Comrade Arnie Indenbaum died at 12:01 AM on May 2 at the age of 92, a minute after the close of May Day. Arnie had been one of the early members of the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM — predecessor of the Progressive Labor Party) — and was at its founding conference in July 1962. One of his first responsibilities was to help organize a student trip to Cuba, breaking the travel ban instituted by President Kennedy. For this action he and other PLM members and supporters were subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was conducting an anti-communist witch-hunt to enforce the travel ban.
Fighting anti-communist intimidation
Arnie refused to cooperate with HUAC’s red-baiting. He charged the Committee with “attempting to prevent U.S. students from exercising their right to travel and from finding out the specific nature of the Cuban system.” He testified that “what the U.S. government and this Committee [HUAC] says about Cuba is an outrageous distortion and lie.”Arnie’s indictment of HUAC was part of a campaign which PLM — and later the PLP — launched to expose the Committee’s anti-communism, including mass demonstrations in Buffalo and Washington, leading to HUAC’s eventual dissolution.
PLM on the railroad
Arnie was a brakeman on the New York Central R.R. for ten years until being laid off in 1963. He participated in numerous actions opposing the company’s mass layoffs, including a slowdown which had its quick-witted side. Arnie was walking ever-so-slowly alongside an engine that was crawling up Manhattan’s east side tracks. The exasperated engineer finally called out to Arnie to “speed it up a little; you’re making me look bad.” Arnie had a great sense of humor.
Arnie loved music, especially early jazz, and enjoyed classical music, even opera. He always had a record on, playing the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ben Webster, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and the occasional Pavarotti.
Many folks didn’t know Arnie was a serious scholar of Shakespeare. Over the course of decades, he read and studied Shakespeare, developing a keen and deep understanding of the playwright’s work from a class perspective.
Organizing in later years
Arnie worked as an electrician and a grip in the film industry for many years. For health reasons he left that work and ultimately came to own and operate AS-IS, a small antique book and record store in Manhattan’s West Village. The store — always with music playing in the background — was a place where many people would stop by for coffee, political discourse and often a good laugh. Arnie always took a particular interest in the young people in his life. He mentored many.
Arnie’s last few years were marked by failing health. His contribution to the building of a communist future will be sorely missed but never forgotten.
“There are decades where nothing
happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
—Vladimir Lenin
Millions of workers in more than 50 countries have taken the streets with bold and inspiring rebellions against the racist police lynchings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and too many others. The uprisings expose a system that has failed on every level. From Nigeria to Pakistan, from Mexico and Brazil to Germany and France, this antiracist movement has electrified the workers of the world to fight back against the capitalist bosses’ terror.
Mass multiracial struggle is unstoppable when it’s led by politically advanced Black workers and communist ideas. Many workers have embraced communist leadership in this moment. Many more are looking for something better than the rulers’ sell-out liberal politicians, their merry-go-round of empty reforms, and their brutal path toward fascism and inter-imperialist war. It is the historic task of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to lead the international working class to seize state power, smash the capitalists’ dictatorship, and end for all time the profit system’s deadly racism and sexism. The only solution to murders-by-cop is communist revolution!
Capitalist bosses: the most violent criminals
When huge protests broke out after George Floyd’s execution by four killer cops in Minneapolis, the rulers’ media and politicians first focused on a handful of looters and a few firebombed police cars. They condemned what they called “riots” and demanded that all protests be “peaceful.”
Meanwhile, anyone on the streets—or with a working television—was witnessing the systematic violence of the baton-swinging Klan-in-blue. As thousands of workers risked their health and lives in a pandemic to protest racist police murder, the bosses doubled down with more fascist terror. In Brooklyn, a police van drove into a crowd of demonstrators. In Buffalo, the kkkops knocked down a 75-year-old man and left him bleeding on the concrete with a critical head injury. The bosses’ mad dogs indiscriminately shot people in the head with rubber bullets, leaving some permanently blinded. Reporters were clearly targeted. (When U.S. capitalism is in crisis, “constitutional rights” don’t apply.) In Louisville, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was riddled with eight bullets after narcotics detectives invaded her home, and a “community pillar” named David McAtee was shot and killed outside his barbecue restaurant (abcnews.com, 6/2).
When the bosses’ bought-and-paid-for mayors imposed curfews, a historic tool “to restrict the movement and liberties of free and enslaved” Black workers (Washington Post, 6/3), the cops had a green light for chemical warfare with tear gas and pepper spray. As he made the marchers even more vulnerable to Covid-19, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the cops for their “restraint.” Governor Andrew Cuomo, the mayor’s fellow liberal fascist, denied that cops had bludgeoned protesters “for no reason,” a bald-faced lie he was forced to walk back (slate.com, 6/4). In Washington, DC, as Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump cowered in his White House bunker, top Pentagon officials ordered National Guard helicopters to buzz low over nearby demonstrators, a “display of force usually reserved for combat zones” (New York Times, 6/6).
The truth is that the biggest instrument of violence, worldwide, is the bosses’ state: their government, military forces, cops, courts, schools, and media. The capitalists murder millions every year through imperialist war, mass unemployment, deplorable health care, unaffordable housing, and the profit-driven poisoning of our air, water, and food. During the pandemic, uncounted tens of thousands of workers around the world have died in their homes for lack of access to health care. Many were turned away by overwhelmed local hospitals after decades of budget cuts and closings. As always, Black, Latin, and indigenous workers have been ravaged out of proportion to their population. More than 1,200 U.S. health and medical workers published an open letter hailing the protests, calling anti-racism “vital to the public health” (CNN, 6/5).
Police murder: as American as apple pie
Despite plummeting U.S. crime rates over the last 30 years, police department budgets have kept steadily going up. Each year, the cops kill about 1,000 workers, a high percentage of them Black or Latin. Every so often, a new police reform is adopted: civilian review boards, or body cameras, or “racial sensitivity” training. Or the next wave of Black mayors and police chiefs. None of them make any difference. Democratic politicians are just as complicit in these lynchings as Republicans. During his eight years as president, Barack Obama and his Black attorney general, Eric Holder, refused to bring charges against the police who slaughtered Michael Brown in Ferguson, or Eric Garner on Staten Island, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore. They sat on their hands after Trayvon Martin was killed by a civilian wannabe cop in Florida. When protesters lit up Baltimore after Gray’s murder, Obama blasted them as criminals and “thugs,” the classic racist code for Black rebels (Reuters, 6/1).
Since the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak, in a period of extreme racist inequality and the breakdown of basic infrastructure to keep workers alive and healthy, U.S. billionaires have looted an additional $434 billion (Common Dreams, 5/28). With rising instability both within the U.S. and internationally, the bosses need social control more than ever. Though they may try to quell the protests by restructuring the police, the bosses cannot outsource the class war against furious workers. They need their kkkops for that. As the Washington Post noted, “Even amid the coronavirus pandemic and orders that kept millions at home for weeks, police shot and killed 463 people through the first week of June — 49 more than the same period in 2019. In May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most in any one month since The Post began tracking such incidents” (6/8).
The new abolitionism
Joe Biden, the racist nitwit the Democrats are running against Trump, has his own shameful history as a police shill. In a speech on the Senate floor in 1994, the year he authored the legislation that ushered in mass incarceration in the U.S., Biden said, “Anybody who does not want cops, then do not ask for them; send them my way. Send them to Philadelphia, Wilmington, Trenton, the area I live in. And my daughter will be safer, my wife will be safer, my mother will be safer, and I will be safer. And I will be happy” (NYT, 6/1). More recently, as workers rebelled, Biden offered a suggestion to improve police training: [Y]ou shoot ‘em in the leg instead of in the heart” (foxnews.com, 6/1).
More sophisticated reformers, like Black Lives Matter, have proposed a package of eight measures they claim would reduce police violence by 72 percent. Others, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are leading calls to “defund” the cops and limit their scope of operations. The Minneapolis City Council went so far as to declare its intent to “dismantle” and “abolish” its rabid police force (The Guardian, 6/7). Mainstream Democrats like Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are pushing back against these initiatives. The finance capitalists, the bosses’ main wing, have a problem they cannot solve. On the one hand, they need to keep the loyalty of Black workers, both to get Trump out of office and, down the road, to fight in World War III. On the other hand, they need the cops to defend the bosses’ interests by terrorizing workers—and specifically Black workers. Black women and men, the most exploited and oppressed, have the greatest potential to give our class revolutionary leadership.
While Black Lives Matter’s reformism and identity politics are dangerous and divisive to our class, it’s a positive sign that more workers are aspiring to live in “a police-free society,” as the Minneapolis Council president called it. But we won’t be able to get there until we destroy capitalism, the source of all racism and inequality.
Communism is the only alternative—join PLP!
As the revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong once said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The ruling class will not peacefully hand over their state power or give up their trillions of dollars of profits. If only it were so easy! Historically, big changes—even within the limits of a reform struggle—come about only after workers resort to violence. Consider John Brown and the other armed abolitionists who helped to end slavery, or the gunfighting union coal miners of the 1920s. The gains of the U.S. civil rights movement wouldn’t have happened without armed self-defense groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice—or the bosses’ fear that urban uprisings would destroy their assets and undermine their Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.
But real and lasting change requires something more: organized mass violence to seize state power and make a new society run by and for the working class. Though their communist revolutions were later reversed, that’s what happened in Russia and China. That’s what Progressive Labor Party believes in. Individualistic looting or spontaneous violence won’t get workers what we need. Working class anger is a good and powerful thing, but it must be directed in a strategic way against the bosses. We need millions of workers internationally to join us to smash the bosses’ state with violent communist revolution.
Over the last two weeks, a multiracial, multigenerational, international fightback has given us a glimpse of workers’ potential and power. In New York and Minneapolis, bus drivers refused to take detained protestors off to jail. In Washington, a man sheltered 70 young rebels in his home overnight to help them avoid arrest. Medical workers are heading straight from their long hospital shifts to the latest rally. We don’t need the bosses’ politicians to pacify our anger. We don’t need the bosses’ cops to keep “order” by choking the life out of our brothers and sisters. We are who we have been waiting for!
At some point, the street protests will die down. That’s when we’ll need to carry the same fighting spirit back to our jobs and schools and churches. End the capitalist police state nightmare! Fight for communism! Join PLP!
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, June 1—Wherever workers are unmasking the failure of capitalism, communists will be there. Ten members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) from Chicago and Los Angeles touched down in Minneapolis to join the rebels fighting racist kkkops and the capitalist system that murdered George Floyd. These rebels set the world on fire. PLP is present to follow their leadership and spread communist politics.
For days following the viral video of George Floyd’s pleas of “I can’t breathe” and calling out for his mother, Minneapolis workers brought the City’s bosses to their knees. The rebels marched to the third precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and as night fell, the might of the workers caused the cops to flee. Workers then set the symbol of racism, sexism and oppression on fire. The message to workers everywhere—we have the power.
The rebels blazed a trail of protests worldwide—from London to Dakar to Bangkok to Kingston to Rio de Janeiro—proving once again that Black workers are key to revolution (see page 8). This uprising was not only about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Alex Flores. It was also about workers rebelling against a system that relies on racism to make profits and keep us divided (see page 5). Even if this kkkop Derek Chauvin is convicted, the police will continue to have open season in our class. Even if the police are “defunded,” the role of police (protect the bosses, terrorize the workers) will remain. They may just be cops by a different name or in a different suit.
To abolish police murder and racism, we need nothing short of a system based on need and collectivity instead of profit (see page 2).
“Oh so you’re communist communist?”
When PLP landed, we met with friends and protesters who had been taking part in the fearless uprising. Many said how empowered workers felt in Minneapolis and how they were dedicated to real change. They and many others PL met were thankful that people had come from other cities to support and fight alongside them (see box, page 3). PL’ers salute the rebels for the leadership they gave to the international working class.
Collectively we discussed what labor and life under communism would look like. We discussed the need for the rebellion to evolve into a communist revolution. Everyone agreed that attacking the bosses’ source of power (banks, police stations, media stations) was good. Now, we must fight to build a communist world on the ashes of capitalism. When the protests ebb, workers must continue and build a party to sustain the fightback. One day, PLP and workers will lead the revolution for an egalitarian world.
Bank burned & converted to bathroom
PL’ers and local friends rallied with 500 workers and witnessed the solidarity first hand. Black, white, Asian, Latin, and Muslim workers were sharing water, facemasks, and food. Wells Fargo Bank was burned down and converted into a makeshift bathroom for protesters. What an inspiration it was to see yet another symbol capitalist exploitation burned. This is the kind of leadership our class needs and deserves.
In front of the remains of Wells Fargo, PL’ers unfurled two banners. One called for justice for Alex Flores, 34-year-old Latin worker murdered by Los Angeles Police Department, effectively connecting one struggle to another. The other banner called for workers to join PLP to fight racist murder, calling out the killer Chicago Police Department (CPD). PL’ers and friends distributed 200 CHALLENGEs and 200 leaflets titled “Minneapolis Leads the Way—Burn This System Down.” PL’ers made speeches on the bullhorn about why we were there and our line against capitalism, racism and sexism (see twitter @PLPchallenge).
Eighty workers gathered to hear about communism. They cried out in agreement. Many asked about PLP. Everyone took a copy of CHALLENGE. It’s clear that communist politics belong to the working class and our class is eager to hear it, own it, and be involved in fighting for a better world.
Break curfew, give leadership
At 8 PM, phones went off to warn us that the curfew had begun. So we started marching.
PL’ers were close to the front of the large march, leading in chants like “Racism means—we got to fight back!” The fighters loved the chants and embraced our call for working-class unity under one revolutionary communist party, PLP.
As the march was passing through an empty intersection on the way to downtown, cops drove right into the middle of the march. PL’ers were in front of the cops, who immediately shot tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and stun grenades into the protest. Some fighters retreated. It was clear however that the march must go on.
The PL’ers were not from Minneapolis and didn’t know the literal lay of the land. Yet, the workers looked at the PL’ers for political leadership. Clearly, communist politics had won the confidence of the workers. PLP led the march for three miles through downtown Minneapolis.
When PLP walked the distance back to their cars, they saw the military vehicles driving up the closed expressway. This militarized police presence is proof of the fear that a militant and organized working class instills in the bosses. The bosses’ state was ready to throw all their might on us to protect their system. Rebellions, especially when multiracial and led by Black youth , put terror in the hearts of the exploiters. As it should.
Workers need communism
The experience in Minneapolis was inspiring and confirmed the necessity for communist politics. Rebellions in and of themselves will not lead to a revolution without the organization of the working class. The workers need to be armed with communist ideas. When communists are willing to lead, workers will take up the call—in the streets, on the job, in the churches, or in a study group.
PLP will build with the working class everywhere we are. It’s a lifetime of fighting, but we have fire in our bellies to fight for communism! To smash racism, join PLP!
When Black workers and youth rebel against the capitalist system, it puts the rest of the working class on notice to join. In response to the rebellion in Minneapolis, over 50 countries have protested in solidarity. It’s clearer than ever that Black workers’ leadership is key to communist revolution.
Brazil: Thousands connected the police murders in the U.S. to the anti-Black racism here. The protest also connected George Flyod with the local police murder of João Pedro Pinto, a 14-year-old Black teen shot in the back.
Syria: Workers in this imperialist war-ravaged country have made a glorious mural in the rubble of Idlib province decrying Floyd’s murder and sharply depicting U.S. kkkops wearing the hood of the Klan. U.S. racism has turned with lightning speed into just one more thing to hate about U.S. imperialism. It remains the Achilles’ heel of U.S. capitalism.
UK: In a furious display of anti-racist working class internationalism protesters here tore down a statue of slave trader Edward Colson that had stood since 1895 and pushed it to the water’s edge dumping and dumped it in Bristol Harbor.
Senegal: Students at Cheikh Anta Diop University protested to condemn and call to end racism worldwide.
Spain: Marchers broke a ban containing their protest to the vicinity of the U.S. embassy and took to Puerta del Sol, one of the city’s busiest districts (CNN.com, 6/8).
Cities/countries where sizable protests happened include Nigeria, Argentina, Lithuania, South Africa, Ireland,
Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Austria, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Norway, India, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Africa, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and more. Many of these protests were directed at U.S. embassies (al-Jazeera, 6/7).
When Black workers in the U.S. rise up, the world takes notice. Protest has become a regular feature of life in U.S. cities, large and small. In U.S. cities with larger Black populations the multiracial, and militant character of the protests have caught the ruling classes off guard. Across the globe, workers have taken notice and followed suit, risking their health to gather in large crowds in solidarity with the fight against racism. Multiracial, integrated, and antiracist protest is essential.
Of all that is rotten and wrong with the reign of U.S. imperialism’s liberal world order from climate catastrophe to endless war for oil, it is U.S. racism that has enraged the workers of the world to a degree unseen in decades. We are experiencing the strongest global mass movement since the one that arose in response to U.S. imperialism’s genocidal and ultimately failed effort to subdue the heroic workers and peasants of Vietnam, women and men led by the remnants of a once-revolutionary international communist movement. Black workers in uniformed rebellion were key in making the U.S. ruling class campaign of mass murder in Vietnam untenable.
Black workers remain key in sparking movements where the limits of ruling class power are made plain. As one veteran of the fighting in Minneapolis put it in a PLP forum when speaking about his enemy, the police: “At the end of the day, they are in this for the paycheck. They will never be willing to go as far as us.”
Such wisdom and truth revealed to a new generation can only leave ruling classes quaking in their boots. It leaves communists with increased confidence that we will win, and that Black workers will be key to this victory. We are experiencing just a taste of a world where the struggle of the working class vs. the ruling class, and not between imperialist ruling classes, is the main thing driving events. Inter-imperialist rivalry no doubt still remains the main contradiction in the world; Iran, Russia, and China are already jumping to use the Floyd protests to attack the U.S. 's standing.
Only communism can meet the latent, inextinguishable and now powerful aspiration of the billions who yearn for a world free from the scourge of racism. Anti-racist ideas have gripped the masses and become a material force. We see more clearly how communism can win. This historical-world-historical shift PLP is dedicated to bringing about. Join us!
Newark, May 30—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends fought to share working class communist politics at two demonstrations and a march. The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, spoke under the guise of protesting against police brutality in the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN. He tried seducing masses away from revolutionary ideas of workers power and communist revolution. “We want to march to change the systemic issues...We want good officers to stand up. In Newark, we are fighting right now with the Supreme Court to have the strongest civilian complaint review board.”
However, there is no possible way for “good” cops to stand up because the role of the police under capitalism won’t allow it. Racism and sexism are the viruses of the profit system; it is the foundation of capitalism.
From Covid-19 to George Floyd
Kkkops murdered George Floyd for allegedly using a fake $20 bill. Working class rebellions in response to many murders like his are not unrelated to the way the ruling class has managed the crisis of Covid-19. Worldwide, bosses used their governments to attempt to build class unity between themselves and workers by promoting: “we’re all in this together”. Instead, class hatred of bosses’ disregard for the lives of workers has intensified, while multiracial fightback and anti-racism has grown among workers. Ruling-class imposed lockdowns have resulted in massive attacks on the international working class.
In Newark, the bosses keeping Baraka in charge were incapable of protecting every worker. Instead, Baraka intensified police intimidation in the most exploited and working-class neighborhoods. Thousands of undocumented families had no work or food. Bosses at Newark Beth Israel Hospital suspended a nurse for bringing in protective gear. Incarcerated workers were left to get sick. Many students received failing grades, with total disregard for growing hardships.
How many of us could have benefited from another $20, fake or not, in this time?
Liberal fascist Baraka disarms workers
Whenever the bosses can choose between using ideology or violence to weaken the working class, they will choose to use ideas to brainwash workers and develop misleaders. Now, capitalist ideas of reform and electoral politics have been rejected by workers across the U.S. The use of riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets, sabotage and brutal physical violence against working class rebellions exposes the true nature of “liberal” misleaders. headOnly an armed revolution led by millions of communist workers committed to anti-racism, anti-sexism and internationalism can stop this racist terror.
Fake “radical” politician Baraka is supported by New Jersey’s corporate elite. His job is to hold down the militancy of workers in this mainly Black and Latin city. Rather than organize workers to fight capitalism and the capitalist class that forced workers to be poisoned with lead for years, Baraka and other liberal politicians advocate for passivity. Next year, Newark Public Schools, the state’s largest district will lose $36.4 million. According to an nj.com article, when Baraka started as Mayor he had 900 police officers. His goal - 1700 cops - nearly doubled since he took office (12/16/17). After centuries of racist terror, the working class in Newark, (and elsewhere,) know all too well that an increase in KKKiller cops is not to serve the community.
Workers hungry for communist leadership
5,000 multiracial, and multigenerational workers were ready and looking for a way to fight back. More than a 1,000 took copies of CHALLENGE. The headline of the latest CHALLENGE – “Communism Will End Racist Police Terror” – put our line right up front.
With a bullhorn, electrifying politics and chants, PLP energized about 500 workers. Many went off against capitalism:
“They are not only killing my brother and everyone else that has been killed by the police. You are killing a family. You killed our lack of trust in this system. We tried to get justice. What did they do in return? They promoted the cop stating it was robbery homicide...This is for my generation when I was growing up I didn't see no justice and nobody gave a damn. He was just another fallen statistic and it happened in our streets in Newark, New Jersey.”
“People are living better with unemployment then going to work...I’m tired of seeing my little nieces and nephews go to school and not learn a damn thing...I’m tired of going to the hospital and having to pay big ass bills for something small. How the hell can we afford to live...How the hell are we living under constant injustice and oppression but they expect us to keep calm. We are not going to keep calm. Another one is dead. So that means all of us are rising up.”
These rallies showed us two things. First, youth and workers are looking for revolutionary ideas. Second, the local ruling class in Newark, led by Mayor Ras Baraka, has maintained the anger of the working class by claiming to reform the cops so that they can work for them. Kkkops won't exist in a communist world because there wouldn't be a ruling class system of bosses and profits to protect. Workers internationally will provide for one another as a community making use of materials as needed. Capitalism is the disease and communism is the cure.
