BALTIMORE, March 6—Two days before the trial of Derek Chavin for robbing the life of George Floyd, antiracists and six families whose loved ones were murdered by the kkkops here  rallied to denounce capitalist state terrorism. The West Coalition, with Progressive Labor Party (PLP), organized a demonstration for the prosecution of killer-kkkop Derek Chauvin, the reopening of all local cases of murder-by-police, and the jailing of those cops too! As the masses here fight racist police terror and demand more accountability, it’s becoming more common to hear—even if the speaker is not a member of PLP—that communist revolution is the only solution!
‘They are killing us’
Since the murder of Tyrone West in July 2013, antiracists protested in what became the West Wednesday rallies every week, which since the pandemic have been live-streamed to between 150 and 600 viewers. In fact, the 400th protest will be held as this issue of CHALLENGE goes to press.
Today, about 20 cars, decorated with antiracist posters, caravanned down Greenmount Avenue for two-and-a-half miles. Lyrics of our throbbing music trumpeted the need to stand up against racist police.
The whole way, Tawanda Jones, sister of Tyrone, stood up through the car's moonroof. Her fist was in the air, inspiring enthusiastic onlookers on the sidewalks.
Arriving at City Hall for a high energy, two-hour rally, joining the West family were women and men, representing five more families, each of whom had a loved one murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in blue.
“I imagine what my brother was screaming,” sister Tawanda Jones grieved, referring to when her brother Tyrone West was repeatedly tased, maced, and beaten to death by 11 to 15 cops.
She went on to say, about the early days of the struggle for accountability, “Everyone thought my family was crazy. Now you see! They are killing us!”
‘They brought the war to me’
Jarrel Gray’s uncle performed a spoken-word poem, condemning the criminal in-justice system, in which he tells of his nephew’s death, caused by the electric noose of 50,000 volts from repeated tasings.
Many reformers tout tasers as a reasonable weapon for law enforcement. However, we know that more than 1,000 people in the U.S. have died, during the last two decades, after police shocked them with tasers. The stun gun was ruled to be a cause, or contributing factor, in 153 of those deaths. Nine in ten who died after being tased were unarmed (Reuters).
Leonard Shand’s sister, Tracy, boldly condemned the imperialist roots of U.S. history. Then, Nicole Pettiford spoke. Her family was doubly terrorized, having her father-in-law, Anthony Anderson, and 16-year-old-daughter fall to police and police-instigated violence. In response to cop killings, committed with no consequences, she warned, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!”
Now raising their four children on her own, Marah O’Neal spoke about the horrendous police killing of her former husband, Jamaal Taylor. She explained, “They brought the war to me. They’re going to stop killing our Black men… our children… our Black women… our Latino people… our white people too. Trust and believe they’re going to get this work. It’s all of us versus them!”
‘We need a revolution’
A speaker for Progressive Labor Party unwaveringly declared, “We need a revolution. We need to destroy this capitalist system, and create a brotherly and sisterly world of equality,” a point greeted with enthusiastic cheers, though of course not from everyone.
The Party speaker also explained that fellow workers on the job taught him how racism really works: “It’s a trick by the capitalist class to divide and conquer the working class.”
During applause in response, another speaker shouted out, “Say it again!”
The multiracial crowd of about 50 hissed at the mention of Maryland’s Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of (Killer) Rights, and roared “Shame!” at cops nearby when they were pointed out.
Antiracist learn from LA struggle
Leading up to this event, ever since November of 2018, Progressive Labor Party has led a late-evening CHALLENGE discussion group, once a month, for interested antiracist in the West Wednesday struggle. The affectionate name for this gathering is C-DAWWG, meaning CHALLENGE Discussion After West Wednesday Group. In those sessions, we recently completed the third and final discussion about lessons to be learned from a great report by comrades in Los Angeles (see struggle, page 1).
It tells the exciting story of their bold organizing work: in the fight against police brutality, against evictions, to widely share the important understanding that communism is the only solution, and to recruit new members, thereby expanding the strength of PLP. As communists do, the LA comrades also honestly discussed strengths and weaknesses in their work, and we learned from that too.
Antiracist struggle bears communist fruit
PLP here also recently launched a new study group for folks who are seriously thinking about joining PLP. Our expectation is that this new collective will likely morph into a Party club, which is the basic local organizational unit of Progressive Labor Party.
At this caravan and rally, however, no CHALLENGE newspapers could be distributed, because they were already gone, having all been taken by participants at the rally in Annapolis, two days earlier. We will increase our numbers.
So even if Chauvin’s trial leads to a cellblock, tiny specks of justice will not easily quench the flame towards greater action.
The victory here is antiracist fighters seeing the need and having the commitment to begin the long fight towards building a new society without racist police terror. That system is communism. By growing the Party in numbers and strength, communist influence and leadership can reach more of the working class until one day we are powerful enough to seize state power with communist revolution.

WORCESTER, MA, March 16— St Vincent's Hospital workers are on strike for safe patient staffing. The hospital is owned by Tenet Healthcare, which made $478 million in the last quarter alone. PLP is supporting this strike. The nurses won't give up!
Capitalism means understaffing, cutbacks and systemic, racist, sexist healthcare! Whenever there is a scarcity of a commodity under capitalism (e.g. healthcare, covid vaccines), racism, sexism, and poverty determines who gets left behind.
As long as we have this profit system, human life will be cheap and we will continue to be commodities, tossed aside and discarded when no longer useful to the bosses. Support the striking nurses as they fight for safe patient ratios and their livelihood!
Only a multiracial, antiracist workforce that fights racism and is grounded in the old communist adage: “an injury to one is an injury to all,” can lead and fight for real change. Politicians can’t do that. Union leaders can’t do that. Only the working class with communist leadership can achieve a need-based system because we are the cure. Full story next issue!

One hundred fifty years ago this week, in 1871, armed workers ran the French bosses out of Paris and established the Paris Commune. France was a world superpower. Germany had a growing industrial base and its own super-power ambitions. "We, the members of the International Working Men's Association, know of no frontiers," declared the communists. But competition between French and German capitalists led to war in 1870. The French army was soon routed.
The Parisian masses, though sympathetic to communism, were still swayed by nationalism. They demanded arms to defend the city from the besieging German army. The bourgeois government organized most adult males into its National Guard. However, these Guard units, made up of the working class, organized their own leadership committees in each district and a workers' Central Committee to unite them.
On March 17, 1871, the government gave in to the German army and fled to suburban Versailles. When troops returned the next day to fetch arms they had left behind, angry workers confronted them. The troops refused orders to shoot into the crowd. They handed their weapons to the workers.
The next day, March 18, 1871, the Central Committee of the National Guard took over City Hall and ran up the Red Flag of workers' revolution. For the first time in the history of class society, the working class had taken power.
Building equality
The Central Committee called for new elections. "The men who will serve you best are those whom you choose from amongst yourselves," it urged the workers. Red flags were everywhere.
The Commune kept the bourgeois form of elections, but the victorious workers did not simply take over the bourgeois state machine. They smashed it and began to build something brand new: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The masses were the real masters of the Commune. Twenty thousand activists attended small club meetings daily to offer criticisms and make suggestions. Elected officials considered all proposals and usually acted on them. Officials who disregarded the masses were subject to immediate recall.
The workers' government disbanded the bourgeois Guard units. It suspended all decrees of the old government. Workers pulled down the Victory Column, symbol of French imperialism. They elected a Hungarian-German communist to their governing body, declaring that the Commune represented workers everywhere.
The workers' government wiped out state support of religion and took over church property. It capped officials' salaries so that none made more than a worker's wage. It took away bosses' rights to fine workers. It took over workshops that had been closed because of the economic depression and turned them over to workers' cooperatives.
This working-class dictatorship was the necessary prerequisite to abolishing the wage-slavery of capitalism. The Commune held power for ten short weeks. It proved for all time that the working class can, must, and will rule society.
Why did the workers lose in 1871?
The French bourgeoisie used tax money taken from the workers' sweat to pay off the German government to release French prisoners of war. In May, after a bloody civil war in the streets, these soldiers re-took Paris for the bosses. The communist movement was quick to draw some lessons from this heroic and historic struggle. Other lessons we only recognized a century later.
 Workers need to smash the bosses' state. But the Commune did not go far enough. It was lenient with counter-revolutionaries and renegades. It allowed the French bourgeoisie to regroup, instead of organizing a Red Army to hunt it down. The bourgeoisie was not lenient at all after it crushed the Commune, murdering 100,000 workers (including children). The Commune was not able to link up with Communes in Lyons, Marseilles, and other cities. The working class dictatorship needs to arm and organize the masses, but it also needs a Red Army.
The Commune organized workers into political clubs, but not into a communist party. There was plenty of democracy (discussion of policy) but not much centralism (united action). The political form of bourgeois democracy undermined the working-class goals of the Commune.
The Commune did not move quickly enough to abolish capitalism. Had it expropriated the Bank of France, the French bourgeoisie would have had a much harder time raising a counter-revolutionary army.
The Commune recognized the need for equality among workers and revolutionary cadre. But we can see now that equalizing wages was no substitute for abolishing the wage system altogether.
As we march for communism on May Day this year and every year, the Progressive Labor Party will carry forward the spirit of the Paris Commune.
For more on the Paris Commune and the lessons communists drew from it, read Karl Marx's book, The Civil War In France; Frederick Engels, The Great Lessons of the Paris Commune.

CHICAGO, March 13 – A multiracial group of nearly a dozen workers met in a community garden today to create plans to fight the risks posed by both the pandemic and the racist bosses.
The garden is located across the street from a public school that serves mainly Latin working-class families. Members from the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have worked for years to build relationships with parents and students from this neighborhood.
Collectively, we have helped build the fight for better learning conditions and more resources for the Black and Latin working-class youth who are attacked hardest under capitalism. Most recently, we were active in the fight to force Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to push back school reopenings until more worker and student safety concerns could be met (See CHALLENGE, 2/17 and  3/3).
More students and education workers have started to filter back into the schools.  But that hasn’t prevented us from fighting for our collective interests and safety. On the heels of the liberal bosses passing out the crumbs for economic “relief” (see editorial on page 2), it’s essential that we fight now for that money to be spent to benefit workers and students and not to line the pockets of the parasitic capitalists.
Ultimately, it is only a worker-run, communist society that can guarantee that essentials like education, housing, and medicine can be freely and equitably available to everyone in our class. PLP is committed to build this fight as we continue building our international Party for communist revolution and the destruction of capitalism.
Organize! Expand the struggle
Our group assembled in the garden by late morning. Over donated food and water, each worker shared out some of their experiences navigating the recent challenges of pandemic capitalism.
Many shared their frustrations with the bosses’ racist and bungled vaccine rollout, which turns an essential public health need into a lottery that excludes many Black, elderly, and undocumented workers. Others highlighted their anger about spotty internet access and inferior rental laptops during remote learning sessions. Still others pointed out the school lacks both clean drinking water and a library.
PLP members consistently put forward communist politics and multiracial working-class unity as the way to fight back against the bosses’ disregard for working-class life that we experience. Everyone present agreed that the struggle would only be able to move forward with increased commitment from parents to pressure CPS.
To this end, we made a plan to meet more consistently among ourselves to build our struggle. We made a list of ten demands to bring to the next local school council meeting, including opening the schools up as vaccination spaces for education workers and community members, economic aid for working-class families, and improving ventilation and pipes in the building.
Liberal bosses are the main danger
As part of U.S. President Joe Biden’s new economic stimulus, CPS is set to receive $1.8 billion, which breaks down to about $5,200 additional spending per student in Chicago (Chalkbeat, 3/10). Without workers organizing around demands such as ours, many correctly recognize that the bosses could just as easily hand most of that money over to cover the district’s debt with the bloodsucking bankers. Already, CPS’s credit rating got a small boost as a result of the bill passing (Crain’s, 3/11).
Many of the city’s liberal politicians like to point the finger at the banks for the debt crisis, conveniently forgetting that many of them have clear connections to finance capitalism. The slick liberal bosses in major U.S. cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, who like to cry crocodile tears over the racial educational gaps present under the profit system, are the very ones that have closed down schools in Black and Latin neighborhoods and made students walk through metal detectors for decades. That’s why in PLP we call these Big Fascist bosses the larger threat to the working class.
These Big Fascists are desperate to get students back into classrooms as part of their push to indoctrinate young minds with capitalist ideas to try and prepare them for more discipline and eventually imperialist war. Any plans from the bosses to “educate” working-class youth are a disaster for workers. Nothing short of international communist revolution led by a mass PLP will transform education from an ideologically toxic commodity into a liberating force in the service of the working class.
The Party is the weapon
Working-class organizing from the ground up—like our work here—is an inspiring development. We are committed to continue struggling alongside our fellow workers to insist that our collective demands are met.
Creating a culture of solidarity and struggle can arm our class with the skills and confidence that workers can and will run society, without racism, sexism, or profits. PLP is the weapon to win the egalitarian communist world we need. Join us!