I decided to commit to communism and join the Progressive Labor Party because it was the right thing to do—the progressive thing to do for my family, friends, community, and the earth.
These are loose stats but it feels as though one out of two people I talk to are workers who are tired of working, exhausted by capitalism, not having insurance and drinking Robitussin and other homemade remedies for their colds and ailments because they can’t afford to go pay for prescribed medicine.
I’m done with being super-exploited as a Black, queer woman and disgusted with U.S. imperialism and the effects that war and greed has on the Earth’s land and atmosphere. I’m done with knowing that we should do better and not acting.
I joined because from Puerto Rico to Jersey, there are food deserts leaving workers stranded with little to no healthy food options or food that’s not injected with hormones and making them sick.
I joined because my mother has been on disability for the last 20 years, making a little under $2,000 a month. She’s had a looming cloud of fear to even go back to her former place of employment, the Post Office, because of her past trauma of being treated like a slave as a mail carrier. I joined because of my father sacrificing his spirit, wasting away emotionally and physically as a NJTransit Bus Driver, working day to night and overworking on his days off and on vacation to provide for my mother and I.  Working is the center of his world. The center of his next world is retirement and moving down to a Southern state.
However, more of us want the center of our next world to be different—to not revolve around a potential reward of resting and a pension in exchange for 60 years of labor. Sixty years of not connecting with your family, isolating yourself from your community and only being able to help those closest to you. Sixty years of back and neck injuries, temper flares, trauma, alcoholism and depression.
I joined because my brother, cousin, best friend and many others that I know in Newark and in other parts of New Jersey are limited to low wage jobs at the Post Office, UPS, Amazon and the Newark Airport as their options. The youth know that retirement and a pension is not guaranteed in 40 years. That is no longer a reality for many of us; we don’t stay at one job for 40 years but work pay-check to pay-check, working up to five jobs at the same time. I am no longer okay with knowing better and not doing better.
I joined because I’m fed up with reformism and respectability politics and shaming the poor, working class on whether they vote or not. I’m tired of police brutality and innocent people dying in prisons, I’m tired of street harassment and microagressions in the work place.
The Progressive Labor Party is passionate and direct about what our struggles are and what we need to do to win and defeat capitalism.
PLP is about struggling, growing, caring for each other and equally critiquing others and ourselves on how to be better for the sake of the world. PLP meets people where they are at and connects our personal problems to a bigger picture of how capitalism is destroying us all. But instead of taking on the problems of capitalism by ourselves or complaining about or making a meme about it here and there, PLP challenges us to work together and destroy capitalism instead.
I’m here for it, I’m dedicated to it and I’m hopeful for the future and the solutions that we put into practice. We know the problems, now let’s connect and build towards a new center and a better world. Long live PLP! Long live communism!