LA MAY DAY: Lead with confidence in the working class

LOS ANGELES, April 30–The 12 months since last May Day have been a hell of a year for the working class worldwide. With COVID-19, imperialist wars, unending police murders and terror , unemployment, and a housing crisis  ravaging working-class communities, especially Black, Latin and Asian, it can be hard to imagine creating a better world for all of us. Yet, May Day reminds us that we have a communist world to win if we can join together with our class brothers and sisters.

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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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SMASH RACISM, BUILD WORKERS’ POWER

LOS ANGELES, CA, March 17—“We are going to turn our pain into power” shouted one of the daughters of Marco Vasquez Jr.
This impassioned sentiment was met with cheers and raised fists from about 100 protest supporters. As the struggle against police murder moves forward in Los Angeles, more and more people, especially the families who are closest to this form of racist oppression, recognize the need for systemic change. Through being immersed in the class struggle and intertwining our lives with our base, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are showing that communism is the only system that will meet those aspirations for workers’ power and PLP is the vehicle to achieve it.

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If we don’t get it, shut it down! Families unite to build antiracist movement

Los Angeles, CA – While the bosses just finished parading Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention, hoping to win workers back to capitalism, women from nine different families testified to the brutality that this system perpetrates on workers daily. Initially LA City Council member Curren Price, a leading Black politician of the Democratic party, promised to have a Zoom forum where people could speak to the trauma the “Shootin’ Newton” police station has caused them over the years. But liberal misleader Price reneged, as all politicians are only interested in protecting the capitalist system.
So the workers took over. A family member proclaimed, “If he doesn’t want to help us, we will make our own community forum!” This was a call to action! For nine months, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have deepened our ties with three families who themselves have numerous ties to other families in the fight against racist police brutality. After spending months organizing with communists, the families are skeptical of the promises politicians make. It has also become clearer to many that communist revolution is the long-term solution to ending racist police murders. Today we organize caravans and forums. In the future the working class will run the world.

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Students & workers organize to teach antiracism

LOS ANGELES, September 8 –When high school students organize and lead a Social Justice Day on day three of a school year that is steeped in instability for our class, we can lay claim to the potential of a bright future ahead of us. Sixteen students and 10  staff members (organized by a teacher member of PLP) met and planned through the summer to pull together the day’s activities. When the school’s administration tried to push it back again claiming there was not enough time to “do it right”, students and staff said NO! We demanded that the nonsense they were calling Fall Bridge be condensed so that instead our fight for an antiracist school, community, and world could take center stage.

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Justice for Alex Flores: Organize against racist police terror

Los Angeles, CA,—There is a deep hatred of the kkkops by the family and community of Alex Flores, who was murdered by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on November 11th, 2019. The family, along with our small Progressive Labor Party (PLP) contingent and base have marched nearly every day for 30 days, taking a short break for the funeral services. This murder is becoming a mass issue in the neighborhood where Alex lived, and we are pushing to introduce communist ideas as we participate in the fightback. Together, we have taken to the streets, blocked intersections, and shut down the front entrance of the fascist “Shootin” Newton police station, all while leading Party chants and distributing CHALLENGE and PLP leaflets. We have received mass support from the community and passersby. Whenever a cop car came close or a cop approached us,

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Los Angeles: Smash racist deportations—Working people have no nations!

Los Angeles, February 15—The latest fascist raid triggered an emergency rally where 100 antiracists blocked a Homeland security van from accessing the Metropolitan Detention Center. Protesters called for an end to deportations and for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to get out of Los Angeles; Progressive Labor Party called for a borderless world.

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