ISRAEL-PALESTINE

We PL’ers in Israel-Palestine participated in three May Day marches in our region, two in Tel-Aviv-Jaffa and one in Nazareth.
On April 30, a march was organized in north-central Tel-Aviv by the pro-boss Histadrut union federation as well as its youth movement, HaNoar Hoved (Working Youth) and its adult counterpart, Dror Israel (Freedom Israel). While this march was organized by liberals, a more progressive group attended it: the Coalition for Direct Employment. This group, of which one local PL’er is a member and another is a supporter, fights against the horrors of contract work and for regular employment and unionization.
Approximately thirty contract workers, including PL’ers and our friends, attended this march, carrying signs calling for full-time employment and against the contract bosses. Slogans compared the contract bosses to organized crime bosses (which they are) and called for an end of this ultra-exploitative phenomenon. Many of the marchers were social workers, a profession which is increasingly outsourced by the government, as well as housekeeping workers, a job which is almost entirely outsourced to contract bosses.
On May 1, May Day itself, hundreds of workers, including local PL’ers marched in central Tel-Aviv in the main May Day demonstration. This march was organized by fake leftists (the Israeli “Communist” Party and Socialist Struggle) as well as liberals (the Meretz party), but militancy was high and flags ran red. The march was headed by a sign reading “Workers of the World - Unite!” Some of our friends, Palestinian and Jewish, attended. Under the red flags, workers demanded an end to exploitative capitalism and to contract work.  However, the phony reds mostly shouted slogans about “nationalization,” which, under capitalist rule only means the industries moving from ownership by one boss to collective ownership by the entire capitalist class through its state. We countered this by calling for revolution and the elimination of capitalists to be replaced by workers’ power.
On May 2, a May Day march was organized in Nazareth by the fake Israeli “Communist” Party. This party has a strong base there and was able to fill the streets with red flags and celebrating youth, but did not really call for communism or a revolution. PLP came and raised the red flag in this city as well.
In all cases we raised the red flag high and put communism forward, in most cases together with our friends. We hope that next year we will present an even stronger red block on May Day.

COLOMBIA

Comrades, friends, and workers of the world, we send militant greetings from Bogota, Colombia.
Today we are celebrating one more year of struggle on the International Day of the Working Class. We celebrate with our sights set on the unity of the workers of the world under the red flag of communism and its communist party, PLP. This has been one more year under the rule of the parasitic capitalist class, its racist wage system, its endless wars, its sexism that divides us and weakens us, and its fascism and violence against our class. In short, it’s been a year of working-class struggles, protests, work stoppages, strikes and mobilizations that keeps us committed to the communist ideals of a better world.  
In Colombia, workers live in misery and need. There is a teachers’ strike, unemployment, low wages, poverty, prostitution, crises and chaos in the health care system, malnutrition, drug addiction, high cost of living, a cynical bourgeoisie and a prostrated left that advocates working for peace. But we tell workers, through our newspaper CHALLENGE, that revolution is not negotiable; that we will not negotiate to escape from slavery and will not negotiate to escape from capitalism. We tell workers that the capitalist state is our sworn enemy, an enemy of the working class and of our youth. We tell them that we reject the passivity and the electoral distractions, and that the state cannot be reformed but must be destroyed by a communist revolution. That’s why we need revolutionary organized violence under the leadership of our Party.   
Capitalism has thoroughly shown that it can no longer rule the destiny of humanity, because its laws and contradictions make its destruction inevitable. That’s why we are organizing workers politically in more than 27 countries, consolidating our revolutionary line to overthrow it with the power of the international working class. PLP and its newspaper CHALLENGE call on the unity of communist to fight for this noble goal. Join us!

BALTIMORE, May 1 — Much of the working class loves and respects boldness in the fight against racism! Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party protested throughout Baltimore today in what was the beginning of a rebellion against racist murderers.
On the night of April 24, a modest-sized group marched through downtown and South Baltimore. They blocked traffic in support of the struggle to win justice for Freddie Gray, and for all victims of police brutality. Many motorists — both Black and white — were highly supportive, honking their horns in agreement, throwing clenched fists in the air, and sharing warm smiles. However, one driver with a confederate flag on his antenna drove threateningly, acting as if he would actually run us over. People courageously stood in front of his vehicle, stopped him, and one person, without hesitation, ripped off his confederate flag.
Burn That Racist Flag
The next day, the first huge rally was held. PL’ers sold hundreds of CHALLENGE and our leaflet was received with enthusiasm. Outside the Western District police station, a member of Progressive Labor Party spoke, held up that confederate flag, and explained where it came from. There was boisterous cheering and applause. Two people came up with cigarette lighters, and the flag was set ablaze! A photo, showing the burning of that racist flag inspired thousands. On social media it was shared and liked, tweeted and re-tweeted, again and again and again. People of all ethnic backgrounds — former students of the PL’er holding up the burning flag — sent message after message of admiration and encouragement.
Working-Class Anger Is Justified
We saw many, many clear demonstrations of workers’ anger. When Black police commissioner Anthony Batts came out to pacify the crowd outside the precinct, angry workers quickly surrounded him and refused to allow him to speak. He was hustled back inside by a group of cops. Workers challenged the police across the barricades, showing they had no illusions that any of the cops were their friends, white or Black. The 2.5-mile march from the precinct all the way down to City Hall was multiracial and multigenerational. Babies in strollers, youth, and elders marched. The slogan of the campaign “All Night, All Day, We will Fight for Freddie Gray!” was evident.
The rebellion shortly after the first huge march and rally. A large number of people marched from the City Hall rally to the baseball stadium. Massive lines of cops were deployed in an effort to control us. As it turned out, several cop cars were parked and empty, right next to us. The police lines were very close, barely half a block away. Nevertheless, young men — deeply angered by years of police racism, arrogance and brutality, and ready to take action after the outrageous killing of Freddie Gray — courageously smashed the windows of those parked cop cars. They also stood on top of the cars, at great personal risk, and fearlessly did as much as possible — in clear view of the cops and international media — to disable those vehicles. During all that time, the cops were unable to do anything.
A while later, due to the late hour, members of Freddie Gray’s family said they needed to head back to the Gilmore Homes neighborhood, where Freddie had lived and been murdered. A group of about 60 people, began the three-mile walk. On the way, the tire on another parked cop car was slashed, an effort was made to break out a cop car’s window, and cops — nervous, jumpy, and highly aggressive — showed up and grabbed one young man. Participants in our walking group made a strong effort to pull him away from the police, but weren’t quite able to do so. As we continued toward Gilmore Homes, the windows on several major businesses — just like the cop car windows — were smashed.
Several blocks later, however, we reached the outer edges of downtown, and began walking up Pennsylvania Avenue, a Black residential area. A couple of people among us spoke loudly and confidently, saying “We’re not downtown anymore. Don’t touch anything.”  Starting at that moment, and for the entire rest of our long walk, not a single person bothered anything. Two police hats with badges on them, which had been taken earlier, from the cop cars near the stadium, were passed around. Members of our large group were jubilant with having turned the tables, at least a little, against the racist police who took the life of much-loved Freddie Gray.
The experience of walking back to Gilmore Homes was profoundly inspiring. The working class showed deep hatred for oppression and racism; a readiness to fight powerfully and courageously against those forces; and a thoughtful, disciplined approach to differentiating between the property and symbols of the enemy, as opposed to the lives and belongings of our sisters and brothers, which are to be respected.
Role of Cops: Terrorize Workers
The ruling class — millionaire business owners — has a problem. On the one hand, to protect their system and keep making huge profits, they have to control us. That’s the purpose of police brutality today, much like the very first U.S. police department, whose purpose was to catch runaway slaves, brutalize them to set an example, instill fear in others, and then return them to slavery.
However, today’s ruling class, in addition to utilizing brutality, also needs to fool us into being loyal to this system. The major capitalists — like Rockefellers’ Exxon-Mobil — need to minimize our desire to rebel, and they also need us to fight and die for them, in their wars to accumulate cheap labor, resources, and markets all around the world. Fearing even greater rebellion if the cops weren’t at least slapped on the wrist, Baltimore City State’s Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, announced that the six cops who took Freddie’s life will face a variety of charges. This includes second-degree murder, manslaughter, assault, misconduct in office, and false imprisonment.
On the other hand, the rest of the Baltimore police — who previously brutalized and killed unarmed Anthony Anderson, Tyrone West and many others — have faced no charges at all, and remain on the force to this day. Since 2011, Baltimore City paid out over $5.7 million to more than 100 people who won court cases against the police for assault, false arrest and false imprisonment. Beyond the killings by Baltimore police, dozens of residents have suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — along with head trauma and organ failure.
Let’s be clear: the reason six cops have now been charged is not a commitment to justice. No, it’s the fear by the ruling class that there would be more and bigger rebellions and huge business losses if the cops who took Freddie Gray’s life were not at least charged. While those cops may not actually be indicted or tried and found guilty and serve any time, but something had to be done for the moment. After nothing was done in the high-profile cases of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, working-class anger is ready to boil over.
Guard Cheers Anti-Racists
Once the charges were announced, many people in Baltimore hit the streets to celebrate. That Mondawmin Mall was the site of some of the rebellion had taken place during the afternoon and night of April 27. There were many armed personnel carriers. Large numbers of National Guard soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder, each with an assault rifle. Amid the oncoming traffic, was an extensive, informal convoy of a different type. Many cars, one after another, had their horns honking, headlights flashing, and clenched fists jubilantly held out of windows and sun roofs, accompanied by shouts of joy. Left to right, a number of the Guardswomen and Guardsmen were giving the clenched-fist salute, in powerful solidarity with the motorcade participants.
During that day and the following week, over 3,000 communist flyers — announcing May Day, explaining the need for working-class revolution, and countering Obama, who called the rebels “thugs” — were distributed by Progressive Labor Party. Those flyers were eagerly taken by Baltimoreans — of all racial backgrounds — who, in addition to boldly standing up against police brutality, are now more interested than ever in re-considering their opinions about capitalist society, and how to win a new world without racism.
One day, large sections of the military, along with the rest of the working class, will indeed rise up to defeat capitalism and create a new, communist world of sisterhood and brotherhood. This week, many of us saw glimmers of that bright and inevitable future!

WORCESTER, MA, May 6 — The Progressive Labor Party held a forum on police terror here. Speakers showed how racist police terror is a key tool of capitalism and that fighting it using the bosses’ rules cannot change it. Only getting rid of capitalism can destroy racist cops.
One speaker exposed how even filing complaints is useless. He cited the testimony of a police detective who said that not one of the complaints in Worcester over a long period of time were even investigated. They were just rubber stamped as “unsubstantiated.”
Another speaker offered hope for a world where the choices aren’t between useful complaints and running. He pointed out that racism and bias are caused by the capitalist profit system which uses them to divide the working class and is continuously being reinforced in police departments. PLP fights to expose the lies of the bosses and to organize people to reject the worsening conditions, and to fight for communism. When workers take power, the material basis for racism and exploitation will be gone.
At the forum, PLP sold CHALLENGE and called on everyone to join the May Day marches on May 2 in Brooklyn. Several people committed to going, and money was raised for a defense fund for anti-racist protesters arrested by the police.
Later, one person asked PLP and Massachusetts Human Rights Commission to help him organize a Black Lives Matter rally on April 29. Both organizations agreed and endorsed the rally, which was mainly organized by Worcester State University and Clark University students. Many local residents joined the march and rally.
We will continue to support these struggles, and to raise the need for communist revolution.

In our May 6 issue, we published an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party. In addition to describing the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — we noted four main principles for organizing a communist movement: a concentration among industrial workers; the fight against racism and sexism; internationalism, with one international party leading the international working class; and the necessity of armed struggle, since the bosses will never cede state power peacefully.
Beginning with this issue, we will revisit specific struggles that helped PLP grow to our current presence in 27 countries on five continents. We begin with our concentration among industrial workers.

The Hazard Miners Solidarity Campaign
In the winter of 1962-63, Black and white miners in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia went on a bitter wildcat strike, rebelling against inhuman working conditions and starvation wages. (Average weekly pay was $25.) The mine owners, police and local officials launched a campaign of terror and scabbing to break the strike. Organizing out of their base in Hazard, Kentucky, five hundred rank-and-file miners armed themselves to prepare for class war. They dynamited bridges and blew up scab mines.
Led by one of our railroad comrades, a local union official, PLM formed the Trade Union Solidarity Committee (TUSC) to Back the Hazard Miners. TUSC organized in unions and working-class communities across the country, and workers responded enthusiastically. Truckloads of food, clothing and holiday gifts for miners’ children were shipped to Hazard, along with PL magazines that brought communist ideas to the strikers. A mass meeting in New York drew nearly a thousand workers and students in zero-degree weather to hear the miners’ rank-and-file leader, Berman Gibson.
The bosses went crazy. In a front-page banner outline, the Hazard Herald, screamed: “Communism Comes to the Mountains!” The liberals around President John Kennedy understood the hazard in Hazard: a multiracial group of armed miners uniting with communists to fight the bosses. They responded with a well-funded redbaiting campaign, and sent their anti-communist liberals to take over the Solidarity Committee.
Initially, the miners resisted the anti-communist attack. But as it mounted, Gibson and others retreated and turned to the liberals. After many months, the strike petered out. PLM learned vital lessons from this campaign:
   • Workers will arm themselves to defend their class interests when it’s clear to them that armed struggle is necessary;
   • Striking workers will respond enthusiastically to bold leadership;
   • While the bosses won’t hesitate to use violence to break a strike or rebellion, their most powerful weapon is anti-communism;
   • Red-baiting can be defeated only through protracted class struggle where communists give active leadership.
The 1964-65 Longshore Strike
On October 1, 1964, 60,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) struck all ports from Maine to Texas to fight the shipowners’ demand to cut half their jobs. The strike’s impact on U.S. trade impelled President Lyndon Johnson to use a Taft-Hartley injunction to force the strikers temporarily back to work. The government demanded a settlement “within the national interest.” The resulting contract undermined workers’ job security. Anthony Scotto, head of the Brooklyn local (and a “made” member of the Mafia’s Gambino family), called it the “best contract ever.”
All eight New York City daily papers lauded the contract. Only CHALLENGE, PLM’s newspaper, exposed the sellout and called on workers to reject it. The paper was distributed up and down the docks. Many workers asked for extra copies to distribute, despite their union’s anti-communist leadership.
A worker told CHALLENGE that the federal government had been ready to indict the ILA’s gangster-ridden leadership for racketeering, but offered to quash the indictments if the leadership persuaded the rank and file to ratify the sellout contract. When CHALLENGE exposed this deal on its front page, Scotto denounced the paper’s “red lies” at a meeting of over 2,000 longshoremen in  Brooklyn. He read the entire flyer out loud. But the workers, hearing the contract detail for the first time, were so enraged that they voted overwhelmingly to reject the contract and go back on strike.
‘Reds Under Their Beds?’
The bosses’ press reported that “communist influence was swaying” the dockers to oppose the contract. ILA president Teddy Gleason blamed “communists” for the rank-and-file rebellion. Scotto pointed to “outside agitators.” The World-Telegram’s front page declared: “Red Hand Seen on the Waterfront.” Victor Reisel, a notorious anti-labor columnist, ranted that “Chinese revolutionaries” were “spreading unrest on the docks” and warned that Mao Tse-Tung was “taking over our great urban centers.”
CHALLENGE ran its own headline: “Dockers Resist Sellout, Bosses See Red!”
Johnson’s assistant secretary of labor ordered the FBI to “investigate communist influence on the New York and Baltimore docks.” A new contract added a few crumbs for workers. A majority of the working longshoremen voted it down, but the misleaders used other trades in the union and retired workers to get it passed, ending a four-month struggle. Containerization was ushered in, and thousands of jobs were lost in the years that followed.
PL’ers learned that workers are less likely to fall for red-baiting or be intimidated by mobsters when they are consciously engaged in class struggle. We also witnessed the importance of multi-racial unity. With Black and white longshoremen working together on the job and in the strike, the bosses were unable to use racism to split and weaken them.
Finally, our experience with the ILA helped PL understand the absolute necessity of being embedded in the working class, rather than working from the outside. While our literature played a big role in the strike, our lack of members on the docks hindered our ability to recruit longshoremen and build our organization. The bedrock principle remains: To win workers to revolution, communists must build a base in the working class.
PLP Leads Washington, DC’s Transit Workers
For 40 years, PLP has been a leading force among thousands of transit workers in the Metro system in Washington, DC. In the 1970s, local government took over the private bus companies as the workforce changed from mostly white to mostly African-American. In 1978, the new public transit authority attacked workers by attempting to deny them a cost-of-living increase in a period of high inflation. PLP members and friends led a six-day wildcat strike that defeated the attack. The bosses’ attempt to fire the strike leaders failed.
In the early 1990s, Metro attacked again, threatening to privatize the bus fleet unless workers accepted wage and benefit concessions. The Party and militant workers led hundreds in fights against cuts in bus service and jobs. Meanwhile, the union misleadership agreed to a cap on wage-step increases, lower starting salaries for new workers, and a slower wage progression. During these battles, a PLP’er was elected to the union’s executive board.
In 1998, the union leadership agreed to further givebacks in wage progression, along with limited health insurance benefits for new workers and defunding of the pension system. The PL’er was the only executive board member to oppose this sellout. In 2004, he won the local presidency. The overwhelmingly Black membership refused to succumb to anti-communist attacks and to a nationalist appeal by the incumbent Black president. They followed their class interests in uniting behind the white PLP member.
In the 2004 contract, the wage progression was reduced, and Metro was required to contribute to the pension fund. A new wave of anti-communism was aimed at the Party member, who returned to driving a bus. By that time, however, hundreds of workers had been influenced by PLP and CHALLENGE. A number of them joined the Party. The fight against privatization and anti-worker discipline has been waged by a new generation of Party members at Metro.
Currently, the Party is leading an anti-racist fight against background checks that would bar employment for workers convicted by the bosses’ criminal injustice system. A disproportionate number of these workers are Black; the background checks would cut off one of their few avenues to higher-paying jobs.
The struggle to fight the bosses and to build the Party continues.
(To be continued)