Fight anti-student attacks & anti-working-class ideas

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, August 16—A small but committed group of workers seized the opportunity to distribute Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leaflets in protest against a fundraiser hosted by the Board of Trustees’ President at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF). PLP have been active with campus groups that have been critical of the massive program cuts at CCSF and the following Monday, on the first day back to school, a similar contingent of workers and students attended a press conference to call out the CCSF administration for their lack of health preparations as students, faculty, and CCSF staff return amidst a raging pandemic. The CCSF cuts further demonstrate that capitalism and its education system was not designed for working class students.

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Racist exploitation baked into capitalism—Nabisco strikers need communism

CHICAGO, August 21—As the deadliest pandemic in history continues to wreak havoc on the international working class, U.S. food bosses seized the opportunity to capitalize on our classes’ despair, churning out sugary and salty goods, while raking record profits on the backs of overworked and underpaid workers.
 The latest example is the Nabisco factory workers strike. As many workers worldwide know from direct experience, racism, sexism and exploitation are baked right into this profit system. Just as dough needs yeast to rise, capitalism needs exploitation and racist divisions to function. Communists from the international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) brought revolutionary politics to striking workers outside the Nabisco factory on the city’s southwest side. We distributed CHALLENGE newspapers, held signs, made conversation, and brought food to the multiracial group of picketers.

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CUNY students: Welcome back, fight back, join PLP!

NEW YORK CITY, August 25—For the past 18  months students, faculty, and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY) have been fighting racist conditions on our campuses– conditions worsened by the Covid-19 crisis. Our administrators have used the pandemic as an excuse to implement even more racist austerity: firing almost 3,000 adjuncts, or part-time professors; leaving campus offices severely understaffed; and increasing class sizes.

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Letters of Sept 8

How I use CHALLENGE
I’m an immigrant worker from Mexico living in the United States. I have been a member of the Progressive Labor Party for some years. I joined because I learned how to fight back together with the Party. PLP is like family.
For me, it’s important to read and circulate DESAFIO-CHALLENGE. You can learn the communist analysis about what is happening in the world from Brooklyn to Mexico to Colombia. Every issue, I circulate 25 papers to my close friends and family. They ask me questions when they visit me in my home. The rest, I give to people in my laundromat or in the street.

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombed to save U.S. Imperialism

This August marks the 76th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history when the U.S. ruling class—the only rulers to ever use nuclear bombs—dropped atomic bombs on two civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This obliterated a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in a matter of seconds, injured hundreds of thousands more, and left future generations with everlasting genetic defects.

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‘Profiled’ screening: anti-police fightback raises class consciousness

NEW YORK CITY, August 13—“Why do police killings, especially of Black and Latin youth, continue despite mass protests and uprisings? Is it even possible to stop these murders without also getting rid of the system of capitalism, which depends on racism to exist?” More specifically, capitalism needs racist cops. They enforce all the racist inequalities that capitalism needs from wage and income inequalities to mass incarceration.

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The Olympics: spectacle for a dying system

As Japan sets daily records for Covid-19 cases, the Tokyo Olympics is exposing an anti-worker system in crisis. The International Olympic Committee’s cynical new motto—“Faster, Higher, Stronger—Together”—can’t hide the  vicious lies the capitalists use to keep workers loyal to “their” nation and “their” bosses. “National pride” is built to suppress class consciousness. In a period marked by a declining U.S.-led order and a rising China, imperialists need intensified nationalism to prepare the working class for world war.
Workers in Japan and everywhere need a society organized around the needs of the working class, not the exploitation of the many by the few. Join Progressive Labor Party to build one communist world!

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Free Mohawk: Racist state terror means fight back!

CHICAGO, July 21—Today, communists from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined organizations #FreedomForMohawk, #NoMore Foundation, and #DefundCPD for the spirited “From Mohawk, With Love” Anniversary Rally (see CHALLENGEs from 12/3/20). The event, which brought almost 40 people out, was created to highlight the struggles and triumphs of Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson in the first year since his arrest in August of 2020.

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PROFILED: Movie to Action—Justice means joining the fight for communism

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here recently hosted a screening and discussion of the documentary PROFILED about the fight against police killings in New York. A group of comrades and friends gathered to eat and watch the movie, including three families impacted by racist police violence. Even though the movie came out five years ago, the movement against police terror still faces the same issues: What is justice? And how do we get there?

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​​PLP Speech at the 416 West Wednesday

Baltimore, MD, July 14—Communists have a responsibility—in the fight against police terror, and in all struggles against racism—to go beyond reformism. Think for a moment about the fight against slavery. Looking back, the people we most respect are those who were dedicated to fully abolishing that institution: the hundreds of thousands of folks like Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and John Brown. We don’t look back, with heartfelt admiration, at people who thought slavery couldn’t be defeated, and therefore devoted themselves to the lesser goal of trying to make it slightly less horrific.
Similarly, today, we must work hard to share a very important understanding: capitalism—which is the root of racism and police terror—can and must be abolished. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Baltimore strives  to make that contribution, as part of our vigorous activities supporting the weekly West Wednesday rallies, streaming events, and other parts of the struggle—demanding accountability for the vicious police murder of Tyrone West on June 18, 2013 and for all victims of police terror. In ahave recently made the decision to join Progressive Labor Party.

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