Felt ‘urgency and emotional rawness’
I was impressed by the seriousness of the comrades at the recent cadre school. The school was proof the Party is developing young, working-class, Black and Latin, women leadership to lead the working class to power.

The discussions were advanced, focused, and honest. People shared their questions and disagreements, and we struggled for everyone to be heard. People came from different walks of life, but we were united in our commitment to study the world and fight for a communist future.

We contemplated some of the most complicated issues we face in the class struggle, like the need to confront nationalism and fight for internationalism, the need to fight directly for communism, the necessity of armed struggle and revolutionary violence to defeat the capitalist class once and for all.

You could feel the urgency and emotional rawness in the voices of the comrades in the room: the fate of the international working class is on our shoulders! I came away feeling fortified to apply myself more resolutely to struggling in my neighborhood to win my friends and neighbors to the Progressive Labor Party.

The elections in Argentina in October and November 2023 resulted in the return of the far right to power, with Javier Milei at its helm. For the working class, this election only made things, already bad, worse as Argentina was already going through a period of economic crisis and experiencing social difficulties linked to inflation which had risen to more than 160% in 2022. With a so-called socialist government at the helm, the standard of living of workers was diminished by corruption scandals and structural problems during the past few decades. The rightwing trend mirrors what is happening elsewhere in the world, with xenophobic, nationalist and anti-working class speeches by the newly elected president, especially the anti-migrant ones, which blame migrant workers for the crises brought on by capitalism.

Argentina stands between the current inter-imperialist struggles. At the last BRICS summit in August 2023, Argentina was among the countries proposed to become a member of this grouping. BRICS is an intergovernmental organization comprising the capitalist bosses of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It was at the same time that the IMF granted a loan of several hundred millions of dollars in the country. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a U.S.-controlled body that furthers capitalist expansion, always to the detriment of the working class of its member countries. These two events show how Argentina is being tossed between the influences of the two protagonist camps of the moment, the Western imperialists on one side and their rival imperialists on the other. Both sides are vying for economic and political control of the world’s resources and wealth.

Argentine misleaders attack workers, line the ruler’s pockets
Since the election of Milei, Argentina’s bosses have faced a series of popular protest demonstrations (which are becoming increasingly illegal) against their “anti-democratic” measures. During the first mobilizations the police began to use excessive force against demonstrators and union members. Ten days after taking office, Milei published a “DNU” (decree of necessity and emergency), which aims to modify or repeal more than 300 standards, in particular removing rent controls, State intervention to protect the prices of essential products, weakening worker protections, enabling privatizations. For older workers, their pensions are being cut via an “economically viable” automatic calculation method—once again stealing from the poor to fill the coffers of the already-rich. While Milei talks about austerity measures for the working class, he has not renounced class privileges for himself and his bourgeoisie.

Liberals and Libertarians, fascists-in-arms
Milei’s preparedness shows that the return of the extreme right was a well-planned project that was already underway. Milei’s election was hailed by other hard rightliners such as Bolsonaro (former president of Brazil) and Trump (former president of the U.S.). Milei, like his fascist counterparts, calls himself an “ultra-liberal,” trying to fool the masses into thinking he is really on their side, like the Nazis were called National Socialists and Mussolini started out as a so-called socialist—liberal or far-right fascist, they’re all on the bosses’ side.
The struggle in Argentina is a struggle that promises to be long and difficult for the Argentine workers and students who have a long tradition of fighting back in various forms of class struggle. What the current situation shows us is that our class in Argentina—and everywhere—cannot rely on reformers (liberal or fascist) destroy the capitalist system and replace it with communism—an egalitarian system that the working class controls to serve its own needs. We urge our comrades in Argentina to join with us in the Progressive Labor Party and fight for communist revolution. That is the only way that we will be able to liberate our class.

CHICAGO, December 23 – Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here are putting the racist liberal bosses on blast for their role in murdering our working-class siblings. Today and earlier in the week we have shared communist solidarity outside a mass shelter for migrant workers and families on the city’s near west side, where a five-year-old boy named Jean Carlos Martinez Rivero fell ill and died on December 17th.

As communist revolutionaries, we openly declare that a racist capitalist system that cannot guarantee the safety of children doesn’t deserve to exist and needs to be destroyed. While liberal politicians like Mayor Brandon Johnson offer empty words of condolences and point blame at their political rivals for stoking chaos, none of them have any real solutions for the genocides unleashed on our class. Their position under the system keeps them beholden to capitalism’s need for profit and war.

The only solution to genocide and war, to this sick system murdering children from Chicago to Gaza, is to build a revolutionary class struggle under the leadership of the mass PLP. When we say justice for Jean Carlos and so many others, we mean building the fight for an egalitarian communist world!

In the scene with communist solidarity
The thing most tragic about the death of Jean Carlos is that it was almost certainly avoidable. He and his family had been staying at the former warehouse turned shelter for barely three weeks, herded like cattle next to hundreds of others in a public health catastrophe. Over 2,000 migrant workers and youth were cramped at the same wretched site. In addition to Jean Carlos, four other children and two adults from the shelter were hospitalized in the same week (WTTW, 12/21).

Community organizers quickly organized a memorial vigil outside the shelter for Jean Carlos on the Wednesday after his death. PLP members attended, bringing not just our sympathy, medicine, and some clothes to donate but also our righteous class anger. While everyone present found some comfort in grieving collectively, many workers felt inspired by our sign that read “Justice for Jean Carlos – A system that can’t guarantee the safety of children doesn’t deserve to exist.” Many came up to take pictures, get a copy of CHALLENGE, exchange contact information, and share stories of their struggles under the system.

Today we returned to the same site with an even larger contingent of comrades to continue expressing our solidarity with workers all over the world. We brought pitchers full of warm champurrado to share, along with more CHALLENGEs, medicine, and winter clothing. PLP members took to the bullhorn and gave speeches in Spanish that placed the blame squarely on the bosses for so much chaos. We quickly distributed close to 200 CHALLENGEs and made more contacts.

In a situation of seemingly inescapable desperation and disorder, we point out not only the limits but also the potential. As one comrade shared in his speech, “We are a small party of workers and students. We don’t have many resources and we haven’t taken state power yet from the bosses. But what we do have is our communist ideas and internationalism, which are powerful and will one day create a revolution to build a better world.”

The capitalists’ “solutions” are killing us
The train wreck of a response from the Chicago city bosses to tens of thousands of migrant workers and youth arriving over the past year and a half demonstrates not only their treachery to our class but also the bankruptcy of their so-called “solutions.”

“Progressive” but still capitalist politicians like Brandon Johnson can call out the blatant racism of gutter fascists like Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Florida’s Ron DeSantis for sending busloads of workers from the southern U.S. states. However, his criticism conveniently leaves out the role that his faction of the U.S. ruling class, the Big Fascist wing, has historically played in destabilizing national economies around the world through their control of international finance capital and command of the world’s largest military.

These Big Fascist bosses (mostly Democratic Party “liberal” hacks) position themselves as the more “humane” alternative even as their aid can never be more than a Band-Aid on a mortal wound. Even if shelter conditions were to dramatically improve, there is little to no path for most migrant workers to integrate themselves more widely into a capitalist system in crisis. The status quo of the system will continue to relegate them into positions of instability and as a reserve labor pool for the bosses to super-exploit for higher profits.

We must contrast such notions of capitalism’s “charity” with our vision for a worker-run communist society. Beyond just the working class receiving what we need based on our collective control of distribution, we would be free of the alienation and waste of potential that exists under capitalism. Billions of workers would finally be able to contribute towards the organization and functioning of society.

Planting the seeds for an egalitarian world
Such a reality might seem far off, but we can see the seeds of a more communist world planted in the current struggle. Countless workers in the city have volunteered their time in recent months -- from cooks to carpenters to student doctors -- not because they expect to be paid, but rather because they understand their common existence with workers forced to migrate by capitalism.

PLP will continue to fight alongside workers wherever we are to minimize the immediate harm of this racist system while stressing the need to overthrow it entirely. In the memory of Jean Carlos and so many others, we deserve nothing less.

EAST AFRICA, January 12—On this day when East Africa celebrates the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a meeting of young students and teachers to discuss the genocide in Gaza and how we can fight against this imperialist oppression that is killing innocent children and women and disrupting the day-to-day life of millions of people.

Many participants who are religious Christians were defending Israel’s killing of Palestinians because the Bible says Israel is a holy state given to the Jews by God. We presented the real history behind this war as the product of capitalist expansion, and we exposed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s role in continuing the Nakba of 1948 when the October 7th ethnic cleansing campaign to decimate Palestinians began. We also exposed the religious ideology as a tool of capitalists to maintain their interests and disunite workers.

We watched different revolutionary movies about why Zanzibar had a bloody revolution in 1964 and about Marxist Thomas Sankara (the Upright Man), former president of Burkina Faso. Under his leadership, the rate of literacy there increased from 13 percent in 1983 to 73 percent in 1987. We discussed that only by making a revolution with a mass working-class movement can we win the struggle against all false ideas and the humiliation by imperialists against other states and societies in the world. If we build a strong movement led by PLP to fight for a communist society we can win our struggle and form one society in the world with no racism, gender inequality, or nationalist fighting as is happening in Gaza and Sudan. Only by achieving communism can we build a new international peace.