NEW YORK, March 27th— Today, dozens of students and workers protested the 547 days (and counting) that have passed since we’ve had a cafeteria on campus. All semester, comrades in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been providing snacks at our People’s Pantry, but today we turned up the heat! The protest allowed us to draw some important lessons about our campus situation: Racist austerity is overseen by Black and Latin administrators. Our lack of cafeteria on campus is directly tied to U.S. imperialism and the billions of dollars being used to exterminate Palestinians. But students and workers are ready and willing to escalate our fight. We can only guarantee a decent education and access to nutritious food for all students and workers if we destroy capitalism and replace it with a communist society!

Racist profit$ over food

Even when we had a cafeteria, our campus suffered from racist treatment: The previous cafeteria vendor offered truly awful, unhealthy food options. But in a capitalist system, food is a commodity, which means its main social purpose is to make profit for capitalists. In a communist society these things would not be commodities, but would only be produced to benefit workers. When the vendor couldn’t make enough profit, they closed up shop and left students without access to any kind of nutrition. 

While small, our pantry is a microcosm of communism in action. We, the workers, are producing and distributing better food options to one another based on need, without any profit involved. All we have is each other to rely on in the end.

In response to the closing, more than 40 students and workers rallied in front of our campus. Students spoke about the difficulty of going to a school without access to food. We connected our struggle to the fight against the genocide in Gaza. It’s no mistake this is happening in The Bronx–which has a majority Latin population–and  the highest rate of food insecurity of the five boroughs (Mayor’ Office of Food Policy, 2022), clear cut racism! Would a school like Harvard, with majority white students, have to endure no cafeteria or healthy food options?
A student leader encouraged all of us to “turn our sad stomach grumbles into vicious growls,” and reminded the crowd that “every right gained throughout history: trans and gay rights, civil rights and women’s liberation were not just handed over but fought for in the streets just like this.” 

Latin bosses won’t help Latin students either

The protest ended with a visit to a meeting of the college senate. One of the points of struggle on campus, and around the world, is over identity politics - the bosses’ ideology that people should categorize themselves according to their “race,” gender, sexuality, nationality, etc., rather than as a worker. Our college president, who is Puerto Rican and oversees an administration that is almost entirely Black and Latin, shows what a deadly ideology this is for workers and students. But our students did not care! They called him out for his callousness, his disrespect and his lies, to his face, in front of 40 or 50 faculty and administrators. We left the meeting energized and finished by setting up our People’s Pantry to serve our campus community again.

Students are ready to continue the struggle. Even after we get a cafeteria (if we ever do!) we’ll continue to demand better services on campus. We are also setting up a rapid response team to confront racist ICE stormtroopers if they show up on campus. We’re planning a film screening to highlight the racist immigration system that has spanned Democratic and Republican administrations. In short, students and workers are ready to continue to fight. And PLP members and friends are ready to continue to sharpen the fight, to push for more confrontation with our racist administration, and to build our confidence as we grow the revolutionary communist movement!

“... the Communists remain the only Vietnamese still capable of rallying millions of their countrymen to sacrifice and hardship.” 
--Neil Sheehan, New York Times, 1964

The small country of Vietnam beat the mighty war machine of U.S. imperialism because the working class of Vietnam had strong communist leadership. The courageous Vietnamese fighters were inspired by the revolutions in Russia and China and by the fight for a just and egalitarian society. 

But today the successors of the leaders of People’s War welcome imperialists to come exploit the working class once again. The leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) abandoned the struggle for communism in favor of nationalism—first to win independence and then to live and profit side-by-side with capitalists.

Communists Built a Base Through Class Struggle

The French imperialists conquered Vietnam in the late 19th century. Like all imperialists, they oppressed and exploited the people brutally. In 1954, the Communist-led Vietminh defeated the French imperialists. Then they led a bold program of land reform and social reorganization in the countryside. As Eric Wolf notes in Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, “land was taken from landlords and redistributed among the remainder of the peasantry; at the same time political control was taken from the landlords and rich peasants and transferred to the poor and middle peasantry.” 

People’s War Defeats U.S. Military

After World War II and the communist revolution in China, the international communist movement appeared poised to defeat capitalism everywhere. Desperate to stop the communist advance, U.S. rulers replaced the French in Vietnam and installed regimes of fascist brutality that lasted for 20 years. In 1956, after the CIA installed a puppet government in the South, the communist leadership began to organize People’s War, mobilizing masses of workers to fight for working class power–communism. According to U.S. foreign service agent Douglas Pike, “The Vietnamese [peasant] was not regarded simply as a pawn in a power struggle, but as the active element.” 

Millions of peasants joined this movement. Pike noted: 

.. almost all Vietnamese were of the firm opinion that as a result of [Communist] activity, . . . fundamental change had occurred in the social order...the liberated area was characterized by a greater sense of egalitarianism and a greater awareness of class consciousness, or social solidarity.

By 1965, People’s War had toppled the U.S.-backed dictator Ngo Dinh Diem. Desperate to hold on to Vietnam, U.S. bosses launched a full-scale invasion. By 1967, they’d sent 500,000 U.S. troops. They dropped more bombs on the North than during all of World War II. 
Between three and five million Vietnamese, mostly civilians, were killed in the war. But despite suffering tremendous casualties and hardships, the Vietnamese peasants and workers, led by communists, defeated the U.S. Army on the ground. On April 30, 1975, the last U.S. forces fled Saigon.

Bargaining with the Bosses: A Fatal Error

Ho Chi Minh, founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party, vacillated between the goals of communism and “a war of national salvation.” Since Lenin’s day, the Communist International had supported national liberation struggles in colonial countries. This line led to alliances with capitalist forces that wanted independence but not communism. The Vietnamese communists’ nationalism reflected similar weaknesses in Russia, China, and the international communist movement. It led them to miss the opportunity to win U.S. soldiers to the fight for communism, as the Russian communists had done with German soldiers during World War I. 

Over time, the nationalist line won out. The goal of an egalitarian communist society was abandoned. When Ho died in 1969, James Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, lamented that the U.S. could and should have made deals, not war, with Ho. In fact, the Vietnamese communists showed themselves willing to bargain with the enemy from the start. They signed a treaty with the defeated French imperialists that foreshadowed the sellout to come.

What counted was that the Vietminh was withdrawing troops to the north for two years. This gave the U.S. rulers what they needed ... to install a puppet [in the south]. With this ... the U.S. could wreak havoc on southern Vietnamese working people, smash up their revolutionary organizations. This was a terrible setback for Vietnamese working people.” (PLP pamphlet, Vietnam, Defeat U.S. Imperialism, 1971) 

The Tet Offensive: Betrayal of the Workers

In the Tet Offensive in early 1968, communist troops attacked and expelled the U.S. from nearly every major city. This heroic effort, made at a high cost in the lives of dedicated fighters, was used by the VCP leadership to push U.S. imperialists to negotiate. Tet was a big step back from the People’s War. 

It was in fact a gigantic bluff aimed at convincing the U.S. to begin talks right away. LBJ got the message. He answered with a gesture: on Feb. 9 he called a bombing halt. By November of 1968 the North Vietnamese were involved in full-fledged talks with the U.S. rulers (PLP, 1971). 
These talks ultimately resulted in U.S. withdrawal and independence for a united Vietnam. It also meant the betrayal and defeat of the Vietnamese working class by its own leadership, which had abandoned the fight for a communist society. 

In the 1970s, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, pro-communist forces in the VCP won the collectivization of agriculture. But in the 1980s and 1990s, this huge reform was gradually abandoned, as it was in China and the former Soviet Union. The goal of a classless communist society was abandoned too. Today a post-colonial elite rules a “socialist” Vietnam that is home to some of the world’s worst garment sweat shops. A study of working conditions in Vietnamese factories found “forced labour, child labour and child slavery” (Anti-Slavery International 2019). 

Only Communism Can Defeat Imperialism

In 1964, Progressive Labor Movement, the forerunner of today’s PLP, organized the first anti-war demonstration to protest U.S. imperialism in Vietnam. Seven years later, PLP offered comradely criticism of the Vietnamese leadership for negotiating with U.S. and Soviet bosses—a decisive turn in the creation of a new international communist movement from the ashes of the old. Vietnam’s workers, like workers worldwide, are now faced with the task of helping to rebuild the communist movement and making a new revolution. 

The great victories and tragic betrayal of workers in Vietnam offer today’s communists a powerful lesson. No matter how valiant the fight, no matter how great the sacrifice, only a fight for communism—not nationalism and “socialism”—will liberate the international working class.

Washington, D.C., March 15- Unity Health Clinic staff and physicians led the chant “Unite for our Patients” at a city hall rally in downtown Washington, D.C.. These health care workers demanded more staff and realistic scheduling of patients. Nearly 40 percent of their workers have quit in recent years due to despicable, untenable working conditions. A year ago they joined the Union of American Physicians and Dentists and walked out to demand a change to the unrealistic scheduling of patients which continues to this day. Unity Health was founded to serve unhoused and previously incarcerated workers and provide them with services beyond just health care. The understaffing is a racist attack on the mainly Black and Latin workers who depend on the clinics for their healthcare. A physician who had struck against similar abysmal working conditions years earlier joined the rally, sharing CHALLENGE and Progressive Labor Party's communist analysis. 

Racist understaffing makes workers sicker

Physician Assistants (PAs) and doctors told us that their patients are primarily Spanish speaking and, while many providers are bilingual, some are not. Poverty, immigration fears, and complex medical problems as well as the language barrier drive the challenges facing these patients. Doctors are scheduled for 24 patients a day and physician assistants for 20 patients per day making it impossible to properly deal with these health issues. “It is exhausting for me to speak Spanish all day and manage medical and social issues,” said one of the new PAs. Another doctor who is not bilingual said, “I do use phone translation but it is time consuming, sometimes wrong, and I know I can’t do right by my patients.” 

Besides being understaffed and over scheduled, continuity of care is also lacking which means patients cannot see the same PA or doctor every visit without waiting months for an appointment.

We talked about capitalist health care, the union-busting lawyers the city would rather pay instead of health care workers, and the need for a totally new system that serves workers' interests, not profits. Sharing CHALLENGE with several providers deepened the discussion about the need for revolutionary change in this critical moment. Highlighting the sharpening struggle all around us, another health worker who had just been forced to return from Malawi when President Donald Trump abolished the United States Agency For International Development (USAID) discovered that she had been fired the next day! Unity Health is a federally funded clinic, many of which are facing challenges from Trump's funding freeze and cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. 

In addition, the city budget for D.C. is being held hostage by Congress with $1 billion in spending cuts to city services including community clinics (Washington Post, 04/07). These are blatant racist and sexist attacks on workers who need these programs to stay alive. Nothing short of the complete and utter destruction of the heinous capitalist system will do. Capitalism drives fascist cutbacks in programs serving working people across the globe. Communism will, through collectivity and empathy, meet the needs of the world’s workers!

CHICAGO, March 29—We have to keep struggling for a better communist world, where the workers, not the capitalists, are in charge, and it’s more urgent than ever to fight for workers’ power… During these years I’ve had the chance to learn that it doesn’t matter how difficult the struggle may be, or how small the accomplishment, we have to keep on struggling together for a world free of racism, injustices, and dictators.

With this statement and others, a worker helped summarize political lessons drawn from the mighty antisexist struggle to defend the “La Casita” fieldhouse in Chicago from demolition. To celebrate both International Working Women’s Day and the fifteenth anniversary of the original sit-in, our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) immigrant workers’ club organized a panel presentation and discussion today in the Pilsen neighborhood where the struggle happened.

In September 2010, immigrant parents of students from Whittier Elementary school – mainly mothers – protested plans from the racist, sexist Chicago Public Schools (CPS) bosses to demolish a small fieldhouse (La Casita, or “little house”) that served as a community space and library. The protest rapidly escalated to an occupation by the parents and other workers for 43 days and drew international attention, praise and support from countless workers.

The fight over La Casita remains a bold reminder of the power of a united working class and the necessity of a communist revolution. The same Black, Latin, migrant and women workers that capitalism attacks today will tomorrow form the backbone of a mass international PLP that buries the bosses and their wretched profit system for all time.

Immigrant women workers fight sexism, defend La Casita

Our all women-worker panel was able to reunite four mothers from the original 2010 struggle, including a long-time PLP member. Because of the racist nature of capitalism, Whittier Elementary School with its majority Latin students did not have a library inside of it (and still doesn’t) and La Casita next door served as a makeshift library among other essential community uses. However, CPS bosses and the alderman at the time wanted the space where La Casita stood for their own profit-driven purposes and therefore declared it “structurally unsound” and up for demolition. 

The sit-in was the first time protesting for many workers. But they felt motivated to push back against the bosses because they saw no other way to secure not only the library that their children deserved but this worker-centered space they were attached to. Without any formal hierarchy, workers demonstrated cooperation and solidarity, glimpses of an egalitarian communist society in action.

The panelists shared how immigrant women workers were at the front lines of political leadership at La Casita, from making sure the space was protected 24 hours a day, while organizing classes, feeding people, speaking to the press, and assisting with childcare responsibilities. They were able to accomplish this not only in the face of the sexist attacks of the Chicago bosses trying to undermine them, but also at times from the sexist attitudes of spouses and family members who tried to discourage them from getting involved in the struggle. 

Equally important, the panelists as well as those in the audience today shared important lessons of the treachery and danger presented by the liberal capitalist bosses when it comes to fighting for working-class liberation. PLP holds that liberal bosses are the main danger to the working class not only for their ability to disarm our class through feeble reforms but chiefly for their goals to dominate world markets and resources through imperialist war. 

Sure enough, it was the Democratic politicians who have run Chicago for generations who succeeded in undermining the fightback until they were able to demolish La Casita nearly three years later. Although it was a heartbreaking lesson to accept, it reinforced to many workers the necessity to rely on one another, and never the lying racist bosses.

Capitalism fails us daily fight for communism

Fighting back tears, another veteran PLP member shared her thoughts after the presentation:

I was so honored to be part of that struggle with them because it helped me understand the power of the working class. They (the bosses) had to come in the middle of the night and tear down La Casita, like thieves, because they knew the power of these women… I just want to thank you all and understand that we need to destroy this system, because it’s not gonna work, it can’t work, and they will do everything they can to make it not (work).

Through relentless daily attacks, we workers grasp the truth that this capitalist system can never be reformed to serve our needs. It’s up to us from the PLP to win millions more workers, students and soldiers to take the fight to the next level of joining the Party and building communist revolution. The fighters from La Casita and billions more deserve nothing less.