Bernardo (Joe) Cerini was born on February 20, 1932, named Bernardo Cerini, and lived his entire life in New York City. He grew up during the hardest years of the Great Depression. His family had a very hard time. Joe remembered dreading that there would be nothing to eat at home. The brutality of capitalism was a lesson he learned from an early age.
Witnessing racism and
U.S. imperialism firsthand
In 1950, when he was 18, he was drafted. Draftees were sent by train to basic training in the South. As a NYC contingent it was a multiracial group and they made friends as they journeyed south. They were traveling into the Jim Crow south of the 1950s that was still segregated. Joe and his buddies fought many fights against racists, on the base and in the local town, whenever they hung out as a multi-racial group. Eventually they were reassigned to separate units and labelled as troublemakers. Joe wore that label proudly.
After their training, the soldiers were shipped to Korea to the Korean War involving many countries. Now, besides the overt racism of the Army, Joe learned of the horrors of imperialism. He said that some of the troops from other countries had been mustered by “recruiting” men from their prisons, putting them in uniforms and shipping them to Korea. These guys were brutal. They stole everything off the bodies of fallen soldiers and peasants around them, wore looted watches all the way up their arms, and didn’t give a damn about who they killed. Joe said he was more afraid of the troops behind him than the troops facing him!
But the greatest horror of the war was the abject savagery of U.S. imperialism. The U.S. Air Force would swoop in before an assault and drop white phosphorus on a village. It burns right through human flesh and the hides of animals destroying every living thing in its path. Then the troops were ordered to attack, running over the dead in their assault. Joe was sickened beyond belief even as he retold this 70 years later.
When he returned to the U.S., Bernardo changed his name to Joe, in honor of Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin who was the leader of the heroic Soviet Red Army that crushed the Nazi war machine in WWII and, and in honor of Joe Hill, an American union organizer who was framed for murder by the bosses and executed in 1904. He was evolving into a new person – a fierce fighter for the working class.
Becoming a lifelong PL’er
When he met the newly formed Progressive Labor Party in the 1960s Joe embraced it wholeheartedly! Here were the comrades, the like-minded workers with whom he would fight for the rest of his life! Here was an analysis of the world that made sense of all his experiences and offered a view to the only future for the working class – communist revolution!
Joe was in PLP for 60 years. He was a NYC transit worker for over 30 years. He and fellow white transit workers went to Harlem to actively recruit Black workers into transit jobs. He was a dedicated leader in the historic 1966 strike, when 33,000 transit workers completely shut down the city for 12 days. Joe also dedicated himself to the production and distribution of CHALLENGE. He was still distributing the paper at the age of 90! As he lay ill, his last words were, “Tell everyone, fight for communism, power to the working class.” We will, Joe, we will!
Three comrades in Progressive Labor Party attended the first meeting of our union’s Immigrant Solidarity Working Group, along with 50 other members from many CUNY campuses. A Law School professor spoke to us about how Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents have different restrictions depending on whether it’s a public or a private space. For ICE to come onto campus (a private space), their agents are required to have a judicial warrant, which needs to be signed by a judge. However, ICE often barges into private spaces without a legitimate warrant, so their agents need to be confronted and asked to see a warrant. One of the projects of our group is a Rapid Response Team that will gather quickly at sites where ICE has come to arrest people.
Organizing antiracist fightback
The group is just beginning, but two things impressed me at the meeting. First, many were excited about starting committees on campus to reach out to students and other faculty members with tabling, teach-ins, film-showings, and putting pressure on the administration to keep ICE off-campus at a time when Mayor Adams is welcoming ICE’s presence. Second, there is a qualitative difference when a union throws its resources into a campaign. Our union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), has "Immigrants Are Welcome Here!" flyers that professors are putting on their office doors. It has printed thousands of small Know Your Rights cards to hand out on campus. The union website has a wealth of information about immigrant rights. The union has members from many countries, and the PSC is part of the NYC Immigration Coalition with other unions and community groups.
One of the films we plan to show on campuses is the 2024 film, Borderland: The Line Within, which graphically depicts how ICE detention centers are not only on the southern border but are spread throughout the country. The border is everywhere! Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the border was increasingly militarized and the massive ICE infrastructure grew. Dozens of companies, including Amazon, make huge profits from contracts as part of the Border Industrial Complex, which last year under Biden received $25 billion in contracts.
The film centers on undocumented immigrants who have refused to be cowed or be silent, and who are fighting for the right of those without papers to live where they want. For most of human history, there were no borders and no nations. Borderland also shows us the admirable work of organizations like The Border Network for Human Rights and No More Deaths, groups with volunteers who leave gallons of water and set up tents with food and medicine for thirsty and hungry migrants crossing the desert.
Communists are vitally important in bringing a class analysis to the fight against deportations. We understand that borders benefit capitalists in two ways:
(1) They produce a class of undocumented workers who are exploited on farms, meatpacking and poultry plants, construction sites, and restaurants, but who are afraid to protest or organize for fear their bosses will turn them over to ICE. These vulnerable workers are a source of super profits for their employers, but they also benefit U.S. capitalism as a whole because their low pay keeps wages low for all workers, and
(2) The big capitalists like Elon Musk (worth over $400 billion) and the politicians that serve them work overtime trying to convince native-born workers that their problems are the results of foreign workers being here, splitting the working class. As though the anxiety workers feel over high prices, insufficient wages, high levels of debt, and inadequate medical care are because of other workers with the same problems, and not because of the billionaires whose greed knows no limits!
When we chant “Stop Racist Deportations, Working People Have No Nation!” or “No ICE, No Fear, Immigrants Are Welcome Here!”, we’re motivated by a vision of a future world without borders, without nations, without the current system of global apartheid, and without bosses — a world run by workers. That’s communism.
We don’t need permission to defend the working class!
Today, one hundred students, professors and professional staff rallied and marched on the campus of Queens College (QC), part of the City University of New York. We were protesting a violation of the QC president’s regulations! According to the president, any group wishing to hold a demonstration must submit a request at least three days before the event. This and other tight restrictions are part of a nationwide blitzkrieg on the part of university administrators to curb college protests, especially protests against the Israel/U.S. genocide in Gaza.
There is a clock tower on campus named after three murdered civil rights workers: Andrew Goodman (who attended QC), James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. One of the speakers at today’s protest remarked, “The administration never tires of extolling Andrew Goodman. But do you think Andrew Goodman would have asked for permission to protest injustice on campus?” The large crowd responded loudly, “NO!!”
We marched around campus, stopping at buildings that had been the site of past anti-war protests and protests against tuition increases, with people holding large placards with photos of those events. The rally and march was organized by the chapter of the Professional Staff Congress, which last week had an online teach-in and collected 565 faculty and student signatures on a petition opposing the new policy. We marched into the administration building to deliver the petition — violating the new “no inside demonstrations” rule!
The PSC has also organized an Immigrant Solidarity Working Group, in which PLP comrades are participating. Today, a speaker asked, “If ICE shows up on our campus, do you think we’ll ask for permission to confront them and protect our students from being thrown into a detention center and deported?” The answer again was a vigorous “NO!!”
Years before he co-authored the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote a series of articles arguing that peasants collecting dead wood in the forests of the big landlords should not be beaten and in some cases killed for “property theft.” Marx argued that the fallen tree branches were no longer the property of the landed aristocracy and could be collected by the peasants to warm their homes. He and Engels consistently defended the right of the exploited to organize, to demonstrate and speak out, to publish radical pamphlets, and to strike. In a period of rising fascist repression, the battle to protect freedom of assembly and speech of students, faculty and staff is a necessary part of a larger struggle for social justice and for communism.
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Our Black students matter
During my morning prep, a comrade in my club sent a flier for the memorial for a student who was murdered. Her principal had refused to have any memorial of him in the building, even going so far as to say that teachers weren’t even legally allowed to say his name. I mentioned this to several teachers who were prepping with me.
One of the teachers pointed out that a similar event had happened at her school and that the administration had wanted to keep it business as usual. I pointed out that this was racism, as in predominantly Black schools, the students who are murdered due to capitalism’s wanton violence are considered a norm. The bosses want the death of these students to be seen as an everyday occurrence and not as a horrible tragedy. Their administrators carry out this racist idea that this violence is just the scenery in a Black school.
The teacher, who was both Black and a woman, told us teachers how hard it was to lose students and then be told to tell the survivors to “get it together” and excel in class. She ended up having to leave that historically Black school and was happy to hear that our comrade had fought so hard for Black youth to be seen as valuable and their death is a tragedy that should be felt. This moment helped me to remember that we should be bringing up the victories our comrades are having due to good practice in their work. These are the little things that count.
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Class society is not human nature; fightback is
Over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Progressive Labor Party hosted a West Coast retreat which brought together workers and students to discuss the world situation and how the Party’s line can be put forth to workers in our base and mass organizations. The retreat focused on three specific areas: (1) Bosses can’t rule in the old way, (2) Workers can’t live in the old way and (3) Why we need a Party. We also had one person join the Party who has since been meeting with the education club in Southern California.
One of the most impressive parts of the retreat was the collectivity everyone put forth. When we arrived someone made a chart that had a space for each person’s name under either set up or clean up for meals and other various jobs. Every person wrote their name in one of the spaces which meant that we each only had one small job to do. Whereas under capitalist society a small group of bosses sit back doing nothing while the masses of workers are exploited and super exploited this weekend showed we do have the ability to live collectively and from each according to their ability to each according to their need.
One of the main highlights of the weekend was a presentation about the progression of human nature. The presenters showed how human beings had existed for tens of thousands of years under primitive communism and showed the progression and development of class society. Often workers are made to believe that class society has always existed and humans don’t have the capacity to live collectively. But, our presenters proved that to be inaccurate and we were able to see through practice that we can and should live collectively under a classless society with communist principles guiding us.
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Enjoying experience at the DC march
Upon entering a Progressive Labor Party member’s home the morning of the People’s march in D.C., I noticed many PL’ers already within the first floor. I turned to my left to enter the dining room where I spoke to two comrades about the Russia-Iran Nuclear Treaty. After the conversation, I had some breakfast and familiarized myself with one comrade I met at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Not long after, PL’ers in charge of organizing our contingent gathered everybody in the living room. They discussed the plans for how we were going to march on Freedom Plaza. I offered to hold a bag of CHALLENGE copies before we left the house. Once it was time to go, the leadership requested us to line up with a partner. We made our way down to the bus stop and got on once we were ready.
Once we got off, we traveled down the street to a corner near the Plaza. We stopped there to form a picket line to get our message across. I was distributing CHALLENGE to passersby. Unfortunately, I was only able to sell two copies before we started marching to our destination. This is where it started to get rejuvenating. During our march, we held up posters and yelled out chants. My favorite one being ‘Arab, Jewish, Black, and White. Workers of the world unite!’ Overall, I had an enjoyable time marching with PLP and I wouldn’t mind going to another one of their protests.
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Fighting modern-day nazis
I have been sending the above document to my base, and to progressive bookstores that take CHALLENGE newspapers that I send them. This document is on how to refuse cooperating with ICE as it looks for undocumented workers. I didn’t write it, but it’s an antiracist attempt to help resist. The arbitrary arrest of undocumented immigrants by ICE (the ‘Gestapo’ of this era ) is dangerous, and represents fascism. True to racist form, ICE is not only targeting immigrant workers from Latin America, especially Black workers from Haiti, but also Muslim workers. Racism hurts all workers. Trump is one of the most blatant open racists since Woodrow Wilson. The international working class must stop this fascist. Workers, students, and soldiers must resist. The working class under Progressive Labor Party leadership, must stop these attempts to create a Nazi 4th Reich. At the same time we must organize for communist revolution, where workers run the world collectively
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Black workers crush police-protected Nazi rally
WKRC 12, 2/7–A group of neo-Nazis was seen on Friday hanging a banner and flags off the overpass between Evendale and Lincoln Heights. With Lincoln Heights being a historically Black community, their demonstration drew counter-protests. Lincoln Heights residents yelled for them to leave and set fire to one of their flags. They took a stand against white supremacists…"They jumped into U-Haul [and] we pulled up on the bridge and grabbed a flag. As the people here, we burned the flag right over there," said Howard…He also wants to talk to the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office and Evendale Police for not breaking up the neo-Nazis' protest…
Historical parallels between South Africa and Israel just won’t go away
France24, 2/8–South Africa on Saturday condemned a "campaign of misinformation" after US President Donald Trump issued an order freezing aid to the country over a law he alleges allows land to be seized from white farmers. Land ownership is a contentious issue in South Africa, with most farmland still owned by white people three decades after the end of apartheid…The allegation came in an executive order, which also noted foreign policy clashes between the United States and South Africa over the war in Gaza, particularly Pretoria's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice…"
Ukraine is running out of people
Der Spiegel, 1/24–The Russian invasion has now turned the demographic crisis into a catastrophe. Almost 7 million people…have fled abroad since…the day of the invasion. At least 5 million Ukrainians are now living under Russian occupation, cut off from the rest of the country by trenches and minefields…In the early 1990s…Ukraine had a population of 51.5 million. Today, only an estimated 29 million people live in Ukrainian areas…The populations of industrialized countries begin shrinking when the birthrate falls below 2.1 children per woman, and in the EU, the rate is 1.5. In Ukraine, though, the birth rate has fallen below one…The country is running out of people.
Workers rally, march and make plans to fight fascism
The Guardian, 2/9–Thousands took to the streets on Wednesday and Saturday last week following a series of dramatic raids by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement throughout Denver as protesters expressed solidarity with the undocumented…last week heavily armed Swat teams began storming apartment complexes around Denver and Aurora in the early hours of the morning …though with 30 arrests in all, only one gang member has been confirmed to be in custody…The protester and artist Starks, along with many others, has been attending weekly gatherings at a local Methodist church on how to best serve the legal needs of immigrants.
Analysis of Trump’s foreign policy plan
Foreign Affairs, 1/30–Pax Americana is gone. Born with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S.-led international rules-based order died with the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump…“The postwar global order is not just obsolete,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared…Trump’s skepticism about U.S. support for Ukraine and Taiwan, his eagerness to impose tariffs, and his threats to retake the Panama Canal, absorb Canada, and acquire Greenland make it clear that he envisions a return to nineteenth-century power politics and spheres of interest…humiliating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the 2008–9 financial crisis shattered faith in the U.S…
Mark one for China versus U.S. in battle of imperialists
Al Jazeera, 2/10–Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown is visiting Beijing this week to sign a strategic partnership agreement with the world’s second-largest economy in the latest sign of China’s expanding influence in the Pacific Islands region. But the proposed pact has shaken decades-old ties between the Cook Islands and New Zealand…the United States and its allies in the region, including Australia and New Zealand, have been wary of China’s growing influence in the Pacific ever since Beijing signed a security agreement with the Solomon Islands in 2022.
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Editorial: Trump 2.0 - Smash Racist Deportations & Borders
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- 30 January 2025 1292 hits
Refugee, indigenous, or legalized—no one is safe from the crisis of capitalism. In just the first week since Klansman Donald Trump’s second inauguration, over 4,500 people have been arrested (Washington Times, 1/28). Amid a barrage of racist and sexist attacks—banning diversity programs—Trump issued more than twenty executive orders for mass deportations. But while Trump gives off Hitler vibes, it’s the worldwide crisis and decay of capitalist liberal democracy that set the stage for more open fascism.
The next four years will further expose the rot of U.S. imperialism, intensify fascism in the U.S. and Europe, and propel the world closer to a global bloodbath.. But instead of sinking into fear or despair or cynicism, the international working class must fight back! Take inspiration from the San Jose students walking out against deportations or from Los Angeles workers organizing on the job . Join Progressive Labor Party in building an international, multiracial movement to smash all borders and build a communist society.
Reign of fascist terror
As liberal democracy crumbles, both Democrats and Republicans are unleashing a ghastly wave of racist terror on migrant workers and youth. Wasting no time in expanding the Obama-Biden legacy of mass deportation and family separation, Trump vowed to “launch the largest deportation operation” in U.S. history. Just two days after the inauguration, 46 House Democrats joined Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act, which allows the kkkops to jail and deport–with no “due process”--any undocumented migrant accused of shoplifting or other minor crimes. But the most violent criminals–the capitalist ruling class–remainremains at large to slaughter our class in endless wars (see box).
Following in the footsteps of Joe Biden, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs, the modern slave patrol, are busy disappearing our class sisters and brothers. Shockingly, 40 percent of those swept up for deportation are workers with legal work and residency documents (NY Times, 1/24). Birthright citizenship, which secured the children of enslaved parents as part of the 14th amendment in 1868, is also under siege. As always, the rulers’ assaults on Black workers are a blueprint for their plans to terrorize the rest of our class.
Trump also axed the glitchy CBP One mobile app, which migrant workers had tried to use to schedule appointments with border patrol agents. Places long deemed safe havens, including schools, hospitals, and churches, are now unprotected from ICE raids. And where Biden had deployed 2,500 soldiers to militarize the border with Mexico, Trump just added 1,500 more (BBC, 1/27).
Liberals built it, Trump expanded it
Fast-rising fascism under Trump rests on the lethal foundation built by liberal rulers for decades. Thomas Homan, his pick as the gestapo “border czar,” got his start terrorizing migrants under Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama, whose administration built the freezing, squalid cages later used by Trump. In Trump’s first term, Homan was the architect of the “zero-tolerance” family separation policy that traumatized thousands of children. Now Trump has defunded efforts to reunite those children with their parents. The bosses’ cruelty knows no bounds!
By late last year, as Biden escalated brutal ICE policing and effectively ended asylum, border crossings fell below the levels in Trump’s first term.
Biden wound up deporting four million migrant workers and children, more than double Trump’s total (NYT, 1/22). In last fall’s election, in a cynical bid to hold on to power, Kamala Harris and the Democrats matched the Republicans’ racism in their campaign for “border security.”
Fascism needs scapegoats
Like the domestic capitalists behind Trump, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class–finance capital–is scapegoating migrants for capitalism’s failures, a hallmark of rising fascism. Fascism emerges as capitalism decays and forces the bosses to rule through a more open class dictatorship. It relies on more virulent and violent racism, nationalism, and sexism to control both the working class and the bosses’ own ranks.
Finance capital, the liberal imperialist bosses who direct the Democratic Party, tried to use identity politics to blunt class consciousness and counter communist influence. But as they see Trump outflanking them, they’re now echoing the president’s Make America White Again movement in scapegoating migrants for capitalism’s failures, a hallmark of fascism. While gutter racists like Trump spread open terror, liberal bosses remain the greater danger because they pacify workers and undermine fightback. These main wing rulers need anti-Trump workers to cling to the myth that the liberals are a “lesser evil.” But we see these racist, sexist warmongers for who they are–just evil.
Refugee families are the canaries in capitalism’s coal mine; the bosses’ attacks on these vulnerable workers and children foreshadow what’s coming for the rest of the working class. As the U.S. moves more swiftly toward open fascism, the tools used to track migrants today–including nearly $8 billion of ICE surveillance tech left for Trump by Biden (NY Times, 1/24)--will target communists, antiracists, and antisexists tomorrow. First they come for the migrants, then they come for everyone who resists. But the working class always fights back! Workers are already organizing their defenses against the latest Trump attacks.
No borders, no bosses
The capitalists’ laws protect capitalism, not workers. The bosses carve up the world to control labor and resources while keeping us divided. But we are one world and one class. Workers have no stake in the rulers’ racist national boundaries. We must unite under one flag, the red flag of communist revolution!Let’s form collectives in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces to stop these racist deportations. The politicians are paving the road to fascism—they won’t save us. Only a united working class can fight back to keep us safe. Together we will build a new underground railroad to protect migrant workers. Together we will build a world that protects all of us. Join Progressive Labor Party and fight for the world we deserve. Smash racist deportations—working people have no nations!
Capitalism will never cease fire
After 15 months of phony condemnations, the U.S. ruling class has convinced Nazi Netanyahu and Hamas misleaders to accept a so-called “ceasefire”.
But under capitalism, there are no ceasefires. The bosses never stop competing with each other or terrorizing and murdering our class in the crossfire. In the days just before the Middle East deal went into effect, the Israel Defense Forces killed at least 200 workers and children in Gaza and wounded more than 264. Now the racist Zionist regime has shifted its wrath to the West Bank, where IDF raids have killed at least 10 people and wounded 40 more. Since the deal, more Palestinians have been arrested than those released (Aljazeera, 1/24). Both Trump and Biden have already greenlit Israel’s next mass-murdering attacks on Gaza.
To date, at least 46,000 people in Gaza have been slaughtered by U.S.-funded bombs. More than 2.3 million have been displaced (BBC, 1/16). Those returning are coming home to 40 million tons of toxic rubble and 245,000 destroyed houses, schools, and hospitals. Under the terms of Israel’s blockade, it could take 350 years to rebuild Gaza (AP News, 10/22/24).
Our class deserves better. The courageous workers and students of Palestine and the world will keep fighting back until the day we smash the capitalist profit system for all time.