During a forum discussion about the recent outbreak of teacher strikes, a Bronx college student asked “Yes, but when will we go on strike here at CUNY?” Whether raising tuition every year or paying poverty wages to part-time instructors, these attacks are racist as they target students and faculty that are disproportionally Black and Latin. But militant, multi-racial, student & faculty fightback is growing on a number of campuses. We are organizing forums, conferences, rallies and “grade-ins.”
 Whether organizing to oppose tuition hikes or demanding better pay for part-time instructors, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are there, fighting hard now but also for a better future. And that future is communism where the workers and students fighting back today run all of society in the future.
CUNY runs on part-time (adjunct) labor. More than 60 percent of the courses are taught by adjuncts, many of whom make approximately $3,000 a course. An adjunct teaching the maximum number of courses (which is never guaranteed) at this salary makes a yearly salary of around $33,000 per year. This is a poverty wage in New York City! This two-tier system of full-time and part-time faculty has allowed CUNY to get away with running its 20 campuses on the backs of low wage faculty, who are disproportionately Black and Latin.
But let’s be clear, even though the current fight is to improve the wages of part-time faculty, we can never forget that the primary targets of racist attacks at CUNY are the students. The majority of students at CUNY are Black and Latin and the racist attacks on them come from every direction. Their instructors struggle with poverty wages and they are overworked, often having to travel long distances between campuses. Student’s books become more and more expensive and the buildings where they attend classes crumble around them, and their tuition keeps going up.
To build unity between faculty and students, we have invited students to our union meetings. This has strengthened the connections between faculty and students revealing, for example, that many of our students and some adjuncts are Uber drivers. Students see the adjunct struggle as part of their struggle and they are also the most willing and ready to fight.
In a significant development, more than eight campuses passed resolutions last spring endorsing militant actions, including a strike. However, due to the dead-end politics of the union leadership, the 25,000 members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union are not prepared for a strike. Instead of seriously planning for a strike the union leaders plan endless, useless trips to the state capitol to lobby politicians or spend time and energy figuring out how to shame the CUNY Board of Trustees. As if any of the CEOs who launch these racist attacks on our faculty and students have any shame!
Nonetheless, while we realize that we may not be in a position to just “go on strike” we know we have to try to expand the limits of what’s possible at CUNY. That means getting to know people, joining committees, and getting people to trust one another, all the while organizing collective actions. Many rank and filers and PLP members are involved in this kind of work. At a recent conference led by a rank and file group, over 100 people attended to share experiences about the strike wave and make plans for future actions. One PLP comrade spoke about the “traveling strike panel” where students go from class to class talking about a strike. Another spoke about the need to make the fight against racism a central theme in our organizing.
 PLP members have many plans to continue participating, learning, and leading in these struggles. In our staff and student organizations, we are involved in many activities- from social evenings at the movies to hosting a forum on U.S. policy in Venezuela. We are participating in a rally at the Bronx Borough President’s Office where student leaders will denounce racist plans for tuition hikes and fare hikes and demand higher pay for adjuncts.
PLP is fighting hard for the worker-student alliance, challenging the divisions that exist between students and teachers. As we get closer to May Day, we plan to organize a CUNY contingent that reflects this sense of urgency and class struggle. We want to be clear in our study groups and meetings that we participate in these struggles not only to win some reforms and make life a little better under capitalism, but we also fight for a better future, communism. With the dynamic students and young adjuncts we are working with, the future is bright!

NEW YORK CITY, March 19—Over 20 Progressive Labor Party members (PLP) and friends at a local study group compared the nationalist lies of “Blackkklansman,” the film directed by Spike Lee to Boots Riley’s heroic tale of multiracial workers fighting back in “Sorry to Bother You.” We watched both movies. We discussed how Riley’s is a pro-working class movie while Spike Lee (who started his career as an anti-cop writer/director) is now doing the work for the ruling class in his pro-cop film.
We were a multiracial group of workers, students and retirees. After the movie, we passed out a copy of a CHALLENGE article, which was a critique of “Blackkklansman” by Boots Riley and the PLP. Having the leaflet as a source material, we opened the floor for thoughts and questions. Someone said, “Spike deserves credit for bringing the story to light.” A comrade rebutted that statement by saying, “This story is all a lie, as stated in the CHALLENGE article. The film upholds the ideas of capitalism which are very dangerous for the working class.”
“Well, how is it dangerous when it’s just him using his poetic license?” a friend questioned. Another PL’er said, “It’s dangerous like “Birth of a Nation” is dangerous. It’s stories like these that promote ideas that the oppression we feel is coming from other workers and not the system.”
Someone mentioned that a Jewish cop was in the film, as if that is promoting multiracial unity. As a criticism, it was clear by this point we should’ve done the reading together, before watching the movie. Another PL’er pointed out that it wasn’t even true. The real Ron Stalworth character had a non-Jewish white partner made to be Jewish in the movie to share a vested interest in stopping the Klan. “The only unity this film wants us to feel is the unity with cops,” the comrade insisted.
A different PL’er disagreed, “The other unity is with Black nationalism. In this film we only see the racism and sexism of the Klan and no criticism of Stokely Carmichael or the Black Student government as if they were flawless. Spike Lee wants Black workers to trust the system and Black nationalism when the rulers attack, which are both dead-ends for Black workers.”
In response, someone said, “The end of this movie really moved me. When I saw the footage of what happened in Charlottesville, it put it all in context for me. That we need to do something to fight this!” Another friend replied, “That’s what’s so dangerous about this movie, it uses emotions about a very dramatic experience for all of us to conform to their solution.”
Final comments were, “The unity in “Sorry to Bother You” was better because it showed the unity between the workers,” and “I liked “Sorry to Bother You”—it was just a better film.”
It’s important to note how art is used under capitalism. Just as in everything else under this system, it is used to hide capitalism’s true nature, which is racist, sexist and in a constant state of war for profit.
At the end of the event, we spoke about communism and how May Day is coming up. That’s when we get to use our voices and tell the truth about our past, future and the truth of who we really are. We are workers fighting to end this system of torture and greed. We collected donations and encouraged our friends to come to May Day. Join us as we prepare to write our own story. Fight for communism!

    “I spend my life in someone else’s home, shunned from family and my life. I work day and night, 24 hours at work without rest. My body aches all over, my nerves have been damaged.” These jarring words are one of the many vivid snapshots from the film “The 24 Hour Workday,” a grassroots documentary that exposes the level of hyper-exploitation suffered by women workers in the home care industry. Divorced from the film’s context, these words sound like they came from the pages of a history book about Black women workers living in bondage up until the 19th century, many of whom raised the slaveowners’ children, losing their own. After organizing with homecare workers, I think this should be rightfully called out as modern-day wage slavery. The homecare industry still retains much of the racist and sexist essence it did in the past.
Women—predominately immigrants, Black, Latin, and Asian—make up 93 percent of the labor force in the homecare industry. The homecare workers who star in the film reflect this statistic. They’re mostly immigrants from Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and China, who came here in order to escape poverty or violence, to give their families a better hope for the future.
Ironically, once they became homecare workers, many discovered they weren’t not much better off. Many reported they started neglecting their families once they began working 24-hour shifts. They described taking on such grueling work out of necessity and the scarcity of opportunities, others found themselves coerced by agencies to take on 24-hour shifts as 12- and 8-hour shifts became less available. Homecare workers call this good work, but describe the working conditions as a prison from which they can’t escape
Most of the stories we hear in the film, or in our organizing with them, have a theme of loss. Some have lost their children to violence and drugs on the streets of New York, others in Honduras. Or they miss out on important milestones in their families. Some say the long hours destroyed their marriages or relationships with their children.
Above all, the most profound loss homecare workers face is the destruction of their health. Homecare workers account for some of the highest rates of disability in the workforce, second only to construction workers. Many become patients as a result of working long hours. As is the case of one worker in the film who is barely 50, uses a walker, and now needs a homecare worker.
Throughout the film, home attendants have accurately appraised the situation, and called it out as slavery. Aside from being forced to do double, sometimes triple, the work for half the pay, many have been fired for asking for less hours.
The agency bosses make these workers agree to shady contractual agreements that hold them legally responsible if something happens to the patient on their watch.This forces them to stay awake, so their patient doesn’t die on their watch. Crooked agencies have also gone as far as intimidating undocumented homecare workers with threats of deportation.
 This level of exploitation is legal, just as it was in the past.The state plantation sponsor, otherwise known as the New York State Department of Labor, has long justified this practice through the 13-hour rule (where the homecare workers are paid wages for 13 hours for 24 hours work, thus robbed of 11 hours pay), and is doing everything in its power to block home attendants from fighting back.
But while the state cries crocodile tears over this bit of thievery on the part of the homecare bosses, they continuosly pit workers against their patients, while insurance companies rake in massive profits. The bosses rationale for justifying the 13 hour rule is to save agencies from imminent “financial ruin, but these arguments sound sickeningly familiar, to the ones plantation bosses used to preserve the violence of slavery in the past.Yet this entire country was built on slavery.Truly the bosses have no interest in entirely abolishing it.
 Despite these concrete examples of this partiuclarly disgusting form of wage slavery, many workers outside the campaign have objected to workers referring to it as modern day slavery. Many, parroting the bosses’ line, say it’s an exaggeration, that home attendants have a choice in the matter, and can quit.That in order for it to be slavery you need an auction block, or  shackles or physical violence to keep them in bondage.
These objections are in part due to the capitalist lie that we get a fair exchange for our labor—a fair day’s wage for our work. But the truth is that we are all wage slaves.
However the bosses use insidious means to cover it up. Through  their laws,courts, and cultural brainwashing, the bosses have long been appropriating our labor, robbing us of our time, families, homes, and lives. They also reinforce this with brutal impunity, using their cops, military, and other forms of terror to suppress us and keep us in line, so we won’t fight back. Nevertheless homecare workers continue to fight back. Still workers rise!

With six weeks left in his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to be indicted on charges of bribery and “breach of trust.” The embattled, U.S.-led liberal world order needs a change to sustain its control over Israel, its strategic bulwark against Iran, the pro-Iran regime in Syria, and the threat of expanding Russian influence in the oil-rich Middle East. Netanyahu’s open fascism and racism, on top of his petty corruption and divisive style, no longer serves the liberal racist bosses’ interests in the region.
The final straw may have been Netanyahu’s desperate bid to stay in power by forging an alliance with the Nazi-inspired Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power. The disciples of Meir Kahane’s outlawed, anti-Arab terrorist Kach Party, Jewish Power calls for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the state of Israel and its occupied territories, vigilante violence against Arab workers, and bans on marriages between Arabs and Jews. On top of that, Netanyahu brokered a merger between Jewish Power and two other extreme right-wing parties, Jewish Home and National Union. Netanyahu ‘‘‘splits the nation,’ said Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert in public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. ‘His are the politics of polarization and exaggeration. If he got any more polarizing he’d fall off the planet’” (New York Times, 3/1).
This presents a problem for Israel’s capitalist rulers, who need more unity among Jewish workers even as they divide Jewish and Arab workers with anti-Arab racism. The self-serving Netanyahu makes it harder for Israel’s ruling class to justify its settlement land grabs, daily atrocities against workers and children in the occupied West Bank, indiscriminate killing of protesters, and, in collaboration with Egypt’s fascist bosses, the economic strangulation of Gaza. Israeli security forces have arrested and detained hundreds of Arab children “suspected of criminal offenses, usually stone-throwing, often using unnecessary force, questioned them without a family member present, and made them sign confessions in Hebrew, which most did not understand” (Human Rights Watch, World Report 2018).
U.S. rulers divided
The Donald Trump administration continues to back Netanyahu and his openly fascist allies. After moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in December 2017, the U.S. State Department announced that the Palestinian Mission will now be housed in the Israeli embassy (NYT, 3/3). Palestinian workers see this as a step toward supporting a single Jewish state throughout Palestine-Israel, a permanent “one-state” solution designed to oppress and isolate Arab workers.
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class, representing finance capital, needs a more stable Israel to keep Russia and China from gaining a stronger foothold in the region. These bosses want to downplay calls for genocide of the Palestinian working class in favor of promoting unity against Iran.
Liberals are the main danger
“Centrist” candidates Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid have combined their campaigns into a single slate to unseat Netanyahu. Currently leading in the polls, Gantz is a war criminal (Haaretz, 2/1) who led  the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Operation Protective Edge, its 2014 massacre of thousands of workers and children in Gaza. According to the United Nations, two-thirds of those killed were civilians. More than a thousand children were left permanently disabled (Defence for Children International-Palestine, April 2015). Thousands of homes were destroyed.
Gantz took a strong stand against growing numbers of Iranian troops threatening Israel in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. His rabidly nationalist Blue and White Party—named after the colors of Israel’s flag—has vowed to pursue a military solution with help from the U.S. (Jerusalem Post, 3/4). Gantz has vowed “never” to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which Israel seized after the Six Day War in 1967. He is ready to form a “unity” government with Netanyahu’s Likud party and anyone else “who is Zionist and sane” (Haaretz, 3/4).The party’s platform pledges  to “deepen the processes of separation from the Palestinians, while uncompromisingly protecting the security interests of the country and the Israeli army’s freedom of action everywhere.” It also promises to “strengthen the [West Bank] settlement blocs and enable normal life anywhere Israelis live,” with no further settlement “disengagement” (Haaretz, 3/6).
In other words, Gantz is committed to legalized racism, institutional fascism, and state-sponsored terrorism against Arab workers and children. The difference between Netanyahu and Gantz is the difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton, or between Trump and Barack Obama. While they may serve different factions of their capitalist ruling class, and employ different racist or imperialist strategies, they are all murderous enemies of the international working class.
Jewish State = death of Palestinian Workers
A racist, fascist Jewish state is the ultimate outcome of identity politics and a massive loss for the international working class. The ultimate goal of identity politics is to divide the working class by ethnicity, nationality, or the mythology of “race.” It misleads workers into believing they have more in common with their identity group’s bosses than with the international working class. It is an especially dangerous trap for workers in Palestine-Israel. With the Arab population about to surpass the Jewish population in the whole of Israel and the occupied territories (Reuters, 3/26/18), the Jewish bosses will have only two ways to sustain a Jewish state: permanent apartheid, where Arab workers essentially live as powerless refugees in the land where they were born (the “centrist” solution), or mass expulsion or extermination of Arab workers (the Jewish Power solution). Last November’s demolition of 21 storefronts in the Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem may be a sign of things to come.
Only communism can free workers
Capitalism inevitably leads to war over land, workers, and limited natural resources. The rulers use racism, sexism, nationalism, and fascism to divide workers to extract maximum profits and keep us from fighting back. Workers around the world have a material basis for unity. We create all the wealth, maintain all the infrastructure, and fight all the wars. We help each other in times of crisis. All workers must unite to fight for the only “one-state” solution that can meet their needs: a communist workers’ state. Progressive Labor Party must organize now to turn the bosses’ imperialist wars into revolutionary wars for communism. Join us!