Letters of October 1

Colombia, Salvador, Mexico, U.S. PL’ers Move Ahead at Communist School
We had a PLP Communist School in Bogotá, Colombia, in which comrades from El Salvador, Mexico and the United States, as well as friends of the Party, participated.
We saw the political development of comrades and friends, and in particular that of the youth, who showed great enthusiasm and commitment. There was also criticism and self-criticism due to some shortcomings in the reports as well as in the organizing, outreach and propaganda work.
We must highlight the work taking place in Mexico, with families studying dialectical materialism, comrades’ supporting workers’ struggles, and recruiting members to the Party.
In terms of ideological debate, “base-building” and “reform and revolution,” all the comrades made good contributions, emphasizing the need to be part of workers’ struggles. We can recruit new comrades and support workers struggles, by making communist politics primary. We can win the working class to see that taking power is the only solution.
We established responsibilities for everyone when they return home, highlighting writing for CHALLENGE more regularly, participating in youth organizations, and providing leadership to workers’ struggles. We must denounce local and international abuses of the criminal capitalist system — with its racist, sexist, nationalist policies and thirst for profits realized through the wage slavery and extreme poverty of the working class.
We concluded the communist school with an evaluation based on self-criticism. We assessed the work done and committed to our full potential to continue growing as an international Party and consolidating our communist political line, so that we can put an end to the capitalist nightmare with a worldwide communist revolution.
Colombian Comrades
Depression, Racist Cop Terror Pervades Western Pennsylvania
This story will not appear on the bosses’ nightly news, which tries to justify racist murder or beats the war drums for U.S. imperialism or attempts to put us all to sleep with one inane story after another. I have lived in the coalfields of western Pennsylvania for many years, during which time I’ve viewed developments in this region from a revolutionary communist perspective.
In the 1980’s, we witnessed what was called the deindustrialization of this country. It was then that scores of mines shut down and steel mills were closed. This eliminated decent-paying jobs and spurred rampant unemployment, underemployment and low-wage jobs. Their effects continue and the conditions of daily life under this declining capitalist system grow worse with each passing day while poverty intensifies.
Some turn to petty crime and others to drugs. Of course, these things victimizing mostly poor people are nothing compared to the crimes perpetrated by the U.S. bosses. However, the local news programs act as the “crime report,” showing pictures of people who supposedly robbed a store or sold drugs. The small coal town of Nanty-Glo (which means streams of coal in Welsh) is severely economically depressed, with growing poverty and even hunger. There are now attempts to establish food banks to deal with this problem.
Meanwhile, racist cop terror has raised its ugly head and, as CHALLENGE has pointed out, this is the hideous face of the growing fascism and racism in the U.S. In Pittsburgh, a 20-year-old black man is on trial, even though he was shot five times by a cop during a traffic stop, leaving the young man paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. The cops say he
“resembled” another man who was wanted by the police for some crime. At the trial, the young man stated that the cop who shot him said that he hoped the n***** would die.
I think this upsurge in racism and cop terror is the most important issue confronting all workers, and it’s imperative that the communist message on this be given to all workers.
Concerning the coal fields, the high point of life right now seems to be the Friday night high school football games and the fans are not mean-spirited. It’s all done in fun and gives workers a release from all the problems capitalism is throwing at them. But what we all need in order to halt this growing fascism is the politics of the revolutionary communist PLP.
Red Coal
‘How I discovered PLP…’
I met the Party through a close nursing school friend, which led to my participation in her club, getting invited to a study group, and having the chance to discuss different ideas. We read Political Economy: Capitalist Ideas Chain the Workers, chapter 4, was a good read that caused me to experience annoyance, impotence, and anger to discover how the capitalist system is strategically designed to divide and repress the working class.
I also learned to analyze the way economics and politics are connected, and the importance of knowing how and in what ways the bosses invest money so that I can understand how this affects workers’ lives.
The experience of being part of a study group is enriching because it provides us with the knowledge to understand the root of our problems, which motivate us to keep on studying and later to put that knowledge into practice through collective work.
Nursing Student
Racist Apartheid Explodes in Ferguson
At a recent discussion group I described the media report of a 90-year-old Jewish woman Holocaust survivor, Hedi Epstein, who was arrested in Ferguson, Mo., protesting against the execution of Michael Brown. She said the conditions there reminded her of the Israeli apartheid system she witnessed in Palestine.
One person said she was shocked at the military appearance of the police with snipers, dogs, gas, rifles pointed at protestors’ heads, and the many wounded with rubber and pellet bullets while armored vehicles rammed into crowds to break up protests. I said the cops’ storm trooper tactics and later use of the National Guard was probably due to police chief Tom Jackson who was replaced by a black cop when the 90-percent white police force failed to stop the protests. According to media reports, Jackson had been sent to Israel to receive training in crowd control. Israel has a long history of training police in genocidal tactics, from racist South African apartheid police to Israeli fascist police who have been torturing and imprisoning Palestinians for 70 years. One of the racist tactics is flooding the media with reports of “outside agitators” and “terrorists” infiltrating protests. The U.S. capitalist rulers, who had been making billions from racist apartheid conditions against blacks in the 1960s, reacted to the Civil Rights movement by “disappearing” and murdering “outside” student volunteers who went to the South.
When the people protest the execution of Eric Garner by NYC’s racist police on Staten Island, all the guardians of the profiteers like FBI informer Sharpton, police commissioner Bratton, Mayor de Blasio and Cardinal Dolan gather to protect their profits from poverty wages, exploitation and apartheid neighborhoods. They are assuring their Wall Street bosses that no disruptions or resistance to fascist police tactics will be tolerated.
While Obama, who has prosecuted and imprisoned more reporters and whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined, and the Pope were “horrified” over the execution of a reporter in Syria, there has not been one word of outrage from them over the daily stop-and-kill executions of black youths in the streets across the U.S. The only reason the media responds to these crimes is because workers take to the streets. But our chants must become, “Capitalism can’t be fixed, we need communist revolution.”
A Comrade