To end police terror, revolt!

ANNAPOLIS, MD—Chants and demands rang out in Maryland’s state capital as over 150 protesters, with support from 90 mass organizations, marched on the Annapolis statehouse. The collective of the Maryland Coalition for Justice and Police Accountability had high hopes that a bill repealing the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBR) would finally pass but as is the case with many reform struggles, these hopes came crashing down as multiple amendments obliterated demands. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined the voices calling out the legislative betrayal of the working class and chanted: “only communist revolution will break our chains.” We can’t reform away racism that’s integral to this profit system’s survival.
PLP has been working with the coalition to end racist police terror and murder for years now. Several PLP members who also work with Community Justice in Prince George’s County and the West Wednesday Coalition in Baltimore attended the march, distributing copies of CHALLENGE.
Our message to workers: ending police terror and murder requires a revolutionary overthrow of the whole damn system—appealing to the legislature will never free the working class. Pandering politicians represent and manage this racist capitalist system.

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Red presence matters: Brooklyn teachers go extra mile with antiracist commuter plan

BROOKLYN, March 29—In early March the bosses’ media finally reported a year-old wave of anti-Asian violence in a serious way and the antiracist reflexes of dedicated staff at the mostly-Asian Brooklyn Technical High School sprang into action.
The school's equity team organized a schoolwide response which included devoting time in all classes to solidarity lessons and setting up travel groups from Chinese immigrant neighborhoods to the school.  
Then came the horrific Atlanta shootings targeting young Asian women. Asian students shared stories of families afraid to leave the house. The week’s lessons and a town hall organized by the sophomore class took on increased urgency. In a promising sign of potential class-consciousness most students who spoke up have resisted the twin poisonous ideas of anti-Black racism (since some attacks on Asian workers have been carried out by Black workers or youth) and reliance on the heightened police protection as a source of safety. 

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Amid rising fascism, workers in Pakistan rally against sexism

PAKISTAN, March 8—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) spread revolutionary communist politics while participating in the rallies on International Working Women’s Day this past month in Pakistan.
This was partly because of the increasing misleadership of liberal and nongovernmental organization-led groups in the mass movement, who are disconnected from the social, political and economic conditions of working-class women. This year there were fewer women workers compared to last year. The low participation was also because of threats given by fascist religious clerics. These liberal misleaders were not interested in talking about the racism, poverty, exploitation, illiteracy, domestic violence, and special type of religious oppression against working women.

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Justice for Victoria! Sexist police terror part and parcel of capitalism

On March 28, in Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico, Victoria Salazar, a working-class woman from El Salvador was murdered by police. Victoria committed the capitalist crime of being a worker, a woman and a migrant in a system that only serves the ruling class. Capitalism uses sexism, nationalism and racism as the ideological pillars to keep the working class divided and to perpetuate its system of exploitation and oppression. Without fighting for a communist society, we will never bring down these deadly pillars.

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IWWD Panel: Communism means liberation from sexism

The following articles cover some topics discussed at the International Working Women’s Day celebration. To view, click here
March 28 – Dozens of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends gathered virtually today for a bilingual panel celebrating the International Working Women’s Day  and communist anti-sexism. Across at least four countries, workers shared personal experiences, reflected on historical movements, and discussed political theory as key pillars in advancing the fight against capitalism’s sexist culture and exploitation.
Sexism is one of the most powerful tools in the bosses’ arsenal to divide and attack our class. Due to their experience against capitalism’s sexist and racist attacks, we have throughout our history fought to have women workers—particularly Blac

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Imperialist rivalry fuels global vaccine apartheid

As of March 30, over 60 countries had not received a single dose of vaccine, and many are not on track to be fully vaccinated before 2024 (New York Times, 3/30). Even as thousands of workers die daily from coronavirus, capitalism sees the vaccine as another vehicle for racist profits and a weapon in inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Chinese imperialists.
In wealthy countries, vaccine apartheid is apparent. The U.S. has vaccinated white people  at 2.5 times the rate for Latin and 2 times that of Black workers (KFF.org, 3/17). Israel has fully vaccinated over 50 percent of the Jewish population and is denying vaccines to the 4.5 million Palestinians under its military occupation. Capitalism will always see the lives of the working class as expendable. We must fight for communist revolution to build a society that serves the needs of the working class.

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Deliver communism to striking Amazon workers

Under capitalism workers’ lives are expendable. Under communism profits will cease to exist and the collective health of workers will be guarenteed.In Bessemer, Alabama 5,800 Amazon warehouse workers are voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). This union drive, among a largely Black workforce, has gotten the attention of the U.S. labor movement and the Democratic Party. The campaign has been publicly endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Stacey Abrams, actor Danny Glover, along with the National Football League and Major League Baseball Players Associations. Even President Joe Biden spoke about the advantage unions provide “for Black and Brown workers.” What is going on?

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Turkey: city workers strike, need workers’ power

ISTANBUL, Turkey – On February 15, 2,300 municipal workers in the city district of Kadıköy boldly went on strike against the poverty wages offered by the local bosses. These essential workers, who have carried on throughout the pandemic, are being “rewarded” with miserable pay, strike-breakers, and a sellout of their fight.
When workers in different parts of the world seek to increase their militancy and sharpen the contradictions of the class struggle, we find ourselves attacked not only by the capitalist bosses and politicians but also by the fake-left trade union misleaders.
Striking workers in Istanbul and everywhere else need and deserve the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) as the only force that can crush the bosses and their profit system and build a worker-run world.

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Letters of April 14

Fighting LA’s racist housing crisis
On March 25, I attended a rally in support of homeless residents who were being “swept” and displaced from Echo Park, located in Los Angeles. The sweeps were conducted by city workers, backed up by a massive Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) presence. Hundreds of people, including neighborhood residents, protested and marched for hours to demand a stop to the sweeps and permanent housing for everyone. The LAPD penned in and arrested 182 people after they sat down in the street. Two news reporters were also charged and National Lawyers’ Guild legal observers were detained, before being released.
There are hundreds of homeless encampments across the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. The 2020 official Point in Time Count for LA County (likely an undercount) was 66,436. Recently, the Los Angeles Times newspaper even compared LA to the encampments described in Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel about the great migration from the “Dust Bowl” to California in the 1930s.

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Stimulus package: Crumbs on the road to war and fascism

The $1.9 trillion “America Rescue Plan” from Jim Crow Joe Biden, rammed through a Democrat-controlled Congress, is an act of desperation by the U.S. finance capital bosses. As they move toward more open fascism and global war, these liberal rulers need to build loyalty among workers devastated by Covid-19, mass unemployment, and the basic contradictions of the profit system.
The finance capitalists—the Big Fascists who have mostly run the U.S. and dominated the globe since World War II—are now threatened on all sides. They’re losing geopolitical ground by the day to China, their chief inter-imperialist rival. Their own Capitol was besieged by armed militias loyal to the openly racist Small Fascists, the isolationist wing led by the Koch and Mercer and DeVos families, among others. (See glossary on p. 5.) Meanwhile, tens of millions of workers have lost confidence in a system that can’t provide decent-paying jobs, basic healthcare in a pandemic, or enough reliable energy to keep their children from freezing to death in a winter storm (see CHALLENGE, 3/17).

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