NEW JERSEY & NEW YORK, JULY 12-18—Amidst sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry, fascist terror and the ever-clearer bankruptcy of liberal and fake left misleadership, the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) of the New Jersey-New York City metropolitan area raised the red flag high with comrades from Virginia to Boston at our weeklong 2026 Summer Project! Each day was hosted by different collectives that showcased past and current antiracist, antisexist struggles with study groups discussing aspects of the Party’s line, and our revolutionary working class philosophy and guide to action, dialectical materialism.
New Jersey: Communist politics in our pockets
We kicked off the project by meeting in a neighborhood park in Newark where the Party has been organizing for over 40 years. The collectively made lunch was soon followed by two young comrades welcoming over 30 friends and comrades to the summer project, summarizing one of the most important goals of the week: building and training new leaders.
After the speeches, two veteran comrades led a workshop called “Speech in a Pocket.” As communists we understand the importance of giving political leadership in moments of struggle on campus or on the job, and the workshop was designed to train comrades and friends to give communist speeches on the spot. Participants were given an actual scenario and had to think about the audience they were talking to and asked to think of three points that they wanted to make. The leaders helped organize these points into a communist speech by first “finding the trick” the bosses use in each scenario to divide the working class. Most often, it’s racism or its liberal counterpart, identity politics; nationalism, and sexism.
Our job is then to introduce internationalism and why communism is the only solution.
One highlight was a young woman from Jamaica struck by the following realization: workers in Jamaica face mass displacement and environmental destruction by mining companies extracting bauxite, a key mineral in electronics and AI. This creates a material international connection between them and workers across the U.S. fighting displacement and environmental destruction from AI data centers built with this bauxite. Therefore, our fightback and our Party must be international, from Jamaica to the U.S. to the DRC and beyond!
This echoes Russian communist leader V.I. Lenin’s point that communist ideas must “come from the outside.” This doesn’t mean that “communists are outsiders,” which anticommunists love to say. It means communist ideas don’t arrive to people spontaneously, and must be introduced amidst struggle.
Illustrating this point, we then took our newspaper CHALLENGE to the residents of a large multiracial immigrant apartment complex where PL’ers are active in organizing a tenant union. One of the tenants we met remembered seeing CHALLENGE years before from previous organizing, and another excited resident shared an opportunity to meet their fellow Muslim immigrant residents who have been angry at conditions in the building and want to organize.
On our second day we made our way to north New Jersey where some comrades are organizing in “Trump loyalist territory” against a proposed AI data center that has given the Party an opportunity to spread our politics amongst workers in the region. Young comrades then led a powerful dialectical materialism workshop on contradiction, quantity into quality, and negation of the negation, vividly using the recent New York Knicks championship to illustrate the three laws in action. After the workshop, comrades went to a local lake to relax.
The third day, PLP once again made their presence felt through Newark as we led a motorcade from the West Ward of Newark all the way to Delaney Hall. With banners such as Smash Racist Deportations, Smash Sexism, and Fight For Communism! Our goal was to connect the housing struggles in Newark to the ICE concentration camp at Delaney Hall. In Newark, Black workers continue to face worsening conditions by slumlords and rising rental prices. The ICE attacks are not just an attack on migrant workers, but they are setting the stage to attack all workers who are fighting against these conditions.
As we wound our way into the Ironbound of Newark, where multiple ICE raids had taken place, our bullhorn rang out throughout the streets while students and workers came up to the cars to get CHALLENGE and raised their fists in support of our motorcade. Eventually we got to Delaney Hall, had a spirited rally in the heat where comrades gave their “speeches in a pocket,” and moved the project to NYC.
NYC: Building the fightback across five boroughs
With dangerous air quality from the Canadian wildfires and a desire to keep each other safe, our collective leadership decided to cancel our planned Thursday activities for the Bronx and upper Manhattan and instead meet locally for study groups around the houses where people were staying.
On Friday, we gathered for a report on work from the Flatbush neighborhood, where a longtime friend’s sister, Shantel Davis, was the victim of racist police murder, and shared the history of the struggle for justice and naming a street in Shantel’s name. Over the years of fighting for justice, she saw the same patterns of capitalist politicians coopting or attempting to coopt and control every other family fighting for their own justice – and she realized the contradiction was between relying on these capitalist politicians and sellout misleaders, or the potential power of the working class.
Our discussion elaborated that communist organizing among the working class is deeply personal to our life experiences, and ultimately, we face a choice: we can either look up to these sellout politicians defending this capitalist pyramid of abuse, or look to our class siblings, share our communist politics and fight to overthrow it. But these ideas are in contradiction. We cannot build for revolution while compromising through voting for politicians like Mamdani, because through state power the bosses ultimately pick politicians that represent their class interests. If we agree that communism is the only solution, especially for smashing racist police terror, then we must pick – and intensify – that side of the contradiction. Otherwise we follow the sellout path and, at best, repeat the failures of the old communist movement.
On the closing day of the project, more than 50 comrades and friends gathered at a community space donated by base members for a presentation on neighborhood anti-ICE organizing. The presentation was hosted by a multiracial group of women antiracist fighters from a South Brooklyn anti-ICE group that PL’ers have organized in over the past year. While poor weather prevented our breakout teams from patrolling and canvassing the neighborhoods, our backup indoor activities and youth-led study group on reform versus revolution were lifted by delicious Mexican food donated by workers in our political base. When PL’ers passed the hat to offer tips to the workers, the workers refused and told us the money will be used to prepare food for our next event!
As the fascists prepare sharper attacks on the international working class, PLP’s NJ-NY Summer Project welcomed new young comrades into our Party and displayed the organization and potential of our area collectives in building a mass, fighting Party that, in the coming period, will take this escalating class war all the way to communist revolution. The future is bright – JOIN US!
