I got a text from one of my students in the Social Justice Club last night that read “I was wondering if you knew where I could get the next issues of the newspaper that was handed out at the protest we attended? It was named along the lines of “communist labor party” or something like that. I remember you used to give them to a classmate and I was wondering if there’s any where I could find them whether online or if there’s some sort of mailing list.”
As I’m reading this text beaming ear to ear, I reflected on the transformation this student has gone through. In a short two years, she has gone from a somewhat introverted young woman, who fixed her hair in the mirror way too much in my opinion, into an outspoken fighter for justice. In that time she has seen a football stadium gentrify her neighborhood and the negative impact that is having on the people who have lived there for decades. She also saw a Black man suffer a slow death by the knee of a killer cop. And on top of all that, she lived through over a year of a pandemic that was allowed to ravage Black, Latin working class communities worldwide.
She is not the only one! Young people are being politicized at a rate that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. We have to be there beside them to walk with them on their journey of uncovering how to change the world. Young people will grow the Progressive Labor Party and continue to move us forward on the path to revolution.

COLOMBIA—The marking of May Day this year resonated with protests and masses of workers taking the streets. They are rejecting the proposed anti-worker tax reform that prioritizes President Ivan Duque and his capitalist masters represented by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Inter-American Development Bank. These bloodsucking financial bosses conspire to attack us workers and try to completely ruin the international working class.
The historical commemoration of May 1st was sharpened with this elevation of class struggle. The so-called labor “leaders” are unable to organize and convene the working class, which is more and more rejecting the calls to surrender and conform to the current state of capitalist dictatorship and wage slavery. In northern Bogotá, we have made a presence in these protests, due to the close proximity of our residence, even though our collective has been affected by the cuts in transportation and the dangers of Covid-19.
Our role in these marches has been to spread CHALLENGE and our flyers as well as talk with friends and protesters, showing them that the road to victory is the unity and organization of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and its international communist line. We are building the fight for workers’ power and the organizing all of society according to the needs of our class.
Our participation in these protests have been very enriching, because there is great involvement of militant youth and workers with great enthusiasm, bold leadership and many proposals for advancing revolutionary struggle. However, there still remains an acute need to politicize the masses with class consciousness and a defined revolutionary strategy, so as not to fall naively in folklore and the defense of the bourgeois constitution, nationalism and the state’s rotten "democracy.” To fight for the bosses’ ideas is to continue a vicious circle, where our class fails to become the main protagonist of these struggles.
The murderous capitalist system makes clear its criminal objectives and attacks us with police brutality, paramilitaries, mercenaries and assassins. In the recent uprising they have killed at least 54 protesters while committing over 20 cases of sexual abuse against women. There have been dozens of disappearances and cases of torturing. More than 50 people have lost their eyes and more than 1000 fighters against the tax reform have been imprisoned. These brutal bosses continue to exercise their armed state power, demonstrating their racist, fascist and sexist character against the working class.
After more than 30 days of protest and much political discussion we continue linking with the masses, supporting reform demands while emphasizing that the victories of these struggles must be political in order to be long-lasting. To help present our line, we share our revolutionary slogans, "Against the capitalist virus, communism is the vaccine” and "With or without pandemic, capitalism only gives misery!”
We struggle daily with these protesters to break the ideological blockade that capitalist culture has submerged us in. We need to be aware of who the enemy is and what their tricks and false ideals are, so as not to fall into the error of defending the bosses and their deadly profit system.
We will demonstrate that the fight of the workers knows no racist borders! Onward fellow workers, everything we do counts.

NEW YORK CITY—Over 100 workers demonstrated recently after it was revealed that Medicare of over 200,000 retired New York City (NYC) workers will be privatized. This new plan was struck by union misleaders and liberal Democratic Party politicians to make up a shortfall in the medical “stabilization fund” for current and retired workers. Demonstrating workers instead demanded that all workers and retirees not be moved into privatization until all retirees and workers are involved in the process. The demonstration was called by the Retiree Advocates/United Federation of Teachers, with retirees from the DC-37 Retiree Association, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) and other retiree groups joining with them to protest the privatization of our Medicare health care.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been in the thick of the fight from various unions. It was PL’ers who first exposed that the union misleaders and politicians have been secretly planning this racist scheme for over three years, and it’s PL’ers who are struggling to broaden this fight into class war to guarantee healthcare the only way we can: by smashing capitalism with communist revolution.
Capitalist racist “advantage”= death
The bosses’ plan is this: $600 billion will be saved each year by making us go through one private company to get Medicare. They will supposedly save money even though the companies who we must go through take out 12-18 percent of every dollar for administrative fees. These fees pay for their profits and tremendous executive salaries. These Medicare “Advantage” plans (originally called Medicare HMOs) will do this by restricting how retirees can get health care and where they get healthcare. Many doctors and health care providers, who accept Medicare do not accept Medicare Advantage. In addition, we believe we will ultimately have to go through gatekeepers for specialists and advanced testing and care. Denials are so frequent that over 70 percent of all the appeals are overturned. Another 5 percent were partially overturned (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, Medicare Advantage Appeal Outcomes and Audit Findings Raise Concerns About Service and Payment Denials, Sept. 2018 and Consumer Reports March 28,. 2019). Medicare Advantage plans: “deny preauthorization of services for beneficiaries, and payments to providers, in order to increase profits.” Unfortunately, these appeals take a long time and just waiting to see a specialist often results in death.
The union misleaders’ plans are racist as usual. They will increase racist inequality in that all city retired workers will have up to $1,500 in co-pays. Of the many city retirees who get pensions and Social Security that are extremely low, a disproportionate number are Black and Latin workers. This will cost one friend of PLP over 20  percent of her income.
Union misleaders and bosses: partners in crime
Why is the money needed? Under Democrats and Republicans, for decades, more and more tax breaks have been given to the rich at both the federal and state level. Democrat Andrew Cuomo proposed cuts in Medicaid during the Covid-19 crisis while the union misleaders snuck agreements into our contracts that promised to save money on healthcare by the workers paying for our last round of raises. Most of all, ALL recent U.S. presidents, including Jim Crow Joe Biden, have accelerated the build-up of the military to counter the growing power of the U.S.’s imperialist rival China.
The union misleaders have opposed single payer plans (Medicare for All) so they could tell us what great medical plans they get for us. UFT Unity caucus hack, Tom Murphy, boasted about stopping the NY State single payer plan at the last in-person retiree association meeting before Covid-19 shutdowns. Communists argue that unions must fight for all workers, not just their members. Furthermore, they should not support the capitalist medical system.
Many, many more people died during Covid-19 because they never had access to medical care before getting sick and were afraid to go get treated because they didn’t have health care. Many young Black and Latin workers died when they were admitted to hospitals because they hadn’t been given any diagnosis of conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes because of their lack of access to health care. This exposed the medical inequalities that exist under a capitalist system. We need to fight back against these racist and class-based inequalities.
State run health care systems have been and are continuing to be cut back all over the world; even in so-called liberal social democracies such as Sweden, Great Britain, and France. Hard won reforms are taken away when the capitalist class thinks people are not organized enough to fight back and when they need the money to invest elsewhere: Now they are investing in war. We must organize Progressive Labor Party to end capitalism and create a health care system that serves the entire working class. Only communist revolution can do that. Join us!

On June 22, 1941, in the middle of World War II, more than 3,000,000 Nazi troops invaded the Soviet Union. Fascist troops from Finland, Rumania, Hungary, Italy and Spain  later joined them. This, the largest military attack in history on any country, was a second attempt by the capitalists to smash the world’s first workers’ state. Only 18 years earlier in 1917, right after the Russian Revolution, imperialist troops from 14 countries, including the U.S., Britain and France had invaded the Soviet Union to "strangle the socialist infant in its cradle." The Bolsheviks (communist revolutionaries) organized to defend their revolution. Though 4.5 million Soviet workers lost their lives, the communist-led Red Army defeated them. Now Adolf Hitler’s armies would meet a similar fate.
Virtually all Western military experts predicted Hitler would be in Moscow in six weeks. Capitalists in the U.S. and Western Europe didn’t care. They wanted the socialist Soviet Union weakened or even defeated by the Nazis. But less than four years later, Soviet troops marched triumphantly into Berlin, having smashed the "invincible" Nazi war machine.
About 80 percent of Hitler’s armies were tied down in Russia on the 2,000-mile-long Eastern Front. By the time the allies launched the D-Day invasion of France in 1944, the Red Army had already swept the Nazis out of all of occupied Russia and part of Eastern Europe and Soviet tanks were rolling towards Germany at 40 miles a day.
Today a flood of movies, books and TV specials tell us how the U.S. single-handedly won World War II, saving "Private Ryan" and the world. In fact, U.S. rulers were worried that if they didn’t invade France when they did, the Red Army would liberate all of Western Europe by itself.
Even Western historians agree the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the battle against Hitler and the Soviet victory at Stalingrad was the turning point of WWII. The USSR lost over 20 million lives defeating the Nazis (75 times the 300,000 U.S. deaths). And 75 to 80 percent of Nazi WWII casualties were inflicted by the Soviet Army. In the Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, "about two-thirds of the houses and productive capacity was destroyed." Not one bomb fell on the U.S. during the entire war. [All figures from The World Almanac of World War II.]
U.S. and British imperialists conspire against the Soviet Union
The imperialist conspiracy to smash the Soviet Union began long before WWII. The British and French rejected five separate Soviet proposals for an alliance against Hitler in the 1930s. The West supplied Hitler with oil, rubber and bank loans for his war machine. They hoped Hitler would move east and crush the Soviet Union and thereby prevent the spread of the overthrow of the capitalist profit system. When Hitler marched into Poland, Britain and France "declared war," but it was a "Phony War," because 110 Western divisions did nothing while the Nazis mopped up in Poland, hoping Hitler would continue to move eastward and invade the Soviet Union, the workers’ state.
But before they took on the Soviets, the Germans occupied Holland, Belgium and Norway. Hitler then invaded France. The French high command went over to Hitler’s side, allowing him to march into Paris in three weeks, driving British troops into the sea at Dunkirk.
Communist underground leads resistance against the Nazis
In almost all of Europe, the communist underground led the resistance that helped defeat the Nazis over the next four years. Communist-led partisans behind enemy lines in the Soviet Union alone destroyed one million Nazi troops, more than the combined total destroyed by the U.S. and British in the entire war.
When Hitler finally invaded the Soviet Union, the predicted "six weeks" victory never happened. German troops found total destruction and desolation in every captured Russian city or town — the "scorched earth" policy. Soviet defenders burned everything to the ground that could be useful to the Nazis and that they could not take with them. Then they organized armed resistance behind enemy lines. Over 6,000 factories were dismantled and moved east of the Ural Mountains, then re-assembled to produce weapons again, a feat requiring total unity and support of Soviet workers, unmatched by any country, before or since.
By December  2, 1941, the Nazis were just 20 miles from Moscow and the Kremlin (headquarters of the Soviet government). Joseph Stalin stayed in Moscow throughout this period and rallied the Soviet workers and Red Army. On December  6 (the day before Pearl Harbor), the Soviets launched a counter-attack on a 500-mile front and drove the fascists from the gates of Moscow. Hitler was forced to halt this offensive.
Battle of Stalingrad: Turning point of World War II
By September 1942, the Nazis had begun another offensive, reaching the outskirts of Stalingrad. They planned to take that city and then seize the oil of the Caucasus region to the south (bordering oil-rich Iran) and drive on Moscow to the north. But it was not to be. Soviet soldiers and workers fought for Stalingrad block-by-block, house-by-house and room-by-room to halt the "unbeatable" Nazi invaders. Workers in arms factories produced weapons for the Red Army working 24 hours a day. When Nazi troops captured factories, heroic Soviet workers and soldiers would take them back.
The entire German Sixth Army and 24 of Hitler’s generals were surrounded and killed or captured in the battle of Stalingrad. Never again would the Nazis mount an offensive against the Red Army. Stalingrad was truly the turning point of the Second World War. The communist-led Soviet Union smashed the largest and most powerful army ever mounted by a capitalist power.
Internal weaknesses and reforms eventually destroyed the first workers’ state. Socialism retained too many capitalist concepts, especially wages and money, and the Soviet Union reverted to capitalism. But as a British general remarked in introducing a documentary about the Battle of Russia, "if it were not for the heroism of the Soviet workers, if Hitler had conquered the Soviet Union, millions of citizens in Britain and the United States would be dead today." We are slowly learning the hard lessons from the defeat of the old communist movement. But emulating the mass heroism and determination they displayed in defeating fascism is the goal of Progressive Labor Party in our fight for communist revolution.