Los Angeles, October 17—Dozens of workers militantly took to the streets to protest the racist police murder of David Flores by kkkiller kops Andrew Do and Bryan Tahuite of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In a magnificent show of solidarity, four other families of workers who have been murdered by these killers, came out to speak and support following the strong leadership of working-class women.
In the two days before our rally and march, the LAPD and the LA Sheriff’s Department each killed two more workers. Despite massive multi-racial marches against racist cop terror in the LA area all summer, these ruling class-serving thugs continue to brutalize our class. Mass anti-racist actions are inspiring and essential. But, without a revolutionary communist outlook and plan for taking down and smashing the capitalist system itself, we will never achieve true justice for our class. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) aspires to do just that!
Families, workers, PL’ers fight for Flores to build antiracist movement
David Flores was the first person in his family to graduate high school and go on to college. He worked two construction jobs to support his two sons. Like many other workers, David’s children were his inspiration and the reason he struggled so hard to make ends meet. His mother, Teresa, has taken up the fight for justice for her son.
Our protest began at the corner near where kkkops murdered David back on April 22, 2019. Workers warmly received us in this mostly Black and Latin neighborhood. As we rallied, passing cars slowed down to listen to our speeches, honked, and took copies of our flyer and CHALLENGE.
After our rally, about 30 of us began our march and caravan to the Southeast Station. As we approached, three kkkops approached us and tried to shut us down. However, a swarm of enraged and loud family members, PLPers, and protestors quickly surrounded the kkkops. Within minutes, they made a tactical retreat behind the automatic gate of their parking lot.
As we blocked the gate with our numbers, the cops frequently warned us in English and Spanish to leave or face arrest. We stood our ground. Three young workers who lived across the street began vigorously chanting “Black Lives Matter”. We called out the contemptuous kkkops, who smirked at our chants. Meanwhile, we distributed literature and talked with workers who lived near the station. Several filmed  our action. They were unanimous in their support.
 Family members from each of the other four victims’ families spoke on the bullhorn. The horrendous stories of their losses are heartbreaking, but, working-class anger predominated in response to their impassioned calls for justice. After two hours of rallying and shutting down the parking lot exit, we accomplished our goals for the day. We pledged to continue the battle to smash racism and, before leaving, warned  the Southeast Station cops that they had not seen the last of us.
KKKops and kkkourts: partners in racist terror
Three days later, the weekly meeting of the Los Angeles Police Commission (LAPC) was scheduled to discuss the November 19, 2019 murder of Alex Flores. The LAPC basically rubber stamps police murders. They discuss the cases in “closed session.” It is exceedingly rare for a killer cop to be disciplined when they murder one of our class.The LA City Attorney no doubt advises the LAPC to avoid findings that would in any way aid families filing civil rights lawsuits against the cops and the City.
Alex’s family was determined to tell their story to the LAPC, PLPers and others joined them online. We witnessed a racist travesty. The LAPC said the day before that it would allot the family a total of 10  minutes to speak. But they were cut off after only six by the Commissioners sitting in their posh offices because we hadn’t supplied them with the names of the family speakers the prior day. We notified them in advance that translation was needed for Alex’s mother and father. Of course there was a “technical problem” and they didn’t have translation services available. A substituted board secretary mangled what Alex’s parents said, her translation deliberately leaving out statements like “all cops are racist”.
Many other speakers supported the Flores family’s struggles and sharply attacked the LAPC for persistently condoning the cops murders. But the klan-in-blue also organized themselves and their friends to speak. They attacked Alex and his family as “gang members”, among other disgusting slanders. These are the same racist LAPD cops whose fellow officers have recently been exposed as fraudulently adding thousands of mainly Black and Latin youth to the “CalGang'' statewide database, subjecting targeted youth to enhanced charges.
PLP must continue to help lead the battle for justice for the family of Alex Flores and many others. The mainly women workers who lead these campaigns defy the sexist gender roles that capitalism imposes on our class. They are strong, smart and dedicated organizers of working-class fightback against racism. Through this work, more people understand the true role of the police in a capitalist society and see PLP as leading the fight against their murders. Communist ideas will become more widespread and the Party will grow. Only a communist society can eliminate the bosses’ armed goons who protect private property and preserve the rule of the capitalists.

COLOMBIA, November 1—In recent days, the working class has marched and protested once again. This is in response to the racist murders of over 150 social leaders this year and the recurrent police terror. While the rulers offer our class identity politics, we need nothing short of workers’ power.
Militant fighters and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated to win workers to reject these bosses' attacks and the entire capitalist system. We distributed  more than 300 copies of our party newspaper, DESAFIO,  and organized with them to build ongoing struggles, strengthening our identity as workers and as an international revolutionary class.
In recent months, there have been 66 massacres, which led to demonstrations against the police. This response has left 15 dead and 300 injured,  100 of which were police. The mass injuries are a result of police shootings against the protesters whose only weapons are stones, sticks and banners.
As the working class takes to the streets to defend ourselves, the ruling mafias and the ruling class continue to divert more economic resources towards beefing up and arming their fascist police forces. They have also added 2,000 more to their task forces to oppress the new protests.
Limits of the reform struggle
This mass struggle is led by strike committees, women's groups, indigenous movements, peasant cooperatives, worker unions, student and artist associations, sports clubs, supportive neighbors, and political parties. The workers continue to fight in the reform struggles to demand that the bosses address their most immediate demands and the most basic of human needs. What we need is a united working-class movement under a communist leadership.
The current government of President Ivan Duqueand the fake leftists want to silence the growing workers’ struggle using national identity politics. In this way, they take advantage of the divisions between the workers, calling on us to join them in defending the bosses’ democracy. Furthermore, they want us to blame the protesters and characterize them as “destabilizing forces, guerrilla infiltrators and misfit bandits” who must be defeated with jails and bullets.
This is why we fight
The current climate is dark for our class. Under the yoke of the capitalist dictatorship, we will always receive repression and death. But our potential to build our Party and  put an end to exploitation with the demolition of capitalism and build the dictatorship of the proletariat under the ideas of PLP and its communist line is strong.
That is why in Haiti, Mexico, India, the United States, Colombia and in other areas around  the world , our Party fights  to build a  communist mass movement. We cannot rely on reforms or spontaneous uprisings alone.
That is why we must continue to work in many organizations, winning workers to break with the rotten leadership of reformists, liberals, warmongers, racists, sexists, and nationalists.
That is why, everything you do counts. Fight for communism. Join PLP.

NEW YORK, October 24—“We’ve got to change the top, the middle and the bottom. We’ve got to get rid of the whole thing.” This was the sentiment expressed by friends and members at the sixth annual Progressive Labor Party (PLP) College Conference, entitled “Communism, Covid-19 and The Fight Against Racism.” The October 24  conference drew international and national participation from nearly 90 students and education workers. From the Bronx to New Jersey from Brooklyn to Puerto Rico, speakers strategized about fightback struggles on the City University of New York (CUNY) campuses and uniting student and worker struggles.
The opening speaker laid out the state of the world: increasing rivalry between the U.S. and its imperialist foes such as China and Russia is creating more volatility and a need for greater fascist control. The cutbacks on campuses are part of this trend, as local bosses prepare workers and students to accept worsening conditions. The speech ended on a positive note, as the many fightbacks that workers and students have engaged in were highlighted, and linked to the need for communist leadership to turn these fights into schools for communism.
Bosses’ dictatorship exposed
One participant suggested that by getting rid of the top New York racists, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, things would be better for workers here. But regardless of who occupies city hall, the governor’s office or the Presidency, cutbacks on college campuses, the continued needless deaths from Covid-19 and racist attacks on the homeless will continue(see article below). Instead, the nearly 90 attendees spent four hours discussing another approach: organizing the students and workers to join  the revolutionary PLP to destroy the system entirely. During the break-out sessions, participants discussed Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s theory of the state in relation to elections—that no matter which capitalist party is in charge, it’s always a bosses’ dictatorship under capitalism.
We also debunked the capitalists' use of bogus “white privilege” ideology as a means of co-opting and commodifying multiracial, antiracist workers' struggles. It is in the interest of all workers to abolish racism, a tool of capitalist division.

Finally, Da Homeless Hero, a leader of the struggle against de Blasio’s racist attacks on homeless workers, closed the conference with a rousing call for all workers to unite and fight the capitalist attack on workers in the coronavirus era.  
Students: to arms and revolution!
With college students facing rising homelessness—more than 25 percent of students at community colleges deal with homelessness and a full third face food shortages—it is all the more important that friends and members of PLP are in the streets and hallways of college campuses, uniting students, faculty, and workers to fight for communism. This is the only way we will get what we want and need as an international working class.
A central aspect of PLP’s outlook is to make  practice primary over theory, and so our final appeal was for every attendee to increase their engagement in fightbacks on campus or on the job. We invited everyone to participate in election day demonstrations and CHALLENGE sales to bring the ideas of the conference out to the masses of students and workers.

SAN FRANCISCO, October 17—Hundreds of antiracist fighters assembled on short notice today to stop a fascist rally dead in its tracks. When word went out that the racist, sexist Proud Boys planned a rally here, it was Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) revolutionary communist duty to be present, ready to fight back with our anti-fascist class sisters and brothers.
Yet the Proud Boys are small fry compared to the Big Fascists who control Wall Street and wage wars over Mideast oil. So to eradicate all  fascists, we must kill the profit system that birthed them all, possible only when readers like you help build a mass Party of millions.  
Break a fascist’s face
The city of San Francisco is a target because it is what is termed by the bosses as a “sanctuary city” that supposedly shelters immigrant workers. It also draws the gutter racists’ wrath because many residents of the city are antiracist, and it has a Black mayor. The initial rally permit was for Dolores Park in the Mission District (until recently home to many immigrant workers) but the night before the venue was changed to the UN Plaza.
The day of, the racist scum from “Team Save America” totaled six people and were defended by a force of approximately 300 kkkops. They were met by close to 400 anti-fascists.When the fascists arrived they were escorted behind a barricade by the police and they tried to speak.  We shouted them down and threw plastic bottles of water to shut them down. Someone beat up one fascist, another fighter punched their leader, Philip Anderson, breaking his two front teeth. The fascists spoke for less than 10  minutes before being whisked away under police escort.
A few PL’ers organized a small contingent to attend the counter-demonstration.  As a student newer to the Party said, “We are here for two reasons: One is to clear the streets of fascists and defend the right of protest for the working class, and secondly to recruit anti-fascists to the PLP.” We distributed over 300 leaflets and dozens of copies of CHALLENGE to the anti-fascist fighters, and made contacts.
PLP says, No free speech for fascists! Fascist words and movements have led to genocidal state terror and the slaughter of tens of millions of workers in the past 90 years. Fascist terror in the U.S. more recently took the lives of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and two antiracists protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We have learned the lesson—fascist words kill, and we must stop fascists from promoting racist violence when necessary.
Organizing to protect ourselves in the present as a united working class is necessary, but it is not our only goal as a Party. Our goal, as the international PLP, is to win millions of workers and students to the reality that fascism directly results from capitalism in crisis and decay, and that both will only be destroyed with communist revolution!
Liberal politicians & kkkops attack the working class
The city’s Black liberal mayor, London Breed, spent at least $96,000 on overtime police pay to send the force of 300 to defend the fascists. This is the same mayor who promised, this past June, to reallocate funds from the police and into reforms to supposedly benefit Black workers. But like all liberal politicians,  when push came to shove, Breed sent  out the kkkops to defend the capitalists and their private property.
The racist cops’ defense of fascist groups while attacking anti-racists is nothing new, and we should never expect them to be “neutral” in these struggles. Throughout this past summer we watched the bosses’ attack dogs beat and arrest countless anti-racists in the streets, only to allow murdering teen Kyle Rittenhouse stroll past them with a smoking assault rifle. They all protect this racist capitalist state!
Only communism crushes fascism
Some 100 counter-protesters wearing black clothing and flak vests identified with “Antifa,” short for anti-fascist. Antifa is a coalition of various groups including some who agree that violence against the far right is sometimes called for. The Antifa flag (“The Iron Front”) echoes the bosses’ lie that communism is like fascism, when in reality communists have been the greatest antiracist and anti-fascist force in history.
It was the communists who opposed fascism in Europe before and during World War II.  It was the communists in the Soviet Union and the European partisans trained and organized by the Soviets who defeated Hitler.  The Soviet Union lost millions of citizens in that conflict and the Nazis suffered 75 percent  of their losses fighting the Soviets (Washington Post, 5/8/15).  The U.S. and Great Britain held back and didn’t enter the war in Europe until it was clear that the Soviets were winning and that other workers of Europe might follow their lead and throw out capitalism elsewhere.
As the drums of imperialist war become clearer on the horizon, PLP is fighting to build our anti-fascist movement of millions. When the international working class takes power again, we’ll make sure that no seed of capitalism is ever allowed to grow—only communism. Fight fascism, join PLP!