Newark NJ, January 19 – Over a dozen Progressive Labor Party members and friends attended a rally commemorating MLK Day by protesting racist ICE abductions across the U.S. We are currently facing a rising tide of fascism (see editorial on page 2) and must prepare to take the streets with students and workers every chance we get. In New Jersey, we called up students from local colleges, antiracist fighters against the genocide in Palestine, and fierce organizers against the murderous ICE jail, Delaney Hall, to join us at the nearest march. Our class is righteously fired up about the public execution of Renee Good, the murder of Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent and the murder of ICE detainees like 41-year-old Jean Wilson Brutus, dying within days of detainment.
This murderous system has robbed our class, the working class, of too many people to name. The only way we can avenge our class is to fight to end this capitalist system and organize for the inevitable clash between the ruling class and the working class that is to come. If we organize for it, we can win the communist future that our class has the potential to win.
To strengthen our spears, our Party consistently stands beside antiracist fighters and families outside of Delaney Hall. We share CHALLENGE newspapers and host study groups, connecting police terror to the needs of this system—profit, war and imperialist competition, which is clearly leading us down a deadly road to World War 3. The bosses want our class to be under the boot of killer kkkops and ICE, long enough to figure out how to untangle the mess of their previous wars and expeditions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Latin America. As we prepare ourselves for what’s to come, we must bridge the confidence we have in our class to every worker, neighbor, and student, inviting them to join us in class struggle and build an internationalist Party that can contest the ruling class.
Liberalism poisons our class
A few days before the march, teachers, organizers, and parents met and exposed a connection between Delaney Hall and Newark Public Schools. Both corporate and state funded entities share Driscoll Foods as its food distributor. The same rotten food being fed to school children is killing workers like Brutus in Delaney Hall. Workers detained inside the ICE jail have complained of moldy or frozen food, freezing temperatures, and zero medical care. We decided to print this information on leaflets and call for every fighter at the rally to turn up at the upcoming Board of Education meeting.
The march’s organizers are known to be the mayor’s go-to for bringing out masses of workers and then ushering them behind the Democratic Party and collaborating with the police. This rally was no different. One speaker essentially declared that she didn’t want to abolish police but stop ICE from the fascist level of terror. Some fighters in the crowd boo’ed. We let out the chant: HOW DO YOU SPELL RACIST//G-O-P//HOW DO YOU SPELL MURDERERS//D-N-C. Some workers were taken aback by our boldness but still joined in. We made it our goal to not have the same few PL’ers chanting but to encourage fellow fighters to raise their voice, sharing printed versions of chant sheets that we made for the day.
Black workers are key to revolution
As we marched, undercover cops murdered a 43-year-old Black worker, Wali Bey. Newark’s Mayor, Ras Baraka’s weak response: “It is a heartbreaking tragedy for everyone involved when a police officer feels the need to draw a weapon—and so much more so
when they are compelled to fire.” The officer had no reason to draw the weapon, as Wali and another man were sitting in their car. The KKKops terrorized and shot them because police are given the rights under this system to murder in broad daylight and without impunity. Wali was a beloved member of the community and his murder exposes the contradictions of liberal responses to racist police terror under this capitalist regime. Baraka has built a base around the idea that Black workers and students, the primary targets of police terror under capitalism, could befriend and soften the nature of their captors, Killer KKKops in the Newark PD.
Days later, there was a statement released that officers could no longer wear a mask while patrolling the street. Not only is this reformist order too late; it’s a hollow peace offering in exchange for the life of a man and the lifelong trauma of his family and community. Wali’s family and supporters who were in Baraka’s base have protested outside of the local police precinct and disrupted the recent City Council meeting with chants to demand that they SAY HIS NAME. They are pressuring the local police and misleaders like Baraka to explicitly state what happened to Wali and are exposing the crimes that are inflicted against all of our class. One PL’er is related to Wali and is leading ways for our NJ section to support the family turning this tragedy into class struggle.
We have no time to lose
For Wali and the too many names of our class siblings slain by racist police and ICE, we must smash and bury this capitalist system. It is our role as antiracist communists during this period to also link struggles between racist ICE terror to racist KKKOP terror. Whether in the United States or anywhere in the world the horrors of capitalism are the same. Workers everywhere have the same needs and the same fight! Black, Latin, Asian, Arab, and white--workers of the world unite!
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New York City: Masses of red-led workers can crush ICE
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- 31 January 2026 677 hits
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day and again the following Friday, New York City workers took the streets twice in determined demonstrations of proletarian internationalist resolve against ICE terror. First hundreds, then thousands marched. These actions reflect a growing impulse among workers to fight back. It is up to the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to make the most of this momentum by building the communist movement, the only force capable of winning the abolition of ICE and the capitalist system that sustains it.
Both demonstrations saw significant presence from organized labor, with UNITE HERE on MLK day and the United Federation of Teachers on Friday. On Monday workers gathered at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn and thundered across the Brooklyn Bridge to 26 Federal Plaza. With vigorous chanting PL’ers laid bare the stakes for our class: the necessity of abolishing ICE and dismantling borders with communist revolution as the only solution. Liberal bosses commissioned the march, yet botched the basics: late start times, chaotic coordination, and a press conference were prioritized over building the kind of discipline our class will need to confront rising fascism.
These bosses present themselves as defenders of “democratic values,” yet when ICE terrorizes immigrant workers, they offer nothing beyond reformist slogans. They call for a kinder, more efficient ICE, not its abolition. This trajectory is the politics of the Democratic Party’s big-wing fascism, which seeks a more legalistic Obama-Biden era deportation machine. The liberals’ reliance on and support of the NYPD—the very force that collaborates with ICE—underscored the hollowness of their values. The bosses will never protect workers, as their power rests on enforcing capitalist rule.
Growing anger with racist ICE
On Friday, hundreds of teachers joined a crowd of thousands in a march through lower Manhattan at an even colder after work rally and march.
PL’ers marched with co-workers but were open about our plan to meet up as a Party to distribute the few papers we had remaining from Monday’s demonstration. This mattered. Co-workers saw communists bringing revolutionary politics directly into the mass movement, not hiding them. These moments open the door to future struggle and recruitment into the Party.
At both marches PLP took a ‘struggle with, struggle against’ stance, uniting with workers we were near while exposing the misleadership of the liberal head honchos directing the day’s events. On MLK Day, our leaflets invoked Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to expose the real danger facing our class: that liberals are the main danger since they “prefer order over justice.” The moderate reformist urges perpetual patience and compromise while workers endure austerity, family separation, healthcare denial, and imperialist war. These misleaders lull workers into passivity as capitalism sharpens its claws and drives the world toward World War III and environmental catastrophe.
Throughout both marches, PLP members and supporters raised sharp communist slogans that clarified the political line required for this moment. We linked ICE, the NYPD, and the Ku Klux Klan as different instruments of the same class terror. We demanded the abolition of all borders, because workers have no country under capitalism. We called for workers of the world to unite against capitalist violence and repression.
We also injected a global, internationalist analysis into the march. Imperialist wars, driven by capitalist competition for oil and power, uproot families and create waves of migration. These displaced workers do not cross borders out of choice, but out of desperation created by capitalism’s crisis. Capitalist nations then fortify borders and unleash ICE, weaponizing racism and nationalism to divide the very class that should unite against exploitation.
Red heat melts ICE
We must learn from 2020 that mass mobilizations co-opted by liberals lead only to cynicism, exhaustion, and defeat. We must expose the liberal bosses’ inability to lead workers. PLP showed the necessity of disciplined, communist, worker-led base building. Workers — whether in hospitals, schools, transit, or neighborhoods — are the only force capable of dismantling the capitalist system that produces ICE, racist policing, war, and exploitation. By building a base in the working class, we can build the capacity to shut this racist, sexist, capitalist system down from Brooklyn to Venezuela, to Iran, to Sudan, Palestine, to Mexico. Join us, become a member of Progressive Labor Party!
KENTUCKY—The local Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leadership in our area took the initiative and organized a rally against imperialism and the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE in Minnesota. We held the rally at the local downtown park. Our plan for the new year was to work to push out the liberal old guard who, for the last five years, has fought to maintain a stranglehold on all political activism happening in our area, suppressing the progressive and “radical” voices in our community.
Beating back liberal misleaders
By being the first to produce a flyer, we were able to out-pivot the liberal groups like Indivisible, and 50501, ensuring the rally maintained a revolutionary character to it, and was not watered down by “vote blue no matter who!” rhetoric. We established that if anyone wants to speak, they may, but the communists will speak first, and last. This was accepted. In fact, no liberal group members spoke, only workers from the crowd.
Then we were encouraged to come up and speak. We made it clear that their participation, and voices mattered.
Around 1:30pm the crowd had grown to a size of around 60-70 local workers. A total of seven different local organizations were represented in the crowd. This was outstanding as they had only had a week’s notice to come to the rally. The workers came out in the cold and the rain to stand against ICE and imperialism. The PLP made opening introductions and led with the first speech. We explained how important it is for all of us to get involved - that rallies, protests, and voting were not enough to push back fascism and that only revolution could liberate us from capitalism’s authoritarian rule. We expressed that we need a united movement, organized on a foundation of class struggle, and that we need interconnected communities focused on the defense of one another, and an organized labor force. Then we will be able to curb the ruling class elite and their power.
All struggles have a connection
We continued telling the workers that this intervention in Venezuela is nothing new. The United States has always been an imperialist war machine. The Gestapo ICE crackdowns and the war posturing abroad are all interconnected. We explained that we as workers in the U.S. have more in common with the workers of Palestine, Sudan, Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela than we have with our own ruling class elite. This generated the most response from the crowd as hoots and hollers of affirmation rang out. We ended the opening speech on a strong note. Using the Lenin quote “Can a nation that oppresses other nations be free? It cannot!”
Afterwards we pulled up many workers from the crowd. Many of whom had never done any sort of public speaking, and empowered them standing beside the workers as each of them spoke to the people. Several of them maintained the revolutionary rhetoric that we opened up with: how all of these issues are interconnected and that the root cause is capitalism. A fiery emotional speech ignited the crowd once more. We garnered several contacts and multiple people mentioned they would be attending the next weekend’s “lunch and learn”, and were interested in joining the PLP.
Why we need the Party
All in all we handed out every issue of CHALLENGE that we had, as well as some pamphlets made prior to the event. We were well received by everyone except a Vietnam vet, who recoiled at the first mention we were communists. But then he went back to the local VFW with an issue of CHALLENGE himself when it was all over. The lesson learned is that we as communists have to understand where the workers of our locality are, and we need to take the reins out of the liberals’ hands, and dominate the conversation when the opportunity arises. The workers are sick and tired of running into brick wall after brick wall. Liberalism, and social democracy will lead you off a cliff. Only communist revolution can truly set us free.
Brazil, January 5—Following the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela by U.S. imperialists (see editorial, Jan. 28 issue), who were thirsty for natural resources including oil and rare earth minerals, there were large anti-U.S. mobilizations worldwide. Here in Brazil, people demonstrated in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador de Bahia. Numerous student organizations, labor unions and left-wing political groups, including opportunist politicians and judges participated in these spirited marches against imperialism. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) was also present, with some of our friends and our “Fight for Communism” flags, to speak out against U.S. imperialism’s naked aggression, to defend the unity of workers and students and to advocate for the ultimate solution: communist revolution.
Capitalism offers misery and death
During the march, many spoke out against this odious and arbitrary capitalist system, which confirms Lenin’s view of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. Slogans included: “Trump, take your claws out of Venezuela!”, “Long live a free Latin America!”, “Down with U.S. imperialism!”, and “Long live socialism!” The slimy politicians led the chorus of the nationalists, comparing Trump to Bolsonaro, the former right-wing president of Brazil, and some even mentioned Hitler. There was even a caricature of Hitler resembling Trump. One of the march’s limitations was the focus on nationalism and individual protectionism, calling for socialism—a system that maintains most of the inequalities of racist capitalist exploitation—to liberate the working class. What these misleaders tried to hide was that our class has never been liberated through bourgeois elections or bourgeois parties that try to limit class struggle to merely reform capitalism. We don’t need to sweeten this rotten system of racism, sexism, exploitation and war—we need to destroy it by fighting for and winning a communist world that serves the interests of the vast majority of humanity.
Some people we spoke with still believe in 2-stage revolution: struggle is gradual, socialism now, communism sometime in the future. When we asked where that approach ever succeeded, they were hard-pressed to reply. There is still a lot of work to do in overcoming ideas of the old movement that have proven to be incorrect. We made some contacts though, including a local professor and an Argentinian filmmaker. The struggle continues.
It is here that the struggle of the PLP must breathe new life into the class struggle in Latin America and the battles to come. Our job is to win workers and students away from the dead-end politics of elections and socialism, to break with the traditional misleaders of every stripe who only serve the status quo, and forge a mass party, tested in battle, in every corner of the world. The PLP slogan of “one class, one flag, one party!” will become our marching orders.
Provincial Haiti, January 1—222 years after its independence, Haiti has once again awakened in the abyss of capitalist misery and violence. The struggle for power and wealth between bourgeois groups, each supported by their favored imperialist groups, plunges the working class into the most appalling poverty.
An antiracist, pro working class food tradition
Workers here will never forget that their ancestors fought valiantly and fiercely to overcome racism, colonialism, and slavery. And this is the importance of the “joumou (pumpkin) soup” eaten on January 1st: slaves were forbidden from tasting it during the period of slavery era. It has become the tradition since the end of France’s colonial rule on January 1, 1804 for Haitians to consume joumou soup as a symbol of liberation. However, day by day, this storied tradition is fading out due to the misery and despair created by capitalism. This system does everything in its power to erase all traces of the victorious struggles of the masses against exploitation, racism, and domination.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP), in the fight against capitalism and for communism, is striving to revive the struggles of the dominated masses against their oppressors. Thus, every year in Haiti, PLP comrades, with the contribution and collaboration of friends and relatives, prepare and distribute pumpkin soup. We call it “solidarity soup.” This year, several hundred people participated in the distribution of soup in the public square in a small town where there is a PLP club. Our comrades and close friends used this occasion to talk about the history of the independence struggles and relate them to our current local situation as well as national and international politics, racism, and the migration crisis that affects all workers.
“Look! He [Donald Trump] treats our brothers like dogs in his country,” said a 50-year-old man. A family man and hard worker, he feels dismayed by the migration policy of the U.S. president, which impacts him personally because so many of his own friends and relatives have been forced to migrate to the U.S. He doesn’t use the term capitalism, but he angrily says that “they are racists, wild beasts who suck the blood of unfortunate workers from the Global South, then chase them away when they have no more blood left, forgetting that it is these workers who create the wealth they enjoy.” Another young woman followed up by saying, “Dessalines [one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution] knew how to put them in their place.” This conversation continued throughout the day, with more and more people joining in. They denounced capitalism and demanded that this system come to an end one day.
We need to fight the bosses worldwide!
At this point, the Party comrades analyzed the current world situation with them, emphasizing that to save humanity, capitalism must be ended, and to end capitalism, the exploited people of all countries must unite and build an international revolutionary communist party capable of leading the class struggle. They described some of the struggles that had been waged against the aggressions of imperialism by workers, often led by communists—including in our Party—around the world and the heroism of the men and women who resisted them.
There were many children and teenagers who listened closely to these discussions, which continued for several hours in the hot sun. The words spoken today piqued the curiosity of many. It was an exceptional moment in the building and strengthening of the Party in Haiti. We will continue to organize activities to keep alive the memory of the victories in the struggles against the capitalists. Our next mass activity will be around International Working Women’s Day on March 8, when we will join with several local women’s and students’ groups.
Join us, exploited people of all countries! We oppressed/workers have always made history through resistance against the savage will of the racist exploiters. Our strength is solidarity!
