Score for the Working Class

BROOKLYN, NY, August 9 —The Shantel Davis Committee and PLP organized the third annual Hoops for Justice basketball tournament yesterday in Shantel Davis’s and Kimani Gray’s memory, two Black youth murdered by kkkops. Players waiting to compete looked through CHALLENGE as announcers mixed in play-calling with political consciousness. This tournament kicked off Progressive Labor Party’s summer project, a week of political actions concentrated among training youth to be communist organizers.

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Verizon Workers Threaten Strike

Verizon workers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and Communication Workers of America (CWA) have been working without a contract since August 1st.
Verizon is a very profitable company. Last year it earned $9.6 billion in profits, but the ceiling on the exploitative needs of the one percent extends at least to the moon. They still want to cut union workers’ pensions, healthcare benefits, take away workers’ job security and create more repressive working conditions. These conditions are opportunities for PLP to advance revolutionary politics among these strategic telecommunications workers, so one day we can control them!

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Bombing A-Bomb Lies

This August marks the 70th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history. On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the U.S. ruling class dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering over 300,000 civilian men, women and children. In 2004, a report from Hiroshima set the cumulative death total at 237,062 (CBS News, 8/6/2005), plus another 75,000 from the after-effects in Nagasaki.

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Robert Conquest: Good Riddance!

Like all institutions under capitalism, universities and colleges serve the needs of the ruling class. They slant their research to cloud the reality of class conflict and to advance the bosses’ lethal anti-worker ideologies: racism, sexism, nationalism, imperialism, anti-communism. In the U.S., nowhere is their agenda more brazen than in the field of Russian or Soviet studies. Leading departments—at bastions like Harvard and Columbia—were essentially created in the Cold War 1950s by alumni of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. From the start, their mission was to promote anti-communist propaganda masquerading as academic scholarship.

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Bernie Sanders No Solution: Liberal Pols the Main Enemy

It’s easy to spot right-wing capitalist mouthpieces, the politicians who build racism by attacking immigrants, poor people, and what little remains of the social safety net. But the more dangerous enemies are the liberals, whose main job is to deceive and pacify the international working class. Ranging from Pope Francis to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, these fake leftists are falling over one another to bemoan the profit system’s growing economic inequalities.
The latest darling of the lethal ruling-class liberals is Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2016.

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DEATH TO THE KLAN!

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, July 18 — “Shut this racist rally down! Chase them out of town!” Scores of anti-racists took up Progressive Labor Party’s chants at a rally here against the Ku Klux Klan. Both Black and white working-class families welcomed PLP’s call for multiracial unity against all forms of nationalism.
South Carolina has been rocked by racist murders. Walter Scott was shot in the back by kkkop Michael Slager after a routine traffic stop. Klan-lover Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emmanuel AME Church, spurring a national debate over public displays of the Confederate flag.

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Black Lives Matter Convention: PL’ers Push Back vs. Nationalists

CLEVELAND, July 26 — At the first Black Lives Matter (BLM) convention, as our Black, white, and South Asian comrades chanted “Racism means we got to fight back!” a group of people tried to rip the bullhorn from our hands. They apparently were outraged by a multiracial group like the Progressive Labor Party leading anti-racist chants.

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Kyam: Two Years, Still Fighting

BROOKLYN, July 21 — It is two years since Kyam Livingston was killed in a Brooklyn jail cell. She was ill and crying out in pain for over seven hours while her pleas, and those of others in her cell, were ignored by the murderous New York Police Department. The 24th demonstration for Justice for Kyam was held today, on the second anniversary of her death, outside the courthouse where Brooklyn Central Booking is located. More than 60 people joined this multi-racial rally.

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NYC: Fight vs. Racism Heats Up

STATEN ISLAND, NY, July 18 —  “We are going to continue to fight to build a mass struggle around the issues of racism and police brutality, the only way we can bring any change. Electing politicians won’t change anything!” This declaration of defiance was made today by two dozen workers on the steps to the office of Staten Island Congressman Dan Donovan.
The rally was called to commemorate Eric Garner’s murder and condemn this racist politician. Donovan made sure that the grand jury didn’t indict Garner’s murderer, killer kkkop Daniel Pantaleo, or anybody else for Eric Garner’s murder. He even had the courageous Ramsay Orta, who took the video of Pantaleo’s choke hold, arrested and indicted three times!

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White Comrades, Not Allies

Within the Black Lives Matter movement, there is confusion over the meaning and significance of “white supremacy.” As communists, we need to understand what the term means to folks who are actually using it. Distorted ideas can weaken working-class struggle against racism, capitalism and for workers’ power. Yet many advocates of these ideas may simply not yet be familiar with the richness of class analysis, which includes anti-racism at its core. Our discussions with such potential comrades need to be clear and friendly, and help move the struggle forward.  

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