Letters 5/25

A communist education
Sometimes, the Party’s ideas can reach people, and have a wonderful impact, in unexpected ways.
Three days ago, I participated in the PLP-organized May Day march in Brooklyn, New York. Then yesterday, I sent videos of the keynote speech to friends who didn’t make it to the march.
One friend, who now lives in another state, wrote back saying, “Thanks. I enjoyed that. It is a good reminder of the essence of community.”
Another friend, who is a teacher, sent this especially heart-warming note:
“Thank you for sharing this! She educated me soooooooo much just now! Some things I was aware of, but much of what she stated, I did not know! This is powerful! Do you mind if I share this with my students in class tomorrow?... I think it would be powerful to show this and discuss . . . and scrap what my original lesson was going to be.”
We never know, in advance, what the consequences will be, when we do a bit of extra Party work. In this case, the lesson is we should be bold in sharing communist ideas, even more broadly than we may have thought possible!
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Workers will be safe under communism
The May Day March was great despite the rain, and the chaos trying to get on a commuter train from Indiana to Chicago. It was great to see comrades I have known for years. The best part of the march was taking the Party’s message that our only way forward is for the workers to take state power straight to the agents of the racist bosses, the fascist cops at the ‘Public Safety’ Center in the Bronzeville neighborhood. They now  know that we’ll be coming for them someday during the communist revolution led by workers under Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leadership. The chants condemning the imperialist Ukraine-Russian war were great. May Day inspired all of us to do BETTER to build this antiracist, anti imperialist, revolutionary communist movement!
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Tale of two May Days
There were two New York May Day marches, a communist PLP march in Brooklyn and a reformist (socialist, anarchist) sponsored march from Union Square to Jeff Bezos’ headquarters in Manhattan to support the Amazon union movement. Due to physical limitations I wasn’t able to participate in either march but was able to get to the May Day Union Square rally to sell CHALLENGE and talk to some laundry, restaurant and transit workers about their labor struggles. I am a retired transit worker who participated in the 1964 Transit Strike that shut the city down for 11 days and forced the city to give a pension after 20 years, which all the workers I talked to have lost.
The young workers knew about the strike. I explained that the benefits were won because the union leadership at that time received only the average pay of the rest of the workers and not the six figure salaries of today’s union misleaders, much like today’s politicians who are bought and sold by anonymous unlimited contributions. The revisionists tried to sell me their socialist propaganda which I refused, explaining it was just state capitalism.
Some workers however seemed favorable to my communist ideas by buying all the CHALLENGE issues I had and taking many pictures of my sign which read, “Capitalists worldwide need you to fight other workers for power and profits…communists want to turn profit wars into revolution for workers’ power – read CHALLENGE”.