Prince George’s County, February 5–Another police murder of a Black man happened just as the Community Justice Coalition (CJC) in Prince George’s County, MD was holding a conference call about police brutality! 43-year-old William (Boo) Green was another slain victim of racist capitalism. Only a revolution against the whole damn profit system can begin to end such racism, since it is needed by capitalism to intimidate, control, and subject us all to intense exploitation. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members participate in the CJC to help sharpen the struggle against racism and to bring more anti-racist fighters into the communist movement.
Racist killer cop Owen
Boo banged into some parked cars in Temple Hills, MD, and the police put him in handcuffs (behind his back) and strapped him into the front seat of a police cruiser. Then Cpl. Michael Owen, a Black cop, shot seven times, fatally striking him, demonstrating that all cops carry out racist attacks. This same pig had killed another Black Prince George’s County resident in 2011! The police chief, Henry Stawinksi, and his top cops huddled and put out the lie that Boo was on PCP, but once they saw that local residents had cell phone videos that showed no resistance by him, or erratic behavior, they realized they had to change their story. They charged pig Owen with 2nd degree murder, manslaughter, and weapons violations (Washington Post, 2/4/). We’ll see if there is truly any accountability for this racist murder.
Capitalist racism: little changes in 27 years
This incident was just like an earlier police murder that PLP fought against–Artie Elliott in 1993 was handcuffed behind his back in a police cruiser and then murdered in a hail of bullets from two cops. So little change, after two Department of Justice consent decrees with the county, and a parade of “reforming” police chiefs! It takes a revolution, not some bogus reform, to end such racist police behavior.
Emergency meetup in response to Boo’s murder
We held an emergency meeting via conference call to consider a course of action in response to Boo’s  murder. It turns out that a leader of the CJC grew up with him, bringing home how police violence harms us all. Coalition members had lots of recommendations, from encouraging an uprising against the police state violence to a renewed circulation of our petition demanding the firing of Chief Stawinski. A PLP member recommended we take to the streets with a bullhorn rally near the site of the murder to swell the ranks of our modest organization.  
At our follow up meeting, another case of racist police action came to us. In this case, cops with guns drawn burst into a Black couple’s home, failed to identify themselves, poked around the house while the wife told them to get out and that they had no right to search her house. The terror felt by her and her husband is a prime example of how routine aggressive racist behavior is intended to intimidate and control Black working class people, all in the service of helping capitalists achieve maximum profits through the exploitation of the working class as a whole.
The fightback will continue!

Bronx, January 20 –On Martin Luther King day (MLK day) the interfaith coalition joined with a Black church in the Bronx for the third year to emphasize the struggle aspect of MLK day. Antiracists workers in this mass organization, and members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) packed the church’s basement with a multiracial crowd, young and old, eager to learn from our panel of experienced organizers. The presenters clearly described the racist horror of police killings nationally, the scandal of Columbia Presbyterian’s attempt to close the Allen Hospital Psychiatric service, the life and death need to expand mental health services, and the campaign to stop cops from being the first responders to calls for people in mental crisis.
Surely the future must hold an egalitarian, communist world with medical care, food, housing and all basic needs available equally to all. That’s when the working class runs all aspects of society. In the meantime we organize to fight back against the capitalists who are mainly concerned with profits.
Cops hail from slave system
How cops respond to people in mental crisis is a racist horror.  The Washington Post and the The Guardian estimate that uniformed, armed cops kill roughly 1,000 victims annually.  Almost half are Black, Latin, or Indigenous, and fully half are people suffering mental crisis.  Weekly  friends ask, “Why are cops allowed to administer this racist carnage?” Why are they “out of control?”  We answer that they are, in fact, very much “in control!”From their origins in the slavery enforcing murder squads, police have always served the fundamental needs of the U.S. ruling class.  Now more than ever racist intimidation is vital to forestall any multiracial rebellion that could threaten the critical need of the U.S. to militarize to counter the ascendancy of other international imperialists, principally China, that are moving to become the Top Dog Imperialist.  Knowing that this process is leading to World War III, the capitalist rulers depend on racist cop forces to terrorize and control the working class domestically as these bosses mobilize to defend U.S. imperialism globally. These cops provide the front line warriors nationally to promote fascism at home.
As empowering as our speakers were, an important part of the program came at the end when PLP challenged our friends, new and old, to sign on to weekly activity. Twenty three agreed to work together to save and expand Allen Psych services and to barrage the New York City Council demanding hearings and legislation to stop cops as first responders to calls for people in mental crisis and to expand mental health services sufficiently to meet a critically growing need. This was an important albeit small victory of the day.
Of course, the most important victory will emerge as we share CHALLENGE, issue by issue, with our new coworkers and convince them to march on May Day with us, grow closer to the Progressive Labor Party with us, and build the world wide movement to smash death dealing imperialism finally with world wide communist revolution!

The working class in France is on the move, with a bold and militant transit strike that has lasted more than six weeks and enlisted strong support from workers throughout the country (Odaxa poll, 1/8). At its peak, the action involved more than a million workers, from electrical workers to ballet dancers. In a period of intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry and harsher repression by the capitalist bosses, spontaneous fightback and class struggle is also on the rise.
Behind its investment banker president, Emmanuel Macron, the declining French ruling class has aggressively attacked workers in France and its former colonies in Africa. As Progressive Labor Party has pointed out, inter-imperialist competition—chiefly among the U.S., China, Russia, and the European Union—will inevitably lead to world war, as the bloodthirsty bosses scramble to protect their profits. France, in particular, is a dying empire desperate to keep its iron grip on the workers it exploits. Only by building an international communist movement, led by PLP, can workers move forward in this period—to resist the capitalists, and then to conquer them with communist revolution.
Nationwide strike
Last December 5, transit workers in France walked out of work and triggered the longest labor strike in French history. Workers shut down buses, trains, and high-speed rail lines, costing the bosses millions in profits. The strike was sparked by Macron’s proposal to savage the country’s pension system, cutting the average pension by 30 percent while raising the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64. These vicious reforms would most punish workers who’d taken time off due to injury or to raise children. The French pension system, established in the 1940s, is relied upon by France’s elderly, who have the lowest rates of elder poverty in Europe.
The  working class in France has a long history of fightback against the bosses, going back to the Paris Commune of 1871. But this revolutionary history and spirit has been undermined by divisions in the working class and racism toward African and Arab immigrants, who are segregated in impoverished and neglected suburbs of major cities.
The immigrants’ struggles for survival have been ignored by sell-out trade unions and fake-left political leaders (Atlantic, 2/26/19), despite a three-week uprising in 2005 and repeated fightbacks since. Without multiracial unity against racism and the bosses’ state, the current upheaval will be sorely limited, both for immediate impact and for longer-term, revolutionary change.
France’s imperialist conundrum
The French bosses’ profits are driven both by their exploitation of workers at home and their continued economic control over 14 former colonies in Central and West Africa, which provide a steady flow of cheap raw materials back to France. The former colonies are required to hold 50 percent of their foreign reserves in the French treasury, while French multinational firms retain rights to extract natural resources from the region.
To guarantee the continued flow of resources and profits, France has threatened to withdraw troops from Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mauritania as they face increasing violence from Islamic nationalist fighters (New York Times, 1/12). At the same time, France is using its permanent military bases in Africa to train anti-Islamist militias that have carried out genocidal massacres (International Crisis Group, 3/25/19).
Meanwhile, China has increased its investments throughout the region to $38.4 billion in 2016, as compared to France’s $7.7 billion. And where China is investing heavily in infrastructure and economic development in Africa, France’s imports remain heavily concentrated in commodities.
Revolution v. reform
The current upheaval in France recalls the lessons learned from the even more massive rebellion in May 1968, which toppled a government (see PL Magazine,1968, www.plp.org/pl-magazine/selections). Months of strikes and student protests against U.S. and French slaughters in Vietnam and Algeria led to the bosses’ state terror against students, and then to a general strike. Despite mass militancy and revolutionary fervor, workers and students were sold out by the fake-left Communist Party of France, which misled them back to the bosses’ elections. The capitalists remained in power, and workers’ reform gains were ultimately reversed. Like Bernie Sanders and other social democratic reformers in the U.S., the French “Socialist” Party—which later elected two presidents and groomed Macron—helped lead the way to betray our class.
Workers can’t rely on liberal politicians or boss-controlled union leaders to protect them from the capitalists’ attacks. While Macron has been pushed into a partial retreat, both in France and in Africa, history shows that the working class can’t be fooled into believing that any imperialist rulers have their best interests at heart. Far from it!
The only way to smash worker exploitation is to build Progressive Labor Party and fight for communism against the global capitalist class. Join us! We have a world to win!

OAKLAND, CA, January 21— Hundreds of workers and students support four Black mothers fighting for housing. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members advocated for Moms 4 Housing and showed that it’s not greed that causes homelessness; it’s capitalism.
For a place to call home
Since November 18, a group of working moms and their children occupied a vacant house owned by absentee real estate boss Wedgewood LLC. During the two months, hundreds came to the house from dawn to late at night to protect the families from a sheriff’s eviction and supported their court case. On January 14, sheriffs carried out a military style eviction and shortly after that, the mothers won a limited victory. The struggle continues.
Capitalism causes homelessness
Capitalism is inherently unequal, racist, sexist and exploitative—and becoming more so. The Moms 4 Housing movement lets us see more clearly that capitalists and their puppet politicians cause homelessness. They make the laws that say it’s legal to hold onto empty homes and illegal for unhoused people to move in. The Moms 4 Housing website correctly says, “We believe it is a crime to keep homes vacant while people suffer on the street from the California housing crisis.” Over 4,000 families in Oakland are homeless, even though there are four housing units standing empty for each homeless person (sfcurbed, 11/29/19). In Oakland, 80 percent of the homeless are Black, while immigrants and other workers also suffer disproportionately from evictions and housing insecurity. This contradiction is foremost in the minds of protestors and Moms 4 Housing.
Oakland was a destination for Black families migrating in the 1940s but the government’s systematic racism plagued the Black workers. “Officials constructed freeways, train tracks and federal buildings that literally destroyed homes and tore neighborhoods apart. Federal ‘redlining’ practices embedded racial inequality and segregation into the city’s development, with banks allowing wealthy white communities to flourish while denying home ownership to black families. A corrupt police agency brutalized and jailed innocent black [workers]”(The Gaurdian, 6/1/18). While all of this is legal under capitalism, finding housing in a vacant property is a crime. A system that robs workers of housing does not deserve to exist.  
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment
This movement has drawn support from many anti-capitalist fighters. PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE, met workers and students, and initiated discussions on how we can build a communist movement to get rid of capitalism once and for all.
The nonprofit Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) is instrumental in this movement. In the first week of the occupation, ACCE held a march against displacement and realtors like Hines, a privately-owned global real estate company that built MacArthur Commons, which gentrifies Oakland and excludes working-class renters: (a studio is considered “affordable” at $1408/mo. Market rate is $2535/mo.)
This rate is clearly out of reach for homeless and low-wage workers. By participating in ACCE, PL’ers are able to show that reforms are limited and temporary. To ensure housing for all, the whole damn system has to go.
Experiences like these are steps to learning how to fight together for an egalitarian, communist society where the working class collectively produces and distributes for need.  
 Disrupt SB50
On January 10, 60 members and friends of Moms 4 Housing, including PLP, disrupted a press conference by the authors of a bill SB50 to expand zoning for luxury condominiums in Oakland. For the entire press conference, chants  such as “Housing for need, not for greed” and “housing is a human right” filled the room. The press could not hear the bill’s authors, the Mayor, and their developer friends.
The Mothers spoke out against the high rents and developer’s plans for gentrification through SB50. They vowed to stay in the house to set a precedent for the right to housing. The politicians and developers behind SB50 are looking to maximize profits from the housing crisis by promising a small percentage of “affordable housing” in new high-rises. We are looking to beat back their high rents as we build a movement for communism where all housing will be based on need.
Beat back the militarized eviction
On January 14, after Wedgewood won in court, sheriffs in flak suits carried out their eviction with a battering ram, a robot, armored vehicles, tasers, and huge military rifles. Two of the Moms and two supporters were jailed. The movement reacted to this racist, terror attack with courage and militancy.
The huge show of force at the eviction shows that the speculators and their bought-and-paid-for politicians fear a growing solidarity.
Their attempt to stop us through terror did not work. A week later, the Moms were greeted as heroes at the Reclaim Martin Luther King March. It was a good experience in collective action and fightback. We need to continue to build the antiracist, anti-sexist strength of a united working class that can take on the capitalists all over the world.
After a week of worldwide publicity, the Oakland political apparatus and Wedgewood brokered a compromise. Wedgewood will allow the Oakland Land Trust to purchase the property. This compromise will not destroy Wedgewood or take profiteering out of the housing market. This is an immediate win for the Moms 4 Housing movement. Some families will get some relatively affordable housing. Overmore, this movement build confidence in workers’ ability to fight back.
This reform victory is limited: the real estate and banking capitalists will continue to displace families en masse for profit.
Moms 4 Housing challenges the capitalists’ golden rule
The Moms 4 Housing movement takes on a fundamental tenet of capitalism: private property is protected by the law. This is a golden rule of capitalism: the one who has the gold makes the rules. Companies like Wedgewood belong to the class that controls the politicians who make the laws that protect their property. They also control the cops and use them to protect their wealth.
PLP applauds the women who continue to bravely stand up to the bosses and their state terror (cops, courts, prison). The working class needs more leaders like these. Whatever reforms we win will not solve the housing crisis because the capitalists are forced by their own system to constantly increase profits and exploitation.
In a communist society, workers collectively produce housing because the international working class needs shelter. Production will be for need, not for profits! Fight for communism and workers’ power!