Newark, New Jersey, May 6 – About 75 people in this working class, mostly Black and Latin city, attended a forum whose key purpose was to alert neighborhood residents about the ongoing lead contamination of their water. Progressive Labor Party(PLP) alerted residents to the destructive nature of capitalism that destroys our environment and all aspects of our lives, from working conditions to education to healthcare.
 Many of the forum’s organizers were critical of the city administration’s initial failure to address the crisis and their attempts to lie their way out of public criticism. PLP members have consistently pointed out that capitalism’s insatiable demand for profit is the source of racist attacks on the working class such as lead poisoning. Only communism, a society run by the working class, can end these atrocities and build a world where profiting from the sale of toxic products will become a distant memory.
Liberal misleaders
Electing “progressive” politicians like Newark’s Mayor Ras Baraka can never end these racist attacks. As one of the forum panelists said: “I tell my students that politicians running for president in 2020 promise us they will fix the system; but I ask my students why we, as working class parents, teachers and students, couldn’t run things much better than the politicians and the rulers behind them do.”
The forum opened with a short statement summarizing the 20th century history of corporate use of lead products. In the 1920s, the oil, auto, chemical and lead industry bosses conspired to promote lead in gasoline. Even before that, the lead industry was successfully campaigning to convince city administrations to use lead pipes to transport water. While raking in billions in profits from the sale of products containing lead, these capitalists were well aware of their lethal toxicity. Years later, cities like Newark were left to deal with the murderous consequences of long-term exposure to lead.
The panelists included one of the attorneys currently suing Newark over the lead contamination, a scientist who specializes in the effects of chemical contamination, and a Newark high school teacher actively involved in the fight to rid Newark’s water of lead. The panelists discussed the centuries old history of the human use of lead, the deadly long-term consequences of lead exposure, and the current status of the lawsuit.
The environmental attorney pointed out that lead poisoning disproportionately affects cities with large Black and Latin working class populations. As with Flint, Michigan, Newark’s lead testing in 2017 and 2018 showed that almost 20 percent of measured households had levels above the federal action limit, and both cities measured elevated amounts among children (nrdc.org). Just as racist unemployment, police brutality, gentrification and skyrocketing rents have plagued former industrial cities like Newark and Flint, so have environmental catastrophes.
Several residents accused the city administration and Mayor Baraka of lying about the safety of Newark’s water. In July of 2017, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection gave the city six months to develop a plan to address the problem of lead leaching into the water system. The city only commissioned a further study, doing nothing to remedy the problem.  
In February of 2018, Newark’s own consultant advised the Water Department that preliminary results also showed that corrosion control was ineffective. But, in June of 2018, the Water Department Director issued a statement proclaiming that the water was completely safe, accusing the environmental lawyers of “outrageously false” charges. Ras Baraka said the same thing during his 2018 reelection campaign, with mass Robocalls and mailings, claiming the water was safe to drink. The city did nothing until October 2018, after the lawsuit was filed, when the final results of its study showed conclusively that the corrosion control in one of the two city reservoirs was not working.
Workers need clean water and communism
Several media outlets, including the Newark-based Star Ledger, have reported extensively on the lead crisis. All of these outfits have their own motives for exposing and controlling Mayor Baraka, including keeping gentrification on track in Newark. Also, the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit has already made it clear that she thinks the city’s belated remedial actions absolve it of legal responsibility for the problem. Both the bourgeois press and the rulers’ courts serve the capitalists and their lackey politicians and have little care for the interests of the working class.   
PLP members and friends are actively fighting for clean water. We want the local bosses and developers to pay the entire cost of the lead clean-up and we want workers and students to join us in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow this racist, capitalist system. Then we can end capitalism’s environmental disasters behind and focus on building communism, a healthy and productive world for the working class.

COLOMBIA—For 27 days 13,000 organized peasants blocked traffic on the Pan-American highway (the region’s biggest roadway). This struggle persists despite the Colombian bosses’ racist terrorism which has killed more than 600 local workers in the last two years. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Colombia is organizing the only solution to this class struggle: communist revolution.
These peasants organized themselves in
indigenous rural collectives and descended from different locales and blocked the road in several points such as Cauca, Nariño, and in other towns. They were protesting and angrily demanding from the racists Ivan Duque and Alvaro Uribe (current and former Colombian presidents) an agrarian reform, resources for hospitals, schools, housing, roads, drinking water, sewerage, not spraying their crops with glyphosate and stopping the murder of social leaders and local peasants.
On March 13, the workers blocked nine miles of the Pan-American Highway and the bosses, instead of discussing their just demands, sent the ESMAD riot squads, the army and the hordes of paramilitaries that attacked the native population using tear gas and excessive force. The workers defended themselves with their only weapons: clubs and stones.
Never stopped fighting
The bosses’ forces left eight peasants dead, more than 80 injured and 30 arrested. Despite the state terrorism characteristic in Colombia in recent decades and despite the paramilitary barbarism, which has resulted in thousands of deaths, disappearances and exiles, the workers of the countryside and the city, and students have not stopped fighting. Practically all the peasants and oppressed people are proletarianized. The vast majority have no land or means of production, so they are forced to fight for higher wages and shorter work hours to save their lives.
The previous 1,300 treaties that were agreed upon during the past 30 years were totally or partially broken by different governments. This has left  3.5 million people in this area living in poverty, misery and unemployment. In addition, armed groups kill, threaten and persecute them. They are displaced from their lands, which are now dominated by companies owned by landlord mafiosos and thieving politicians. These bosses want thelands for mining, cattle raising, and to plant coca, African palm, and sugarcane.
Historical materialism teaches us to recognize the oppressive and lying nature of the Colombian bourgeoisie. We know that they will again fail to comply with what was agreed to. Alvaro Uribe rejected an agreement 10 years ago of a similar struggle, and then massacred the peasants. Thousands of indigenous workers in the public square of Caldono waited in vain to meet Ivan Duque as promised, but that never happened. The corrupt prosecutor Martinez invented the lie that indigenous groups would attack this fascist president.
In PLP, we see racism as a class problem. We understand that the capitalists use it to super- exploit and divide the workers (today the indigenous population tends to be more urban than rural in many parts of the world). Racism is a political weapon used by the bourgeoisie to obtain super profits and divide the proletariat and prevent a struggle by a united working class to defeat capitalism.
PLP’s communist and anti-racist politics offers the true answer to the indigenous question from Colombia to Mexico to Peru to Ecuador. Under communism, proletarian internationalism will create a new society where production will be according to the needs of those who produce all wealth, and where any form of racism, sexism, will be fought using workers’ power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The following story has been reprinted from Wally Linder’s Life of Labor and Love.
In June 1964, the Progressive Labor Movement decided to print an eight-page weekly newspaper; CHALLENGE was born. Our search for a printer led us to an outfit in Trenton, N.J. After laying down a deposit, the printer looked at the first issue and told us that would be the last one he’d print.
We called up the Harris offset press manufacturer and asked for a list of newspaper printers to whom it had sold web offset presses. That’s how we found the Sun Publishing Co., located in the Chinese community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. We showed our first issue to the owner, Mr. Chan, and he agreed to print our newspaper. His wife and kids helped with various tasks. Milt Rosen, PLM chairperson, and I packed the papers into boxes for pick-up.
As it happened, later that month the Harlem rebellion erupted, during which the rebels were holding the front page of CHALLENGE as their flag while marching. This prompted the NYPD Red Squad to visit Mr. Chan and warn him that if he continued to print our paper he would be in for trouble. Chan told them he was within his rights to print any newspaper brought to him. “What about freedom of the press?” he shot back at the cops’ threat. He was not about to abandon his only account. Years later, when Mr. Chan retired, our search for another printer led us to Brooklyn and Ballan Printing, a company that printed many small community and campus papers—and a huge number of pornographic ones that had sprung up since the 1960s. (The Mafia, in collusion with the owners, had coerced the workers into a local union it controlled.) But neither the owners nor the Mafia counted on the workers’ rebelliousness.
The workers read our paper and saw the various exposés we wrote about the lousy working conditions that profit-hungry bosses were pushing on workers throughout the country.
When we went to pick up the paper, the workers showed us the horrible condition of what passed for their bathroom and asked us to write about it. Our editor Luis Castro wrote an exposé for the next issue, which the workers read with enthusiastic approval. When the bosses saw the article, they went wild. They told us it was all lies and one-sided and challenged us to print their side, “the truth.” We told them that there was only one “truth,” the “workers’ truth,” which made them even crazier. From then on, they scrutinized every issue. Soon afterwards, the owners renovated the bathroom into a halfway decent condition. The workers attributed that improvement to the article we had written.
When a pre-May Day issue came out, we printed the words of the workers’ anthem, “The Internationale.” When we went to pick up that issue, a pressman suddenly leapt up the two flights of stairs to the top of the huge web press and in a clear, loud voice began singing “The Internationale.” As the strains of the final words, “the International working class shall be the human race,” drifted across the pressroom, the workers spontaneously burst into applause.
We never found out how this worker knew the song’s melody, but news of the performance soon traveled to the far reaches of Brooklyn. We are now in our 55th year of publishing CHALLENGE, and have never missed an issue.

*****

Don’t Undersell it!
Sometimes, we think that Progressive Labor Party’s modest size and modest distribution of our literature limits our influence to a few close friends.
  While it is true that PLP needs to grow tremendously to be in a position to take state power away from the ruling class in any area of the world, the mass character of the response to our May Day March in Flatbush, Brooklyn bears out our line on concentrating our forces and bodes well for the future.
  For quite a few years now, hundreds of people along the route of the march intently watch our march, honk in support, put thumbs up, dance to our chants, or otherwise show support for our march. Thousands take CHALLENGE newspaper. This year, near the end of the march, one comrade on the outside of the line of march told me she had seen exactly one negative response from those watching us.
  I drove in from New Jersey with a full car. As soon as the closing rally ended, I headed for my car so that I could come back and pick up my passengers. As I was about to reach my car, I noticed two young Black men on bikes riding in the street. They had obviously been observing the march because I distinctly heard one of them say to the other “The big problem with capitalism is that it keeps us all separate.” I marveled at the effect our communist march had on these young men, who probably just happened to be riding near Flatbush Avenue when we marched by.
No doubt the determination and perseverance of our Brooklyn comrades to expand the party and its ideas is being duplicated in other PLP concentrations all over the world. This is an important step on the road to communist revolution and workers’ power.

Mexico, May 1–This May Day, just over thirty enthusiastic friends and members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) commemorated this international working class holiday with two marches, one in Mexico City and another in Oaxaca. We distributed 4,500 Challenge fliers, chanted slogans and sang communist songs. The presence of our modest contingents represents a small flame that, with dedication and work in organizing our class, will eventually become a conflagration that will reduce inequality, racism, sexism, exploitation, fascism and nationalism to ashes.
The working class must understand the real meaning of the Fourth Transformation (4T) that the current government is carrying out. It is really just another deceptive trick of the capitalist system. For centuries, capitalism has generated huge profits for the bosses at the cost of exploitation, misery and death for workers all over the world. The working class does not need more capitalism, what it needs is a system of social equality like communism.
Behind Andres Manuel López Obrador’s rhetoric, under the 4T’s plans the profit system remains intact, as well as the theft of the impoverished majority by the billionaire minority. For proof all we need to do is review the main policies that it promotes.
The labor law reforms that will take shape in the Senate in the coming days, tackle three main issues. For starters, it attacks the union structure. Even though this structure has not been the most revolutionary, it has been used by workers as a vehicle for class struggle. The reforms are also trying to impose direct voting for the union leaders, regulate their decision making process and make their pay more transparent. Under the pretext of eliminating the union leaders’ power, an important worker defense mechanism is being weakened.
Another proposal is to improve the mechanisms of labor flexibility, which will not reverse the weakening of labor contracts with subcontracting as its maximum expression. The bosses want to force women and young people to join the labor market with "training contracts."
A similar situation can be observed with the approval of education reform, which maintains its punitive and repressive character against teachers and opens the doors to the privatization of public education, so desired by the bourgeoisie.
Criminal violence continues to increase, the alternative of providing economic support for the vulnerable population will only serve to promote political and electoral patronage. Even worse, the approval of the so-called National Guard, will increase the police and military presence that will mainly ensure the realization of national and global capitalist projects such as the interoceanic corridor, the Mayan train, the Dos Bocas refinery, mining, oil, water and biodiversity exploitation.
These projects will face working class resistance, as is currently happening in several parts of the country. Workers have organized against mining projects, mainly, but also against the airport in Texcoco. In addition to the media and political coverage used to achieve these plans through rigged consultations, the presidency will use the discrediting of opponents as radicalized minorities, as it has done with teachers in Michoacán and Oaxaca, or with opponents of the thermoelectric plant in Puebla, which ended in the murder of one of its leaders.
After the "democratic" simulation and discrediting of opponents, the use of state violence through the National Guard and the army will be justified, to enforce the "rule of law" and the will of the majority. The projects of the 4T are the same as those of big local capitalists and the global imperialists.
At a global level capitalism is in crisis, the threat of a war between the main imperialists is increasing. Millions of workers have to migrate from their places of origin to escape violence and poverty; migration is growing rapidly in Mexico and Central America. Contrary to the promises made in the campaign, the current government has adopted a policy of control, repression and criminalization of migrants.
The working class in Mexico has been one of the most oppressed in the world in the last decade. It receives one of the lowest salaries, with fewer and fewer labor rights, with the longest working hours, it is disorganized and depoliticized and is facing levels of violence similar to a country at war.
For the ruling class it was fundamental that a politician like López Obrador came to power, to give an appearance of change and democracy. The new government has given a respite to the political and capitalist class in Mexico and the world, to realize their plans for exploitation and to advance fascism.
Faced with this panorama, the working class must have its own plans, to reorganize, to politicize, and to resist and fight to change the unequal capitalist system for a communist system of social equality. That is the plan of the Progressive Labor Party.
This May Day, we raise the flags of the international unity of the working class, we defend the struggle of the workers for our liberation from the yoke of capital through a communist revolution, we reject the electoral farce and we call on workers to organize themselves in action-study collectives to understand the capitalist reality and eventually change it.
Members and friends of PLP believe that changing the capitalist system will take several generations, but we are confident that our class historically has achieved the greatest social, cultural, political, technological, and scientific advances as occurred during the Russian and Chinese revolution and during all class struggle around the world.

 ****

Haiti, May 27—“We have to destroy capitalism to make room for communism.” This was the most memorable sentence at the Progressive Labor Party’s May Day activities. To mark the International Workers’ Day, PLP participated in a number of militant activities in several locations.
Red discussions
One event was organized in a community of agricultural workers and their families where PLP has been active for a long time. A discussion was held under the Mapou tree on May 1 about the history and importance of May Day as a worldwide workers’ celebration of fights against the capitalism. “Today is really not a fête,” said one of our comrades. “It is a moment of reflection about how to organize ourselves noting the difference between May Day as a day of commemoration of struggle and not just the celebration of ‘agriculture and work’ as the Haitian capitalist class would have us believe.”
These ideas were greeted with smiles and applause. The comrade noted that Haitian workers and students have contributed to this worldwide movement in their fight against corruption, unemployment and all the misery that capitalism brings to workers and their families.
Mass mobilizations
In the capital city, Port-au-Prince, several participated in mass mobilizations of thousands of workers and students. They continue to build confidence inside the working class about the necessity to fight back under the communist leadership of the PLP. The current period is favorable to these ideas because there is a real lack of leadership among those engaged in spontaneous mobilizations against the Haitian and international bourgeoisie.  
The current economic, social and political context is an objective condition for the class struggle. The PLP takes the opportunity to raise awareness and organize masses for the class struggle.
Destroy this rotten system
On May 5, in the provincial town, we organized a full day of activities. A militant anti-capitalist professor and a PLP comrade hosted a talk about the ruling class’s mafia-like strategies. Workers, employed and unemployed, high school and university students all had the opportunity to struggle, with much animation, over the ideas about revolutionary communism. One of them underscored the conclusion: “We have to build the Party to destroy this rotten system, capitalism!”
A PL’er spoke about why May Day calls for ongoing reflection and organization. “Thanks to struggles of workers under communist leadership for almost two centuries, the working class has had many victories. Yet many of those victories have been reversed, such as the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions. Unless we permanently bury the capitalists, they will always find a way back.”
The comrade used the labor code as an example of a legal maneuver used by the capitalist state to guarantee their rule. “Labor regulations are designed by the bosses and voted into law by their valets, the bought-and-paid-for politicians. A portion of the labor code states workers’ strikes must be announced in advance and cannot go on for more than two days! At this, one worker exclaimed, “We must put an end to all this, the politicians are not in favor of the masses, we must no longer vote!”
For his part, the professor criticized the imperialists’ savage exploitation of the natural resources and the labor force of the working class, particularly here. He highlighted the lies concocted by the rulers and their stooges to make workers believe that the investments made by the bourgeoisie will change their lives so that they passively accept the bondage imposed on them.
At the end of the day, we shared some tasty food prepared by the organizing collective, while the participants took the opportunity to express their satisfaction and confidence in our line. Indeed, our Party is getting stronger day by day.