From neighborhood into antiracist network 

I am working with a friend in a small town in Prince George’s County, Maryland. A year ago we were both actively organizing with Solidarity Not Silence in Montgomery County to reinstate the four teachers put on administrative leave for social media posts supporting Gaza (CHALLENGE  3/16/24 ). Now this activist has organized her neighbors into a resistance network. Their mission is resistance against fascism, racism and Trump. One campaign is to go to local businesses asking them to post a sign in English and Spanish that ICE is not welcome here.  A few members have approached local businesses in the center of town. Last weekend I volunteered to go to the local mall with her and her husband to contact the mom and pop stores, not the chains.  We visited seventeen stores in two hours. 

Some store owners/managers were skeptical but many were glad to see us. We gave them the poster and a few Know Your Rights (KYR) cards in English and Spanish. Our discussions started out with the mention of ICE raids and we asked how aware they were of these.  We talked about security and that ICE needs a warrant to go into back rooms with doors. Patrons and employees could shelter in place in back rooms until ICE left. Many shop owners were Asian, Southeast Asian and Latin. One woman gave us bottles of water!

One Southeast Asian woman talked animatedly with us and gave her name and number. A Latin woman in her late 30’s who runs her business enthusiastically welcomed us. She appreciated our efforts to contact store owners and  confirmed what we had been seeing---few holiday shoppers out of fear of ICE. The most interesting conversation we had was with a Black woman who ran a dance studio. It was empty. She was not aware that ICE was in the area conducting raids. She put forward myths about who was being seized, i.e. criminals. We patiently broke down the subject. We explained that racial profiling was recently made legal by the Supreme Court so she could even be targeted. In the end she realized why her Peruvian students did not attend dance class this Saturday.

Afterward we talked about why more folks in the resistance network are reluctant to reach out and put  “boots on the ground” even though many have joined protest marches. Overcoming class and race divisions may be part of the hesitation people have to move outside of their comfort zone. A possible solution would be to ask members in the network to tag along just to observe. Also working to meet neighbors of diverse backgrounds and bring them into the movement is critical. 

My friend regularly gets CHALLENGES in the mail and  today she took copies of the latest issue about the Starbucks strike to share at another event on Sunday. On January 11, 2026 the resistance network held a one year anniversary potluck with literature tables for multiple political groups including Progressive Labor Party. Organizing in these spaces and keeping in touch is essential in bringing out contradictions and points of agreement. We have to be in to win it!
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“This must happen!”

On a Harlem street corner at rush hour in the cold light rain of December, two veteran PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE with the headline “Unite to Crush ICE Terror.” “Fight ICE, read CHALLENGE!” “Fight Trump, fight fascism, read all about it!” “A revolutionary communist newspaper!” 

About one in three busy people took us up on it, a few with a smile, a few with a thank you. Some stony faces but no outright hostility. Then an older Black worker took it, read the headline, and waved it back at us: “This must happen!” he cried; “This has to happen! This must happen! My mother, my grandmother...this must happen!”

“Well, we’re the ones to make it happen. You knew those generations?”

He pulled down his surgical mask to talk. “I’m sixty-eight years old, my name is  __ __ __, and I’m not going back to chopping cotton!” And he was gone around the corner.

What do we make of this quick moment in a busy commuters’ day? It held so much of the history of Harlem, from the Great Migration which perhaps his grandmother participated in, to its current gentrification by the real estate industry, led by Columbia University’s land grabs. We took his comment to refer to the uninterrupted use against Black workers of the extreme violence characteristic of fascism. This was a Black man who identified ICE as fascism  and fascism as anti-Black; who identified fascism as exploitation of workers; who knew that in his bones, whose family knew it across three generations.

He made sense of our headline, of the imperative to unite all those with experience of capitalist exploitation and its inherent violence. His history was part of “all the struggling workers of the world,” as Langston Hughes’s poem “Always the Same” said on the Letters page of the issue we gave him. We hope he read through to that page. 

Fight ICE, fight fascism, read CHALLENGE!  
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North Carolina: counter racist terror

Here is a short rundown on Donald Trump’s fascist North Carolina ‘Operation Charlotte’s Web’ in Charlotte, and the Raleigh-Durham metro region. Under the racist lie of “going after criminal gangs,” ICE went on a rampage, netting 370 undocumented  immigrants. Undocumented and documented workers were so afraid of running afoul of ICE, especially after seeing news videos of ICE’s fascist brutality, that workers stayed home rather than go to work, school, or church. In Raleigh, 50 ICE agents arrested immigrants. Also, Trump and Noem ordered U.S. Border Patrol agents into North Carolina to aid ICE. 

As one local said “It all happened so fast!”

The Charlotte community, naturally, was panicked / terrified by this mass surprise attack.  Unlike in the past when places of worship were legally recognized and respected as sanctuaries, ICE stormed several Charlotte-area churches during their recent rampage.

Many community members, frightened, stayed home from work and church.

The larger Charlotte community response ranged from filming ICE attacks (so family members have documentation in their attempts to track down loved ones), to local lookout patrols tracking and publicizing ICE whereabouts, to mutual aid activities providing assistance to affected families.

During the week of November 17th, hundreds of students ranging from middle school and high school walked out at various times protesting ICE and their Gestapo raids. Just as quickly as the fascist raids started, they stopped.

As communists, we understand that multiracial unity will be the winning strategy in fighting fascism. To that end, we took DESAFIO to the North Hills neighborhood of Raleigh and stopped at bus stops, and a strip mall. We handed out 25 copies of DESAFIO.  We plan to go to Raleigh when we receive the next issue. Our local Unitarian Church holds a food drive for Latin families affected by these ICE raids. We are volunteering there and show DESAFIO and try to get contacts.

Importantly being in the struggle with workers means we learn from them and they learn from us. We need to be in it to win the fight for communism. Spreading our ideas is life and death for the whole international working class. 
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Delaney hall: warm front vs cold system

I’ve been going with members of the Progressive Labor Party to the immigration detention center, Delaney Hall, in New Jersey for the past several months now. A collective of volunteers from mutual aid orgs, religious nonprofits, and the DSA have kept a mutual aid camp running since May right outside of Delaney to offer various resources to the family members who come to visit their loved ones detained inside the jail. Delaney Hall is one of the few detention centers in the country to make visitors stand outside in any kind of weather while waiting in line to visit their family member. Thankfully the mutual aid camp we volunteer at provides clothes, groceries, umbrellas and coats, toys for children and even uber rides to the families experiencing the brutal separation from their people. As these fascist bosses amp up their racist attacks against our class siblings, volunteering at this mutual aid camp and connecting with the children remind me of why it is paramount we intertwine our lives with all kinds of workers; our livelihoods, our joy, and our survival depend on it.
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Bosses’ flags are workers’ graves

Back in 2014, two news stories starkly showed the peril workers face if they buy into nationalism of any kind (New York Times, 5/16/2014). Nationalism, patriotism, is a boss’s lie. I thought of this again today, as Donald Trump threatens to send U.S. worker-soldiers into Venezuela. Here are the stories.

In eastern Ukraine, steelworkers and miners in the companies owned by the billionaire Rinat Akhmetov downed tools and, led by their managers, occupied their city Mariupol as militias against the pro-Russian secessionists.  Akhmetov said secession would bring sanctions and destroy his businesses and the workers’ jobs.  He was probably right, so the unity of Ukraine became his slogan as he turned the workers into his private soldiers to enforce Ukrainian nationalism.  Forget that he might go tomorrow in the opposite direction. “If you want to keep your jobs, fight for me,” is always the boss’s song. 

What these workers did was follow their boss down the path of nationalism, which delivered them into the bosses’ hands.  The bad thing was not just because they became cops and soldiers in Akhmetov’s private army.  Worse, it set them up for war with other Ukrainian and Russian workers in their own city and the whole Eurasian region.  It delivered them into the hands of rival imperialists, allied with local capitalists. They were used as cannon fodder against other workers flying different bosses’ flags. Every flag save the red one is a boss’s flag. Patriotism is a boss’s lie.

The other story was from Vietnam, where anti-Chinese nationalism turned violently racist.  “One Chinese laborer said angry Vietnamese workers had stomped on his hands, crushing them.  Another said his son had been struck in the head with a metal rod by a Vietnamese mob that had sought out Chinese for beatings. At least one Chinese worker died” (NYT, 5/16/14). This was a tragedy for our class.  

Both Vietnamese and Chinese workers are exploited by bosses of many nationalities, and nationalist strife between them only serves the exploiters on both sides.  It is class suicide for workers to turn on one another like this, to define one another as “foreign,” to kill one another for a boss’s lie.

Two generations earlier both Vietnamese and Chinese workers fought for communism together.  What a falling off from the line of the Vietnamese communist poet To Huu: “For the Party’s long life/together we march/with the same heart.”  Now it’s the task of communists to revive proletarian revolutionary internationalism. We know it will need the same heroism that To Huu’s nephew Little Huom displayed, dying in battle “in a jet of blood”: “His cap askew/ he whistled away/ like a warbler/ on a garden path.” 

Even the most tragic moment has its beauty, because Huom’s red song goes on like the species-life of humanity itself.  That is why he fought, and the Vietnamese women To Huu called heroes “who don’t need a beard to be heroes,” and why we fight on in his name, for a communist future in every land.
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