Alabama strike reveals capitalist corruption 
After visiting Alabama miners and staying in touch with them over the last month and a half, our club has been able to reach out to miners in other countries to connect with them and support them. A few activities are coming up! One, is to celebrate Bolshevik Revolution Day on November 6 at Brighton Beach. We will sell some home-made mead and food to collect funds and support the striking miners in Alabama. Our second goal is to organize an international conference on November 20 to study the history of mining as well as to understand and learn from the miners' experiences. These two events will prepare us for a winter project in Alabama on December 20, where we will support the strike, collaborate at a toy drive and continue building solidarity with the miners.
BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world and the largest shadow bank. It is the largest stockholder of WarriorMet, the coal company in Alabama where the miners are on strike. Aside from Alabama, this multinational company is involved in the exploitation of mine workers in countries from South America and Africa. At the same time, this corporation fuels war and death around the world by investing in weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and civilian firearms manufacturers in the U.S., Afghanistan and the Middle East.
We, as a Progressive Labor Party club, think that it is important to build internationalism and to draw the connections that one struggle has with another. The world is run by a few companies that control the money and resources and decide the future of the working class.
Our mission is to unveil these capitalists that create war and destruction across the globe and build solidarity among us so that we can overthrow imperialism in and outside of the U.S. We hope you can mark off these dates on your calendar and join us for the events. They will be fun!
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Building a base fundamental to struggle and morale
We are Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members that have been organizing with a collective of students, staff, and faculty at the City University of New York (CUNY). During the ongoing pandemic, we have had some modest successes in helping to lead the campaign to build strike readiness against racist austerity. This includes a number of militant caravans to the homes of CUNY presidents, marches through the community, teach-ins and speak-outs, CHALLENGE sales and study groups. We are also active in a collective of rank and file union members who are open to our ideas and agree that students are the key element in building this fightback.
This semester started somewhat slowly for us. It’s been hard to get students to attend events and sometimes our Zoom meetings, usually robust, have ended up small and more low key. We always have big plans, call for mass events, and are good at being bold, but after a few meetings that were not well attended, we wondered if this semester might be one where we just can’t get things going.
Subjectivity is the enemy! That feeling that “things are not going my way,” that our own view on things is what should guide our actions, these are fatal mistakes in the class struggle. The power of the collective is much stronger than subjectivity. Through discussions with other members of our mass organization and insisting that we keep trying, the last few weeks we saw our perseverance pay off. We had an excellent student study group with some of our students where we discussed many important political questions, including the key question of how we can reach more people with PLP’s ideas. We had a well attended student meeting and we helped to lead a student speak-out on campus two weeks ago against CUNY’s racist disorganization. The speak-out was well organized, got front page coverage in a local newspaper, and energized all of us to continue fighting back!
There are important lessons that we can learn from the masses of students and workers.In this period we have learned that relying on our base is key—they were the ones pushing us forward to hold these events. We also learned that our seriousness and dedication builds confidence in us as organizers, and in PLP as a Party that can lead the workers to our ultimate victory. We learned that we need to continue pushing forward, meeting, planning, struggling…and even in what can feel like difficult times, keep going forward!*
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Young communists learn from leadership in action
I recently attended my first Party cadre school, which I led along with four other Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members. Being a new and young member of PLP, I was intimidated by the task when first offered. However, it was a valuable experience in many ways. In the months leading up, I coordinated planning meetings with my comrades, and we gradually built our vision for the event. Up until the day of the event, we had only met and discussed virtually—which helped in terms of seeing all the planning notes but lacked the same energy as in-person gatherings.
Our cadre school completely made up for the time apart. With one of our discussion leaders out of state, we led virtual and live discussions based on the theme Communism: Past, Present, and Future. About 40 comrades and friends of  the party participated in discussions and reflected on communism’s distinction from capitalism and socialism. Two of our comrades, who are Metro workers, ended our event with a discussion on an ideal transportation system. One comrade from New York pointed out the ruling class’s tactics to divide workers over financial insecurities for transportation fare.
An older comrade, who introduced me to the Party, commended me and our fellow comrade who led virtually. Despite technical issues and timing, we succeeded in facilitating engaging conversations and using our time to analyze the flaws of the old communist movement and our own actions to fight against the oppressive system of capitalism.
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After more than 10,000 refugees from Haiti risked their lives to journey through South American jungles and gang-infested territory to reach the Texas border, they were met by a wave of racist terror. In a throwback to the 18th-century slave catchers, U.S. border patrol agents, mounted on horseback, whipped and kidnapped members of our class—men, women, and children. But this shocking display of inhumanity was nothing new. It was part of a long tradition of liberal atrocities toward immigrant and Black workers. In the United States of Amerikkka, Democrat and Republican rulers alike use racism to divide, exploit, scapegoat, and demonize the most vulnerable workers.
After U.S. President Joe Biden campaigned last year to address “the Trump-created humanitarian crisis at our border” and to stop “denying asylum to people fleeing persecution and violence” (joebiden.com), many were deceived into thinking his administration would be a change from open racist Donald Trump, and that he would welcome immigrants with open arms. The reality exposes the fallacy of “lesser evil” wishful thinking. The fact that liberals are the main danger to the international working class. In fact, Biden is following the same playbook used both by Trump and by Biden’s nightmare Democrat predecessor, Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama. Like Trump, Biden is cynically exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic and using “Title 42” to authorize his nazi border agents to deny migrants their asylum “rights.” Like Obama, he is expelling migrants en masse—more than 700,000 since February (BuzzFeed, 9/23).
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights these racist expulsions and stands in solidarity with workers who are fleeing the instability and destruction caused by capitalism. The international working class must reject all forms of nationalism and borders. The fight to destroy capitalism and imperialist exploitation must be led by Black workers under the banner of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
Bosses’racism leads to mass desperate, migrations
Anti-immigrant and anti-Black racism are essential to all capitalist rulers. Since the devastating 2010 earthquake, Haitian bosses have partnered with U.S. and other imperialist thieves in skimming tens of millions of dollars for business “development” while leaving workers in Haiti worse off than ever. This, in turn, has led to the latest mass migration out of Haiti (Current Affairs, November 2016).
In Brazil, the bosses super-exploited these immigrant workers to build stadiums for the 2014 World Cup (Reuters, July 2014). In Chile, they faced racist super-exploitation and terrible poverty; in Venezuela, the collapse of the state capitalist economy caused more of the same. Heading north to the U.S., they had to pass through Mexico under the fake-socialist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who collaborated with the U.S. to keep migrants penned in Mexico while waiting indefinitely for their asylum claims to be processed in the U.S.
Abused, humiliated and rejected, these refugees trekked on from the frying pan into the fire: to the United States, with its horrific history of brutalizing immigrants in general and workers from Haiti in particular.
From Carter to Clinton: racist incarceration
Former U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan worked hand-in-hand with the arch-criminal Duvalier dictatorship(Papa Doc and Baby Doc, ruthless ex-Presidents of Haiti) They deported asylum seekers back to Haiti, sending many to their torture and death.
In 1991, after Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a coup, thousands of fleeing workers were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and penned in an overcrowded camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to await processing. Then President George H.W. Bush ordered the Coast Guard to turn back ships directly to Haiti—a policy denounced as “cruel” by Bill Clinton in his 1992 campaign for president. But after taking office, Clinton reversed course and kept Bush’s policy in place.
He also continued to use Guantánamo Bay for the racist detention of hundreds of refugees from Haiti. His administration justified this racist detention by claiming that they were carriers of the HIV virus, even though the rate of HIV transmission was lower in Haiti than in the U.S.(refugees.org, 9/21).
Obama to Biden: continued racist assault
Under the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton focused on building a favorable climate for business in Haiti. In the name of “free trade,” the U.S. embassy engaged in a joint effort with Haitian elites, factory owners, and big U.S. textile companies to cap the minimum wage in Haiti at 31 cents per hour (COHA.org, 7/11).  
After the 2010 earthquake, the face of the international relief effort was United Nations “special envoy” Bill Clinton, who channeled “relief” efforts to attract foreign investments and profits. At the time, Port-au-Prince lay in ruins. Haitian workers were crowded into filthy tent cities, where thousands died in a cholera epidemic triggered by United Nations “peacekeepers” (pri.org, 10/27/20). As Current Affairs (11/2/16) noted, “the Clinton-led recovery was a disaster.”
Shortly before Obama left office, his Homeland Security Department rounded up thousands of refugees: “Immigration facilities have been so overrun that hundreds of immigrants have been moved to criminal jails, in violation of international norms” (Miami New Times, 12/14/16). Obama’s solution was to ramp up and fast-track deportations to a country then in shambles from Hurricane Matthew and rocked by “violent post election unrest”(Miami New Times, 12/14/16).
Communism = No Borders
In the face of the relentless attacks by Biden and other capitalist bosses, the refugees from Haiti organized migrant caravans to protect themselves from police and gangs, and to take care of one another to the best of their ability.
 As usual, the international working class has turned out in support, with rallies in solidarity throughout the world. At the U.S.-Mexico border, workers from Mexico cooked for the refugees stuck under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas (Mexico Daily News, 9/27). On the U.S. side, community organizations have raised money for them.
As this border crisis continues, we must fight for no deportations—and to build a revolutionary communist party. Borders were created by the capitalists to define which workers were theirs to exploit. But workers have no borders!  We must fight for communism to create a world without nations or exploitation. One class, one world, one Party. Join PLP!

BROOKLYN, NY, October 6—What does winning mean for antiracists in competitive sports within a racist society? That’s the big question in a struggle involving coaches, players, teachers, and parents, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), in the newly integrated John Jay and Millennium High School sports program.
Under capitalism, a system that feeds on inequality and applauds individualism, winning games against rival teams is the be-all and end-all of sports. But communists see winning in a different way. Our victories are defined by antiracism and collectivity. We win by developing people to value the long-term needs of the group over individual achievements.  
At John Jay-Millennium, the girls’ volleyball players and coaches have a special responsibility to help lead and integrate the school as it transitions from two teams—one with mainly Black and Latin players, the other with mostly white and Asian players—to one. This program has a proud history of fighting racist treatment of Black and Latin players by out-of-control school cops. It has also called out the racist funding inequities in the Department of Education’s varsity athletics.
What does antiracist struggle look like on a sports team?
Tryouts for the volleyball team began in August, shortly before the start of the school year. Most of the young women trying out were from Millennium Manhattan school, which in previous years had shared a sports program with the Brooklyn Millennium school at John Jay. When it became clear that John Jay’s Black and Latin students would be left with few spots on the varsity team, antiracism needed to be put front and center.
Though tryouts were extended into the first weeks of school to give more opportunities to students from other John Jay schools, coaches conducted the tryouts as they had in years past.
Less experienced players were sent to a second gym within the building, with the intention of providing targeted support to improve their chances of making the team. But in this case, the result was that most of the Black and Latin athletes went to the second gym, while the head coach remained in the first gym with most of the white and Asian athletes. Many of these students had gained an advantage by playing volleyball on private club teams during the previous year, when public school teams were shut down because of the pandemic. Club volleyball costs serious money, as much as $10,000 per player plus travel expenses—which means that most working class Black and Latin youth don’t have access.
In short, there needed to be a vigorous struggle to discuss and act on the importance of uniting the two programs to create an antiracist, integrated team. Some bold Black players came forward to point out how racist inequities were exposed by the tryouts, and a sharp struggle ensued. What does it mean to have a winning team? Should the most experienced players get all of the meaningful playing time to give the team the best chance to come out on top? Or should the team on the court consistently play more and less experienced players together to advance integration, unity, and the entire squad’s development?  
Make antiracist integration primary over winning
We are up against a segregated and inherently unequal society and public school system. This system is no accident. Capitalism needs racism to survive. It needs to divide white from Black and Latin students and workers so that all can be oppressed and exploited for profit.
Building an antiracist, integrated team on and off the court is one way we can begin to crack the racist divisions the Department of Education
(DOE)trains us all to accept as normal. Since the Black players initiated this struggle, the volleyball team has held multiple discussions about putting antiracism front and center and building team unity. These meetings will continue through the remaining weeks of the season. They are at the core of what we will be most proud of when looking back on this season, whether John Jay Campus wins a championship or not.  
For the first time, players are being asked to evaluate how the team is doing politically as well as athletically. They’re being encouraged to suggest specific strategies for making the team more equitable. The leadership of Black youth—the ones most brutally targeted by this racist systems–is key to this process. A truly integrated team, with more and less experienced players sharing the court together, is happening more consistently. Although fewer Black players than usual tried out for the team due to vaccination requirements and the vaccine hesitancy of many Black families, the team now has as many Black and Latin players as white and Asian players. As they practice volleyball, they’re also practicing antiracist, multiracial unity.    
History of segregated sports teams
The John Jay Campus, a historically Black and Latin school in the heart of a wealthy white neighborhood in Brooklyn, is a model of racist capitalist inequality. It houses three schools that enroll predominantly Black and Latin students from low-income families outside the neighborhood and a fourth school, Millennium Brooklyn, a selective, significantly white high school that has received more funding and resources per student than the other three.
Racist inequalities in sports access were a stunningly obvious feature of the segregated package deal forced by Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio. The John Jay Campus sports program served 1,859 students, more than 90 percent of them Black or Latin, and was given only nine teams. But the Millennium sports program got 17 teams for only 1,261 students—about half of them from  Millennium High School in Manhattan, which uses John Jay’s gym facilities and is only 25 percent Black and Latin.  
As part of a long-running struggle to integrate the programs and get Black and Latin students their fair share of resources, PLP parents joined with others in designing a sharp antiracist leaflet that rocked the racist status quo. After the killing of George Floyd and the mass protests that followed, the DOE’s blatant racism was too much of an embarrassment even for the shameless school bosses. The two sports teams were integrated–a huge reform victory. But the real work of building antiracist integration is just beginning.
For athletes, coaches, teachers, and parents, the real victory comes every time we stand up to the racist ruling class. Racism isn’t going anywhere as long as we have capitalism. Only under communism, a society where the whole working class will work together for the benefit of all, will racism ever be smashed. In the meantime, all students and workers need to be ready to take action over and over again. If we can make antiracist sports integration the main goal for students, parents, and staff, we will be one step closer to building working-class consciousness and one step closer to smashing capitalism. Stay tuned for more!

This coming October 17 marks the 162nd anniversary of abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. It was a revolutionary revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle!
1850s: U.S. capitalist class splits violently
The setting of John Brown’s Raid is the U.S. of the 1850s, with dueling factions of the U.S. capitalist class fighting each other. To the Southern slave-owning planters, harvesting cotton depended on enslaving Black workers indefinitely, even if it meant seceding and forming their own country. The Southern capitalists had a stranglehold on U.S. state power, controlling the Supreme Court and the presidency for decades. The logic of the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court case of 1857 gave a green light to expand slavery, and in 1859, John Brown led his multiracial raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
The Southern plantation-owning U.S. capitalists were terrified by John Brown’s Raid’s militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:
"I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter."
From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery
This trust among white and Black workers did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever. He believed Black and white people were completely equal. He put this knowledge into action daily.
As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, NY near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as "Mr." or "Mrs.," sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).
Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist and former enslaved worker.
Tubman: Liberator of 300 enslaved workers
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown close. Born around 1820 of enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her owner tried selling her as "damaged goods." Instead, she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.
Over 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as "General Tubman." Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.
Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harper’s Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the Southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.
Black rebellions petrified slave owners
Like all forms of class society, slavery relied on ruling class violence. But to those who say workers won’t fight back against oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal.
Nat Turner’s 1831 armed rebellion catapulted abolition as an immediate demand.
Abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and many others, joined this fight. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act extended the reach of the enslavers into the North to capture accused runaways, but abolitionists often attacked these kidnappers, sometimes freeing the runaways. Frederick Douglass said, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”The enslavers, although talking of "docile" Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of "outside agitators."
They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep abolitionist literature away from them. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas
 cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.
Revolutionary mass violence
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in antiracist struggle to join Progressive Labor Party (PLP). PLP stands on the shoulders of Brown, Tubman, Douglass and the masses of workers who supported John Brown’s Raid and the Underground Railroad. These antiracists and their politics, however, were not without limitations.
John Brown correctly analyzed that only direct action and violence could end slavery — and on the eve of his execution, even admitted he underestimated how much violence it would take. PLP applauds the merciless violence shown by Brown to racists like plantation owners and kidnappers but rejects small-scale guerilla warfare. We fight for a mass militant communist movement whose soldiers will come from workers in the factories and fields. Communist revolution means millions of us —eventually all of us — must become communist organizers at our jobs, campuses, barracks, and mass organizations.
Mass violence is the opposite of John Brown’s religious-based outlook of individual martyrdom. History has shown that wherever the working masses have stood and fought, they are invincible. Mass violence means millions of workers are organized and armed, first, with communist ideas. It means fighting to win workers to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and analyzing the world from the perspective of class struggle and smashing racism with communist revolution for workers’ dictatorship.
The working class’ historic task is to overthrow capitalism. Violence cannot be avoided. However, this means neither dwelling on death nor on individualistic “revolutionary suicide,” but on organizing and preserving our forces to continue the struggle.
Join PLP!
Today there is again a split within the U.S. ruling class, but the world situation is much different. U.S. imperialism is declining while Chinese and Russian imperialism grow more assertive. The Big Fascist (see glossary box), imperialist section of the U.S. ruling class has no Lincoln to unite their faction of capitalists, just the feeble Joe Biden. The Big Fascists want to build liberal fascism under the guise of saving a democracy that never existed while building for war with China and or Russia. Meanwhile the domestically oriented, Small Fascist capitalists have unhinged egomaniacs like Donald Trump who want an isolationist “Fortress America.”
Both capitalist factions mean sharper racist, sexist, and open fascist attacks on the international working class. PLP fights to follow John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s example and lead the working class to revolution where workers run the world, without racist bosses and their profit system. JOIN US!