HYATTSVILLE, MARYLAND—Today Maryland residents celebrated the sixth month of weekly protests against ICE, chanting “Ch—a la migra” and “Not another nickel, not another dime, No more money for ICE’s crimes” Forty residents of Hyattsville and Greenbelt picketed the METRO 1 building where ICE is trying to expand its personnel on the 3rd floor. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has steadily participated in these rallies and held our May Day rally at the location as well (CHALLENGE,  6/3/26). 

Leading the fight to smash ICE

Today’s rally engaged representatives of multiple organizations in the area and eight members of PLP along with friends and neighbors who joined this event with literature and chants. A PLP speaker spoke about organizing in the transit union and workers refusing to drive buses that advertise the border patrol. We cannot let the capitalists succeed in using ICE to divide the working class and weaken our struggles through racist divisions. Keeping ICE out of the neighborhood is just one step towards ending capitalism’s rule and building a new society of equality. Another PLP speaker challenged the Hyattsville City Council members who attended to step up and use their tools to keep ICE from expanding in our community, and called on everyone to get a CHALLENGE, which headlined the Delaney struggle against the ICE-funded GEO detention center on the first page! Thirty CHALLENGEs were distributed to marchers and others who stopped  by the rally.

Right now, the large area in METRO 1 remains empty, but residents are keeping the pressure on the building owner, the city, and the county to stop ICE in its tracks, rather than letting them set up shop a block from the immigration court. 

Students at Prince George’s Community College as well as several Howard University students and local residents have taken the lead in organizing, including a student who had traveled to Delaney to participate in the anti-ICE action there. Their organizing secured $100,000 from the Hyattsville City Council to help victims of ICE in the city. One of the council members got a CHALLENGE about Delaney. We encouraged him to hold meetings in every ward to discuss the ICE issue and get more participation in determining what city residents could do to stop ICE.
Several PLP members talked with organizers about coming to some Party events and invited them to consider joining our Party. The risks and fears are great, but the alternative is worse. 

Organizing for more than reform fights

Much work needs to be done to strengthen this fight, including more outreach to Hyattsville and Greenbelt neighbors. Recruiting these organizers to the Party requires more one-on-one discussions and planning this struggle together. But we have a bold and winning strategy: building towards a revolution to abolish wages, bosses, racism and sexism. Workers know how to run the factories, organize transit systems, clean office buildings and above all, how to work collectively to meet each other’s needs. The bosses know none of this, and only know about pumping profits out of our labor and using divisive tactics to keep us weak. They are doomed, and we must work to hasten their exit from society.

NEW JERSEY, JUNE 21—The hundreds of people gathered outside of the Delaney Hall migrant prison on Father’s Day prove that the working class will never accept fascism without a fight. The ruling class uses racism, sexism, and nationalism to divide us but class consciousness and internationalism beat in the hearts of workers, regardless of the labels that the bosses put on us. Friends and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were there to struggle with demonstrators to marry their working-class spirit with a revolutionary outlook. Only a communist revolution will see the end of ICE, Delaney Hall, and all fascists.

Delaney Hall is an infamous prison, run by the racist GEO Group, contracting for the fascist ICE goons, where detained migrants are treated brutally. Recently, detainees have started a strike, refusing to work and eat, in response to being served rotten food, denied medical care and family visitation.  

Bosses’ misleaders quell workers’ energy

On Father’s Day, a group of labor unions organized an “Eyes on ICE” rally, to support the striking workers inside Delaney. The potential for a large, militant action was wasted by the timid and disorganized labor misleaders. The hundreds of protestors stood around for two hours listening to speeches, most of them uninspiring. The exceptions were the heartbreaking stories from families of detainees and the brave little girls who spoke of missing their dads on Father’s Day. Toward the end, there was also an excellent contribution by a young Black physics teacher from Newark who made the point that workers have to organize themselves and not count on politicians. 

However, the passivity at the heart of the event was demonstrated clearly when a transport vehicle, carrying our migrant siblings to who-knows-where, was allowed to pass through the prison gate with barely a reaction from the mis-leadership. We attempted to inject some energy and fighting spirit into the crowd by chanting “Smash Racist Deportations, Working People Have no Nation!” and “Las Luchas Obreras No Tienen Fronteras!” in between speeches. The crowd appreciated it even as the leadership tried, and failed, to get us to stop. Finally, it was up to PLP members to organize a proper picket line after the speeches ended. 

The experience reinforced important lessons in the struggle: One, building connections to our coworkers, classmates and students is key. Our contingent included friends and coworkers that we’ve been in the class struggle with for a long time and the trip to and from the demonstration was a great opportunity to talk politics. Two, liberal misleaders have the power and potential to lead our class to ruin. For all their talk about fighting fascism and the danger of the time we’re living in, their actions produced a passive and disorganized crowd. The working class deserves and will get better! 

This July marks the 237th anniversary of the start of the French Revolution, a day the French capitalist class has whitewashed into a celebration of the dawn of their racist, imperialist, and decaying democracy. But Bastille Day carries buried working-class and revolutionary roots: it helped inspire the enslaved workers of Haiti to rise up and overthrow the French plantation slavers, and it echoed through the movements that later toppled colonial rule across Latin America.

This year, the anniversary falls on the eve of the 250th anniversary (semiquincentennial) of a the United States, built on the bedrock of slavery, genocide, a nation the French monarchy itself helped bring into being. Seeking to weaken its rival Britain, the crown bankrolled a small class of planters and merchants, the so-called founding fathers, who declared independence on July 4, 1776, just under seventeen years before that same monarchy lost its head to the guillotine.

As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary and France marks another Bastille Day, both holidays expose the same hollow core: fake democracies built to serve capital. France today is a wasteland of exploitation, where unemployment runs nearly twice as high for African immigrants as for native French workers, and discrimination against Black and Arab communities remains well documented in hiring, housing, and everyday life.Paris and Brussels bankroll border-militarization deals with Libya, Morocco, and Niger that have turned the Sahara and the Mediterranean into mass graves, with the UN estimating migrant deaths in the desert may run twice as high as those recorded at sea.Meanwhile, crushing debt, first imposed on Haiti in 1825 as literal ransom for its freedom, has cost the country tens of billions in lost development and helped lock it into the crisis it faces today.

Meanwhile, on the eve of its own semiquincentennial, the U.S. ruling class is unmasking its "sacred democracy": the Supreme Court is greenlighting escalating attacks on immigrants, deepening the exploitation of workers, minting new trillionaires, hunting down and caging migrant workers in concentration camps, and stripping Temporary Protected Status from Haitians and Syrians, sending them back to the violent, destabilized chaos the U.S. itself created. Justice Kagan's dissent in the June 2026 ruling did not mince words, writing that the record "fairly shouts" that race drove the decision to strip Haitians of protection.

The article that follows is a reprint on the history of the Bastille and the lessons the international working class can still draw from it today. As Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Marx himself was profoundly shaped by the earth-shattering example of the French Revolution, and it is that same history the working class must learn from and finish the job on. Workers took power once. We can do it again, and hold it this time. Join PLP, and help us write a new revolutionary history that frees workers from this capitalist nightmare for good.

Lessons from the storming of Bastille

France was then an agricultural society ruled by noble landowners and a powerful Catholic church, with the king at the top. The urban bourgeoisie wanted a constitutional monarchy. That would give them more political power. They needed the urban workers, called “sans-culottes” – a French word meaning “worker’s pants”– to fight for them against the monarchy. But for a few years the “sans-culottes” fought for their own interests.

The sudden, violent overthrow of the French monarchy and landed aristocracy proved that the status quo was not “God-given,” not inevitable, not the product of “human nature.” It proved that the political structure could be changed for the better. A society with more equality and less exploitation was possible! The French Revolution also gave birth to future revolutionary communist movements.

The French Revolution was inspired by the Enlightenment, a bourgeois movement that attacked monarchies and feudalism. The Enlightenment popularized talk of human rights— liberal democracy, the so called rights of the people and equality for all. It argued that the power of kings and aristocrats was illegitimate.

In 1789 the French King had called a nationwide meeting (Estates-General) of nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie, to vote for new taxes. When the bourgeoisie refused, the king tried to shut them down. But the “sans-culottes” rebelled and stormed the Bastille. The revolution began.

Here are some lessons, especially from the most radical and democratic period of 1789 to 1795.

The “sans-culottes” of the cities—workers, journeymen, apprentices, working women—always pushed the Revolution ahead, towards more equality, more rights and power for working people.

The “sans-culottes” had no political party. The party of petty-bourgeois revolutionaries and sincere idealists who worked most closely with them was called the Jacobins.

But the working class needs its own party. This is the greatest discovery of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik ( communist) Revolution of 1917 in Russia. Today, it’s the job of the Progressive Labor Party to fulfill that historic task.

It was the mass actions of the “sans-culottes”, sometimes supported by the most radical Jacobins, who pushed the Revolution to adopt the most democratic reforms.

The bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and “sans-culottes” all united to get rid of the king and aristocracy and to take land from the Church. But after that, their interests no longer coincided. The radical bourgeoisie needed the “sans-culottes” only as long as foreign armies threatened to destroy the Revolution.

With the seizing of the lands of aristocrats and the Church, peasants gained their own land. They also wanted higher prices for the food they grew. But the urban “sans-culottes” needed low food prices. The peasants’ economic interests were more aligned with the bourgeois merchants, traders, and landlords than with those of the “sans-culottes.”Once foreign armies were driven back, the bourgeois representatives—some of whom had been executed as counter-revolutionaries—turned against the Jacobins and the “sans-culottes” and established a more repressive state. After 1795 the propertied bourgeoisie was in firm control. They organized a bourgeois dictatorship, and then an authoritarian empire under Napoleon Bonaparte.

The communist movement begins

Gracchus Babeuf, a poor, self-taught worker, headed the last and most radical movement of the Revolution. His “Conspiracy for Equality” was crushed, and Babeuf executed. But one of his followers, Buonarroti, survived to influence the working-class and student militants of the 1840s, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The working class of Europe learned from the experience of the “sans-culottes” of France. The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, were the first revolutions by the industrial working class, the proletariat. They all sprang from the lessons of the great French Revolution.

Washington D.C.—“Hey Hey, Ho Ho, “Quote the Fare’ Has Got to Go” started off a rally by over 100 transit workers in ATU 689 in front of the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) headquarters just before the monthly board meeting. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were on the picket line and distributed CHALLENGE to over 60 percent of the workers, reflecting the high level of class consciousness developed over long years of Party organizing. 

NO cuts for transit workers!

Today’s Safety First Rally attacked the Metro Board for cutting station attendant staffing, speeding up trains in workplace sites, and changing roadway workers’ protections. WMATA has demanded that the operators “quote the fare” as riders get on the bus, and put “FARE REQUIRED” on the front of buses. They have also increased transit police enforcement over people who don’t pay. The fare issue is also a safety issue, since arguments with riders over fares have led to fights and episodes of assaults on operators. Turning riders against operators is an example of the bosses’ goals of creating division in the working class. Besides attacking Washington area residents, this repressive approach has also led to transit police working closely with ICE to detain Black and Latin riders who get a ticket. This shameful attack has been emphasized by ongoing bus size ads recruiting for the Customs and Border Patrol (CHALLENGE  7/30/2025).

Bosses cutting OT

Inside the board meeting, PLP and metro workers spoke sharply against the board for an hour on these issues, as well as against a pilot proposal by WMATA to move to four day work weeks. This sinister attack on the eight hour day includes ignoring the requirement for overtime pay after 8 hours of work, which has always been the basic way that bosses have been forced to maintain a standard eight hour day. 

The bosses are not worried about tired operators or more injuries if they can save money. As the bosses look to profit from Artificial Intelligence and automation in transit by laying off workers, unions must fight for a shorter work week with no reduction in weekly pay. Workers can be trained for the new jobs that automation will create, rather than being laid off. But until workers have overthrown the entire capitalist system that lives to pump profits out of their labor, they will continue to face challenges as the trend towards fascism intensifies.

Workers in transit have real power to shut the system down by striking and following through on their safety and workplace demands. Communist leadership in these unions is necessary to break through the “business union” approach by union officials who are happy to accommodate unsafe productivity improvements while protecting their own salaries and position instead of leading struggles for safety and jobs for the working class.