CHICAGO, IL, April 16–Almost 2,000 people gathered a few blocks from Chicago’s Democratic and Black Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s house to protest the police murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. The working-class anger against this latest police atrocity had been seething all week long (see CHALLENGE, 4/28). This mass demonstration was in response to the video released of the murder of young Adam, which clearly showed that he was murdered with his hands up. It was the biggest march in Chicago since last summer’s uprisings against the racist murder of George Floyd (see editorial, page 2).
“Lori Lightfoot you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” and “KKKops how many kids have you killed today,”thundered loudly in Chicago’s Logan Square. 20  friends and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  joined the masses in denouncing the cops and the capitalist/fascist system that spawns them. We quickly ran out of the 300 copies of CHALLENGEs and the hundreds of leaflets we brought to distribute.
The protesters marched down the middle of a major street, Milwaukee Avenue, stopping every few minutes to speak on the bull horn and invite marchers to join us on May Day, the revolutionary workers’ day that is celebrated all over the world on May 1. We called for a communist world we envision free from killer cops, racism, sexism, and exploitation. Many people responded by clapping and cheering us on when we spoke about communist revolution and the need for workers’ power. Many joined our communist chant, “The only solution is a communist revolution!”
Peace walk
Two days later, there was a peace walk of hundreds of people through the mainly Latin neighborhood of Little Village. We again distributed our communist literature inviting all to our May Day march which will begin a few blocks away from where Adam was savagely shot. We also led chants and more significantly briefly met with Adam’s father and let him know that our Party stood in solidarity with his family and that our goal was to abolish capitalism and the police forces who murdered his son.
For this peace walk, a young artist who we work with and has read CHALLENGE drew a beautiful mural. It was painted on the other side of the fence where Adam Toledo was murdered. The mural is of huge letters that read, “We need each other.”
Everyone was invited to write some words inside the letters for Adam’s family. We wrote, “death to racism and fascism, long live Adam Toledo. PLP”
Winning youth to communist politics
The next week, we participated in a press conference/rally that demanded that Kim Foxx, our county’s Democratic and Black State’s Attorney file murder charges against the kkkop Eric Stillman and that her lying Assistant, James Murphy, resign for lying about the video tape that clearly showed that Adam was murdered in cold blood with his hands up. We are working with community organizers we met at the first vigil for Adam. They have all taken our literature and have welcomed us to their struggle.
By taking bold leadership our Party is being recognized and looked to for guidance and leadership against this murder. As soon as we arrived at the Logan Square protest surrounded by 100s  of protesters, we began a PLP mini-rally giving a communist analysis of this murder. People listened intently agreeing with many of our points. Our consistent communist anti-racist and anti-fascist politics are attracting many young workers to us. At work, we are recognized as leaders and they ask us about the next actions and then they accompany us to them.
By participating in the Free Mohawk struggles we’ve been participating in over 2020 and 2021, young workers sought us out at the Logan Square march and they held up our communist banners. We plan to recruit these workers and students to build a communist Red Army that will smash our class enemies, and their liberal, Democratic lap dog politicians. On to May Day and on to communist revolution.

Greetings to the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) May Day marchers in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and around the world; greetings to the international working class:
Today, in Haiti and around the world, imperialism’s relentless march for profits and power is worsening the living conditions of our class. The coronavirus pandemic is only one of the horrors that show how the racist and sexist inequalities of capitalism increase our suffering and make the precariousness of our lives even more glaring. In fact, in addition to the restrictive laws which reinforce authoritarian and so-called democratic regimes alike, the working masses have seen their purchasing power considerably decrease and a large majority of them sink into unprecedented unemployment and misery. All the while, the bourgeoisie keeps accumulating wealth, stolen from our labor and dreams of schemes for world war—where we workers are supposed to fight and die—to enrich themselves further with the spoils.
Kidnappings, gangsterism, unemployment, homelessness, the almost complete absence of medical care, repression of trade unionists and activists, massacres in working-class neighborhoods, expropriation of peasants in favor of large multinationals are the main daily challenges facing workers in Haiti. The far-right government imposed by the U.S. imperialists, through the UN, the OAS and their embassies, continues to destroy the rare social gains obtained by workers in Haiti at the end of the 20th century. Workers and students in Haiti are fighting back, but we need to know we are not alone! We need the resolute leadership of a revolutionary communist party with deep ties inside our class.
Comrades, workers all over the world are all experiencing similar difficulties. But, in Haiti as elsewhere, PLP must continue to organize workers, students and soldiers with a view to building a true international mass Party, capable of leading the class-struggle that will destroy capitalism and put an end to all its inequalities. Only then, under the leadership of our revolutionary communist party, will workers be able to liberate ourselves: we will abolish racism and sexism, we will abolish wages, and work according to need and commitment. We will build a society that serves the interests of the working class. .
Communist comrades of PLP: Our challenge is great but not impossible. The struggle for communism is at a crossroads. The fight against capitalism/imperialism is a fight to the death. Let’s choose to fight back—and win. We are committed to that fight. The struggle is for liberation of our class, for well-being, for life. Let us join forces and engage in the fight!
Long live communism! Long live the PLP!

The COVID-19 crisis has unmasked the inability of capitalism to ensure the health, work, well-being, and life of the working class. This system serves bosses’ profits, not workers, as evidenced by the following figures:
While big capitalists in Mexico increased their wealth by an average of 20 percent during the pandemic (Forbes, 4/6), 12 million people were left jobless and an estimated similar amount fell into poverty (Expansion, 2/28). As Morena-PT liberals and PRI-PAN-PRD conservatives blame each other, COVID-19-associated deaths through February reached 316,000 (Mexico Excess Mortality Report, 3/15).
Health authorities have presented population confinement as the most effective measure to control the pandemic, but they hide its class nature. Because the most unprotected sector of the working class live day by day, they can't stay at home and have to expose themselves to find a way to survive, resulting in increased contagion and deaths in the most marginalized areas of large cities. Industrial zones have not stopped regardless of the lives of the workers.
The confinement measures were used by the current liberal government of López Obrador, to strengthen the demobilization of social protest, the advancement of its social programs of electoral co-optation and the deployment of the armed forces disguised as the National Guard. All this helps continue the capitalists’ megaprojects of the Interocean Corridor, the Maya Train, the New International Airport of Mexico City, the Integral Morelos Project (PIM) and the Dos Bocas Refinery.
AMLO's liberal government, with its pro-worker mask, has also attacked labor rights. As is the case of the dissenting teachers’ faction of the CNTE, who demand that this government comply with the cancellation of the Capitalist Educational Reform and the fascist ISSSTE Act. It denies fair payment to pensioners and retirees through an administrative trap that calculates their payment using the Update Unit of Measure (UMA) and not the minimum wage as required by the constitution. In that conversion workers lose almost half their wages; UMA is worth $4.48 and the minimum wage is $7.08.
So, this May Day workers will mobilize to stop this action plan to attack the policy of the capitalist liberal state.
Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the bosses will seek to drag us into their electoral circus, heralded as the largest in history at a cost of 694 million pesos, which could be better spent to slow the pandemic. But for capitalists, it is essential that workers see the thm as the only alternative and choose one of them as our savior. In fact, they cynically use vaccinations to build support for the ruling Morena party.
In areas under the control of organized crime, which according to the U.S. northern command estimates is between 30 percent and 35 percent of the national territory, organized crime in contention with the economic and political elites will decide who will participate in the elections and eventually rule. To date, there have been 252 assaults on politicians and 65 murders. (El Universal 4/27).
PLP members support the struggle of each sector of workers to fight for their immediate interests, making it clear that the real and definitive solution for the working class is the revolutionary unity used to destroy the lethal virus called capitalism. This will be done through a conscious and participatory process that leads to the building of communism, a society without oppressors, exploiters, bosses or liberal governments disguised as progressive.
For a revolutionary communist May Day!

NEW YORK CITY, April 15—The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bosses are continuing their racist and life-threatening policies of creating an unsafe environment for both riders and workers of the NYC subway system. These attacks are about maintaining the profits of Wall Street banks and businesses. The MTA is  reducing train service, leading to crowded trains that will recklessly expose riders to the coronavirus and increase the wait times between trains.
Communists in the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are in the midst of the struggle organizing for rider-worker unity and for communist revolution to smash the MTA bosses, union misleaders, and this entire racist, sexist, imperialist capitalist system!
Bosses and union misleaders in bed
During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, transit bosses reduced service on all lines, initially blaming the reduction on their own workers (of which over 150 have died due to the MTA’s lack of preparedness) rather than the 90 percent reduced ridership.. Since then, service has been restored to most lines, but the racist bosses took the opportunity to cut jobs on the busy C and F lines.
Instead of building a mass, united fightback of transit workers and riders, Transit Workers’ Union (TWU) Local 100 leadership showed they are deep in bed with management. They are supporting the bosses’ plans for cutting the scheduled runs along a train line (“jobs”) that created the reduced trips to begin with.
In response to rank and file workers pressing the issue during an online employee town hall on March 12, Interim New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg claimed the cuts were “minimal in scope.”
A look at any subway platform during rush hours exposes Feinberg's racist lies. Ridership is returning, platforms are crowding  again, and fewer cars are carrying more passengers. March 11 marked a  record for the single highest day ridership since the pandemic began, which has already been surpassed  again. (Gothamist, 3/13) Workers' safety remains on the chopping block so the bosses can hoard money, playing with our lives.
Union misleadership: train to nowhere
The naked racism of this crisis was exposed during a recent lawsuit between Local 100 and the MTA, with the MTA telling the mostly working-class Black and Latin riders calling out  the line cuts and crowded trains to accept them. But when mainly white, wealthier Long Island Railroad customers complained about crowding on their trains after service cuts, the MTA immediately reversed them (Gothamist, 3/9)!
Though transit bosses have agreed to restore service on the C and F after a lawsuit that the union dragged their heels in filing (Gothamist, 3/31), that is no guarantee workers are permanently safe: the agreement is verbal only, and not on paper.
Despite receiving billions in federal aid (PIX 11, 3/11), the transit bosses remain committed to cutting service to pay the debts to their Wall Street benefactors, while TWU Local 100’s misleadership carry their bags and enable it all. Transit workers and riders need to join together with  PLP and smash these crooks and their union misleadership stooges!
MTA bosses blame workers for racist neglect
Currently, seven track inspectors are suspended without pay as the MTA, along with the inspector general’s office, scapegoats workers over its horrid safety practices, and pushes for automation and cost saving.
The track inspector’s job is the most important track job in the system, as they walk hundreds of miles of subway tracks collecting data on which tracks need repairs. The track inspector division is made up mainly of track inspectors and two foremen whose job it is to oversee the inspectors’ work.
When the MTA recently moved to a phone-based system of reporting defects, the bosses didn’t ensure the old data written on physical cards was transferred into the new system. Now the bosses are using this excuse to blame the track inspectors for the problems they reported in the past! Track inspectors are on a race to report the old issues before management claims lack of data to say they are not working, and are punishing and suspending track inspectors. The union leadership is accepting these write-ups laying down; not one union representative close to the leadership wanted to represent the workers being suspended.
The system is highly in need of repair. Every time there is track work needed, it causes delays in subway service which the MTA bosses don’t want. There is a system of how things are reported: “P3” being least serious to “P1” meaning the track must be taken out of service. P1s are intentionally avoided by foremen, and if a track inspector believes there’s a P1, a foreman typically reinspects the same track and downgrades it to a P2.
Communists in transit believe this attack on workers is an opportunity to build unity with the riding public and expose the MTA bosses’ policy on safety. It’s time to expose the reports and conditions that management let slide and didn’t repair. It’s time to expose that while the track inspectors report safety issues, the management bosses decide on what gets repaired — and most of the repairs are like band aids on a bleeding artery.
Struggling with coworkers
Comrades active in the MTA and Local 100 have been pushing PLP’s militant anti-racist politics with our coworkers. The bosses have used the pandemic to further poison workers’ minds with more racism, and we’ve encountered many down here who believe that the solution is voting and more cops on trains.
But contradictions are everywhere! At the same time, these same workers have a fire burning deep inside them all from the racist treatment they've endured from transit bosses. We build PLP in transit so that communist leadership can spread the flames of fightback and revolution we need to control the transit system in the heart of U.S. imperialism. Struggle by struggle we can turn the tide against the bosses, and build a Red Army to smash them for a communist world for workers to run! JOIN US!