Newark, NJ—Over two dozen protestors marched outside Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s “State of the City” address today. The goal of the protest was to shed more light on the water crisis occurring in Newark and other cities around the U.S. While the protest did that, it also exposed the liberal politicians for the fascists they really are. Many groups focus strictly on Trump and other open right-wingers as ushering in fascism, but Progressive Labor Party has always maintained that the liberals will be much more successful at getting the working class in line for what the capitalists have in store for us. Some of our friends are starting to realize that as our struggle sharpens.
Class struggle will expose liberals
The protest was organized by the Newark Water Coalition, a group trying to organize students and workers to fight for clean water. The organization began a few months ago with meetings twice a week, but this was the group’s first action—a big step forward.
The action not only energized many who have been coming to the meetings, but it also exposed how the liberal politicians are going to be able to usher in fascism more successfully in the cities than the open white supremacists. As we marched outside the front entrance of the New Jersey Performing Art Center, a few members of the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition came out of the building to heckle the crowd, and called on the police to remove them.
The Newark Anti-Violence Coalition, started by Baraka before he became mayor, has been “fighting” police and gang violence in Newark. The group had a history of shutting down traffic in the street. Many of the members have now been able to work with City Hall and look at cops as their allies. Soon after a confrontation with these liberal fascists, the cops pushed the crowd to the other side of the street behind barricades.
This so-called revolutionary Mayor had a plan to work with the cops to try to shut us down immediately.”
The fact that Baraka had to set up barricades and have the cops push the protestors back outside the event is actually a step backwards for him and the capitalist class he serves. Liberals always try to control the masses through winning them over with ideas. In his speech, Baraka spoke a lot about fighting gentrification and getting people jobs. Whether or not these things will come to fruition is not the point. What is clear is that liberal politicians need to address the issues that Black and Latin workers are concerned about to try to win them to believe that capitalism can be made to work for them. It seems to be working for the moment. The protests for clean water have been relatively small.
However, as the fightback continues, more and more workers and students will recognize that the liberals, through their words and deeds, owe their allegiance to the capitalist class.
City council tries to silence protestors
While the Mayor sends cops and his stooges to try to silence protestors, Council President Mildred Crump is doing it at the Newark City Council meetings. Over the last month, Crump (another one of the professional liberal politicians who has been on the council since 1994) had the police remove three speakers from the podium because they were using “inappropriate language.” One of them used the word “damn” as he was talking about the lead water crisis.
Many people are working alongside legalistic groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (TAPinto 3/25/19), but it really is going to take a mass movement to stop the attacks on workers who are fighting back.
Class struggle will make our ideas shine
Members of PLP have been involved in this struggle and will continue to fight alongside students and workers to expose  liberals as we fight for our class needs. While many of our friends still believe that workers can get power through voting for the “best” candidate, it is up to us communists to show them how this system really works. In this battle over the lead in our water, we have met some great young fighters. Many of them have been open to receiving copies of Challenge and we hope to build a study group to further discuss our political philosophy and to sharpen the struggle. As one friend recently put it, “I know you always like to call Democrats the more sophisticated fascists and I thought you were just paranoid, but this sh*t today showed me.”

NEW YORK CITY, March 26—Outside of City Hall, 25 protesters marched and chanted to oppose police being the first responders to those in mental health crisis. Since June 2015, the racist New York cops have killed 14 people whose neighbors or family called for assistance. All but one of those killed were Black or Latin. Racism infects every aspect of working people’s lives.
We are demanding that teams of mental health workers be the ones who answer such calls, and that they be reached by a system separate from 911, which goes right to the police.  Several churches, the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP), No New Jails, and Jewish Voice for Peace, and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated. Mental health professionals would tend to be compassionate toward their fellow workers. Cops are thugs for the bosses. They protect the bosses and their capitalist system. Their tendency is to shoot.
Overall, the racist police kill about 1,000 people a year in the U.S., of whom a quarter are mentally ill. Black, Latin, and indigenous workers are much more likely to be killed than white workers, and the police hardly ever suffer any consequences for their actions. So blatant is this behavior that the American Public Health Association, after a four-year struggle by young members, declared police violence to be a public health issue (endingpoliceviolence.com). Next week, the Mayor’s task force on the issue is planning to announce their solution to the problem—training all police on how to respond to such calls.
This will never work. Police are trained to be violent, to behave in a military manner, and their racism and mistreatment of workers is ignored or supported by the bosses and their politicians. In fact, police are the arm of the capitalist state designed to control and intimidate workers and perpetuate the racist divisions that are necessary for U.S. capitalism to maintain its empire and profits. In several communities that have tried the Mayor’s approach, it has failed because cops cannot be turned into caring ‘social workers’. Certainly more community mental health treatment is needed but that issue is not even being addressed.
We chanted and passed out leaflets for 90 minutes and made several contacts. Representatives of every group present made speeches. The No New Jails speaker told of their campaign against the new jails being planned in each of the five NYC boroughs, saying the money should be invested in social services, jobs, education, and health care. The Progressive Labor Party speaker talked about the role of police in capitalist society and our upcoming May Day March. At May Day we will promote a vision of a communist world run by the working class for our needs with no exploitation and profiteering. Every participant and about 100 others received CHALLENGE. Our campaign will continue next week when we attend the Mayor’s announcement of his bullshit plan.

BROOKLYN, April 3—Members of a community organization where Progressive Labor Party does political work participated in a preparation meeting to collect funds and plan the participation of friends in the May Day march. Thirty people, most immigrant workers from different countries, met with PLP during this international dinner. Two PL’ers members led the political program.
A young PL’er opened the event. He related a profound review and pictures on the history and beginnings of May Day and the eight hour day. During his presentation, the young leader informed the workers that May Day is a holiday all over the world except in the U.S., even though it was born in Chicago. He talked about how the bosses are always trying to erase workers struggles by rewriting history. Workers really paid attention to this history presentation. At the end there were many questions about his presentation and pictures.
Aftwards, veteran PLP comrade with a long history of struggle began her presentation asking the workers there several questions about their work. She showed several images of workers fighting each other while the bosses laugh. She also showed images of how we can unite and fight back. The participants liked that image so they asked for copies of it. She gave them a pamphlet about May Day in English, for those who are learning the language.
Many workers participated enthusiastically during the discussion on the importance of participating not only in the march, which will be led by PLP,  but all the activities leading to May Day. This is the heritage left us by those who fought in the first May Day in Chicago in 1886 against the capitalist system. During the discussion we asked:  How can we abolish capitalism once and for all and create workers power?  Why do the bosses still rob us of our salaries and discriminate against us even though their politicians have passed “laws” against that?  The young leader asked us to participate in the international workers day, that it belongs to us even if the U.S. bosses try to take it from us.
These questions generated a good discussion amongst those present. A worker from an agency that provides homeworkers, and many times has worked up to 24 hours straight while only getting 13 hours pay and has no rights, talked about her vibrant experience in confronting her boss. This opened the way for others to share their experiences. They all told stories of exploitation and discrimination, fear of being fired, and how the threat of deportation stops them from fighting back. There were several proposals of unity, on how to organize small struggles against the exploiting bosses at these and other sites where our friends work.
At the closing, PL’ers invited the people present to participate in the May Day march, so they can see on a small scale how the workers take the streets. We also had a delicious dinner, prepared by other comrades and families. We felt optimism at the commitment of those present.
The workers left the event with enthusiasm, thirsty to know more about the history of May Day. We left convinced that this is how we can expand the base of a communist movement, led by the Progressive Labor Party. This is how you make a revolution and create workers power for an egalitarian society without bosses and to end the profit system of exploitation. We still have a while until our communist march on May Day. We hope for a solid turnout and we’ll continue to work enthusiastically to make it happen.

Manlio Argueta’s novel One Day of Life  (1980) about the exploitation of peasants by the U.S.-backed landlord government of El Salvador confronts capitalist rationalizations. It specifically counters U.S. support for fascist terror and murder, and the anticommunist ideology used to justify it.
The novel’s subject is severe exploitation in the Marxist sense – value taken from the peasants’ labor by keeping their standard of living so low that many children die of starvation. Exploitation is enforced by terror and legitimized by branding all peasants who do anything to raise their income as communists and, therefore, legitimate targets for torture and murder.
Traditional Roman Catholicism is used by the exploiters to train the peasants in fatalistic acquiescence. After the 2nd Vatican Council in the early 1960s “new priests” arrive, they teach the peasants to form buyers’ and sellers’ co-operatives that raise their standard of living. Then the National Guardsmen start to patrol Chalate, asking about the “communist priests.” The Guard tortures one of the “new priests” and we hear no more about them.
The U.S. Army Special Forces, the “Green Berets,” train the National Guardsmen in terror, torture, and murder. They feed them a U.S. diet to bulk them up, so that they look and feel superior to the peasants who cannot afford protein.
This primes the young peasant recruits to accept their indoctrination which is:
“any peasant unsatisfied with his traditional poverty-stricken life is a communist and “enemy of democracy.”
“true religion” comes from the United States, in the form of fundamentalist Protestant sects, which are imported from the United States to re-indoctrinate the peasants in fatalism and anticommunism.
peasants are poor not because they are exploited but because (a) they are part Indian, and “all Indians are lazy”; (b) there are too many peasants, because “all women are wh*res.”
Two chapters, “The Authorities” and “Them,” represent Argueta’s attempt to depict the ideology of a young peasant man who is successfully indoctrinated by the U.S. to terrorize, torture, and kill peasant families from his own village. The U.S. can trainers pound anticommunism, machismo, racism, and fundamentalist Protestantism into the heads of the trainees.
Education is used to identify peasant candidates for the National Guard. The Guardsman has made it through 6th grade, and so is recruited to be a fascist killer—another example of how capitalist education serves only the interests of the rich by indoctrinating the working class with sexist, racist and imperialist ideas to keep us divided.
Exploitation of the poor by the rich is the central theme. Lupe Guardado, the main narrator, comes to understand that the peasants are poor BECAUSE the landowners are rich. She is instructed by Chepe, her husband, Justino, her son, and Helio, her son-in-law, all of whom are tortured and murdered by the U.S.-trained National Guardsmen.
Before he is tortured and murdered by the U.S.-trained National Guardsmen, Chepe tells Lupe that God is conscience, and conscience is the poor. In short, “God is the poor.” The struggle of life is not to gain paradise after death, but to win a paradise on earth.
The “paradise” we need to struggle for is an egalitarian communist world where the capitalist ideas of sexism and racism are rejected and workers share the fruits of their own labor.
Through this novel, readers are introduced to the essential evil of the capitalist system, and the realities of U.S. brutality, mass murder, and exploitation in Latin America.