New Jersey: Abolish ICE, Smash Borders

KEARNY, NJ, January 18—A  multiracial, multi-generational crowd of antiracists and communists gathered on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention death camps, where 21 workers have died in the past year. Progressive Labor Party and friends seized the day by sharing our ideas with working-class fighters and putting communist tactics into practice.

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Workers resist liberal bosses’ sick school plan

We have heard a lot about mutated viruses and whether they are more contagious or more deadly than the original Covid-19 virus from Wuhan. Covid-19 has been multiplying countless times around the world. Capitalism has been unable to control the pandemic and the resultant infinite viral replications that are occurring are resulting in more dangerous mutants. As CHALLENGE has pointed out (See Page 8, February 3, 2021), the chaotic nature of capitalism in crisis combined with massive inequality has resulted in the uncontrolled spread of the virus in most countries.

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Anniversary of liberation of a Nazi death camp: Red Army defeated fascists

The anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration camp on January 27, 1945, shows how the communists defeated fascism.  
May 1945 was the end of one of the most horrendous capitalist systems the world has suffered. The fascist Nazi government of Germany led by Adolph Hitler was defeated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin. Today there are many anticommunist lies about World War II, the Nazi period, and especially about the role of the then-socialist Soviet Union in smashing the fascist German forces. As we commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, let’s refute some of those lies.

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Rest in Power Phil: a red teacher, singer, fighter

Phillip Lawrence Batton, a member of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) for more than half a century, who advanced the working class as a thinker, teacher, singer, and self-taught linguist, died on January 22 after fighting off a series of illnesses.
Phil was born in 1939 in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a segregated steel mill town just outside of Pittsburgh. He grew up in the shadow of where his father worked for most of his life. But were it not  for his talent for football, he might have followed his father to work at U.S. Steel Clairton Coke Works. An athletic and fearless sophomore halfback on Clairton’s varsity football team, Phil incurred a serious head and neck injury that left him temporarily paralyzed. He recovered, and though his left side was atrophied, he never lost the graceful swagger to his stride and gestures.

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Capitalism can’t keep up with Covid-19 mutations

We have heard a lot about mutated viruses and whether they are more contagious or more deadly than the original Covid-19 virus from Wuhan. Covid-19 has been multiplying countless times around the world. Capitalism has been unable to control the pandemic and the resultant infinite viral replications that are occurring are resulting in more dangerous mutants. As CHALLENGE has pointed out (See Page 8, February 3, 2021), the chaotic nature of capitalism in crisis combined with massive inequality has resulted in the uncontrolled spread of the virus in most countries.

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Racist Covid-19 crisis in U.S. concentration camps

The U.S. injustice system’s racist treatment of undocumented workers, intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic, is proof of the necessity of organizing society without borders and exploitation.
In its desperation to intimidate, criminalize and build racism against undocumented workers, 110,100 have been imprisoned by the U.S. Government since March 2020.  The dangerous conditions inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement concentration camps, made much more so by the pandemic, led to hunger strikes by 2,500 detainees nationwide from last March to July. Recently detainees at three northern NJ prisons, where NY detainees are also sent - Essex, Hudson, and Bergen County Jails – have struck to protest their continued endangerment.

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Letters of February 17

Raise hell with radios!
I recently discovered a WBAI radio talk show in New York city called A New Day airing at 7 am when many workers commute to jobs with their cell phones. I was able to get on the air a few times already and got to mention our www.plp.org website.
Recently I got on the air about the Bronx Hunts Point Teamsters strike that was attacked by police. I said:
 Police are the corporate dictatorship’s first budget priority because they break strikes

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In the fight between Fascists, liberal bosses still main danger

The insurrection in the U.S. Capitol was no one-off. It marked an explosion of the divisions in the U.S. ruling class that have simmered to a boil—and that point to even bloodier battles in the years to come. As U.S. imperialism spirals into decline and rival imperialists in China are poised to become the world’s top-dog capitalist superpower, the U.S. bosses are falling out like the thieves they are. A subordinate but rising faction, the “America First” wing fronted by Donald Trump, is challenging the liberal finance capitalists who have ruled the globe since World War II.

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Free antiracists today, smash capitalism tomorrow

CHICAGO, January 20—“FREE THEM ALL! DROP THE CHARGES!” This was the main rallying cry heard in front of the Leighton Criminal Courthouse as over a dozen antiracist fighters braved freezing temperatures outside. Today marked the date of a court hearing for an antiracist fighter who was among the thousands attacked and charged by the racist capitalist state for their participation in a militant rebellion last year.

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Capitalist Individual freedom vs. Communist collective freedom

Workers pay the heaviest of prices for buying into capitalist ideas, which in every country capitalism tries convincing us are universal truths— in the U.S., schools and movies alike saturate us with ideas like “individual freedom.” But when evaluating the toll of COVID-19, the cost of these ideas is measured in the hundreds of thousands of workers dead and the millions of workers’ lives uprooted and shattered in the U.S. alone: in the belly of the beast of history’s richest and most powerful imperialist power.
And the very first mechanism by which capitalism guaranteed the lethality of the COVID-19 was the infection of the working class with capitalist ideas, starting with individualism.

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