Minneapolis, MN—A multiracial collective of students and workers from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) brought the heat of antiracist communist politics and organizing to the city of Minneapolis this weekend. In subzero temperatures, we proudly stood shoulder to shoulder next to tens of thousands of other students and workers demanding an immediate end to the ICE nazis’ racist and fascist assault on the city.

The ongoing racist raids, arrests and deportations are rooted in the capitalist profit system, which can only exist from the division and intense exploitation of the international working class. Facing this truth, we shared the goal and vision of a communist revolution led by the mass PLP to overthrow the hated bosses and their wretched system and build an egalitarian worker-run society in its place!

ALL OUT for the general strike!

Our plan to travel to Minneapolis coincided with the call of unions and social organizations to hold a general strike on January 23rd. The ICE gestapo has ratcheted up their invasion of the area over the past weeks, sending thousands of agents to make arrests of our immigrant worker siblings while executing mother of three Renee Good in cold blood on January 7th.

The working class here has responded to the raids with passion and skill, organizing rapid response networks and mobilizing the masses to protect their neighbors, family, co-workers and friends through direct action. The general strike is the logical escalation of the class struggle: withholding our labor in a mass coordinated way across different industries to confront the bosses’ plans and damage their ability to make profits.
In inspiring solidarity, with the wind dropping the air temperature to around -30º, the working class showed up around 100,000 deep in the downtown commons area to participate in the strike. Our PLP collective chanted and spoke amidst enraged masses of workers rallying, chanting and marching to demonstrate the earth-shaking power of a unified working class.

Throughout the action, we marched with our red communist flags high, distributing hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE and leaflets. We sharpened the tone and militancy of the chants, stressing the need for multiracial working-class unity to challenge the bosses: “Asian, Latin, Black and white – Workers of the world, unite!” We peppered these chants with speeches that were well-received, especially by connecting the history of slavery to racist police terror and the murder of George Floyd with the genocides in Palestine and Sudan, and that our goal should not just be to kick the hated ICE out of Minnesota. General strikes can teach us our own power, but the only way to end this terror everywhere is to use our power to uproot the vicious capitalist society requiring such ruthless force to maintain their imperialist system. To do that we need a mass Red Army waging revolutionary violence and millions of workers building a mass international PLP. Anything less and we will repeat this same murderous cycle.

Capitalism keeps murdering us – Justice for Alex Pretti

The morning after the general strike we awoke to the horrifying news that the ICE fascists took the life of yet another worker in Minneapolis. 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti was wrestled to the ground by at least six agents and shot dead on a crowded street at point blank range.

Just as they did after the racist murder of Black worker George Floyd in 2020, liberal racist bosses like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz rushed to do damage control and provide cover for the murderers, pleading for calm and a peaceful response. 

They were answered with a resounding HELL NO! As usual, the liberal misleaders like to pose as an alternative against Donald Trump and project a more friendly face of capitalism, but through hard experience workers see through their treachery. Their attempts to mask the brutal reality of the system make them the greater long-term danger to our class.

Connecting with local workers we met from the day before, our collective rushed to the growing scene of rebellion on Nicolett Avenue. The ICE fascists were quick to unleash crowd control, making arrests and shooting clouds of tear gas. But they failed to repel the working-class wrath and were forced to retreat as hundreds of workers weaved through a flimsy police perimeter to gather near the site of Alex’s murder.

Barricades were quickly erected by workers at street intersections to the north and south of the site of the shooting to keep ICE and any kkkops out. Businesses along the street opened their doors in solidarity to the antiracist fighters as spaces to warm up, strategize, and get free food, beverages and hand warmers. Members from our PLP collective who work in healthcare connected with other workers in a donut shop to create a street medic space for any people who were potentially injured in clashes with the police or ICE.

Soldiers: Turn the guns around!

Later, at that day’s mass vigil for Alex, we learned the Minnesota National Guard was staging to clear the area, prompting some to compare soldiers to kkkops and chant of “f*ck the Guard!” Amidst this chant, a woman took the mic and movingly spoke as a former soldier who refused orders to kill in Iraq and shared that many soldiers didn’t enlist to commit racist crimes, aren’t police, and often question their orders. In the stunned silence, a PL’er inspired by the veteran’s passion connected their experiences in Iraq to the murders of Shantel Davis, George Floyd and now these latest martyrs and said that only communist revolution can avenge them and bring the world we deserve. 

Grief turned into militant cheers, and in the conversations that followed, we learned the soldiers nearby were in contact and questioning their orders. We were able to send messages to refuse orders to harm their class siblings, and to join us and turn the guns around. Ultimately, the Guard wasn’t sent out – but with our contacts here we can plant the seeds for future rebellions.

Contrary to the capitalist bosses and their mouthpieces’ constant lies that communism can’t work because it goes against “human nature” and other nonsense, Minneapolis gave genuine examples of communism in action. Workers of every background came together to organize, share, and defend one another without any motivation of personal gain. As one of our friends put it, it was “the dream within the nightmare.” 

The class struggle continues 

The mass openness to communist ideas in this atmosphere isn’t a coincidence. For the apparent future, our class will remain in mortal struggle against these capitalist parasites and the fascists protecting their property and wealth. But the fighting example of workers across Minneapolis as well as the entire world shows how rapidly the illusions of capitalist strength vanish in the face of workers’ power. Minneapolis demonstrates that our class has the potential and spirit to destroy this capitalist system before it destroys us. ALL POWER to the international working class! We salute the antiracist fighters everywhere – JOIN PLP, FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!

Newark NJ, January 19 – Over a dozen Progressive Labor Party members and friends attended a rally commemorating MLK Day by protesting racist ICE abductions across the U.S. We are currently facing a rising tide of fascism (see editorial on page 2) and must prepare to take the streets with students and workers every chance we get. In New Jersey, we called up students from local colleges, antiracist fighters against the genocide in Palestine, and fierce organizers against the murderous ICE jail, Delaney Hall, to join us at the nearest march. Our class is righteously fired up about the public execution of Renee Good, the murder of Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent and the murder of ICE detainees like 41-year-old Jean Wilson Brutus, dying within days of detainment. 

This murderous system has robbed our class, the working class, of too many people to name. The only way we can avenge our class is to fight to end this capitalist system and organize for the inevitable clash between the ruling class and the working class that is to come. If we organize for it, we can win the communist future that our class has the potential to win.

To strengthen our spears, our Party consistently stands beside antiracist fighters and families outside of Delaney Hall. We share CHALLENGE newspapers and host study groups, connecting police terror to the needs of this system—profit, war and imperialist competition, which is clearly leading us down a deadly road to World War 3. The bosses want our class to be under the boot of killer kkkops and ICE, long enough to figure out how to untangle the mess of their previous wars and expeditions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Latin America. As we prepare ourselves for what’s to come, we must bridge the confidence we have in our class to every worker, neighbor, and student, inviting them to join us in class struggle and build an internationalist Party that can contest the ruling class.

Liberalism poisons our class

A few days before the march, teachers, organizers, and parents met and exposed a connection between Delaney Hall and Newark Public Schools. Both corporate and state funded entities share Driscoll Foods as its food distributor. The same rotten food being fed to school children is killing workers like Brutus in Delaney Hall. Workers detained inside the ICE jail have complained of moldy or frozen food, freezing temperatures, and zero medical care. We decided to print this information on leaflets and call for every fighter at the rally to turn up at the upcoming Board of Education meeting.

The march’s organizers are known to be the mayor’s go-to for bringing out masses of workers and then ushering them behind the Democratic Party and collaborating with the police. This rally was no different. One speaker essentially declared that she didn’t want to abolish police but stop ICE from the fascist level of terror. Some fighters in the crowd boo’ed. We let out the chant: HOW DO YOU SPELL RACIST//G-O-P//HOW DO YOU SPELL MURDERERS//D-N-C. Some workers were taken aback by our boldness but still joined in. We made it our goal to not have the same few PL’ers chanting but to encourage fellow fighters to raise their voice, sharing printed versions of chant sheets that we made for the day.

Black workers are key to revolution

As we marched, undercover cops murdered a 43-year-old Black worker, Wali Bey. Newark’s Mayor, Ras Baraka’s weak response: “It is a heartbreaking tragedy for everyone involved when a police officer feels the need to draw a weapon—and so much more so 
when they are compelled to fire.” The officer had no reason to draw the weapon, as Wali and another man were sitting in their car. The KKKops terrorized and shot them because police are given the rights under this system to murder in broad daylight and without impunity. Wali was a beloved member of the community and his murder exposes the contradictions of liberal responses to racist police terror under this capitalist regime. Baraka has built a base around the idea that Black workers and students, the primary targets of police terror under capitalism, could befriend and soften the nature of their captors, Killer KKKops in the Newark PD.

Days later, there was a statement released that officers could no longer wear a mask while patrolling the street. Not only is this reformist order too late; it’s a hollow peace offering in exchange for the life of a man and the lifelong trauma of his family and community. Wali’s family and supporters who were in Baraka’s base have protested outside of the local police precinct and disrupted the recent City Council meeting with chants to demand that they SAY HIS NAME. They are pressuring the local police and misleaders like Baraka to explicitly state what happened to Wali and are exposing the crimes that are inflicted against all of our class. One PL’er is related to Wali and is leading ways for our NJ section to support the family turning this tragedy into class struggle.

We have no time to lose

For Wali and the too many names of our class siblings slain by racist police and ICE, we must smash and bury this capitalist system. It is our role as antiracist communists during this period to also link struggles between racist ICE terror to racist KKKOP terror. Whether in the United States or anywhere in the world the horrors of capitalism are the same. Workers everywhere have the same needs and the same fight! Black, Latin, Asian, Arab, and white--workers of the world unite!

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day and again the following Friday, New York City workers took the streets twice in determined demonstrations of proletarian internationalist resolve against ICE terror. First hundreds, then thousands marched. These actions reflect a growing impulse among workers to fight back. It is up to the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to make the most of this momentum by building the communist movement, the only force capable of winning the abolition of ICE and the capitalist system that sustains it.

Both demonstrations saw significant presence from organized labor, with UNITE HERE on MLK day and the United Federation of Teachers on Friday. On Monday workers gathered at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn and thundered across the Brooklyn Bridge to 26 Federal Plaza. With vigorous chanting PL’ers laid bare the stakes for our class: the necessity of abolishing ICE and dismantling borders with communist revolution as the only solution. Liberal bosses commissioned the march, yet botched the basics: late start times, chaotic coordination, and a press conference were prioritized over building the kind of discipline our class will need to confront rising fascism.  

These bosses present themselves as defenders of “democratic values,” yet when ICE terrorizes immigrant workers, they offer nothing beyond reformist slogans. They call for a kinder, more efficient ICE, not its abolition. This trajectory is the politics of the Democratic Party’s big-wing fascism, which seeks a more legalistic Obama-Biden era deportation machine. The liberals’ reliance on and support of the NYPD—the very force that collaborates with ICE—underscored the hollowness of their values. The bosses will never protect workers, as their power rests on enforcing capitalist rule. 

Growing anger with racist ICE 

On Friday, hundreds of teachers joined a crowd of thousands in a march through lower Manhattan at an even colder after work rally and march. 

PL’ers marched with co-workers but were open about our plan to meet up as a Party to distribute the few papers we had remaining from Monday’s demonstration. This mattered. Co-workers saw communists bringing revolutionary politics directly into the mass movement, not hiding them. These moments open the door to future struggle and recruitment into the Party.

At both marches PLP took a ‘struggle with, struggle against’ stance, uniting with workers we were near while exposing the misleadership of the liberal head honchos directing the day’s events. On MLK Day, our leaflets invoked Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to expose the real danger facing our class: that liberals are the main danger since they “prefer order over justice.” The moderate reformist urges perpetual patience and compromise while workers endure austerity, family separation, healthcare denial, and imperialist war. These misleaders lull workers into passivity as capitalism sharpens its claws and drives the world toward World War III and environmental catastrophe.

Throughout both marches, PLP members and supporters raised sharp communist slogans that clarified the political line required for this moment. We linked ICE, the NYPD, and the Ku Klux Klan as different instruments of the same class terror. We demanded the abolition of all borders, because workers have no country under capitalism. We called for workers of the world to unite against capitalist violence and repression.

We also injected a global, internationalist analysis into the march. Imperialist wars, driven by capitalist competition for oil and power, uproot families and create waves of migration. These displaced workers do not cross borders out of choice, but out of desperation created by capitalism’s crisis. Capitalist nations then fortify borders and unleash ICE, weaponizing racism and nationalism to divide the very class that should unite against exploitation. 

Red heat melts ICE

We must learn from 2020 that mass mobilizations co-opted by liberals lead only to cynicism, exhaustion, and defeat. We must expose the liberal bosses’ inability to lead workers. PLP showed the necessity of disciplined, communist, worker-led base building. Workers — whether in hospitals, schools, transit, or neighborhoods — are the only force capable of dismantling the capitalist system that produces ICE, racist policing, war, and exploitation. By building a base in the working class, we can build the capacity to shut this racist, sexist, capitalist system down from Brooklyn to Venezuela, to Iran, to Sudan, Palestine, to Mexico.  Join us, become a member of Progressive Labor Party!

KENTUCKY—The local Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leadership in our area took the initiative and organized a rally against imperialism and the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE in Minnesota. We held the rally at the local downtown park. Our plan for the new year was to work to push out the liberal old guard who, for the last five years, has fought to maintain a stranglehold on all political activism happening in our area, suppressing the progressive and “radical” voices in our community. 

Beating back liberal misleaders 

By being the first to produce a flyer, we were able to out-pivot the liberal groups like Indivisible, and 50501, ensuring the rally maintained a revolutionary character to it, and was not watered down by “vote blue no matter who!” rhetoric. We established that if anyone wants to speak, they may, but the communists will speak first, and last. This was accepted. In fact, no liberal group members spoke, only workers from the crowd. 

Then we were encouraged to come up and speak. We made it clear that their participation, and voices mattered. 

Around 1:30pm the crowd had grown to a size of around 60-70 local workers. A total of seven different local organizations were represented in the crowd. This was outstanding as they had only had a week’s notice to come to the rally. The workers came out in the cold and the rain to stand against ICE and imperialism. The PLP made opening introductions and led with the first speech. We explained how important it is for all of us to get involved - that rallies, protests, and voting were not enough to push back fascism and that only revolution could liberate us from capitalism’s authoritarian rule. We expressed that we need a united movement, organized on a foundation of class struggle, and that we need interconnected communities focused on the defense of one another, and an organized labor force. Then we will be able to curb the ruling class elite and their power. 

All struggles have a connection 

We continued telling the workers that this intervention in Venezuela is nothing new. The United States has always been an imperialist war machine. The Gestapo ICE crackdowns and the war posturing abroad are all interconnected. We explained that we as workers in the U.S. have more in common with the workers of Palestine, Sudan, Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela than we have with our own ruling class elite. This generated the most response from the crowd as hoots and hollers of affirmation rang out. We ended the opening speech on a strong note. Using the Lenin quote “Can a nation that oppresses other nations be free? It cannot!”

Afterwards we pulled up many workers from the crowd. Many of whom had never done any sort of public speaking, and empowered them standing beside the workers as each of them spoke to the people. Several of them maintained the revolutionary rhetoric that we opened up with: how all of these issues are interconnected and that the root cause is capitalism. A fiery emotional speech ignited the crowd once more. We garnered several contacts and multiple people mentioned they would be attending the next weekend’s “lunch and learn”, and were interested in joining the PLP. 

Why we need the Party

All in all we handed out every issue of CHALLENGE that we had, as well as some pamphlets made prior to the event. We were well received by everyone except a Vietnam vet, who recoiled at the first mention we were communists. But then he went back to the local VFW with an issue of CHALLENGE himself when it was all over. The lesson learned is that we as communists have to understand where the workers of our locality are, and we need to take the reins out of the liberals’ hands, and dominate the conversation when the opportunity arises. The workers are sick and tired of running into brick wall after brick wall. Liberalism, and social democracy will lead you off a cliff. Only communist revolution can truly set us free.