Remember Marikana! Workers, Students Show Solidarity

NEW YORK CITY, August 16 — Thirty comrades from Progressive Labor Party, including members from other countries, went from the 2015 PLP convention to join more than one hundred professors, students, and other workers of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) to turn up the heat on the South African consulate. We rallied in solidarity with the 20,000 South African workers who gathered on that same day in the northern town of Marikana to protest the brutal slaughter of striking workers there three years earlier. In August, 2012, platinum miners were on a wildcat strike against Lonmin, the British-owned mining giant, demanding a living wage and an end to intolerable housing conditions. On August 16, in a planned attack, the police opened fire on a large crowd, killing thirty-four miners and wounding eighty. The Marikana Massacre is the worst since sixty-nine demonstrators were slaughtered by the apartheid regime at Sharpeville in 1960.

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New Orleans: Lessons from the Katrina Genocide

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina sideswiped the city of New Orleans. The capitalist class and its politicians turned this unnatural disaster into a genocide of more than 1,400 mostly Black workers. The racist displacement of tens of thousands of Black families was the largest refugee crisis in U.S. history (New York Times, 9/11/05).
Katrina exposed the face of fascism to workers worldwide. One hundred thousand mostly Black workers were left to die and then forced into concentration camps by the National Guard. For half a century, the capitalists knew that New Orleans was vulnerable to storms. They knew that a direct hit would devastate the city and could wipe out poor Black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward. These areas were especially vulnerable because of canal dredging and the destruction of natural woodlands to promote commercial development and the bosses’ profits. Even so, levees could have been reinforced and protected. Tens of thousands of mostly Black families could have been evacuated in plenty of time. But under capitalism, maximum profits and imperialist wars trump workers’ lives. Ten years later, the working class of New Orleans is still under attack and still fighting back!

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CHALLENGE Project: Learn to Fight, Fight to Learn

BROOKLYN, August 13 — Snippets of conversations in English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Mandarin. Keys tapping away. Pens scribbling furiously. Some arguments and laughter over an article. This is the sound of the Challenge Summer Project. This August, comrades and friends from around the world came to New York City before our Convention to participate in the production, distribution, and strengthening of CHALLENGE, the communist newspaper of PLP.

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Fighting Anticommunist Lies

On August 23, each year since 2008, the European Union marks the “European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.” The EU’s rulers want to spread the big lie that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, in particular—were equally evil, while the capitalist imperialists stand for all things good.

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Dark Night Shall Have Its End

This editorial is adapted from a report of PLP’s Central Committee to our 2015 Convention. Its title derives from a message of encouragement from Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, to William Z. Foster, chairman of the Communist Party USA, in response to Foster’s complaint that U.S. imperialism appeared indestructible.
Capitalism offers the world’s workers nothing but endless horrors. Its “triumph” brings imperialist war; mass racist and sexist poverty and unemployment; racist police terror and border control; fascist  “homeland security”; hunger and malnutrition; ethnic and religious genocide; mind-numbing cultural degradation. This is the nature of the profit system. It cannot change. It will prevail until it is smashed by communist revolution. That is the main task for workers of the world: to destroy the old order and create something new. The challenge was never easy, but today it is harder than ever. Why? Because of the cynicism and passivity resulting from the collapse of the old communist movement.

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Ferguson Youth Defy KKKops

FERGUSON, Missouri, August 11 —  “Racism means? We got to fight back!” came the shout down West Florissant Avenue, as hundreds of Black youth and PL’ers took the streets one year after the murder of Mike Brown by the racist Ferguson Police Department. In defiance of both the Ferguson PD and a thunderstorm, we chanted and stopped traffic.
PLP sent contingents from the South, the Midwest, and Los Angeles to Ferguson to organize around the one-year anniversary of Brown’s murder. Because of PLP’s consistent work in Ferguson over the past year, we have been welcomed by workers there. We received an especially warm response at CHALLENGE sales near the site of Mike Brown’s murder, a segregated Black working-class area. Many residents agreed with our analysis on the need for multiracial unity and workers’ power.

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Haiti: ‘We Are Rebelling, We Cannot Bear Hunger’

HAITI, July 28 — On the one hundred year anniversary since the 1915 U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti, more than a thousand angry workers, students and youth demonstrated, marched and sang under the Progressive Labor Party’s leadership in the south of the country! The demonstration was called denouncing hunger, high prices, and the MINUSTAH occupation. MINUSTAH is an acronym for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, an imperialist military occupation began in 2004, following a U.S. imperialist-backed coup. This occupation intensified after the devastating earthquake on January 12, 2010, which massacred more than 250,000 workers, injured 300,000 and displaced 1.5 million more. MINUSTAH’s occupation is also responsible for the spread of cholera in the earthquake’s aftermath.

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Mexico: Teachers Fight Bosses’Attacks

OAXACA, MEXICO — On July 21, the Governor of Oaxaca, Gabino Cué, announced the elimination of the State Institute of Public Education of Oaxaca (IEEPO) and the creation of a “new” governing body of education in the state. As Cué made this announcement, the sinister head of the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) Emilio Chuayffet was there showing his support, and that of the federal government.
These politicians state that this measure will put an end to teachers’ control of the IEEPO, held since 1992 under Section 22, won by the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) union. At the core of the announcement is a fascist hit against Section 22, openly excluding teachers from participation in decision-making on educational programs and the organization and supervision of the schools. According to Cué and Chuayffet these things must be performed by personnel as corrupt and sinister as they are, not the teachers who are responsible for the education of the children and youth in the classroom. That is the capitalists’ vision for all aspects of society.

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Build International PLP — SMASH BOSSES’ BORDERS

Beginning with our May 6 issue, CHALLENGE has run a series celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party. These articles have described the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — as well as our concentration among industrial workers; the fight against racism; our Party’s leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement; the breaking of the government ban on travel to Cuba; the defeat of the fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Here we will review the Party’s championing of internationalism.

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Health Profits Kill Kids

CHICAGO, August 5 — “If you go ahead with this plan, you are murderers!” said a speaker at a community meeting, after a secret plan was revealed to close pediatric inpatient units at Stroger Cook County Hospital. The bosses’ plan to quietly phase out the pediatric patients was disrupted when someone leaked minutes of their secret June meeting, and resistance to this secret plan has been building since. On July 31, CEO Jay Shannon’s smug arrogance was shaken at a monthly Board meeting for Cook County Health and Hospitals as scores of outraged doctors, nurses and patients packed into the meeting room. Security told the local news that they couldn’t bring in their cameras to film the public meeting, while outside the Administration Building, hospital security guards failed to silence two dozen members of the United Methodist Women demonstrating in support.

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