The intensification of dishonest propaganda that the bosses sell to the international working class is a symptom of the breakdown of capitalism and the sharpening of contradictions between classes. There is an increase in violence and exploitation where our oppressors use different tricks to control the masses of workers in the countryside and the city. This is evident in the desperate push to get behind their corrupt electoral system, with workers and students being offered to “choose” to their exploiters who will repress them under the farce of “representative democracy.”

Politicians at different levels of government, such as governors and mayors, aspire in Colombia to control the mass of profits derived from exploitation of natural resources and the labor of the increasingly impoverished workers. All electoral parties base their campaigns on lies rather than solutions and proposals, while attacking and belittling anyone who does not follow them. They bring to light mismanagement of public treasuries, the criminal records of their opponents and the constant violation of the bourgeois constitution by their peers.

Capitalism bases its development on the laws of profit. The ruling classes pull their leaders from wealthy capitalist elites and protect those leaders through the armed might of the state as well as drug trafficking mafias. The social democracy that fights for a “friendlier” capitalism always falls into the same patterns of misery and exploitation. Meanwhile, workers remain chained to this electoral circus, which blocks our path to fight for revolution. Only the destruction of the wage system and its racist state through the communist revolution will allow the working class to free itself from oppression, nationalism, racism, sexism and bloody imperialist bosses' wars.

Capitalism needs the electoral circus to make us believe that voting will help reform the profit system and address the needs of workers. This is why the bosses find populist candidates who divert and pacify thousands of skeptical workers and students who are tired of the endless violence perpetrated during the governments of Uribe, Duque and Santos as well as the failures of leaders like liberals Gustavo Petro and Claudia López.

We workers can’t continue believing the lies of any of these mafia factions, who seek to build their fascist state power to better disarm and control the anger of our class. During the marches for and against the reforms proposed by the current “government of change,” our work is focused on talking with relatives and friends in the streets, universities and workplaces about the traps and false promises of these reformists.

To this end, we are attending sit-ins, forums and rallies, sharing our newspaper Desafío, which condemns this corrupt electoral farce and declares that our class enemies will not be defeated by voting! We stand by our political line that only by building our mass Progressive Labor Party (PLP) will we be able to demolish them with revolutionary violent struggle, building a dictatorship of the international working class.

For this we repeat our call not to vote and instead organize around the PLP and its revolutionary communist political leadership. We must continually fight alongside our fellow workers because it is only the working class that has the numbers and historical potential to lead society. We fight to win more workers, soldiers and students to the need to destroy this warmongering system, responsible for all the unemployment, misery, poor health, environmental crises and generalized violence that we suffer daily.

Our comrade, Horace, passed October 14th 2023, at the age of 94. Horace, you were a communist, and the light of so many lives. Words cannot express the grief we feel at your loss. You were striving for a new world, a world that would not know the meaning of exploitation, racism, nationalism and sexism, a communist world.
Horace was born in Trinidad and Tobago on June 9th 1929 during the Great Depression. He became interested in world affairs at the age of nine, as World War II loomed. At 15 he joined the Negro Welfare Cultural Association (NWCA), which was organized by the international communist movement. He started reading the works of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. He married in 1955 to his lifelong partner, Cynthia, and they had three children, two boys and a girl.

After WWII Horace participated in the struggles of workers in Trinidad against the inhumane harsh economic conditions suffered under the racist British colonial system. He became the secretary of the Federation Workers Trade Union, organizing bus drivers and conductors. There he joined many workers on a march to the U.S. military base in Trinidad, to protest against the racist conditions. In 1970, the working class rebelled in an insurrection against the capitalist-run government. Horace’s committee united Indian and African workers marching through the streets of Trinidad. Unfortunately, the insurrection was put down by the government. Many workers were arrested and sent to prison. Horace lost his job. His family was forced to bag up peanuts which Horace would sell for 6 cents a bag to put food on the table.

In the early 1970’s, he moved to New York City. He got a job at Montefiore, a hospital where workers were represented by 1199 SEIU. In time he received a scholarship allowing him to become an x-ray tech and was able to bring his family to Brooklyn.

At the hospital he came in contact with a PLP member. PLP’s newspaper, CHALLENGE, resonated with his militant anti-capitalist experiences in Trinidad.  His journey began on the long struggle for communism. He participated in many May Day marches in Washington, D.C., always bringing a busload of workers from his building. He organized many social events among family and friends. He was a great chef. Using tropical ingredients: peppers and chilies , coconuts, plantains, sweet potatoes and spices, he gave us a taste of the Caribbean. On behalf of our entire Party, our class, our women and youth, dear Comrade, Farewell.

H.S. teach-in vs genocide
Last week, a few days after Israel began bombing the workers in Gaza, my coworker and I decided we needed to organize a space for our high school students to learn more about what was happening. My co-teacher and I had already spent a class lesson teaching students some of the history of Palestine and taking questions and comments, so I knew some students wanted to learn more. I spoke to other coworkers, including one who has family in Palestine about the plan to respond to this war with a discussion. Because there is a Zionist teacher at the school, who has a history of opening up investigations on coworkers, I was given lots of warnings to think twice about having this event and to be careful.

We went ahead and organized it by making announcements in all of the history classes, so all students were invited. This was a good way to build with the teachers in the department, too. Given the email by the New York City Schools Chancellor expressing support only for those killed in Israel and implicitly threatening anyone with an alternate point of view, it was a big deal that teachers agreed to announce it.

At the meeting about ten students showed up. My co-worker, who is a relatively new teacher, and very antiracist, wanted to lead by explaining why he, as a Jewish worker, felt strongly about criticizing Israel’s fascist attacks. Students responded by expressing what they had been hearing on the news and Tiktok. They compared what was happening in Palestine over the last six or so decades to gentrification in NYC. They expressed outrage at the racism of it all and the attacks on innocent people. One student asked what we thought the solution was. I immediately took the opportunity to explain that I was a communist and why I thought communism was the only solution. I invited them to a study group happening a few days later. Although none made it, a few have told me they are interested in attending future events. The next step is to share CHALLENGE with them and get to know their parents!
*****

Boston UAW picket: mood of the workers is changing
Several groups of Boston/Worcester PL’ers and our friends walked the UAW picket line at the Stellantis distribution warehouse in Mansfield, MA to bring our solidarity and communist politics. The picketers welcomed our Challenges and leaflets. It was clear that the mood of the working class is changing!

I have never seen striking workers so open to an anti-capitalist perspective. It was pushing an open door for them to condemn the Democratic Party and Biden for bailing out the Big 3 in 2008 and coercing the workers to accept give-back contracts. They also know that the future of auto production works against them. Electric vehicles production is simpler, and uses fewer production workers. This is the logic of capitalism that they can do nothing about short of destroying the profit system.

There were workers who were also walking the picket line from several different unions—SAG-AFTA, Steel Workers, Electrical Workers. This organizing of strike support represents some improvement in the leadership of the AFL-CIO, and It made a big impression on the UAW workers. They commented on how their demands were clearly resonating with all workers. It fostered their class consciousness in that they could see that their bold strike action was leading the way for the working class. Strike support should always be a cornerstone of our practice.
*****

How nationalism poisoned the communist movement
The CHALLENGE editorial in the Nov. 1 issue stated, “The...U.S. ruling class....supported the creation of a ‘Jewish state’ and the displacement of millions of workers from Palestine in exchange for a Cold War ally against Soviet influence in the Middle East and support in the fight to control...the region’s oil.”  However, the issue of nationalism is much more complex.

Zionism, a form of Jewish nationalism, was always an anathema to early Jewish communists. The book Perfidy, by Ben Hecht exposes the role of Israeli rulers in sacrificing Jewish workers in the Holocaust in order to gain control and pad their own nests. But in addition, the Soviets were instrumental in establishing the State of Israel in 1947. The U.S. was, in fact, at first opposed to it.

The Soviets had hoped to find a home for the remnant of Jews after the Holocaust, during which six million were murdered, and established Birobidzhan in Siberia, which didn’t succeed for long. During the war, once they realized the magnitude of Hitler’s designs, they moved surviving Jews to Uzbekistan in the East to save them. In 1948 the Soviet ambassador to the U.N., Andrei Gromyko spoke about the Jewish historical claim to Palestine and the need to respond to “...the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own state.”  The U.S. would be the first to recognize this new state, but the U.S.S.R. soon followed, the first to offer ‘de jure’ recognition, a stronger form of international recognition and one that the U.S. delayed in giving.

In 1948 the U.S. had joined with Britain, its wartime ally, in following a U.N. embargo on arms shipments to the Middle East, leaving the Zionists with only one major lifeline of weapons, the then-socialist Czechoslovakia. Included were weapons, ammunition, fighter airplanes, and secret training areas for Israeli troops.  A brigade of Czech volunteers was also trained to fight with the Israeli army.  The Arabs knew something was going on, and in the U.N. an Arab diplomat charged that Zionists were using weapons, “the source of which was known to the U.S.S.R. representative.”

Although Soviet Jews were prevented from emigrating to Israel, other countries permitted it.  During the “thaw years” between 1948 and 1952, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Poland allowed almost 300,000 surviving Jews to go to Israel.The Soviet Union’s help ended almost as soon as it began, and Israel started turning to Western imperialists who welcomed them in the competition for dominance of local resources, especially oil.  What had motivated the Soviet Union to take the position it did? Stalin’s concern for the Jews was already evident.But nationalism as a political ideology was not thoroughly rooted out in the Soviet Union. There were so-called progressive nationalists, who were to be supported,whilst bad nationalists were to be opposed.  Progressive Labor Party says all nationalism is bad. In this way we attempt to correct errors which led to the revival of capitalism in the Soviet Union and China.

Some of the reasons historians have offered for the Soviet Union’s stance on Israel are: that Stalin was angered with the Arabs for being pro-German during the war and sided with the Jews who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis; that the Soviets wanted to penetrate the Middle East and the Mediterranean and saw a Jewish state as an opening wedge; that the Jews were more open to communism than the reactionary Arabs; that the Jewish state would grow increasingly favorable to the Soviet Union and thereby spurn the U.S. imperialists. That isn’t how it turned out.

The  article “No fair contract in a profit system” in the last issue of CHALLENGE (11/1), reported that there were around 4,600 workers at the Chicago Assembly Plant, producing around 2400 vehicles per day. The actual number of workers at the plant is over 5,000, who produce around 700 vehicles per shift when the plant is running at a max capacity.