NEW YORK CITY—In November, the news said that Muslim terrorists killed hundreds of people in Paris. For the next days and weeks, the bosses’ media sounding the same racist alarm. As a club of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, we have been organizing interfaith friendship dinners with the local Muslim community for 15 years, since 9/11, to fight racist anti-Muslim propaganda. This year’s interfaith dinner came one day after the Paris shootings, and we wondered how it would go. 
We carried out our usual work to ensure a successful dinner. Typically, about 70 workers attend this event. This year? Ninety! Normally, most of the attendees are our Muslim guests, with about a third of the workers coming from our congregation and other friendly groups. But this year, we saw an outpouring from our church. Workers responded to our ideas of building unity in the international working class against imperialism and racist terror.
At first, the atmosphere was a bit muted because of the shootings and the response of the racist capitalist media. But as soon as everyone started socializing, the room warmed up!
All Partake the Same Bread: Working-Class Unity
Our senior minister welcomed all of us and offered a prayer for the terrible events in France, Lebanon, and Syria. Then the Imam of our local mosque led another prayer. We broke bread together and talked. Each table was integrated with Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists.  
As the meal ended, speeches began. The mosque’s president spoke first, saying that Muslims are just like everyone else. They worry about their children, their home life and their jobs. It was painful to hear these words; the racism of capitalist society makes it necessary to say the obvious.
Other workers talked about our obligations to stand up for each other, irrespective of religion. A visiting worker, whose church organizes against racist police terror and for workers’ rights, connected many seemingly separate international events, and shared a plan for action.
He explained that the biggest cause of terrorism is U.S. imperialism. He related the current racist oppression of Muslims to the historic, centuries-old racism against Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant workers. By fighting to unify and organize the international working class, he stated, we can become part of the solution.
After that talk, there was palpable joy from our friends and guests. More workers spoke about various aspects of our common struggle, animating and transforming the tenor of the evening. A great weight was lifted from the shoulders of those present—a coming together.
Building Antiracist, Revolutionary Devotion
Over 15 years of building friendships and holding these dinners, our communist group within the church has built a real community. PL’ers and their friends from church have protested the oppressive surveillance of mosques by the local police department, and have been invited to many Iftars (the break-the-fast meals during the month of Ramadan).
At our most recent dinner, despite our different religious beliefs, immigration status and national origin, we shared a clarity about the source of working-class division: the tiny minority of the ultra-wealthy, the capitalist class, who profit from imperialist war and maintain power with racism, sexism and nationalism. We discussed and debated working-class revolution, the need to seize state power, and the egalitarian essence of communism.
While this particular event is a beacon of our church work, we must continue to move forward each day.
To this we are committed.
We are sharpening the political struggle in our club to distribute greater numbers of CHALLENGE to workers in our church and in the mosque. We will struggle with more workers to attend our study groups, take an active role in our Party, and plan more unifying events. Little by little, the clouds are parting and the sun is starting to shine. Stay tuned for updates, comrades!

New York City, January 13—The New Year began with a round of sexist, racist home raids and deportations of undocumented immigrants, mainly mothers and children from Central America. The Obama administration has kept its promise of terrorizing Latin workers. Immigration Customs Enforcement has arrested hundreds of immigrants, all subject to deportation, mostly in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas and California, but also in New Jersey and New York.
Best Defense: Stay on the Offense Against Capitalism
Members of the immigrant rights organization in which Progressive Labor Party members are active, as well as large numbers of undocumented workers in this working-class neighborhood, are alarmed. The organization gave workshops informing immigrants of their legal “rights” if ICE confronts them. There was also talk of finding sanctuary in churches for immigrants at risk of deportation. We in PLP are supporting these measures.
But its reformist outlook limits the organization. It is downplaying this surge in deportations as “normal” ICE activity. It relies on good lawyers in deportation hearings and tries to get local laws passed to protect immigrants. While PLP is not opposed to good lawyers, these approaches are at best illusory and at worst a liberal attempt to pacify the working class in the face of growing capitalist oppression and racist division.
Our club continues to be active in anti-racist fightback. We are organizing events and bringing communist analysis to our friends in the immigrant organization. Our comments have been applauded at two big meetings. We have called for demands that can put the working class on the offensive: no deportations, immediate acceptance of Syrian war refugees, open borders for all workers and amnesty now for all immigrants in the U.S., with no restrictions. We want fightback that will include all workers: “Black, Latin, Asian, white, same enemy, same fight.” We will never accept racist state terror as “normal.”
Citizen and immigrant workers must unite to fight these racist deportations. Being a citizen worker in the capitalists’ most powerful imperialist nation is no protection, either. Just look at the workers in Flint, Michigan--56 percent Black, 35 percent white—whose fecal-colored water with high lead content saves the bosses money (see page 3). Capitalist state terror comes in many forms, but it hurts all workers.
What Is to Be Done?
So what does communist leadership within mass organizations mean today? To strengthen the working class, communists must:
★ Develop workers’ understanding of how imperialist rivalry and constant war is related to attacks on immigrants worldwide (see next issue);
★ Relate deportations to racist surge of police killings of Black workers and youth to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attacks;
★ Expose how the capitalist ruling class and its media seize on “fear of terrorism” to blame immigrants and Syrian refugees for the entry of terrorists into the U.S. and Europe while obscuring the criminal, racist and fascist nature of capitalism;
★ Denounce the capitalist governments, from Europe to the US., that are closing borders and leaving refugees to their deaths. This is capitalist murder.
★ Fight like hell to build a multiracial movement to organize and win people to communism. Study alone cannot teach us what we need to learn. Fighting back in our community centers, jobs, schools, military and streets can be school for communism.
Workers will continue to find ways to cross borders and to be a source of cheap labor in the U.S. They cross these fake borders because capitalism has displaced families with inter-imperialist wars and un-natural disasters, all in pursuit of maximum profit.
Not all immigrants are unwelcome, however. The bosses will continue to welcome technologists and scientists who can help U.S. imperialism project its power worldwide and remain on top. There might be a guest worker program to allow temporary immigrants to work in agriculture, food packing and other industries, but without any of the so-called labor rights currently held by citizen workers in the U.S. Another focus will be on immigrant youth who can join the military as ground troops in the next big imperialist war.
Our club wrote a leaflet to distribute in the neighborhood, and we are organizing a march. The working class needs communist revolution. As the leaflet concludes, “The only way the international working class can destroy racism, fascism and imperialist war is to make revolution so the working class can take power and build communist society based on egalitarianism. Only the international working class can destroy the brutal, capitalist system.” Join our Party!

TEXAS, January 13—A recent school and community art project has galvanized working-class struggle here. A widely viewed, student-created mural of a mass of students, parents and workers fighting back against the racist inequalities in our school district inspired teachers to organize and fight back.
Class Struggle Imitates Art
After weeks of conversation about the mural, teachers issued a collective statement that cited student concerns about district budget cuts and the school-to-prison pipeline. The teachers then made a plan to deliver the bold statement at the next local school board meeting. In a period of intensifying fascism and fear, this was no small feat.
At the meeting, nearly 20 teachers, students, parents and community members confronted the school board. Standing united, they called out the injustice of ongoing district budget cuts and made demands that the board restore programs cut years ago. One after another, they exposed the board’s lies about providing students with a quality and equal education.
One grandparent and Progressive Labor Party member denounced the entire school board as a corrupt gang of racists. He stated that their complicity in keeping the school district in a perpetual state of crisis served capitalism by forcing underserved students into a lifetime of low-wage work, the military or prison.
This inspiring event revealed the potential of working-class unity. The teachers, students and parents who stood together got a glimpse of working-class power. When the working-class is united and armed with a communist analysis, the potential is enormous.  
Liberal Union Bosses Pacify, Then Betray
This struggle, organized with rank-and-file teacher leadership, stands in sharp contrast to the misleadership of the union bosses. The following month, the school board announced an “emergency meeting” to vote on a new district health insurance plan. Given the last-minute timing of the meeting, teachers were unable to organize a rank-and-file response, and relied on their local union bosses.
The union misleaders first called on members to attend the meeting and pressure the school board to increase the district’s contribution to the health plan. But the three health plan options presented to the board all had higher rates than last year. No matter what plan the board chose, teachers were facing a pay cut!
In the ensuing discussion, board members who’d been endorsed by the union expressed their “regret” in raising the rates and explained that we all had to “sacrifice.” Several teachers yelled at the board in anger, but the union misleaders could only beg for a few more crumbs.
In the end, the board voted on the “least bad” option, which still raised rates and cut wages. While many teachers felt betrayed by the board, the more dangerous betrayal came from their own union, which pacified and misled the teachers to prevent them from fighting back. In practice, the union’s actions led to acceptance of the school board’s attacks.
Lessons Learned
The experience of these events highlights the opportunities involved in seizing and sharpening seemingly small political struggles like school board meetings. This struggle exposed the role of liberal bosses and their unions in dividing and misleading the workers away from the militant, anti-racist student-education worker-parent unity shown at the first board meeting.
We learned we must engage in struggle anywhere and everywhere, no matter how small. Where there is no struggle happening, we must create one. We must fight back against the racist injustices that workers experience every day. Daily conversations with friends and co-workers about these injustices have the potential to be organized into larger on-the-job struggles. Guided by communist politics, these struggles have the potential to inspire bold action by regular workers and to produce long-lasting class struggle.
The struggle continues! The next step is to connect worsening conditions in the school to the larger issues of war, fascism, and growing inter-imperialist rivalries around the world. We will continue to struggle for teachers, students and parents to join PLP in organizing the fight for our class and a communist future.

I recently participated in my first job action, helping organize bike messengers for Uber RUSH, a delivery network the on-demand company started in New York City in April 2014.
Since I joined RUSH last year, Uber has constantly cut messenger rates. They justified these cuts by saying more customers would use RUSH because it is cheaper, meaning more money.
Uber’s drivers—largely African and Middle-Eastern men who left their cab jobs for Uber’s promise of higher wages in less hours—have experienced the same racist cuts under the same premise, and have to work much longer hours now to make ends meet.
NYC messengers in general are young Black and Latin workers. Bike messenger work is dangerous. We constantly have to navigate crazy traffic, potholed streets and overzealous kkkops giving us motor vehicle tickets to generate profit for the bosses. Most messengers work as independent contractors, meaning they receive no benefits (i.e. health insurance, disability, unemployment).
In mid-November, nine RUSH messengers confronted RUSH’s manager at Uber’s Manhattan office, demanding he release tips owed to the fleet: literally wage theft!
One messenger even threatened him with a chair if he kept ignoring them! Later that day, the manager announced Uber would dispense the tips. That showed the power workers have when we unite against the bosses!
The messenger who lead this action announced the strike for December 1. He created a Facebook page promoting it. The plan was for all RUSH messengers to take no jobs for the entire day, then show up at the office in the afternoon to make our demands clear.
Though I found out about the action days later, I sprang into action, leafleting with our list of demands from a post on the FB page.
I held routine conversations with other messengers about how capitalism exploits us as workers and Uber is making money off our efforts. This demanded the need for us to fight back!
I underestimated how much organizing comes into a successful strike. Fourteen days was too little time. Worse, we never held meetings before the action. This meant our “strike” was a disjointed effort that didn’t resonate well.
Most people who clicked “Going” on the FB page didn’t show up. While Facebook can be a organizing tool, it will never replace building true interpersonal relationships with workers.
Uber, in an attempt to curb the strike, offered an extra $50 bribe to messengers who completed five runs that day.
The RUSH manager heard our case in the office before stating the original rates were too expensive for the company to keep up with its massive delivery fleet, and quickly left.
Though I distributed a few CHALLENGEs, I felt upset. Self-critically, I began calling the workers sellouts. Thankfully, fellow comrades struggled with me to understand why that was the wrong line and why this action failed.
I have learned much from this experience.
Paramount is that we should not blame workers, whose minds have been poisoned by capitalist individualism and passivity. And that these actions need real organizing.
But I am making progress. One person I gave CHALLENGE to was turned out to be already familiar with and receptive to the paper. Even better, I gained the courage during this struggle to openly reveal to another worker that I’m a communist—another first for me.
I plan on forming better relationships with my co-workers, and get them to understand that communism is the ultimate solution to this garbage system.
Though I am generally asocial, I’m struggling to change that. Hopefully, I’ll make things happen.