Colombia: May Day and workers’ fightback

COLOMBIA—The marking of May Day this year resonated with protests and masses of workers taking the streets. They are rejecting the proposed anti-worker tax reform that prioritizes President Ivan Duque and his capitalist masters represented by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Inter-American Development Bank. These bloodsucking financial bosses conspire to attack us workers and try to completely ruin the international working class.

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Capitalism, a deadly disease: NYC Retirees fight attacks on medicare

NEW YORK CITY—Over 100 workers demonstrated recently after it was revealed that Medicare of over 200,000 retired New York City (NYC) workers will be privatized. This new plan was struck by union misleaders and liberal Democratic Party politicians to make up a shortfall in the medical “stabilization fund” for current and retired workers. Demonstrating workers instead demanded that all workers and retirees not be moved into privatization until all retirees and workers are involved in the process. The demonstration was called by the Retiree Advocates/United Federation of Teachers, with retirees from the DC-37 Retiree Association, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) and other retiree groups joining with them to protest the privatization of our Medicare health care.

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80th Anniversary: Red Army smashed Nazis

On June 22, 1941, in the middle of World War II, more than 3,000,000 Nazi troops invaded the Soviet Union. Fascist troops from Finland, Rumania, Hungary, Italy and Spain  later joined them. This, the largest military attack in history on any country, was a second attempt by the capitalists to smash the world’s first workers’ state. Only 18 years earlier in 1917, right after the Russian Revolution, imperialist troops from 14 countries, including the U.S., Britain and France had invaded the Soviet Union to "strangle the socialist infant in its cradle." The Bolsheviks (communist revolutionaries) organized to defend their revolution. Though 4.5 million Soviet workers lost their lives, the communist-led Red Army defeated them. Now Adolf Hitler’s armies would meet a similar fate.

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Letter: I remember the first issue of CHALLENGE

The first issue of CHALLENGE (Vol. 1, No 1) came out on June 15, 1964. When we sold that first issue of CHALLENGE, most of us had no idea how significant it was AND the role that CHALLENGE would soon play in the fight against capitalism. The headline on page one  was prophetic: Police War on Harlem. Barely four  weeks later, the Harlem Rebellion started after racist KKKop Thomas Gilligan of the New York Police Department (NYPD) shot and killed young James Powell who, with his friends, was trying to cool off from the July heat by spraying water on themselves and a bystander who complained about it and eventually called the police. This killing was the last straw in a long series of racist oppression. The news media called the rebellion a “riot” but it was most definitely a rebellion!  Most of the stores that were attacked were pawnshops that had been looting the residents of Harlem for decades!

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Letters of June 23

Killer kkkops and mental health are class issues
May was mental health awareness month and National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) hosts a fundraising walk every May. During 2020 our family weathered some serious mental health crises and NAMI helped provide education, resources, and support.

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Arab & Jewish workers unite! SMASH ISRAELI STATE TERROR

The Gaza Strip is a burial ground for thousands of workers massacred in the never-ending Palestine-Israel Conflict, with the self-serving nationalist bosses of Hamas on one side and the apartheid Israeli state, in alliance with U.S. imperialism, on the other. In the latest round of violence over 11 days in May, at least 248 people—including 66 children--were killed in Gaza, while Israeli fatalities stood at 13 (Aljazeera.com, 5/24). The gap in death tolls is nothing new; it reflects a deliberate policy of collective punishment by the Israeli war machine and its openly racist government.

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To abolish capitalism, kick kkkops out of CUNY

NEW YORK CITY, May 14—In the French Revolution Georges Danton came up with the slogan “Boldness! Again, boldness! Always, boldness!” That describes the rally today of sixty City University of New York (CUNY) students and a few faculty, multiracial, multi-gender, and all ages marched from Hunter College to John Jay College. Their demand: abolition. Abolish the police, prisons, the carceral state, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperialism.

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Israeli and Hamas bosses fight – Palestinian and Israeli workers pay the price

ISRAEL-PALESTINE, May 21— Another round of warfare between Hamas and Israel ended with a ceasefire, with both Hamas and Israeli capitalists claiming “victory”. But with 13 workers killed in Israel and 258 workers killed and two thousand more wounded in Palestine, it was the working class of both sides, especially the Palestinian working class, who paid the price.

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Colombia: Long Live May Day!

COLOMBIA— union workers, teachers' associations, students, drivers, women's groups, indigenous people and a multitude of social organizations organized dozens of demonstrations in fields and cities against Duque's tax reform and warlike policy. In Bogotá, we commemorated May Day once again -- the international day of the working class. We promoted the vision of the unity of the workers of the world, under one red flag and our communist Party, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).

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Pakistan May Day: fighting horrendous capitalist conditions

PAKISTAN—Unlike past years, this year’s May Day was a less than jubilant celebration. This was because of a lockdown due to a third wave of Covid-19. Yet, Progressive Labor Party continues to call for fightback and communism.

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