PLP and friends gathered virtually for our annual
Black and Red Celebration, giving tribute to the leadership
of Black communists. CHALLENGE readers are invited
to view the event by clicking here.

CHICAGO, February 23—Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined with Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) workers for a multiracial “Hour of Power” rally today at the 95 Street transit station to protest the sellout union leaders. These misleaders work hand in hand with the transit bosses, helping them stay in control. Transit, when run in the interest of profit, can never function to sustain the working-class necessities. PLP members call for communism, working-class power, where transit workers will not only keep move the city but also steer the world.
Commuters and drivers passing by honked their horns in support while we held signs and picketed the bus/rail terminal, denouncing the union misleaders. Workers from Locals 241 and 308 who drive the buses and the trains in Chicago are spreading the word on how they have been shut out of negotiations for a new contract with the city.
Speakers on the bullhorn demanded hazard pay, sanitized facilities and vehicles, two-person crews, more full-time jobs and job security, paid sick time for all employees, and member control of their unions. These demands are ripe for struggle class where workers and communists can push the limits of these reforms to fight the whole system.
Workers were receptive to PLP members who distributed 50 copies of CHALLENGE while helping lead chants against racism, for worker unity, and for communist revolution.
Under capitalism, especially one in decline like the U.S.’s, public transit operations are chronically underfunded to the point of physical collapse. They routinely put workers in mortal danger. Their role is to shuttle us to and from our jobs in order to make profits for this racist profit system.
Communist control of transportation means always having the proper resources and safety protocols in place to protect our class. Smashing the bosses’ state dictatorship and erecting a working-class dictatorship through an international PLP is the only route that will guarantee safe mass transit.
CTA and union attack – Workers unite, fight back
CTA is the second largest transit system in the country, and has a mostly Black workforce. Whenever there are contract negotiations, the bosses attack the workers in an effort to keep wages down and to try to turn public sentiment against them. By failing to address dangers during the pandemic, the racist CTA bosses and their union hacks are responsible for at least eight deaths and 900 workers having contracted the Covid-19 virus (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/20/20).
The union misleadership has worked for decades to alienate transit workers from meetings and contract discussions. Although boasting 3,000  members, it is rare to have 50  workers attend a general meeting. Now, in a period of virtual calls, worker input about job conditions has become even more limited.
In spite of these attempts to shut them out, workers have bravely pushed back against the racist working conditions. Many have organized meetings to address concerns, defying CTA and the union’s attempts to retaliate against them for doing so (see CHALLENGE letters, 4/16/20). PLP have supported these efforts to build multiracial, rank-and-file solidarity as the way for our class to grasp our potential power outside the limits of the bosses’ institutions.
A route to workers’ power
The power of a militant and united transit workforce can hardly be understated. If more workers were to reject both the bosses and their collaborating unions and organize on behalf of our class interest, we could shut both the rails and the roads down and bring the capitalist system to its knees. As conditions become evermore untenable and communist ideas grip our class, this level of class struggle will rise again.
But in PLP, we’re not just about shutting the profit system down; we’re about wiping it out entirely. A worker-run communist society would make our class’s needs as the determining factor of all decisions. With that, we will rebuild and expand mass transit in a way that meets our collective needs and that operates in the most environmentally healthy ways possible.
The finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class is more and more worried about their worldwide imperialist empire. Represented by President Joe Biden, they are ramping up their calls to rebuild a failing U.S. infrastructure (see editorial, page 2), but only to better prepare their country and the working class for future imperialist war.
PLP calls on workers to reject both wings of the U.S. bosses and fight for a future where our power and safety always comes first. That’s communism. Join us!

On February 25 U.S. President Joe Biden bombed Syria taking only 36 days to join the list of U.S. Presidents whose blood-soaked hands have killed workers across the Middle East. The airstrike on a base in Syria used by an Iranian backed militia to launch rocket attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq came out of the increasing weakness of the U.S. ruling class. Across the Middle East the U.S. bosses are in retreat. The latest bombings, which killed at least 17 people and wounded dozens more (NY Times, 2/26), highlights how, as the U.S. ruling class grows weaker, direct war between the imperialists becomes more and more likely.
This latest bombing, like all the wars between the capitalists, was an example of workers killing workers. The bosses continually pit us against our sisters and brothers in the working class. The bosses use racism and nationalism to turn us against each other. Workers in one country are ordered to kill workers in another. Whether we live in the U.S., Iran, Syria or anywhere else, we have to reject siding with any bosses. Our task is to build internationalism among the workers of the world as one class united. The future for the working class lies in turning the bosses' war into a class war against the bosses for communist revolution and building a society that serves the needs of the international working class.
U.S. bosses are no longer calling the shots in the Middle East
Biden dropped the bombs out of weakness. Over the last 10 years the U.S. has been losing in the Middle East. The U.S. military was forced out of Iraq and is on the verge of leaving Afghanistan, which would give the Taliban nearly complete control of that country. Then, just this week, Biden declared the U.S. was not in a position to punish Saudi Arabian ruler Prince Mohammed bin Salman for killing the U.S. reporter Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered on the orders of the Prince (The Hill, 2/27).
Biden and company are trying to portray themselves as somehow being in control of the back and forth between the U.S. war machine and the Iranian backed militias. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. bosses have no more ability to control the tides of war rumbling across the globe than they could control the spread of Covid-19. Capitalism can only go from crisis and war to crisis and war leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
Volatility in the Middle East increases as U.S. bosses position weakens
For the last 60 years, since the 1958 Marine invasion of Lebanon, post World War II (WWII) U.S. ruling class strategy has revolved around military control of the Middle East. For the last 30 years the U.S. has been in almost continual war in Iraq and going on 20 years now in Afghanistan, wars the U.S. bosses have lost (Brooking Institute, 7/27/20). In this period the U.S. ruling class has gone from a growing dominant imperialist power to a declining empire being challenged in every corner of the globe it once dominated.   
Prior to losing in Iraq and Afghanistan the U.S. bosses, backed by their gigantic military, controlled the region. That is no longer the situation and has created a free for all between the various ruling classes trying to take control. The increasing volatility driven by the decline of the U.S. empire and the rise of competing capitalists has created an extremely unpredictable and volatile situation.
As the U.S. ruling class has weakened, Iran and Russia are asserting themselves across the Middle East. Biden is faced with trying to reinstall U.S. power. This latest rain of death was the U.S. bosses trying to contain the Iranian bosses who have taken advantage of the U.S. defeat in Iraq to become the largest power there, with Turkey and Syria also vying for control (Middle East Institute, 3/12/20).
Specifics are unpredictable, big picture is clear
The specifics of how all this will play out are hard to predict. The U.S. ruling class is being challenged by Russia and Iran in the Middle East and by China in virtually every other corner of the globe, including Latin America, the U.S. bosses’ backyard. Other ruling classes, like Turkey, seeing the upheaval are taking their own shots at asserting power. That’s a lot of bombs and tanks and fighter jets scrambling to grab pieces of the world.
What is clear is that big wars are on the horizon and the bosses of all these countries are planning to use the working class to fight and die in them. World War I (WWI) and WWII were both driven by the desperation of capitalism in crisis (Internationalism). Millions of workers were killed by the bosses' bombs. At the same time the communist movement united workers in the midst of capitalist war and when the smoke cleared the working class had fought to victory for our class. In Russia during WWI and in China during WWII the working class under the leadership of the communist movement built internationalism and turned the bosses' wars into revolution for workers power. Our hope for the future depends on building the PLP and the communist movement today.

The previous issue of CHALLENGE (3/3) remembered Langston Hughes as a writer sharply critical of Jim Crow segregation during World War II and as a poet for the U.S. working class—particularly Black workers. Now we’ll flash back to the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became an advocate for multiracial, anti-capitalist revolution.  
A tradition of antiracist fightback ran deep in Hughes’s family history. In 1858, his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, married Lewis Leary, an abolitionist who died in John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Howard Langston, was an educator and ardent abolitionist.
Hughes’s influences
According to his biographer Arnold Rampersad, young Langston Hughes was influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay, along with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the antiracist, pro-communist writer and historian. In June 1921, Hughes’ poetry was published for the first time in a professional journal. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” came out in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.
In September 1921, Hughes moved to New York to attend Columbia University. Not yet ready for college, he withdrew before the year was out. He plunged into Black cosmopolitan New York and met Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, both writers at The Crisis, and the poet Countee Collins. By 1924, after a journey to West Africa and Paris and an extended sojourn in Washington, DC, he’d become a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance. In March 1925, a landmark issue of Survey Graphic, “Harlem:  Mecca of the New Negro” (edited by Alain Locke), contained 10  poems by Hughes, including: “I, too, sing America./I am the darker brother. . . .”  
In 1926, Hughes published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues, and a famous essay for The Nation (June 23, 1926).  In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes wasn’t yet ready to attack capitalism or embrace the need for militant, collective antiracism. Instead, he argued for the importance of Black identity and called for racial pride: “Why should I want to be white? I am Negro—and beautiful.”
By the late 1920s, when Hughes was enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically Black institution outside Philadelphia, he was meeting communists as well as Harlem’s cultural leaders.  In December 1926, four of his poems were published in the communist monthly New Masses, though they were nowhere near as politically sharp as his work to come.  
With the Great Depression, beginning in November 1929, communists took leadership positions in major labor unions. They had an explanation for the Depression and a solution for racist inequalities and capitalist exploitation. They called for multiracial unity and revolution.  Hughes was drawn to these ideas in New Masses, and he put his art at the service of revolution.
The Scottsboro Boys
For Hughes and millions of others, a political turning point came on March 25, 1931, when nine young Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white young women in a railroad boxcar in Alabama. The arrest and trial of the Scottsboro Boys galvanized communists and antiracists throughout the world. Eight of the teenagers were quickly tried by the racists and sentenced to death; a mistrial was declared for the ninth because he was underage. The Communist Party USA sent in lawyers to challenge the case. The Supreme Court overturned the convictions; one of the women recanted her accusations and even went on tour to defend the defendants. Yet they languished in jail, many of them for decades.

Hughes responded with a terse four-line poem, “Justice,” for New Masses (July 1931), which accompanied a drawing of a lynching by artist Phil Bard.

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we poor are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once, perhaps, were eyes.

For the November 1931 New Masses, Hughes wrote “Scottsboro, Limited:  A One Act Play.” The cast roster includes “Red Voices,” who counter racist “Mob Voices” and shout out: “We’ll fight! The Communists will fight for you./ not just black—but black and white.” At the end of the play, the “Red Voices” declare: “Rise from the dead, workers, and fight!” For the finale, Hughes directs that “Here the Internationale may be sung and the red flag raised above the heads of the black and white workers together.”
To Hughes and others in the communist movement, the trial of the Scottsboro Boys was both the cutting-edge antiracist fight of the day and a huge opportunity to unite Black and white workers.  For the June 1932 issue of New Masses, Hughes wrote the poem “An Open Letter to the South.”           

White workers of the South:
. . .
I am the black worker.
Listen:
That the land might be ours,
And the mines and the factories and the office towers
At Harlem, Richmond, Gastonia, Atlanta, New Orleans;
That the plants and the roads and the tools of power
  Be ours   
 …
Let us become instead, you and I,
One single hand
That can united rise
To smash the old dead dogmas of the past—To kill the lies of color
That keep the rich enthroned
  . . .
Let us get together, say:
“You are my brother, black or white.
You my sister—now—today!”
  . . .
We did not know that we were brothers.
Now we know!
Out of that brotherhood
Let power grow!
We did not know
That we were strong.
Now we see
In union lies our strength.
 . . .
White worker,
Here is my hand.
Today,
We’re Man to Man.   

Good Morning, Revolution
As Hughes wrote the poem, in the spring of 1932, he was preparing to join a group of 22 writers, journalists, and actors to travel through the Soviet Union. He mailed back from the USSR to New Masses his rousing poem “Good Morning Revolution,” which was excerpted in the last issue of CHALLENGE. After writing a number of commissioned pieces for Soviet journals and a short book, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, Hughes returned to the U.S. in the summer of 1933. It was a pivotal period in U.S. politics, when communists played a big role in the fight against rising fascism, both in Europe and inside the U.S.
For the remainder of the 1930s, Hughes continued writing his radical poetry. He also traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War—the topic of our next CHALLENGE article.
The work of Hughes shows that a capitalist understanding of art as being from and for the individual is used to divorce workers from the material world. Hughes is an example that art from and for the working class can advance our fightback. Let’s celebrate Langston Hughes as part of our communist legacy. His antiracist work and writing gave us a model for working-class unity and revolutionary optimism.

Biographical information is drawn from Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford, 2002; and Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 3 vols.  Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2001.