To mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of Progressive Labor Party, CHALLENGE is publishing a series of articles on our Party’s history, from its origins as the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) to its presence today in more than two dozen countries worldwide. This is the second part of an article on PLP’s historic fights against racism. The previous part discussed the Harlem Rebellion and PLP’s leadership in fomenting it.
The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 raised the fight against racist oppression to a new level while exposing the class treason of Black reformist leadership. After Harlem, more than 100 cities in the U.S. felt the torch of rebellion. PLP’s leadership in this struggle set the tone for our unceasing fight against racism:

Beating down racists in the streets

From the 1970s to the current day, PL’ers have organized hundreds of attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis wherever they spread their racist garbage. Rejecting the pacifist mythology that these gutter racists would fade away if ignored, we have attacked them head-on—and confronted the capitalists’ cops who protect them. We have mounted these anti-racist, multiracial actions in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Detroit and St. Louis. We’ve done the same in smaller communities like Tupelo, Mississippi, Scotland, Connecticut, Jamesburg and Morristown, New Jersey, and scores of cities and towns in California. We invaded the Nazis’ headquarters in Chicago. We beat a white supremacist leader in a Boston television interview. These militant anti-KKK/Nazi actions have involved an estimated 100,000 or more workers and youth.

On May Day, 1975, we mobilized 2,500 anti-racists in Boston to march against the segregationist, terrorist organization called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights, accurately nicknamed Racists On A Rampage). When they physically attacked us, we routed them. We subsequently organized a summer project to combat ROAR’s mob violence and its anti-busing racism. We integrated formerly all-white beaches, held antiracist summer schools for Black children, and rallied to escort Black children into their first day of integrating formerly all-white schools. Our efforts smashed ROAR. 

On May Day, 1976, we marched into Chicago’s Marquette Park, where Nazis had barred Black people. Black workers cheered and welcomed us like we were a victorious army. The next weekend white neighborhood workers routed a Nazi rally. We integrated that neighborhood and the Nazis were finished.

No nazis in academia!

Simultaneously, PLP exposed academic charlatans — like E.O. Wilson, Richard Herrnstein, and Arthur Jensen — who spewed racist filth about the “inferiority” of Black workers and the Nazi fantasy that unemployment was inherited in their genes. We mobilized demonstrations wherever these racists appeared, chased them off auditorium stages, and even poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head in the middle of a lecture. (Our member called out, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”) PLP’s position was clear and uncompromising: No free speech for racists.

Throughout this period, PLP helped organize the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), a mass antiracist, multiracial group that led many of these struggles.

In Southern California, our Party has organized against the anti-immigrant Minute Men. We have gone to border towns to fight racist attacks on immigrant workers from Mexico, rallying support from citizen workers around the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”
More recently, PL’ers have taken to the streets in Brooklyn and Los Angeles to protest the police murders of Black women, men, and youth by racist cops.

PLP also advanced the protest against the cops’ murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, raising our slogan — “Fight Like Ferguson!” — among thousands across the country. Our Party is building a movement for rebellion against racist police and ICE terror, not pacifist appeals to ruling-class officials.

Antiracism on the shop floor

PLP has consistently raised the issue of racism among organized workers to unite them against the bosses’ racist attacks. In 1973, when a New York City Police Department undercover cop shot a Black 10-year-old in the back in Queens, a PLP club at the Ford auto plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, brought the atrocity onto the factory assembly line. Our Party petitioned the do-nothing union local leadership to take a public stance and demand that the cop be indicted for murder. The workers’ response was electric. They were galvanized into action during a contract struggle that previously had been limited to economic issues. Their heightened political consciousness and militancy led to a weeklong wildcat strike against 100-degree temperatures in the plant, which in turn set the tone for the Chrysler Mack Avenue sit-down strike two months later (see CHALLENGE, May 6).

Beginning in the 1980’s, PLP has provided antiracist leadership to 6,000 Washington, DC Metro transit workers. At one point, the local’s overwhelmingly Black membership elected a white PL’er as their president, defeating a passive Black incumbent. As Metro bosses exclude people convicted of crimes by the rulers’ criminal injustice system, they close one of the few avenues for many Black workers to obtain a decent-paying job. PLP has demanded that the union oppose racist background checks. 

Many workers were won to our Party as a result of our generational commitment and leadership to antiracist fightbacks! 

Fighting racism internationally

PLP is now actively organizing on five continents.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, political assassinations, and fights between gangs and U.N. soldiers, we spread the struggle against U.S. imperialism and racism, which have enslaved workers there for two centuries.

In Israel-Palestine, PL’ers are exposing and fighting the intense racism of the Israeli bosses (with U.S. ruling-class support) against workers from Africa and Palestine, who are victims of super-exploitation. We are also organizing workers against the Israeli rulers’ genocide of Palestinian workers..  

In Pakistan, PL’ers are mobilizing thousands of workers to fight racist super-exploitation by Pakistani bosses in alliance with U.S. imperialism. The bosses have slaughtered thousands in sweatshops, drone attacks, and through their corruption and mismanagement of disastrous flooding.

These are only a few highlights of PLP’s long fight against racism, the ideological foundation of the profit system. The struggle against racism will prepare our class to overthrow capitalism and obliterate exploitation and divisions among workers. It is the watchword of the Progressive Labor Party.

CHICAGO, September 14—Members from the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) connected with thousands of other workers at the Mexican Independence Day parade today on the city’s southwest side. Distributing hundreds of flyers and copies of CHALLENGE newspaper in a short time, we stood in solidarity with countless immigrant workers and families facing a surge of racist state terror while we offered a fighting, internationalist and anti-capitalist alternative.

The frenzy of attacks by Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unleashed on the greater Chicago area recently, under the orders of U.S. Klansman-In-Chief Donald Trump, is spreading fear as they destroy lives. At the same time, however, the state terror is provoking a militant response from many workers committed to repel the rotten attacks on us and our class.

We communists in PLP have a unique role to play in the growing fightback. Instead of relying on nationalism, “lesser evil” politicians, weak reforms or the bosses’ laws and courts, we must be building a mass militant working-class movement under communist leadership. As we fight like hell to protect our class from the current attacks, we must be bold in putting forward communist revolution as the only real solution to the chaos of capitalism and recruit more antiracist fighters to the Party!

Seizing the moment to fight back

Our attendance at the parade today was in line with efforts from the Party in our area to grow our connections with ongoing anti-ICE struggles. Just one day prior, a PLP member joined close to a dozen other workers in an “ICE Watch Bike Ride” through the same neighborhood where the parade was held. Riders monitored for any ICE activity along our route while we spread messages of support and solidarity to workers we passed. Plans were made to continue the rides on a weekly basis at least.

In another nearby neighborhood that has a majority population of Latin workers, another PLP member has been forming walking groups to promote safety among undocumented parents. The prospect of heading out solo for many undocumented workers for work, appointments, or shopping is an intimidating task in the current climate. Many are forced to forgo earning wages for the sake of security, or vice versa. By organizing to head out in groups, we are helping to reduce our risk in a collective way while having an opportunity to spread the politics of PLP among other workers regularly.

Liberal bosses lie, workers die

Deepening our roots and connections with our fellow workers is essential to win more of our class politically to communism and away from the deadly mis-leadership and illusions of the liberal bosses. As the vile Donald Trump administration has ratcheted up its racist hate speech against immigrant and refugee workers, these liberal bosses have cynically seized on the opportunity to pose as the defenders of workers. On a local level, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker like to talk tough at press conferences about how they’re ready to stand up against Trump’s faction of capitalist bosses. But the fact is that they’re just two sides to the same capitalist coin.

We won’t forget that under Brandon Johnson’s watch thousands of migrant workers and their children were overcrowded into filthy shelters, served rotten food, and denied proper medical attention with deadly consequences (see CHALLENGE, 1/31/24). And J.B. Pritzker, whose family wealth reaches into the billions, slashed healthcare coverage programs for undocumented workers in recent state budgets (WTTW, 2/28).

The truth is that capitalists of all countries depend on the higher profits gained from super-exploiting immigrant labor. And all politicians are defenders of capitalism, in one form or another, so we can never expect any of them to stop terrorizing, dividing, deporting and murdering members of our class. The only way to secure a dignified existence for all workers without exploitation is to destroy capitalism and build a communist society where the needs of the working class are primary, never profits.

Hate deportations? Fight for communism!

Our party collective here is optimistic of the struggles we’re currently involved in, and reflective of the hard work that remains to continue to grow the mass fight for communism. We’re confident that the Mexican and U.S. flags waved at parades today will in time be replaced with the red flags of the international working class and its mass PLP, but that all depends on the work we do today, and the weeks, months, years, and decades to come.

If you hate deportations, racism and borders, then you’re ready to fight for a communist world! PLP is your party to defend our class and fight for the egalitarian future all workers need and deserve – Join us!

Pakistan, September 2—In August 2025, vast stretches of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Kashmir were swallowed by raging floods. Nature provided the rainfall, but it is capitalism—with its ruthless exploitation of land, reckless construction, and refusal to invest in protective infrastructure—that turns rain into mass destruction. The working class in these areas needs help and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is organizing relief efforts. But we know only a communist revolution will bring the change the working class needs.

Heavy monsoon rains, intensified by global warming, combined with decades of reckless capitalist development has unleashed destruction on an enormous scale. By the end of August, more than 1,000 people had been killed nationwide. In Punjab alone, over 1,600 villages were submerged, more than 2 million people were caught in the floodwaters, and nearly half a million were driven from their homes. Crops across thousands of acres were ruined; bridges, schools, and hospitals collapsed; and waterborne diseases spread rapidly through crowded camps and submerged neighborhoods.

Capitalists use and overuse fossil fuels to increase profits

The ruling class insists on labeling this a “natural calamity.” But nothing about this catastrophe is natural. PLP emphasizes that disasters of this kind are the direct product of capitalism. 

Imperialism makes the chain of capitalist misery even tighter. The bosses in the big imperialist countries have burned fossil fuels for centuries, heating the atmosphere and intensifying monsoon cycles while the working class around the world suffers the consequences.

In these conditions, relief efforts were not charity but solidarity—workers protecting one another when the capitalist state refused to act. PLP coordinated with local unions, student organizations, shopkeepers, professionals, charitable groups, and even some international NGOs to provide tents, food parcels, and hygiene kits. It was ordinary people who stepped forward. PLP members and supporters mobilized rapidly across Pakistan. With limited resources but coordinated efforts, PLP managed to reach people in difficult situations. These contributions saved lives. Yet even the best relief work is constrained under capitalism. Aid eases suffering temporarily but cannot prevent the next flood.

As PLP comrades explained while meeting people in flood-hit areas, under capitalism disasters are class war. The rich retreat to their safe homes and demand bailouts. The poor drown in their fields, their schools, and their villages. When the waters came, the capitalist state proved useless. Paltry compensation, token suspensions of officials, and staged visits by politicians could not hide the reality that the rulers had abandoned the masses. In flooded areas, families spent days without food or clean water. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan, entire districts were cut off as cholera and hepatitis spread unchecked.

While fighting for international communist revolution, PLP also demands urgent survival measures. Displaced families need shelter and compensation now. Empty luxury properties must be used to house the homeless, rent collection must be suspended, and direct cash aid delivered. Workers must be protected—no layoffs in flood zones. Instead, public works jobs should employ locals to rebuild their communities. 

Farmers need immediate relief: debts canceled, fresh seeds and livestock supplied, and communal grazing lands restored.

Keeping the fight for communism central to the struggle

Fighting for reforms isn’t enough. Profit must give way to planning. A communist economy would meet human needs: flood-safe collective housing, restored forests and rivers, modern flood-control systems accountable to communities, renewable energy to replace fossil fuels, and universal, people-run warning and evacuation networks.

The drowned villages of Punjab and the collapsed bridges of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are not signs of “mismanagement.” Only a revolutionary transformation led by the working class under the red banners of PLP can protect the masses and heal the environment. The existing state is built to defend property, not people—it cannot be reformed. Workers and peasants must organize in the international revolutionary communist PLP to overthrow it and build a state of their own under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which expropriates the exploiters and puts production under collective control.

The floods of 2025 are both a tragedy and a warning. PLP calls on the working class to organize in their workplaces, campuses, and villages to build an international communist party — PLP and to link the struggle in Pakistan with the global fight for communism.

This coming October 17 marks the 166th anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry. It was a revolutionary revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle! The fight against racist terror worldwide rages on today as the ruling class relies on it to keep workers in line, especially among brewing interimperialist rivalry with Russia and China.

As workers recognize the power of unity, the cops crack down harder on protests

The southern enslaving class was terrified by the Harpers Ferry raiders’ militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. 

One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:

“I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-Slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter.”

From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery

This trust among white and Black fighters did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Ohio.

At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever.
 He believed Black and white workers were completely equal. He put 
this knowledge into action daily.

As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, N.Y. near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).

Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, reaching out to Black abolitionists and former enslaved workers.

Tubman single-handedly freed 300 enslaved workers

Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown allies. Born around 1820 to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her “owner” tried selling her as “damaged goods.” Instead she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.

Over the following 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made approximately 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. This resolute, daring revolutionary declared, “I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger.”Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as “General Tubman.” Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.

Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harpers Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.

Black rebels petrified slave-owners

To those today who say workers won’t fight oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal. The slave-owners, although talking of “docile” Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of “outside agitators.” They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep Yankees and abolitionist literature away from them.

Today the “outside agitators” are Progressive Labor Party (PLP) communists, fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us that the impoverished working class is too ground down, too alienated to fight back collectively, saying workers hate communism. Yet they organize cops, plant security, the Minutemen, Black nationalists and sellout union “leaders” to try to keep communists out, and instantly fire them when they’re discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if the working class is supposed to be so passive?

Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds are able to overcome the “natural” segregation capitalist society promotes. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.

Today, U.S. capitalism has created its own contradiction. Workers still often live in neighborhoods separated by “race”, but many are integrated within their workplaces and schools. The bosses try to divide us there as well, with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture to keep workers apart (e.g., soul “versus” country music). Nevertheless, workers rub shoulders every day. Class-conscious workers in PLP must develop these acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.
Class struggle strikes out racism

As in Tubman and Brown’s time, today racism permeates society. But rebellions and strikes reveal multiracial unity and struggle against the bosses. At the Smithfield Ham Factory in Tarheel, NC, for example, a 15-year unionization fight witnessed intense intimidation from the bosses to scare workers from signing union cards. But by organizing support from grocery workers from far and wide, Smithfield workers felt part of a larger community. When the bosses got immigration agents to raid the plant, targeting Latin workers for deportation, the workers saw through this divisive trick, and, in November 2006, 500 marched out in a two-day strike protesting this raid, forcing the company to rehire all the fired immigrant workers!

In 2008 in the Bronx, NY, the Stella D’Oro workers went on strike for 11 months. These immigrant workers from across the world, men and women, overcame differences and stuck together. Not one worker crossed the picket line! PLP had organized friends, comrades, teachers and students onto the picket lines, bringing solidarity and communist leadership. PLP members steadfastly stood in solidarity with the strikers via donations, rallies and marches, and supported their fight against plant closure. 

The fight against police brutality is a protracted class war still being waged today. It is the same war left unfinished by Tubman and Brown.  PLP joins the militant antiracist fightback against the kkkops, who in less than a year’s time, stole the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor,  Jacob Blake, and countless others. The multiracial character of these protests are glimmers of the revolutionary potential of the working class.

John Brown’s raid and Harriet Tubman’s courage in freeing 300 slaves along the Underground Railroad teach antiracists many valuable lessons . First, militancy was foremost in their thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to being a slave, that she would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Bloody Kansas, realized that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed with them, especially after the 1857 Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery nationwide.

The second lesson is that multiracial unity is essential in any fight. Black workers escaping from enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists to reach the North. Thousands of workers, Black and white, helped escaping slaves along their journeys and defended them when attacked by slave-catchers. These workers attended public meetings, donated money, passed the word to their friends, and helped harbor fugitive slaves.

PLP does similar things today. We discuss political struggles and the vital need for multiracial unity against the racist system with friends, coworkers and neighbors. We urge them to join in militant antiracist demonstrations, build a multiracial base with fellow workers or donate to CHALLENGE. Every time someone we know does one of these simple acts, they’re making a political commitment in the fight against racism, capitalism and imperialism, just as thousands of anti-slavery workers did against slavery — taking small steps to serve and defend those who had escaped slavery as well as those who fought it directly.

Join PLP 

We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in these struggles to join Progressive Labor Party.

Today’s supporters of antiracist struggle understand — just as did the thousands backing Brown and Tubman 165 years ago — that revolutionaries like the raiders then and PLP now are the honest, reliable leaders in struggle. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. CHALLENGE constantly reports workers being won to militancy and multiracial unity in struggles against the racist bosses, hailing those joining our ranks. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other’s needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.