April 17 marked the 57th anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). From a meeting of barely two dozen members of the old U.S. communist movement, PLP has grown into an international party now organizing in five continents. Even as our class faces a dark night and growing inter imperialist-rivalry and fascism (see editorial, page 2) we continue our fightback because this is just the beginning of a worthy struggle towards an international communist revolution.
Over our first half-century, PLP has propelled the march to communism—first by leading antiracist, working-class struggle, and then through that struggle advancing communist ideas. This two-pronged strategy—practice and theory—is the basis for winning masses of workers to fight for communism.
Why communism? In our vision, the working class will determine society’s future. It will destroy the capitalist world and its brutal exploitation. It will smash a system that drives us into constant unemployment and poverty. It will stop the racism that drags down all workers. It will terminate the racist cops who break our strikes and kill workers, especially our Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant sisters and brothers. And it will end for all time the imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.
A communist world
Here is our vision for a communist world (also see May Day speech, page 1):

• A society run by workers and for workers. After all, the working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need.
• Abolition of the exploitative wage system and the money that runs it. We have no need for the parasitic bosses who steal most of the value of our labor through wage slavery.
• Multiracial unity and death to the racism that divides the working class. Racism is rooted in capitalism; the bosses rely on it to steal trillions in super-profits worldwide. Fighting racism is part of the lifeblood of PLP.
• The destruction of sexism and the systemic exploitation, oppression, and cultural degradation of women workers. Sexism is a pillar of class society, and capitalism has only furthered this lethal weapon against our class. Women and men must unite to smash sexist ideas and practices. PLP emphasizes working-class women’s leadership in making revolution, particularly Black women’s leadership.
• Eliminating all borders, artificial lines the bosses draw to make even more profits from workers they call “foreigners.” Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor. Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag.

This is the world the PLP has fought for from the start. We will continue to fight until our class prevails. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.
Struggle and theory
 From our earliest beginnings in the 1960s, PLP has fought tooth and nail against attacks by the ruling class. We have organized and supported Ford workers and striking teachers in Mexico; wildcatting miners in Hazard, Kentucky; longshore workers in New York City; jute (fiber) workers in India; miners in Britain; garment workers in Los Angeles; bank workers in Colombia; transit workers in Washington, DC; Chrysler sit-down strikers at Detroit’s Mack Avenue plant; farm workers in California, and bakery workers at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx. We have stood with evicted workers in Palestine-Israel, earthquake victims in Pakistan, and hurricane victims in Haiti and New Orleans.
Antiracism is a hallmark of PLP.  We backed Black workers and youth in the 1964 Harlem Rebellion, and fought off racist school segregationists in Boston in 1975. In 1976 we integrated Chicago’s Marquette Park while smashing the Nazi headquarters there, and have led more than a hundred thousand protesters against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis across the United States. We have mobilized against racist killer cops from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Ferguson, Missouri.
PLP has led fierce fightbacks opposing the  bosses’ wars. In the 1960s, we were the first to organize mass demonstrations for the U.S. to “Get Out of Vietnam!” We formed the Worker-Student Alliance in the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society. PLP broke the U.S. travel ban to Cuba and undermined the rulers’ House Un-American Activities Committee to the point of collapse. More recently, working both within the military and on the streets, we exposed the U.S. rulers’ invasions of Iraq as a murderous oil grab.
None of these developments came out of thin air. They grew out of our Party’s analysis of past class struggles and the achievements of millions of workers. PLP studied the strengths and weaknesses of the communist movement led by—among many others—Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. In 1917, this movement created a revolution in Russia; in 1949, a revolution in China. It defeated the Nazis in Europe and fascists in Japan in World War II. It reached its highest point in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which attempted to push back a growing elitism in the Communist Party leadership and put the masses in charge of society.
PLP is the only group on the left to point out what went wrong in the Soviet Union and China. We are the only organization to analyze how socialism in those countries led back to the unvarnished profit system, where all workers are now mired.
A communist society will have no bosses or profits. It will be led by the working class through its Progressive Labor Party.
Marxism: An evolving idea
The history of the Progressive Labor Party began in 1962. A small group of communists left the Communist Party USA and organized the Progressive Labor Movement. They rejected the CPUSA’s capitulation to capitalism and its abandonment of the open advocacy of communist revolution. The old communist movement proposed that the bosses would peacefully relinquish control of society and allow what the CPUSA called “socialism” to be “voted into existence.” The communists who formed PLM refused to mislead workers and broke away from the old guard.
In the course of PLP’s history, we have rejected some traditional Marxist concepts and advanced a number of new ones, all based on our practice and our examination of world events and the decay of the old communist movement. These new principles are expressed in a series of documents, including Road to Revolution I, II, III and IV; Revolution Not Reform; and “Dark Night Shall Have Its End.” (These are all available on PL’s website or in pamphlet form.)
Above all, Progressive Labor Party stands for the principle that the working class must fight directly for communism rather than moving first through a transitional phase of socialism. We reject this two-stage theory, a central premise of classical Marxism, because events have shown that socialism inevitably leads back to full-blown capitalism. In both Russia and China, socialism preserved capitalist features like money and the wage system, leading to inequalities that divided the working class. In both of these countries, the communist party became a new ruling class where privileges were attained through party membership. We believe the working class can be won before the revolution to fight directly for communism—to abolish the wage system, the cult of the individual and other capitalist relics.
Core principles
 PLP’s main principles are:

• Internationalism, under the slogan “Smash All Borders,” where workers’ class unity is represented by a single mass, international Party;
• The fight against racism, a strategic necessity in the struggle to overthrow capitalism;      
• The fight against the special oppression of women, another critical component in uniting the working class, a prerequisite for revolution;
• A concentration among industrial workers, who produce the capitalists’ profits and the weapons for the bosses’ imperialist wars;
•  Workers’ power through armed struggle, since the rulers will use their armed state power to violently suppress the working class.

Throughout its existence, PLP has fought for these principles in unceasing class struggle. We have learned that building the Party is the first order of business for communists. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Whatever gains workers make in reform struggles are limited and temporary; sooner or later, the bosses always use their state power to take them back. Communists strive to turn reform struggles into schools for communism and building the Party. Winning workers to PLP is the one and only victory the ruling class can never take back. We therefore urge all workers and youth to join us in the next half-century in this historic task: to organize a communist revolution.

CHICAGO, April 25—Today marked the first full week of an ongoing strike of over one thousand multiracial graduate workers at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC), who are boldly fighting capitalism’s racist and sexist miseducation system. Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active on the picket lines and rallies, distributing CHALLENGE, helping lead chants and chatting with the strikers.
The union representing the workers, the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO), was set to strike on April 1, after 97 percent of workers voted in favor. They are pushing back against the UIC bosses’ attacks of poverty wages, exploitative fees, and hostile and retaliatory work environments. Despite the university’s $2 billion endowment and the chancellors’ six figure salaries, graduate workers here earn as low as $20k a year (Chicago Sun Times, 4/18).
Graduate workers help keep the  university’s miseducation and profit system running, putting in long hours of instruction time, grading, and research while often mentoring other students. Under capitalist education, workers and students are  constantly  degraded. While workers' physical bodies, mental capacity and morale are crushed, bosses get raises and praise from fellow soul-crushing capitalists for how well they exploit our class.
To build a world that serves our interests, we’ll have to organize to smash capitalism with communist revolution. PLP invites GEO strikers and workers everywhere to join the Party and fight for an egalitarian world without borders, racism, or exploitation.
Rally against racist exploitation!
Despite unpredictable Chicago spring weather, the grad workers and their supporters have remained steadfast in  their spirited strike. Moving pickets weaved their way throughout the east campus, with pro-worker and pro-student chants reverberating off the building walls. Students sitting in class are called to walk out and support the fight for improved learning conditions.
Many chants blasted the predatory fees. For the “right” to be exploited by the university bosses, graduate workers are forced to pay over $2,000 in fees every year, over 10 percent of their income. Skyrocketing fees levied against international students—blatantly racist and divisive—have ballooned by over 60 percent since 2013 (ABC7 Chicago, 4/20). GEO’s strike demands rightfully call for an immediate end to such fees in any new contract.
In the campus quad, mass numbers of strikers gave daily  updates on negotiations and supporters gave speeches in solidarity with the strike. Many former grad workers and members of various unions shared experiences from their past fights, inspiring the GEO workers to remain strong. A PLP member proudly shared a statement of solidarity from education workers from the City University of New York, which was received to wide applause. When the working class is under attack, it is our role as communists to build a fight back. In PLP, we raise the line that the sharpest way to fight is dialectically, connecting one moment in history to another and struggles in one area to the other.
Throughout it all the Party has distributed hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE, demonstrating that workers and students are definitely hungry for communist ideas. To prepare for May Day, we also have been pushing hard to invite the friends of PLP to our local march and connecting their fight at UIC to the international struggle against the bosses and capitalism.
From the classroom to the streets – the profit system has got to go!
Reformist demands vs revolutionary solutions
Revolutionary communist politics appeal to the working class because unions in and of themselves cannot get us off this treadmill of reformism, much less put an end to the endemic crises of capitalism. As we fight tooth and nail to obtain our basic needs, we must always be ready to expand the limits of the class struggle at hand.
Any appeals for the bosses to give us workers a “fair” wage or contract is itself a contradiction, as under capitalism the bosses will never compensate us for the complete value of our labor. This exploitation is at the core of their system, and it’s where they get their profits. Our fight should be to smash the wage system entirely. We create all value; and the value of our labor should belong to our class!
What’s more, calls to “defend” the institutions of public education ignore the role of schools and universities in ideologically maintaining capitalism and all its rotten nationalism and extreme competition. Yes, education must be free and equitable for all workers and youth but only under communism, with workers running it would it be grounded in science, collectivity, antiracism, antisexism, and class consciousness.
The bosses, by virtue of their control of the state and economy, are able to roll back even the most hard-fought reform gains. They increase our wages while simultaneously raising the cost of living, and more. The victory that the bosses can’t easily take away is a more unified multiracial working class, steeled in class struggle and ready to make a clean break with capitalism in favor of revolution.
Fight to learn, learn to fight
Many of life’s most lasting lessons aren’t learned in the classroom, but through working people organizing class struggle against the murderous ruling class. A raised fist to the GEO strikers for bringing the fight back to the racist UIC bosses! PLP is with you in this fight!
To write a letter of solidarity to the strikers: https://bit.ly/3vjsHxW To donate to their strike fund: https://bit.ly/3KkPOMT J

This is part six of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States.
This movement was the most advanced political movement at the time. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists. This ended up not working but the struggles they led inspire us today both in practice and in the political lessons learned.
In the Progressive Labor Party we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership is essential. Our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership. The following continues that story:

 Mack Coad was born in 1894 in Blackstock, South Carolina to a Black working class family. As a young adult, he worked as a railroad firefighter and crane operator. He lost his railroad position at the onset of the Great Depression. In 1929, after attending a meeting of a Communist led unemployed group, Coad joined the Communist Party. Because of his leadership capabilities, Coad was selected to be a student at the Lenin School in the Soviet Union. In 1931, after his return to the United States, Coad was assigned as a union organizer in the South. He worked with steelworkers in Birmingham and was an organizer of the Alabama Sharecropper's Union.
When local farmers asked the Communist Party to send organizers to help them build a union,the Party sent several people, among them Mack Coad, who at the time was working as a steelworker.
In March 1931, he was sent to Tallapoosa County, Alabama, to organize the Communist-led Share Croppers' Union (SCU). In the abandoned houses of rural Alabama, Coad discovered local militants who were quite comfortable combining communist and folk cultures. These grass-roots leaders had established a tradition of singing before and after gatherings, which grew out of the rural church services after which they had patterned their meetings. In addition to adopting standards such as the ‘Internationale’ and ‘Solidarity Forever,’ rural Black workers in and around the Party transformed popular spirituals into political songs with new messages. ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and the ever-popular ‘Give Me That Old-Time Religion’ were stock musical forms used to create new Party songs. In the latter, the verse was changed to ‘Give Me That Old Communist Spirit,’ and Party members closed each stanza with ‘It was good enough for Lenin, and it's good enough for me.’
The Black and white sharecroppers involved in organizing the union were under constant threat of attack from the police who organized local racists to attack the union. At one point Coad was part of a group defending the home of a Black leader of the movement and as the racists closed in, workers in the union decided to get Coad out of the area, secretly getting him to Atlanta. Coad played an important role in Southern U.S. communist history in the 1930s as he worked in Chattanooga, Birmingham, and was involved in a 1934 attempt to organize a Memphis Communist Party unit. The Communist Party called Coad “our best southern organizer.” Coad was also active in Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina. In Chattanooga, he was jailed at least twice for organizing unemployment demonstrations and running for judge.
Coad went to fight in Spain in October 1937, where he proved himself an exemplary communist and soldier. He was severely wounded in the right eye in an attack near Gandesa on August 1, 1938, during the Ebro Offensive and spent the rest of the war in the hospital. In an interview in the Daily Worker of February 11, 1939, Coad recalled that he volunteered ‘to help wake the Negro up on the international field.’ Coad died in May 1967, still working as a coal miner at the age of 69.
Mack Coad was a leader of the international communist movement that grew out of battles like the struggle against racism in the South and the fight against fascism in Europe. Coad, like millions of workers worldwide, built the old communist movement while leading the class struggle. They put building the Party in the midst of the struggle for reforms into practice and helped shape our movement and set examples that led to the formation of Progressive Labor Party and the building of a communist movement with Black workers in the lead.

Sources: Lisa A Kirschenbaum: International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suscpicion. Harry Haywood: Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Robin D.G. Kelley: Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.

Nazis Out of Boston! Power to the workers!

Right here in liberal Massachusetts the racist Small Fascist (see glossary) movement, fronted by Trump and engineered by billionaire domestic capitalists like Charles Koch and Kelcy Lee Warren, is trying to gain a toehold of strength. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in New England are priming ourselves to join with other antiracists to crush them in the cradle. Though this racist movement, sprouting in New England, is an immediate threat we must not lose sight of the great danger that Big Fascist liberals pose for the working class.  
Make no mistake, Small Fascists are small fry compared to the Big Fascists, the politically liberal, finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. The Big Fascists pose the greatest danger. From arming Saudi and Israeli terror bosses carrying out nonstop lethal bombing campaigns, to arming Ukranian Nazi battalions, the Big Fascists are the main sponsors of global imperialist terror. Their crumbling empire and decaying liberal order make them especially dangerous for the international working class in this period.
In late January, claiming “white genocide” a neo-Nazi organization, the Nationalist Social Club, (NSC) gathered at Brigham and Women’s Hospital protesting the cardiologists' decision to deny a heart transplant to a white man who refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine. This fascist group also passed out a flier attacking two antiracist doctors who have been fighting systemic racist practices regarding cardiology patients at the hospital. Specifically, the antiracist doctors are trying to correct the pattern of Black cardiac patients typically being admitted to general medicine while white cardiac patients are admitted to the cardiology service which usually results in better care and better outcomes.
Another anti-vaxxer group was also protesting the decision to deny a cardiac patient a heart transplant claiming that it is discriminatory to those who refuse the vaccine. Both groups are using hot-button issues of racism and vaccine mandates to divide the working class and prop up their racist Small Fascist movement.
PLP distributed CHALLENGE and passed out a leaflet calling workers to smash these nazis and to support the fight against racist medical practices. We got a positive response from hundreds of hospital workers as they streamed in and out of the hospital. Many stopped to talk to us while we leafletted and distributed copies of CHALLENGE.
The NSC has made other bold appearances in New England. They tried to shut down the reading of The Communist Manifesto at a library in Providence, Rhode Island, and appeared at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston. The anti-vaxxers disrupted a Boston Teachers Union conference, protesting the union’s position on the vaccine.
Nurses and teachers later spoke out against their reported racist and insulting verbiage against educators. Their actions and the union's response prompted important discussions about racism in the schools. The fascists also protested the mask mandates inside a Boston Public Library Children's Reading Room and vandalized a bust of Maya Angelou. The Boston Public Librarians union held a rally protesting this, which we attended and distributed our literature.  
All over the U.S. and now in Boston, the Small Fascist movement has been building local electoral and other campaigns to mobilize for white nationalism, racism, and anti-communism, appealing to the racist fears of white workers being crushed by the declining standard of living.
PLP in New England has vowed to confront the white supremacists and fascists whenever they raise their ugly heads as we continue to organize opposition to ongoing racist practices in the hospitals and schools where we work.
At the same time, we must not forget that the Big Fascist liberals, who still dominate the U.S. politically and economically, are doing everything in their power to drain the revolutionary potential of antiracist class conscious movements, co-opting and injecting them with  their toxic identity and electoral politics. Big Fascist politicians such as New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot dupe Black, Latin and Asian workers into falling in line with the oppressors they can identify with. Big Fascist movements threaten to win workers to multicultural U.S. nationalism, and its deadly logic of sacrificing workers for the survival of U.S. imperialism.
So, while we fight the Small Fascists in Massachusetts, PLP is especially committed to ideologically defeating Big Fascist misleaders in the unions, nonprofits, and schools as well as defeating Big Fascist representatives in liberal cities.Thus, PLP believes that to truly snuff out the fascist threat we must organize workers around the world to smash all fascists both big and small.

*****

Students connect Alabama to Amazon
  We are college professors who teach at the City University of New York (CUNY) and have been active in building rank and file strike committees on our respective campuses. Last month we held a successful student forum with over 30 students to discuss the historic strikes at CUNY and the need to continue building this movement on our campuses. A few days after the victory at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island we held a “brown bag lunch” on zoom to discuss how we can build the worker-student alliance at CUNY.
  This informal discussion was exciting and timely as we heard from workers who had recently led some job actions at Amazon warehouses, a student and professor who traveled to Alabama this winter as part of a solidarity trip supporting the miners’ strike, and a labor historian. The Amazon workers were bold and inspiring as they described how they shut down the warehouse they work at. The CUNY folks who traveled to Alabama shared their stories of fight back and inspiration, walking the picket lines with Black and white coal miners as well as helping out with Christmas festivities. Our friend who is a labor historian pointed out that one lesson of the Amazon strike is the need to build fightback from “the bottom up” and not to rely on politicians or union “leaders” to organize for us. He also made the point that while we work for wages under capitalism, ultimately there is a better way to organize society, based on the collective needs of the working class and not profit.
  We will continue to find ways to build the worker student alliance at CUNY!