CHICAGO, May 2—Close to 50 multiracial Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades and friends gathered at a park on the city’s west side today, to celebrate International Workers Day. Proudly waving red flags, revolutionary banners and signs, we proclaimed to the masses our communist messages of antiracism, antisexism, internationalism and workers’ power.
Hardly a month and a half ago, our collective was unsure if we would be able to host our annual May Day celebration this year, because of the health risks posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. But collectivity, organization, and communist boldness go a long way. Today’s success shows how we continue to adapt and put our revolutionary line into practice in creative and inspiring ways.
As the racist pandemic continues to devastate workers the world over, the revolutionary spirit of May Day and need for organizing a mass PLP are as essential as ever. We are proud to carry on the generations of communist struggle represented by International Workers Day, and build the lifelong fight for a borderless world!
This is our time!
A handful of comrades arrived early at the rally site to begin preparing for our physically distanced demonstration. Along the points of the sidewalk and grass we measured out distances of six feet, and placed red flags in the ground to mark the space. N95 masks were available to everyone who participated. We decorated nearby bus stops, trees, and light posts with banners and red balloons. Using chalk, we wrote revolutionary communist slogans in large letters on the sidewalk.
As soon as the stage was safely set, we jumped right into our program. A veteran comrade kicked off the celebration by giving a brief history of May Day, including its origins and its true meaning as a communist holiday celebrated all over the world.
A total of five speeches were given, in both Spanish and English, delivered mostly by younger comrades. A spoken word piece written by a comrade working in health care blasted racist capitalism’s priorities of money and profit at all costs, over workers’ lives.
A college student comrade called out the bosses in Chicago for blowing up a toxic coal plant in a Latin working-class neighborhood recently, which covered much of the area in dust in the middle of the pandemic. She stressed the racist double standard and criminalization by the state of Black, Latin, and immigrant workers who are fighting to survive despite the system’s deadly neglect.
Two speeches completely in Spanish came next. The first was from a comrade who has long led struggles in public schools in a majority immigrant worker neighborhood. She detailed the racist response and treatment from Chicago Public Schools in how they are continuing their legacy of racist failure in “educating” working-class youth during the stay-at-home order. Another comrade condemned the racist death sentence handed down from the bosses to immigrant workers in concentration camps, and contrasted how a communist world based on workers’ needs would handle a pandemic far differently.
For the keynote speech, a teacher comrade reflected on his experiences years ago in Ferguson, Missouri after the murder of Mike Brown by racist cop Darren Wilson. As the capitalist bosses ramp up their fascist attacks during the pandemic, he reminded everyone present that “this is our time” and for all comrades to “pick up your gun” and step up for the fights to come.
Up to and including the point where PLP and workers violently take state power from the capitalists, our political ideas are our strongest weapons. The comrade correctly stated that each CHALLENGE that we put in another worker’s hands, each study group that we hold, every walk-out or strike we help organize is a shot fired at the capitalist class.
We wrapped up our rally by singing the communist anthem “The Internationale” in Spanish and English. To finish, our caravan of over 20 cars enthusiastically navigated through working-class neighborhoods around the west side. Many workers who saw the procession pumped their fists in salute and came up to the cars to receive copies of CHALLENGE, of which we handed out over 100 copies!
May Day means… workers’ power!
As the crises of capitalism intensify, the international working class and our Party are presented with many dangers, but also with many opportunities. The celebration of May Day must serve as a vibrant reminder of our own multiracial unity as workers, collective power, and potential to transform the world through communist revolution. The words first spoken over a century ago still ring true today: Workers of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains!
BROOKLYN, NY May 1—For 50 years, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been carrying on the May Day tradition with marches in working class communities. We bring our revolutionary ideas to thousands of people who participate in or witness these marches.
Although we couldn’t march this year in Brooklyn as we have in the past few years, a group of us organized in a different way. We contacted friends from work, community as well as family members to share our celebration. Our determination was to be able to share May Day with as many workers as possible. Our efforts resulted in our biggest May Day participation in years!
We collectively planned an event weaving together images of past PLP marches, the history of May Day's origins, and its revolutionary international character. PLP’s commitment to the fight against racism was proudly showcased in our history, from our May Day march in Boston in 1975 against the fascist anti-busing movement, to our May Day march in Chicago against the Nazis and violent racists. More recently we marched here in Brooklyn along with family members of victims of racist police murders. We highlighted an inspiring example of the working class’ fighting spirit during WWII. Jewish fighters with communist leadership found a way to celebrate May Day in the midst of their heroic armed struggle in Poland's Warsaw ghetto.
We heard a nurse give a detailed indictment of the failures of capitalist health care and their lack of preparation, and mistreatment of workers in the current Covid-19 pandemic. We noted the racist nature of capitalist medical care before and during this crisis. While many of our friends clearly see Donald Trump’s failures, we pointed out the systemic racism and cuts that have occurred under both Democrats and Republicans. A former hospital worker pointed out the huge number of hospital closings and the decrease in total beds (20,000) and staff over the last 20 years in New York. No wonder the number of deaths are so high.
A report was made about the organizing work outside of the U.S. Our comrade detailed the efforts being made to collectively solve the life and death immediate needs of hunger, sanitary conditions and medication made worse during this pandemic. In the midst of these efforts the comrade explained how revolutionary communist ideas were connected to past and current problems and how a communist revolution is the only solution!
As a result of our May Day efforts, a number of the participants voiced interest in learning more about PLP’s communist ideas in study/action groups.
HYATTSVILLE, MD, May 4—Today a bold car caravan rally, organized by Community Justice (CJ), protested the reinstatement of six killer cops to the Hyattsville police force. Twenty cars carrying 30 people, adorned with militant signs against racist police brutality rolled several times around the police station. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members participated in planning this event, calling attention to the way the racist capitalist system systematically terrorizes and intimidates the working class, leaving us no choice but to organize for communist revolution!
Drivers honked their horns continuously as we circled police headquarters. Rebellious music (“Momma momma, Can’t You See”, “Fight the Power”, “They Don’t Care about Us”), blared from a loudspeaker, and a CJ spokesperson vehemently condemned the police and the political leaders of Hyattsville as the caravan stopped briefly in front of the police station.
What sparked this protest was the decision by the Hyattsville police chief, endorsed by the city administrator and unopposed by the mayor and city council, to reinstate cops who murdered Leonard Shand last October. Ten cops from three jurisdictions surrounded Shand and killed him in a hail of bullets like a firing squad (see CHALLENGE, 11/6/2019).
Since then, Shand’s family, CJ, PLP members, and other community organizations have demanded accountability for this heinous racist crime. Instead, we have been met with a pro-cop narrative from Mayor Candice Hollingsworth, Police Chief Amal Awad, and now City Administrator Tracey Douglas. They are justifying the killing, saying that “no violations of internal policy” have been found (Route 1 Reporter, 5/5). These three misleaders are Black women, showing that nationalism or feminism won’t lead us to liberation.
We need working-class unity for communist revolution. All politicians serve only the needs of capitalism, whatever their personal identity and rhetoric. We can only rely on the rank-and-file of the working class to advance our struggle for
liberation! Strikingly, Awad and Douglas made this decision while the formal investigation of these cops by the Prince George’s Police Department (PGPD) and the States Attorney for the Shand murder has not yet been completed.
These Hyattsville political leaders are providing a pre-emptive, de facto exoneration of these killers! Not that workers expect justice from the PGPD investigation. After all, that department harbors cops like those who murdered William Green (see CHALLENGE, 2/17/2019 and Washington Post, 10/23/2019). PGPD has been subject to two federal consent decrees from the U.S. Department of Justice for unconstitutional policing, and still conducts racist intimidation, assaults, and murders.
As CJ rightly continues to escalate its demands for accountability, PLP members will continue to participate, while calling on all workers to join the long term fight for real justice that can only come from toppling the capitalist system. That system needs racist terror and intimidation to keep the working class divided, exploited, and disarmed. Building multi-racial, revolutionary unity in the long term battle for a communist, egalitarian, anti-racist society is the key to our final victory over this inhumane, racist capitalist system.
Every day, capitalism more and more reveals itself as a system that can never serve workers’ needs and must be wiped from the face of the earth. The new coronavirus pandemic, which rulers worldwide could see coming, has temporarily shut down large sectors of their economy. But regardless of when the bosses reopen some or all of their factories and services, it’s clear that their much-touted “boom” has become the biggest catastrophe for workers since the Great Depression, or perhaps ever in modern history. Behind this monumental failure are the economic laws of capitalism (see box) and their cyclical crises. Ultimately, the rulers can survive their self-induced cataclysm only by inciting workers to fight and die by the millions in the coming inter-imperialist world war. As communists in Progressive Labor Party, it’s our job to lead the international working class to turn this murderous conflagration into a fire of revolutionary uprisings. It’s our task to build a world that abolishes production for profit, racism, sexism, and the exploitation of workers.
Big Fascists’ divisions
The Big Fascists of finance capital, who have led U.S. imperialism since World War II, are in a fight to the death with the domestically oriented Small Fascists led by the Koch family and fronted by President Donald Trump. These two factions of bloodsucking parasites have different ideas about getting their profit machine back on track. The Small Fascists are pushing to reopen businesses quickly while passing the buck for Covid-19 testing and ducking any obligation to the cash-hemorrhaging states. The more long-term-thinking Big Fascists, like the Council on Foreign Relations’ Richard Haass, understand that state and local governments and hospitals will need funds to stay afloat and keep workers alive and churning out profits. The ruling class can’t wait until 2021 and a possible vaccine to end mass “safer-at-home” orders and reopen their economy. They need to ramp up surveillance testing and tracking on a mass scale. If they succeed in doing it, it won’t be out of empathy for the workers whose lives hang in the balance. The bosses care only about keeping their assembly lines and supply chains intact and protecting their industries from destruction.
Though they have yet to gather the will to practice what they preach, the Big Fascists know they need to discipline their own class to build all-class unity for world war. They must also co-opt the burgeoning struggles of fast food and other workers and by tenant unions calling for strikes and rent cancellation. But even as liberal Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo feign concern for their residents, it is clear they botched the response to this crisis (see CHALLENGE, 4/29). In fact, both federal and state politicians made severe budget cuts that have led to rationed health care for the working class. Annual reports from U.S. intelligence agencies predicting an inevitable pandemic make a mockery of ruling class claims that they could not prepare for it (The Atlantic, 3/18).
As the great “progressive” hope Bernie Sanders endorses the racist, sexist bankers’ stooge, Joe Biden, as the Democratic nominee for president, main wing liberals are blaming Trump for the latest economic crisis and mismanaging the Covid-19 response. But communists know that the problem began long before Trump and will be with us long after the racist grifter is gone. It’s capitalism that creates the conditions for the disasters that ravage the working class.
With the seeming success in containing the virus in Australia and New Zealand, as well as in South Korea, “some scientists wonder if eliminating the virus with good management might rebuild some faith not just in democracy, but also in the value of expertise” (New York Times, 4/24).
The island nations’ bosses swiftly locked down outside travel and controlled their populations with thorough contact tracing through cell phones. Sooner than later, the U.S. rulers will need similar technology to impose open fascism and prepare for war.
Buildup to World War III
Prolonged global economic crises expose the fact that capitalism will never work for the working class. As their rate of profit falls (see box), capitalists have only one option: a massive destruction of productive capacity that allows them to start the next cycle with less competition. The capitalist world escaped the Great Depression only after both sides bombed their rivals’ factories into oblivion in World War II.
Today, as a prelude to the war to come, the rulers’ nationalist propaganda is on the rise in the U.S. and China. Both of these imperialist rivals must win workers to betray their own class interests and fight a duel to the death for world hegemony. China, the rising power, has used the Covid-19 crisis to brandish its world leadership credentials. Since March 1, it has exported millions of masks, testing kits, and pieces of personal protective equipment (New York Post, 4/6), while pointing to high U.S. death rates and blaming the U.S. military for concocting the rus. The U.S. rulers, meanwhile, are promoting anti-China racism by attacking the Chinese bosses’ early cover-up of the extent of the infection and using the CIA to uncover uncounted deaths there (NYT, 4/2). In its latest vain attempt to check China’s expansion, the U.S. Navy has sent warships into the South China Sea (NYT, 4/21).
Only communism can serve the working class
Workers forced to choose between hunger and a deadly virus can see through this racist garbage. Though many mass protests have been curtailed by curfews and bans on gatherings, workers are still letting their voices be heard. Whether with masks and physical distancing, in caravans of cars, or online and on the phone, strikes and protests are inspiring our class worldwide. Let workers led by communists seize these moments of struggle.
Let’s overthrow the bosses and their death-dealing system! With 26 million workers and counting having filed for unemployment benefits in the U.S. alone, and millions of others out of work who don’t qualify, there now hundreds of millions more unemployed workers worldwide. As masses face hunger and homelessness, the working class is growing more restless. Strikes for the most basic protective equipment and healthier workplaces are spreading, led by the same workers who recently were fighting like hell for better wages and benefits.
Tenants in North America, Europe, and elsewhere are organizing for May 1 strikes to demand rent cancellation for the duration of the pandemic crisis. While the U.S. rulers fight among themselves over how to hold on to their dwindling power in the face of severe challenges from Chinese imperialists, we in Progressive Labor Party have a historic opportunity. As we continue to organize on the job and in our mass organizations, we can turn this upsurge in activity and militancy into schools for communism.
The profit-mad capitalists have a warped view of “essential” work during a pandemic. Health care, grocery stores, food service, and public transportation are necessities for workers. But construction crews building multimillion-dollar sports stadiums in gentrifying neighborhoods aren’t essential for the working class. Nor are racist police harassing and killing our class brothers and sisters in the streets.
The most essential work we can do is to build a mass communist organization to smash the bosses and kill the contagion of capitalism. On to May Day! Join PLP!
*****
Karl Marx on Capitalism in Crisis
“Overproduction is specifically conditioned by the general law... to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay.”
-Karl Marx, Crisis Theory
Karl Marx and the early communist movement studied and exposed the inner workings of capitalism. These thinkers found that capitalist economies—based on production for profit—are vulnerable to periodic crises. Two of their most important ideas are the crisis of overproduction, the result of an unplanned, competitive system, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time.
Mature capitalism requires huge corporations to borrow enormous amounts of money to beat out the competition and corner the market. It creates a consumer economy that requires massive amounts of credit and debt. The bosses’ profit imperatives and competitive pressures lead them to ruthlessly cut costs and attack workers’ wages. This in turn leads to overproduction, since workers can’t afford to buy what all the companies produce.
As restaurants close and workers are fired or furloughed and can’t buy as much food, we see farmers destroying livestock and crops simply because they can’t sell them. No matter that children are going hungry and groceries and food banks are battling shortages. If goods can’t generate a profit, the bosses will plow them under. The capitalist ruling class is driven first and last to protect its own economic interests. Workers’ needs are irrelevant.
The falling rate of profit is most noticeable in advanced capitalist economies like the U.S. Early on, it leads businesses to move their factories to less developed countries, where they can pay workers less and environmental regulations are looser. Then they shift their capital from plants and new technology into paper investments like mortgages and other debt packaged as assets. These asset bubbles eventually burst, as evidenced by the subprime housing market debacle in 2007-8. Because of the global interconnectedness of capitalism, economic downturns in one area soon lead to devastating consequences for workers throughout the world.
The following speech was be given at an Education May Day in New York City.
The world under capitalism is failing and there are two emerging options—the bosses’ option is fascism. Fascism through increased surveillance and police, war over profits and power, destruction of health and education systems, and other crimes against us. Covid-19 has laid bare the lethal racist inequalities of the profit system. From the United States to Africa, from Latin America to South Asia, workers everywhere are suffering unnatural deaths from the disease of capitalism. The choice between capitalist decay and an international communist future has never been clearer.
For the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), our way is building a communist world where workers seize power and erect a society in the interest of the entire international working class.
Neighborhoods, churches, schools, prisons, hospitals, community centers, trains, and buses. These are some of the places where PLP is cultivating a culture of fightback and pro-communist ideas and practices. We are building a Party where all workers and lives are considered essential.
May Day is the celebration of class. Today, we bridge our demands together to fight for communism, a world where exploitation of workers by bosses is banned and racism and sexism is outlawed. The coronavirus is an opportunity for bosses to increase their power but also for workers to fight back and build a world worthy of us. With our responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, communists and friends of the party are already showing how a communist world where we rely on each other instead of bosses could be possible. Haiti. Mexico. Colombia. Chicago. Los Angeles. East Africa. All over the world, we are finding innovative ways to safeguard the health and fighting spirit of our class.
In the last year alone, we have many fightbacks to celebrate:
- Newark, NJ: workers fought for lead-free water and exposed the racist lies of the liberal mayor.
- Los Angeles, CA: Workers connected the struggle of Shantel Davis in Brooklyn to Alex Flores in LA, both who lost their family members to kkkiller kops.
- From Puerto Rico to Colombia, we led the way for an education for liberation for our students.
Meanwhile, how are the bosses responding? On one side, the Small Fascist domestic bosses are pushing to open businesses back up. See, no matter the way they go about it, the ruling class puts workers around the world last and the well being of their profits first! They are building a new world that will put us all in danger but Big Fasicst liberals like Cuomo in NY, Ras Baraka in Newark, AMLO in Mexico, Lori Lightfoot in Chicago are the main danger for workers today and moving forward after Covid-19. The Big Fascist liberals send their lackeys like NY Governor Cuomo to cry crocodile tears while still ripping out the vital resources. They smile in our face while planning ways to lock Black and Latin workers up, whether that’s in the prison system or in debt to the banks. With our chains attached, they’ll ship us to war against their biggest rivals, China and Russia but package the gift of joining their multiracial ranks as freedom from capitalism.
To be a communist means to step up in defense of the working class, now in crisis, and forever in struggle. The opportunities to serve our class will continue on even after Covid-19. It is only by the international working class uniting together to fight back against this racist, sexist system that we can put in real work to free us all.
Worldwide, capitalist infrastructure is crumbling. From our homes, schools, prisons, and the slaughterhouse-hospitals, workers lives matter as long as they create profit. It is our duty as members of the international working class to take responsibility for each other and lead the way toward a communist future. Power to the working class!
