LOS ANGELES, September 8 –When high school students organize and lead a Social Justice Day on day three of a school year that is steeped in instability for our class, we can lay claim to the potential of a bright future ahead of us. Sixteen students and 10  staff members (organized by a teacher member of PLP) met and planned through the summer to pull together the day’s activities. When the school’s administration tried to push it back again claiming there was not enough time to “do it right”, students and staff said NO! We demanded that the nonsense they were calling Fall Bridge be condensed so that instead our fight for an antiracist school, community, and world could take center stage.
The momentum for this event was driven by an emboldened group of students, alumni, and staff to confront the racism on our school campus and within the charter network. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, students and alumni called out school administration and the broader school district for being complicit in racist policies and practices. They were swiftly supported by two thirds of the school’s staff. But the foundation for this fight back has been laid by the struggle over communist ideas and politics for the last five years.
Workers learn through struggle
It is in the day-to-day struggle over ideas, combined with the push for class struggle and action, that lead to leaps in political development during surges of the mass movement. As communist teachers, we fight to make our schools student-centered and for the struggles they face to be our struggles.
Under capitalism, workers are alienated from their labor. For teachers, this means we are alienated from the students and families we serve. The struggle against that is difficult. For school staff who do not understand how capitalism ravages working class families, it is easy to blame students and their families for the problems observed in schools. The communist voice in the school must constantly find new ways to demonstrate capitalism as the root of all the problems we are struggling to solve in the education system.
In this school, over the last five years, that has looked like things as large as an organization wide fight against a racist mandated English curriculum, to as small as the push for teachers to not use zeros in their grade book. It has encompassed a battle to shift from a detention/suspension system to a more restorative justice approach. It has  also meant an organized effort by staff to provide education and services after schools shut down when the school district left families for weeks with nothing. It has also included a fight to improve learning conditions for students, whether for smaller class sizes or for the decades old AC system to be repaired, and the fight against gentrification in the surrounding community.
It is in these fights, and so many more, where communist educators can expose that capitalism has nothing to offer the working class. This will not be an easy battle though. Just as the main wing of the ruling class – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the rest of the liberal Democrats – attempt to fool our class, the so-called “progressive” charter networks are appropriating the language of the left while maintaining the same racist, oppressive systems that exist across the education system. PLP members have not shied away from the struggle with our base that liberals are the main danger to our class, and this has led to many breakthroughs in political development.
Cadre schools un-teach capitalist lies
With the groundwork laid, we were able to present to 600 students and 40 staff members three workshops – “Race is Not Real”, “Racism is Real”, and “What Are We Going to Do About It?”. The content was created and presented by student leaders. Through the workshop development process, the Party teacher was able to struggle for our line on racism to be the basis of the content. Each workshop was followed by breakout discussion groups, many of which were also guided by student leaders. The workshops and discussion groups presented many aspects of the Party’s line, including the importance of multi-racial unity, how racism hurts all workers, and that the working class has power to change society.
It became clear to some students very quickly that not all staff members were on the same page. Like all schools, there is a wide array of political beliefs among the staff. While the administration likes to use the phrase “antiracist practitioners” to describe our staff, they have done nothing to confront the ideas that some staff members, including themselves, hold which contradict that title. Knowing our staff very well, the teacher leaders of Social Justice Day paired the strongest student leaders with the staff members whose politics did not align with our agenda. We also asked staff members to allow students to take the lead.
This did not stop two teachers from spewing their garbage in breakout groups or grade level discussions. As students in one break out room discussed police brutality, the teacher interjected to say racism was not that bad – in the workshop entitled “Racism is Real”! Students held their ground and called this teacher out in the grade level session at the end of the day. The administration stayed silent. Like all other enemies of our class, the administration showed their true colors in that moment. The Party teacher thanked the students for being brave enough to call out their teacher in front of everyone and made it clear to everyone in attendance that we must follow the example of these students and interrupt racist ideas at every turn.
Capitalism for profit, communism for workers’ lives
In another grade level discussion, students suggested one call to action could be following BLM on social media and joining their fightback when possible. A teacher responded “playing devil’s advocate” by saying that BLM is a bunch of Marxists, their protests have only further divided the country, and the riots they caused have destroyed small businesses. Thankfully, a teacher organizer who is in the base of the Party jumped in and demanded that he stop comparing the loss of human life to the loss of property. Again, the silence of the administration exposed where they really stand in the fight against racism.
The battle over ideas will continue. But the main way we can change people’s ideology is through action! Students and staff left Social Justice Day with a call to action – “An Injustice to One is An Injustice to All!” To make that a reality, we have asked staff and students to get involved with the Justice for Alex Flores fight back and some have stepped up. Two teachers and a student attended the recent speak out and one teacher is regularly meeting in a study group. We are also tying the work at the school with the Social Justice Club to broader education work in a larger mass organization in LA. Lastly, we are building a connection to a local tenant’s union to connect families with a way to fight evictions and gentrification in the community.
We still have a long way to go for the masses to turn these ideas into action and to turn action into a fight for a communist world. But anytime we can put the Common Core State Standards of “learning” to the side and present education centered on working class consciousness, we are making a small step in the fight for communism. The struggle continues!

Capitalism killed my patient
One of the major ways the capitalist bosses keep their grip on power over the working class is by convincing us that we, as workers, should assume blame for the failures of their system. This fact was driven home for me recently during a shift in the hospital where I work.
One of the patients that was assigned to me had experienced a traumatic injury before being admitted to the hospital, and the night before I came on her condition had gravely deteriorated. By the time I arrived to work, she had already spent over seven hours in a regular unit when she should have been in an intensive care unit. I was unable to give her the attention that she needed, and within two hours of starting my shift, she had passed.
The reason why she had not been able to be transferred to one of the intensive care units was that the air conditioning unit in another had gone out, and the workers were forced to move the patients out. We were without enough critical care beds for over 24 hours. Electrical outages have been a common occurrence throughout the summer at this hospital, as the bosses are unwilling to make the necessary infrastructure improvements that will better serve our mostly Black and Latin patients.
I truly genuinely believe that if we lived under a communist society, where workers’ lives are paramount over everything and the profit motive is abolished, this patient would still be alive today. I place the blame for her death on the bosses and no one else. For her and so many other countless other workers sent to an early grave, I fight to build the Progessive Labor Party and the struggle for a better world.
*****
Boston PLP’s school against racism
At an all-day Antiracism School today, about 30 people (physically distanced in person and also online) grappled with the question of fighting racism under capitalism.  
In preparation for the School, attendees read selections on the contemporaneous origins of racism and capitalism, the efforts by the slave owners to actually create racism and the concept of "whiteness" so as to suppress multiracial rebellions, and why multi-racial, antiracist struggle is key in defeating racism.
Speeches on the origins of racism, racism in capitalist USA today, PLP's history of fighting racism, the fight against police terror in Worcester, and How to Fight Racism, were followed by workshops and discussions.  A few of the discussion questions: How are white working people hurt by racism?  If Joe Biden is elected, is that a victory against racism?  Is the Democratic party less racist than the Republican Party? Can racism be defeated without a revolution against capitalism?
One speaker said that, just as in Nazi Germany, people who do nothing while others are victimized by racism, are due to pay a huge price. Six million Jews died in the death camps, but 10 million Germans as well as tens  of millions elsewhere, died in WWII , paying the price for allowing the Nazis' racism to come to power.
Most of the speakers and workshop leaders were new members or close friends. Several participants new to PLP's ideas attended, and expressed interest and satisfaction with the School.  Several want to find out more about us, or to join PLP.
Thanks to the host family, the organizers, the participants, and especially to the existence of the PLP which made the School possible!
*****
What’s there to vote for?
The latest election polls show voters are fed up with Trump’s murderous neglect of the pandemic and fascist repression of the antiracist rebellions in the U.S. The Democratic Party alternative is Joe Biden who wrote the 1994 anti-crime bill that laid the framework for the racist mass incarceration of over two million, mostly Black and Latin workers. He allied with segregationists and opposed busing of Black children from segregated schools. During the 2008 recession, the Biden/Obama government refused to help many thousands of Black, Latin, and immigrant workers who lost their homes but bailed out the big banks with our tax money. At the same time Obama became U.S. history’s number one Deporter-in-Chief of immigrant workers.
Biden’s choice for vice president is Kamala Harris who was the main prosecutor in California, a state with the second highest incarceration rate in the country of mostly Black and Latin workers. Harris is a self-proclaimed Top Cop and calls for more police on the streets while Biden opposes any cuts in the multi-billion dollar police budgets. Harris supports Biden’s opposition to Medicare For All when Black workers are five times as likely to die in the pandemic because of lack of health care.
Both the Republican and Democratic Parties work to keep the racist, genocidal capitalist system in power. In the coming election the Democrats are using Black nationalist and gender politics to get their capitalist backers in office. To get working class needs represented, don’t vote. Organize with the communist PLP.
*****
No good cops
CHALLENGE needs to say there are no good cops. In the front-page article, “Rebel Against Racism” (9/9) the statement is made that there are bad cops referring to the two involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake. We should refrain from using that “bad cop” terminology because it implies there might be good cops.
If there is one thing the Small Fascists and Big Fascists support, it’s the capitalist state and its law and order defined as the, “biggest instrument of violence worldwide” in the same article.
However, they disagree on policing. The Small Fascists say protestors against racist murder and imperialist wars are anti-American terrorists who should be violently suppressed by police, vigilantes, and ‘badges without borders’ guards. The Democrat Big Fascists say a few bad cops will be accounted for and protesting is ok as long as it doesn’t defy police violence. If the protestors follow that advice like the “bad cop” statement as the CHALLENGE article seems to say we will be left with our murderous capitalist dictatorship.
The article correctly says, “Police are U.S. capitalisms defenders.” More than half of every federal, state and local budget goes to weaponize and train police and military as stormtroopers to terrorize and kill workers who threaten capitalist power and profits. All these hit men for capitalism know which side they’re on and that their bosses’ system will always protect them.
*****

BOSTON, MA, September 5—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends rallied outside of Brigham and Women's Hospital to protest the police murder of 41-year-old Juston Root, a white working-class man with mental illness. His story shows that the same racist police force that terrorizes  Black and Latin workers is the same police force that is unleashed on the entire working class. PLP calls for multiracial unity against capitalism and its kkkop thugs.
On February 7, two Boston cops at Brigham and Women’s Hospital shot Root, who was in the midst of a mental health crisis, for holding a clear plastic paintball gun. He was hit along with a bystander, who  attempted to evade police in his car. After a short chase, Root crashed and stumbled from his vehicle. Unarmed and bleeding profusely, Root collapsed by the side of the road.
As an EMT ran up to provide emergency care, Boston and State police ordered them away, and then proceeded to execute Root by shooting him 31 times, without warning, within the span of three seconds. The six cops, heard boasting and discussing how to cover up their actions, were later cleared of wrongdoing.
Murdered by the police state
 In August, Root’s family filed a wrongful death suit, seeking justice for his murder. Root was white, and yet his story is disturbingly similar to the slate of racist lynchings of super-exploited Black and Latin workers by kkkops across the country. Due to the inherent racism of this profit system, police disproportionately terrorize Black and Latin workers. Cops are a force to oppress and control the entire working class. Without a unified working class fightback, these murders will continue unabated.
PLP demonstrators distributed hundreds of flyers and sold copies of CHALLENGE to pedestrians and passing cars. They held signs that read: “STOP KILLER KKKOPS,” “Smash Racism with Multiracial Unity,” and “We Need a Revolution to End Racism.”
They also made speeches through a megaphone, illustrating the need for communism and for a multiracial fightback against racist police terror.
One PLP member exposed the long history of lynchings by Boston Police, and the politician-led cover-ups. Another revealed the hidden history of how racism rose with capitalism as an intentional means of dividing the working class along racial lines to prevent uprisings. Colonial plantation owners, terrified of the power of their Black slaves and white servants unifying to resist their rotten profit system, indoctrinated the population in racist ideology and used force to divide families and enforce segregation. Another speaker cautioned the local population about the rising threat of fascism and asserted that communism is the only way to resolve the contradictions in our existing society.
Hospital workers, patients, and others responded enthusiastically to the Party’s message of militant multiracial unity and the need for communism. Many stopped to talk about the police terror in their own community, while others honked horns and raised their fists in support. The working class has had enough!
Racist police terror harms all workers
The ruling class relies on police violence to maintain their racist exploitation of the vast majority of society. Their wealth and everything of value in society comes from the labor of the working class and the super exploitation of Black and Latin workers. The bosses understand that their daily theft would be impossible without an unaccountable, militarized, and loyal force of armed guards to protect them and their stolen wealth. This is the real purpose of the police.
The police’s racist treatment of Black and Latin workers is meant to allow the extraction of super profits and to divide workers and prevent a unified resistance to our exploitation. They maintain a heavy presence in Black and Latin neighborhoods, where workers are disproportionately stopped, arrested, and brutalized. This racism serves as the justification for the build up of legal protections and military hardware, which the police then turn on white workers as well. This is why Root  was murdered, and why no officers have been arrested. Had Root  been the son of a billionaire, the officers would already be rotting in a jail cell. The multiracial working class has had enough!
This is a matter of life and death. Justice cannot be achieved without a unified and committed working class. This is the movement that Progressive Labor Party is building. We fight for an end to the bosses’ profit system, and for a communist society run by and for workers.

Every so often, some tiny grains of truth that appear in the bosses’ liberal media actually contradict the distortions, unwarranted assumptions and outright lies we usually read there. Such is the case with two recent articles that, taken together, validate Progressive Labor Party’s line that: 1) racism is to capitalism as garbage is to rats; and 2) it is in the economic interest of all workers, including white workers, to fight racism.
The first is an analysis of recent studies that examine the Black-white wage gap over the last 70 years (NY Times, 6/25). Most studies of this phenomenon look only at wages of those who are actually working, and conclude that Black workers have made significant progress during that period. The author of the Times article, David Leonhardt, points out that comparing only wage workers in this analysis is insufficient because a large and growing percentage of students and unemployed workers, who are disproportionately Black, have either stopped looking for work completely or are incarcerated. In analyzing comparative wages in that way, a recent study calculated that the ratio of Black median wages to white median wages—about half—is exactly the same as it was in 1950. Leonhardt calls this result “remarkable” only because of his undying faith that progressive change for Black workers can come through reforming the capitalist system.
What is also “remarkable” is the fact that average real wages for all workers are more or less at the same level they were in 1973 (pewresearch.org, 8/7/18). This is without taking into account the downward push on wages that will no doubt be caused by the mass unemployment of the current economic crisis. Meanwhile, despite the fact that productivity of labor during those last 47 years has more than doubled, almost all of the value generated by that increase in productivity has gone to the capitalist class, and very little of it to the working class.       
There has been much written about the Racial Wealth Gap (RWG), which shows that the average net worth of all white households is six and one half times the average net worth of all Black households. The RWG is clearly a result of the racism that is endemic to the capitalist system. It is also a reflection of the super-profits that capitalists have, historically, reaped from the labor of Black workers. The RWG has been used to support arguments by promoters of “White Skin Privilege” (WSP) ideology that white workers need to acknowledge their “privilege” and agree to a plan to redistribute their wealth (see, for example, “Race, The Power of an Illusion, Background Readings”, PBS).
But there has been little analysis of the main source of that gap. A recent article, “The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Upper Classes'' (People Policy Project, Matt Bruenig, 6/29), unmasks the WSP argument on the Gap. By breaking down ownership by deciles of wealth, starting with the richest 10 percent of households, and looking at each 10 percent of the remaining households, down to the poorest 10 percent, Bruenig shows that roughly 75 percent of total wealth is owned by the richest 10 percent of both white households and Black households. Bruenig continues: “[w]hat this means is that the overall racial wealth disparity is being driven almost entirely by the [gap] between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of Black people.”
Bruenig’s analysis of the effect of equalizing the RWG for the poorest 50 percent of households is even more striking. Doing so would still leave a total of 97 percent of the gap intact! As Bruening says “it is not that hard to get two groups who own relatively little to own the same amount of relatively little. But such measures would not make much of a dent in the overall [RWG].”
But Bruenig’s analysis still does not tell the whole story. Wealth under capitalism is extremely concentrated. For example, the top 1 percent of all households own 40 percent of the total wealth in the U.S., with about half of that amount owned by the top .1 percent (Saez and Zucman). The bosses’ media fails to talk about the exploitative relationship between the working class and the ruling class.
To eradicate inequality, trash capitalism
What does all of this mean for the working class? Black and white workers have a common interest in uniting to fight the capitalist class that is stealing most of the wealth that our class, and only our class, creates. The bosses have a tremendous stake in promoting racism, both because of the extra (super) profits generated by lower wages for Black, Latin, immigrant and female workers and because the racist ideology that infects our class allows the bosses to keep playing this same game of divide and conquer. Fighting racism in all of its many forms must be a bedrock principle for workers to make any progress in our struggle to rid ourselves of capitalist exploitation.
The wealth produced by the international working class today is sufficient to feed, clothe, house, provide recreation for and otherwise meet the needs of all workers across the globe. PLP aims to build a multi-racial workers’ movement to smash racism and capitalism. A communist revolution to seize power and take down the exploiters would allow us to share “the fruits of our labor that we have sweated for.”