Letters ... November 2, 2022

Street-vendor workers protest racist harassment We were at a pro-street vendor coalition protest march. It was a reformist protest, demanding that the city increase the number of licenses for these workers. These workers are harassed daily and persecuted by the police, with numerous fines, which they have to pay. This makes life more difficult for these workers since most of them are undocumented and depend on what they can earn from their daily sales to be able to survive in a city where life is becoming more and more expensive and impossible for the working class.

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Editorial: Death to all fascists

With the capitalists’ liberal fascist democracies falling apart from Europe to Latin America to the U.S., the scum-of-the-earth Brothers of Italy Party and its far-right coalition have swept to power in Italy. Reviving the slogan of “God, homeland, family,” bashing immigrants and Muslims, the gutter-racist Giorgia Meloni is set to become the country’s first openly fascist prime minister since her mass-murdering, anti-Semitic hero, Benito Mussolini, was shot like a dog by a communist partisan in 1945. As the rulers prove—yet again—that the profit system cannot solve the crises facing the international working class, from inflation to climate change to Covid-19, the world situation is highly volatile.

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KKKOPS KILL KIDS: SHUT THIS RACIST SYSTEM DOWN!

NEW YORK CITY, September 24—Raymond Chaluisant’s mother, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members, and friends marched through the Bronx to demand justice for Raymond and an end to racist murder. Our chants of “Asian, Latin, Black and White, Same Enemy! Same Fight!…Workers of the World Unite!” and “Shut this racist system down!” could be heard across the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road. We distributed hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE and carried signs remembering Raymond and others who have been killed by kkkops and this capitalist system. PLP members rallied for a communist revolution in which workers no longer need to live in a police state and fear for their lives.

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1978 Oxnard: Beat Back The Klan

From the 1970s to the current day, Progressive Labor Party has organized hundreds of attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and neo-nazis wherever they spread their racist garbage. Rejecting the pacifist mythology that these gutter racists would fade away if ignored, we have attacked them head-on—and confronted the capitalists’ cops who protect them. We have mounted these antiracist, multiracial actions in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Detroit and St. Louis. We’ve done the same in smaller communities like Tupelo, Mississippi; Scotland, Connecticut; Jamesburg and Morristown, New Jersey; and scores of cities and towns in California. We invaded the Nazis’ headquarters in Chicago. We beat a white supremacist leader in a Boston television interview.

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Hitler rose, Hitler fell—Nazi scum, go to hell!

BOSTON, September 19—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) marched against a New England nazi organization, chanting "Hitler rose, Hitler fell, racist Nazis go to hell" and "The Cops, the Courts, the Ku Klux Klan, All a Part of the Bosses' Plan!” We marched to the West Roxbury District Court where a pre-trial hearing was being held for nazi Chris Hood who had been arrested in July for physically attacking an LGBTQ organizer at a children's book reading in Boston.

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Fight For Hadi continues: Multiracial fightback against kkkops

Oak Lawn, Illinois, September 21—Protests against the racist police attack (see CHALLENGE article, September 7 ) on 17-year-old Hadi Abuatrlah continued at the Oak Lawn Police and Fire Commission meeting tonight. About 30 protesters, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), held a rally outside the police station demanding the firing and jailing of the three KKKops who beat Hadi within an inch of his life. We distributed copies of CHALLENGE and a reprint of the Party’s article describing how the Middle-Eastern community in Oak Lawn has been targeted by the police for years. As we fight for Hadi and so many other victims of capitalist terror, we call on all workers to join the fight for communist revolution, where workers not capitalists will run society.

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Mexico: from the rubble workers rise

On September 19 a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck Mexico’s Pacific coast. Two days later a 6.8 quake struck the same area. Earthquakes in Mexico have been devastating to the working class. To many, the destruction and death after earthquakes appears to stem directly from these natural phenomena, but the true cause is the bosses’ disregard for workers' lives, allowing them to live in substandard housing. Capitalism can never keep the working class safe from so-called “natural disasters” because the bosses' drive for profits is the root of what’s causing them. We can only confront this horror with revolution and the building of a worker-led communist society.

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Haiti: revolutionary spirit sprouting

HAITI, October 5–The bosses’ press covers up the horrible conditions that workers from Haiti face. The living conditions of the oppressed masses are hellish. Misery is reaching its peak. According to the CNSA (National Council for Food Security), more than six million workers in Haiti are food insecure—the bourgeoisie’s “cleaned-up” term for starving. This figure doesn't even tell the whole story. There are those whose tables and stomachs are full to overflowing—this is after all, a capitalist system built on massive inequality. In an effort to make even higher profits, the bosses in the oil sector and their lackeys in the government, relying on the gangs that they have set loose on the population, have created a scarcity of fuel to justify the price increase. This has led to a shortage in pumps across the country and a vicious increase in the price of basic necessities. (see letters on page 6 about a recent cadre training school in Haiti)

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For Mahsa: This sexist system, shut it down!

On September 16, 22 year old Mahsa Amini was arrested and beaten by the police in Tehran, Iran. Two days later she died while still in police custody. Masses of people are on the streets protesting the murder and the poor condition of the working class in Iran. The U.S. bosses are seizing on the protests to undermine the Iranian rulers. Unless the working class in Iran rejects the U.S. as well as Iranian bosses and fights for workers power and communist revolution these demonstrations will end up being mis-lead into a dead end of support for U.S. imperialism.

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Bellamy, a backwards anti-revolutionary

In evaluating non-communist authors and their work, communists must pose one critical question: On balance, does the work advance the interests of the international working class? In celebrating Looking Backward, 2000-1887,the wildly popular novel by the 19th-century utopian Edward Bellamy, as “a powerful plea for…a communist world” (10/5/22), CHALLENGE seriously missed the mark. On its surface, Looking Backward would seem to align with Progressive Labor Party’s vision of communism: an egalitarian society with no money, profit, war, poverty, cops, or lawyers, with all capital controlled by the state. But as the CHALLENGE article concedes, the book has its “imperfections.” There are no Black or Latin or immigrant workers in this imaginary year 2000. There is no anti-racist or anti-sexist struggle—no class struggle of any kind, in fact.

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