NEW YORK CITY, February 20—Eighteen years after the bill was first dreamt up in 2001, New York State just approved its own version of the Dream Act, giving a select few undocumented college students access to financial aid. The Dream Act is a win for the liberal bosses, represented mainly by the Democratic Party, who aim to exploit undocumented youth as a chess piece in their games of war and fascism.
A living nightmare
The DREAM Act (acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) was a path to conditional permanent residency for undocumented youth who demonstrate “good moral character” and either serve two years in the military or college without aid.
This state-level Dream Act can neither stop deportation nor grant any legal rights to stay in the United States. Instead, it promises young people eligibility for state aid for college. “The Immigration Policy Center estimates that because of financial constrains, only 5 to 10 percent of the 4,500 undocumented students who graduate from New York high schools each year go on to pursue college degrees” (NY Times, 1/23). New York will now be one of the seven states that have passed similar legislation. When I broke the news to my undocumented family member, she cried then sighed, “better than nothing.”
While the anti-Trump liberal movement is hailing this as a victory, it’s actually a slap in the face. Much like our Black and Latin brothers and sisters (citizen or not), undocumented families live under the threat of state terror. Some state financial aid is helpful, for those who can afford to go to college in the first place. Our class deserves more than crumbs for the select few who keep their head down and don’t question. The liberal rulers are winning Black, Latin, and Asian youth to a degree of cynicism that strangles potential for rebellion in the cradle. Of course, no one sees this NY Dream Act as the end of a fightback. Rather, it’s the beginning. The question is, who will lead it—the working class under communist influence or the ruling class for their imperialist empire?
Liberal bosses play undocumented kids
The passing of this pathetic Dream Act reflects how the U.S. ruling class will be using the fight against deportations as a way to buy votes and allegiance to their imperialist war agenda. When workers ally with our class enemies, we are being won over to a key element of fascism: all-class unity.
“The Dream Act’s passage reflected the Democratic Party’s turn to the left on immigration, an issue party leaders once handled gingerly out of fear of angering some white voters…The party’s 2020 presidential hopefuls — including some who once held more hawkish views on immigration, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — are already moving to reassure liberal activists on the issue in an effort to protect themselves in the 2020 campaign” (NY Times, 1/23). Let’s not mistaken these politicians’ opportunism for actual support for immigrant families.
After all, this is the same party that deported 3 million people under liberal Barack Obama’s presidency. “As of 2016…the number of people living in the United States without documents decreased to 10.7 million from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007. The sharp decline came largely during the Obama administration and in the wake of the Great Recession. Deportations also sharply rose during that time” (NY Times, 11/27). Where was the liberal cry for humanity then?
Driving a wedge between students and workers
The consequences of the Dream Act is much more insidious in that the legislation not only disciplines working-class youth for nationalism, but it also pits students against workers. NYC Department of Education Chancellor Richard Carranza called these students “‘the best of New York City and America…They have gone to school, gotten great grades, and in many cases served our communities and country…’”(Chalk Beat, 1/10). By limiting the fight to just “good children,” this elitist reform criminalizes parents and adults whose only “crime” was crossing an artificial border.
Nothing but desperation and love for one’s children will cause a parent to make the perilous journey across a desert, only to risk living in concentration camps or living under the threat of being snatched up like prey. These are the choices under capitalism. This reform reaffirms the myth of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. In that sense, the blame goes back on the undocumented families for being undocumented, while the system gets away scot-free. The working class did not fail; the system set us up for failure.
We must refuse the bosses’ attempt to divide us by “good” and “bad” immigrants. We must see through the liberal wing’s posturing. We must organize all those around us to invoke love of our class across borders by fighting for a world where we are defined, not by the pieces of papers we hold, but by our labor, creativity, and contribution to communism.

Maryland, February 12–A cohort of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members in Prince George’s County in Maryland have been working in a new coalition sponsored by an immigrants’ rights organization to address police misconduct. A town hall meeting was held that included Latin and Black victims of police brutality in collaboration with ICE (U.S immigrations and Customs Enforcement).
One particularly horrible case was described by “Jorge,”a “Dreamer.”He said, “local law enforcement’s job is [supposed] to keep us safe. Their job was to keep my mother, who was once a victim, of domestic violence safe,instead they arrested her,and told her she has 60 days to leave my sister and me alone in this country.”
Jorge’s mother was detained by a Prince George’s County Sheriffs officer while on her way to work. The officer said Jorge’s mother was speeding but Jorge pointed out “My mother’s driving makes other drivers go around her because it’s going so slow. I believe that the officer was racially motivated to pull my mother over.”
A petition calling for passage of “The Racial Equity in Policing” bill by the County Council is being circulated, and Council members are being lobbied.The bill includes the following points:
Prevent any cooperation between Prince George’s County police and ICE
Support police accountability through the mandatory use of police body cameras
Support an independent investigation with prosecutorial power anytime there is a death or serious trauma at the hands of the police
 Ban the use of internal, extra-judicial gang database.  
A strength of this emerging movement is the multiracial, multi-generational character of participants in the effort. But there are weaknesses in the group’s position,which holds that we can address the mistrust between law enforcement and workers by passing reforms that help deepen our engagement with police. This approach misses the fundamental role of the police in a capitalist society – intimidate, divide, and terrorize the working class to ensure maximum profits for the capitalists. Some participants in this coalition who have been reading Challenge are interested in this analysis and realize that it means we need revolution, not just working with politicians and police. We will continue to work on individual cases of brutality, of illegal police-ICE collaboration and of unjustified maintenance by the cops of a secret “gang list” while continuing to look towards a revolutionary future.

There have been intense daily protests in Venezeula since 2017. The opposition in a threatening move declared Juan Guaidó as president in the National Assembly, and foremost as “President in Charge” of the country. This shows us as we’ve said in many articles that socialism of the 21st century offers almost the same as capitalism. We have to move the masses towards Communism.
The Venezuelan conflict has reaffirmed the chess pieces in inter-imperialist rivalries. This country has the biggest oil reserves in the world. Mike Pence, the vice-president of the United States, was the first to recognize Juan Guaidó as “president in charge” of Venezuela, after Canada, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica and other countries lined up with the U.S. interests did the same.
While China, Russia, Bolivia and its allies continue to recognize Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela. It seems like a proxy war is possible (funded and prepared by the U.S.). The same thing that happened in Iraq, Libya, Yemen (and more) will happen in Venezuela.
While it’s true that the U.S. intervention has worsened the crisis, we can’t limit our analysis just to that, as other leftist organizations do. The history of Venezuela shows, once again that keeping money, the market and production of social relations inevitably leads to a crisis.  
Hugo Chávez’s (president from 1999 to 2013) era had economic, political, and social success not because of socialism. He reached political success because his government was able to channel the greatest increase of crude oil price in history. Another aspect is savage oil inflation pushed by external elements out of Venezuela that funded fast growing minimum wages, mass construction of homes and educational, medical, and national coverage.
Nicolás Maduro inherited a time bomb from Chavez. The inevitable happened. The oil price collapsed in 2014 and the country entered a crisis with no end.
Learning from this process means understanding that communist revolution can’t depend on the ability to sell and buy resources or seeing the masses as simple beneficiaries of reforms. At no point did the working class in Venezuela rule the means of production or society.
The working class needs to be won over to communist ideas, and organized by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). The party has to be the main driver of these much needed changes, for a new way of life.Eliminating money and profit immediately will free the creativity of the masses for the solution of immediate problems (food, water, shelter, security). We must fight for the production of food, people’s needs, communist education, massive campaigns to eradicate sanitary problems, for the zones controlled by the Party. The success of these goals will prepare the masses and demonstrate the organizational capacity of the Party, with our class leading the way.
In contrast the outcome of the Venezuelan crisis depends on who the military officials and middle ranking, and base soldiers supports. The officials of the Venezuelan military continue to be loyal to the official government, despite the pressure and the offering of amnesty on behalf of the opposition.
 PLP long recognized the failures of socialism. Today we organize and fight for communism in many parts of the world. The Venezuelan crisis makes clear the need for a working class revolutionary communist party with a fixed aim: communism.

LOS ANGELES, February 20—The church in which members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP)work organized a discussion on White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, a book written purposefully for white people, by a white person, about the defensiveness of white people in regards to racism. This text successfully erases any class analysis of racism and builds on the cynical ruling class idea that white and Black workers cannot unite against racism:

In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged…She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress (The New Yorker, 7/23/2018).

DiAngelo is popular among white liberals. She is an academic who has worked as a diversity trainer for businesses. Her theory of white fragility is based on the idea that white privilege insulates white people from racial stress and any discussion of race and racism makes them defensive. It also pushes the idea that white people are solely responsible for both creating and dismantling racism in the United States.
While DiAngelo states that race was a social construct created by the white ruling class to justify slavery and keep poor white workers separate from enslaved Blacks and indigenous workers, she gives little to no examples of ways for white workers to fight back against it.
Her book is more descriptive than solution oriented. All she suggests is for white people to acknowledge their white privilege, and join all-white anti-racist organizations like SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) who will support Black Lives Matter, listen, reflect, and be more racially aware toward nonwhite people. We cannot fight racism by using the very tools the bosses use to keep us divided.

On the class question of racism
In Black Reconstruction in America, communist fighter and thinker W.E.B. Du Bois writes,

[T]he white group of laborers, while they receive a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.

White privilege theorists love to co-opt Du Bois’s words out of context. This psychological wage is the ideological division used to prevent white and Black workers from uniting as one class. Du Bois continues:

The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.

Without that crucial analysis, we fall into the trap of blaming each other for a systematic problem that hurts us all, albeit to different degrees. White privilege theory, and all identity politics, is based on a politics of difference, which deliberately seeks to undermine and break any potential for working-class unity.

Who benefits from racism?
White Fragility touched on institutional racism in the context of white people (as a monolithic group) running the institutions and not on capitalism needing racism to keep the working class divided and super exploiting Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant workers. What DiAngelo conveniently fails to do is show how, under the threat of rebellion, the U.S. constructed race and racism off the tears, blood, flesh of Black, indigenous, and white workers. Lerone Bennett’s masterpiece essay The Road Not Taken in The Shaping of Black America illustrates this:

The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money...Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, and the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy – the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen.
[The separation of our class] was done by the creation of a total system of domination, a system that penetrated every corner of Colonial life and made use of every Colonial institution. Nothing was left to chance. The assemblies, the courts, the churches, and the press were thrown into the breach.
The whole system of separation and subordination rested on official state terror. The exigencies of the situation required men to kill some white people to keep them white and to kill many blacks to keep them black. In the North and South, men and women were maimed, tortured, and murdered in a comprehensive campaign of mass conditioning. The severed heads of black and white rebels were impaled on poles along the road as warnings to black people and white people, and opponents of the status quo were starved to death in chains and roasted slowly over open fires. Some rebels were branded; others were castrated. This exemplary cruelty, which was carried out as a deliberate process of mass education, was an inherent part of the new system.

Clearly, if the ruling class ran a state terror campaign to create race and racism, it cannot be for the benefit of any worker. White privilege is a ruling-class idea.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said it plainly, “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

Segregation continues today
Race and racism has been maintained.  Lerone Bennett’s essay continues:

As the seventeenth century ended and the eighteenth century began, white arrogance increased, and a yawning chasm opened up between blacks and whites....Responding to this situation, blacks began to define themselves in opposition to whites, who were viewed as enemies and oppressors.

The bosses over the four hundred years of conditioning have succeeded in separating the natural unity between Black and white workers. Institutions like schools are more segregated today than they were in the 1960s (The Atlantic, 6/11/12). At the discussion, participants talked about their segregated neighborhoods and schools.  Another PL’er brought up going to a diverse school that was still very segregated and their experience with Black and Latin students being racist towards each other. The moderators quickly jumped in to say that wasn’t racism because “people of color can’t be racist.”

What do they fear the most?
An oppressor’s greatest fear is multiracial unity. When Black workers can organize hand in hand with their white counterpart, we are subverting 400 years of racist conditioning. Our discussion showed that workers of all races want to learn about racism and how to combat it. We will continue to struggle with those who were open to the ideas of multiracial unity and actively fighting racism.