BROOKLYN, NY, July 21 — On the seventh anniversary of the murder of Kyam Livingston, a militant, multiracial, antiracist car caravan rolled down the streets of the Flatbush and East Flatbush neighborhoods of Brooklyn, chanting and indicting this entire racist capitalist system. This system rains murder disproportionately on young Black and Latin women and men like Kyam at the hands of kkkops year after year, and the call to fight back for justice was greeted with cheers and support throughout the route.
 The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined the caravan saying that the working class must overthrow this entire capitalist system, and replace it with a communist system that outlaws racism, sexism, imperialism, nationalism, fascism and all the “-isms” that keep  capitalism afloat!
Black women lead the fight for justice
The route of the caravan was planned in honor of the memory of Kyam, and also to continue to link her death to two other victims of racist police murder, Shantel Davis and Kimani “Kiki” Gray, who lived nearby. Hundreds of leaflets linking the anniversary of Kyam’s murder to the recent antiracist rebellions against the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others were distributed, as well as 150 CHALLENGE newspapers.
Members of the Livingston and Davis families, a mom and a sister, both strong women, helped lead today’s action. They gave leadership side by side with PL'ers who have been strong supporters of these families ever since the racist murders of their loved ones.
Seven years of antiracist struggle
It has been seven years fighting for justice for Kyam. On July 21, 2013, 37 year-old Kyam Livingston was being held in a cell in the kkkops’ Brooklyn Central Booking. As she called out in pain for medical attention, the kkkops ignored her and the others in the cell who began calling out to help her as well. Kyam was murdered by the racist kkkops who ignored her pleas for help, by the racist NYPD who covered it up and suppressed evidence, and by capitalism’s utter indifference for working class lives, especially Black working class women.
Masses of workers in the U.S. and around the world, Black and white, already know “liberty and justice for all” is a sick racist joke. The Black women leaders in this car caravan indicted both the killer kkkops and this racist capitalist system – and they show us a glimpse of the key role of Black women workers’ leadership in taking the fight for justice all the way: for armed communist revolution.
Smash racist police terror with multiracial unity
Capitalism is utterly dependent on racism both politically, to divide and conquer the entire working class, and also economically: to reap untold billions of dollars in racist super-profits. In 1866, militant abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote a scathing open letter attacking the racist U.S. government: “the hostility between the poor whites and blacks…was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy over both. They divided both to conquer each.” Racism hurts all workers, and racist oppression exists to support and enhance this racist super-exploitation – and one of the principal means of oppression is racist police terror.
Modern U.S. police were formed out of slave patrols post-Civil War, and today they murder us at a rate of 1,000 workers per year. While, kkkops murder more white workers every year, Black and Latin workers are killed at a disproportionately higher rate. Black workers are murdered more than double the rate of white workers, as well as indigenous workers, given their relatively smaller population following centuries of capitalist genocide.
 Racist police terror keeps the entire working class terrorized and intimidated from uniting and rebelling. The fight against racist police terror and the fight for justice for Kyam, like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, is the fight of ALL workers Black, Asian, Latin and white. The capitalist bosses holding the leashes of their vicious kkkop attack dogs while planning deadlier imperialist wars fear communist-led multiracial working class unity the most, and that is precisely what PLP is fighting to build internationally.
Fight for justice for Kyam and revolution!
The fight for justice for Kyam and for revolution grows with every mass action like this car caravan and by bringing CHALLENGE to more and more workers each issue. The seven-year struggle for justice is far from over because the future of the international working class is bright: workers along our caravan route raised their fists and cheered on our efforts; drivers honked their horns and waved as we passed. Neighborhoods, job sites and schools we passed that have been sites of PL's struggles over the years are today’s fertile ground where we yield recruits, fighters and supporters in our fight for communist revolution!

NEW YORK STATE, July 18— “Shut this racist system down. If we don’t get it, SHUT IT DOWN!” A rally and march of about 150 workers and youth in the Hudson Valley region outside New York City demonstrated the extent to which the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, have angered and roused the masses. A multiracial group of women and men, student and faculty comrades and friends of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) turned up at the rally to advocate for communist revolution. Among the PL’ers was a student with years of history and several contacts in the area.

Red ideas greeted by youth at antiracist rally

The rally was organized by a local group called Chester United, a social justice organization with Christian influences with a multiracial political base in the area and led mostly by young Black workers. Speakers from their organization included local politicians and others offering various dead-end ideas for fighting racism: voting, buying only from Black capitalist-owned businesses, increased dialogue with the local kkkops, fighting for Black “representation” in the bosses’ government, etc. When they opened the floor to everyone, however, Black youth with more militant politics stepped up to share their views.

While some of the group’s misleaders advocated reconciliation and “conversations” with the police, the rally itself began late. The reason? Prior to the rally, local kkkops shut down the roads leading to the rally site, so very few arrived on time– the kkkops claimed it was for “traffic safety” for the rally!
So much for reconciliation. Kkkops defend the capitalist state, and the capitalists know a mass multiracial antiracist movement with communist ideas is the end of them. A PL’er spoke about her experiences growing up there and emphasized how imperialist war and racist police terror are essential to capitalism. She also emphasized how Black workers are key to smashing capitalism and directly attacked liberalism and identity politics. More Black capitalists or “representation” in the bosses’ system isn’t better for ANY workers, Black or white.
Connecting the Hudson Valley antiracist struggles with current PLP antiracist struggles in CUNY, she cited the intensifying racist super-exploitation of Black-majority custodial workers at Kingsborough Community College, which has a Black woman president — and the key importance of communist-led multiracial unity in fighting back.
After inviting the crowd to join the international PLP, the majority of the crowd and especially the multiracial youth present applauded. More than 150 CHALLENGEs were sold, and some approached PL’ers with extra donations and for discussions afterward.
‘To be attacked is good…’
We then marched through the area neighborhoods, and the chants gained intensity and militancy. The youth marching in front picked up PLP chants attacking this racist system. When a racist heckled the march with a U.S. flag shouting “all lives matter,” he was militantly drowned out. By the end, many contacts were made. Some had ties to the Bronx and New Jersey, and ideas for collaborating and connecting the city and tri-state area were shared.
Later, PL’ers discovered on social media that PLP and CHALLENGE were attacked by name by Chester United’s liberal misleadership. These pathetic attacks show that when desperate for influence, liberal misleaders expose their capitalist and kkkop allegiance with anticommunism. They even attacked PL’ers as “outside agitators,” despite some being from the area!
Turn the tide for communist revolution
For the sake of our class, we must continue to have a presence in these mass movements and agitate for revolution. While we made more contacts upstate where the chokehold of liberalism seems weaker, the masses at both actions (see box) were receptive to our politics. This demonstrates the importance of being bold with communist politics, because the masses are eager to hear revolutionary ideas. JOIN OUR FIGHT!

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Solidarity with Portland
The following Saturday, student and faculty PL’ers and friends attended another mass action in response to the fascist intimidation tactics by the Small Fascist-led Trump administration (see back page). Almost 500 CHALLENGEs were sold to the thousands attending in solidarity with workers in Portland, Oregon who have been abducted by secret federal police and held for weeks without charge.
Liberal misleaders once again took the stage attempting to funnel mass outrage into electoral politics for the Big Fascist-led Democrats. One speaker from Movement 4 Black Lives opened his speech with anticommunist messages , stating “Take a look at Eastern European history if you wanna know how bad secret police are” and urged workers to vote, ignoring the masses of Latin migrant workers kidnapped, terrorized and deported under liberal Obama. Our chants calling for international working class solidarity were applauded and picked up and when one of the organizers attempted to drown us out with a mobile wireless speaker, we confronted him, telling him to get lost.

Seventy-five years ago on  August 6, in a monstrous genocidal attack, the U.S. military dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan [and two days later on Nagasaki], slaughtering more than 300,000 innocent civilians in the two cities, plus untold tens of thousands who would die later or suffer the poisonous effects from the radiation unleashed by the two bombs.  
The racist U.S. rulers, murdered masses of people in Japan to intimidate their rival, the then socialist Soviet Union.  The then floated the lie that the A-Bomb attacks were necessary to “force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion of Japan involving 1,000,000 U.S. casualties.” All while the U.S. bosses knew full well Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender BEFORE the atomic bombings.
Atomic bombings not necessary to end the war
  The United States Strategic Bombing Survey reported that, “Certainly …in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. (trumanlibrary.gov, Japan’s Struggle to End the War)
 General (later president) Eisenhower said it was his “belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…and no longer mandatory to save American lives.”(Mandate for Change”; 1963)
 General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, believed the dropping of the bombs was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view.”(The Years of MacArthur; Vol. II)
 The LA Times reported in “The Myths of Hiroshima” (8/5/05) that, “The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of the air to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper’s Magazine essay that he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry Stimson.”
 On March 9, “100,000 to 200,000 men, women and children died when the U.S. Air Force doused Tokyo with jellied gasoline….In the months before Hiroshima [conventional] bombs killed up to 500,000 in Japanese cities and left 13 million homeless.”(U.S. News & World Report, 7/13/95)
By the Spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its military’s lifeline.
By June, U.S. Air Force General LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.” [In fact, Truman’s Secretary  of War Stimson told Truman that he was “fearful” that before the A-Bomb was delivered, the U.S. Air Force would have Japan “so bombed out” that the A-Bomb “would not have a fair background to show its strength.”]
So, if not necessary to end the war, why was the bomb dropped?
In May 1945, Soviet leader Josef Stalin had promised U.S. president Truman at the Yalta Conference that the Red Army would enter the war against Japan within three months after the Nazi surrender in Europe, which occurred on May 8, 1945. On August 8, the Soviets swept into Manchuria and were preparing an invasion of Japan. “It was the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing that provided the final ‘shock’ that led to Japan’s capitulation.” (LA Times 8/5/05)
The U.S. ruling class not only wanted to prevent any Soviet participation in peace settlements with Japan but also to use the bombings as a display of U.S. military might, a political warning to the Soviet Union of what awaited it in the post-war world.
Rather than the last act of World War II, the atomic bombings signaled the U.S. launching of the Cold War.
The U.S. ruling class aims for the driver’s seat vs. the Soviets in post-war world
Truman’s War Secretary . Stimson, in referring to the Bomb as a “master card,” said, “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique.” (Stimson Diary)
 Atomic bomb scientist Leo Szilard, in a meeting with Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes, said: “Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb…in order to win the war….Mr. Byrnes’s view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.” (Szilard: A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb”; 1949)
Truman and Byrnes quite plainly used the Bomb primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. As Churchill had said about the Bomb, “We now had something in our hands that would redress the balance with the Russians.” (LA Times 8/5/05)In what amounted to an indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, atomic scientist Szilard stated that, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremburg and hanged them.” (Szilard: A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb”; 1949)
It remains the historic task of the international working class to smash the most murderous war criminals the world has ever known.

I am not your ally
I am a comrade, not an ally.
It has now been just over two months since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and workers militantly took the streets. As demonstrations erupted worldwide, racism and anti-racist fightback were thrust into mainstream focus as capitalist bosses made calls for white people to “listen,” “learn,” and most loudly made calls for allyship. White workers were asked to fall back and consider their own guilt before taking to the streets.
This paralysis, however, only serves capitalist structures that benefit from racism and a divided working class.
Fighting racism is a task for all workers and we are better equipped to fight back as a multi-racial, multi-generational, international working class.
I take to the streets with my working-class brothers and sisters because the Party has taught me that this is the only way to shut this racist system down.
While, Black workers are key to revolution and their leadership is instrumental to an international working-class uprising, that leadership does not absolve white workers from joining the front lines.
Hiding behind “white guilt” with messages of “learning and listening” is not enough to fight a racist and capitalist system. Moments of sharp struggle call for all workers to join each other and fight back.
Anti-racism in the hands of the bosses will only be manipulated to keep workers divided. It will make empty declarations rooted in intellectualism that further isolate workers from each other.
Workers learn by doing. Our fightback is strongest when we resist, rebel, and revolt together. Join the working-class in the streets today! Join PLP!
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In response to ‘the summer of smashing racists’
I am writing in response to the article “PLP History: The Summer of Smashing Racists” (CHALLENGE, 8/5). I wanted to expand on the brief summary of PLP’s activity in Boston during the summer of 1975.
The Boston 1975 Summer Project was organized by Progressive Labor Party members working in the Committee Against Racism (CAR). CAR was a campus-oriented group that PLP members helped initiate in 1973. At the time, CAR focused on the fight against racist theories of inferiority being propagated by Nazi professors like Williams Shockley and Arthur Jensen. This racist ideology justified the vile acts of gutter racists like those in Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) in Boston, including white parents physically attacking bussed Black schoolchildren with rocks and bottles.
The multiracial group of 150 mostly student and teacher PLP and CAR members who went to Boston saw with their own eyes what it was like to live in a city held hostage by an aggressive racist movement whose political leaders were ensconced in the City Council and the School Committee and proudly pasted ROAR’s initials on their office windows. Hypocritical liberal politicians, like Mayor Kevin White and Senator Edward Kennedy, had for decades overseen Boston, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. The liberals built their political machines on the division between Black and white workers there. This divide between the workers allowed Boston’s business elite to reap huge profits.
Throughout that summer, PLP and CAR volunteers circulated an anti-racist petition that called for major improvements in the schools and the indictment of ROAR leaders for racist conspiracy to violate the rights of school children. 35,000 people, white, Black and Latin signed our petition, and over 100 Black, white and Latin Boston residents joined CAR. ,
CAR’s bullhorn rallies were frequently physically attacked by ROAR goon squads. These attacks followed a familiar pattern. Boston police, who shadowed us all summer, would mysteriously disappear just before the fascists showed up with bats and hockey sticks. When PLP and CAR members fought back, the racists would retreat and the cops would reappear, sometimes arresting some of us on phony charges.
There were also much bigger battles. Hundreds, led by PLP and CAR, desegregated Carson Beach in South Boston (ROAR’s stronghold), which the racists labeled “whites-only”. The gutter racists attacked, throwing rocks and bottles, allowed by the cops who were supposedly there to keep us separated and “protected”. As the battle continued and the PLP and CAR forces were pushed back by the cops, Black nationalists who were behind us attacked our white members. PLP and CAR members fought back, but we were forced to retreat.
Over the course of the summer, there were hundreds of arrests. Two Black members were convicted of assault and spent three  months in prison simply for coming to the defense of a white Boston CAR member who was being chased and harassed by ROAR thugs. 75 PLP and CAR members, planning to welcome Black students being bused, were arrested while sitting on buses that were pulled over by the cops.
The collaboration between the cops, politicians, state bosses and ROAR was blatant. The permit for our Monday, August 18, 1975 march concluding the Summer Project was withdrawn by the cops’ top brass (no doubt with City Hall’s approval) on the Friday afternoon before the march. Although the courts were rarely on our side, even this was too much for a Boston judge. He reinstated the permit Monday morning just before the march started. 350 PLP and CAR members marched to Boston City Hall, where thousands of curious Boston residents watched our rally. Scores of them joined CAR on the spot as the rally concluded.
The Boston 1975 Summer Project was an unforgettable three months of sharp struggle and tremendous comradeship between those of us who fought together. It is no exaggeration to say that the summer of struggle in Boston broke the back of ROAR and stopped the growth of overt fascism there. Lastly and most importantly, that summer played an instrumental role in deepening the commitment of scores of young, relatively new PLP members to both the fight against racism and (at that time) the fight for socialism, now communism.     
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Beware of liberalism  
CHALLENGE has been pointing out correctly that with all of Trump's fascist garbage spewing — equating him with McCarthyism, named for the anti-communist witch-hunting 1950s senator — the liberals remain the main danger, having established fascism's foundation in the U.S.
Trump’s actions and traits do resemble those of McCarthy’s — repetitive lying, bullying, outrageous charges, bluster, rambling tirades, personal attacks, egotistical self-praising, you name it. But McCarthy did not create McCarthyism.
“The blame for that rests with…[president] Harry Truman….The witch hunt that McCarthy is identified with was at its worst before he got started.” (The New Yorker, 8/3).
In March 1947, Truman — the Democratic Party's standard bearer, having become president after being selected by Franklin Roosevelt as his vice-president before FDR’s death — launched the Truman Doctrine aimed at the Soviet Union, initiating the Cold War.
As a teenager I remember how U.S. workers widely admired the communist-led Soviet Union for having  played the leading role in smashing the Nazis in World War II.
To inflame the U.S. population into anti-communism against its former ally, Truman set up a “loyalty” program to be carried out by the FBI and the Attorney-General, forcing 4,765,795 federal workers to sign an anti-communist oath. Eventually over 500 were fired.
Simultaneously, the Democratic-led Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to “investigate” whoever it designated as “subversive.”
This liberal establishment created an anti-communist/anti-Soviet witch-hunt atmosphere years before McCarthy got started. The latter just capitalized on it and used it to become the kind of fascist which Trump now personifies.
(Further case in point: Trump building on former Liberal-in-Chief Barack Obama's racist Middle East and immigration policies.)
So beware of the liberals. They will pursue any path that fortifies the profit system and attempts to blind the working class against a communist solution to capitalism’s exploitation.
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Non-violence is deadly
 In the midst of a nationwide, worldwide anti-racist fight back by protesters against cop and military terror, the capitalist bosses are worried and urging us to become non-violent and go back to work peacefully into their Covid-19 gas chambers using the Nazi idea that ‘work will make you free’ (this was the sign at the entrance gate to Auschwitz). John Lewis, a Black politician has suddenly been elevated by former Presidents, Bush, Obama and Clinton, as a non-violent saint in one of the most spectacular, publicized funerals since President Roosevelt. While praising Lewis for his younger organizing civil rights efforts, one Black woman activist said that Lewis, however, like all politicians, had to limit his  criticism of the system and that he was reprimanded and summoned to the Obama White House whenever his remarks got out of line.
When Malcolm X called for Black resistance to racial oppression, he was assassinated. When non-violence spokesman Martin Luther King supported striking Memphis sanitation workers and spoke out against the genocidal war in Vietnam, saying, “the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” he was also assassinated. During that time hundreds of U.S. cities like Watts in LA, Detroit, Newark and New York went up in flames and I remember a CHALLENGE  headline saying, “Non-violence is Dead, Organize!”
Black slave labor built the U.S. economy and capitalism and today Black and Latin poverty wages produce depressed communities and endangered workers to keep it running. But capitalism is a cancer requiring increasing blood soaked profits from worldwide imperialist exploitation, poverty and occupation which U.S. workers in Portland and Seattle are now getting a gassy taste of from their own brothers in capitalist uniforms. The endless bombed out countries we see on TV are part of 100 nations dominated by taxpayer funding of over 800 U.S. military bases worldwide creating a picture of what capitalism has in store for U.S. cities that resist its terror.
Protesters must begin to handle the truth that capitalism creates racism, poverty, pandemics, profits before health and endless wars that only a communist party like Progressive Labor Party can organize to destroy. Join us!
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