NEW YORK CITY, August 25—For the past 18  months students, faculty, and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY) have been fighting racist conditions on our campuses– conditions worsened by the Covid-19 crisis. Our administrators have used the pandemic as an excuse to implement even more racist austerity: firing almost 3,000 adjuncts, or part-time professors; leaving campus offices severely understaffed; and increasing class sizes. In their latest attack, the CUNY bosses are demanding that workers and students return to unsafe campuses even as the Covid-19 Delta variant rages across the world.
As we return to our campuses, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls all CUNY students and workers to get involved in the fight against the racist conditions on campus. Consider that the fight at CUNY must be part of a bigger battle—a revolutionary battle to rid the world of the racist capitalist system that treats the lives of workers as disposable, from the Bronx to Palestine to Haiti. We need a communist revolution.
Fight bosses, reject union hacks
During the pandemic we have encountered students and workers who are very open to the idea that only communist revolution can create a world where educating the working class is a priority. We are involved in several campus organizations that have been agitating against the campus administration and the go-slow, sell-out union misleadership. We have been influential in winning several small victories (see CUNY, page 4). At the same time, we have robust Party-led study groups where we discuss how these small reform gains will never lead to liberation for our class and that any gain we might make will be met with a racist-cutback elsewhere. For example, CUNY recently announced that they would use a portion of the more than $800 million in federal bailout funds they received to cancel a small portion of student debt. But at the same time, not only did they increase tuition and added a new $120 “Health and Wellness” fee, but they have also done nothing to reduce class size, one of the most critical factors in student success.
Fall curriculum: smash racism, CUNY bosses
This fall semester, members and friends of PLP will continue to work towards turning CUNY into a cauldron of revolutionary politics and action. We will have a teach-in on Haiti, exposing the racist abuse the workers there have suffered for centuries and the heroic efforts of workers and students there to fight back. We will have a forum on the Israeli apartheid regime and the need to reject all forms of nationalism. And we will continue to call out the racist CUNY administration for their racist attacks on our campuses.
If you’re a CUNY student or worker or you would like to be involved in advancing the struggle against CUNY’s racist administration and would like to learn about the need for communist revolution at the same time, we welcome you! Contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more information.

How I use CHALLENGE
I’m an immigrant worker from Mexico living in the United States. I have been a member of the Progressive Labor Party for some years. I joined because I learned how to fight back together with the Party. PLP is like family.
For me, it’s important to read and circulate DESAFIO-CHALLENGE. You can learn the communist analysis about what is happening in the world from Brooklyn to Mexico to Colombia. Every issue, I circulate 25 papers to my close friends and family. They ask me questions when they visit me in my home. The rest, I give to people in my laundromat or in the street.
Recently, my sons and family visited me for my birthday. When my nine year old grandson saw CHALLENGE he said, “wow! What is PLP?”
 I said, “It’s a communist Party.”
 My nine and 14 year old grandsons asked me important questions like why the rich don’t pay taxes and why do they exploit the workers. My grandson said, “I’m reading about this [exploitation] with my father and I don’t like it!”
My PLP club plans to work with young workers and students. I want to ask my family to participate in the fightback. My grandsons agreed to join our study group with their mother. Their father can’t participate because he works six days a week, 12 hours a day.                                                 
  If you are not reading CHALLENGE, I invite you to read it and join PLP.
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Anti-vaccination is anti-working class
Being anti-vaccination is an anti-working class position. It is also racist since Black and Latin workers are contracting and dying from Covid-19 at higher rates.Since capitalism values profits over workers’ health, there are over 130 countries that still don’t have access to the vaccine and others that only have limited access. It is important that everyone who is medically able to get the vaccine receives it promptly to help slow the spread and stop further, dangerous mutations.
Amid a pandemic, those who recognize that getting vaccinated isn’t a personal choice, but, actually, is a social responsibility to their fellow workers to keep the vulnerable from dying are serving the working class, whether it is conscious or not.  This is an early form of political commitment that mirrors the adage “from each according to political commitment and to each according to need.”
The combination of the Big Fascists’ [see Glossary], represented by President Joe Biden, continued mismanagement of the pandemic and the Small Fascists’ gutter racist and anti-science propaganda are serving to divide the working class of the United States. Teachers and nurses who don’t want to get vaccinated because it is “my body, my choice,” — thereby belittling the very real struggle women have over their own means of production — are a danger to their students and patients, as well as their families and themselves.
The history of racist and sexist medical experiments worldwide rightly sows distrust in the medical establishment and the government. However, this vaccine hesitancy ultimately will cause our Black and Latin students and their families to suffer more. The bosses have their own reasons for wanting to get us to sacrifice for the social good, like protecting their profits and building for war, but we need to fight for workers to serve their own interests.
It is not “segregation” to quarantine potential disease carriers during a global pandemic! The Small Fascists want to weaken the terms that represent the brutality of racism that our class has felt for centuries. They want to silence us by turning a rational and scientific response to a deadly disease into a personal choice under the guise of freedom. Freedom is actually the understanding of necessity, so let’s do what needs to be done and help our friends develop a scientific worldview.
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ALL wealth is theft, value comes from labor power
It’s great to hear in the 8/4 issue of CHALLENGE that the Newark summer project discussed political economy and how capitalism is built on the theft of workers’ wealth, but let’s be clear: the end game for the working class is not higher wages or a shorter workday. The article stated that “the labor and pay that an employee receives is not an equal transaction because most of [that worker’s] workday is free labor,” but Marx’s distinction between labor power and labor itself is missing here. Today’s capitalism is based on wage slavery, not chattel slavery, meaning we are all forced to sell our ability, not our actual bodies, to add value to the bosses’ tools in exchange for a wage. That exchange can never be fair or just; it is, by definition, an act of robbery.
Capitalist theft is reliant on one fundamental commodity above all others: workers’ labor power. In Das Kapital, Marx explained how, in capitalist markets, buyers and sellers exchange commodities of the same value by using money, another commodity, to facilitate exchange. Where does exchange value come from? The value of any commodity is equal to the amount of labor time required to produce it. Human labor-power, which is potential energy —our capacity for work–is sold to the capitalists by workers–commonly based on a set amount of time– in exchange for wages.
But wages are ALWAYS theft. Why? Our labor power changes the material that we work on. Workers therefore create value which is added to that material (provided by the capitalist). The value we add rises above the value of what we were promised for our labor-time. Bosses MUST pay us less than the value of our labor power or else they don’t profit. A waiter, an information tech specialist, a delivery person or a public transit worker, “participates” in a business where the collective output of the workers produces wealth for a specific boss or set of bosses who profit from that work. A teacher’s labor power is used to produce ideas that train the working class to stay in their place under capitalism. A soldier’s labor power is used by the capitalist class to protect its class interests in the field of war.
So why do we “agree” to sell our labor power, no matter the wage? If we don’t, we starve. Capitalism’s true freedom for the working person is the freedom to starve. The capitalist is free to decide what is done with our labor power, and in the process our class, as a whole, is enslaved into a series of jobs and tasks that ultimately serve the purpose of making the capitalist class wealthy rather than contributing to the social, political, economic and cultural progress of the human race and planet.
Even though workers no longer have our physical bodies bought and sold on the slave market (barring human trafficking), we must now reach the point in history where we use our labor power to smash this system rather than selling it to the bosses for a wage—any wage!
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Capitalism, a social disease
I was listening to news broadcasts about how “human induced” climate change was causing irreversible world damage and that the governors of Texas and Florida were banning masks for school children and advocating loss of pay for teachers who permit them. Then I tuned in to a radio talk show where a psychologist was describing that capitalism causes social mental diseases, describing Trump as a sociopath. The moderator asked for discussion of how capitalism relates to mental disease.
I called in and luckily got on to say, “We must realize that we are living in a capitalist world that creates people who are no longer human, because they put profits before people's lives.” I said that the discussion of the idea that capitalism causes social mental disease is correct and that a working class revolution for communist equality and collectivity was needed.
The real big lie is that capitalism masks itself as the champion of “democracy” and “human rights” to cover the fact that it is creating an environment that will accept the destruction of humanity for personal gain and privilege. This ‘what’s in it for me’ environment is destroying true world humanity.
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This August marks the 76th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history when the U.S. ruling class—the only rulers to ever use nuclear bombs—dropped atomic bombs on two civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This obliterated a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in a matter of seconds, injured hundreds of thousands more, and left future generations with everlasting genetic defects.
The racist U.S. rulers launched this heinous attack as a political warning to the then-socialist Soviet Union, signaling U.S. imperialism’s launching of the Cold War. Capitalists will stop at nothing when their domination is at stake. This is the natural outcome of a system rooted in the violence of exploitation. The working class instead needs to build a world based on human need. For that, we need millions worldwide to organize under an international communist party, Progressive Labor Party (PLP,) to turn the next capitalist atrocity and war into a class war for communism.
The lies and the reality
For over seven decades, U.S. rulers have tried to justify the A-bomb attacks by maintaining they were needed to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion and a million U.S. casualties. In reality, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before Hiroshima:
 • According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a board of military and civilian experts established by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
   • A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, later the U.S. National Security Adviser, “confessed that he had pulled those numbers out of the air to justify the bombings” (LA Times, 8/5/2005).
   • By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”
   • General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, considered the A-bombs “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (James Clayton, The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II).
A genocide aimed at the USSR
If overwhelming evidence shows that the genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was militarily unnecessary, and that Japan was on the verge of unconditional surrender, why did President Harry Truman order the A-bombs dropped?
The true purpose was to warn the then-socialist Soviet Union that the U.S. had a new and devastating weapon, and was ready to use it against any threat to the U.S. imperialists’ world dominance. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the beginning of the Cold War between capitalists in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Some supporting evidence:
• With the Soviet Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier, to play what Stimson referred to as a “mastercard”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson diary).
• In an implicit indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, Leo Szilard, creator of the the idea of a nuclear fission reactor said, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”
The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the U.S. ruling class will stop at nothing to preserve its state power and profit. Which means the next world war is only a matter of time (see editorial, page 2). It remains for the international working class to mete out justice to the most murderous criminals the world has ever known.

NEW YORK CITY, August 13—“Why do police killings, especially of Black and Latin youth, continue despite mass protests and uprisings? Is it even possible to stop these murders without also getting rid of the system of capitalism, which depends on racism to exist?” More specifically, capitalism needs racist cops. They enforce all the racist inequalities that capitalism needs from wage and income inequalities to mass incarceration. These were some of the ideas discussed by more than 70 people at a screening and discussion of the documentary film Profiled. The film tells the stories of families and friends of youth killed by police, and the multiracial struggles they continue to lead against these racist killings (See Page 8).
Come to “Hoops for Justice”
Two of the organizers featured in the film spoke at the screening about becoming antiracist fighters. One of the fighters, Natasha, was outraged by the way the media portrayed her sister Shantel Davis as a criminal when police dragged her out of her car and murdered her in 2013. She turned her anger into organizing the “Justice for Shantel” campaign, supported by growing ties and friendships with members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Natasha invited everyone to the 6th Annual “Hoops for Justice” 5-on-5 Basketball Tournament on Saturday, August 28, to fight racism and honor the legacy of Shantel and Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old Brooklyn youth also killed by police in 2013.
The other organizer said a key turning point in her understanding of why police killings continue to be rampant was when a PLP member introduced her to Lerone Bennett’s essay, “The Road Not Taken.” This essay outlines how the “race problem was a deliberate invention of plantation owners who systematically separated Blacks and whites in order to make money.” Plantation owners who enslaved Black workers passed laws to separate European, African, and Indigenous workers who intermarried, lived together and united to rebel against their common enemy. This was crucial to her being optimistic about the possibilities of defeating racism.
A lifelong struggle against racism
These stories demonstrate how developing personal ties with communists in PLP helps keep antiracist organizers positive even when the possibilities for change seem dim. Attending May Day marches, study groups and witnessing firsthand the dedication to the long term struggle against capitalism and racism points to a communist future where workers run society. Building these close personal ties while fighting racism was a key takeaway from this screening of Profiled. Racism is crucial to capitalism. In particular, cops are the racist thugs that protect the capitalists from rightfully angry workers.
During the several months of planning this screening of Profiled we made new friends who share our antiracist views. Organizers also reached out to high school and college teachers, including some in PLP who have been deeply involved in building ties with family members who are organizing antiracist campaigns against police violence. More than a dozen high school and college students participated in the discussion.
PLP, the real alternative
This event was organized primarily by members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party active within the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), a fake left organization whose leaders serves the main liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class. Thousands of primarily young people have joined DSA since the 2016 Presidential election because they want to see more progressive change, and saw no other alternative. But the capitalist ruling class and their bought-and-paid for politicians cannot and will not abolish the kkkops. The DSA promotes the circus of electoral politics and leads us into working within the capitalist system.
They helped to elect Joe ‘Jim Crow’ Biden president, calling him a “lesser evil” but he is in fact a greater evil. Biden, a longtime archracist in Washington, helped push then-President Bill Clinton’s crime bill that led to the mass incarceration of mainly Black workers. Now he’s trying to do a better job than Donald Trump to organize for war against China and Russia (see editorial, page 2). In other words, the DSA is part of growing fascism within the U.S.
These young people have another alternative—the communist PLP. Party members call for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Let’s fight for communism where the working class rules. As we develop personal ties with people who want to fight racism, we find they are often open to communist ideas.
Since the Profiled screening, we are organizing to continue to raise the struggle. From the annual Hoops for Justice to fighting to to keep cops out of schools, these antiracist fightbacks help deepen our personal ties, as we build the Progressive Labor Party to fight for a communist world.