Jacob Lawrence, the great Black social realist artist and one of the major U.S. painters of the 20th century, understood that struggle was primary. The first and overdue exhibition from his mid-1950s series of paintings, Struggle: From the History of the American People, is now touring the U.S. When it came to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, in an opening delayed by the pandemic, long lines greeted viewers. But this unique exhibition was worth the wait. Unlike most Met exhibitions, this show featured the politics of struggle. Lawrence (1917-2000) counted communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright among his friends. While he never joined the Communist Party himself, he had a deep understanding of the racist inequalities of capitalism.
Lawrence knew struggle from an early age.  His parents were part of the Great Migration of Black workers who left their persecution in the South in the early and mid-20th century to seek better job opportunities in the North.  The family lived briefly in Atlantic City, where Lawrence was born, before moving to Philadelphia, where his parents split up. Leaving Jacob and two siblings in foster homes, his mother moved to Harlem for better job prospects. The children joined her a couple years later, and Lawrence took art classes in the mid-1930s funded by the Federal Art Project, one of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies.  
  Framing art in antiracist and working-class struggle
Other artists, writers, and communist intellectuals recognized Lawrence’s incredible talent for design, his knowledge of history, and his singular focus to expose exploitation. After his Toussaint L’Ouverture series of 1938 won the young artist acclaim, he used a fellowship to fund his work on three more historical series about anti-racist fighters: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown.  In 1941, Lawrence completed his landmark Migration Series. This epic, 60-panel work showed the exploitation and hardships for Black workers in the South, the ordeal of their journeys to northern cities like Chicago and New York, and their challenges in adapting to new social structures. Lawrence’s family was part of that migration and his experiences informed his work. While he grew up in the supportive community of Harlem, he knew what it meant to live as a Black man in Jim Crow America. He had a sharp eye for the capitalist structures perpetuating racism, a hatred of the poison of racist segregation, and a deep appreciation for the power of working-class fightback.   
In the mid-1950s, during the height of the Cold War and U.S. anti-communism, Lawrence embarked on his Struggle series that’s now on exhibition . As he told an interviewer:
The history of the United States fascinates me.  Right now, I’m reading in it, looking for any episode that suggests a symbol of struggle.  The part the Negro has played in all these events has been greatly overlooked.  I intend to bring it out.  We were not just slaves before the Civil War.  We were volunteers in all the wars.  We played a great part.
Informed by Lawrence’s research at the Schomburg Library in Harlem, the result was a series of 30 paintings that ranged from the American Revolution to the War of 1812. The panels focus not on generals and politicians, but on the struggles of ordinary people.  Many represent the strivings of indigenous and women workers for social justice.  
The exhibition’s first panel, called . . . is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? – Patrick Henry, 1775,” quotes from Henry’s closing line from a speech in Richmond. It depicts a group of men gathered in a circle with fists raised in response to the speech. The exhibition catalogue points out the irony of Henry’s Give me liberty or give me death rhetoric, given that the War of Independence from Britain would perpetuate slavery. Like many of the “Founding Fathers,” Henry was a significant enslaver himself. At the time of his death, he owned 112 enslaved people (redhill.org).
Panel five shows a clash of swords, bayonets, and long knives, with Black soldiers fighting against the British. The title is: We have no Property!  We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country! – petition of many slaves, 1773.” The quotation comes from Herbert Aptheker’s A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (1951), in which slaves were petitioning the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Aptheker, a communist historian, was hounded by the U.S. government during the anti-communist assaults of the 1950s. The point is that there is a long history of workers struggling against racism.
The title of Panel 11 consists of a string of numbers followed by the words “—an informer’s coded message.”  In this panel, one figure in profile whispers into the ear of a man facing forward.  The string of numbers is the code used by the traitor Benedict Arnold when he betrayed the war movements of General George Washington.  The panel clearly references FBI informants who were called as witnesses to the mid-1950s hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.  The catalogue reproduces a photograph of McCarthy and his infamous lawyer Roy Cohn, who later went on to mentor the young Donald Trump. Many of Lawrence’s friends were called to such panels of inquisition; some had their careers ruined by informers.
The writers in the exhibition catalogue are a multiracial group of artists, curators, historians, and art collectors. One curator commented, “In the tradition of artist-educators, Lawrence produced his Struggle series to make history more rebellious, democratic, and complex in a manner that continues to resonate today.”   
Jacob Lawrence’s paintings brought real history alive in the spirit of Karl Marx, who with Friedrich Engels wrote in the 1848 Communist Manifesto: Workers of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your chains! Many artists today follow in Lawrence’s footsteps, and the exhibition catalogue includes illustrations of their works and their words. The exhibition is now at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama and then will move on to the Seattle Art Museum and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

NEW YORK CITY, November 18 – The liberal New York City (NYC) bosses’ racist handling of the pandemic is coming to a head as positive Covid-19 cases among students led liberal misleaders Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut down school buildings and revert back to all remote learning today.
These past two months have taught the working class—students, parents, and education workers—some lessons on who this system is built for and who it is built against. Progressive Labor Party in the education field is gathering virtually this Sunday to report back and share our experiences, lessons, and fightbacks.
Promising developments
This week, teachers’ anger bubbled over in recent social studies department meetings at two different Brooklyn high schools. A promising sign is that teacher frustration is not directed at students. School leaders who haven’t a clue on how to engage students in distance learning are demanding that teachers “figure it out.”  Heat in buildings has not kept pace with the need for open windows, leaving classrooms routinely just a few degrees warmer than the outdoors.  Through a class-conscious lens, teacher anger is being directed at school bosses, not at students.
In schools where communist ideas have a history, union chapters have been won over to the pro-student idea that our presence as education workers in school buildings is important to guarantee that it is safe to return. Otherwise the bosses will take shortcuts that risk student health. Some of the “me-first” ideology that capitalism teaches is being displaced as a more  pro-student form of class-consciousness is taking hold.  
But in schools where communist practices have taken root, school-based “equity teams” have moved from theoretical to actual antiracist work. An example is offering support for teachers in correctly handling racist outbursts in virtual classrooms.  
Going against the grain
Teachers are trained by the bosses, that when things go wrong, they should blame students and their parents. But most of us also know on some level that the main purpose of schools under capitalism is not to educate working-class students to become critical thinking humans, but rather to recreate capitalist inequities and teach students to accept them.
It’s no wonder,then, that remote and hybrid education is a mess that leaves both students and their educators frustrated. For instance, it’s hard to teach a class of students when their cameras are off.  Kids are depressed because they live in a world where there is no sense of a stable future, short or long term.
Teaching students that their anger and sadness is a completely logical response to the crisis of capitalism is necessary. Above all, teaching students that they have to become part of a movement to smash this racist system is the most important lesson we as communists and antiracist fighters need to impart. When feeling frustrated in school the best remedy is to become more political with students!

You’re showing up to the protest and you’re saying with the weaponry, with the numbers, with the tank, with the National Guard, with all the stuff, ‘We’re going to hurt you if you don’t go home. We’re going to hurt you if you don’t stop. We’re going to cause you physical harm.’ You don’t put the public in imminent danger and then pretend like we’re the aggressors - Mohawk Johnson

CHICAGO, November 17— Antiracist students and workers here remain committed to fighting the bosses’ racist system and kkkops. Specifically, we continue to support the mass antiracist campaign to free Black artist/organizer Jeremy “Mohawk” Johnson, who was arrested during an anti-kkkop protest downtown in August and remains on house arrest (see CHALLENGE 11/4, 11/18). Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fight to build this struggle not only for our class brother Mohawk, but for all working-class people whose lives have been shortened and destroyed by capitalism.
As we have seen, not only this past summer, but for many decades, fighting against capitalism and the massive state apparatus that upholds it will be a bloody, prolonged battle. Unfortunately for us, the bosses have already built their army, investing trillions upon trillions of dollars into their military force, the kkkops, ICE, and the racist courts. They use their state apparatus to terrorize workers with deportations, evictions, jails, and countless other tactics that continue to traumatize the working class.
The only way to defeat capitalism is to start a communist revolution under the banner of PLP. There is no end to capitalism's war and oppression. Capitalism means the ruination of our class, our families, and our friends. Capitalism is the dictatorship of the bosses. They hold power through their political parties, their cops, their courts, and their military. They pretend to be democratic, but their "democracy" is a fraud. Only worldwide communism offers workers, soldiers, and students the power to make our own decisions in our own interests.
This is why we must continue to fight and build community among each other as organizers, students and workers. We want a system that encourages every worker to become involved in running society, that trains everyone to act for the common good and does not indoctrinate people to "look out for number one." Communist society opposes placing selfish interests above the social needs.
This is why we, as antiracist fighters, must continue to show up to each and every protest, march, rally, gathering, court support, and strike to show the bosses that we have an army as well. We in PLP are building a mass international Red Army of workers that will fight to end capitalism and destroy the oppressive systems that keep us down.
Building the struggle that gets the charges against Mohawk dropped will remind us of the collective power we have as an organized working class to push back against the bosses’ racist and sexist attacks. It’ll then be on us to keep the momentum growing, building our mass PLP until it’s large and powerful enough to crush this capitalist system for good.
To learn more ways to support, visit linktr.ee/freemohawk

The U.S. presidential election—still undecided as we go to press—is exposing the chaos, decay, and decline of the U.S. ruling class for all the world to see. As arch-racists Donald Trump and Joe Biden jockey for power on behalf of the capitalist bosses’ two warring camps, and vigilante “poll watchers” storm the counting center in Detroit, the end game isn’t likely to be pretty. The world has changed since 2000, when the Democrats gave up on Al Gore and both parties still played for the same team. The stakes are much higher. The future of U.S. capitalism, the legitimacy of its democracy, the fate of the liberal world order—all may hang in the balance.
The U.S. empire is in free fall. As the pandemic rages unchecked in the U.S. and much of Europe, imperialist rival China, already the world’s largest economy, is gaining ground by the day. The isolationist domestic energy bosses—led by the Koch and Mercer families, with Trump as their pathological front man—have hijacked the Republican Party and its base of white racists and nationalist thugs. The liberal finance capital globalists—the blood-stained bosses who have ruled the roost since World War II—are on the ropes. Which makes them even more dangerous than before.
But while we can’t predict the final outcome of the capitalists’ election charade, there is much we do know:
We know that capitalism breeds alienation. Despite a record-breaking election turnout, roughly one of three eligible voters—about 80 million workers—decided not to vote  (USA Today, 11/3). Millions more went to the polls holding their noses, out of fear and loathing of Trump. They see Biden for the criminal he is: friend of gutter segregationists and killer cops, architect of racist mass incarceration, Middle East warmonger, and loyal wingman to Deporter in Chief Barack Obama.
We know that no matter who wins the election, the needs of capitalism will propel the U.S. to fascism and inter-imperialist war. After the bosses get their own house in order, and one wing smashes the other, they will escalate their murderous attacks on our class.
We know that the profit system, no matter who becomes president, can’t protect workers’ health and lives. For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike have shut down hospitals and gutted resources for public health. It’s the same story worldwide, which is why hundreds of thousands are dying of Covid-19 in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Most of all, we know that it’s more vital than ever to join and build Progressive Labor Party (PLP), to organize the international working class into a fighting force to destroy capitalism for all time.
Evil yes, lesser no
Leading up to the election, the liberal bosses drowned us in a message of lesser-evil politics. Though Biden wasn’t perfect, they admitted, all that mattered was getting  rid of the outrageously racist, sexist, and incompetent Trump. But in the current period, when the bosses can no longer govern in the old way, the job of the U.S. president—regardless of party or personality—is to manage the deepening contradictions of their system. For the bosses, fascism isn’t a matter of choice; it’s a necessity of capitalism in crisis.  The difference between the rulers’ two camps is strategic. The forces behind Trump, focused on short-term profits, are using open racism to mislead white workers, divide our class, and build a defensive, predominantly white, “Fortress America” armed forces. Biden’s backers, the finance capitalists, seek to defend their embattled empire with a multicultural, patriotic movement and military that might prevail in a war with China.
The presidential election circus has exposed the fierce fight between these factions. The events of recent weeks reveal a U.S. ruling class in shambles: Trump’s refusal to agree to the bosses’ sacred “peaceful transition of power”; the Republicans’ naked hypocrisy as they ramrodded anti-abortion zealot Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court; the fake moralizing from both sides about the other’s corruption. The upshot is a loss of legitimacy: “[T]he very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during [Trump’s] tenure with potentially long-term ramifications” (New York Times, 11/1).  
The liberal finance capitalists know that this lack of confidence by workers will doom their chances to defeat their imperialist rivals. They see this election as an opportunity to restore their power and save their system. They’ve used Jim Crow Joe Biden and Top Cop Kamala Harris to try to convince workers of the lie that capitalist reforms can eliminate racist police terror, economic ruin, imperialist war, and climate catastrophe.
The working class fights back
History tells us that positive change for workers is generated by class struggle and militant mass movements, not by voting. Slavery and Jim Crow, sexist employment and abortion laws, unlimited work weeks and legalized child labor—all were defeated through class struggle. Workers didn’t vote in the advances of the civil rights movement. They didn’t vote to annihilate the Nazis—or to defeat the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. In every case, masses of courageous workers fought their way to victory, often under the leadership of communists. Unfortunately, none of these historic battles struck at the heart of capitalism. As a result, nearly all of their gains have been reversed. PLP urges all workers to fight back—on the job, in the streets, in the schools. But we also need to transform reform struggles into an attack on the whole capitalist system.
In place of capitalism, we will build a communist society designed to serve workers’ needs, not the bosses and their profit system. Workers are the ones who create all value! We’re the ones who run the machines, fly the planes, care for the sick, teach our young. We can run society better than the bosses because we’ve been doing the real work all along.  In a communist society, profit and money will be abolished. Everyone will be decently housed, fed, and clothed. In a worker-led society, racism and sexism—the capitalists’ essential tools to divide and exploit us—will be outlawed. Our communities will be integrated and freed of borders. While individuals will be developed to their full potential, collectivity will be primary. As workers gain the time to explore and harness new skills, instead of being worked to death for the bosses’ profits, creativity will flourish. Science will be used to create a healthy  environment and advance all society.
The past six months prove that the working class has lost none of its fighting spirit. We’re still fighting for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Walter Wallace Jr., Marcellis Stinnette, and so many more. We’re fighting against all the racist inequalities ingrained in this rotten capitalist system. Whether or not you decided to vote, you have a more important decision in front of you: to fight back on your job, at your school, in your neighborhood. And the most important decision of all is to join the PLP, to help create a world where the Trumps and Bidens and their masters will never have power again.