Haiti—These are bad days for the bosses and their lackey politicians. There is hardly any growth in the capitalist economy. But it’s even worse for workers—double-digit inflation, currently at 15%  (worldbank.org). The value of the Haitian gourde is falling at breakneck  speed (currently 95 hgd (Haitian gourdes) to $1 U.S.,while just last year it was 66 :1), meaning the cost of living really went up about 50 percent. And with an unemployment rate of 70 percent (haitipartners.org), life is an agonizing struggle. The masses are angry!
Tens of thousands took to the streets throughout Haiti on June 9 to demand the ouster of Pres. Moïse Jovenel, just found guilty of allowing the theft of PetroCaribe funds (profits from the sale of subsidized Venezuelan oil). As our comrades here pointed out, amid the police bullets and teargas,  the whole damn system is putrid and cannot be fixed just by putting another actor in the same role. The whole play has to be rewritten—communism—with the working class and its communist party in charge.
Capitalism feeds Haitian workers misery
The world produces enough food to feed twice the number of inhabitants on the planet (Jean Ziegler, La faim dans le monde expliquée à mon fils, 2011). Yet food insecurity (a socio-economic term, indicating hunger and starvation) threatens 2.6 million working class people here (out of a population of 11 million), and 386,000 in phase 4 starvation, according to the last report of the CNSA (National Council for Food Insecurity, cnsa509.org). Each working class person—here or anywhere in the world—who dies of starvation is actually murdered, and the capitalist system is the assassin.
Six million Haitians live below the poverty line with a daily income of $2.41 U.S. ; 2.5 million live in “extreme poverty,” with $1.23 U.S. per person (worldbank.org).  Although tuition is “free” in public universities in Haiti, the rulers line their pockets by increasing the “fees.” In Public University of the South, the university fees were 4,000 hgd in 2015; between 2016 and 2018 they were raised to 10,0000 hgd. This year, the school administrators demanded another 25 percent. Most students in public universities are children of the working class, who clearly don’t have the economic ability to pay these outrageous fees and fee hikes. University bosses know this, but cast a blind eye to the difficulties of their students and their parents. They are only concerned with digging an even deeper ditch of social inequality. Yet things didn’t go as expected.
PLP, a party for the international working class
A member of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is studying at this university. While most students were complaining about fees, she gathered friends to demand no fee hike. They wrote a letter to the university dean and demanded a meeting to discuss the issue. Never having experienced a militant and unbending student delegation protesting a university decision before, the dean was speechless. He feared the birth of a radical movement on this campus, following the tradition of militant communist student movements throughout the region. The dean rescinded the fee hikes, for the moment!
But the struggle is clearly not over. Our PLP comrade made it clear to her classmates that raising fees in one public university where there is already hardly enough funding and resources for those who want to attend, let alone enough students who have the economic means to  attend, is just another attempt to block access of the working class to education in general. They agreed that this was a class question and would have to be fought by the working class as a class. And that this was a small victory that might be taken away at any moment, and that they must keep up the fight. Our comrade was initially disappointed that many more students did not join the struggle, out of fear of repercussions or inexperience in struggle. However, she learned the important lesson of working with the most advanced and class-conscious students around her, building their confidence in organizing struggle, with the outlook of having them bring along others as the struggle grows.
Our Party is a party of the working class; we are involved in class struggle, big and small. We point out every attack against our class in order to fight for and win the liberation of our class from the yoke of capitalist exploitation and misery. Our young student comrade has only recently joined the Party. Yet with the support of the Party, she is learning to arm herself with the ideas Marxism-Leninism and to bring these ideas to the class struggle on her campus, and beyond. Her plan is to organize a PLP study group with some of her friends in struggle, to develop both her and their revolutionary leadership.
While millions of workers and their families in this part of the world currently known as Haiti can’t find enough to feed themselves, and many more are under constant exploitation, engaging in anti-capitalist and pro-communist class struggle is more important than ever. For a small few, it’s a good life, but at our expense! The only way out of this trap is to make the commitment to fight the system and smash it completely. The only solution is communist revolution, under the leadership of the PLP.

 

Voting for liberals will not protect women’s reproductive rights. This fact was not the atmosphere of the May 21 rally that Planned Parenthood of NYC hosted against the anti-abortion laws. It was the kind of rally the bosses wanted. It was a collection of middle-class white women who believe that the next presidential elections will put an end to the Trump trend. There also were a few white middle class men there. Routine.
Six states passed a six-week abortion ban, including Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa, and North Dakota. Most women don’t even realize they’re pregnant at that time. This includes cases of rape, incest, and human trafficking. Alabama governor Kay Ivey signed a near-full ban on the procedure, the harshest anti-abortion measure in the country (The Cut, 5/21).
The issue of reproductive rights is an attack by the bosses. It’s the same bosses who let police kill Black and brown youth—including young women like
Shantel Davis, Kyam Livingston and more. It’s the same bosses who pay white males more than any other group and pay Black women the least. These workers must take a multiracial stand on all these issues. Working-class women are affected the most. Working-class men need to show up. Once we see the connection, the workers cannot be defeated.
Anything you believe is a feminist issue, we see as a communist issue. The workers cannot win if we are divided. That was our stance as we distributed CHALLENGE. This led to a fairly cool response from the crowd but we stuck to our position.
The workers who unite will be victorious when it comes to reproductive healthcare issues. The answer to the sexism women face is communism. We don’t simply mean that communism is good for women; we mean that women should be leading the fight for communism. It’s the only way sexism, police terror, or any other fascist attacks the workers face will be beaten back.

On May 13, on Chicago’s West Side police shot and killed yet another Black man, 26-year-old Sharell Brown. A Progressive Labor Party member was informed soon after the deadly shooting by one of their hospital co-workers. They quickly relayed this to fellow Party members who went door-to-door in an effort to get more information about the killing. It was reported on the Internet that Sharell was shot multiple times in confrontations with two cops, who—of course—claimed he was shooting at them. PL’ers went to neighborhood people to give PL’s perspective on the need to organize in order to advance the fight against these racist murders. They brought CHALLENGE with them too to help bring home that racism pervades the whole country and is the life-blood of U.S. capitalism. Capitalism needs and breeds racist hatred and racist murder, and if there’s going to be an end to racist murders it means building and winning the revolutionary fight for communism. It’s the only way.
Just like police killings all over the U.S., this police murder came as no surprise to the West Side. Police murders here are not rare. Last summer, another young Black man, 15-year-old Steven Rosenthal was killed by a cop who claimed that Steven committed suicide at the back door of his grandmother’s house after being chased on foot by the cops. PLP joined Steven’s family and friends in many marches to protest this fake account, which was supported by the Chicago Police Department.
The lives of Black folk in poor neighborhoods like the West Side are cheap to capitalist bosses. They not only don’t care but have to harass, pin crimes on, jail and terrorize working people, especially Black workers, to keep them down. The police are an essential part of the whole machine that oppresses working people and then blames them for the problems we face. Those who run the U.S. look like they’re above it all, because the cops do their dirty work.
PL’ers distributed CHALLENGEs and made contacts in an effort to develop a bigger base to keep the fight going. We’re clear that we need to get the word out to our co-workers and neighbors. One way was to have our May Day March and Dinner this year in the community itself. As we marched, many said that we all need to get better organized. It’s said that the bosses create their own gravediggers, but it’s not enough to be a gravedigger. You have to take the life out of capitalism first to have something to put in the grave. We’ll be continuing to protest this latest killing and to organize for the struggles to come.

Comrade Robert “Bob” Patterson died in Brooklyn, NY on May 8 of heart failure. He was 72 years old. He leaves behind a son, daughter-in-law, grandson, brother, nieces and nephews, and a large group of friends and comrades.
Bob was a presence that could always be counted on. His passing leaves a tremendous hole that we will work hard to fill. After Bob was introduced to the Progressive Labor Party, he embraced it and regretted that he had not met our Party earlier in his life.
As a child, Bob was taught anti-racism by his Mennonite grandmother. This was solidified on a trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida which he won for selling newspapers as a teenage delivery boy. As the van with the winners drove deeper and deeper into the Jim Crow South, he was angered at the treatment of two Black youth who also won the trip. They were not allowed to use the same hotels and restaurants as the white youth, their dignity being stripped away. This was the start of his militancy. Bob was deeply involved in struggles for workers’ rights and antiracism for the rest of his life.
As a young man, he worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement. He also participated in the famous anti-racist march for voting rights over the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, a life-changing event for Bob. The marchers were trained to be passive in the face of all attacks that were directed at them. Bob was outraged when one of his best friends, a young Black man, was doused in white paint by the racists and no one fought back. When Bob met PLP 17 years ago, he came to understand the misleadership of pacifism and on relying on legislation to end racism, and how reform movements lead to reversals. Comrade Bob also took part in antiwar efforts of the 1960s, helping many Vietnam Vets who went AWOL (absent without leave).
Bob’s acting ability was recognized by Sir Tyrone Guthrie and he received a full scholarship to act in Minneapolis’ prestigious Guthrie Theater. All through his professional career as an actor and teacher of the acting craft, he continued to promote and organize around antiracism and for social justice. He was a visionary and always thinking about the larger world, in his studio, in his church, in the community, and in the Party. Bob thought of acting as a collective craft and that actors could be won to be politically antiracist and fighters for social justice. He thought actors must search for the truth in the world around them and that this truth leads to understanding the necessity for an egalitarian world. Through his years in the Party, he brought many of his students to PLP events and study groups. And through PLP cultural work, Comrade Bob used his skills to help spread our political ideas, helping develop collective performances and presentations.
Bob aided in creating a social justice group in his church 20 years ago, which continues to this day. He proposed and organized forums, marches and protests, to which we could invite our friends, always making sure we were in motion to fight racism and injustice. He was the “go-to guy” if you wanted information or wanted to plan an event, but he did not do all the work himself. He was able to encourage others to step up and realize their untapped talents. He often got people to go beyond their limits (such as shyness) to make presentations at forums, dinners, demonstrations, etc.
The forums were on a range of subjects: “single payer health insurance,” racist treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims, anti-Muslim hysteria after 911, racist police killings such as the murder of Kyam Livingston, etc. Bob also encouraged those of us working at Downstate Medical Center to have a big rally against plans to close down the hospital, resulting in the largest rally there since the 1960s. Four hundred workers, doctors and patients rallied, putting the fear of workers’ power into the bosses and building our confidence. Thanks for the push, Bob.
Up until his last breath, Bob was organizing for a better world for his grandchild and all of our grandchildren, making dozens of daily phone calls; he was sorry that he missed the Brooklyn May Day March.
Bob was, modest yet immodest. He did say that he was the best acting teacher around but rarely boasted about his standing in the profession or the famous people he knew. He was also a man of many interests, beyond art and politics. He loved basketball and watched every NBA game he could. He had long arms and was quick on the court. He battled to keep in shape and hid his failing health from his friends.
Bob was a great presence and constant organizer. If a measure of a person is that they leave the world a better place, then Bob has more than exceeded that measure. He will be greatly missed by all who worked with him.