PL’ers Help Build Campus Anti-Racism

BOSTON, September 25 — The Progressive Labor Party here hosted three student comrades from New York City who brought their youthful energy and insights about campus organizing to Roxbury Community College (RCC) and University of Massachusetts (UMass), where we are building a base for communism.
Pizza and Politics, a student club exposing members to a class analysis and communist ideas, hosted a panel about fighting back against U.S. imperialism on campus. The NYC students shared their experience organizing at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the Fall semester of 2013 against General Petraeus, a leading U.S. general from the Iraq war. The CUNY administration, behaving as true lackeys for the U.S. ruling class, had

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Haiti: Students Block Racist Exam

Port-au-Prince, September 7 — It’s 10:30 am and a tire is still burning in front of the gate of the Medical School of the State University of Haiti (UEH). Today is the day of the competitive entrance exam. As many as 11,000 students are set to take the test for 170 to 200 seats in the incoming class. But this test will not take place!
A PLP member at the medical school found out about a fraud corrupting the exam. Certain privileged students had been given advance copies to guarantee their success. The PL’er alerted other students of this plan to keep the sons and daughters of the working class from gaining admission.

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Bella Ciao

I would like to congratulate PLP for the work that you are doing, some of which I read in Challenge. I would also like to tell you about how I became a communist and why I joined PLP.
As I learned in the song Bella Ciao, which we sing here in a Creole translation, I will live and die a communist.
How did I become a communist? I was really a communist before I even knew about the concept of communism. Nevertheless, it was because of the reality of my life and my family’s life, and the social and economic conditions of our class which made me choose sides and become a communist. My activities in organizing among students, my political positions and my class consciousness also helped pave the way for me to become a communist. There was really no option more humane than communism in a society where the bosses suck the blood of thousands and millions of workers around the world.

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Health Workers, Patients Build Fightback vs. Killer KKKops

I recently started working in a county clinic with predominantly black and Latin patients and workers. The rebellions in Ferguson, as well as the local fightback against the murder of 25-year-old black worker Ezell Ford here in Los Angeles, provided an opportunity to meet my new co-workers on a political footing.
I wasn’t sure what to do or how to do it but I knew workers were outraged about what was happening in Ferguson. I also wasn’t sure if they heard about Ezell Ford, murdered only two days after Michael Brown. So I printed out a picture of a demonstration I went to. I wrote a few sentences beneath it about sending our

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The Circle: Straight Line to Fascism

Can we make a better society, a more humane and fair world? Dave Eggers in his 2013 dystopian novel The Circle sees us headed in another direction. His book is a major best-seller and is hard to put down. Reading it with our friends could open some useful discussions with them. Maybe imagining with them how society might change, they would better understand why we disagree with that book’s take-away message. Why, as Nadine Gortimer said, “Communists are the last optimists.”
The plot of The Circle centers on a woman in her early 20s, but the main philosophical perspectives are provided by the three “Wise Men,” billionaire founders of the company where she works. The Circle is a cutting-edge and rapidly expanding corporation that is the center of a fascist digital empire. It’s basically what you would get if Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft melded into one company and controlled over 95 percent of everything on the Web.

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U.S. Rulers’ Strategy: Workers’ Blood for Bosses’ Oil

The U.S. bosses’ widening campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as ISIL or IS, represents their latest move to control Middle East oil and dominate their imperialist rivals in the heart of their global empire. Oil is the lifeblood of capitalism. The loss of the world’s most profitable reserves would devastate energy giants like ExxonMobil and send the U.S. into its worst depression in history (see box, page 2). The bosses will continue to defend their interests at all costs. Twenty-three years of invasions, bombings and sanctions have killed more than three million working-class Iraqis and tens of thousands more in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. For U.S. rulers, the most violent terrorists in the history of the world, eliminating ISIS terrorists would represent a drop in the bucket.

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Newark Marchers Hit Racist Cop Murders

Newark, August 20 — A multiracial group of  250 workers, students, community activists and others, marched today to condemn the racist cop murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Abdul Kamal (an unarmed black man shot and killed by cops in Irvington, N.J. last year). The event was called by the People’s Organization for Progress (POP), an activist community group. The protesters continuously chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” while marching down Market Street to the center of Newark. Many onlookers responded favorably to the militant tone of the march. A total of 240 Challenges were distributed.

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Colombia PL’ers Back Ferguson Rebels

Members and friends of PLP in Colombia condemn the despicable murder of our class brother Michael Brown, whose name must sadly be added to the list of workers murdered in the U.S. and the world by the miserable capitalist system. Capitalism has shed the blood of our friends and comrades since its inception.

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Ferguson: Black Youth Defy Armed Racist Cops

FERGUSON, Sept 16 — In August, the first team, three students and a teacher, of Progressive Labor Party members went to Ferguson, Missouri, to fight alongside local residents against racist police terror and murder. As soon as we got into the crowd, we could feel the tension between community members and the St. Louis County police. The cops had formed a line with assault rifles, clubs, shields, and armored trucks to block protesters from marching down the street. We responded with chants like “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” or “Who Shot Mike Brown, You Shot Mike Brown!”  The crowd of mostly black youth was fearless in confronting the hyper-militarized police force.

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Workers: Confront Israeli Rulers’ Land Grab

WEST BANK, Sept 17 — As if Israel had not already inflicted enough pain by murdering over 2,100 Gazans, mostly civilians and children, they have now grabbed almost 1,000 acres of cultivated Palestinian land near Bethlehem. This is said to be further punishment for the killing of three Israeli teens in July. In reality, it is just part of the plan to gradually take over all of historic Palestine through illegal Israeli settlements and land grabs. Palestinians  now live on only 20 percent of this land.

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