International Working Women’s Day: Only communism can eradicate sexism

Under capitalism the education system is driven by individualism, identity politics, and a fractured way of learning. Once a year during International Women’s Month, students learn about women artists, scientists, politicians and millionaires. International Working Women’s Day (March 8) is a holiday originally born from the working class as an antisexist celebration of women in the class struggle.
Yet, without communist analysis or leadershipthis holiday has been reduced to celebrating our oppressors of a different gender—women who are a part of and a proponent of the ruling class and their sexist ideas.

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Black and Red Celebration

PLP and friends gathered virtually for our annual
Black and Red Celebration, giving tribute to the leadership
of Black communists. CHALLENGE readers are invited
to view the event by clicking here.

Transit workers expose cheating CTA, deserve a worker-run system

CHICAGO, February 23—Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined with Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) workers for a multiracial “Hour of Power” rally today at the 95 Street transit station to protest the sellout union leaders. These misleaders work hand in hand with the transit bosses, helping them stay in control. Transit, when run in the interest of profit, can never function to sustain the working-class necessities. PLP members call for communism, working-class power, where transit workers will not only keep move the city but also steer the world.

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Biden’s bombs kill workers and increase Middle East chaos

On February 25 U.S. President Joe Biden bombed Syria taking only 36 days to join the list of U.S. Presidents whose blood-soaked hands have killed workers across the Middle East. The airstrike on a base in Syria used by an Iranian backed militia to launch rocket attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq came out of the increasing weakness of the U.S. ruling class. Across the Middle East the U.S. bosses are in retreat. The latest bombings, which killed at least 17 people and wounded dozens more (NY Times, 2/26), highlights how, as the U.S. ruling class grows weaker, direct war between the imperialists becomes more and more likely.

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1930s: Langston Hughes, major poet of the communist movement

The previous issue of CHALLENGE (3/3) remembered Langston Hughes as a writer sharply critical of Jim Crow segregation during World War II and as a poet for the U.S. working class—particularly Black workers. Now we’ll flash back to the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became an advocate for multiracial, anti-capitalist revolution.  
A tradition of antiracist fightback ran deep in Hughes’s family history. In 1858, his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, married Lewis Leary, an abolitionist who died in John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Howard Langston, was an educator and ardent abolitionist.
Hughes’s influences
According to his biographer Arnold Rampersad, young Langston Hughes was influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay, along with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the antiracist, pro-communist writer and historian. In June 1921, Hughes’ poetry was published for the first time in a professional journal. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” came out in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.

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Letters of March 17

Meisha Porter, new face of liberal racism
Bad News! Meisha Porter has been appointed as the first Black woman to lead as NYC’s chancellor of the country’s largest public school system, effectively becoming the new face of liberal racism.
While Porter has been promoted as an antiracist Black woman leader, and champion for “equitable schools,” her history proves otherwise.

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Book Review “Agent Sonya,” Heroic Communist

In Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy (2020), Ben Macintyre describes the evolution of Ursula Kuczynski, from an incipient revolutionary into a career of one of the most successful Soviet spies before, during, and after World War II.
Time of great conflict & revolution
Between two world wars, fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and Asia. Germany was roiling with street battles between fascists, the German Communist Party, and the Social Democratic Party.

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Rest in Power, Elizam Escobar

On  January 15, 2021, Elizam Escobar passed away, a former member of the Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña and of the  Progresive Labor Party (PLP).  Elizam was a great cartoonist and artist whose political commitment was expressed through his art work in CHALLENGE during the early 1970s.  They are of lasting value and a tribute to the communist spirit he showed during those years. We have reproduced one of them here (see cartoon).

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Bosses’ dogfight in Myanmar: racists vs. racists

Thousands of workers in Myanmar (also called Burma) have taken to the streets in defiance of the Tatmadaw, the thuggish military that has ruled the country for most of the last 60 years. In a February 1 coup, the Tatmadaw ousted the racist civilian misleader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her NLD (National League for Democracy) Party. Protesters are demanding her release from prison and a return to democracy. But make no mistake about it, democracy will never liberate the working class from the horrors of capitalism.
Under class society, the ruling class dictates to everyone else. Under capitalism, a capitalist dictatorship rules for maximum profit and power for the few by exploiting the international working class. “Democratic” elections are a sham the liberal bosses use to hide the coercion and violence of their rule. We must fight for a workers’ dictatorship—for communism. Only then will workers have any control over society and their lives.
The current conflict in Myanmar, one of poorest countries in Asia, is between two enemies of the working class. It’s a fight over which group of bosses will rule the country and line their pockets with profits stolen from workers. It’s also a fight over which imperialist power Myanmar will align with—China or the U.S.? What’s happening in this small, impoverished country is part of a worldwide trend toward fascism and world war.

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NO SAFE SCHOOLS UNDER CAPITALISM

CHICAGO, February 17—Scores of working-class parents over the past month have fought together in bold opposition to the bosses’ racist lose-lose scenario for school reopenings. Sharply attacked by the profit system, they are collectively pushing struggles that prioritize greater working-class safety and a better future for youth.
Some of the fiercest leadership is coming from Latin workers, organizing out of schools where members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have helped build class struggle against the bosses. We have been proud to fight alongside many of them and inject communist politics and multiracial unity into the militant campaigns.

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