Graduate workers, strike against capitalism

NEW YORK CITY—As the clock struck 12am on April 26, New York University (NYU) graduate workers brought the work they do to sustain the university to a halt and took to the picket line. The strike represents one step in the fight against capitalist exploitation. Changing—rather abolishing—this exploitative class relationship requires communist revolution through an international party, PLP.

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MLA: push limits of reform, fight for communism

NEW JERSEY, April 30—On the day before May Day, over 65 faculty, academic workers, graduate and undergraduate students participated in a virtual forum on “Class and Struggle in Higher Education,” organized by the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA). The forum’s theme, described by the opening speaker as “the systemic failure of capitalism to meet the needs of the great majority of the world’s people,” reflected the growing mass anger and fightback

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Long-time supporter of communism, Len Ragozin

Len Ragozin, a long-time supporter of the fight for communism, died on May 13 at the age of 92. Len absorbed his working-class consciousness from the women in his family. His mother lived through the Russian Revolution in 1917, immigrated to the U.S., and was renowned in the family for translating for Stalin during a return trip to Russia. His Aunt Rachel was a founding member of the U.S. Communist Party.
Len grew up in an environment where his family argued politics around the dinner table and the communist contingent did more than hold their own.

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Bella Ciao to Comrade Sandy

On May 12 our comrade, Sandy Spier, lost her 10 month fight with a brutally aggressive colon cancer.
Sandy joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) some fifty years ago while living in Minnesota.  At the time, PLP was organizing to fight against the imperialist Vietnam War. We were also spearheading the fight against academic racism. At a time when Black workers were leading a strike wave across the U.S. and  rebellions in the inner cities and were at the forefront of the fight within the military against the war, a group of academic prostitutes came up with theories that Black workers were destined to be violent and stay poor because of genetics. PL led the charge disproving these racist ideas. We were also trying to build alliances between the struggles of workers and students. The friends she made in Minnesota  remained her friends for years. People throughout the Midwest remember her coming to marches and summer projects.

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Remembering Laszlo Berkovits

Laszlo’s kind personality was not in contradiction to his fighting spirit and staunch antiracism. In 1979, while working at NYU Hospital, Laszlo and two comrades mounted a campaign against harassment and regular searches of the predominantly Black and Latin workers by hospital security guards. Threats of disciplinary action did not stop Laszlo and others. They even led workers to loudly picket a hospital administrator’s home.
When Laszlo and his comrades were

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TRUTH ABOUT D-DAY: THE RED ARMY DEFEATED THE NAZIS

On the occasion of the 77th anniversary of D-Day, the U.S.-British invasion of Nazi-occupied Western Europe on June 6, 1944, we’ll hear lies telling us how the U.S. won the Second World War. The decisive role of the Soviet Red Army and working class will be deliberately underplayed or ignored altogether to avoid recognizing the fact that it was the communist-led Soviet Union, under the leadership of Josef Stalin—not the U.S.—that defeated Hitler’s Nazi armies.

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India: massacre by racist profit system

As bodies wash up on the banks of the Ganges river, mass cremation pyres light the sky, and Covid-19 patients die by the thousands for lack of simple oxygen, we need look no further than India to see the sickness of capitalism. Though India is the world’s leading maker of Covid-19 vaccines, less than three percent of its population is fully vaccinated. With 17 percent of the world’s population, the country “accounts for half of Covid-19 cases and 30 percent of deaths worldwide” (reuters.com, 5/12). As inter-imperialist rivals U.S. and China seesaw between vaccine nationalism and vaccine geopolitics, the profit system’s callous indifference to workers’ lives has been exposed as rarely before.

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May Day: Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES—The 12 months since last May Day has been a hell of a year for the working class of the world. With Covid-19, continued police murders and brutality , unemployment, and lack of housing ravishing working-class communities, especially Black, Latin and Asian, it can be hard to imagine creating a better world for all of us. But May Day reminds us that we have a communist world to win and we can join together with our class brothers and sisters to fight to achieve that goal.
In Los Angeles, May Day was a coming together of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and our friends to commemorate the struggles of our past comrades and highlight the continuing battles PLP is helping to lead. Through our work within two mass organizations, one dedicated to giving voice to the families of those murdered by the police, and the other a tenants’ union fighting racist gentrification, we were able to celebrate May Day in a community park and lead a car caravan to the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters.

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May Day: Brooklyn

BROOKLYN, May 1—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in New York City and New Jersey united a multiracial and multi generational crowd of over 200 fighters to march  working-class power. “Whose day? Our day!! What day? May Day!” Several Black and Latin women workers gave speeches throughout the march. The essential message was loud and clear: “The victories of the rich are not the victories of the international working class; putting worker needs at the forefront is our victory.” That’s communism.

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May Day: Chicago

Close to 100 members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends gathered on the west side of the city today to boldly celebrate International Workers Day and our vision of a communist future. Working-class fighters of all ages – Asian, Latin, Black and white – united for the purpose of carrying out our most inspirational and well-organized May Day in years.

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