HARLEM, December 20—A Harlem congregation and Progressive Labor Party members within it have focused on two fights this season: opposing racist police terror and supporting the Standing Rock resistance. These fights toughen up the working class for more battles ahead, building communist fighters and a communist outlook along the way.
The two fights are in fact closely related. The indigenous organizers in North Dakota were leading the struggle against the emerging global fossil fuel disaster pushed by ExxonMobil. Predictably, they have encountered the kind of brutal, racist repression like Black children suffered in Birmingham Alabama in 1963.
In September, our climate justice fighters organized a march of fifty community people against the banks that fund the North Dakota pipeline. Then a friend began the mobilization that culminated in thousands massing at Foley Square on November 15 to demand that the Army Corps of Engineers continue to block the pipeline’s construction. We were there with five college students.
At the demonstration we noticed that a number of cops we were chanting against were not wearing badges. When we called them out, one cop yelled back “We don’t need any stinking badges!”
This shows that we are entering a new territory of sharpening fascist repression. Badge-less cops can’t stop us from identifying and organizing against vicious cop attackers.
More importantly, racist police have struck twice in within weeks of each other—Deborah Danner  (Black, 66, schizophrenic) and Ariel Galarza (Latin, 49, emotionally disturbed, disabled) in the Bronx. We have been in the streets with militant workers from Harlem in outrage against these atrocities and are reaching out to college students, other congregations and community groups for a broader based actionas soon as possible: “Unite Against Racism and Sexism, No Deportations.”
Through the mass organizing, PLP is able to affect those around us, and foster a fighting climate based on communist values. We are building class consciousness, helping workers act on the principle that an injury to one member of our class is an injury to all. Engaging in the class struggle can lead workers and youth to have confidence in our class to make communist revolution. We aim to overthrow this dictatorship of the capitalists, and build a worker-run world.