Somalia bombings: U.S. imperialism shows its weakness

Somalia is seeing an increase in lethal U.S. drone strikes, with 47 attacks killing 326 people over the last third of 2018 (New York Times, 3/10). These terror bombings are an essentially defensive response by a weakening U.S. imperialist state trying to counter the ascendant superpower China in East Africa. While both factions of the U.S. ruling class know they must try to contain China’s influence, the bosses’ main wing, the finance capitalists, should know that bombing with no boots on the ground is not a winning formula.
This U.S. is targeting al-Shabab, a band of small capitalists who use religion to justify their own bombings and murders of Somalians and Kenyans (see box). The U.S. is backing the current Somali regime against the al-Shabab insurgency to keep its imperialist toehold in the country. President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed is a dual Somali and U.S. citizen who until recently worked at the New York State Department of Transportation in Buffalo. He is seen as a willing collaborator with the U.S. (Politico, 2/19/17).

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Abolish KKKops

CHICAGO, March 12-Dozens of protesters, including Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members, blocked City Hall elevators for nine hours to protest the $95 million police training academy to be built on Chicago’s impoverished West Side. This is on top of the $1.5 billion yearly budget for the police (Chicago City Budget) and the $113 million the city spent on police misconduct lawsuits in 2018 (The Chicago Reporter, 3/7).
The Chicago City Council nevertheless approved this expenditure, showing once again that the job of all politicians and cops is to “serve and protect” their billionaire capitalist masters.Workers don’t need “better trained” cops that will control us and stop us from fighting back more effectively. We don’t need politicians bought and controlled by billionaires and their lobbyists and their bribes.We need a system where we run society for the working class and by the working class. That’s communism. But to organize such a society we must fight racism and sexism. We must unite our class into a multi-racial force that can overthrow the capitalists. This is why PLP organizes for communist revolution.

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Green New Deal: Liberal bosses push fascism

The Youth Climate Strike on March 15 brought school walkouts to dozens of countries. Millions have been driven to participate out of disgust with capitalism’s wanton destruction of the natural world. Masses of people took to the streets across Europe, Chile, India, Kenya, South Africa, New Zealand and dozens more countries.
To realize the potential power of the working class to unite and fight for a better world, we will have to free ourselves from the ruling class’ leadership of the climate movement. The environmental movement is being led and promoted by the main wing U.S. bosses and their allies in Europe who are moving towards fascism to hold onto control of their increasingly threatened liberal world order.

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JHU: Reject police on campus

Baltimore, MD – Students at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) have joined local residents to combat JHU’s push for a state law authorizing it to establish a private police force that will patrol campus areas and neighboring public streets. These “Hop Cops” would report to and serve the interests of the administration and board of JHU. That’s how capitalism works. Workers and students need a system that serves our needs. That’s communism.

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Oakland strike builds confidence for future battles

BAY AREA, March 20—Teachers in the Oakland Education Association (OEA) went on strike and settled a new contract. Oakland public schools are a product of the same racism addressed in the recent LA, Denver, West Virginia and Charter school strikes. This strike was a mass school for pro-communist ideas.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP)members participated in picket lines at seven schools, worked with friends and co-workers before the strike to build consciousness and solidarity, participated in the mass actions organized by the OEA, and distributed leaflets and literature. PLP teachers were embedded in the picket lines and the on-site organizing and decision-making at their schools.

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Fight Sexism, Build Communism: MEXICO

MEXICO, March 19—The International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Denmark in 1910, established March 8 as the International Working Women’s Day, to recognize women’s struggle for their political and economic rights. This communist origin, and its significance in the revolutionary struggle to end the special oppression of working-class women, is generally unknown or purposelessly hidden.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) organizes all workers to put an end to the capitalist system and its sexist ideology that justifies and promotes the special oppression of women. Financially, this oppression generates huge profits for the capitalists due to the super exploitation of women. Politically, sexist ideology divides the working class, limiting its capacity to organize and struggle.

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Fight Sexism, Build Communism: HAITI

HAITI, March 19—Working class women are in a precarious condition in Haiti. Despite the fact that the government has a minister of women’s affairs, and there are many organizations who “fight” for the rights of women, against discrimination between men and women and against domestic violence perpetrated against women—nothing has really improved in the lives of working women in Haiti.

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College forum: when will CUNY go on strike?

During a forum discussion about the recent outbreak of teacher strikes, a Bronx college student asked “Yes, but when will we go on strike here at CUNY?” Whether raising tuition every year or paying poverty wages to part-time instructors, these attacks are racist as they target students and faculty that are disproportionally Black and Latin. But militant, multi-racial, student & faculty fightback is growing on a number of campuses. We are organizing forums, conferences, rallies and “grade-ins.”

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Workers' studygroup debate Blackkklansman, a pro-cop film

NEW YORK CITY, March 19—Over 20 Progressive Labor Party members (PLP) and friends at a local study group compared the nationalist lies of “Blackkklansman,” the film directed by Spike Lee to Boots Riley’s heroic tale of multiracial workers fighting back in “Sorry to Bother You.” We watched both movies. We discussed how Riley’s is a pro-working class movie while Spike Lee (who started his career as an anti-cop writer/director) is now doing the work for the ruling class in his pro-cop film.

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The homecare industry: wage slavery

    “I spend my life in someone else’s home, shunned from family and my life. I work day and night, 24 hours at work without rest. My body aches all over, my nerves have been damaged.” These jarring words are one of the many vivid snapshots from the film “The 24 Hour Workday,” a grassroots documentary that exposes the level of hyper-exploitation suffered by women workers in the home care industry. Divorced from the film’s context, these words sound like they came from the pages of a history book about Black women workers living in bondage up until the 19th century, many of whom raised the slaveowners’ children, losing their own. After organizing with homecare workers, I think this should be rightfully called out as modern-day wage slavery. The homecare industry still retains much of the racist and sexist essence it did in the past.
Women—predominately immigrants, Black, Latin, and Asian—make up 93 percent of the labor force in the homecare industry. The homecare workers who star in the film reflect this statistic. They’re mostly immigrants from Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and China, who came here in order to escape poverty or violence, to give their families a better hope for the future.

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