COLOMBIA— union workers, teachers' associations, students, drivers, women's groups, indigenous people and a multitude of social organizations organized dozens of demonstrations in fields and cities against Duque's tax reform and warlike policy. In Bogotá, we commemorated May Day once again -- the international day of the working class. We promoted the vision of the unity of the workers of the world, under one red flag and our communist Party, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
Gone is another year under the rule of the capitalist criminal class and its racist wage slavery system, its endless wars, its sexism that divides us and makes us weaker, its fascism and violence against our class. Meanwhile, we have known one more year of workers' struggles, protests, strikes, mobilizations that keep us firm in our communist ideas, fighting for a better world.
The state of workers here is one of pandemic, death, misery and need. Unemployment, low wages, indigence, prostitution, crisis in the health system, malnutrition, drug addiction, a high cost of living, a fascist bourgeoisie and a “left” that kneels to them in order to defend bourgeois democracy and “national unity.”
We are active in these protests to show our class, with the help of our newspaper CHALLENGE, that we fight for communist revolution. We are not negotiating to get out of wage slavery. We do not negotiate to reform capitalism, which is our declared enemy. The youth and workers are rejecting passivity, surrender and the electoral circus. The racist state cannot be reformed. it must be destroyed with a communist revolution and for this we need organized and revolutionary violence under the communist leadership of our Party.
Since the pandemic, the Duque-Uribe mafia government has kept us locked up with fear of the virus and continuous curfews. Because of the risks, this great commemoration of the workers' struggles was held more locally in 2020. This year it was held in a neighborhood in the south of the city where our Party and literature have been present for more than 20 years, making friends and building a good part of our social base.
Here we have been involved in the fight against the persecution of street vendors and police brutality. Because of this, over 40 PLP members, women and men, motivated by the current rise in the class struggle enthusiastically organized this revolutionary protest.
We started in a local park giving a discussion about the national strike and our commemoration, with our flags, banners and slogans such as “Capitalism is the pandemic, the vaccine is communism” and “Long live May 1st!” We began our march towards the center of the city, accompanied by horns of cars and motorcycles and people on the sidewalks, who raised their fists in approval while others joined the protest.
Along the way, more PLP members arrived, and more community groups joined, including sports leagues of women and men, street vendors and independent workers who fight daily against racist oppression and to defeat misery. By the end of our march there were more than 350 people, whom we tried to organize on the basis of unity of the international working class. Against the fascist state, communist revolution is the best weapon!
With people from other organizations we agreed to continue participating in the sit-ins, cacerolazos (protests in which we bang pots and pans), mass community assemblies and the strike committees organized by workers. Many enthusiastically accepted our message of unity and our literature and flyers in which we made a call to communist revolution as a response of our class to the capitalist pandemic, to the sexist brutality and murder of the police state against more than 45 young protesters during the recent general strike.
At one point, some older people with medical comorbidities isolated themselves trying to avoid possible COVID infections, while most of the protesters continued to the north of the city under a heavy downpour of rain. The air was thick with the siege and strong smell of gases fired by the esmad (riot police), but we pressed on.
Hours later a group of workers ended up making an analysis of what was done, congratulating those youth, students, and workers for their drive and courage—above all for being friends, supporters and collaborators of our innovative communist PLP, fighting for workers’ power worldwide.
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Pakistan May Day: fighting horrendous capitalist conditions
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- 29 May 2021 87 hits
PAKISTAN—Unlike past years, this year’s May Day was a less than jubilant celebration. This was because of a lockdown due to a third wave of Covid-19. Yet, Progressive Labor Party continues to call for fightback and communism.
Progressive Labor Party participated in seminars held under strict guidelines to prevent the spread of the disease. The ruling class failed to do mass testing, and is not making any arrangements to import vaccines. Instead, Pakistan's bosses are spending countless money on their luxurious lifestyle and security but not on vaccines. The government is still begging the World Health Organization aof storage capacity and proper logistics, it is rumored that some vaccines are doomed to spoil. Poor working class people are dying because of lack of vaccination and testing, but the bosses are too busy updating the Exit Control List.
Working class people are dying because of the high infection rate. Meanwhile the bosses are fooling workers with lollipop election reforms. As workers die due to lack of oxygen tanks, ventilators, and vaccines, ruling elites babble endlessly about the advantages of electronic voting. What’s worse, bosses are crying about not being able to afford the vaccine, while spending money on importing electronic voting machines. Workers are still in search of vacant hospital beds, but the government is talking about the corruption of past ruling parties to divert working-class people’s attention from real issues. Covid-19 tests are scarce; the infection rate is high, with some areas reaching 50 percent.
Masses of workers and PL’ers are fighting to increase the minimum wage during this escalating inflation. Growing prices of basic commodities are making the life of workers miserable. Every day we read news about workers who are forced to suicide because they have nothing to eat. Comrades also condemned the role of the International Monetary Fund and other monetary institutions for instructing the government to take steps according to the will of the international capitalist class.
Comrades emphasized that a ban on trade unions is a trick of bosses to make a huge profit by robustly exploiting the workers. The politicians are there to solve the problems of the working class, but they are just planning to make more and more profits for the bosses. The ruling class is getting richer but workers have little to feed themselves and their children.
Comrades are confident fighting against inequality, injustice, poverty, illiteracy, fundamentalism and nationalism under the red banner of the international communist Progressive Labor Party. Long live Communism!
NEW YORK CITY—As the clock struck 12am on April 26, New York University (NYU) graduate workers brought the work they do to sustain the university to a halt and took to the picket line. The strike represents one step in the fight against capitalist exploitation. Changing—rather abolishing—this exploitative class relationship requires communist revolution through an international party, PLP.
Grad workers are fed up
These actions came after 10 months of unsuccessfully negotiating with NYU for a living wage, affordable healthcare, and protection for international students, just to name a few grievances. NYU, which sits on a $4.7 billion endowment and is one of the largest landlords and real estate developers in New York State, responded by deeming the strike “unwarranted, untimely, and regrettable.” For the university, graduate student workers who made $20/hr at up to 20hrs/week “are among the best compensated in the U.S.” (https://bit.ly/3b5g4Mo).
With high-spirits, graduate students are pressuring the university. Spirited chants such as “What’s disgusting? Union busting! What’s Outrageous? NYU wages!” fill the air while poignant speeches capture the hearts of supporters and curious onlookers. The bargaining demands highlight graduate workers’ understanding of the racist and sexist underpinnings that define and structure capitalism.
On the table, for example, are calls for NYU to cut ties with the NYPD, calls to protect international students from ICE and other Custom Border agents, and calls for support for workers with families. But these demands point to a world that the capitalist system can never provide. When NYU graduate student workers and auto workers from Mexico and nurses from Palestine run the world then we can have an egalitarian world. That’s communism. Let’s add that to our fight for higher wages and against racism.
Pressure on the NYU bosess
The strike so far has pressured NYU to make some concessions. More pressure from students and supporters alike is needed since the university is refusing to budge on several key issues such as wages (at one point the university offered an insulting $1 increase), tuition waivers for master students, and its NYPD ties. Fortunately, the graduate strikers remain undaunted, both at the bargaining table and on the picket line.
They have garnered attention from Democratic senator, Bernie Sanders, NY mayoral candidate, Diana Morales, and other liberal politicians. While support from these politicians attest to the strength of the strike, such support should make strikers wary of politicians who see these moments of struggle as an opportunity to channel workers' fight into U.S. imperialist support.
Like their counterparts at Columbia University and the striking nurses in Massachusetts, these striking graduate workers are demonstrating that it is pivotal that workers take to the streets if they want to gain even a modicum of crumbs from the bosses. Meaningful change will only come about under communism, however. Under communism, workers will no longer need to fight for basic necessities. Wages and profit will be abolished, along with the borders that perpetuate inequality. Racism and sexism will remain bloodsucking characteristics of a bygone capitalist order. The vision for a communist world, led by the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party, should guide all of our fights against the capitalist bosses.
NEW JERSEY, April 30—On the day before May Day, over 65 faculty, academic workers, graduate and undergraduate students participated in a virtual forum on “Class and Struggle in Higher Education,” organized by the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA). The forum’s theme, described by the opening speaker as “the systemic failure of capitalism to meet the needs of the great majority of the world’s people,” reflected the growing mass anger and fightback in higher education in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Even more important, however, the forum demonstrated the sharpening of Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) work among academics, addressing immediate concerns about the crisis in academic labor but also emphasizing the need for current organizing to be guided by a revolutionary outlook.
In response to the call to build a mass national—and international—higher education worker-student-faculty movement, nine speakers reported on sharp struggles they helped lead: winning a 4.5 percent raise for a new grad-student-worker union at Brown, leading a wildcat strike of grad workers at UC Santa Cruz, starting a union at Duke University Press, combating passive union leadership and calling for a strike at two New Jersey campuses, fighting for adjuncts at CUNY, and adjuncts at a Canadian campus challenging full-time faculty to wake up to their duty of care and solidarity. A lecturer from Haiti urged attendees to “use every means possible to bring revolutionary ideas into the universities with the goal of raising student consciousness and integrating militant, Marxist-revolutionary ideas into the campus.”
The April 30 forum grew out of three RC-sponsored events at the January 2021 MLA Convention: two RC panels -- on “Climate Activist Pedagogies” and “The Post-Pandemic University” -- and the RC’s annual meeting, all held virtually. Attendees strongly encouraged the RC to use the opportunity of virtual meetings to organize activities throughout the year; a core group of new and long-standing RC and PLP members volunteered to organize the pre-May Day forum on class struggles in higher education. The forum also drew upon the activism and relationships established by the long-term work of Party members in the CUNY Professional Staff Caucus (union) and the Marxist Literary Group as well as PLP membership in the MLA Radical Caucus since its founding in the crucible of the Vietnam War.
One key decision was to focus the opening talk on the importance of understanding the political economy of present-day capitalism, so that our organizing activities can draw the necessary connections between the crisis in higher education and the shifting needs of the ruling class which has produced, in the words of the opening speaker, the current “obscenity of economic inequality.“ The conference looked at the effects of this kind of crisis, a general capitalist crisis deepened by financialization and globalization and imperialist rivalry, on faculty and students in universities. One of the key challenges facing communist organizing when mass anger erupts into class struggle, is the illusion workers have that liberal reforms can bring about real change, but history has shown us over and over that reforms will be reversed when struggle dies because the laws of capitalism depend on the drive for profit. Only a communist revolution can fundamentally change the lives of workers, since we will eliminate exploitation and capitalism.
Participants concluded the conference with plans to pursue three initiatives: (1) to build a network of radical academic organizations across disciplines; (2) to hold a second forum in the fall on “the new keywords of our struggle,” that looks at the way in which influential new terminology—terms like “intersectionality” and “social justice”—has drawn people into struggle but also limited them to reformism; and (3) to research and promote new initiatives and campaigns for academic labor organizing.
Members and friends in PLP have a pivotal role to play in this effort, developing deeper ties with fellow workers and students through discussions, study groups, and struggles. A key lesson of the forum was the necessity of having a long-term approach to communist organizing and Party building and having confidence in our fellow workers.
Len Ragozin, a long-time supporter of the fight for communism, died on May 13 at the age of 92. Len absorbed his working-class consciousness from the women in his family. His mother lived through the Russian Revolution in 1917, immigrated to the U.S., and was renowned in the family for translating for Stalin during a return trip to Russia. His Aunt Rachel was a founding member of the U.S. Communist Party.
Len grew up in an environment where his family argued politics around the dinner table and the communist contingent did more than hold their own.
From an early age, he identified with the interests of the working class. Even as a child, as Len liked to say, he was “against the fat cats.”
After graduating from Harvard, Len got involved in the union organizing movement in Memphis, Tennessee, where he took a factory job.
After getting fired for organizing, he found another factory job and got fired once more. This cycle continued until the Korean War broke out and Len was drafted.In the military, Len kept organizing. He talked with other soldiers about the war and why the U.S. “fat cats” sending them to fight the Chinese communist army cared only about their profits.
He gained a reputation on base as someone who wasn’t scared to tell the truth. The military responded with several threatening letters. But after seeing that Len wasn’t going to shut up, they discharged him and sent Len home.
Upon returning to New York, Len got a job at Newsweek magazine as a researcher. Two FBI agents came to his office and asked him to name names of any communists he knew in college. He refused, even as they threatened to get him fired. Len held firm and sent them packing.
Len met Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in the early days of the Party when our founding chairperson, Milt Rosen, was teaching a class at the Free University of New York. Len had a photographic memory and had read virtually everything written by Marx and Lenin. In the early 1970s, before a large crowd in Greenwich Village, Len debated a fake Marxist who was being promoted by the liberal press. He systematically took apart every argument the revisionist made while referencing Marx and Lenin—citing not just the original documents, but also the page numbers!
Len went on to become a long-time supporter of PLP, volunteering to help with CHALLENGE, writing articles and contributing ideas from his many years of experience in the class struggle. He always took great interest and joy in reports on the Party’s organizing activities on the job, in the schools, and in the neighborhoods. Throughout his life, Len Ragozin was a staunch supporter of the working class.
