Editorial: Peru’s crisis, a flashpoint of imperialist rivalry

With capitalism in a worldwide crisis, inter-imperialist rivalry on the rise, and the bosses’ liberal democracies under siege, Peru is in bloody turmoil. Competing ruling-class factions are pushing our class to fight and die for their profits. Following the ouster of fake-left misleader President Pedro Castillo in December, mass demonstrations have erupted against his unpopular successor, Dina Boluarte. Workers have barricaded roads, blocked airports, and even forced the shutdown of the historic Inca site of Machu Picchu (Washington Post, 1/26). More than 50 workers, many of them Indigenous workers who’ve been targeted for racist oppression since the Spanish conquest of Peru in the 16th century, have been killed in clashes with the cops.

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For Tyre, kill kkkapitalism

NEWARK, NJ, January 30—Workers across the U.S. are taking to the streets to rally against the murder of Tyre Nichols after the release of bodycam footage showed Nichols's brutal, deadly beating by Black Memphis cops. Progressive Labor Party members (PLP) joined a rally in Newark in solidarity with Tyre Nichols and the countless names of workers slain by this murderous system. This latest murder confirms a trend of Black-led liberal fascism where we see cities with a Black democratic ruling class government are becoming the new faces of terror against our class. Now, the workers’ anger confirms a) the shallowness of identity politics as a tool to divide us, and b) reforms don’t work. Instead, workers need to join PLP. Smashing the racist, fascist police terror that robbed Tyre’s life is a pillar of our Party’s work.

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Cop city: liberal fascism on steroids

Under liberal fascist former mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and current mayor Andre Dickens, Atlanta began plans to build Cop City. This $90 million training center would include a shooting range and model neighborhood to stage raids on 85 acres of forest adjacent to historically Black communities (CNN, 9/24/22?). Workers are fighting back with street protests and erecting their own camps in the threatened forest.

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Marx and Du Bois: Abolish racism with the workers’ dictatorship

While “abolition” politics has become the trend among armchair intellectuals in the academic community, some PLP members working in the Marxist Literary Group this past year have engaged the political writings of two preeminent Marxist philosophers, Karl Marx and W.E.B.DuBois, alongside academic workers who can potentially join our party. Struggling over the main political contributions put forward in Marx’s Capital, Vol. I (1867) and Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), our comrades in the MLG underscore Marx’s concept of “human labor pure and simple,” as a foundation for emphasizing PLP’s call for egalitarian communism. PLP demonstrates how this concept was absorbed by Du Bois and became the foundation of his new theory of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era in the US;

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KKKop Ron & state guilty of racist murder

Los Angeles, CA, January 20- Criminal KKKop Martin Ron was found guilty by an LA County civil jury today of “negligence” which caused the death of Cesar Rodriguez, a 23-year old Latin man. Cesar was accused of not paying his transit fare and taken off the METRO train by a racist fare inspector, who then handed him over to City of Long Beach cop Ron. Cesar was wrongly arrested and Ron then performed an “off-balance” full body search of Cesar within 2-3 feet of the edge of the subway platform. Cesar fell and, with Ron on top of him and his outstretched legs dangling over the edge, an oncoming train crushed and killed him.

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APHA public health struggle: From Haiti to Ukraine, combat imperialism

Vaccine equity When Covid-19 hit, PLP members and colleagues joined forces with Justice Is Global and others to demand vaccines for the world. While the U.S. and European countries had vaccinated over 60 percent of their residents, poorer countries in Africa had vaccinated less than 12 percent; Haiti had even less protection. With many friends, we helped write and pass a successful resolution that attacked the trade and patent policies that prevented other countries from developing their own vaccines. Joining forces with APHA’s International Section, we supported another resolution calling for debt cancellation and public funding of health and social services.

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‘23 MLA Convention: Raising red ideas amid rising fascism

NEW JERSEY, January 31—As the class struggle in higher education intensifies and the echo of war drums gets louder every day, there is a desperate need for a class-conscious, anti-imperialist war movement on university campuses around the world. While the role of universities is to ideologically train the next generation of exploited workers, middle managers, and soldiers, reproducing the bosses’ racist and sexist divisions within capitalism, they are also an arena for class struggle fertile for planting revolutionary ideas, and winning students to communism. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been working to build that movement through the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association

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NYC housing history - Stuytown: communists led antiracist fight

In 1943, the New York City government expected a huge demand for affordable housing from returning soldiers. It approved construction of 1,232 middle-income apartments to be named Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village. The new apartment complex was built by the notoriously racist Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. that “had two million Black policyholders carrying $77 million in insurance while employing no Blacks.” This involved demolishing 18 square blocks of the “gas house” section of lower Manhattan’s East Side, displacing 11,000 low-income workers and their families. No more than 3 percent of them would be able to afford even the modest rents in the new development.

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80th Anniversary of Battle of Stalingrad: Red Army’s victory vs nazi scum

February 2 is the 80th anniversary of the COMMUNIST VICTORY in the Battle of Stalingrad (1943), a major battle on the Eastern Front of World War II where the Nazis and its fascist allies invaded the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution of November 7, 1917, is the most important event in the history of class struggle. The multi-national Russian working class seized state power and held it for decades. The Bolsheviks (the Russian Communist Party) led the workers to defeat Russian and foreign armies that tried to overthrow them in a hard-fought four-year civil war from 1917 to 1921. From 1929 to 1941 the Bolsheviks, now under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, ended the remnants of capitalism and collectivized agriculture to stop the endless series of devastating famines. They created the Five-Year Plans to industrialize the enormous country.

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RED EYE ON THE NEWS . . . February 15, 2023

U.S. general warns that U.S.-China war is coming soon NBC News, 1/27–A four-star Air Force general sent a memo on Friday to the officers he commands that predicts the U.S. will be at war with China in two years and tells them to get ready to prep by firing "a clip" at a target, and "aim for the head." Gen. Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, said, “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.” He lays out his goals for preparing, including building “a fortified, ready, integrated, and agile Joint Force Maneuver Team ready to fight and win inside the first island chain.”

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