BROOKLYN, September 4—“Same enemy, same fight! Workers of the world, unite!” rang through the streets of Flatbush neighborhood. As the bosses’ racist attacks on workers in Haiti continue unabated, more than 30 members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) unfurled banners in solidarity with our working-class sisters and brothers in Haiti today. We expressed anti-imperialist and internationalist politics and brought a message of revolutionary hope. Not false hope through elections or fake leftist misleaders, but through confidence in the international working class to one day overthrow this vicious racist imperialist system. And build a communist world–without nations, borders, the ever-present threat of war, and profit-driven disasters.
Learning to fight collectively
A PLP club at the  City University of New York (CUNY), with little collective experience, planned a successful rally and  learned rich lessons. We began reaching out to students and staff from several CUNY campuses and friends made in the #SOSColombia movement (see CHALLENGE, 9/8). We also had several study groups that drew connections between U.S. imperialism and racism in Israel-Palestine, Colombia and Haiti, using CHALLENGE articles to anchor each discussion.
The use of a Colombian death squad to assassinate Haiti’s president illustrated yet another blatant example of the relationship between U.S. imperialism and fascism in Colombia and Haiti. Building international working-class solidarity has been a focal point of our discussions and actions, especially following the devastating earthquake and hurricane.
Days before the rally, two comrades posted 200 flyers along Flatbush Avenue and Church Avenue. Passersby gave enthusiastic support. We made new contacts, saw old friends, and sold CHALLENGE along the way.
Internationalism and food fuel our movement
Before the rally, we held a covid-safe  banner making party. We shared a delicious spread of pizza and home-cooked food including Haitian-style pasta and pikliz. This nourished a debate over elections, reform versus communist revolution, and the connections between workers in Colombia and Haiti.
While many disagreements remain, we were in agreement on the urgent need for smashing racism, and fighting for internationalism. This helped decide the slogans for our banners and we began painting to the music of Colombia’s Joe Arroyo and Haiti’s Emeline Michel. The banners read, “Smash Imperialism from: U.S. to China to Russia” and “Solidarity with Workers in Haiti—Smash Racism!”
Haiti means FIGHT BACK!
When we unfurled our banners in this working-class Caribbean neighborhood, some cars honked and workers raised their fists in support. We carried posters demanding COVID-19 vaccines and immediate aid sent to Haiti. Others carried signs connecting workers in Haiti’s fight with the striking Alabama miners, and with miners in Colombia and Haiti.
We distributed 500 CHALLENGEs. To conclude our rally, we marched on the sidewalks and finally took over a street lane with chants of “Asian, Latin, Black and white! Workers of the world unite!” and “Koupe tèt, boule kay!” (cut off their [bosses’] heads, burn down their houses in Kreyol).
Lessons learned
We are learning how to fight for solidarity and working class internationalism, while exposing our common enemy, imperialism. We’re learning how to build toward revolution through regular study groups, social events, and protests.
Most of all we learned that as U.S. imperialism declines and marches our class toward World War III, we need to be bolder in bringing our politics to the international working class. Workers are looking for answers. We are building communist revolution through practice, making mistakes, and growing.

NEW YORK CITY, September 8—As a new school year begins, working-class students and families are again faced with dangerous lose-lose conditions created by capitalism in crisis. Rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, crumbling school buildings, and a demand to return to business as usual threaten the lives of students, their families, and education workers. This is unfolding as the shortcomings of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan, next door to their main rival China, are on full display to the world (See Editorial, page 2). This school year, let’s continue to build student-worker-parent solidarity and turn crises into opportunities to build a culture of fightback for communist ideas and culture.
A divided U.S. ruling class united in contempt for workers’ lives
Led by President Joe Biden, the finance capitalist Big Fascists are trying to create a more unified approach to schooling. The Small-Fascist Republicans are more domestically oriented and isolationist. In states like Florida and Tennessee the governors attacked smaller city governments that pushed for more vaccinations and use of masks in schools. In response the U.S. Department of Education launched civil rights investigations and lawsuits to block the attacks.
It’s a deadly mistake to think that Biden, the federal courts, or local Democratic politicians in cities like New York and Los Angeles, are motivated to protect the safety of the working class. As the dominant grouping since World War II, these Big Fascists were the architects of the liberal world order with the U.S. bosses on top. Their dominance rests on U.S. financial and military power and its strategic control of the Middle East and the flow of oil to Europe, Asia, and Africa. To maintain this dominance against their rivals, the Big Fascists need a future generation of workers, soldiers, and managers that are willing to fight and die for this unequal system.  
A “lost generation” disillusioned and unfit for this task will hinder their ability to wage such a war. Liberals’ phony, silver-tongued appeals to workers that “we are all in this together” and empty assurances that “we are ready” show that the liberal wing is the main danger to the working class.They are just as ready as ever to have workers die from both Covid-19 and World War III for their long-term profits.
The blatant disregard for workers’ lives shown by both wings of the U.S. ruling class is a hallmark of rising fascism. Capitalists of any stripe are workers’ enemies.
Fight to learn, learn to fight
Capitalist schooling trains us to treat the working class as expendable. We are taught to accept that some workers and youth will be homeless, unemployed, homeless, incarcerated, or killed. Education workers are habituated to accept some dropouts, suspensions, and failure as unavoidable. Capitalist schools also teach patriotism and build loyalty to U.S. imperialism. If millions of youth question capitalism, while the façade of stability crumbles, imperialists will have a harder time winning workers to fight a war against China. Thus as students and education workers fight to learn, they must also learn to fight a capitalist system that fails our class daily.
Even before the pandemic, capitalist schools were unsafe: suspensions, crumbling toxic-filled walls, unhealthy cafeteria food, racist police criminalizing Black and Latin students. The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked additional havoc on student learning. Students have learned even less under these conditions and the bosses plans to catch students up will be plagued with cracks and holes for working-class students to fall through.
Communists and many antiracist education workers refuse to accept this fate. We know the working class is full of fighters, and that whether remote or in-person, education workers and students must use the sharp study of math, science, history and language to understand the racist poison of capitalism and the need for a new, communist society.
Education workers must fight back alongside their students and parents against the bosses’ system, which has set our class up to fail in what will certainly be a tough school year. Every rotten aspect of capitalist schools reinforces the same lesson for us: a system that can’t educate and care for its youth does not deserve to exist, and we must learn together what it will take to smash it.Join the fight with PLP!

NEW YORK CITY, September 5—A Progressive Labor Party (PLP) struggle in the MTA's NYCT division (Metropolitan Transportation Agency/New York City Transit) to help a fellow train operator with a wrongful termination lawsuit has resulted in the agency rehiring her with full back pay. A year and a half after the racist transit bosses allowed its mostly Black and Latin workers to die from Covid-19 (The Guardian,  4/21/20), this is a critical development. While a win in the bosses' legal system is far from real working-class justice, it puts our fightback in public transit on the right track to organize workers for communist revolution.
Sick system disregards the sick
When the PLP member first received word that the MTA bosses had fired Maria, he contacted fellow transit comrades for advice. A woman worker connected us with a civil service lawyer experienced in fighting the MTA. She and the PL’er helped launch a Go Fund Me to raise legal funds, after Maria said she wanted to fight for her job. They promoted it on social media and a local news station did a story on the firing.
The heartless bosses had let Maria go because of “excessive '' sick time usage and absences while on probation (she began training in 2019 with fellow PL’er), but that doesn't tell the whole story. In February 2020, officials ordered her to stay home for four days when she mentioned having a fever. That June, when a senior train operator training her had an incident where he was drug tested, so was Maria, and the bosses held her out for additional days. These days also unfairly counted against her.
The bosses used those total missing days as justification for extending her probation by six months. When she had to take an additional four days to care for her mother, who had suffered a stroke, Transit fired her this past January.
Racist bosses, do-nothing union
Maria's case perfectly displayed the MTA bosses' racist, sexist callousness towards its workforce. This young Latin worker came to work daily, had a flawless operational record, and risked her life during the pandemic to transport essential workers while the bosses cowered in their homes. Termination was how they repaid her efforts! The MTA is especially ruthless against probationary hires, who virtually cannot call out sick for an entire year or face similar penalties.
Per usual, the union proved useless. Her union rep didn’t even return her phone calls. The PL’er later went to a union meeting and blasted Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 representatives for their racist negligence. They repeatedly told him that since Maria was on probation, there was nothing they could do for her. The TWU’s inaction should come as no surprise, given how little they have fought to keep workers safe during Covid. Unions have become a shell of their former selves, and the union misleaders are all in bed with the bosses.
Pushing through anti-communism
The PL’er had initial doubts this would work. His anti-communist fears had him wondering how many would donate to the fundraiser. But support poured in, from co-workers to supervisors and also fellow comrades outside work. Workers have one another's backs!
Getting Maria her job back is a win, but our fight is far from over. The PL’er continues to meet with Maria regularly, gives her CHALLENGE, and struggles with her to see that it’s not just the union or the transit bosses, this whole damn system has to go! We look forward to continuing this fight with our co-workers in the MTA, laying down the tracks that will lead our class to the communist world we deserve.

Retiree raises solidarity funds for workers in Haiti
I’ve been politically active in a large union for over 50 years as a worker and a retiree. I have led struggles on the job and tried to connect those struggles to events around the world and to build solidarity with workers’ struggles around the world.
When the recent earthquake left 2,000 people dead in Haiti and many thousands others injured and without shelter, food, clean water and health facilities, I brought the issue of international solidarity to my retiree association meeting in the form of a request for financial support.
I asked for a donation of $5,000 with a plan for a Haitian “hometown” association functioning in New York City and in Haiti to distribute the funds to working class folks in the small towns hard hit by the earthquake. One retiree asked if he could make an amendment. I was pleasantly surprised by his suggestion that we increase the donation to $7,500. We voted to send the larger amount.
At the end of the meeting, another retiree, who is from Haiti, said that he was proud that our association had taken this action in support of our brothers and sisters in Haiti.
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Immigration march coming up in DC
On September 21 a coalition of groups from different states will march in Washington DC to demand that the Biden government pass immigration reform for all undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S. Previously, various administrations have proposed immigration reform bills which have failed because the capitalist politicians didn’t agree with the proposals. They demanded requirements from immigrants to begin the process of legalization that in the majority of cases were impossible to complete.      
 The capitalists will never “agree” to resolve the problems of the working class. For them immigration reform means to guarantee a source of cheap labor to exploit in agriculture, factories, services and other sectors and especially to amass immigrant youth to enter the military to be cannon fodder in imperialist wars.              
 On September 21, PLP members will unite with our sisters and brothers, immigrant workers and their families in a mass march demanding immigration reform and amnesty for all immigrants. We will widely distribute CHALLENGE. We need to grow our bases into millions of workers organized for communist revolution and the seizure of power for a world in which the working class won’t need “reforms” nor “amnesty” because we will abolish all borders that separate us. We will be one international working class as we rid ourselves of all vestiges of capitalism. Only a united working class can lead an egalitarian society in which we will work collectively for the well being of all, a new communist society led by PLP.
CHALLENGE response: We need to expose the liberal bosses’ plans to use immigration reform as a path to fascism and war. Immigrant workers who are willing to embrace nationalism, patriotism, and sacrifice themselves  will be pawns of U.S. imperialists who are desperate for legitimacy and all-class unity against their rivals China and Russia. Emphasizing this can help arm our class against all faces of fascism.
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Response: no genetic defects from nuclear bombing
The September 8 issue of CHALLENGE’s article entitled “Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bombed to Save U.S. Imperialism” excellently illuminates an important historical fact about the genocidal use of atomic warfare during World War II, but its claims about the long-term effects of this nuclear technology can be misused by anti-nuclear dogmatists who lose sight of the potentially positive use of nuclear power in a worker-run society.  It correctly points out that the US bosses’ use of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in August, 1945 was an offensive measure aimed at the growing Soviet state more so than an act of defending the citizens of the US from imminent Japanese attack.  
However, the idea that one lasting outcome of this genocidal warfare is residual genetic defects among some Japanese people to this day is patently false.  This factoid, though at one time widely believed,or has been convincingly debunked (see Bernard R. Jordan’s 2016 analysis at doi.org).  In addition to distorting past history, this misinformation contributes to the phobia of all things nuclear that is befogging present debates over possible alternatives to fossil-based fuels. So there is a good deal at stake—as the article points out—in getting out the whole truth, both political and scientific, about the tragic events of August 1945 and their aftermath.
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Haiti: natural disasters compound capitalist-made crisis
Another earthquake. Another storm. Nearly 2000 confirmed dead so far, many more    wounded.  At least 60,000 homes were destroyed. Before this latest disaster 60 percent of workers in Haiti lived in poverty, 25 percent in extreme poverty. But ordinary people have never stopped organizing themselves and fighting for a better life.
Haiti was the first to form an independent Black nation after overthrowing slavery in 1791. For that audacious act of overthrowing racist slavery they have been punished ever since. France demanded the repayment of $21 million for the “theft” of its slaves, not repaid until 1947. The US invaded in 1915 and occupied the island for 19 years, enacting forced labor and the murder of resisters and stealing 40% of Haiti’s output. Until 2000, the US and the IMF manipulated tariffs, the economy and financed coups.  In 2000 Haitians elected the reformer Aristede, who, even though he was no friend to communism or the idea of workers running society, so threatened US and Haitian elites that he was kidnapped and whisked away to Africa.
A massive earthquake in 2010 killed over 200,000, destroyed much infrastructure, and left Haiti vulnerable to a cholera epidemic brought by UN peacekeepers. Most of the aid sent to the island was lost to government and NGO corruption. Since then a series of feckless Presidents have been manipulated into office by the US, the latest one assassinated by parties unknown only weeks ago.
In the western region where the latest quake occurred, no government presence has been seen. Local workers and students and community organizations are fighting as much as they can.
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