Richmond, KY—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members at a local University held a series of events before and during the first week of classes. On the Saturday before classes started, PLP members and other local comrades held a sign-making party in the public plaza of the university. We invited our base members to join us, and we also gained visibility by making our signs publicly. Many students walking by joined in when they saw us. Some students couldn’t join but were interested in what we were doing when they saw our anti-ICE, anti-Zionist signs. We explained the protest to them and identified ourselves as the PLP. Almost all of the students who joined us in making signs came to our protest the next day. Almost all of them said this was their first protest! They asked us what protests on campus were like. We told them that actually protests have not been very common here, but we hope to change that with the leadership of the PLP. In fact, one former EKU student walking through the plaza stopped to talk to us because he said when he went here no groups were organizing, and it was great to see a group of people coming together!

Bringing left politics to Kentucky workers!

The next day, Sunday, August 17, we had a protest. We organized the protest alongside another local group, RichmondKY4Palestine. The local United Campus Workers also participated. We had students, faculty members, and Richmond locals come out. We started out with about 20, but later more students joined us as they walked by. We started by practicing chants, handing out CHALLENGE, and promoting our planned cadre school. We marched to the same plaza while chanting, “15,000 child lives, this ain’t war, it’s genocide!”, “ICE out of Kentucky now!”, as well as classic PLP chants like “Asian, Latin, Black, and White, Workers of the World Unite!” 

We then started with speeches. Several attendees gave their own speeches alongside organizers. One attendee, from a small town in eastern KY, gave a speech detailing how his political positions have changed over time due to seeing mass unemployment, poverty, and a rising wealth gap. “I used to only listen to what my parents said–I would call people ‘pinko commies,’ but now I realize, I’m one of them.”

Why everything is connected

PLP members gave speeches explaining why the issues of Palestine and ICE are tied together, and why revolution is the only solution to both of these issues. We identified communism as the only viable path. One member’s speech read: “From Palestinian refugees, to immigrants here in the U.S., everywhere, refugees are fleeing the consequences of imperialism, war, famine, sanctions, as in, the consequences of capitalism. The migrant crisis in both the U.S.A. and western Europe is a result of capitalist imperialist policies… join the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party and fight for all workers around the world!”

As we were handing out CHALLENGE to some students, one saw “Worcester, MA” on the front cover and said “This is my hometown!” We told him how our Party actually protested there over the summer. This is why it is so important that the newspaper showcases fightback in areas all over the country and the world. Party members are encouraged to pay attention to and even participate in things that are happening not only in their local region, but nationally and internationally. This helps us make personal connections like this one!
Organizing and educating 

That Saturday, August 23rd, we held an educational event in the campus library on the topics of imperialism, nationalism, and why class war is the only solution. We watched videos, read PLP documents, and went over a series of questions on each topic. At the end, we handed out a pamphlet explaining what it means to join the PLP and to be a communist. Two new comrades joined the Party and more hope to fight back with us in the future. We will continue organizing students and training the new generation of communists to overthrow this racist, sexist, capitalist system!

For too long we have been stuck in the doldrums’ of capitalism with no relief in sight. Many of us are sick or hungry and too weak to fight. The billionaires and turncoat politicians are well aware of the plight of the working class. They control our resources and give us just enough to survive so we may continue to work for them. This is no way to live. In the words of Angela Davis “[We are] changing the things we can no longer accept.” For decades, New York City’s Hostos and Bronx Community College have been united in struggle and fighting racist austerity politics.

Most recently, (for the past two years) the student run Common Ground Club has been demanding healthy affordable food on our respective campuses. Now, in addition to fighting for equality and equity within the CUNY school system, we also fight for the same on behalf of working people in our streets and communities.

On  August 25, 2025, the Common Ground Club and other student fighters took to the streets of the Bronx (NYC). Our target was 149th Street and Third Avenue, the HUB, the poorest congressional district in all of the U.S.A. Our goals were clearly defined. We set out to connect with the community, feed fellow working people, and inspire our class into action.  Armed with 80 healthy bagged lunches which included a sandwich, clementine, protein bar, and bottled water and accompanied with the latest issue of CHALLENGE, we did just that.

Upon our arrival to the HUB, we immediately noticed that the surrounding area had been “cleaned up”, simply meaning that the unhoused population that congregated in this area had been displaced. We can’t help but wonder, however, how many of these individuals got the help they needed? Or had they been inhumanely imprisoned or kidnapped into ICE custody? Nevertheless, we announced our presence and began our mission. Within 30 minutes we had given out all 80 lunches, countless copies of CHALLENGE and Common Ground literature. It was clear that our fellow workers are in serious need of help in this area, as some folks returned crying for more food. We wish we could afford to do more.

Most folks we talked to were receptive to our mission and thankful for the lunch we provided. There were, however, one or two skeptics in the crowd. One gentleman in particular was standoffish and unsure if we were truly there to help. He questioned if we were working with the government and stated, “I hate politicians.” After explaining our position and goals of uniting the working class against the politicians and billionaires, the man took lunch and literature and simply said “Bless you.”  This man’s initial reaction is not surprising, as we all have been lied to, let down and neglected by this “democracy” year after year.

Before leaving the scene, we pulled out the trusted bull horn to reaffirm our position to the crowd, in English and Spanish. If our “leaders” wanted to help us, they would have done so by now. A case in point is our own congressman, Richie Torres, who turns a blind eye to the needs of his constituency while agreeing to send BILLIONS of dollars to Israel to help carry out GENOCIDE on Gaza (Richie Torres has received approximately $2 million dollars from pro Israel groups). We reminded them that only we, the working class, can save us, and small revolutionary acts like we executed that day are the foundations of taking our humanity back from the bosses. We assured the crowd that this would not be our last time at the HUB, and we would return because our fight was only just beginning. Common Ground is excited to return next month and we will send updates of our progress.     

The road to revolution will not be linear. We must attack from all sides. We must learn with  the masses and teach each other  how to organize in their workplaces and communities. Furthermore, we must always remind ourselves that it is the working class that holds the power to enact change in our society. We can’t afford to wait any longer. We must act now.

Bogta, Colombia, August 11th, 2025—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a communist cadre school to deepen our political understanding of unity and organization. Over two dozen PLP members and close friends came together for two days of study, discussion, and camaraderie. We examined the global situation and shared political responsibilities.

Real workers’ education

Comrades from Mexico and Haiti participated in the school, along with local readers of CHALLENGE and PLP supporters. We engaged in rich, in-depth discussions about inter-imperialist rivalry and its impact on local conditions and the lives of millions of workers around the world. We also studied dialectical materialism and its relevance for understanding capitalist exploitation and advancing the liberation of the proletariat.

Cadre schools are one of the primary mechanisms through which PL’ers and our base (our close friends in the working class) become antiracist, antisexist communist fighters, guided by a materialist understanding of history and the collective experience of PLP. In these schools, we analyze our ongoing struggles and the political line that shapes our work, reaching higher levels of consciousness that make us sharper fighters on the difficult path of revolution—hand in hand with the international working class. We stand firm in our belief that communist ideas belong to the working class as a whole, not to a select few “special” individuals. 

Key conclusions from the Cadre School:

The current global political situation reflects the intensifying contradictions among imperialist powers—China, the U.S., Russia, Iran, Israel, and others. This sharpening intercapitalist conflict is destabilizing the world and setting the stage for broader confrontations. The genocide in Palestine, the wars in Ukraine and Yemen, and the rise of fascism in South America are all symptoms of the deepening crisis of the capitalist system. Fascism is reemerging as a tool to discipline and divide our class.

Militant workers and PLP comrades in Colombia are fighting back—organizing protests, giving speeches, and challenging issues such as rising factory closures driven by AI automation, the skyrocketing cost of living, collapsing public services and transportation, the education crisis, and the use of workers as cannon fodder in imperialist wars. Everywhere we go, workers are open to our message. They accept our badges, banners, and eagerly receive CHALLENGE and our literature.

At the Cadre School, we reaffirmed our commitment to making communism the long-term goal of every struggle against the system. We resolved to write more for CHALLENGE, to study dialectical materialism with our friends, and to apply it in reform struggles. We will participate in Marxist schools and youth projects, adopt new technologies to strengthen Party leadership, and win new members to build a stronger PLP on the revolutionary road to construct a new worker-run, egalitarian world.

LET’S FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s saw a dangerous upsurge in attempts to provide an “academic” justification for racism. In 1969, Arthur Jensen of the University of California, Berkeley argued in the Harvard Education Review that most Black people in the U.S. inherited lower intelligence (I.Q.). In

The Unheavenly City, Edward Banfield of Harvard argued that poor workers were lazy, prone to criminality, uninterested in education, and disinclined to plan for the future, so that poverty in slums and ghettos are inevitable, not caused by racism and exploitation. William Shockley of Stanford University advocated sterilizing persons with IQ scores lower than 100. 

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members know that racist pseudo-science must be fought. We helped to form the Committee Against Racism (C.A.R.) in order to unite with antiracist students, academics, and workers. In alliance with non-communist students and faculty we organized teach-ins against racism at dozens of colleges and universities.

PLP’s independent communist position was and remains: “No free speech for racists.” We refuted the thinly-veiled gutter racism of these pseudo-scientists in a militant, scholarly book-length pamphlet Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class. We organized shutting down talks by Jensen, Shockley, and,  beginning in 1974, by Richard Herrnstein of Harvard, whose book The Bell Curve argued that “intelligence” was genetically determined and poverty had nothing to do with racism or capitalist exploitation.

Expose racist pseudo-science 

On November 17–18, 1973, hundreds of faculty, graduate students, and intellectuals attended a two-day conference at New York University sponsored by the Committee Against Racism. By then the nationwide teach-in movement against racism was involving masses in the discussion of racist ideas and practices, their inter-relation, and how to fight against them.

The October 28, 1973, issue of the New York Times carried an antiracist advertisement signed and paid for by 1400 professors, teachers, and others. It read, in part: “Racist theoreticians have recently sought sanction and protection in the concept of academic freedom. This is a subterfuge ... (Academic freedom) is not a license to justify oppression. It was no more intended to protect racism than verbal assault of libel, with which racism has more in common than it has with free intellectual inquiry ... The use of the academy to further racist oppression must be halted.” 

The ad called for specific action against racism and the racists and endorsed the N.Y.U. conference. Organizers at the C.A.R. Storrs, Connecticut headquarters received hundreds of responses to the ad and call for the conference, many with substantial contributions.
PLP’s line of “no free speech for racists” was attacked by liberal anticommunists and confused many honest antiracists as well. In response, PLP and CAR organized a debate at Columbia University. Nat Hentoff, who had attacked PLP and CAR in his column in the Village Voice, represented the view that freedom of speech was “absolute” and “guaranteed by the Constitution.” 

Racist ideas not welcome!

Finley Campbell, national chairperson of CAR and professor at U. Wisconsin, who with scientist Toby Schwartz of the University of Connecticut and PLP, founded CAR, represented an antiracist but non-communist stance. Campbell also exposed the ‘‘neo-racists”’ as scientific charlatans and said that academic freedom did not apply to their type of pseudo-‘research. He pointed out that no university would give a professor tenure to teach ideas that science had disproved for centuries, and that the same limits should be applied to racist pseudo-science.

Bob Leonhardt put forward PLP’s ideas on racism. All history—particularly the history of Nazi Germany—shows that racist ideas mean death and genocide. Racism isn’t only the affair of those who are most directly attacked by it: ultimately, it devastates everyone but the ruling class. Free speech and academic freedom are not an abstract question but a class question—who has the money to own newspapers and TV stations, to publish racist theories in the Harvard Education Review, to fund racist research. 

The only long-range strategy for destroying racism is working-class revolution to get rid of all bosses. Capitalists’ class existence requires racist super-profits as well as their apologists like Shockley. Communists and workers should learn from history. We must fight racism harder than ever in order to advance the revolutionary process.