Oak Lawn, Illinois, September 21—Protests against the racist police attack (see CHALLENGE article, September 7 ) on 17-year-old  Hadi Abuatrlah continued at the Oak Lawn Police and Fire Commission meeting tonight. About 30  protesters, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), held a rally outside the police station demanding the firing and jailing of the three KKKops who beat Hadi within an inch of his life.  We distributed copies of CHALLENGE  and a reprint of the Party’s  article describing how the Middle-Eastern community in Oak Lawn has been targeted by the police for years. As we fight for Hadi and so many other victims of capitalist terror, we call on all workers to join the fight for communist revolution, where workers not capitalists will run society.

On July 27th, Hadi and friends were pulled over by kkkops because the car they were in allegedly smelled like marijuana. Those kkkops preceeded to brutally beat Hadi, after he was handcuffed. He suffered from a fractured pelvis, broken nose, and a bleeding brain. In August, over 50 multiracial workers, including PLP members protested this racist attack.

The highlight of the evening came when a multiracial and united collection of  community members stood up before the commission and denounced their silence as being complicit in this police attack.  The police chief has stated that the beating of Hadi was justified, just like the Apartheid and  Nazi regimes justified their genocidal tactics. A teacher from an area school told the commissioners about a racist incident when the police showed up concerning a disturbance outside her class.  She said the first thing the kkkop asked her was, “how many wives does your husband have,” because she was wearing a head covering or hijab.

Many protesters spoke fearlessly to the commissioners who were recording the proceedings (video and  audio) surrounded by a herd of armed police. Another speaker listed an almost endless list of lawsuits brought by victims of the racist police in Oak Lawn. The commissioners' only response to the community has been their willingness to protect and support the Klan in blue. The meeting was adjourned after we promised to return next month and every month to expose the commission, and to continue to fight for justice for Hadi.

Police racism and brutality are integral parts of capitalism.  This system cannot survive without racism; that’s why we need a communist revolution. Join us!

On September 19 a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck Mexico’s Pacific coast. Two days later a 6.8 quake struck the same area. Earthquakes in Mexico have been devastating to the working class. To many, the destruction and death after earthquakes appears to stem directly from these natural phenomena, but the true cause is the bosses’ disregard for workers' lives, allowing them to live in substandard housing. Capitalism can never keep the working class safe from so-called “natural disasters” because the bosses' drive for profits is the root of what’s causing them. We can only confront this horror with revolution and the building of a worker-led communist society.

Mexico sits in a seismic zone, on five  tectonic plates whose rearrangement each year causes hundreds of low intensity tremors and dozens of very strong earthquakes. And in the last 30 years, two devastating earthquakes left thousands dead in a gigantic wake of destruction. A severe earthquake called the Michoacan earthquake of 1985 led to widespread death and catastrophic damage to the infrastructure in Mexico City. The electricity was knocked out, leaving many workers without public transit or working traffic lights.

The president of Mexico, Miguel de la Madrid, and his advisers rejected international aid, while working people evacuated neighbors from fallen buildings and organized distribution of supplies themselves (Brittanica, 9/22).

The only true help and protection comes from the solidarity and unconditional support of the working class itself during and after most earthquakes, crises and disasters. The mobilization and solidarity of the international working class is immediate, spontaneous, and unconditional, making it clear that only workers can save workers, showing that our class  has the capacity and potential understanding to be able to organize and lead a new communist society of equality.

It is no coincidence that destruction and death are most extreme in working class neighborhoods and worksites, which are unprotected and more vulnerable to natural phenomena. The capitalist class protects its houses and large, modern buildings with anti-earthquake systems. Capitalist inequality is the real cause of these tragedies after earthquakes and is why we need to destroy this capitalist system and build a new society based on communist social equality.

On top of already vulnerable conditions of poverty, lack of preparation and corruption allow construction that does not meet safe standards and a preventable scarcity of resources to help those affected. The politicians and their electoral parties profit from the suffering of the people, blaming each other to win votes. No more electoral circus, all power to the workers!

Working class  solidarity and organization always exceed the official,  capitalist response, which is slow, inefficient, lazy and manipulative. This working class solidarity scares the bosses who, instead of helping, deploy police to control neighborhood operations and to protect the properties of the capitalists. They even resort to media fabrications to divert workers from neighborhood sites to sites controlled by security forces. Most notoriously, after the 2017 earthquake, the media created the story of Frida Sofia, a fictional child reported to be alive in the rubble of a collapsed elementary school.

Despite the danger of recurring earthquakes, workers are more afraid of the insecurity and death created by ruling class criminal gangs that the bosses use to terrorize the working class. Intuitively, the masses see more danger in capitalism than in natural phenomena.

HAITI, October 5–The bosses’ press covers up the horrible conditions that workers from Haiti face. The living conditions of the oppressed masses are hellish. Misery is reaching its peak. According to the CNSA (National Council for Food Security), more than six million workers in Haiti are food insecure—the  bourgeoisie’s “cleaned-up” term for starving. This figure doesn't even tell the whole story. There are those whose tables and stomachs are full to overflowing—this is after all, a capitalist system built on massive inequality. In an effort to make even higher profits, the bosses in the oil sector and their lackeys in the government, relying on the gangs that they have set loose on the population, have created a scarcity of fuel to justify the price increase.  This has led to a shortage in pumps across the country and a vicious increase in the price of basic necessities. (see letters on page 6 about a recent cadre training school in Haiti)

Communist leadership is needed
But the rest of the story is what really counts. Tens of thousands of workers and students take to the streets, angry and ready to fight back. At present, they are still being played like puppets by the so-called opposition politicians, but that will change with steadfast organizing by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). The objective conditions are ripening for revolution—a government that cannot govern, a working class that doesn't want to live in the same old way. What is missing is a revolutionary communist party with deep ties among the masses and in mass organizations. A party that is challenging the capitalist/imperialist system and winning our class and its allies to overthrow the current reality and build an egalitarian society that fights in the interest of the majority.

We are convinced that the anger of the working class cannot be dissipated, despite all the violence that the capitalist system engenders. Feeding a family has become a painful exercise for families as inflation becomes insupportable and the exchange rate continues to climb. Crime is raging with murders, kidnappings, robberies and rapes. For more than three weeks, there has been no transport as the hospitals (where they exist at all) no longer function for lack of fuel. Telecommunications are affected as well.

Communication is almost impossible, even as radio and television stations are forced to shutter their doors or reduce their operating hours. The banks—the foundation of the capitalist system—are closed and the transfer offices can no longer function, resulting in virtually no money in circulation.

Imperialism starves workers
Despite this untenable situation, the Core Group (the imperialists: U.S., France, Canada, European Union) and their local lackeys in the OAS as well as the IMF and the World Bank, all the managers of neoliberal financial capitalism, continue to tolerate and encourage Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s policies. The IMF had already pushed Haiti into a familiar situation by forcing former Pres. Jovenel Moïse to end government subsidies of petroleum products.

Workers and students, fed up with their daily conditions, have blocked the streets in various neighborhoods, attacked politicians, and broken into and liberated goods from some businesses that have exploited them.

Haitian workers need communist revolution
While these actions are called by various elements in the “opportunist opposition,” in a good number of cases, particularly in the provincial areas, it is groups of workers and students, trade unions or social organizations that organize them. This is the case in a city where the PLP is very active. Party members provide militant leadership and contribute to the organization of all mobilizations.

The only solution to free our class from this misery is to build the PLP as a large and strong party, giving leadership to and taking leadership from the masses. Our task today is to politicize our class, workers and students, and engage them in the factories and rural areas, on campus and in the classroom. We must take the uprising in the streets back to the job and the campus, raise class awareness to understand the roots of our misery —capitalism/imperialism— and then take this increased awareness back into the streets, the job and the campus, bringing the class struggle to a higher level.

This is how we will recruit to the PLP and build the revolutionary response of our class throughout the world—the communist revolution for an egalitarian society, without money, without racism/sexism and without imperialist wars. We launched the challenge with our cadre school this past summer (see letters on page 6). We will continue this battle until victory is ours! We will build another world. Our class and our Party is the future.

On September 16, 22 year old Mahsa Amini was arrested and beaten by the police in Tehran, Iran. Two days later she died while still in police custody. Masses of people are on the streets protesting the murder and the poor condition of the working class in Iran. The U.S. bosses are seizing on the protests to undermine the Iranian rulers. Unless the working class in Iran rejects the U.S. as well as Iranian bosses and fights for workers power and communist revolution these demonstrations will end up being mis-lead into a dead end of support for U.S. imperialism.

Mahsa was arrested for improperly wearing her hijab, a common occurrence in Iran, whose  ruling class has secured its power by mobilizing millions of workers around a form of Islam based on using fundamentalism to terrorize people who oppose the ruling class. In response to Mahsa’s killing, many thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest. At the forefront of the demonstrations have been young women who have expanded the protests beyond the murder of Mahsa to protest the deteriorating economic conditions of the working class in Iran.

U.S. liberal fascists try to co-opt antisexist fightback
Thousands of brave workers and students, with women in the lead are fighting these sexist attacks on women in Iran and to have a decent life. At the same time the U.S. ruling class is once again cynically exploiting the anger of workers in Iran for their own interests. The likely U.S. participation in the demonstrations and the acceptance of U.S. support by the leaders of the opposition movement in Iran will insure that workers in Iran are left in a bad place, still under the thumb of ruthless exploiters, regardless of how the current uprising plays out.

Since the U.S. puppet and mass murderer, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown in 1979, the U.S. bosses have been funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to opposition groups in Iran (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 7/9/2007) with the hopes of overthrowing the current Iranian ruling class and inserting a pro-U.S. group of bosses.

The U.S. is less concerned with what kind of government rules Iran than ensuring that it supports U.S. imperialism. Their funding efforts have ranged from the heirs of the former Shah to pseudo left-wing Kurdish militias. Even among the Iranian opposition many fear the U.S. is willing to install a new Shah type dictator (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 7/9/2007). What has been consistent is the devastation to workers in Iran caught between the dueling butchers in Tehran and D.C. For example, in 1981 the U.S. encouraged and financed both sides in the deadly Iran – Iraq war which resulted in hundreds of thousands dead on both sides. Since then the U.S. has encouraged and financed several mass protest movements in Iran, most recently the 2009 demonstrations known as the Green Revolution. In 2009 the U.S. used the protests to weaken the Iranian government during negotiations of the first Iran-U.S. nuclear deal. Once the deal was signed the U.S. support for the protests evaporated as then President Obama refused to sanction the Iranian government after it started killing protesters (CNN, 10/9/2012).

Unity with capitalists is deadly for our class
The demonstrations in Iran are an example of the bravery and power of the working class, along with the failed strategy of siding with one set of bosses or another. These battles can become either schools for communism, a way for the working class to learn how to beat the bosses and run society or the struggles can lead to a dead end and cynicism. We see this around the world over and over again. We must use every battle against the bosses to build a working class communist led movement for revolution. This power and our future as the working class will continue to lead to dead ends as long as we side with some group of capitalists. We must reject siding with any bosses. When the working-class sides with the bosses at best we get temporary reforms that are taken away once the bosses are able to. At worst we end up being killed when the bosses turn on us or we are used to fight against other workers in bosses’ wars. The liberation of the working class will only happen through the fight for communist revolution.