BRONX, November 2–“Take a hand warmer. You’ll need it” Last week a dozen students and educational workers rallied in front of Bronx Community College due to of lack heat in the entire campus. We gave out hundreds of hand warmers and fliers calling on students, staff, and faculty to challenge racist austerity policies at City College of New York (CUNY) and to join our group that is building a strike movement. This rally was held just a week after we demonstrated a few miles south, at Hostos Community College, where the student cafeteria has been closed for over two years, vending machines and elevators are constantly out of order, and the outdoor spaces have been closed to students. The righteous anger of students and workers at the racist conditions that we’re forced to endure was on display, as people eagerly respond to our fightback message. As we fight for better student and worker conditions on campus we are also calling for communist revolution - a revolution that puts the needs of the international working class first.

What does racist austerity look like?
This fall, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active with students and other education workers at Hostos Community College. We have helped to launch a mass petition campaign demanding the immediate reopening of the cafeteria and hiring of unionized cafeteria workers. This campaign, initiated by students, has gained much momentum as hundreds have stopped to sign and talk with us. Of course, everyone asks the same question- “What can we do about it?” Our answer is two-fold: We must fight to open the cafeteria, to get heat back on campus and to stand up to the college administration in whatever way we can. But we must also recognize that these fights aren’t enough and that students at CUNY and worldwide will only get the education that our class needs once we have destroyed capitalism and replaced it with communism. Communism means a society that is run for and by workers, and where there will always be free, quality, life-long education for all workers. Having CHALLENGE present at these rallies has helped us get this vital message across.

As we head into winter, students will have to head outside to buy food. Hostos is in the South Bronx, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country and in the middle of a true “food desert” with only fast food available. We point out that the CUNY bosses have whittled many campuses to the bare bones, including closing cafeterias in almost half of the 25 campuses across New York City. This is part of a strategy that includes early cancellation of classes and offering fewer and fewer services to students.  

New student leadership emerging
“I feel like I’ve been waiting for this my whole life” was the comment made by one new student who has stepped up to help lead and organize these fightbacks.

Students are seeing very clearly that these fightbacks must be led by students in order to have the best impact.

In the past month, new students have come forward to help organize petitioning, make signs, write speeches, and even help with a social justice history trip. We plan to win more students to join the Party. These struggles are a training ground for these students. As students combat racist and sexist inequality on campus they accumulate the knowledge and experience they need,alongside our class siblings, to eventually  build and run the communist world they deserve.


What do communist ideas look like in the struggle?
PLP members are always learning how to participate and help lead reform struggles while advancing communist politics. We have a study group that is meeting with students from different campuses around the Northeast, biweekly CHALLENGE rallies in the Bronx and an upcoming conference we are building for. We are challenging identity politics and are clear that having a Latin or Black administrator doesn’t mean they will be more responsive to our students.

Identity politics and reforms are not the end goal - it is communist revolution. Join PLP!

The principled stance taken by three of the greatest Black communist leaders of the 20th century — Paul Robeson, Benjamin Davis and William E. B. Du Bois, showed through their practice that to fight racism you have to fight the bosses. They understood that racism was created by capitalism to both divide and weaken the working class as well as to net the bosses hundreds of billions in super-profits from the lower pay forced on Black and Latin workers.

These three leaders of the working class fought in different spheres and in different ways. Robeson became a world-famous actor and singer who used his fame and position to support anti-racist struggles and workers on strike. He also helped to popularize the Soviet Union, at that time led by communists. Robeson traveled the world and in practice built international working-class unity.

Benjamin Davis graduated from Harvard Law School and defended Angelo Herndon, a Black communist organizer in Georgia who was on trial for organizing Black and white workers to fight for relief payments in Jim Crow Georgia in 1932. Davis went on to become a communist community organizer in Harlem who was elected to the New York City Council as an open communist.

W.E.B. Du Bois took on the bosses across many fields as a writer, sociologist and political organizer. Du Bois used the bosses’ publications and academia to attack capitalism, fight against pseudo-scientific racism and fight for workers' power. His organizing led him to finally join the Communist Party (CP).

Black workers’ leadership, key to communist revolution
Robeson, Davis and Du Bois showed the strength and power of Black leadership in the fight for workers power. They were communists and represented both the strengths and weaknesses of the communist movement in the period of the 1920s through the reversal of workers’ power in the Soviet Union in 1953. The communist movement was the leading force in the fight against racism around the world. It also made serious errors, such as participating in the bosses’ elections, as Ben Davis did, that ultimately weakened the communist movement and led to its temporary collapse.The CP built  illusions that capitalist controlled democracy could serve the working class. Despite the weaknesses of the old movement, all three understood you can’t fight racism by following the bosses. Robeson, Davis and Du Bois never kowtowed to the big bosses. In the face of tremendous attacks they fought the racist rulers throughout their entire lives.

Robeson felt free of racism in Soviet Union
Robeson stood up for the communist-led Soviet Union during the height of Cold War anti-communist frenzy. U.S. rulers seized Robeson’s passport, fearing his revolutionary influence around the world; hauled him before HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), cajoled Black “leaders” and the popular major league baseball player Jackie Robinson to condemn him (although Robinson later said he had made a mistake) and took away Robeson’s internationally acclaimed acting and singing career.
Throughout all these attacks Robeson never once flinched. He was maligned for vowing that Black people in the U.S. would never fight an imperialist war against the socialist Soviet Union (USSR), declaring that the USSR was the first place he had ever felt free of racism. Robeson was awarded and accepted the Stalin Peace Prize. Now, when he is long dead, the rulers and their lackeys try to “honor” him in order to allow some of his greatness to rub off on them, conveniently “forgetting” on whose side Robeson stood.

Davis, communist jailed for fighting U.S. imperiaism
Communist leader Benjamin Davis, beloved by Black and white workers alike in the 1930s and 1940s, was elected to the New York City Council from Harlem on the Communist Party ticket, garnering more votes than any other Councilman of his day. He was a leading fighter to end Metropolitan Life’s ban on Black tenants in their huge tax-supported housing development, Stuyvesant Town. He was indicted and jailed by the Cold War government of Harry Truman for his communist beliefs and support of the worldwide fight against U.S. imperialism.

He continued the fight against the racist U.S. rulers to his dying day.

Du Bois joins Communist Party “the logic of my life”
Finally, there was the great, world-respected William E. B. Dubois, a founder of the NAACP over  a century ago, who, after more than 60 years of fighting racism, joined the Communist Party in 1961. Du Bois declared that becoming a communist was “the logic of my life.”

Du Bois was a leader in the fight against racism across intellectual fields and in the mass movement. He brought a class line on racism to the NAACP’s newspaper Crisis, which under Du Bois’ editorship grew to have a circulation of over 100,000. Du Bois took on the battle against the eugenicists and popularized the understanding that race is a social construct without any scientific basis and was created by capitalism to divide the working class.

Du Bois defended the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin against anti-communist attacks during the McCarthy period. Like Robeson, Du Bois was world renowned. He wrote regularly for Foreign Affairs magazine and was a staunch critic of liberalism as perpetrating capitalist racism. Like Robeson and Davis, he was hounded by the ruling class, banned from traveling, unable to find work. Like them, he never backed down.

Today, Progressive Labor Party is here because of people like Robeson, Davis and Du Bois and millions of other workers who have fought the bosses and united the working class. We look to the lessons learned from their practice. We are focused on the fight against racism as key to uniting the working class. We see that the way to respond to the bosses’ attacks is to fight even harder. We know that we must stay focused on the fight for workers' power , and that’s a communist world.

LOS ANGELES, November 2–Antiracist fighters have united across Los Angeles County for weeks to stand up against anti-Black and anti-indigenous racism. A recently revealed leaked audio tape exposed a top labor leader and three members of the LA city council, including the first Latin woman president of the council, Nury Martinez, using vile, racist language. They were discussing how to redistrict LA so that the voter population best benefits them. This redistricting also intentionally disadvantages their fellow Black council people. They are modeling themselves off of the big imperialist powers as they carve up the city for their gain. As the Democrats struggle to maintain the appearance of liberalism, calls for the council members’ resignations have gone up the chain as high as President Joe Biden. While most workers fighting for their resignation will simply put their faith in the next up-and-coming Democrat, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are struggling with our base to understand racism as the bedrock of capitalism. Our calls for “Don’t Vote - Revolt'' have to be even sharper when the liberals expose themselves as they do time and time again.

PLP offers a way for workers to overthrow capitalism
It is against this backdrop that PLP hosted our quarterly forum. One of our previous forums on imperialist war was in the works for weeks and was coincidentally scheduled for just two weeks after the launch of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian bosses. Similarly, this forum was already being planned to fall a week after the audio tapes surfaced. Comrades in LA are not psychic though. We just know the enduring characteristics of capitalism - war, racism, police brutality, etc. will never stop wreaking havoc on our class. The system constantly exposes itself as long as we are there to take advantage of the opportunities.

Almost 25 comrades and base members gathered to look at the long history of mass movements in the U.S. - the abolition of slavery, anti-Jim Crow fights, the Civil Rights movement, and the recent antiracist movement reignited during the summer of 2020. The engaging presentation declared all of these time periods as potential tipping points that never tipped due to the reliance on working within the system and electoral politics. Attendees connected with the Audre Lorde quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” That framework led to a discussion of the tools PLP has to offer our class - organizing on the job, in mass organizations, and in the military to build the Party in the fight to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a system of communism.

Elections trap workers in nightmare of capitalism
All participants agreed whole-heartedly that elections could never bring about the change they want to see in the world. One young Black high school student noted she’s “been looking for like-minded people  like us who really want to change the world.”She wants to attend all future PLP events! Another highlight was the attendance of a family in the anti-police brutality movement we work in here. We have known them for a while and discussed Party ideas and shared our literature, but this was the family’s first time coming to an event hosted by the Party. The husband, wife, and their teenage daughter were very engaged and said they learned a lot.

This was not a stand alone forum. In addition to connecting to the LA city council “scandal,” it served as a precursor to an upcoming action. District Attorney George Gascon has been heralded in LA as progressive and for the people. Even after 30 years as an LAPD officer and chief, and no prosecutions of police officers during another eight years as DA in the Bay Area, politicians and organizers alike have uplifted him to be the savior of the working class from police violence. Many families we work with believe his words that he will reopen cases and trust that he will prosecute police moving forward even though there has been little movement on his part for the first year and a half in office. Many are convinced by his excuses - that he wants to do more, but he is underfunded and under attack from the right.

The Party, working in unison for almost three years with the Flores family, has finally been able to break through some of that support. Our next action, which everyone at the forum was invited to attend, will be a march to Gascon’s house. This is a big step in breaking the illusions that people  can rely on the system to bring about the justice they seek for their loved ones. The next article will give updates on this action. Until then, we will continue to wage the day to day struggles in building for the time when the next tipping point will actually tip. For a lasting change for the working class, that tipping point must lead to a communist revolution, which will end racist police terror, overthrow the bosses’ dictatorship, and put a PLP-led working class in command of society.

Since June, a third of Pakistan has come under water resulting in over two thousand deaths and upwards of 20 million displaced, revealing the complete failure of the capitalist Pakistani government in particular and ineffective capacity for capitalism globally to solve the problems endemic to the climate crisis.  In 2022 alone, famines, floods and catastrophes wrought by climate change have laid bare to workers from East Africa to Pakistan two facts of this profit-driven system: first, that international “aid” is often a smokescreen for imperialist aggression; second, that local government neglect and corruption leaves millions around the world starving and tens of thousands dead—often women, children and the most vulnerable.  Take Haiti where, after the 2010 earthquake and ensuing cholera outbreak, mafioso agencies diverted needed goods to the poor to line the pockets of greasy Haitian elites via either the black market or for personal use.  As in Haiti, Pakistani workers show us that only the heroic efforts of members of the working class will offer the courage, energy and political commitment needed to share our resources and help prevent further suffering from class brothers and sisters.

The recent floods in Pakistan are the direct outcome of the deadly admixture of heavier than normal monsoon rains and rapidly melting glaciers, both resulting from the bosses’ system of profit-driven production which continues to pollute the atmosphere, ravage the ozone and intensify global warming.  Chinese, US and neighboring bosses in India contribute the largest share of CO2 emissions, and workers the world over suffer the impacts. Pakistan’s share in the world’s CO2 emission is 0.5 percent only which may not be a reason for climate change, but the government-backed rich landowners divert the natural flow of water toward the small piece of lands and dwellings of poor farmers to save their own crops and properties.

Bosses save their profits
The bosses there have proven entirely ineffective with government mismanagement of international aid and mob-like agencies swarming to hoard the “charity” and relief donations arriving from around the world, causing even more death and devastation than the floods themselves. While the Current Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s brother is largely behind the corruption in the current flood relief, the Sharif brothers years ago opportunistically called out the former regime in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake that killed 100,000 people, claiming the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority had misused 60 per cent of the funds.  According to one local journalist, Shadi Khan Saif, “There are already quite credible reports concerning criminal negligence and abuse of authority to loot and misappropriate the funds and resources meant for the flood victims…It is, however, quite ironic to see the power-greedy elite looking at this calamity as an opportunity to accumulate more wealth.”  Saif is mistaken, however, to see this greed as ironic when it is in fact the parasitic nature of a system  
based on exploitation for profit that such “corruption” take place (in.investing.com/news).   

Workers better than anyone know not to be fooled, as many impoverished Pakistanis understand that donors are sending the relief items like tents, mosquito nets, blankets, mattresses, kitchen utensils, medicines etc. that are being diverted into the markets.

As winter is approaching a large number of displaced populations are living without shelter, clean water and warm clothes. Still more than ten million people are surrounded by water which is breeding ground for malaria-breeding mosquitos, because the government is doing nothing to get the water out of the affected areas.  As of October 25, “in Sindh, 59 health facilities are fully damaged and 461 partially damaged, further limiting access to primary health care. In Sindh, between July and early October, nearly 350,000 people were suspected of having malaria, more than 700,000 had some form of diarrhea, and over 770,000 people reported a skin-related disease, according to the Directorate General of Health Services” (reliefweb.int/report).  Not only do poor people have no way to access hospitals, but capitalists owning the pharmaceutical companies are creating artificial scarcity of life saving drugs to increase the prices of medicines. Now an ordinary medicine like Paracetamol is not available in the market which is widely used to treat dengue and malaria. Some lifesaving medicines became very expensive. Those capitalizing on the shortage offering black market generics have joined the ranks of those responsible for severe reactions and sudden deaths.

Workers save lives
We approached some areas where there is no road intact. We used boats without engines/motors and were pushed by the men using a piece of wood to reach out the poor people with medicines, clothes and tents. We are a party of the poor working class therefore we don’t have resources to meet the requirements of poor displaced people but we used to collect some used items, food, water and lifesaving drugs from our neighborhoods, and we coordinated to establish some medical camps. Some of our comrades fell sick because of Malaria and dehydration during these efforts.

We in the PLP are trying to expose the bosses’ high officials and political leaders for their systemic neglect and discrimination against members of our class. When we told them that we are from a political party which is striving to establish a society without classes and exploitation, we collected all that stuff from the poor working class people and their sympathizers, they in turn showed full support to our ideology and activities. They asked us to come over here again when the situation gets better. We have found very good contacts in these areas to develop a base of support for workers’ class consciousness, a critical step toward revolution. We are proud of our poor brothers and sisters living under the sky without a tent, warm clothes, mosquito nets and clean water but understanding that it is all because of a bad political and economic system which is creating
problems for them.

Natural disasters require political solutions!
Whether it be the crushing of innocent people in Seoul’s Halloween celebration or last year’s Travis Scott concert, October deadly collapse of the bridge in India, or recent cholera outbreaks from Haiti to Pakistan, capitalism proves time and again that profiteering bosses are always at root of the events that cause needless death for our class.  Natural disasters will occur even under communism, but natural disasters under capitalism are 90 percent man-made.  They can only be combatted and mitigated through political organization and the power of our class.  Hoarding of commodities, competition over land ownership and business, pharmaceutical profiteering are all political problems fueled by the capitalist world order. Until workers seize control of land, of pharmaceutical plants—we will continue to be left at the mercy and will of the same class that places us in this continuous cycle of crisis, displacement, misery and death.  Long live Communism and PLP.