The work of Carolyn’s life speaks for her
I met Carolyn in Tupelo, Mississippi in the summer of 1979. David Duke, leader of the KKK, had declared that Tupelo would become the national headquarters of the Klan. Progressive Labor Party and INCAR, an organization we were building at the time, refused to accept this and launched a campaign to make Tupelo the headquarters of antiracism and the fight for communism. Over 40 volunteers joined the Project at various times. Carolyn was there the entire summer.

The Project dug deep roots in the Black working class of Tupelo. We organized public CHALLENGE sales, rallies and lots of visiting to make and consolidate friends who joined the Project. Carolyn was involved in it all.
I actually met her when she was sitting on the balcony of the apartment where volunteers were living. She was making “sun tea.” She had a gallon jar filled with tea bags, sugar and lemon slices. We had a long talk as the hot summer sun brewed the tea. I realized later that she was lounging there because she was recovering from her gunshot wounds.

Mid-way through the Project a march was organized from the Black worker’s housing project where we had a base to downtown Tupelo, where there was a rally. Carolyn and Findley Campbell were standing at the sound truck giving speeches when a racist, who we later learned had been released from jail that morning and given the shotgun, opened fire into the crowd.

Carolyn and Findley were sprayed with birdshot. Our security team leaped into action, tackling the shooter and keeping him from firing again. Suddenly the police, who had not been visible before, swarmed over our team, arresting many. Birdshot, used for shooting birds, sprays small pellets. Carolyn was shot down one leg. Although the doctors were able to find and remove some of the pellets, many remained in her leg the rest of her life.

Our comrade, Floyd, was charged with attempted murder and held without bail. I arrived in Tupelo at that point to work on the legal case. No defense attorney in the state of Mississippi would take the case. The district attorney called Carolyn and Findley to appear before a Grand Jury conniving to get them to testify against our comrade charged with murder! I warned them that we were all probably going to jail for what we were going to do. There was no hesitation. Carolyn and Findley were each called into the room and refused to say a word. Ranting and raving, the prosecutor called me into the room. I told the whole story, since I was not a witness to any of it. As Carolyn had come out she whispered to me that she recognized some of our CHALLENGE readers on the Grand Jury! The workers of Tupelo were on our side. The charges were dismissed.
The Project immediately organized a second march. Walking in the first row as we headed downtown was Carolyn proudly waving a red flag. That’s how I will always remember her–proudly waving the red flag!!

*****
It’s good to see the big picture
I was disappointed that I could not attend Progressive Labor Party’s May Day march in Brooklyn on Saturday, April 29.  However, on Monday, May 1, I accompanied a comrade to a march in Trenton, NJ being led by Cosecha.  Cosecha is an organization that struggles to improve the conditions of undocumented workers. They fight for driver’s licenses, paths to citizenship, etc. My comrade has worked with that organization for a few years. On the drive down, he was expressing his frustration about how little he thought he had accomplished with them in all that time.

When we arrived, there was a lot of evidence to the contrary. The members of Cosecha had adopted several of PLP’s chants – “La clase Obrera, No Tienen Fronteras” and  “Obreros, Unidos, Jamas Seran Vencidos” (The working class has no borders, and Workers, united, will never be defeated). Although my Spanish is intermediate, I could tell there was much more class analysis in the speeches.

I congratulated my comrade on the impact he has had over the years. It pays to be in it for the long haul.

In addition, we distributed many DESAFIOS (spanish version CHALLENGE), not only to the marchers, but to the residents of the largely immigrant neighborhood where we marched.

*****
A Neighbor’s story with CHALLENGE
This past Saturday a couple of comrades, including an awesome high school student, came to do another CHALLENGE newspaper sale at the 15 floor building where my partner and I live. A neighbor had the following to say after we asked him what he thought about it. The first time he saw the newspaper outside his door he did not pay it much attention. Eventually, he grabbed it and left it in his car. Then, during his lunch break he began looking through it and even started to discuss some of the ideas with a coworker. He told us, “When I read the paper I feel strongly. By now I know I’m going to get another. And look forward to it.”

He also spoke about how challenging life as an immigrant father and husband from Ghana is in the U.S. How supervisors at his job have used his ideas in a way that has discouraged him from wanting to contribute further. How he wishes we lived in a world where people were encouraged to freely contribute our naturally endowed gifts to provide for each other. We responded by saying, “That’s communism!” He shared how more recently a bill collector called him to get their money for a Covid test his family had received way back when the pandemic was more intense. He was trying to say how backwards capitalist society is in that it puts profits first over people’s wellbeing. He also expressed that what the paper is  communicating reminds him of parts of his life where he has been vocal about what is wrong with this system. We told him that the fact that the  paper’s ideas have hit this key cord within him to the extent that he felt compelled to share it with a coworker is a really powerful thing! We asked him if he would be open to coming over to our apartment in the near future to talk more about these communist politics. To which he said definitely!

Our neighbor’s growing confidence in our ideas and willingness to get closer to us represent another nail in the coffin of a profit system that depends on keeping us divided in order to keep exploiting us. This new development - one of many recently in our building - is the product of becoming more disciplined and committed about distributing CHALLENGE where we have  lived over the last 4+ years and fighting to be more communist in the way that we live, share with our neighbors, and respond to each other’s needs.

*****
I protested: rent is too damn high!
I attended a protest in Jersey City titled The Rent is Too High put on by a local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). While the march attracted some vocal young workers, the majority of the downtown crowd they were speaking to seemed indifferent.

Maybe it is due to their call to action, which involves passing a measure before the city council for a right to counsel for tenants paid for by developer taxes in the future. If that sounds far off to you as well, you are right. While local agitation and engagement is good, without a permanent solution of communist hope and revolution, the struggle will continue.

*****
Remember: it was the reds who smashed the Nazis
May 9th is the day that the Soviet Union celebrates the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies. In the largest land war in history with 27 million dead, the Soviet people, led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin, smashed, at least for a time, the most evil doctrine yet to appear on our planet. Had the Nazis defeated the Soviet Union, many if not most of us would not be here to talk about it.

Even though Germany and other countries banned the flying of Russian and Soviet flags during the demonstrations there, people all over the world celebrated the Soviet victory.

Today the PLP is attempting to learn from and advance upon the lessons of the USSR. Visit the PLP.org website for more information.

In early January of this year Comrade Russell Phillips died. He was a longtime member of The Progressive Labor Party. Russell worked at Lenox Hill Hospital for about 5 years in the late 70’s to early 80’s.

Along with other Party members he consistently fought the management of that hospital around racism. He also combined bread and butter issues (he worked in the engineering department) with broader international issues.

He would leaflet and sell CHALLENGE consistently both in the hospital and outside at the entrance.
In 1983, when Russell was leafleting against the Reagan invasion of Lebanon, the hospital bosses instigated a backward worker to violently attack him with a 2 by 4. That worker was suspended and Russell was fired.

The sellout hospital workers union 1199 to whom Russell had been a thorn in the side of, did not defend him and he ultimately lost his job but over the course of those years had brought many communist ideas to the hospital workers.

In 1979, he was involved in PLP’s activities in Tupelo, Mississippi when the Party violently fought back the attacks of the Klan.

Russell soon after moved to NYC and organized at Lenox Hill Hospital against the hospital bosses and sellout 1199 leaders.

Eventually moving to Philadelphia, Russell did political work in a small church.

Russell was always reading the Party literature and many other sources. He called me a week before he died to discuss a podcast he had just seen criticizing NATO’s instigation of The Ukrainian War.

Russell was just shy of 91. He had good innings but will be missed by his close friend in Philadelphia Jean and the many comrades and workers who knew him. Rest in power.

It’s a tale of two governors: Florida’s racist Republican Ron DeSantis bans books, busts unions and ends tenure. New Jersey’s Democratic “friend-of-labor” Phil Murphy breaks the first-ever Rutgers University strike of 9,000 educators, by summoning union and management into his office to broker a deceptive deal. Two apparent opposites, both waging the current bosses’ war on higher education workers and students.  Do their differences hide their sameness? Dialectical philosophy argues that apparent opposites are also interconnected—both share similarities and differences. In the end they are primarily same. Two sides of the same coin, representing the same rotten system.

Speakers from the Rutgers strike and the Florida antifascist fight took up this question on April 15 at a Modern Language Association Radical Caucus Roundtable, “The Racist Offensive Against Higher Education: Organizing a Marxist Response in the MLA.”

The  accounts of front-line struggle, along with radical analyses by a Newark-based community organizer and faculty speakers from Florida, Rutgers, and CUNY, electrified the 40-plus attendees. PLP participants helped push this discussion to the left with our own speakers, as well as being key organizers of the event.

“Teach students about class society so they can overthrow it”

The Newark community organizer framed the political and ideological stakes of the roundtable debate most sharply:

"Our political work is to make visible how the education system at all levels has been formed by both liberals and fascists to keep capitalism in place. Before fascists were banning books, liberals were creating conditions in which students could not read: the capitalist education system is deliberately designed to give a handful of elite students a ‘liberal’ anti-racist and anti-sexist ‘miseducation’ to prepare us to be part of a capitalist managerial class, while grossly underfunding the overall education system so that the overwhelming majority of students at all levels, including college, are kept in the low ranks of the working class."

“Only a communist education can diagnose the problems of capitalism, and teach students the class nature of society so they can overthrow it,” she concluded.

Appearance and essence
The keynote speaker praised the antiracist opposition to DeSantis and Murphy, yet offered a Marxist analysis of  the anti-fascist struggle in Florida:

"We need to analyze these newer, sharper right-wing offensives in connection to the much longer trends of the massive theft of the social wage and declining standard of living, not only for higher education workers but for the entire working class, native-born as well as immigrant, white as well as Black and brown."

She pointed out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have overseen decades of massive cuts in education that have proletarianized 75 percent of higher education faculty, who have no prospect of tenure and earn less than a living wage.

While DeSantis and Murphy are opponents in the political war between Democrats and Republicans, she emphasized that both governors operate as “state managers” for capital: to preserve the conditions for capitalists to make profits by exploiting workers. Social control of universities and unions by the state—in either its liberal or its fascist  versions—is  key  for capitalism to flourish. Two Florida union speakers later referred to this capitalist control of education as teaching “anticipatory obedience”—forcing union faculty to obey racist state laws, teaching students to obey  future bosses.

“Fascism is on a continuum with liberalism”
“Fascism is on a continuum with liberalism,” the first faculty union speaker from Florida put it starkly, giving a Marxist view different from the dominant liberal view of fascism. Faculty are fighting hard against new laws that tighten state control of curriculum, eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and erode academic freedom, he said. The most explicit shift from liberalism to fascism in Florida is using state funds to create a new University of Florida institute, The Hamilton Center, to uphold right-wing ideology (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/22).  A recent Scientific American  article (4/7/2023) says that the  new Florida policies “mirror past fascist strategies” used in Italy by Mussolini.

A CUNY community college professor on the panel showed how the liberal CUNY system misleads working-class urban students into the individualism of “social mobility,” a multicultural spin on the American Dream.  “Campus DEI initiatives are held up with pride, but in moments of crisis, this veneer falls away” and administrators show their true colors.

Another Florida faculty union militant called on everyone present to “Organize, organize, organize. That’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years and will continue doing.” A Rutgers graduate student and strike organizer scathingly attacked New Jersey Governor Murphy, as well as Rutgers President “good cop” Holloway (a Black civil rights historian), and the union misleaders who suspended the strike at Murphy’s urging. “Next time union members have to be prepared to go further and stay out against the leaders’ double-cross,” she declared.

Communists never give up building workers’ power
For communists, winning means building workers’ power. Our Florida friends are feeling down today because the DeSantis laws were passed. Many Rutgers organizers were also disappointed by the suspension of their strike.  But look at the Florida motto, “Organize, organize, organize!” It comes from the history of workers fighting again even after a defeat: the only defeat is giving up. As Lenin wrote, “strikes are schools for communism.” The lesson of Florida, that “fascism is on a continuum with liberalism,” puts us already further down the road to revolution.

The role of PLP at this forum was to strengthen ourselves and our co-workers with that communist vision. As they teach us valuable lessons in how to rebel against the racist state control of education, our role is to build power for workers’ revolution, where winning means taking state power from the capitalists. Then a human history—not the history of warring classes but of workers’ control over their lives, can begin in earnest.

New York City, May 18–Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades joined 300 workers and students in a powerful march sponsored by Make the Road NY in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We were protesting against high rents, displacement and evictions in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Comrades connected with many friends in the march and on the streets. The demand of the organization and politicians who spoke was that the state legislature pass “Good Cause” legislation. “Good Cause,” if passed, would supposedly mean that landlords across New York state with buildings with less than six apartments can’t evict or raise rents dramatically without good cause.
                
Migrants not our enemies
As we marched, comrades chanted with the marchers and distributed 150 CHALLENGE papers about May Day around the world and 200 PLP leaflets  demanding low rent housing for all homeless people in shelters and arriving migrants. New York City is now housing new migrants in the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, paying the hotel owners $200 a night per room! The liberal bosses and their lackey politicians in NYC are deviously using these migrants to divide the working class and to distract us from the real enemies (the capitalists). The same way racism affects the entire working class, so does unemployment, which the bosses use in order to bring down wages for the entire working class, including for white workers. We can’t let the bosses divide us and that’s why all workers need to unite, Black, Latin, Asian and white. The bosses want to use migrants as  scapegoats and want to blame them for their problems, but we need to direct our anger against the capitalist bosses.

Reform is never enough
Marchers enthusiastically took CHALLENGE and our leaflets which stated, “Workers need power, not crumbs! A worldwide system that won’t provide jobs, housing and healthcare for the working class doesn’t deserve to exist. The working class needs to destroy capitalism with revolution. We need a system that will collectively and globally eliminate exploitation, war, racism and sexism. We need communism, community in its essence.”
                                                    
The contradiction between reform and revolution was on display. While desperate, angry workers support reform, they know from experience that even if “Good Cause” is passed by the state government, it will largely be ignored by the landlords without long, drawn out cases in landlord court.

“Why are so many politicians speaking?” asked a participant.

“To direct and control the workers’ movement,” answered a comrade.

“Why can’t they pass a law forcing the landlords to open up empty buildings and apartments the landlords are holding?” a friend asked.

“Landlords are part of the capitalist ruling class and dominate all aspects of our lives,” the comrade answered. Some workers say the fight for reforms is a step toward revolution. That’s an illusion. There is no peaceful transition from reform to revolution. PLP’s role is to participate in the reform fight while sharpening the revolutionary side of the contradiction. It’s happening now!