Put communism in students’ hands
The Monday after the Buffalo shooting I bumped into a new friend from the neighborhood on the train, another dad taking his kid to school.  He’s active in local politics, putting on a very successful, multiracial open mic every ten days where long-time and newer residents of our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood hear from each other, show talent, etc.  I got to announce May Day a few weeks ago here, and at least one neighbor came and checked it out as a result.  
On Monday this friend wanted to talk about Buffalo, and in particular why the response to the loss of ten Black lives at the hands of a racist mass murderer has been so muted.  My friend’s urgency pushed me to demand the principal at a school where I work read a statement condemning racist mass murder, which he did, to 6000+ students.  This statement was passed around among comrades, was improved upon and read at other schools.  
In my classroom I have guided high school seniors in using a communist analysis to understand current affairs, government and economics since September.  Due to my own anticommunism I usually adopt the approach of offering the ‘communist take’ on the matter at hand, which is how I handled the first class on Monday.  The discussion was okay, not great.  It’s always best to never pretend nothing happened when something did.  In my second class I sort of switched it up.  I said very little to start off, just asked: “how would a communist society help prevent or ensure that a shooting like the one in Buffalo never happens in the first place?”  I got three responses that showed me some of my students have been thinking a lot about communism:
“In order to get to a communist society the working class would have had to overcome a lot of racism, and so this young man is less likely to have grown up around racist ideas.”
“In a communist society workers are not simply replaceable, everyone has a role.  So ‘replacement theory’ would not win people over like it can these days.”
“Under communism there would be no guns.”
All three are so true, though none of us will live to see the last one.  What was most striking is that two of those communist solutions were ones I hadn’t mentioned during the prior class.  The working class has fresh insight when communists put communism in their hands.  
What a day!  Being a communist does not insulate any of us from the deep sense of helplessness an event like the Buffalo massacre can bring on when the boss-taught lesson of passivity is setting the tone.  I try to make communist politics a part of my day, which means that new friends and students come to expect more from me in times of crisis.  Older friends know the ups and downs of the struggle and form a solid basis of high expectation.  With sharp struggle from my club I am less prone to let these folks down.  Still, on Monday it was the working class, not my club, that pressed me into action.  I was reminded that workers and youth retain a deep desire for and agreement with communism.  Only the PLP can make concrete these abstract communist tendencies.  The working class will never let you down.  Good thing we have Challenge!  I look forward to using it this issue.

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PL’ers protest racist massacre
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held signs at  Main and Austin streets Wednesday in front of Gala Supermarket before reading aloud the names of the 13 victims of last weekend’s shooting in Buffalo New York. PLP called for an end to fascist violence by means of communist revolution and for support of the working class in Buffalo.
A PLayer said that they wanted to bring attention to the shooting while calling for a mass, militant, multiracial force against racism and fascism.
PLP also denounced racist conspiracy theories and lies such as the Great Replacement Theory, a theory of racist, demographic replacement that is believed to have inspired the racist shooter in Saturday’s mass shooting in Buffalo (see editorial, page 2).
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‘break this chain of domination’
Today I participated in my first May Day activity in Haiti. May Day is the international day to celebrate the struggle led by workers around the world. Here in our town we celebrated it with a conference about the labor movements and class struggle in Haiti since 1986. 1986 was a special year in our history, when the hated Duvalier dictatorship was overthrown by workers and students after more than 30 years of terror.
The conference began with Karl Marx’s definition of social class as: a person’s relationship to his/her labor (which allows a worker to identify his/her work as a thing which is not his/hers, but belongs to the capitalists); the consciousness of a class for itself (where the contradictions of the interests of the workers and the bosses come into conflict); and finally the class struggle in which the working class battles against its exploitation.
We discussed what the working class is, how it is exploited, how workers learn to act together as one in face of this exploitation (the economic solution, as workers have done since the beginning of the industrial revolution in France and England with the formation of labor unions), and the need for political—communist—solutions to end this exploitation once and for all.
Thus, we defined three dimensions of the workers’ movement: the organizational dimension of trade unionism; the political dimension of a revolutionary communist party to lead; and the transformational dimension of the working class transforming itself and society.
Historically, in England, for example, the State (government) passed laws that took away the traditional rights to land and a way of life of the rural peasantry and forced them into factories, proletarianizing them along the way. This was the beginning of the modern conquest of the working class.
In Haiti, the “modernization” began with the colonizing by the Spanish invaders and their genocide against the indiginous population, and continued with the enslavement of stolen Africans by the French invaders.
This is called the primitive accumulation of capital—literally stealing wealth and putting it in the hands of a small minority.
We concluded that we must understand the meaning of May Day, this day commemorating the struggle of workers in Haiti, and around the world: it is to understand the ordeal that the workers face. We must organize and transform ourselves in order to break the chains of class domination, so that we can live as “la race humaine” –the human race, and run society in order to enjoy the fruits of our labor, in our own interests, and in our well-being.
I hope that this conference will be the beginning of a stronger relationship between us, university students and teachers and workers, as we join in the class struggle and begin the process of transforming ourselves and our society.
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Veterans in class war give leadership at  May Day
I was moved by the participation of two friends at our May Day party. A friend I met before I retired from the Chicago Transit Authority spoke at our May Day March for the second year in a row. He has been working hard for close to ten years to organize the transit workers to not only fight for a better contract but to fight for the rights of homeless workers, to win transit workers to fight against what capitalism has done to our class and to the world. He has brought the fight against racism into our reform struggles on the job. His speech this year urged everyone to join mass organizations and build a movement so we can take power. He sees capitalism as the enemy and reads CHALLENGE. (https://youtu.be/QcCRFg3JnUw–his video on May Day)
A retired health care worker stepped up to the bullhorn when there was a lull at the opening rally. She led us in some chants. “The Only Solution Is Communist Revolution!” rang out in the streets. This woman was in PLP over 30 years ago but kept up ties with us. She brought a friend to the march who had also been in the Party, and also was here for the second year in a row.
Also five friends and comrades from Detroit drove to Chicago for May Day! One of the comrades from Detroit gave an inspiring speech. During the ride back to Detroit they had good discussions and said they want to come back to Chicago for other events.
We need to win our friends to join PLP and fight for communist revolution. No amount of organizing for reforms will put an end to the brutality, injustice and suffering that capitalism creates. Only a communist revolution led by PLP can and will smash capitalism and build communism.
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On the bus ride to May Day
This was the first time in two years that workers and students from Washington, DC and Baltimore came to New York City for Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) May Day march. En route to our May Day march, two women leaders led a program.They read revolutionary poems and led a singing of “The Internationale.” This year marked the change in leadership to younger comrades. Confidence in them was well placed.
 A teacher talked about the struggles teachers have had during the last two years. Inconsistent health care guidance caused many students and staff to contract Covid-19. Staffing shortages were dire as teachers struggled to cover each other. A PLP member attacked the racism inherent in public health and medicine and cited the Boston article in CHALLENGE that showed PLP fighting back against the racists who wanted to deny health care to Black workers with heart disease. Protests against Moderna in Boston this week highlighted the importance to the capitalists of profit – not sharing vaccine patents with the world.
A highlight of the march was the speech from Baltimore’s West Wednesday organizers about the police murder of Anthony Anderson and a daughter lost to police tactics.
We tried to protect each other from Covid-19 by wearing masks on the bus and eating food outside the bus on breaks. It is up to us to keep each other safe.
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