NEW JERSEY, October 21— “Workers created unions to fight, not be in bed with the bosses. You run this union like a country club!” Class struggle has been heating up at Essex County College (ECC) with faculty and members of the Progressive Labor Party indicting their local racist local union misleaders at a local meeting recently against racist cutbacks and layoffs on staff and services amidst the pandemic.
PL’ers and friends have been in the thick of organizing fightback and student and staff unity, and the fight is only just beginning to fight back against these conditions and build a mass revolutionary communist PLP that can smash this entire system!
Cutbacks are racist attacks on students
ECC is a community college in Newark with currently around 5,000 working class students, with the majority of the students, faculty and staff Black, Latin, immigrant and women. Every cut and layoff is a racist and sexist attack on this student population, who depend on the staff and services being cut. Meanwhile, while the cuts were being announced, ECC received eight million dollars in federal Covid-19 relief.
Over the summer, ECC students and faculty organized 300 students and workers to sign a petition demanding to know where this money had disappeared to and presented it at an online Board of Trustees meeting. The students were not only prevented from speaking because of a rule requiring all comments be submitted 24 hours in advance, their petition was openly laughed at by several of the Trustees.
Furthermore, and conveniently for the bosses, the person who could best answer the students’ questions—ECC President Andrew Munroe— had just resigned to assume presidency of a college right across the Hudson River: at the City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College in neighboring New York City.   
Sharpening fascism and ‘shared sacrifice’
Fascist attacks on the working class in Newark have been sharpening for decades. ECC’s new president, Augustine Boakye, is connected to both Newark’s local real estate bosses and Democrat Mayor Ras Baraka through organizations like the Greater Newark Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.
The GNCVB and Big Fascist-tied investment banks Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and insurance giant Prudential have poured hundreds of millions of dollars to attract property developers and companies like Amazon while driving out working class Black residents (NYT, 11/26/19; PR Newswire, 9/26/19).
ECC’s Board of Trustees is composed of former politicians and lawyers from firms who have helped lead these attacks. ECC’s union chapter looks and acts like a capitalist country club: led by an all-white group of racist men whose chapter chair is paid more than the ECC president. The chapter is part of the National Educators’ Association (NEA), the largest union in the U.S. with over two million members. Along with their counterpart the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the union is close allies of the Big Fascist-aligned Democratic Party.
These fascist union misleaders have joined with the ECC Trustees and NJ Governor Murphy in calling for “shared sacrifice” through five per cent pay cuts, which will force faculty deeper into poverty and searching for additional jobs, all of which worsen student learning conditions.
Fightback grows
ECC students, faculty and PLP have waged years-long battles against both the ECC administration and these union misleaders. As a sign of our growing strength, after two years of struggle we scored an important victory in getting a racist, sexist administrator fired. With PLP leadership, faculty continue to expose the ECC union misleaders utter collaboration with the bosses, and more and more faculty who have never been “political” before are stepping up to join us.

During a recent faculty town hall following the Trustees meeting, PL’ers and friends received support for calls to unify with workers in other departments under attack, including a mail clerk who was recently laid off. This semester we are also organizing with our students who reported to faculty that ECC Enrollment Services has been utterly unresponsive to them due to the cuts. We are currently planning campus demonstrations with them, and using CHALLENGE to connect these struggles with the racist attacks on workers in Newark, and that it’s these same bosses driving our entire class to more fascism and imperialist wars.
Liberalism, identity politics main danger
Both ECC and Newark are led by Black misleaders—Ras Baraka, a liberal Democrat, was the target of PLP demonstration this summer. Workers are told to trust that these bosses somehow “identify” with Black workers’ struggles because of their race and/or gender—yet they are forcing the most brutal cuts! Communist leadership of worker fight-back is more necessary than ever in the face of liberal fascist and gutter fascist attacks on us.  As more workers see through their lies—the bosses won’t stand a chance!

Over the past couple of weeks, the U.S. news cycle has been dominated by the upcoming Presidential election. The most recent Presidential and Vice Presidential debates are coming on the heels of an incredible summer of struggle, which has left many workers taking stock in local politicians and governing institutions. At the forefront for many workers is Kamala Harris who is being paraded as a progressive choice simply because she is Black and Asian. She is another example of the bosses using identity politics to pacify the working class into voting and co-signing their own demise (see editorial).
The ruling class needs workers to believe in their institutions. As cynicism builds and splits in the ruling class continue to deepen, both the Big Fascists and Small Fascists are preparing to do anything to reclaim U.S. dominance. What they have planned is truly despicable and will result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of worker’s lives – just look at the over 200,000 U.S. workers who have died during the butchering of the Covid-19 crisis. In order to tamper a worker-led uprising, the ruling class (both wings) need workers to vote-in their leaders to ensure that when they usher in rising fascism they can say, this is the future we chose for ourselves.
The only identity is worker
In the hands of the bosses, identity politics are used to weaken and divide workers across race lines. At his address at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march Martin Luther King Jr. said:
If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.
King points out that race as an identity has always been used to fissure the working class to keep them from rising up. In modern times, Jim Crow segregation has either been proudly celebrated by Donald Trump’s racists base or shrouded in euphemisms by liberal fascists like Harris and her running-mate Jim Crow Joe An idea that the liberal fascists continue to push on workers is “Safe Spaces.” A constructed idea where people of the same race are encouraged to segregate and gather, promoting an identity other than that of WORKER.
No safes spaces under capitalism
Under capitalism, however, there are no safe spaces for workers. By dividing workers, like King points out, bosses sow mistrust and strife between people. But PLP knows that multiracial, multigenerational, and anti-sexist fight back is the REAL and only safe space for the working class.
As displayed this summer, workers are sick and tired of being told how to take back the streets they built. Workers are sick of being told that protest and fight back is too disruptive. Workers are sick of being pitted against one another.
But the ruling class, particularly the liberal fascists will do anything to keep us in line and party to their for-profit plans, with voting their number one tactic.
Revolt, don’t vote
While reform struggles will never break the chains of the working class, they do provide us with schools for communism. Black workers are key to revolution, and their leadership on the streets is instrumental in building working class confidence.
We are still in a dark night and many of us will struggle at home, at our work places, and with our friends and family over the idea that voting will not liberate the working class. Individualism, cynicism, despair, and fear of Trump’s gutter racism are plaguing workers today. But our potential is stronger than ever.
Don’t be fooled or blinded by identity politics and top kkkop candidates.
You are a worker. I am a worker. WE are the working class and united we can smash this racist capitalist system.
Don’t vote, revolt!

Bronx actions against racist terror
In the last month our Antiracist Coalition has been on the move. Almost 40 strong, we marched on the 50th Precinct, decrying their indifference to nooses and semi-automatic assault rifles found in and near Van Cortlandt Park, as well as their brutal assaults against a young Black suspect. We also demanded that no more cops be sent as first responders to calls for people in mental crisis. This provoked a huge "Blue Lives Matter" mobilization in the park days later.  We were noticed!
We were invited to speak at a Climate Justice rally at Manhattan College and detailed how centuries of capitalist agribusiness have exacerbated climate catastrophes and pandemics.
These horrors deliver racist oppression upon front-line workers who are affected worst and who are giving strong leadership in the fightback against capitalist terror, like at Standing Rock. The participants were mainly students and some faculty. Two indicated that they would like to do consistent organizing with us.
Finally, we helped to organize a vigil for justice for Breonna Taylor at a Riverdale traffic circle. Streams of rush hour travelers honked their horns in support! We met two Professional Staff Congress union members who want to work with us as well.
We fight. We grow!
*****
Belarus solidarity
I wanted to take the opportunity to express solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of workers and students who have been continually taking to the streets in Belarus over the past two months. They are risking arrest, torture, and even death in their protests against the corrupt and reactionary government of Alexander Lukashenko.
But even as I applaud their boldness, I’m forced to think about  how capitalism tries to force the working-class everywhere to pick sides in these “lose-lose” fights, and how we can best support them as an international communist party.
Obviously they have every reason to reject a boss like Lukashenko, an authoritarian relic of failed Soviet revisionism, who is propped up with energy subsidies by the militarist Russian bosses. But on the other hand, we definitely wouldn’t support pro-U.S./pro-E.U. opposition leaders like Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Their end game if they were to be put in power would be an infusion of capitalist reforms that would only continue and likely worsen attacks like income inequality and unemployment.
The cynical U.S. and E.U. capitalist bosses only care about the “human rights” of workers in Belarus so far as the geographical location of the country is significant for their imperialist goals. Similar to how they support  (one could argue unsuccessfully) regime change in Venezuela against Nicolas Maduro, their interests only lie in countering the influence of their imperialist rivals Russia and China, as they continue marching towards global conflict.
The best path forward for workers in Belarus and everywhere is to acknowledge the power we have as an international class, from Minsk to Hong Kong to Kenosha, and reject all these bosses completely. Organized into a mass international Progressive Labor Party, we can convert their upcoming world war into a class war where workers take state power and build an egalitarian communist society.  
*****
Capitalism & science
I have a point to add to the CHALLENGE (10/21) article The history of philosophy is written in blood about dialectical materialism.  The two trends of materialism and idealism exist together in struggle all the time. The ideas of the new society come from the class struggle within the old society. The article points out the threat to the rule of the church from the ideas of Copernicus. The Roman Catholic Church understood the earth revolves around the sun. Copernicus was an official in the Catholic Church. The reason he was not persecuted was that he wrote it in Latin, which was not widely read, for use by the Church. Galileo became a threat when he wrote in Italian, which was an everyday language that would take the ideas outside the church’s control.
Within the incorrect theory of the sun revolving around the earth, there existed many accepted materialist ideas, such as the earth was round and navigation by stars. The practice and struggle between the Church and the rising capitalist class opened the door to the theory that the sun is the center of the universe, which had been around for many centuries. It was liberated with the rise of the early capitalists, who replaced the Church as the ruling class and could utilize and build on the more advanced ideas as opposed to suppressing them.
Today the mechanical materialism of capitalism is holding science back, much as the church did in the 1600’s. Capitalism is suppressing advanced ideas that debunk race and intelligence and thus threaten the bosses’ power. Communist revolution, based on dialectical materialism, will both liberate existing knowledge and open the door for a deeper understanding based on more struggle and practice.
*****
Book shows how liberals are biggest racist danger
The War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton does not present a class analysis, but has valuable information by showing how liberal politicians fostered mass incarceration.
People often credit President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) , with passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and  launching federal initiatives which were supposed to launch the “War on Poverty.” This is racist fiction. The next year Johnson sent to Congress the Voting Rights Act. But, just one week before that - on March 8, 1965, he presented to Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) following an urban, rebellious summer against racist police terror months prior.
America's “justice system” of prisons, jails and police has  always promoted racist terror, but this act offered a response to the “threat” the Kerner Commission would, in 1968, designate as the continuing violent rebellions that came on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement.
The LEAA undercut many Great Society programs that history texts heed as LBJ’s liberal legacy. Still today, political pundits cite liberal leaders as reasons why we should vote.
The capstone of Johnson’s Great Society was the Safe Streets Act of 1968, which invested $400 million  into the War on Crime. By 1973 this funding grew to $850 million! By 1980, Ronald Regan made this initiative far more punitive. The ruling class was able to do this given legislative proposals from Nixon and Ford which further federalized police militarization. Liberal Jimmy Carter also extended surveillance and the U.S. Border Patrol while in office.
By the beginning of the Johnson Administration, there were 184,901 mostly Black and Latin  workers in state and federal prisons. By the end of Regan’s “War on Drugs” that number grew to 436,008.  
Liberal reformer LBJ bolstered these racist policies. Republicans did not create the expansion of our fascist “justice” criminal system - it was a product of liberal welfare programs. I would also include Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration's Executive Order 9066 that unapologetically interned some 120,000 Japanese into internment/concentration camps with about 2,000 who died of diseases like TB.  
In 1942, 23-year-old Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to these racist hellholes. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued that the order violated the Fifth Amendment. He lost the case to FDR’s liberal Supreme Court!
Without a historically materialist understanding, a Joe Biden vote seems like a way to fight racism. The reality is much more bleak.
A meaningful discussion and struggle with our friends is essential for organizing to fight against capitalism. A for-profit system - a system that  relies on racist and sexist oppression and divisions and a fascist “justice” criminal system against the entire working class.
*****

New York City, October 18— “Mayor de Blasio, you have committed a crime, a major injustice against Black and Brown people, in particular to the men at the Lucerne Hotel…You are a racist, and even worse than that guy in the White House!”

That’s what a homeless resident-leader had to say at a rally at the Mayor’s residence at Gracie Mansion, where homeless people from three temporary shelters and their supporters presented de Blasio with the “Tale of Two Cities” Award. 

The Mayor wants to transfer the more than 240 mostly Black and Latin homeless men safely housed and socially distanced in the Lucerne Hotel, to a hotel in the Wall St. area. He ordered the men transferred, bowing to the demands of a handful of rich, racist businessmen and real estate owners, backed by former Mayor and top Trump confidante Rudy Giuliani.

The racist West Side Community Organization claims 10,000 followers on Facebook, but they have never put more than a handful in the street and never filed their threatened lawsuit. By bowing to the racists, de Blasio encouraged another group of rich racists in the Wall St. area to go to court to prevent the men from being moved to the Financial District. Another group has formed in Hell’s Kitchen. At best the liberal politicians cannot stop the fascists, and at worst, they are just like them, “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” It’s not just Trump! The whole racist profit system has got to go.

Today, Lucerne residents won a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to stop the planned transfer, at least until another hearing scheduled for November 16. More than 50 UWS residents showed up to support our homeless brothers and if need be, to stop the City from moving them out before their case was heard. The City attorneys argued that the homeless men have no right to stay at the Lucerne, and no right to have a say in where they would be placed. The judge, for now, rejected both arguments.

There are about 700 homeless workers in four UWS hotels, and thousands more in 60 hotels around the city. In May 2020, there were 13,523 homeless families with 20,044 homeless children in the New York City shelter system, more than two-thirds of the homeless shelter population, and 90% are Black and Latinx. Thousands of unsheltered homeless people sleep on the streets, in the subway and in other public spaces every night. (CoalitionfortheHomeless.org).

Meanwhile, 118 billionaires increased their wealth by $77 billion during the pandemic and the Democratic Governor, Mayor, City Council and State Legislature can’t or won’t touch them. With more than a million New Yorkers out of work and tens of thousands of families facing evictions next January, homelessness will spread faster than Covid-19.

The Upper West Side Open Hearts Initiative (UWS OHI) emerged out of the anti-racist uprising this summer to defend the Lucerne residents, staging protests, marches on the Mayor’s home, and organizing all levels of support from clothing distributions to 12-step classes and more as a number of the residents suffer from substance abuse and/or mental illness.

All of the Democratic mayoral candidates, City Council members and city-wide elected officials who have come to speak at rallies and press conferences have provided no help at all as the crisis of racist poverty and homelessness deepens. Talk is cheap.

PLP has been involved in this fight from the beginning, making new friends inside and outside the temporary homeless shelter. We are in this struggle to fight the racist attacks against our most vulnerable brothers, and to build the movement for communist revolution, to end racist inequality and homelessness forever.