Colombia: solution is revolution, not votes

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA– Over 50 Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends marched today in the capital to celebrate International Workers’ Day, May Day, and the fight for the dictatorship of the working class. While raising our communist flags and banners, our young leaders led our contingent with valor . They took the lead  chanting various slogans, including "If you vote, prepare for disappointment,”  "The only solution is a communist revolution!”

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Racist bosses further displace homeless workers

NEW YORK CITY— “They got 250,000 vacant apartments in the city, man…Why am I homeless?” That’s what Johnny Grima yelled as NYC police pulled him out of his tent and dragged him toward a police van. “Why are my friends homeless?!” he demanded. The answer is, “because of capitalism.” Grima is a homeless worker who is part of a movement demanding permanent housing for every homeless person in New York City. Housing based on need is a commnist idea, and can only be realized under a society run by workers themselves.

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NYC Mayor, kkkops pit workers against workers in racist crackdown

NEW YORK CITY, May 25—Almost three years into a pandemic where the city’s bosses left workers for dead, cutting services and jobs, their solutions to working class desperation are racist crackdowns targeting the homeless and lower income workers, largely Black and Latin.
The bosses know they are responsible for increases in workers attacking workers. It's the bosses who create the conditions leaving workers with mental illness, drug addictions, and homelessness by putting profit before their lives, the real crime. But rather than fix the underlying issues, they know blaming certain workers, sowing divisions among all, is best to protect their profits.
Under communism no worker would be abandoned. We build a society around workers’ needs: food, clothes, shelter and medical care without a profit motive. That is the only way out of this crisis.

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Put communism in students’ hands
The Monday after the Buffalo shooting I bumped into a new friend from the neighborhood on the train, another dad taking his kid to school.  He’s active in local politics, putting on a very successful, multiracial open mic every ten days where long-time and newer residents of our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood hear from each other, show talent, etc.  I got to announce May Day a few weeks ago here, and at least one neighbor came and checked it out as a result.  
On Monday this friend wanted to talk about Buffalo, and in particular why the response to the loss of ten Black lives at the hands of a racist mass murderer has been so muted.  My friend’s urgency pushed me to demand the principal at a school where I work read a statement condemning racist mass murder, which he did, to 6000+ students.  This statement was passed around among comrades, was improved upon and read at other schools.  

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Redeye 6/8

Capitalism kills in more ways than one
JACC Heart Failure, 5/2022–The aim of this study was to assess trends in heart failure (HF) hospitalizations among young adults. The National Inpatient Sample database was analyzed to identify adults aged 18 to 45 years who were hospitalized for HF between 2004 and 2018.
Black adults (50.1 percent) had a significantly higher proportion of HF hospitalizations compared with White (31.9 percent) and Hispanic adults (12.2 percent) throughout the study period. Nearly half of patients (45.8 percent) lived in zip codes in the lowest quartile of national household income.
German Green Party joins the war train
Der Spiegel, 5/6–The Greens have long been regarded as peace-loving idealists. They are now among the loudest voices calling for heavy weapons to be delivered to Ukraine and have placed considerable pressure on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to do so. The pacifists of yore have gone quiet and now the talk is of tanks and howitzers.
With his long hair,

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Abort capitalism! The only healthy choice for our class is communism

The U.S. ruling class is imploding. The leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling to destroy a fundamental part of women’s healthcare—access to abortion—reveals a deeply divided ruling class. In the desperate battle between the Big Fascists of multinational finance capital and the domestically oriented Small Fascists, the U.S. bosses are ready and willing to destroy trust in their most sacred institution.
The Big Fascist media typically describe the fight over abortion as one between compassionate “pro-choice” liberals and heartless “pro-life” reactionaries. But this framing ignores the longstanding sexism and racism that bars working-class women from life-saving access to healthcare. It also minimizes the threat posed by the dominant Big Fascist bosses as they move toward a bloody global conflict and the vicious destruction of working-class lives around the world.
Antisexists, let’s not fall into the trap of voting for the liberal rulers who oppress us. They are the greatest danger.

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LA MAY DAY: Lead with confidence in the working class

LOS ANGELES, April 30–The 12 months since last May Day have been a hell of a year for the working class worldwide. With COVID-19, imperialist wars, unending police murders and terror , unemployment, and a housing crisis  ravaging working-class communities, especially Black, Latin and Asian, it can be hard to imagine creating a better world for all of us. Yet, May Day reminds us that we have a communist world to win if we can join together with our class brothers and sisters.

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U.S. bosses always controlled workers’ reproduction

​​From its earliest days capitalism has used its state power in the courts and the law to control the working class’ ability to have children. The brutal enforcement of the bosses’ policies and practices on childbirth have been intertwined with their building of a racist society. The latest move to ban abortion is no isolated attack on women. It is an attack on all workers and a warning of more fascist discipline for the working class on the horizon, with Black, Latin and indigenous women disproportionately bearing the brunt of these sexist, racist attacks (see editorial on page 2).

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HAITI MAY DAY Letters

I first met communist members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) following the earthquake in my hometown in the summer of 2021. I could see that these people want us to have an egalitarian society, where everyone can get what they need and want. Here in Haiti (and I believe elsewhere too) there is a greedy and a brutal bourgeois minority which monopolizes almost all the wealth of the country. This goes back not only to slavery, but the period after too, when the mixed race children of the French slave masters demanded and gained , through fraudulent maneuvers, property and power. Now workers want a real redistribution of wealth so that everyone can live life as it should be.
A few months after I met PLers, a friendly relationship developed between us. We often

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DC Transit: Strike wins reform, workers need revolution

Washington, DC, May 5—Circulator transit workers in  the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 forced RAPD, a private contractor of the public Metro Transit system, to increase wages 25 percent (still below parity with other transit workers), make modest improvements in health coverage and retirement, and limit contracting out. One hundred and sixty mainly Black workers struck solidly for three days (only one scab) after months of management stonewalling negotiations. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members in the ATU were intimately involved in this action, organizing and leading pre-strike rallies and marching on the picket lines, with other comrades bringing sandwiches and CHALLENGE newspapers to the three Circulator garages.

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