As CHALLENGE goes to press, and mass protests involving more than one million workers in Colombia enter their seventh week, we are witnessing the power of the working class in real time. Initially triggered by a government plan to raise taxes on wages and basic necessities, the uprising has virtually shut down the country. It has channeled the class anger of young workers into a mass fight for basic income, opportunities for youth, and an end to police and military brutality. The working-class rage has exposed the weakness of the U.S. bosses and the rise of their rival Chinese capitalists in the imperialists’ sharpening competition for control of the country.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is working to build a revolutionary communist movement in the heat of this struggle. However this battle plays out in coming weeks, our goal is to continue to grow and develop a young communist leadership for the struggles of the future (see front page).
Working-class power
The demonstrations began on April 28, in response to a proposed tax increase on basic goods and workers’ salaries. This came at a time when the working class in Colombia had  been devastated by Covid-19. More than 90,000 have died, according to the official count (worldometer.com, 6/5), with the true number likely several times higher. Over 3.5 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty (BBC, 5/31).
Though the bosses canceled the tax plan a few days later, the demonstrations have continued across the country. Young workers in the streets have shown courage and militancy in the face of brutal and deadly attacks by the police and military. Scores of protesters have been slaughtered (Washington Post, 5/20). On May 28, in Cali, 14 workers were killed by the police and civilian vigilantes while guarding roadblocks around the city (ABCNews, 6/1).
The power and bravery of the working class is inspirational. But without a revolutionary outlook, it will be impossible to liberate ourselves from the exploitation and brutality of capitalism.
Leadership and misleadership
The liberal leaders of the National Strike Committee are working hard to get the working class off the streets. A coalition of unions and student groups, including the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, the Teacher’s Union, and the Colombian Association of Student Representatives, are collaborating with the Ivan Duque government to negotiate an end to the protests and limit the struggle to narrow reforms, To this point, however, they have been unsuccessful. They are caught between the anger of the working class and the unwillingness of the Colombian bosses to make substantive concessions.
The division between the working class and the liberal leaders grew when the police and military brutally attacked the protests.  As the National Strike Committee called for peaceful demonstrations, young people responded by barricading the streets and burning police vehicles and even some police stations (Wall Street Journal, 5/22).
PLP has been on the barricades and leading marches, confronting the police and military, while at the same time recruiting workers into communist study groups and distributing CHALLENGE. We have also organized workers in our community to cook and distribute food to anyone who needs it. Theory and practice are working hand in hand. As we’ve engaged protesters in discussions on why we need to build a communist movement led by PLP, the struggle in the streets has built confidence in our class and helped people to see the possibility of a communist future. Our ties within youth groups have helped us organize militant demonstrations despite enforcement of bans on protests by the bosses’ cops. We’ve used these mass events to distribute PLP flyers and CHALLENGE.
Chinese bosses move in
The broader context to the rebellion is the weakening of the longtime alliance between Colombian and U.S. imperialist bosses. For decades, Colombia’s rulers have welcomed U.S. military training and police funding to counteract the political influence of opposition and guerilla movements within the country and across Latin America.
From mining and coffee to auto manufacturing and oil production, the capitalist bosses have lost over $2 billion from strikes and other disruptions (bloomberg.com 5/28). U.S. President Joe Biden is now being forced to confront the Mobile Anti-Disturbances Squadron (ESMAD), the government death squad he championed as a U.S. senator in 1999 (aljazeera.com, 11/18/20). During the current rebellion, the Biden administration called for peace from both sides—and then made its real position clear by asking for $453 million in assistance to Colombia—$41 million more than the U.S. aid package under Donald Trump. Biden’s request included more than $140 million for the murderous police (semana.com, 5/28). When push comes to shove, capitalism relies on state violence to enforce its rule.
Within Colombia’s ruling class, a competing set of bosses—led by liberal capitalists like Senator Gustavo Petro and Bogota’s mayor, Claudia Lopez—is trying to steer workers away from Duque, the right-wing “populist” sponsored by U.S. imperialism. This split provides an opening for the Chinese imperialist bosses.
After the mass workers’ movement forced Duque to revoke his proposed tax reform, Petro tried his hardest to end the protests. He declared that the cops are not workers’ enemies and pushed for an end to the strikes (AP News, 5/17). Petro has also criticized U.S. capitalism while praising Chinese capitalism for its help in the pandemic (Twitter, 3/10/2020). Lopez, like Biden, has called for an end to violence on both sides—as if there was no difference between the cops’ militarized terror and workers’ struggles for the basic necessities of life (Semana, 05/31). She alternates between empty apologies for the profit system and empty calls for social and economic transformation. Last October, in announcing the winning bid from a Chinese company on a multibillion dollar  metro project, Lopez celebrated the start of a new relationship with China (Harvard Political Review, 5/10).
 Fighting for communism
Whenever the working class acts collectively to seize control of a community or the streets, however temporarily, they provide glimpses of what it will take to build workers' power and a workers’ state—communism. The emerging generation of militant workers in Colombia reminds us that we have the power to make the bosses shake. As we fight in the militant reform struggle, we must make clear what is primary: to build PLP and a movement for communist revolution.
From Colombia to Gaza, in every neighborhood we live and work, we must refuse to be fooled by any and all bosses. There is no future for the working class under capitalism. Our fight is to organize for a world run by and for the working class. Join us!

Newark, NJ, June 8—“That’s why [the youth] lost hope in this system, even the adults lost hope. That’s why they don’t come out to vote,” shouted one of the family members outside the 5th precinct in response to recent police attacks on her family. Despite attempts at intimidation from the police and Mayor Baraka, the Rodwell and Spivey families pushed forward with the protest to let the city know that Black workers are fed up with the constant police harassment. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stands with these families as they fight to free their family members from prison. As “radical” mayors try to silence these fighting voices, we know that these families are the future leaders in creating a communist world.
Gang and state violence = Both products of capitalism
In a neighborhood that has seen shootings amongst the working class, city and police officials have used this to justify their terroristic attacks. On Tuesday, June 1st, one of the young men in the area was outside his house when plainclothes cops ran up on him and asked him if he had a gun. His family members, worrying that something was happening, came out to support him. As more cops came, the young men were thrown to the ground and arrested.
The media and police were quick to spin the story, blaming the incident on these young workers minding their own business. Chief Racist James Stewart, Fraternal Order of Police President, played his role in creating fear by claiming that a “mob” attacked the police (nj.com, 6/2). As usual there was no gun found, but that didn’t stop the harassment. A day later the police invaded the home of the family looking for something to justify their attacks. Mayor Baraka, supporting the cops, ordered a mobile police precinct set up on the block so an “increased police presence can be felt around the clock” (Dailyvoice.com, 6/4). Residents coming in and out of the block had to show ID while helicopters flew above.
This neighborhood is just one example of the need for communist revolution. As unemployment, poverty, and failing schools continue to make workers quick to turn on each other, we call on all youth and workers to turn their anger away from their class and against a system that will never serve them. These are the anti-working class ideas that destroy our class power. The bosses and their politicians will never provide real solutions for working class power, but these workers have the potential to turn their counter-revolutionary actions into real revolutionary change with a communist analysis.
Baraka: Model mayor for Big Fascists
Baraka has started to present himself as the model mayor for the Big Fascists (see Glossary, p. 6). A recent ABC News article cites Newark as an example for police reform nationwide (ABCNEWS.com). After the incident Baraka attacked the openly racist Stewart, “The false narrative put forth feeds the old and archaic thinking that police are an occupying force, always in danger from a hostile community, rather than goodwill guardians of a community that has a growing respect and cooperation with one another,” said Baraka in a statement Thursday morning. “That is what we are building in Newark, truth be told (nj.com, 6/3).” The truth is that the police are not the “goodwill guardians of the community.” Baraka has also been silent on the ensuing attacks after the incident and has not reached out to the family, instead working closely with the 5th precinct to further the terror.
While this is happening, Baraka has been pushing his “Civilian Review Board.” This is the same as the National Labor Relations Board that was established by the government after militant working class struggles in the early 20th century. These boards are used to kill any working class struggle and have workers sit idly by while these capitalist institutions “provide justice.” But we know the only way for real justice is an end to the capitalist system that relies on police terror to keep workers in their place.
Black workers lead the way
The rally confirms our line that Black workers are key to communist revolution. Last year the Newark Water Coalition tried to hold a rally in front of the 5th precinct. The Baraka administration, led by Mayor Baraka’s brother and Chief of Staff, Middy Baraka, was able to organize Black workers to support the cops and smash the rally. They were able to do it because the rally did not include any youth or workers from the community. This time around Middy Baraka was there, but because of the militancy of the families he was forced to stand there and watch as the families recounted the incident and called for more fight back.
From Newark to Palestine: fight back against racist police terror
At the rally another organizer made comparisons to workers in Palestine. “If you look at those [police] videos it looks like we are in Palestine.” A follow-up podcast discussing this matter also discussed the similarities between the forced evictions in Israel and the forced gentrification in U.S. cities. As workers across the world fight back, from Colombia to Gaza to the U.S., making these connections is essential in building a revolutionary international working class. The bosses will always try to keep us from making these connections. The PLP will continue to fight to smash borders and see how all of these struggles are connected as we move forward in building one international communist party that will smash this system once and for all.

NEW YORK CITY, June 5—Protests and demonstrations have shaken the rulers of Colombia (see editorial, page 2). The working-class across the globe has shown a lot of solidarity with the workers in Colombia. In New York City, under the hashtag #SOSColombia, a bus was organized to join a national march in Washington, D.C.
A Progressive Labor Party (PLP) club joined the bus at 6AM in Midtown to support the workers fighting back in Colombia with international working-class solidarity and with the message of communist revolution.
In Colombia, since April 28, millions have marched in the streets, while the ruling class invests millions of dollars in weapons, tanks and police training to oppress the workers. Massacres, police brutality, people disappeared by the police, arbitrary arrests, victims of sexual assault, and more have been part of the conflict in Colombia for decades. Nowadays, the struggle has spread from the rural areas to the cities, initially spurred by plans to raise taxes on the working-class and further fueled by the unbearable conditions oppressed upon our brothers and sisters. It’s becoming clearer that the entire racist capitalist system has to go.
Inspiring bus ride and protest
Speeches, music, chanting, and even dancing revved people up as water and sandwiches were shared. There was never a moment of quiet. The bus ride was full of cheer and anger against President Alvaro Uribe, the imperialist killer of Colombia. We listened to Colombian protest songs, sang a version of Bella Ciao, and prepared for the march.
On arrival, we unloaded signs and equipment to join the group already there. Hundreds of people soon began marching. As we passed the White House, speakers aimed their words at the tourists, telling them that the Colombian government was killing its people using U.S. dollars and training. Chants and singing were constant, alternating spanish and english.
Signs were carefully spread out for display near a tent, where water and supplies were ready and microphones were set up. Speeches, songs, and poetry in spanish and english continued for six hours while many retreated to the shade.
Smash imperialism with international working-class unity
A comrade gave a speech at the rally, attacking imperialism and the role of the U.S. and Biden in Colombian fascism. Part of the political message at the rally was that Colombia needs democracy and that Uribe is an anti-democratic killer. But our comrade listed a few of the countries devastated by U.S. imperialism: Mexico, India, Gaza, Chile and Brazil. She listed a few more of the many that receive funding from the U.S. for military and war: Afghanistan, Egypt, South Africa, Congo (Kinshasa), Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Ethiopia, Kenya.
She listed the skyrocketing atrocities against the working class in Colombia: 3,789 cases of police brutality, 1,248 victims of physical violence by the police, 1,649 arbitrary arrests, 705 violent interventions by the public force, 65 victims with injuries to their eyes, 187 cases of firearm shootings by the police, 25 victims of sexual assault, 45 victims of homicides allegedly committed by the public force and 29 currently under verification (Temblores, 5/28).
There was some nationalism at this protest. In PLP we believe that workers in the U.S. and Colombia are part of one class, separated by borders that were created and enforced by capitalist stooges like Joe Biden, Uribe and Donald Trump. The chant, "el pueblo unido, jamás será vencido" [The people united will never be defeated] was popular on the march. PLP members instead chanted "los  obreros unidos, jamás serán vencidos"
[The workers united will never be defeated]. This was also well received. For the emancipation of all workers we must become united against the capitalist class and that means fighting all their stooges, Biden and Kamala Harris, not just Trump and Uribe. People on the bus saw the connection to the struggle in Palestine. Although there is a thread of nationalism, class solidarity is strong.
The bus ride home was quiet at first,  but after a brief stop, the speeches and music began. A comrade thanked the group for being an inspiration. We had distributed copies of CHALLENGE and made contacts.
Workers: let’s make the world ours
Uribe said on Twitter: “We support the right of soldiers and police to use their weapons to defend their integrity and to defend people and things from the criminal action of the vandal’s terrrorism.”
Throughout history, the capitalists, the ruling class, like Uribe, Santos, Samper, Marta L.Ramírez, Trump, Biden, and their governments, have used nationalism, racism, sexism, other divisions by regions among our country or cities, to divide us and advance their political and economic agendas. They protect their interests, their money, their profits and their wealth.
But no more!
It was wonderful that so many people from all over the U.S. and Canada were able to organize themselves without the need of any politicians. That’s a bit of working class power; a small step toward communism. We need to abolish all forms of discrimination and police brutality. We need to smash racism, sexism, classism and capitalism. We need to organize for communist revolution. Then the world will be ours.

As U.S. bosses grow tired of lost profits after over a year of pandemic driven shut downs, we are seeing cities internationally struggle to “reopen.” Workers have been asked to return to unsafe work conditions, send their children back to schools that might not have their health as a priority, and mentally readjust to a world that has been further thrown into crisis. While these domestic duties fall on all workers, we still live in a society where women bear the brunt of these responsibilities. So we, in the Progressive Labor Party, ask our fellow sisters and brothers, what has been done fundamentally to advance the fight against sexism for the working class?  
Just as the bosses have largely succeeded in turning Women’s History Month into a pro-capitalist celebration of women who have “made it”, so too is Mother’s Day a way to mask the super-exploitation of household work with gifts such as flowers. In the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) we know that only a truly antisexist communist party can lead workers in the complete overthrow of this capitalist system which makes the daily nurturing  of the working-class the responsibility of women workers rather than the responsibility of our class as a whole.
Equality: humanity’s original state
Sexist inequality emerged in the past several thousand years of human history. For 10’s  of thousands of years, humans were based in egalitarian, hunter-gatherer societies, and during that phase of history women were central to the major decision-making around questions of production and distribution of a community’s resources. Although women both hunted and gathered—often tying their children to their front or backsides while casting a net or raising a bow and arrow—gathering tended to be a primary women’s task. This meant women had to be botanists. They had to know which berries, grasses, seeds, could be gathered so as not to poison their communities. In Central America and Mexico, for example, women were chiefly responsible for the domestication of corn (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, p.15).
In short, women were the first farmers. Why is it important to know about that phase of history, when there was no private property or system of class-based exploitation? Because it demonstrates that maintaining  the conditions of daily life was—for most of history—not only a valued, but the chiefly valued form of work.
Origins of sexism in class rule
With the origin of private property, exploitation of all working people in the ancient world entailed the super-exploitation of women. It was not until commodity production came into being that domestically categorized responsibilities became associated with the unrespected, unvalued and unpaid labor largely performed by women.
Internationally, women and children were the first significant form of private property in slave society. It was not until the beginnings of class-based societies that there emerged the need to devalue the literal “labor” that women produced by giving birth to children. Under class rule, women’s primary function became reproducing the offspring of social classes—whether slave, peasant, free artisan, noble, or elite.
Capitalism creates modern forms of sexism
Without communist revolution, working-class women are tasked with ensuring  the well-being of children who will grow up to be the new workers and cannon-fodder for the capitalists of the world. Whether they join the military, end up in jail or die at the hands of killer cops, or working as educators or engineers, in textile mills or as hotel workers, our children will be  destined to serve the interests of the rich unless we overthrow this racist capitalism system.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, when schools closed and children were expected to stay home, home-care responsibilities primarily fell on women workers. Whether single, partnered, or living with family, many women workers  were themselves expected to work from home AND ALSO become the stand-in teachers while their children received either virtual schooling or no schooling at all. Covid-19 has been absolutely brutal for countless families around the world, and women in general, bore the brunt of that increased “social distancing” burden.
Socialism made advances against sexist oppression
Socialism in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba made a proven positive impact on the quality of life of all workers and particularly women, but they also made significant errors by relegating the fight against sexism to a women’s issue, failing to place the full force of the revolution behind the smashing of sexist inequality within their parties and in the society as a whole. In the past 100 years our class has made leaps in social progress when we took control of the state and production.
In the Soviet Union, within months of seizing power in Petrograd, Alexandra Kollontai and the Women’s Dept of 1919 was critical to the ushering in, under the leadership of the Commissariats of Education and Social Welfare, socialist programs that fundamentally overturned the capitalist notion that child-rearing is an atomized responsibility for each individual working family. In Communism and the Family (1920), Kollantai wrote:
We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children.... All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.
In China, the brutal and widely practiced feudal remnants of footbinding, concubinage and slavery were abolished overnight wherever the Red Army and the Communist Party held power during war and revolution, and across the land after 1949.
In Cuba, thousands of women were sent to the Soviet Union to study engineering beginning in the late 1960s, and as early as 1961, prostitution”a legacy of both U.S. imperialism and domestic Cuban sexism” was outlawed.
But many of the gains made in the fight against sexism under socialist regimes were taken away, like so many reforms. Even as early as the 1930s, elements of the Kollantai-led programs began to be dismantled as the rapid industrialization of the economy, which also reintroduced wage incentives, helped the Soviets prepare for the impending war with Nazi Germany. In Cuba, the Fidel Castro regime had undone its own anti-sexist efforts by inscribing into law that only mothers were allowed to leave or miss work due to sick children. In essence, this meant fathers were barred from
tending to their children without risking punishment by the state. Now we see the vicious return of sex trafficking in the former Soviet sphere (UC Boulder, 2019) and concubinage among the rotten elite of the Chinese Communist Party (BBC, 10/2013) as a terrible cost paid by the working class for the failure of these parties  to defeat capitalist ideas and win a truly communist world.
Fight against sexism by fighting for communism
In order for sexism to end, workers  cannot return to hunting and gathering social systems and somehow roll back the clock on all the advances made in technology, science and culture that came through class society.
The truth is just the opposite: we must move all these levels of society FORWARD through communist revolution, where the best advances of modern medicine and technology can be re-appropriated and controlled by the working-class itself. We reject a politics of representation based on “identity,” but we understand that women workers, like all members of the working class, are not just critical, they are indispensable, for leading our class in the antiracist, antisexist world that we are fighting to achieve.
It is from the practices that we implement today, while we do not yet hold state power, that the seeds for communism must be sewn. We begin by fighting sexism in the class struggle—at our jobs, community organizations, schools, military, and streets.
From leaders who hold key positions in our Party, to the collective struggles that we wage with our fellow workers, to the ways we strive for equality within our personal lives, to the way our newspaper is produced and distributed, we fight to build an egalitarian world through building an egalitarian party. Fight for communism! Join PLP!