BROOKLYN, April 3—Members of a community organization where Progressive Labor Party does political work participated in a preparation meeting to collect funds and plan the participation of friends in the May Day march. Thirty people, most immigrant workers from different countries, met with PLP during this international dinner. Two PL’ers members led the political program.
A young PL’er opened the event. He related a profound review and pictures on the history and beginnings of May Day and the eight hour day. During his presentation, the young leader informed the workers that May Day is a holiday all over the world except in the U.S., even though it was born in Chicago. He talked about how the bosses are always trying to erase workers struggles by rewriting history. Workers really paid attention to this history presentation. At the end there were many questions about his presentation and pictures.
Aftwards, veteran PLP comrade with a long history of struggle began her presentation asking the workers there several questions about their work. She showed several images of workers fighting each other while the bosses laugh. She also showed images of how we can unite and fight back. The participants liked that image so they asked for copies of it. She gave them a pamphlet about May Day in English, for those who are learning the language.
Many workers participated enthusiastically during the discussion on the importance of participating not only in the march, which will be led by PLP,  but all the activities leading to May Day. This is the heritage left us by those who fought in the first May Day in Chicago in 1886 against the capitalist system. During the discussion we asked:  How can we abolish capitalism once and for all and create workers power?  Why do the bosses still rob us of our salaries and discriminate against us even though their politicians have passed “laws” against that?  The young leader asked us to participate in the international workers day, that it belongs to us even if the U.S. bosses try to take it from us.
These questions generated a good discussion amongst those present. A worker from an agency that provides homeworkers, and many times has worked up to 24 hours straight while only getting 13 hours pay and has no rights, talked about her vibrant experience in confronting her boss. This opened the way for others to share their experiences. They all told stories of exploitation and discrimination, fear of being fired, and how the threat of deportation stops them from fighting back. There were several proposals of unity, on how to organize small struggles against the exploiting bosses at these and other sites where our friends work.
At the closing, PL’ers invited the people present to participate in the May Day march, so they can see on a small scale how the workers take the streets. We also had a delicious dinner, prepared by other comrades and families. We felt optimism at the commitment of those present.
The workers left the event with enthusiasm, thirsty to know more about the history of May Day. We left convinced that this is how we can expand the base of a communist movement, led by the Progressive Labor Party. This is how you make a revolution and create workers power for an egalitarian society without bosses and to end the profit system of exploitation. We still have a while until our communist march on May Day. We hope for a solid turnout and we’ll continue to work enthusiastically to make it happen.

Manlio Argueta’s novel One Day of Life  (1980) about the exploitation of peasants by the U.S.-backed landlord government of El Salvador confronts capitalist rationalizations. It specifically counters U.S. support for fascist terror and murder, and the anticommunist ideology used to justify it.
The novel’s subject is severe exploitation in the Marxist sense – value taken from the peasants’ labor by keeping their standard of living so low that many children die of starvation. Exploitation is enforced by terror and legitimized by branding all peasants who do anything to raise their income as communists and, therefore, legitimate targets for torture and murder.
Traditional Roman Catholicism is used by the exploiters to train the peasants in fatalistic acquiescence. After the 2nd Vatican Council in the early 1960s “new priests” arrive, they teach the peasants to form buyers’ and sellers’ co-operatives that raise their standard of living. Then the National Guardsmen start to patrol Chalate, asking about the “communist priests.” The Guard tortures one of the “new priests” and we hear no more about them.
The U.S. Army Special Forces, the “Green Berets,” train the National Guardsmen in terror, torture, and murder. They feed them a U.S. diet to bulk them up, so that they look and feel superior to the peasants who cannot afford protein.
This primes the young peasant recruits to accept their indoctrination which is:
“any peasant unsatisfied with his traditional poverty-stricken life is a communist and “enemy of democracy.”
“true religion” comes from the United States, in the form of fundamentalist Protestant sects, which are imported from the United States to re-indoctrinate the peasants in fatalism and anticommunism.
peasants are poor not because they are exploited but because (a) they are part Indian, and “all Indians are lazy”; (b) there are too many peasants, because “all women are wh*res.”
Two chapters, “The Authorities” and “Them,” represent Argueta’s attempt to depict the ideology of a young peasant man who is successfully indoctrinated by the U.S. to terrorize, torture, and kill peasant families from his own village. The U.S. can trainers pound anticommunism, machismo, racism, and fundamentalist Protestantism into the heads of the trainees.
Education is used to identify peasant candidates for the National Guard. The Guardsman has made it through 6th grade, and so is recruited to be a fascist killer—another example of how capitalist education serves only the interests of the rich by indoctrinating the working class with sexist, racist and imperialist ideas to keep us divided.
Exploitation of the poor by the rich is the central theme. Lupe Guardado, the main narrator, comes to understand that the peasants are poor BECAUSE the landowners are rich. She is instructed by Chepe, her husband, Justino, her son, and Helio, her son-in-law, all of whom are tortured and murdered by the U.S.-trained National Guardsmen.
Before he is tortured and murdered by the U.S.-trained National Guardsmen, Chepe tells Lupe that God is conscience, and conscience is the poor. In short, “God is the poor.” The struggle of life is not to gain paradise after death, but to win a paradise on earth.
The “paradise” we need to struggle for is an egalitarian communist world where the capitalist ideas of sexism and racism are rejected and workers share the fruits of their own labor.
Through this novel, readers are introduced to the essential evil of the capitalist system, and the realities of U.S. brutality, mass murder, and exploitation in Latin America.

CHICAGO, March 30—Anti-deportation community organizers from three different Midwest states met in a forum to share their struggles and successes against the capitalist bosses’ racist mass detention and deportation machine.
The forum demonstrated that even small collectives of committed anti-racist fighters can effectively shut down the fascist plans of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prison profiteers, especially when they are committed to long-term struggle and building a base in working-class neigborhoods.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) put forth a communist perspective on the movement against racist deportations. We stressed the importance of connecting the fights against the bosses’ racist attacks on both Latin workers and Black workers as we build a movement against the capitalist system that exploits and oppresses us all.
Learning through the mass work
The focus of the event was to summarize the work of three fightback groups, including the groups of several Party members, and discuss ways that their continued support of each other could be beneficial. The forum was organized by a local collective with deep ties in immigrant neighborhoods around Chicago’s west side. The struggles shared today spanned as far back as 2012, taking place across Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.
Organizers from Illinois discussed how they were able to defeat a proposal to build an immigrant prison in the small rural town of Crete in 2012, by utilizing mass media and organizing a three-day march from Chicago to the town in order to build opposition. Their efforts coincided with mass anti-NATO demonstrations that were happening in Chicago at the time, and therefore were able to draw support from other anti-capitalist fighters.
Workers from Indiana shared their efforts organizing in the majority-Black city of Gary to defeat a similar proposal to build an immigration prison. By drawing a wide base of support from many organizations, including faith-based groups, workers and community organizers, they were able to build a protracted campaign against local politicians and the GEO Group, a private prison corporation.
They discussed how their struggle was boosted by the surge in national anti-racist fightback inspired by the anti-racist rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Comrades in this group talked about how their communist politics directed both their actions and line within the organization, and their collective base-building among other workers.
Members from a prison abolition organization in Michigan then detailed their recent success in preventing a prison from being built in a small town in western Michigan. They explained how the private prison corporations intentionally target smaller, economically-devastated towns with majority-white populations, and try to build support by the promise of “bringing jobs.”
A key theme tonight centered on the liberal racism and anti-working class politics of non-profit immigrant rights groups. These groups are funded by and march in lockstep with the Democratic Party. Numerous instances were brought up in which organizations such as the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) intentionally withheld information about the prison proposals and sought to undermine more radical and anti-racist efforts to oppose the prisons.
Liberal reforms will never end the racist attacks against immigrant workers because reforms seek to steer the struggle into electoral politics and ultimately win more workers into supporting the capitalist system. The bosses’ liberal fascism must be countered with a bold message of communist revolution, which seeks to unite all workers into a movement to destroy this system which profits off the detention and deportation of our class sisters and brothers.
Building working-class consciousness
Fighters also discussed the ongoing work and lessons they’ve continued to learn. PL’ers said class struggle teaches the working class to fight and build a higher class-consciousness. Wins and losses are short-lived due to the nature of the reform. The ultimate goal has to be smashing the capitalist system that keeps workers and students on this hamster wheel of reformism.
Fighting alongside the masses against the bosses, their cronies, and their institutions is a mandatory step in building revolutionary consciousness and resolve. Equally mandatory is sharing these experiences in communal spaces and continuing to be bold about the line, including distributing CHALLENGE.
Our collective knowledge and skills in fighting immigrant prisons is set to be tested once again, as the mayor and town council of the small town of Dwight, Illinois have tentatively approved the construction of a detention center by Immigrant Centers of America.
Onward to another battle against the racist capitalists! Onward to international communist revolution!

NEW YORK CITY, April 1—The daily oppression that workers face is what makes capitalism a system worthy of destruction. From the mistreatment on public benefit lines to outright abuse in job centers, the everyday racism that Black and Latin women workers face is proof that capitalism does not serve us.
We continue to witness how the enforcers of the system—the police, security guards—scare and discipline the working class into staying in line. We also witness how public service workers who are hired to serve their class sisters and brothers are won to doing the opposite. Under capitalism, jobs that are meant to be helpful turn into the opposite.
Only under communism can we organize a society that is designed to serve, not oppress, the working class.
Mother wants benefits for child, gets terrorized instead
Headley took her baby boy to a public benefits office to investigate why the City stopped paying for the baby to go to daycare while she worked cleaning offices. Instead, the City took away her child and arrested her.
She had waited for over two hours only to find that it would take another week to reconnect her childcare allowance.  To find out the status of her November application for cash allowance she had to take another number.  There were no seats in the waiting room, so Headley could only sit on the floor next to her baby’s carriage.  A security guard viciously ordered her to get up and, in ten minutes, returned with two cops.  She picked up her child and rose to her feet. The cop threatened to take her to central booking and her son to the City child welfare agency. When she expressed anger and turned to go, the cop lunged at her. Two cops restrained her while two guards stripped her shrieking child out of her arms.
The capitalist liberal New York Times admits that this kind of abuse is not unusual. What the Times does not admit is that U.S. capitalism was born out of the racist slave trade and slavery and today capitalism all over the world still cannot exist without constant racist oppression.
Racism takes a heavy toll
Similarly, one of Progressive Labor Party, a single mother of a seven-year old, has endured this kind of racist mistreatment for years. She has suffered a continual series of terminations, denials, and, reapplications. Currently, she is expecting to be denied a huge portion of what is owed her for back underpayments, and may not get her tax refund because she didn’t provided several documents—all discovered after hours and days wasted traveling and waiting.
Many kinds of daily abuses against workers are repeated millions of times around the world. Whether it’s being bombed in Yemen by U.S. made bombs, or detained in concentration camps at the U.S./Mexico border while separated from your children, or getting arrested while applying for benefits for your child in New York City, capitalism has got to go.
The defenders of the system
Recently our comrade witnessed a similar horror scene at a job center in Manhattan. A young Latin woman entered and walked up to the customer service window with a brief question. The representative rudely responded, “Do not ask me anything. Go and stand in line!” Angered, the young worker persisted, and in three minutes four cops and three security goons rushed from the back room to detain her.  In the process she was thrown to the floor and her head was slammed against the wall. They escorted her outside to be arrested.
The PL’er and about 20 other bystanders were warned that if they recorded this racist outrage on cell phones, their cases would be closed and they would be kicked out of the center.
Make friends, march on May Day, and fight back
The PL’er said, “I try to make contacts whenever I have to go for services or references. I try to follow up these new friends, along with family and old friends giving them CHALLENGEs. I stress that marching on May Day will build the movement we need to fight back against this oppression and finally to end it for good. We need to take over the world and build a society planned and run by working people.”