“7K or strike” was the chant heard outside in the hallway after a group of CUNY (City University of New York) faculty walked out together after a heated union meeting on Thursday night . Numerous militant speakers rose to talk against tuition hikes, for improved wages for adjuncts(part timers), and for a strike. Part timers, who receive poverty wages and are the majority of the teaching staff tried to get a resolution passed that would delay the contract vote until the fall. While unsurprisingly, the union leadership of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) was able to squash that resolution, they got a taste of what an organized fightback  looks like. PLP members and friends are part of this 7K or Strike Campaign and have organized our students to sign solidarity statements with the adjuncts.
What CUNY and the union leadership would like is for us to meekly accept continued starvation wages for part-time faculty and racist tuition increases for students. They would like for us to channel our furious anger at the crumbling infrastructure and decreasing services into pointless lobbying trips to Albany. They would like us to view the fact that, according to a recent survey, 48 percent of CUNY students are food insecure, 55 percent are housing insecure and 14 percent are homeless, as unavoidable parts of a capitalist system that we are powerless to change.(NYT 5/2 Tuition or Dinner?)
But workers and students, not just in CUNY but around the world continue to put the fight-back on display, illustrating the enormous potential of the working-class. With communist leadership and discipline, we have the ability not just to change capitalism, but to smash it altogether. That is the message that members and friends of PL are bringing to CUNY students and workers.
CUNY Board of Trustees: racist goons
For all the hardship experienced by the faculty and staff at CUNY, the group that the racist CUNY Board of Trustees have targeted most viciously is the students. Their so-called “rational” tuition plan has seen tuition increase every semester since 2011. Yet, knowing full-well the statistics cited above about student food insecurity and homelessness, and knowing that most CUNY students have to watch every penny, they just voted to raise tuition by $200.
Good capitalists that they are, the CUNY Board has also invented the myth that the tuition increase is necessary to pay for “future labor costs.” The CUNY annual budget is around $3.5 billion dollars. The notion that the small percentage increase needed for labor contracts must come from student tuition is idiotic. It’s a purely political tactic, precisely designed to weaken student-faculty solidarity. Meanwhile, the silence coming from the PSC is deafening. Fearful that it will jeopardize whatever awful contract is offered by CUNY, they have sold out students in the most brazen way by refusing to condemn the tuition increase. Here also, the $7K or Strike campaign has revealed the collaborationist nature of the PSC leadership,by boldly calling out the tuition increase as racist.
PSC leadership sows disilusion
Beyond selling out the students, the PSC continues its campaign to disarm and disillusion its members. The writing is on the wall: the CUNY  Trustees and Albany politicians continue to strangle the CUNY budget, and that’s with the racist $200 tuition increase. Yet the PSC leadership asks its members to continue the same failing strategies over and over - beg and plead with politicians, travel to Albany, testify at hearings. At multiple union meetings across the university system activists have implored the PSC leadership to develop an alternate plan – a strike plan. Yet at tonight’s meeting, even the most mild resolution – to delay any vote on a potential contract until after the summer break, giving the rank-and-file a chance to collectively discuss it – was attacked by the leadership and soundly defeated. They have systematically weakened any kind of union militancy and then have the nerve to declare that the contract timing is “fragile” and that we should not fight back.
The fight for $7K and the fight against tuition increases are critical, but history teaches us an unflinching truth: Reforms made under capitalism are fleeting - and replacing a president, a congressional representative, a governor, mayor or union president will never create a world where all workers can live with dignity in their jobs and at home. The U.S. ruling class faces an intractable need to discipline the working class and prepare for greater global conflict.
This need has not arisen because Trump is president or Republicans control the Senate or Cuomo is governor or Bill Thompson is Chair of the CUNY Board and certainly not because Barbara Bowen is PSC President. No, this need arises from the laws of imperialism and inter-imperialist rivalry. And it is this need that filters down to our working conditions and our students’ learning conditions. It is this need that drives Cuomo and DeBlasio to strangle the CUNY budget and to raise tuition. None of these characters is relieved of their responsibility in heaping racist misery on workers to a greater or lesser degree. But replacing them is not the answer. We must replace the capitalist system that feeds and is fed by them. And that requires a communist revolution.

BROOKLYN, June 30—“What’s your strategy to organize the left in the United States?” asked a young man who was a part of the Yellow Vest movement in Paris as he approached our Progressive Labor Party table this weekend at the Left Forum. (The Left Forum is a NYC-based event that seeks to “bring progressive people together to share radical ideas for social change.”) Our international strategy is to build a base in the working class and focus on organizing a mass party with workers, students, and soldiers. Only a revolutionary communist party of millions can turn the coming imperialist world war into a war for communism, a society totally run by the working class.
So organizing a revolution for communism will take tens of millions of workers, students, and soldiers worldwide. And that will take a worldwide party of millions. Not an easy task. “Organizing the left” certainly won’t do it.  But it was useful to reach out; you never know when you might meet someone who will join the fight for communism.
Black workers’ leadership key to communist revolution
PLP participated in this three-day conference, attending various panels as well as organizing our own, Black Workers Key to Communist Revolution. Young Black and South Asian comrades led the panel. They explained how fighting anti-Black racism and uniting the entire working class, led by Black workers was key to organizing a communist revolution for working class power. Black and white, women and men, PLP and others, everyone participated.
Black workers have an especially urgent case to revolt and smash the bosses’ state. Throughout U.S. history, from the time they were kidnapped from Africa as a pool of no-wage labor, they have served at the forefront of every working-class movement: the war against slavery, the struggle for civil rights, the mass strikes against the industrial bosses, the fights for jobs and housing and decent schools. Wherever workers have confronted the profit system and its parasites, Black workers have stood at the front lines. Wherever Black workers gave leadership, our entire class stood to benefit and gain class-consciousness as a result.
Anti-Black racism is deeply rooted. It is the very foundation of the U.S. Empire. More than 500 years after Europe’s colonial powers first invaded the Americas, racism exists for one reason: the division and oppression generates billions upon billions in profit for the capitalists. If our class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership are fundamental to destroy racism.
No matter where you are in the world, fighting anti-Black racism and recruiting the most oppressed part of the working class to the highest level of leadership must be part and parcel to our fight against capitalism.
Rainbow fascism
Contrast communist Black leadership with the bosses’ call for liberal leadership. Many agreed that the liberal bosses were the main danger. One young Black worker did not like our criticism of the Democratic Socialists, particularly Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC). This was a discussion of how these “socialists” may get a few crumbs for the working class, but they support the capitalist system and they especially always support the capitalists’ imperialist wars. Because AOC is doing the bidding of the U.S. imperialists, she has an interest in building a multicultural patriotic army willing to die for this empire.
Trump can’t deliver that. Following the liberal politicians disarms our class, the working class, and allows capitalism to build all-class unity (a characteristic of fascism). Instead, we must rely on only our class for leadership.
Everyone left the panel with CHALLENGE and a copy of the latest PL Magazine, which contains the article: “Black Workers Leadership Key to Communist Revolution” (see www.plp.org for your copy!). Self-critically, we could have done a better job at promoting the PLP panel.
Fight fascism today
PL’ers attended other panels to raise our political ideas. In the panel on national teacher strikes, PLP spoke about the historic, racist role the leadership of the United Federation of Teachers has played, our experiences in various reform struggles, and most importantly why, even if we win strikes, we must turn these battles into battles against capitalism. Our comments were warmly received and CHALLENGE was distributed.  
Some PL’ers also attended a panel on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War. We learned about how the communist movement fought against fascism during the Second World War. Many people who were friends and relatives of those who volunteered in Spain to fight fascism attended the workshop. At the end of the discussion, a daughter of one of the Brigadistas said, “It’s all fine and good to talk about how our families fought fascism then, but the glaring question is what are we doing today?” A PLP member brought up the Texas Summer Project and our fight at the border (see front page). Applause and thank yous broke out from the audience.
Raise the flag of communism
We must take advantage of any and all opportunities. We have to fight for our line everywhere. So while we spent the weekend meeting and talking to people who believe in everything from supporting the right “socialist” candidate to identity politics, our presence is important. PLP met quite a few people who are former members, who spoke very highly of their experiences, and were very glad to see us. Overall, we distributed 200 CHALLENGEs and other literature.
At the next Left Forum, PLP will again raise the red flag of communist revolution!

Capitalist history textbooks rarely tell us real working-class history. They especially don’t teach us about the countless working-class heroes. One such hero is Zinaida Portnova, or “Zina” for short, a Soviet teenager, Soviet partisan, and hero of the Soviet Union under leader Joseph Stalin.
She was known for killing over 100 Nazis by poison. She is said to have shot the Nazi detective who captured her. Zina was born on February 20, 1926 in the city of Leningrad in a working-class Belarusian family. Her father Martyn worked at the huge Kirov factory. She graduated from seventh grade in 1941, then left for her grandmother’s home in in the countryside.
Nazis invade USSR, Zina becomes a red
At the beginning of June 1941, she arrived for school holidays in the village of Zui, near the Obol station of the Shumilino district of the Vitebsk region. When the Nazis invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, Zina  found herself in Nazi-occupied territory. She was forced to watch as soldiers beat her grandmother for their cattle.
In 1942, she became a member of the local underground resistance “Young Avengers” headed by Yefrosinya Zenkova (who was a leader of the Komosol, the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Zina committed herself to communism.
She began by distributing Soviet propaganda leaflets in German-occupied Belorussia, collecting and hiding weapons for Soviet soldiers, and reporting on German troop movements. After learning how to use weapons and explosives, Portnova participated in sabotage actions at a pump, local power plant, and brick factory.
Zina poisons a 100 Nazis
She got herself a job working in the kitchens of a nearby Nazi garrison. On the instructions of the underground she poisoned the soup, which resulted in the deaths of many high-ranking officials. Soviet sources say more than 100 Nazi scum died.
The Nazis began a search for intruders. Zina claimed that she was innocent and ate some of the food in front of the Nazis to prove it was not poisoned. When she did not fall ill immediately, they released her. She managed to survive this after being  treated with grass broth antidote at her grandmothers house. However, after this it was too dangerous for her to remain in the village, and Zina was later transferred to the fighting partisan detachment.From August 1943, she was a member of the Kliment Voroshilov scout partisan detachment. In December 1943, returning from an assignment to discover the reasons for the failure of the Young Avengers organization, she was captured in the village of Mostysche.
Reports of her escape vary. One version is that, during Gestapo interrogation in the village of Goriany, she took the investigator’s pistol off the table, then shot and killed him. When two Nazi soldiers entered after hearing the gunshots, she shot them as well. She then attempted to escape the compound and ran into the woods, where she was caught near the banks of a river.
Another version is that the Gestapo interrogator, in a fit of rage, threw his pistol to the table after threatening to shoot her. Taking the pistol, Portnova shot him. Escaping through the door, she shot a guard in the corridor, then another in the courtyard. After the pistol misfired when Portnova attempted to shoot a guard blocking her access to the street, she was captured. After that the Nazis tortured her for more than a month, trying to get information about the partisans. On the morning of January 10, 1944, she was shot, either in the prison of the city of Polotsk or in the village of Goryany.
Remember Zina
Today there are two monuments standing for her, a bust in Minsk near where she was born and an obelisk in Obol where she was killed.
Zina’s story is one of working-class bravery. Trained by communists, she clearly had a deep hatred for the Nazis and a deeper love for the working class. Her story shows that young people can be thinkers and fighters for a better world.

In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew exposes the broad, coordinated nature of the U.S. gutter racist and fascist “white power” movement and its responsibility for many killings by so-called “lone wolves.” The white supremacist movement itself is a loose collection of many racist, nationalist and anti-communist groups from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to neo-Nazis to militias and is a part of how U.S. capitalism maintains control over the working class through racism.
Federal agencies in the U.S. have long known of the white supremacist movement’s mass base, but they have not responded proportionately. Although Belew sees violent fascism as a consequence of a violent U.S. foreign policy, she does not consider that the growth of extreme racism is useful to the ruling class or contrast their undersized response with the aggressive targeting of foreign-inspired terrorism and antiracists.
She also does not discuss anti-racist opposition to white supremacists, much of which has been led by the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) for decades all over the country. Communists fight to unite the entire working class to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system and build a communist world, run by the international working class. This proudly makes the communist PLP the sworn enemy of racists everywhere!
History of white supremacists
While gutter racist mass movements have been nurtured by the U.S. ruling class since the 1860s U.S. Civil War, the latest surge in racist activism began after the 1960s Vietnam War. Some veterans resented racial integration in the army and bought the U.S. government lies about fighting communism. The post-Vietnam racists built paramilitary camps in nine states and launched many attacks, while suffering few arrests or convictions. In 1979, they killed five leftist anti-KKK demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina, while the cops did nothing. Belew attributes this only to poor command and miscommunications.
By 1993, white supremacist groups unified and started getting out of the U.S. government’s control, declaring their goal of eventually seizing the government for themselves. They began to counterfeit and steal money and encouraged attacks on infrastructure and the assassination of federal agents and judges. Tactically, they developed a terrorist model of small leaderless cells of one to five persons, with communications through print media and the internet.
When the increasingly militarized U.S. police of the 90s attacked two white supremacist centers with tactics previously limited to poor Black communities, and killed women and children, the racists had another surge in membership. One recruit was a terrorist named Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people. Belew fails to consider that extreme racism has a value in this nation birthed in slavery and still home to massive racial discrimination.
The U.S. depends on racism to keep workers divided and save trillions on lower wages and social spending in non-white communities, which in turn lowers standards for all workers. Not only do these extremists help keep racist ideas and practices alive, but they allow the more liberal politicians to be mildly critical and so appear less racist themselves. And, while the history presented by Belew is important, the author fails to contrast this picture of a growing white supremacist movement only occasionally facing police opposition with the intense police efforts to infiltrate and control antiracist and leftist organizing.
In 1967, the FBI Counterintelligence Program began COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE, which focused on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and many antiracist groups with Black workers. The FBI’s Ghetto Informant Program disrupted or discredited similar antiracist organizations, and similar programs still exist today.
What of the antiracist opposition?
There have been many instances of successful antiracist actions against white supremacist groups, many led by PLP. Throughout the 1970s until today, among many confrontations, PLP has invaded the Nazi headquarters in Chicago, disrupted racist radio broadcasts in Kansas City and KKK demonstrations in Texas. We smashed the Klan in Boston, stood up against armed Klansmen in Mississippi, and infiltrated and attacked the racists in downtown New York City and Morristown, New Jersey, among a proud and militant history of other actions. Klan leader Bill Wilkerson even declared in the 1980s that PLP was the main barrier they faced in building their movement.
Yet if law enforcement is present at white supremacist events, those injured or arrested are more likely to be antiracists than racists. This was the case in 2016, when PLP demonstrators were injured and arrested in Anaheim, California while knife-wielding racists went free.  In 2017, a massive group of racists was met by an even larger group of protestors in Charlottesville, and the police did little. One racist was convicted later for killing a white woman anti-racist, an act too despicable to be ignored.
The ruling class needs racists
Although the fascist right accounts for 73 percent of extremist murders, they are rarely labeled hate crimes or terrorism; unlike how the racist capitalist media regularly portrays Muslim workers. Trump has rescinded grants to organizations countering white supremacy, and the Department of Homeland Security has disbanded its analyst group on domestic terrorism.
Now that the U.S. is closer to fascism, the President can openly embrace racist thugs. Even if liberal Democrats win the presidency in 2020, the history of all politicians, even Black ones, should not give us hope that violent racists will be made to account. Only by building multiracial relationships and struggles ourselves and vigorously opposing the ideas and actions of white supremacy and nationalism can we defeat racist divisions and violence. Only by making a communist revolution can we guarantee that racism will be eliminated once and for all!