CHICAGO, December 2—We are currently seeing workers fight back by cooperating in a mass way to take on the racist capitalist bosses. Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are helping build a citywide antiracist support network, because the only defense we can count on is a unified and fighting working class.
We’re seeing more organizations come together to fight against the system. The newly-created Chicago Protester Defense Committee looks to unify different organizations and initiatives within Chicago so that we can all come together as a united front from below. Some of our efforts include raising funds to help those arrested make bail, supply and food drives for unhoused workers, building social media campaigns, and arranging legal representation.
We want to fight in defense of our fellow workers, specifically those facing felony charges and racist and sexist violence while protesting against the state terror committed by Mayor Lori Lightcop and her gang, the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The goal is to meet regularly and put in the collective work in order to advance the protection and strength of our class. As the capitalists increase their racist and sexist attacks on us and get closer to war with China and/or Russia, we will need a strengthened working class to build a revolutionary, communist movement to get rid of these parasites once and for all.
Bring the antiracist fight
Throughout most of this year we’ve been reminded just how vicious and ruthless the kkkops can be when the bosses’ power is threatened. We’ve seen them smash cameras, phones, and eyeglasses, confiscate bikes and backpacks, and regularly call protestors by racist and sexist names. These racist thugs often turn these encounters into violent situations for the protestors through taunts, shoves, and pushes which quickly turn into brutal hits with batons, strikes to the head, kicking and dragging protestors through the streets, even sometimes using chemical agents.
On November 19, there was a lawsuit filed against the city bosses on behalf of 60 people who joined protests over this summer. They were fighting to bring national attention against the racist murder of Black workers like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade. The 17-count suit alleges violations of protesters' so-called “constitutional” rights and names Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown, along with 20 officers (USA Today, 11/19).
From the end of May to early June, there were at least 3,000 arrests in Chicago alone (BlockClub Chicago, 6/9). Many arrests have turned into felony charges, including federal cases. The cops have targeted antiracist fighters such as Mohawk Johnson, a Black artist/activist who was arrested at a protest in August and remains on house arrest with eight aggravated assault charges. The bosses try to make an example out of our class sisters and brothers, instilling fear into the rest of us so that we’re hesitant to fight against their state violence.
This is by no means limited to the United States. The bosses in France recently tried to ram through a new law that would criminalize workers for filming cops. Thankfully, workers and students there fought back in the streets and on the job and the bosses were forced to back down (Reuters, 11/30).
The state is never neutral—fight for communism
In the class struggle between the working class and the capitalists, we must never expect the courts and cops to be neutral. They all serve the role of defending and upholding this racist and sexist capitalist state. The bosses’ whole apparatus of “law and order” above all protects property and profits, over workers’ lives.
Those of us in PLP are ready to fight to build this defense network, as it is through the mass movement that we grasp our power to protect ourselves as a class. But ultimately, our collective liberation and justice will only be served when we build a mass Party capable of crushing this capitalist system and replacing it with a worker-led communist one.

NEW YORK CITY, November 29—About 80 protesters in the Upper West Side opposed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to forcibly relocate workers from The Lucerne (hotel-turned-men’s shelter) to the financial district. Out of this struggle, workers and Progressive Labor Party members are learning two things: the potential power of working-class unity and the inability of this system to provide housing for all.
We demanded that the 5,500 homeless people currently in unsafe crowded shelters be placed in the empty hotel rooms for the duration of the pandemic. Today’s action came three days after we distributed hundreds of Thanksgiving meals to our Lucerne brothers, and four days after losing the legal battle. When the City sought to relocate workers, they sued the City to block the relocation. On November 25, Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Debra James ruled in favor of the relocation, paving the way for the forcible eviction of the nearly 200 homeless men from the hotel.
Displaced by the profit motive
The rising homeless numbers in NY State and the U.S. parallel the 70 million displaced refugees around the world. It is a sure sign that the racist profit system can never meet the needs of the international working class. And the enthusiastic support for the men at the Lucerne by people on the Upper West Side reflects that if given the chance, people give what they can to create a more equal and egalitarian world.
But such a world is impossible under capitalism, a system based on racist and sexist exploitation of the working class, rising inequality and wars for profit. Where there is profit, there is exploitation and where there is exploitation, there is no equality. We need communism where the many skills of the working class are harnessed and organized to meet people’s needs and potential. Out of this month’s long campaign, we are slowly building friendships that will build the Progressive Labor Party and the movement for communist revolution.
As one of the leaders of this struggle said after the NY State Supreme Court ruled against the Lucerne residents, “We won whether the City admits it or not because… the [Dept. of Homeless services] has been served notice. If you violate our humanity, we will fight you…we will keep fighting until we beat you, and until your broken system is replaced.”
This capitalist system in crisis has nothing to offer our class. Join the Progressive Labor Party and help us fight for a better world.

In A life of Labor and Love: A Red Memoir, Wally Linder reminds us of both the power of a united working class to fight the capitalist bosses, and of the special people that make up our class. He interweaves the political and the personal as he chronicles his 89 years of life. He shares the joys and the tragedies, and we get a glimpse of the heart and soul of this ordinary but extraordinary man.
Born in 1930, Wally grew up as a New York working-class kid who loved baseball and was curious about the world. At 19, he participated in a strike at City College against two racist, anti-Semitic professors. At 23, he supported the Rosenbergs, two communists who were falsely accused of giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. He later helped “shut down the waterfront” by organizing teamsters and railroad workers to respect tugboat workers’ very sparse picket lines (600 workers had to cover hundreds of stations). We learn not only about these militant actions, but also about the people in Wally’s life.
Multiracial unity strengthens 1960s transit workers
In the early 1960s, the railroad workers unions were still racially segregated, but Wally had been working to bring the two unions together since he first became a steward in the late 1950s. Wally was a Communist Party (CP) member when he started working on the railroad, but would soon join a dissident group—which later became Progressive Labor Party (PLP)—organized around militancy and open advocacy of communism. PLP’s approach was in contrast to that of the CP, which, in response to the McCarthy witch hunts, hid their politics and blended in with activist liberals.
As a member of the Brotherhood Railway Clerks and Freight Handlers, the first thing Wally did was to develop relationships among stewards from both the two racially divided unions. This laid the basis for suggesting that both Black and white stewards represent any worker brought up on disciplinary charges. Their unity allowed for a stronger defense for every worker and as the union kept winning cases, the bosses stopped disciplining so many workers. These victories built support for the idea of one local with multi-racial leadership. The CP’s position had been that members should tell no one that they were communists. Wally discovered, however, that all the workers knew that he and his 65 other comrades working on the railroad were CP members. The FBI told the union leaders, and the union leaders told the workers.
In 1963, when the railroad laid off all its unionized workers, Wally, now a member of PLP, organized a multiracial Railroad Workers Unemployment Council. He inspired many with his fighting spirit, his antiracism, and his communist politics, which he no longer kept “secret”.
The personal is political
Throughout the book, we meet the people Wally loved. We learn about his first wife, Esther, the mother of his two children Anita and Andrew. Like many women, Esther was Wally’s rock. When he feared getting fired for his railroad organizing and not having a job, Esther said, “So, you’ll get another one”. Esther was friends with Stokely Carmichael, loved to dance and go camping, and was a mother figure to many.  She was also an active member of PLP, and was out with a group of her comrades selling the Party’s newspaper, CHALLENGE, when she was tragically struck by a car and killed in 1983.
Wally’s good friend Gus is someone else we meet in this book. Gus worked at a wholesale shoe market, but was so much more than what some might assume from his occupation. Gus was an accomplished cook, carpenter, gardener, fisherman, creator of ceramics and stained glass, voracious reader, world traveler, and a loving husband and father. Wally’s several stories about Gus are a delight and reminder that people are so much more interesting than the stereotypes we might develop of them.
Wally has led an amazing life, and continues to do so! We learn many details about this fascinating person, the historical periods he’s lived through and helped influence, the people in his life who have loved and been loved by him, and the joys and tragedies of his 89 years of life. This book is highly recommended, especially for those participating in today’s antiracist movements and for those wanting to learn about what it means to be a communist.

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The results are in. The victory for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is a step toward more racism and global war. In the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of the liberal finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, Biden stated, “As president, I will take immediate steps to renew U.S. democracy and alliances, protect the United States’ economic future, and once more have America lead the world” (Foreign Affairs, 1/23). Now that Biden and running mate Kamala Harris have won the election, their first task is to strengthen the U.S. in its life-and-death competition with the Chinese and Russian capitalist bosses.
Historically, the ruling class has used elections to sort out their differences and redefine their strategies for inter-imperialist rivalry and the best way to attack the U.S. working class. But with U.S. capitalism in a state of growing weakness and volatility, this fall’s election resolved very little.  If anything, the gutter-racist Trump has become even more dangerous as he refuses to concede (New York Times, 11/16).
Communists must cut through the noise
A shared hatred of Trump temporarily united the Democratic Party bosses and the workers in their base. But now that the bogeyman is on his way out the door, the differences seem sharper than ever between finance capital’s status quo “moderate” wing and the new wave that wants more aggressive reforms of the bosses’ failing system. Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger chastised “progressive” party mates like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for embracing “defund the police” sloganeering and not pushing back against Republican charges of socialism (NYT, 11/5).
Now led by Biden, the Big Fascist finance capital bosses will need to find a way to close ranks to compete with China’s growing economic power (Reuters, 11/16). To promote patriotism among skeptical workers, the cannon fodder they’ll need for their next war, the rulers may offer student loan forgiveness, climate change deals, or expanded health care coverage. The international working class must cut through the noise of politics and understand that any reforms offered under capitalism will be racist and sexist at their core.
The liberal rulers will also have to deal with 73 million Trump voters (10 million more than in 2016), a raging pandemic [see page 8], and an economy in crisis. As communists, Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) role is to help workers understand that no matter who is president, our class will be exploited and brutalized until we commit to fighting for communist revolution. Only by smashing capitalism can we run society on our own terms, in a new, egalitarian way.
Workers’ identity crisis
Over his disgraceful 40-year-plus career in Washington, Biden proved to the liberal bosses that he was one of the most reliably racist, anti-worker warmongers in town (see CHALLENGE editorial, 11/4). As California’s attorney general, Harris supported the jailing and police abuse of Black, Latin and women workers (NYT, 8/9). A week before the election, Biden announced that workers in Philadelphia, one of the poorest cities in the country, had no excuse for “looting and violence” in response to the racist kkkop murder of Walter Wallace Jr. (The Hill, 10/28). Even so, many Black, Latin, and women workers believed that voting for this ticket from hell would improve their own lives.
From their life experience, workers know the facts of life under capitalist “democracy,” the mask for the bosses’ dictatorship. They know we can’t vote for more jobs or to end poverty or unemployment or racist police terror. We can’t vote to end sexist inequalities or domestic violence. We can’t vote against drone bombings or climate change or capitalist wars that kill or displace millions. We cannot simply vote to create a different world. Even so, a higher proportion of workers voted in this U.S. presidential election than in any other in more than 100 years (Washington Post, 11/5). But if revolution wasn’t on the ballot, why was there a record turnout for the toxic Biden-Harris ticket? In short, most workers don’t yet understand that their essential identity is their membership in the international working class. Many voted for the same reason that so many people pray. They hold to the illusion that the true power to change their lives lies in a force outside the working class itself.
Our long-term fight
The shameful administration of Deporter in Chief Barack Obama confirmed our Party’s understanding that there are no good managers--i.e., politicians--of the bosses’ nightmare system. The failed strategy of the old communist movement to work as the “left opposition” within the Democratic Party led to reformism and irrelevancy. PLP has always been clear that liberal misleaders like Obama, Biden, and Harris are in fact the greatest dangers, even more so than the outright racist Republicans. Why? Because they’re more effective in preventing our class from seeing the catastrophic reality of capitalism.
PLP remains active in teachers’ unions, student movements, immigrants’ rights campaigns, police brutality protests, and strikes from the U.S. to Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. In the early months of the Covid-19 outbreak, we called out pseudo “radical” mayors like Ras Baraka of Newark and Bill de Blasio of New York for their racist curfews and violent policing of demonstrations against murder by cops. At high schools and colleges around the world, we have joined in challenging sellout union bosses who betray education workers’ struggles in the face of relentless cutbacks.
But here is the key: Instead of fighting only for reforms, as ends in themselves, we treat these struggles as schools for communism. While standing shoulder to shoulder with our class sisters and brothers, we take every opportunity to share more advanced political ideas, to teach and to learn from them as well. Our task is to build a mass revolutionary communist organization, and to sweep the Bidens and Harris’s of the world into the dustbin of history. PLP is taking the lead by showing that our class and our class alone can lead the world into a future where the pandemic of capitalism is eradicated for all time.