- Information
MLA: ‘From the rubble of defeat’ - Building for a communist future
- Information
- 27 December 2025 454 hits
It is January in Toronto, Canada. It is very cold outside. Several thousand scholars and teachers in the Humanities are attending the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA). They are huddled in conference sessions where they attempt to find some light in the darkness. Those who aspire to teach the literature that they love face a future of precarity and poverty. Those who have jobs are painfully aware that they must be careful not to talk about “critical race theory,” “gender politics,” colonialism and imperialism, and the class struggle.
Those who have protested the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza are paying the price for telling the truth. With few exceptions, their university administrations have shamefully acceded to the transit into fascism. And too many professional associations--the MLA, AHA, and APHA--have been complicit in this transition, preventing discussion and debate over the government assault on the freedom and funding of universities. Fascist politicians silence students and fire our colleagues, suspend students and deport international scholars.
Turning loss into its opposite under growing fascism
Radical activists in the MLA have witnessed some painful defeats in recent years. The Executive Council has undermined all efforts to take a stand against the Palestinian genocide. Scores of members have quit the MLA in disgust, though the Radical Caucus persists. The antifascist playwright Lillian Hellman described the descent into McCarthyism I as “Scoundrel Time.” We are now in the midst of McCarthyism II. Scoundrels are everywhere, riding high in Washington, state capitols and university administrations.
This might seem like a strange time to talk at the MLA about the possible communist future buried somewhere under the fascist rubble. Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) disagree. The Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani said after the defeat of the 1967 war: “What is happening now is only the labor pains of something great that will be born from the rubble of defeat like a volcano born from under the cold ashes of a forsaken mountain.” Dark times are the best times to think ahead.
As capitalism leads to greater crises we must offer an alternative
It is precisely because the crisis we face in higher education is rooted in the broader crisis in global capitalism—and the threat of global war--that we must think beyond the idealist myths of bourgeois democracy. Fascism is not just undemocratic authoritarianism; it is a mode of capitalist class rule resorted to in ‘polycrises’ of economic stagnation, fading political legitimacy and proliferating war. The only antidote to a system based upon the brutal pursuit of profit is its revolutionary transcendence by an egalitarian system of mass participation based upon the fulfillment of human needs—communism.
There is a mass base for fascism in many parts of the planet. About this we cannot fool ourselves. But there is also a mass hunger for a better world. The millions who have been marching and striking against genocide and xenophobia around the world embody what the U.S. proletarian writer Tillie Olsen called “the not-yet in the now.” Repression breeds resistance. As Kanafani wrote, “Resistance is the essence.” Communism is the future and that requires a communist party. This could be the time to join PLP!
Maryland, December 13, 2025—College Park, Maryland “No Contract, No Coffee” rang out in front of the Starbucks near the University of Maryland where workers were on strike, part of a nationwide struggle against bloodthirsty Brian Niccol, the CEO. The workers had shut down Starbucks on Thursday and Friday, but today scabs reported to work, and some students crossed the picket line despite chants calling for solidarity. Still, several workers and students left after talking to the strikers and getting educated on the class struggle.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined in the picketing, shared several copies of CHALLENGE, and talked with the workers, who were mostly university students. One student told us that she had organized the union there over a year ago because Starbucks was demanding a conservative dress code with black shirts. But then the issue of last-minute scheduling changes – often on the same workday – became the driving issue to create a union. Now she thinks that the scheduling is being negotiated, but wages and benefits are being stonewalled by the company. So sharper chants included “How much does Brian make: 6000 times our pay!” and “What’s appalling? Corporate stalling!” A new student from Saudi Arabia walking past was very supportive, and as the morning went on more students walked by with drinks from other shops.
The student organizer is graduating this year with a major in public health. She said, “You have to be on the left to be in public health”. We shared the issue of CHALLENGE that included the article about the PLP-led protest at the American Public Health Association last month (CD, 11/26/25). Even in a field that should be for health for all workers, the capitalist system can distort and destroy such a goal. It is therefore necessary to fight for communism, as early public health leaders like Rudolf Virchow understood. We will continue to reach out to the student workers here and at nearby Starbucks locations with CHALLENGE and revolutionary analysis.
The editorial “Ukraine exposes U.S. decline, world war looms” (Dec. 24, 2025) incorrectly stated that more than one million Russian workers have been killed in the war in Ukraine. The figure refers to the total number killed and wounded. The error has been corrected online.
From neighborhood into antiracist network
I am working with a friend in a small town in Prince George’s County, Maryland. A year ago we were both actively organizing with Solidarity Not Silence in Montgomery County to reinstate the four teachers put on administrative leave for social media posts supporting Gaza (CHALLENGE 3/16/24 ). Now this activist has organized her neighbors into a resistance network. Their mission is resistance against fascism, racism and Trump. One campaign is to go to local businesses asking them to post a sign in English and Spanish that ICE is not welcome here. A few members have approached local businesses in the center of town. Last weekend I volunteered to go to the local mall with her and her husband to contact the mom and pop stores, not the chains. We visited seventeen stores in two hours.
Some store owners/managers were skeptical but many were glad to see us. We gave them the poster and a few Know Your Rights (KYR) cards in English and Spanish. Our discussions started out with the mention of ICE raids and we asked how aware they were of these. We talked about security and that ICE needs a warrant to go into back rooms with doors. Patrons and employees could shelter in place in back rooms until ICE left. Many shop owners were Asian, Southeast Asian and Latin. One woman gave us bottles of water!
One Southeast Asian woman talked animatedly with us and gave her name and number. A Latin woman in her late 30’s who runs her business enthusiastically welcomed us. She appreciated our efforts to contact store owners and confirmed what we had been seeing---few holiday shoppers out of fear of ICE. The most interesting conversation we had was with a Black woman who ran a dance studio. It was empty. She was not aware that ICE was in the area conducting raids. She put forward myths about who was being seized, i.e. criminals. We patiently broke down the subject. We explained that racial profiling was recently made legal by the Supreme Court so she could even be targeted. In the end she realized why her Peruvian students did not attend dance class this Saturday.
Afterward we talked about why more folks in the resistance network are reluctant to reach out and put “boots on the ground” even though many have joined protest marches. Overcoming class and race divisions may be part of the hesitation people have to move outside of their comfort zone. A possible solution would be to ask members in the network to tag along just to observe. Also working to meet neighbors of diverse backgrounds and bring them into the movement is critical.
My friend regularly gets CHALLENGES in the mail and today she took copies of the latest issue about the Starbucks strike to share at another event on Sunday. On January 11, 2026 the resistance network held a one year anniversary potluck with literature tables for multiple political groups including Progressive Labor Party. Organizing in these spaces and keeping in touch is essential in bringing out contradictions and points of agreement. We have to be in to win it!
*****
“This must happen!”
On a Harlem street corner at rush hour in the cold light rain of December, two veteran PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE with the headline “Unite to Crush ICE Terror.” “Fight ICE, read CHALLENGE!” “Fight Trump, fight fascism, read all about it!” “A revolutionary communist newspaper!”
About one in three busy people took us up on it, a few with a smile, a few with a thank you. Some stony faces but no outright hostility. Then an older Black worker took it, read the headline, and waved it back at us: “This must happen!” he cried; “This has to happen! This must happen! My mother, my grandmother...this must happen!”
“Well, we’re the ones to make it happen. You knew those generations?”
He pulled down his surgical mask to talk. “I’m sixty-eight years old, my name is __ __ __, and I’m not going back to chopping cotton!” And he was gone around the corner.
What do we make of this quick moment in a busy commuters’ day? It held so much of the history of Harlem, from the Great Migration which perhaps his grandmother participated in, to its current gentrification by the real estate industry, led by Columbia University’s land grabs. We took his comment to refer to the uninterrupted use against Black workers of the extreme violence characteristic of fascism. This was a Black man who identified ICE as fascism and fascism as anti-Black; who identified fascism as exploitation of workers; who knew that in his bones, whose family knew it across three generations.
He made sense of our headline, of the imperative to unite all those with experience of capitalist exploitation and its inherent violence. His history was part of “all the struggling workers of the world,” as Langston Hughes’s poem “Always the Same” said on the Letters page of the issue we gave him. We hope he read through to that page.
Fight ICE, fight fascism, read CHALLENGE!
*****
North Carolina: counter racist terror
Here is a short rundown on Donald Trump’s fascist North Carolina ‘Operation Charlotte’s Web’ in Charlotte, and the Raleigh-Durham metro region. Under the racist lie of “going after criminal gangs,” ICE went on a rampage, netting 370 undocumented immigrants. Undocumented and documented workers were so afraid of running afoul of ICE, especially after seeing news videos of ICE’s fascist brutality, that workers stayed home rather than go to work, school, or church. In Raleigh, 50 ICE agents arrested immigrants. Also, Trump and Noem ordered U.S. Border Patrol agents into North Carolina to aid ICE.
As one local said “It all happened so fast!”
The Charlotte community, naturally, was panicked / terrified by this mass surprise attack. Unlike in the past when places of worship were legally recognized and respected as sanctuaries, ICE stormed several Charlotte-area churches during their recent rampage.
Many community members, frightened, stayed home from work and church.
The larger Charlotte community response ranged from filming ICE attacks (so family members have documentation in their attempts to track down loved ones), to local lookout patrols tracking and publicizing ICE whereabouts, to mutual aid activities providing assistance to affected families.
During the week of November 17th, hundreds of students ranging from middle school and high school walked out at various times protesting ICE and their Gestapo raids. Just as quickly as the fascist raids started, they stopped.
As communists, we understand that multiracial unity will be the winning strategy in fighting fascism. To that end, we took DESAFIO to the North Hills neighborhood of Raleigh and stopped at bus stops, and a strip mall. We handed out 25 copies of DESAFIO. We plan to go to Raleigh when we receive the next issue. Our local Unitarian Church holds a food drive for Latin families affected by these ICE raids. We are volunteering there and show DESAFIO and try to get contacts.
Importantly being in the struggle with workers means we learn from them and they learn from us. We need to be in it to win the fight for communism. Spreading our ideas is life and death for the whole international working class.
*****
Delaney hall: warm front vs cold system
I’ve been going with members of the Progressive Labor Party to the immigration detention center, Delaney Hall, in New Jersey for the past several months now. A collective of volunteers from mutual aid orgs, religious nonprofits, and the DSA have kept a mutual aid camp running since May right outside of Delaney to offer various resources to the family members who come to visit their loved ones detained inside the jail. Delaney Hall is one of the few detention centers in the country to make visitors stand outside in any kind of weather while waiting in line to visit their family member. Thankfully the mutual aid camp we volunteer at provides clothes, groceries, umbrellas and coats, toys for children and even uber rides to the families experiencing the brutal separation from their people. As these fascist bosses amp up their racist attacks against our class siblings, volunteering at this mutual aid camp and connecting with the children remind me of why it is paramount we intertwine our lives with all kinds of workers; our livelihoods, our joy, and our survival depend on it.
*****
Bosses’ flags are workers’ graves
Back in 2014, two news stories starkly showed the peril workers face if they buy into nationalism of any kind (New York Times, 5/16/2014). Nationalism, patriotism, is a boss’s lie. I thought of this again today, as Donald Trump threatens to send U.S. worker-soldiers into Venezuela. Here are the stories.
In eastern Ukraine, steelworkers and miners in the companies owned by the billionaire Rinat Akhmetov downed tools and, led by their managers, occupied their city Mariupol as militias against the pro-Russian secessionists. Akhmetov said secession would bring sanctions and destroy his businesses and the workers’ jobs. He was probably right, so the unity of Ukraine became his slogan as he turned the workers into his private soldiers to enforce Ukrainian nationalism. Forget that he might go tomorrow in the opposite direction. “If you want to keep your jobs, fight for me,” is always the boss’s song.
What these workers did was follow their boss down the path of nationalism, which delivered them into the bosses’ hands. The bad thing was not just because they became cops and soldiers in Akhmetov’s private army. Worse, it set them up for war with other Ukrainian and Russian workers in their own city and the whole Eurasian region. It delivered them into the hands of rival imperialists, allied with local capitalists. They were used as cannon fodder against other workers flying different bosses’ flags. Every flag save the red one is a boss’s flag. Patriotism is a boss’s lie.
The other story was from Vietnam, where anti-Chinese nationalism turned violently racist. “One Chinese laborer said angry Vietnamese workers had stomped on his hands, crushing them. Another said his son had been struck in the head with a metal rod by a Vietnamese mob that had sought out Chinese for beatings. At least one Chinese worker died” (NYT, 5/16/14). This was a tragedy for our class.
Both Vietnamese and Chinese workers are exploited by bosses of many nationalities, and nationalist strife between them only serves the exploiters on both sides. It is class suicide for workers to turn on one another like this, to define one another as “foreign,” to kill one another for a boss’s lie.
Two generations earlier both Vietnamese and Chinese workers fought for communism together. What a falling off from the line of the Vietnamese communist poet To Huu: “For the Party’s long life/together we march/with the same heart.” Now it’s the task of communists to revive proletarian revolutionary internationalism. We know it will need the same heroism that To Huu’s nephew Little Huom displayed, dying in battle “in a jet of blood”: “His cap askew/ he whistled away/ like a warbler/ on a garden path.”
Even the most tragic moment has its beauty, because Huom’s red song goes on like the species-life of humanity itself. That is why he fought, and the Vietnamese women To Huu called heroes “who don’t need a beard to be heroes,” and why we fight on in his name, for a communist future in every land.
*****
Chinese bosses now have ability to battle U.S. bosses economically
Foreign Affairs, 12/16/25–For much of the past year, China’s response to trade tensions has continually surprised hawks in Washington…the Biden administration imposed new export restrictions on advanced chips, Beijing immediately answered by banning exports of several metallic elements to the United States…after the Trump administration threatened huge tariffs on China, Beijing dug in, imposing strict export controls on seven rare-earth minerals vital to defense and clean energy manufacturing. In May, China stopped buying U.S. soybeans…Discarding the strategic restraint that had previously characterized its approach to the United States, China has shown it is ready to weaponize its supply chain dominance.
In Portugal, general strike forces bosses to compromise, but only slightly
Reuters, 12/17/2025–Portugal’s centre-right minority government has said it will amend labour reform legislation to appease trade unions following the country’s first general strike in more than a decade. The proposed overhaul of over 100 articles of the labour code is an important part of the government’s agenda to boost productivity and economic growth...After meeting the leadership of umbrella union UGT, Labour Minister Maria do Rosario Ramalho said the government was ready to reach a compromise…
Pro-Palestinian protesters in U.K. prison facing starvation
Al Jazeera, 12/18/25–Six remand prisoners affiliated with…Palestine Action who are on hunger strike are not receiving adequate healthcare and face an immediate risk of death…more than 800 doctors, nurses, therapists and carers wrote to Justice Secretary David Lammy to warn that “without resolution, there is the real and increasingly likely potential that young British citizens will die in prison, having never even been convicted of an offence”…The group are being held across five prisons over their alleged involvement in break-ins at the UK subsidiary of the Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems in Bristol and a Royal Air Force (RAF) base in Oxfordshire…
Trump not saying whether bombs and missiles will rain down on Venezuelan workers
The Guardian, 12/19/2025–In his NBC interview, Donald Trump declined to say whether removing Maduro was his ultimate goal, telling NBC News: “He knows exactly what I want.” “He knows better than anybody,” the US President added, referring to Maduro. The report did not elaborate. Maduro has alleged that the US action is aimed at overthrowing him and gaining control of the OPEC nation’s oil resources, which are the world’s largest crude reserves. Trump elaborated on his claim there would be additional seizures of oil tankers near Venezuelan waters, adding: “If they’re foolish enough to be sailing along, they’ll be sailing along back into one of our harbours.”
European bosses work out finances to kill more Russian and Ukrainian workers
New York Times, 12/19/2025–European leaders agreed early on Friday morning to keep Ukraine funded for two years with a loan of 90 billion euros, or about $105 billion, though they failed to agree on their first-choice option of using Russian state assets frozen on the continent as backing for the loan. That ambitious frozen-asset plan was killed at the 11th hour as European heads of state and government met in Brussels — a show of division that risked making the European Union appear indecisive at a key moment. Instead, European leaders announced that they will funnel money to Ukraine with a loan backed by the E.U. budget…
National strike in Italy shows worker anger toward bosses’ plan
Associated Press, 12/12,2025–A national strike called on Friday by Italy’s largest trade union in protest against the government’s budget plans widely disrupted transportation, health and school services across the country. The protest, which targets the 2026 budget bill proposed by the conservative government of Premier Giorgia Meloni, comes just two weeks after another general strike organized by smaller trade unions, with the same motivations. The strike mainly hit railway transportation, with cancellations and delays registered for both long-distance and regional trains. Public schools across the country canceled classes…
