Comrade Joan Heymont died on February 26, surrounded by her family and comrades who had become her family, after a valiant battle against interstitial lung disease. A lifelong communist, Joan was an anchor of the New York City Progressive Labor Party collective and a leader of the Party’s education work around the world.
Joan grew up in Rockaway, Queens, the child of two former Communist Party members. She learned strong working-class values and a fighting spirit from her parents, who helped organize the Rockaway community against displacement of Black communities by the city and support for workers harmed by unsafe working conditions.
An excellent student, Joan entered Stony Brook University early and joined Progressive Labor Party there, having met the Party through the anti-war work of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Joan then spent many years as a hospital laboratory worker, organizing for communism in the unions there.
Communist science teacher
Joan later began to work in the NYC public schools, first as a laboratory specialist, and then as a science teacher. Joan was a dedicated teacher who spent enormous amounts of time thinking about what and how to teach her students, connecting with other teachers to learn from them, and sharing her own ideas and lesson plans at science teacher meetings and online groups. She made the connection between science and politics, knowing that the two are interconnected.
Joan was a leader of the Party’s work in education, helping to lead the struggle for Party teachers to make sure that their pedagogy was as strong as their political agitation and base building. Joan worked to help other communist teachers see that “fighting to learn” and “learning to fight” were equally important, organizing several conferences of Party teachers focused on the connections between our political organizing and planning for our classrooms. She was a mentor to many teachers at the schools she worked at, as well as in the Party.
Union work
Joan represented the Party’s ideas in the teachers union at the local and national levels. She stood on the floor of the UFT Delegates Assembly every month and at NEA and AFT conventions every summer to advocate for working-class politics and struggle. She joined many coalitions and union groups over the years, fighting to move those groups to the left. In every group she participated in, she was respected for her integrity and welcomed as a friend. She was able to build friendly relationships even with those who disagreed with her ideas. Joan didn’t give up on workers; she worked to bring her friends closer to the Party, to win them to communist ideas.
Wherever Joan was, she fought for communism. Wherever the Party was fighting, Joan was there. As much as the workers loved her, the bosses wanted to be rid of her. At Boys and Girls High School, the administration attacked her for organizing students and removed her from her classroom and the school for several months. Joan fought like hell to get back to her work teaching and organizing. She never gave up until she was back in that classroom.
Far beyond the struggles on the job, at the union and in the streets, Joan built a collective life. She and her husband Paul raised four daughters together, trying to develop equality in their home. Many more young people over the years have described Joan as “like a mother” to them - former students, younger comrades, the children of friends. Joan helped raise dozens, there for support and struggle. And anyone Joan knew who had a new baby received a beautiful blanket or sweater, hand knit by her while she led meetings, rode the train or just had 10 minutes to sit still.
Party is red politics and red culture
Joan always said that joining the Party had taught her many things beyond politics and she saw it as her legacy to continue that gift. She remembered older comrades introducing her to cuisines and cultures she had never experienced before and she delighted in doing the same for her students and young comrades. She took joy in sharing a new restaurant, a new recipe, a new neighborhood or museum or city. And Joan made the life of the Party delicious. She loved to cook and bake, both as a scientist looking for the best recipe and a communist recognizing the role of building a collective. Many a potluck, cookout and fundraiser were made successful by Joan’s efforts. As her politics had a strong social aspect, Joan’s social life was political. At her family’s enormous annual Thanksgiving Rehearsal open house, or any other event she hosted, CHALLENGE was offered and communist politics were discussed.
Joan’s comrades, friends and family members all describe her in the same way. She was a steady, tireless and optimistic fighter for the working class. She cared for and educated those around her without letting her ego get in the way of what needed to be done. Joan built networks and collectives in every aspect of her life, and that must now carry her work forward: building collective knowledge and struggle, learning about the world in all its aspects, and fighting the bosses everywhere we can.

MEXICO, March 3—We live under the capitalist system, where a minority of profit thirsty multi-billonaires steal the wealth socially generated by the majority of the exploited and impoverished working class. In Mexico the Fourth Transformation Government (4T), of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s (AMLO) campaign, and its promise to end corrpution, and  massive income disparity plaguing Mexico, is continuing this viscious cycle rather than eradicating it.
AMLO’S exploitation
The megaprojects of the Interoceanic Corridor (CI, Spanish abbreviation), the Maya Train, the new International Airport in Mexico City, the Comprehensive Project of Morelos (PIM, Spanish abbreviation) and the Dos Bocas Refinery, will bring destruction, death and exploitation for the communities where they are being created. But, according to AMLO’s government, it will bring “progress” and “development”.  Words that under capitalism mean more poverty, exploitation and repression for workers.
Mining destroys
We just have to look at how mining has devastated the lives of millions of workers living in the municipalities where it is taking place.  According to a 2017 report from the FUNDAR organization: 50 percent of the mining municipalities in Mexico have higher levels of poverty than the national average and 13 percent of those communities surpass the limits of extreme poverty (Las Actividades Extractivas en México: Minería e Hidrocarburos Hacia el Fin del Sexenio, 2017).
During that same year, according to a report from the Chamber of Mines of Mexico, the mining production was up to 12,772 billion dollars, which means record breaking profits for the mining bosses and inequality and poverty for those communities. Let’s not forget that mining destroys  workers’ way of life and the environment.  
Those who oppose these megaprojects are often intimidated or assassinated by the repressive forces and paramilitary groups hired by the companies or organized crime.  Samir Flores, an indigenous fighter and leader of the resistance against  PIM, was assassinated a few days after AMLO called him a “leftist conservative”.
The government of the 4T is also creating conflcit between imperialists. The CI is a project that U.S. imperialism has long wished for; to streamline and simplify the flow of raw material and products between the east and west coast of the U.S., creating more profits.  It also means creating big industrial parks with laws that impose slave labor conditions for workers, while taking the abundant hydraulic, mining and energetic resources in the south of Mexico.
 But China is rising to become the main imperialist rival of the U.S. The CI will be a confrontation point due to its connection with the strategic Pacific Ocean, the main disputing zone for both imperialists.
Reject all capitalist politicians
We have to confront the attacks these megaprojects represent for our class.  The international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is in solidarity with these communities and their resistance. We reject all forms of repression against this struggle.  
Capitalism will continue its deadly projects, be it with right-wing governments like Peña’s or Calderon’s or liberal governments like AMLO’s.  Only in a society run by and for the workers, can projects be done on the basis of the social needs of workers, and without destroying the environment.
In order to make this an effective fight, we have to collectively organize an international revolutionary communist party to unite all the isolated efforts of all communities to the struggles of the world’s working class.  Only a multiracial, antifascist, international antisexist movement can unite the world’s workers in a common fight to liberate the working class from the oppression of the capitalist system.  PLP is fighting to build the movement to end capitalism once and for all! Join us!

Washington, D.C., February 6—Progressive Labor Party members have joined a number of rallies and struggles against racist immigration policies, including a recent rally in Washington, D.C. Our goal: show medical professionals that only a strategy with the end goal of communism and revolution can alter the vicious capitalist attacks on workers who are divided from each other by capitalist-formed borders. Our class has no borders, and revolution will abolish them!
Racism and cages divide families
Racist immigration policies are dividing families at the Texas-Mexico border. The U.S. bosses’ racist immigration policies create a devil’s choice for families migrating to the U.S. from Central America. The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) force families who come together into unsafe conditions in Mexico where children entering without parents are forced into U.S. detention centers. Children are in cages and some have died while the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) was supposed to be monitoring them and getting them treatment. Among many horrors, the CBP is not giving children flu vaccines. The CBP claimed that the children could get the vaccine after they reached their final destination since they would only be held a couple of days. But in fact, many are held longer and the crowded conditions predispose the spread of infection.
Medical workers organize
One organization in which we are involved in is Doctors4CampClosure (D4CC), which is protesting against inhumane and racist policies. This group has over 2,000 medical professionals and has demanded to meet with CBP medical staff about flu vaccinations and general medical care for children and families. In DMV (District of Maryland and Virginia) an active chapter led a protest at the Trump hotel in October and today a local contingent gathered to protest in D.C. at the CBP headquarters. In response to the mobilization, CBP Senior Medical Advisor David Tarantino said he would meet with the group after all.  This remains to be seen.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have participated with D4CC here and led the rally at the Philadelphia ICE office during the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in November. Today’s rally included plans to disrupt CBP work and risk arrest through civil disobedience tactics. This reflects the anger and seriousness of medical professionals who join the fight for immigrant rights and building solidarity among all workers. This rally built on the many resolutions passed in medical organizations to get the message out. This is similar to the way we led the rally at the APHA and turns words into action. While most of the D4CC members are physicians, their events have welcomed a wide range of medical workers as well. In Maryland we are demanding that no new ICE detention centers be built and that local government connections to ICE be stopped. These reforms would be welcome, but they only scratch the surface of capitalism’s systematic attack on workers around the world.
Concentration camps litter U.S.-Mexico border
The MPP went into effect on January 29, 2019 and has since detained 58,000 asylum applicants in Mexico until their asylum cases can be heard. Corralled into makeshift camps on the Mexican border, refugees sleep in the open without adequate access to water or proper sanitation. Human Rights First reported 660 reported cases of murder, rape, kidnapping and other attacks against migrants relegated to stay in Mexico by the U.S. under the MPP. These include 148 cases of children who were kidnapped or nearly kidnapped.
The MPP explicitly exempts those with medical and mental health issues; however, the Administration routinely denies humanitarian parole into the U.S. to vulnerable people. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has reported on 17 instances of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers sending women in the final trimester of pregnancy back to Mexico under the MPP. A woman with a known history of preeclampsia was sent back to Matamoros and went into labor in a tent, endangering both her life and that of her baby. In another case, CBP denied U.S. entry to a seven-year-old girl from Honduras with an enterocutaneous fistula, a condition in which excrement leaks through a hole from the intestines to the skin.
Communist revolution is workers only solution
International agreements and the U.S. bosses own laws claim to be against the mistreatment of refugees, but U.S. bosses ignore these agreements. The bosses break their own laws whenever it suits them—truly a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Building our party to move this struggle in a revolutionary direction is critical.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a tried-and-true racist, sexist, and fascist of the internationalist main wing of the U.S. ruling class, is rising in the polls after spending $338 million on media ads—to date—in his bid for the presidency. Bloomberg’s candidacy reveals the dilemma of the banks and multinational corporations that rule the U.S. When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election in 2016, it marked finance capital’s loss of control over the Republican Party. Trump has mostly allied with the isolationist Small Fascists led by the Koch family, the “Fortress America” capitalist bosses who don’t want to invest in a global war with China and/or Russia. As a former stock and bond trader who made his fortune by selling data to Wall Street, Bloomberg and his checkbook candidacy reflect a desperate bid by the main wing, the Big Fascists, to impose direct control over the elections and the state apparatus. But unfortunately for the bosses, Bloomberg brings a lot of negative baggage with him.
Over the last 30 years, the most powerful ruling class in history has been on an epic losing streak: two disastrous wars in the Middle East, a devastating economic crisis, and a stubborn challenge from the Koch faction. The main wing bosses have responded with intensifying fascism, from mass incarceration to mass deportations to record levels of kkkop murders of Black workers. Meanwhile, the rulers’ ranks are divided, undisciplined and openly corrupt. Barely half of U.S. workers bother to vote for president. Alienation and disgust with the capitalist system is widespread and profound.
At the moment, finance capital’s best bets to unseat Small Fascist Trump are three white men close to 80.  Bernie Sanders is a fake leftist who backs U.S. imperialism and garners support among desperate young workers buried in debt. Joe Biden is a racist bumbler who has yet to come close to winning a primary in three presidential campaigns. Bloomberg is a richer and more disciplined version of Trump, with a personal fortune estimated at $64 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the U.S. (Forbes). His well-documented history of outrageous racism and sexism will make him a tough sell for the younger workers the bosses will need to fight World War III.  
Big Racists
The main wing capitalists have a long history of seeking Black loyalty while simultaneously launching vicious assaults on the Black working class.  We can see this from the Civil War to World War II, from Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs to Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech, where he peddled the old racist myth that the plight of Black workers was the fault of Black male irresponsibility (New York Times, 6/15/08).
Arch-racist Bloomberg is a shameful part of this tradition. As mayor of New York City, he unleashed the cops to stop and frisk innocent workers more than five million times during his 12 years in office. The vast majority of those terrorized and abused were Black and Latin males, “even though their white counterparts were twice as likely to be found with a gun, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union” (NYT, 11/17/19). Bloomberg arrogantly defended his Jim Crow policy right up until he decided to run for president last fall. If anything, he said, “we disproportionately stop whites too much, and minorities too little” (6/28/13 interview on WOR).  
While Bloomberg is a Klansman in a three-piece suit, his racist approach to criminal injustice is part of the liberal Democratic Party tradition. Stop-and-frisk was a logical extension of the mass incarceration policies rooted in Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, “tough-on-crime legislation that was championed by [presidential candidate] Joe Biden and supported by Bernie Sanders” (Politico, 2/13).
There is also no shortage of older Black misleaders, from senior ministers like New York’s Calvin Butts to the Congressional Black Caucus, lining up to pocket some of racist Bloomberg’s cash and support his campaign. Among these class traitors is former Black Panther and Chicago hack Bobby Rush.
Big Sexists
Over the last four years, the Democratic Party has been posing as the anti-sexist savior of the working class by exposing Trump’s crude sexism.  But in reality, liberals’ assaults on women may be worse. Since the 1980s, 64 women have brought sex discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits against Bloomberg and his organizations (GQ, 2/13). According to the Washington Post, he told a pregnant employee to “kill” her unborn child and “talked kind of crudely about women all the time” (Washington Post, 2/15).
When Bloomberg helped to engineer the massive wave of gentrification in Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods, he disproportionately displaced women and families (NYT, 11/9/19).
Big Fascists
Bloomberg is used to suspending liberal democratic laws and rules, a hallmark of fascism. As New York’s mayor, with the Democratic Party’s blessing, he used his fat bankroll to change the term limits law and then buy himself a third term. More recently, the Democratic National Committee changed its rules to give Bloomberg a place in the February 19 debate, despite the fact that he essentially has just one donor: himself.
For years now, main wing liberals have championed direct ruling-class control over education through the heavily segregated charter school movement, where powerful bosses like Eli Broad or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg privatize schools and run them on the taxpayers’ dime without interference from elected school boards, teachers’ unions, or parents. After Bloomberg won mayoral control over the New York City school system, the number of charter schools expanded from 18 to 183 under his administration  (Politico, 1/20).
Bloomberg wants a national ID work card system based on DNA and fingerprints. He expanded camera surveillancein Manhattan, bragging “you’re never going to know where all of our cameras are” (politico.com, 1/18). He gave drones to the NYPD and deployed the Sky Watch towers used at the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor Black and Latin neighborhoods. He spied on Occupy Wall Street protesters and sent police agents to snoop on Muslims up and down the East Coast (Politico, 1/18).
Before they can try to impose full-blown fascism on the working class, the bosses must get their own house in order. Bloomberg is showing a new willingness to discipline the capitalist ruling class. Though he’d opposed financial regulation and oversight in the past, “the candidate announced an ambitious financial policy plan on Tuesday that includes imposing a tax on financial transactions and toughening restrictions on risky banking practices…Perhaps the most surprising proposal, given the billionaire’s close personal ties to Wall Street movers and shakers, is a plan for the Justice Department to create a dedicated team to fight corporate crime by “encouraging prosecutors to pursue individuals, not only corporations, for infractions” (NYT, 2/18).
Workers need communism: join PLP
Election-year rhetoric aside, the bosses’ political parties always defend the capitalists’ class interests. At the moment, Republicans and Democrats are serving different wings of the U.S. ruling class. But both parties represent anti-worker sexism, racism, and fascism.  
The Progressive Labor Party seeks to champion the interests of the international working class. By joining the class struggle in our areas of work, by expanding the readership of Challenge and most of all by recruiting workers and youth to our revolutionary communist organization, we help the working class prepare to turn imperialist war into class war and lead armed struggle for a dictatorship of the proletariat.  Because the working class is international, we are organized as one international party dedicated to communism, and nothing less.  Don’t vote, join PLP!