CHICAGO, June 25—A multiracial group of over a dozen Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) workers and supporters rallied at a busy station today for a spirited “Hour of Power” demonstration. We are fighting for equal pay for equal work, rights and benefits for the growing ranks of part-time CTA workers and to organize more workers to fight the sellout union misleaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU). Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are also fighting for the idea that workers can run all of society without profiteering bosses and their puppet politicians. That’s communism—working class power.
We rallied near a busy transit stop and then marched down the streets to the Howard Street maintenance shop where workers leaned over the concrete wall to check us out. They discussed the rally all day. More people discussed  the need to strike. As we were wrapping up our rally in a nearby park one of the women workers said, "We should do this again next week!" Later, another worker said she was proud to be there.
A bus driver and a rail mechanic have organized two previous rallies, but this was the largest one. Black women workers, who make up the largest group of lower-paid, part-time workers have added militant leadership to this fight! Their leadership has clarified how the workers, armed with
class-conscious politics can and will overcome the bosses’ efforts to divide us. Through our own experience fighting back, the class struggle becomes illuminated. We see that capitalism needs racism and sexism to exist, so we can only smash these inequalities by smashing capitalism.
Members of the international PLP have been at all three rallies selling CHALLENGE, handing out fliers and leading chants. We are helping to create opportunities for the Party to grow and to spread communist ideas among more workers.
Reject all capitalist misleaders, steer towards communism
The CTA and the ATU use the part-timer workers for the money they save the company and the dues they pay the union. Many of them are part of the so-called “Second Chance” program, meaning that they have previously been deemed guilty by the bosses’ racist injustice system for non-violent offenses.
Under this label, the transit bosses try to rationalize a higher rate of exploitation that is inherently racist. The rank-and-file union members in fact voted down this program during negotiations around five years ago, only for the union hacks to turn around and still include it in the contract! For this, we have included in our demands that all CTA workers be offered full-time positions to push back against their divide-and-conquer attacks.
What’s more, the union mis-leadership wants us to rely on the politicians, but these ruling-class parasites will never serve our needs. Decades of relying on the liberal bosses in Chicago has led to nothing for workers here but evictions, layoffs, closed hospitals and schools, and racist police terror.
More union members are beginning to believe that it is the international working class who has the power to fight back against the politicians, bankers and billionaires. After all, it was our class that has kept the world running as we risked our lives during this deadly pandemic. We have the potential to create a worker-led communist society that abolishes racism and money and puts our needs first!
Board the train to workers’ power
All workers, part-time and full-time, are seeing our paychecks shrink as the cost of living continues to rise. The CTA and the ATU have worked overtime to create divisions among the membership. As a consequence of their efforts some full-timers unfortunately have been won to believe that the part-time workers don't really have it so bad. But all workers – part-time or full-time, employed or unemployed—can do so much better than what this racist, sexist profit system has to offer!
The struggle in front of us is difficult, but what we do today counts. Rank-and-file organizing and arming the working class with communist politics and a fighting mass PLP will slowly but surely build the revolutionary movement that finally buries the bosses and their rotten system. Board the train to workers’ power – Join PLP!

Newark, NJ, July 4—Fifty Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends collectively kicked off this year’s Summer Project by sharing food, speeches and international solidarity. The goal was to sharpen the fight against racism, sexism and nationalism as we organize for communist revolution - working class power. One participant commented that as communists, “we make a commitment to free ourselves from capital and invest our lives into the international working class.”
At each summer project like this one, workers from around the world put communism into action in one central location of struggle. With an ongoing pandemic, we are raising working class consciousness about how fascism, or excessive state control and police terror is rampant in Newark. To smash this, we need to build an internationalist communist party with Black, white, Latin, Asian and Arab workers leading the way toward a world where the needs of all workers are put first.
History of Newark
Three newer and two veteran comrades gave speeches about the history of Newark and how the education, housing and court system is impacted by racism. The first speech discussed the importance of recognizing Newark as a laboratory for Big Fascists (see Glossary, p. 6) to operate on a local scale under Mayor Ras Baraka. Praised as a “progressive” and “revolutionary” the Mayor has promoted reforms like Universal Basic Income, a worker-led review board of the police and temporarily fixed lead-poisoned water pipes.But in fact, he’s in line with what the Big Fascists are pushing worldwide. They want to throw a few crumbs or fake reforms to the working class to win us to support the finance capitalists’ plans for imperialist war against China and Russia. As we fight against racist police killings and for better housing conditions, PLP wants workers to see through the lies of the Big Fascists in Newark and worldwide to fight for a communist world.
In the United States, particularly during the 60s, the U.S. bosses were faced with hundreds of rebellions led by Black workers fighting against their racist conditions. As a result the bosses began to experiment with using Black politicians to control the masses. Ken Gibson was elected Newark’s first Black mayor in 1970. The speaker went on to say that the “Main legacy of the civil rights movement and those riots, where Black workers rose up against police brutality, is that Black politicians came into office and betrayed the workers.” Big Fascist politicians like Baraka ultimately steer workers away from fightback and into the ballot box, while smashing any revolutionary potential amongst the working class.
Another speaker talked about the history of the education struggle in Newark. Schools here “continue the legacy of molding children into compliant workers.” At the same time segregation in Newark contributes to the racist conditions in the schools. However, this does not mean there was no fightback. The Newark Teachers’ strike in 1970-1971, the student-led fightbacks for better curriculum and school conditions of the 80s and 90s, and the fightback in 2015 to get rid of Superintendent Cami Anderson and State control of Newark schools all provided valuable lessons for our Party.
The final speech addressed public housing in Newark. Like many cities, Newark saw a rise of public housing during the 1930s New Deal era. Then a decline in funding started in the 1960s. The speaker talked about the courageous tenants of the Stella Wright Housing Project who conducted a four year rent strike (1970-1974) against racist housing conditions that persisted for over a decade. But what was most powerful was her own experience of living in public housing and committing to fight for communism because of the strike. She had moved to a number of different housing projects throughout the city as one shut down after another. On top of the inhumane living conditions, many of those in public housing during Covid-19 had to deal with constant police surveillance, day and night. Despite these conditions, many residents who are on disability and rely on this housing are afraid to speak out. This even with the city's possible gentrification plans for this housing project. She then stated, “And Ras [Baraka] is on this trip that if you want to get rid of gentrification, then buy a house - but that’s not possible for us.” But PLP is continuing to organize and talk to residents so that they have the confidence through collective action to fight for what we all deserve.
As the cookout was wrapping up the Rodwell/Spivey family and a local organizer arrived. The lawyer for the family spoke about the case and how these young men were racially profiled and attacked by the cops. Then another local organizer, who has been leading the fight back in this struggle, spoke about his attempts to organize support around the family and how PLP was the only organization to respond. “After I saw the video and news headlines I visited the family myself. When I heard the real story I called every organization in the city. Nobody called me back except for PLP. And the next day at the rally they came out.” That’s what we do. In this period it is important for us to take a patient long term approach when organizing workers and students, but it is also necessary to act with urgency when situations like these arise. The mother of the young men also spoke about how the cops have been harassing the family by parking a mobile precinct on the street and checking Is of those coming in and out of the neighborhood. After she spoke we passed around a hat to raise funds for the family’s legal defense fund.
Just as Big Facist liberal bosses like Ras Baraka build a base for capitalism, PLP is building a base for communism. It was evident when one woman who attended and was alive in the 60s commented that when she was growing up in Jersey City, she never would have seen a multiracial, intergenerational group. Communist organizing was also clear in the way that members collectively produced the speeches.
As essential as it is for the 20 percent of non-english speakers at the opening event to listen to Black and white workers in the fight against racism and leading communism, as we move forward with our activities it’s equally as important for us to struggle with mainly English-speaking workers to experience live translation as a form of anti-racist internationalism. Practices like these smash the uneven divisions bosses flame to keep the most useful ideas for our class scattered.
What’s ahead
Over the next few weeks this PLP Summer Project will continue to build upon the barbeque through CHALLENGE distributions around the city, and study groups on topics like political economy, displacement, nationalism, and racism. We will end our project with a rally and a motorcade connecting the various struggles that the working class in this part of the world is currently involved in. We plan to maintain the common feeling of strong solidarity and joy felt throughout, as a way to strengthen the bonds among members and friends of PLP. Contact PLP if you would like to join us during this Summer Project.

New York City, June 30—Over 200  angry retired New York City workers demonstrated in over 95 degree heat in the continuing effort to stop the privatization of their Medicare health insurance (see CHALLENGE, 6/23). Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been actively building this fight for decades. It was heartening to see marchers whose average age was certainly over 70 fighting back. We may be retired but we haven’t expired!
Under capitalism, decent health care is not guaranteed to all workers. The health benefits which current and former workers in this city have fought for are being eroded and the costs for these benefits are being borne more and more by us retirees. This means higher copays for medical appointments and prescription drugs and more narrow health care choices. The cuts we face today are part of a slippery slope of cutbacks faced by workers around the world that have everything to do with the intensifying rivalry between the world’s top capitalist powers. Chinese and Russian imperialists are challenging the U.S. empire everywhere. There’s the Chinese space station and the Russian cyber attacks. There’s growing Russian influence in the Middle East and Chinese economic expansion all over Africa and Latin America. As the U.S. capitalists gear up for war, the governments that they control have less and less money for worker’s needs such as health care.
Capitalist inequality and racism has been highlighted through the  many struggles around racist police murders and the inequalities pushed front and center by the  Covid-19 crisis. Lower paid New York City workers who are disproportionately Black and Latin will be the hardest hit by the health care changes. The $1,500 maximum annual copays per person will certainly be more difficult to afford for a retired school crossing guard whose pension plus social security may be less than $10,000 than a retired city manager whose income is likely at least 10 times as much.
Starting in the financial district of New York, we marched to several union headquarters and the city’s office of labor relations on our way to city hall. This route underlined the partnership of union misleaders and city bosses in orchestrating this attack on our health care. Their partnership is based on shared support of the capitalist system. Union sellouts use their clout to steer working-class anger away from direct struggles like strikes and into the arms of politicians who are mere puppets of the capitalist state. The capitalist bosses and their politician puppets have all got to go. Workers have to go from protesting to actually running society. That means working class power - communism.
Today’s demonstration, confrontations of misleaders at union meetings, and an online petition which over 23,000 workers have signed point to the anger and struggle that are alive and kicking. Capitalism, however, which needs inequality and racism to exist, will never provide a decent life for all workers. That is why Progressive Labor Party is organizing to end capitalism and create a communist society that will serve the needs of all workers.

It is widely if not explicitly acknowledged that profit motive lies behind the evolving horror of the Miami condo collapse (see editorial, page 2). The evidence is incontrovertible: cost-cutting in both building materials and building maintenance are to blame. The apparently inescapable reach of profit-driven tragedy leaves any decent person feeling sickened and perhaps even defeated.
Readers of CHALLENGE deserve to know—what would housing be like under communism?
Building from ashes
For starters, we must be real: Following the devastation of world war and armed revolution, housing would be scarce. Revolutionary workers will inherit the wreckage that is housing under capitalism, where even in peacetime, a great portion of the population is left poorly housed or unhoused. Revolution emerging from the ashes of war will compound that  challenge.
In socialist Cuba the Urban Reform Law of 1960 abolished the collection of rent by landlords.
During Joseph Stalin's time, the main form of Soviet housing in cities was the communal apartment, known as Kommunalkas. Every unit—single, couple, or family—had a room, size varied by family, with  shared kitchens and bathrooms (see diagram). This was due to a great housing shortage at the time of the Revolution and thereafter.
But this was also a society where EVERYONE had access to a roof over their head, a kitchen and a bathroom. Abolition of homelessness was the core principle, not profit maximization. This interview captures how Soviet workers experienced communal living conditions.

A: How many years would you say you have spent in kommunalkas?
B : All my life. All my life. I was born in a kommunalka. Of course there we had a three-family apartment, and then I lived on Petr Lavrov Street, there were nine tenants, and here there are 11. So, my whole life.
A: And every time a bigger one.
B : Yes, yes, my whole life.
A: I see. And where is it better to live, in a new district in your own little apartment or despite everything?
B : Yes, I like living here very much.
A: Since the film won’t have my question, you should answer in a full sentence. Is it better to live in a kommunalka in the center of the city than in a private apartment in a new district?
B : It’s better to live in a communal apartment, a large one, in this kind of, in a historic district, a historic Petersburg district, than in a housing complex.
A: Why?
B.: There’s some kind of disconnection; life is more boring. I don’t know, it seems to me that people there are completely different. Everybody is on their own. And here we’re like one big family. If someone is in trouble, it gets shared. Or a joy, you share that too.

 Today one person will be in a bad mood, and tomorrow it will be a different person. We somehow neutralize each other, and it works out very well.
A: I see.
B : I like it. I love this apartment. I do. The bathroom has its problems, but we put up with everything. Of course, your own apartment is a good thing, but if I had to choose the lesser of two evils, then this is better.
- Barker and Grant, eds. The Russia Reader (Duke UP, 2010), pp. 617-618.

The interviewee describes the benefits of thinking of, living with, and working with the masses. These communal apartments engendered a sense of collectivity. We can see communist ideas taking shape.
Compromises with capitalism lead to demise
The accelerating compromises with capitalism of the post-Stalin era spelled the death of communism in the USSR. Nikita Krushchev was a Soviet revisionist misleader that ushered this in. This passage from the Wikipedia article "Communal Living in Russia” shows this development:

After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev's regime embarked upon a mass housing campaign, to eliminate the persistent housing shortages, and create private apartments for urban residents. This campaign was a response to popular demand for “better living conditions, single-family housing, and greater privacy;” Khrushchev believed that granting the people private apartments would give them greater enthusiasm for the communist system in place and that improving people's attitudes and living conditions would lead to a healthier and more productive workforce. However, the new apartments were built quickly, with an emphasis on quantity over quality, and in underdeveloped neighborhoods, with poor systems of public transportation, making daily life harder for workers. These apartment blocks quickly became called ‘khrushchyovka,’ a cross between Khrushchev's name and the Russian term for slums.

The lesson here is profound—even the defeat of shortage does not guarantee the victory of communism. Building private apartments instead of collective ones was a step backward for the working class. It promoted individualism and isolation. This led to dealing with problems by yourself (or letting them fester) instead of solving problems collectively. When it comes to building a communist society, we can’t cut corners.
Only the most determined and protracted battle to expand the scope of each worker’s concern so that shortage must be endured wherever workers hold power until profit-induced homelessness (or hunger or oppression) of any worker anywhere has been defeated.

PLP’s more complete analysis of how and why communists fell short of this task in the USSR, China, and Cuba are at www.plp.org