Biden’s reforms build for war
The House of Representatives, spearheaded by Democrats, servants of the liberal old money wing of U.S. imperialists, voted to include an immigration provision in Jim Crow Joe Biden’s  Build Back Better bill. Aside from the fact that the Congressional parliamentarian may exclude the provision, the debate in the Senate, whether the bill passes or not, will further intensify fear, repression, racist scapegoating and exploitation of immigrant workers. What does it all mean?
So-called Plan C will temporarily infuse the capitalist economy with “in chains” low wage workers to fill momentary job shortages, guarantee huge profits for businesses and aid in the liberal strategy to control inflation. The “immigration reform” will position young workers to serve as cannon fodder in the next war. Horrendous fascist conditions at the border will intensify. The provision in the bill is a big fascist attack on the working class, leaving immigrant workers vulnerable to deportation at the end of five to ten years.
The crumbs thrown by these liberal wolves in sheep’s clothing are sweet, but are certainly  poisoned. Comrades participating in pro-immigrant groups, community groups, unions, schools, etc. need to step up the fight for amnesty as we fight inside the movement facing endless reforms to benefit the capitalists. It’s hard to do but we must do it as we sharpen the struggle to unite the working class, men, women, Black, Latin, Asian, white, immigrant, and workers of different backgrounds and sexual orientation. We must redouble our confidence in the working class as we fight against illusions in the bosses’ reforms and for the necessity to be in the protracted struggle for communist revolution and workers’ power.
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Party parents organize vaccination drive
Communists have the outlook of both organizing against capitalism and building ties in the working class. Many have written about building connections on the job, in unions, and at schools. Parents can also build these ties within the communities of their children by fighting against racism and making the personal political.
Recently Chicago Public Schools (CPS) had a “Vaccine Awareness Day” and school was closed so elementary age children could get vaccinated. But while several private schools on the North Side arranged to have mass vaccination events at their schools for children and parents, almost no Chicago public schools had similar events planned.
In fact, the Chicago Department of Health and Board of Education claimed that school vaccination events hadn’t worked in other places and purposely made no effort to create these opportunities.
However, one school that serves 80 percent working-class students and many Spanish-speaking students went ahead anyway under the leadership of a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) parent. We organized a pharmacy to come that day and vaccinate both children and adults. To answer questions and increase knowledge and confidence in the vaccine, we held a Q&A event with a bilingual physician during the week before the event. The day of the event, we brought banners, balloons, snacks, and even got news coverage.
Having this in the neighborhood worked out well—127 people were vaccinated including some neighbors whose children did not attend the public school. Meanwhile at a rich private school, 600 people were vaccinated in one day.
The disparity in Covid-19-related deaths has been well documented now and it appears that CPS and the Chicago Department of Health are more than happy to let that continue. PLP is organizing to change these racist decisions and to build multiracial community power so workers and parents can be in charge the next time and get everyone the care they need.

 We have seen this historically and we continue to see this at racist borders today: concentration camps and genocide are an integral part of the political economy of the capitalist system, and every capitalist imperialist power. From the extermination campaigns against indigenous workers who lived in what is now North America to the U.S. encampment of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II, these bloody stains on the U.S. are buried, obscured, and even warped into tortured apologies by the bosses’ media. Today, as the U.S. bosses imprison thousands upon thousands of refugees from Haiti and Latin America in camps, it’s not enough that we learn and gain awareness of these atrocities against the working class. We must fight back.
It’s up to workers to arm ourselves with the rich and militant history of workers’ fightback. Over a half century ago, author Yuri Suhl did just that, and wrote a history of fightback and rebellion within one of the darkest periods of working class history. For communists, Suhl’s They Fought Back serves as a manual containing lessons for how workers, staring down the face of brutal oppression, can join fists and fight back.
Fascist capitalism can be defeated
In 1967, Yuri Suhl compiled accounts of resistance to Nazism during World War II. His purpose was to dispel the myth that Jewish workers in Europe were passive and never fought back against the Nazi fascists. Most of the accounts are of lesser-known events and resistance leaders. These are honest, and although written from a nationalist perspective, Suhl and the authors highlight communist and rank-and-file leadership.
The account by Alexander Pechersky, a Red Army commander who led a revolt at the Sobibor death camp, is worth retelling. It shows how even in the most desperate situation, with confidence in the working class and a strong political base, the fascists can be taken, even from within their strongholds.
The Sobibor camp in eastern Poland was the final destination for Jewish deportees from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France, Austria, and later the Soviet Union. The Nazis murdered them at the rate of 15,000 a day. Those who remained labored from five in the morning to eight pm, barely surviving on bread and moldy barley. Typhus was rampant, and the Nazi guards immediately executed those who contracted it. The guards systematically beat the workers with whips and forced them to count their own lashes. For the rest, the children, the old and most women, there was no work, only death.  
Red Army Lieutenant Pechersky arrived at Sobibor in September, 1943, from Minsk, the first transport from the Soviet Union. He and 80 other men were spared from the ovens; the others were never seen again. Initially he suffered severe depression and nightmares, but quickly moved past that to begin escape plans and base building.  
The Nazis conducted massive executions in retaliation for attempted escapes. Pechersky reasoned that everyone must escape and relied on the workers there to make that escape possible. He allied himself with two young workers, one of whose father was a communist, who helped him to organize political discussions in the barracks, which he describes:
For those who did not understand Russian, Shloime translated into Yiddish. They translated for each other into German and Dutch ... The barracks dwellers sat on the lower bunks together with the "Easterners" (that's how we who came from the Soviet Union were called by the camp inmates). They were hungry, exhausted from hard labor, their bodies bruised from the whippings; they were doomed to death. However, it sufficed to have a brief rest, a few peaceful moments, and one's spirit rose again. Especially here, in the company of women, backs straightened out, eyes sparkled, laughter was heard, and wherever you turned, a lively discussion was in progress. And what were they discussing here? They talked about the war and its prospects; about countries and cities; about science and technology; about the theater; music, and literature; about the contradictions in human nature and about the future of humanity; here they sang, cried, and kissed; here the feelings of love and jealousy came into play; all the emotions that set the human heart aglow and quickened its pulse beat found expression here. (pp. 20, 22)
Most striking was Pechersky’s lack of cynicism. He had every "objective" reason for feeling despair, and yet he did not. Despite everything, many imprisoned workers continued to believe Hitler's lie that their lives would be saved, and this gave rise to defeatist ideas borne of fear. While capitalism exists there will always be some workers who feel this way, a lesson for us to always keep in mind.
Pechersky’s List
In the 1990s, a blockbuster Hollywood film, Schindler’s List, glorified a Nazi officer and capitalist who felt sympathy for his Jewish prisoners being sent to slaughter. Working within the Nazi system through bribes, he made a list of those to save by working in factories he ran, with the helpless Jewish prisoners having little agency in their future. In stark contrast to this passivity, at Sobibor,  “Pechersky’s list” included thirteen leading Nazi officers assassinated in advance with axes and knives secretly made by the Red Army and Jewish prisoners. They also determined that any imprisoned workers who betrayed them would be killed. Before and during this revolt, carefully planned tunnels were dug, guns were taken from the dead Nazis, and telephone lines cut.
During the revolt in October 1943, all 600 inmates made a break for freedom. About 400 succeeded in breaking out of the camp, but about half of these were killed by landmines. Pursued by aircraft, the SS (Nazi soldiers), police, and thousands of troops, some were killed. Polish fascists killed yet more – these were the anticommunist Armija Krajowa, the “national army” of the anticommunist and anti-Semitic Polish “government in exile” in London, who are “heroes” in today’s capitalist Poland. Still, some managed to elude their pursuers, and Pechersky's group of 60 men and women succeeded in making contact with Soviet “partisans,” or communist guerillas.
Before the revolt, in one of Alexander Pechersky's barracks discussions, he was peppered with questions about liberation and the state of the war. One person asked, “If there are so many partisans, why don't they attack our camp?" Pechersky replied, "The partisans have their tasks. No one can do our work for us." The workers were excited by that idea and embraced it. Their collective self-reliance was the other prong of the winning strategy. They realized — as the working class must again today — it is up to us to make change.
Auschwitz rebels betrayed by U.S., British capitalists
In contrast to Sobibor, there was also an escape from Auschwitz. The escapees made their way to the Vatican, contacting the British foreign minister and President Roosevelt to try to convince them to bomb the crematoriums and railroad transport lines. All refused. U.S. Asst. Secretary for War John J. McCoy told the World Jewish Congress:
    ... After a study it became apparent that such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources [Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Why-wasnt-Auschwitz-bombed-717594].
Those death camps functioned with direct Allied knowledge and complicity. Those agents of capital were not interested in saving the lives of the Jewish workers, communists, trade unionists, and others who were in the camps. The Auschwitz rebels’ strategy of relying on the bosses for help, waiting and negotiating, cost more lives.
Lessons from Sobibor
When workers rely on themselves, they can win their objectives, but when they rely on the agents of the bourgeoisie, labor union fakers and rotten politicians of every party, they are doomed. This is a key lesson for the international working class in this period of the development of fascism as a worldwide system.
As fascism further develops in the U.S. as they face off against imperialist rivals China and Russia, the camps housing refugees today may serve as prisons for all workers and others who rebel, and we must learn from our class’ experiences at Sobibor.
Nazism was defeated by mustering every ounce of working-class heroism during those six years of world war. But although Nazism was defeated, capitalism was not. The imperialists that united with the Soviet Union only until they could defeat their rival imperialists, the German Nazis and Italian fascists, went on to install fascist regimes to murder and terrorize workers across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. They still do. More workers have been murdered by the fascist regimes installed and bankrolled by these imperialists than were murdered by the German Nazis, Italian fascists, and their allies during World War II. Many of the refugees braving the horrific journey to the U.S. and EU borders today are fleeing these fascist regimes, and it is the duty of today’s communists in the Progressive Labor Party to learn from the past —the victories and mistakes—and finish the job.
World-wide, there are millions of workers who have no intention of being herded into death camps. But the bastard bosses and their two-bit chumps will never be defeated unless we organize now, with the spirit of those fighters at Sobibor, to smash all camps and this entire capitalist system for communist revolution.

As the liberal U.S. bosses escalate their attacks on tech giant Facebook (now rebranded as “Meta”), their pretense of “protecting democracy” against “domestic terrorism” is in fact an exercise of state control and capitalist dictatorship. As the U.S. accelerates toward more open fascism and global conflict, their rulers must first and foremost discipline their own class.
When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked thousands of documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), she revealed what were mostly open secrets: Facebook’s sexist body-shaming of teenaged girls on Instagram; its open market for sex trafficking of women and children; its callous promotion of click-bait racism (CNN, 10/28). This is business as usual in the maximum-profit world of social media. What’s new is the liberal bosses’ urgency to crack down on billionaires like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and force them to fall in line with the rulers’ agenda.
To understand the liberals’ move toward fascism, the natural response of capitalism in crisis, we must look at the deepening split within the U.S. ruling class. The Big Fascists, the finance capitalists representing the wealthiest bosses and most powerful multinational corporations, are the architects of an imperialist world order they’ve dominated since World War II. The Small Fascists, the opposition wing mobilized by Donald Trump, make most of their profits domestically and oppose higher taxes for the next big war. At stake is the future of U.S. imperialism.
With their empire in decline, the Big Fascists won’t give up world dominance without a fight—most likely with capitalist archrival China. To prepare for war, rulers turn to fascism—first to discipline and unify their own ranks, then to control the working class. To defend their system from internal and external threats, they must use every instrument in their state apparatus, including the internet and social media. The U.S. government investigations of Facebook are a step toward organizing all of society while building patriotism and nationalism for imperialist war. That is why Progressive Labor Party fights to win our class to reject fascism and fight for a communist alternative.
The hammer of discipline leads to fascism
While Zuckerberg leans toward the Big Fascists, his short-sighted individualism makes him unreliable. He donated $419 million to turn out the Democratic vote in 2020 (NY Post, 10/14) and funded the failed Newark charter school initiative, a pet project for the liberal bosses. But most of all, Zuckerberg is for Zuckerberg. He’s the controlling shareholder of a company valued at more than $900 billion. Facebook’s algorithms are engineered to generate maximum likes, shares, attention, and ad revenues. Given the racist, sexist essence of capitalist society, it was inevitable that racists and sexists—representing fascists big and small—would dominate the platform.
For the liberal U.S. rulers, reining in tech kingpins is nothing new. In 1998, under President Bill Clinton, the Department of Justice brought an antitrust suit against Microsoft to force Bill Gates into finance capital’s tent. Now social media are the ones under the gun. In the 2016 presidential races, the liberal bosses stood helpless as Trump expanded and weaponized his following through Twitter. They were infuriated when Facebook enabled Russian hackers to help throw Trump and the Small Fascists the election. They are determined not to let it happen again.
The Big Fascists’ quandary is that social media is much harder to tame than the old media of TV networks and  newspapers like the New York Times. After the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, the rulers squeezed Twitter and Facebook to kick Trump off their platforms. From the evidence of last month’s Congressional hearing, where Haugen was the star witness, more aggressive moves are coming.
Social media hurts working class
Under capitalism, everything that might have been a social good, like being able to stay connected with people far away, turns into its opposite. As a tool for profit, social media:

• Generates racist violence For many workers, Facebook IS their internet—and their main source of news. Along with WhatsApp, it has fomented ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia (harvardpolitics.com, 4/19), violence against Muslim workers in India (Slate, 10/26), and genocide against the Rohingya working class in Myanmar, a campaign that “has led to murder, rape and forced migration” (New York Times, 11/6/18).
• Trafficks women workers In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Facebook knowingly serves as a market for enslavement: “the recruitment,...buying, and selling of domestic workers” (BBC, 9/23).
• Spreads anti-scientific lies and conspiracy theories “Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation [including anti-vaccination falsehoods], hate speech, and political polarization” (The Atlantic, 10/25). Regarding “combustible election misinformation,” a former employee noted that “we amplify them and give them broader distribution” (NYT, 10/26).
• Fuels sexism and alienation “Passive consumption of sexually objectifying content on social networking sites...result in lowered body satisfaction and self-esteem, particularly in women” (Frontiers in Psychology, 8/25). Teens who regularly use social media are three times more likely to feel socially isolated (NPR, 3/6/17).
• Represses fightback Following the kkkop murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, police used social media platforms to map, identify, and arrest protesters (The Verge, 10/11/16). They did the same after the summer 2020 rebellions. As fascism rises, militant workers and communists in particular will be targeted and attacked. Clearly, we cannot use online organizing to replace real-life base-building and immersion in workers’ lives.

Fascism and inter-imperialist rivalry
The imperialist bosses in China (and Russia) hold a big advantage over the Big Fascists in the U.S.: a unified ruling class that rigidly controls social media, and media in general.
So how could the U.S. bosses’ slap-down of these rotten social media be a danger for the international working class? The enemy of our enemy is not our ally. Just as the finance capital main wing fights to shut down Small Fascist content, they will also shut down any dissent at odds with their patriotic war agenda—including CHALLENGE. The attack on Facebook is a precedent for a much broader assault upon the working class.
From chaos comes fascism but dark night shall have its end
We cannot afford to be complacent. A weakened U.S. is not an automatic opportunity for the working class. Out of the bosses’ desperation comes fascism. Workers must arm ourselves with communist politics, a mass Progressive Labor Party, and a fighting red army. As we raise our red flag high, we raise it with CHALLENGE in hand! Only a communist revolution—the final conflict—will liberate our class. Long after the Zuckerbergs of the world and their billions have been ploughed under, it is a story we will tell ourselves, with communist media run by and for the working class.

LOS ANGELES, November 1—As communists, we know everything is political. We strive to make that apparent to our friends and the entire working class. It is with this in mind that we took Día de Los Muertos, a holiday to honor the dead, and united with impacted families to not only honor loved ones, but indict this racist system that stole them from us. The event with about 75 attendees included dinner, music, poetry, a police car shaped piñata, and a pin the Molotov cocktail on the cop car game.
A poem, excerpted below, was written and performed by a comrade who has spent the last two years immersed in the struggle against police murder. As a Party, we have consistently injected revolutionary politics into the reform struggle. This poem lays out the current struggle we are waging –that police murder cannot be reformed away. KKKops will only be abolished when we overthrow the entire system of capitalism through a revolution led by Progressive Labor Party. The poem was well received and we will follow up with a Party forum discussing this very topic.
 
Día de los Muertos

This Día de los Muertos
We honor Nicholas Burgos
And all those souls the police stole
With stories of our loved ones told
Break bread, art and music
And a film with raised tombstones
Flowered by multiracial fists and Mexican marigolds
And poems
Both passionate and bold
And gotta fight like Ghada writes
Tonight
We deepen our ties
And love a little deeper
See past the masks and masquerades
Of politicians that parade by
But instead listen
What are those who passed away trying to say?
What is the lesson?
 
I think of Julius Fuchick on this night of hallow
A Czechoslovakian communist who wrote notes on scraps in secret
Even as he faced certain death by Nazi gallows
He said, “in real life there are no spectators: you all participate in life”
His work in the underground helped defeat fascism
and inspired Ricardo Neftalí Basoalto
You know him as Pablo
But you probably didn’t know it
That he took the name of a Czechoslovakian poet
Neruda—
 
So what are the deceased who live on within us trying to tell us?
The building blocks of life are found on icy rocks of comets
The universe is ours!
But beyond the poetry and astrophysics
Capitalism is killing us and the environment
It’s never been more apparent
But if only common sense was enough
If we couple it with scientific philosophy
We can learn that we need to be communists
 
Cuz the jig is up and the vote is in
Drugs are being criminalized by Joe Biden again
A public health crisis like covid
And we are dying by the hundreds of thousands
From synthetic opioids and overdoses
And guaranteed more police violence          
The community harm – you name it
Are these sins of capitalism?
 
And forever destined to repeat
Because they’re imprinted in the profits
And foundations of finance on Wall Street
Which has stood the test of every reform for centuries
Including Abolition and a civil war
We live in one of the most democratic cities
In the most democratic state in one of the most democratic countries
And it cages the most people than any place on Earth
So where does this confidence that their state apparatus can work for us come from?

When billionaires fund U.S. imperialism abroad
Do we raise a fist or a brow?        
What is in it for them?

When folks who claim to be the new political sages
Maybe using different language up on these stages
Sounding radical but with the same message wrapped in a new package Do we still say they’re the lesser evil, the answer, or do we get enraged?
And recognize the fundamental flaws of simply passing laws
Focusing on the effects and not the cause. Going to the polls for politicians within institutions designed for our demise

Petitioning for legislation that can purportedly abolish their policing
That they created and control since day one in this country
Is not up for discussion let alone defunding
The belief that through passing bills or even with a storm on capitol hill
That this system can be abolished piecemeal
Without a violent revolution to end this whole damn system
Is the new opiate of the masses—
It’s about more than shutting it down and burning it down
But what do we build now and in its place?
 
The genius of the masses is found
Where the struggle abounds
In the groundedness
Yes it’s about the sun on high but without the fertile dirt
It’s the difference between Mars and Earth
 
So what is our class trying to teach us
The working class
That is screaming out segregated
Like our dearly departed
But trying to reach us
In desperate need of organization
We are inevitably defeated before we get started
If we don’t build a communist Party

I know this poem   
Is only words on a page
Like pan de muerto on an altar
But consider this food for thought
From those beyond the grave
Resting in power
 
And when
Maria, Evelia
Marie, Pamela
Sam, Amanda
Rosa, Eloina Leti, Hilda
Deanna, Christina
Valerie, Barbara
Lisa, Lea
Emily, Jonetta
Ghada,
 
Hasta la Victoria!
Victoria
When we join together.