Chinatown: learn to fight, fight to learn - Picket shows how to fight liberal racists

CHINATOWN, New York City July 12—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) ended our summer project on a red-hot note, turning the working-class neighborhood of Chinatown into a hub for communist ideas. Workers and students braved the heat and poor air quality (capitalism-induced) and joined a PL'er, leading the antiracist fightback in Chinatown on a historic tour, culminating in a rally to support a two-year picket led by workers in the Coalition to Protect Chinatown and Lower East Side against the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) and the museum’s board of liberal finance capitalists overseeing the displacement of Black, Latin, and Asian workers.

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Kentucky: We confronted the Klan & spread communist ideas

KENTUCKY, June 24—When the Ku Klux Klan tried to intimate antisexist protesters with a gun, we didn’t back down. Progressive Labor Party joined with an LBGTQ+ rally to fight the racist, sexist Klan and share communist politics. The Klansmen were creeping around the parking lot with guns but fled once they were spotted. But then more Klansmen walked to the rally site. Since we had the permit, they weren’t able to counter-protest on the parallel sidewalk, so they were just shouting at us from way down the block.

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From de Blasio to Adams: Racist liberal pols cut literacy for kids

This past June, approximately 200 literacy coaches, supporting hundreds of elementary teachers, and thousands of students, were fired from their positions with little notice. The simple fact that almost all of these positions were filled by women, many of whom were Black and Latino makes this a massively racist and sexist attack (Chalkbeat New York, 7/13). While former Black kkkop, Mayor Eric Adams and his appointed lack NYC Schools Chancellor, David Banks are responsible for this cutback, it is more complicated than blaming one administration over the other.

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Letters...August, 16 2023

Summer Project inspired me! The 2023 summer project inspired me to recommit myself to mass work in the service of communist revolution. The sustained fightback of many comrades in different areas was really impressive to witness and support. It was inspiring to find out Shantel Davis’s close relative had joined the Progressive Labor Party and called for communist revolution. In addition to the mass work scheduled into the trip, it was informative and encouraging to meet the comrades involved in mass struggles I had read about in CHALLENGE and hear from them first hand about the conditions faced by the international working class. Multiple comrades – including Black and Latin comrades – had been attacked and called racist by liberal misleadership in mass organizations for their principled stands in Chinatown and in the Rutgers strike. These comrades worked closely with a multiracial base in fightback against reformist and class collaborationist misleadership.

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Letter from India: Nationalism incites racist mass slaughter

Nearly three long months. That’s the duration of an attempted ethnic cleansing in Manipur, a small province of extreme geopolitical importance, bordering Myanmar in North-Eastern India. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological fountain head Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are deeply experimenting with a neo-Nazi model there. Why so? The seven states in that part of India (often nicknamed as Seven Sisters) are overwhelmingly indigenous in terms of their ethnicity, language, culture, and belief systems. Such thriving diversity doesn’t fit into the fascist ideas of Hindutva brigade there. As a result, this murderous plot was hatched, when Indian prime minister Narenda Modi came to power in 2014, to divide the people across their religious and ethnic identities.

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Redeye On the News...August, 16 2023

Interimperialist competition on display in “coup belt” New York Times, 7/29–Africa’s coup belt spans the continent: a line of six countries crossing 3,500 miles, from coast to coast, that has become the longest corridor of military rule on Earth. This past week’s military takeover in the West African nation of Niger toppled the final domino in a band across the girth of Africa, from Guinea in the west to Sudan in the east, now controlled by juntas that came to power in a coup — all but one in the past two years…Until this past week, Niger was the cornerstone of the Pentagon’s regional strategy. At least 1,100 American troops are stationed in the country…Any American withdrawal could open a door to Russia. The sight of Russian flags being waved by coup supporters in Niamey this past week echoed similar scenes after a coup in neighboring Burkina Faso last year.

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Editorial: Spain-Fight bosses’ rising fascism

If the far-right Vox party joins Spain’s ruling coalition after the July 23 general election, it will be the first Spanish government to include open fascists since the death of mass murderer Francisco Franco in 1975. It would also mark the latest failure of liberal democracy to manage the growing global crisis of capitalism. As the U.S. bosses keep weakening in the face of an aggressive challenge by the Chinese imperialists, their junior NATO partners—the centrist parties that have ruled Western Europe since World War II--are losing their grip as well.

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STRIKE!

It’s a hot fightback summer! From hotel workers, grad-student workers, writers, actors, workers are shutting it down!. Earlier this year, college teachers, healthcare workers, education workers, graduate students—all have walked off the job with overwhelming public support. As we go to press 40,000 rail workers from the United Kingdom are on the picket lines leading the largest rail strike in 30 years. We may see strikes by 350,000 UPS workers in August and by auto workers this fall. Clearly, capitalism’s crisis appears to have triggered a period of sharper class struggle.

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‘Storm the Bastille!’ Workers can, workers will revolt!

On July 14, 1789, poor workers took over the Bastille, a medieval prison in the center of working-class Paris and a symbol of feudal, aristocratic power. The great French Revolution had begun! The capitalist class (bourgeoisie) would replace the monarchy (king and nobles). But some advanced revolutionaries were advocating an egalitarian, communist society. This was the birth of the modern working-class communist movement!

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Hot red summer: New fighters & thinkers for communist world

New York City, July 12–Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) week-long summer project of rallies, discussion groups, CHALLENGE newspaper sales, social events and protests was proof that today’s working-class youth are committed to building an international party for the masses of workers under rising fascism. Throughout the project, about 50 youth and workers distributed over 1,000 papers, rallied in working-class neighborhoods, and participated in our CHALLENGE workshops and sessions on fascism, sexism and more. This project increased our understanding and prepared our class to fight against the bosses’ ideas and culture.

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