AT&T Wireless Workers on Strike

NEW YORK CITY, May 21—Twenty-one thousand AT&T Mobile workers went on a three-day national strike this weekend, as a dress rehearsal for a bigger confrontation. These workers are fighting for survival in a continuing offensive of capitalist profiteering against worker’s conditions of work and living standards. Rivalries between global imperialists are sharpening, and moving toward even greater war. While the telecommunications bosses tighten the screws, the Progressive Labor Party salutes and supports the AT&T workers for saying enough is enough!
Much like Verizon Wireless’s strike last summer this battle is over the outsourcing of call center jobs, the closing of stores, hiring of part-timers instead of full-time workers, and higher co-pays for health insurance. The workers are represented by Communication Workers of America (CWA). The three-day strike is the first for most of these workers and was intended as a shot across the bosses’ bow to move contract negotiations forward.

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No Free Speech for Racists Antiracists Picket Anti-Immigrant Hate Group

BOSTON, May 28—Today, 70 protestors picketed at the Elks Club in West Roxbury, the site of a panel discussion called by Bostonians Against Sanctuary Cities.  This racist organization formed after Trump’s election with the goal of popularizing his viciously anti-immigrant agenda.
When Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends arrived, an ad hoc group of protesters from all over the Boston area were standing in a line with signs.  We seized the opportunity to provide some leadership and organized a picket line. We began chants “Hitler Rose, Hitler Fell, racist hate groups go to hell” and “Stop racist deportations, working people have no nation.” We distributed a leaflet and carried signs that boldly exclaimed “No Free Speech for Racists”, and “We won’t be divided, we won’t be fooled. Racism is the boss’s tool”.  Almost everyone accepted our leaflet “The main thing to do: Fight Racism.”
 The panel consisted of a mother whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, a Bristol County sheriff who wants to use Massachusetts inmates to build the wall on the Mexican border, and a woman from the openly anti-immigrant Washington DC organization, Center for Immigrant Studies.  It is an ultra-conservative group trying to get a foothold in liberal Massachusetts.
The Trump takeover is fostering more racism as well as more protest. Many protesters are new to fightback and open to rejecting the liberalism of the Democratic Party.  Anti-immigrant racism has always been and is part of capitalist profiteering and exploitation of the working class. Electing a Democrat will not change that. Obama deported 3.2 million immigrants, more than any U. S. president in history. PL’ers need to go to these protests with the outlook of meeting new friends who want to help build a militant, multiracial movement against racism, and we need to bring our friends to help develop them as working class leaders. Join us!

Manchester: Little vs. Big Terrorists

The Manchester atrocity shows how cowardly acts of individual violence are spawned by the biggest terrorists of them all: UK and U.S. imperialists. It also creates an opening for state violence and fascism against the working class.
On May 22 at an Ariana Grande concert, Salman Ramadan Abedi detonated a device packed with metal nuts and bolts and killed 22 people, injured over 60, many of them children, and terrorized the working class. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility, but there is no evidence providing IS was directly involved (Stratfor, 5/27).
The 22-year-old Libyan Briton bomber’s action was a despicable attack on masses of unarmed youth and families. But, the biggest terrorists are the capitalist bosses. When the UK and U.S. bosses aren’t bombing hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re shattering the lives of millions with racist incarceration, deportation, segregated housing and schooling, and unemployment. To divert attention from their own monstrous crimes, the bosses will exploit fears of ISIS to stir anti-Muslim racism as well as to pledge allegiance to this savage system to protect us.

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Commencement Day: Worker-Student Alliance Defies Yale Bosses

New Haven, CT, May 22 —It was Yale’s graduation day. Three thousand workers and students—multiracial, young and old, men and women—marched together through the streets of New Haven in support of Yale graduate student teachers who are waging a determined struggle for union recognition and their first contract

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France Election: Macron, New Face of Fascism

The election of ex-investment banker Emmanuel Macron as president of France reflects the global crisis of capitalism. Like all other capitalist powers, the French ruling class has responded with rising fascism and heightened attacks on the working class. Like Donald Trump (and Barack Obama before him), who has surrounded himself with Wall Street bankers, French finance capital is maneuvering to maintain its rule.
Beneath Macron’s liberal, “pro-immigrant” rhetoric, this so-called outsider and his “independent” political party (En Marche!) received the full backing of France’s political elites, with unlimited media and financial support. Simultaneously, he effectively isolated the mainstream capitalist parties that have lost credibility with French workers.

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COLOMBIA MAY DAY

COLOMBIA, May 1—The peace between social classes serves the criminal bosses, down with the capitalist dictatorship, arise the communist revolution, long live the international communist May Day!
In celebration of May Day the contingent of the PLP resonated these and many other chants resonated with anger and enthusiasm. This manifestation was carried out in Bogota, Colombia commemorating the International Workers’ Day. Since early on we began selling and distributing Challenge, making an emphasis on the line and the PLP program and communism as the only solution to escape the capitalist jail. Electoral groups of the left, unions, social organizations and women groups began to group and organize their banners.

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School Segregation in Brooklyn: Once Again, DoE Rears its Racist Head

Park Slope Collegiate, a public secondary school that has led the fight against segregation and racist inequalities in the Department of Education, is now under assault by a DoE investigation of “Communist organizing” (New York Times, 5/4). The DoE has targeted anti-racist Principal Bloomberg as a member of Progressive Labor Party (which she isn’t) and accused her of recruiting students to PLP (which she hasn’t).
But the school bosses’ baseless charges are rooted in an antiracist history. Going back to the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s and through the Civil Rights movement and beyond, communists have led the multiracial fightback against racism in the streets, the schools and universities, the workplace, and the military.
The DoE’s attack on Park Slope Collegiate echoes the intimidation tactics of 1950s’-era communist-hunter Joseph McCarthy. Two of New York City’s most powerful liberal bosses—Mayor Bill De Blasio and DoE Chancellor Carmen Farina—are counting on anti-communism to frighten and silence anyone who stands up against their racist policies, which consign the vast majority of Black and Latin children—approximately 75 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school student population—to a segregated, second-class education. In so doing, these bosses have yet again exposed themselves as the shameless racists they are.

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Black and Red, untold history part I: The FIGHT TO FREE THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS

History has segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
Below is part I of a series aimed at reuniting the history of communism with antiracism. Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, excerpted throughout this piece, is a good supplement for those who would like to find out more.

In the years after slavery, Southern U.S. bosses used racist terror in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, police beatings, and lynching, legal and extralegal, to keep Black workers oppressed and as a source of cheap labor to drive down the wages of all workers Black and white.

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HAITI MAY DAY

HAITI, May 1—On May Day in Haiti, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continued to denounce capitalism while raising the consciousness of the masses about the conditions of workers and the atrocious exploitation and domination by the bosses. In one small city, comrades organized a day of activities, including a conference-debate during which we presented the history of May Day and the situation of the working class in this region; a dinner and cultural evening of militant song and poetry. Other comrades participated in a mass march of workers in the capital city, Port-au-Prince.

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MEXICO MAY DAY

MEXICO CITY, MAY 1—A group of 45 comrades, sympathizers, and friends of Progressive Labor Party carried the red flags of communism in the May 1st march in Mexico City. Our revolutionary slogans and chants were heard by thousands of workers. We distributed 1,500 pamphlets of Challenge. In Oaxaca, another group of 12 comrades distributed 3,000 pamphlets in the march organized by the Teacher’s Union Local Section 22.
History has taught us that workers can only confront imperialist war if we fight to get rid of the capitalist system that creates crisis, war, and fascism. That teaching is the heritage that the Russian and Chinese workers left us when they took power during WWI and WWII, respectively. We shouldn’t forget that in order to put an end to both wars, it was essential that workers took power into their own hands.
The recent attacks by the United States on Syria and Afghanistan, much like the mobilization of aircraft carriers to the Korean Peninsula, is a signal of war against the imperialists of Russia and China, their true targets. It’s a sign that the bosses are, with each action, closer to initiating a third world war, in which they will use both conventional and nuclear weapons and spill the blood of millions of workers, all for the sake of their profits. Under this reality, capitalism confirms its devastating and criminal essence.
Within the shadow of imperialist war, the ruling class of Mexico can only offer an electoral circus with increasing fascism. Workers must be very clear that bourgeois “democracy” is a dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class—a dictatorship of a few privileged parasites who exploit that great majority of impoverished workers.

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