NEWARK, August 28—As the recent protests at the MTV Video Music Awards demonstrate, the racist liberal Ras Baraka administration and this capitalist system continues to poison the working class of Newark.
This month, the Environmental Protection Agency notified Newark that two of three homes tested with PUR filters still have high levels of lead, despite the discovery of lead 3 years ago. The EPA cynically suggested the working class drink bottled water.
These events are a textbook example of how racism wreaks havoc on Black and Latin workers. It also shows how these liberal politicians like Mayor Baraka appear to be “for the people,” but they represent the interests of capitalism.
The health of our class in Newark is in peril. Yet, one thing is clear—this country is moving towards war and fascism. It is not enough to fight for clean water; we must struggle to overthrow the capitalist system that is using its resources towards war with countries like China and Russia rather than water for workers. The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) unites workers internationally to fight for working-class power: communism.
Echo of Flint
Eighty five percent of Newark is Black or Latin and the working class has been suffering through the blatant racism unsafe drinking water.
Lead is a powerful neurotoxin. It can lead to developmental delays, hearing loss, seizures, learning difficulties, and behavioral disorders in children. Adults can develop mental, nerve, kidney, and cardiovascular problems. Pregnant women are at risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, and newborns with irreversible damage to their brain and nervous system.  There is no such thing as a “safe” level of lead consumption.
The Baraka administration knew this in 2016, when over 30 schools had to turn off their water. Newark was out of compliance with federal lead regulations. “Newark reported yet another exceedance of the 15 parts per billion federal action level for lead in drinking water—this time, lead levels are tapping in at 55 parts per billion, more than three times the federal action level” (Natural Resource Defense Council).
Newark politicians stayed silent. In April 2018, the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) and the Newark Education Workers (NEW) Caucus made an announcement: they intend to file a lawsuit. Even then, the City still confused people by announcing on their website, “NEWARK’S WATER IS ABSOLUTELY SAFE TO DRINK.”
Liberal politicians’ racism continues
It wasn’t until October 2018, when the trial was set to begin, that the City admitted to the lead problem. Even then, half of the residents have yet to recieve filters. People were turned away, given the wrong filters, or not taught properly how to install and use them.
The City had to replace lead service lines for each home. The lead service line connects the water main to individual homes. In Flint and Pittsburgh, those lines were replaced for free. In Newark, residents are expected to pay up to $1,000 to replace their line. This was the same City that found money to give Jeff Bezos and Amazon $8 billion in tax credits. Newark has only removed 755 lead service lines out of 18,000 so far (they were supposed to start in July 2018).
Under communism, we would change the entire way this crisis is being dealt with. The problem wouldn’t have been acute, if existent at all, because the society’s resources would be allocated according to need, not profits or wars. With the working class in charge, all homes would be tested rigorously; all lead would be removed immediately because there would be one main determinant: safety. We would train millions to help solve and prevent the problem.
 Trusting Democrats is toxic
While the Republicans and Trump are openly racist and clearly enemies of the working class—particularly Black and Latin workers, trusting the Democrats is clearly toxic. The Baraka administration continues to lie about the extent of the crisis. While those in the Pequannock town continue to struggle with high lead levels and inadequate resources from the City, those in the Wanaque town are getting zero support! City hall continues to lie about the extent of the lead in the East Ward, as well as parts of the North, Central, and South wards. They even refused to give out cheap PUR filters to these residents.
The administration has done little: distributed filters with fast-approaching expiration dates, improper installation. When asked to be more proactive in assisting the residents, the City cries that they don’t have the resources. While these politicians don’t have the resources for Black and Latin workers, they have resources for war and fascism.  
This crisis shows us how capitalism is a democracy for the bosses and a dictatorship for the working class. Even after all of this, Newark still refuses to give out relief to the eastern part of the City because their water comes from a different reservoir. There is evidence that lead problems exist in this area as well but the bosses don’t care! (NRDC, Olson, 4/30).
When money is needed for war, or to give to their allies like Saudi Arabia or Israel, or when banks need billions to get bailed out—money is never a problem. When the working class needs basic drinking water—the burden is on us to fight for it.
Money for war & police state but not for water
Time and time again, the ruling class will present us with wolves in sheeps’ clothing. Democratic Party politicians like Congressman Alibo Sires and Donald Payne Jr. voted for a $1.4 trillion war budget but have done nothing for relief in this City. Their interests lie with JP Morgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, and the rest of the corporations that rule the US. That is why they can put trillions towards building the war machine while not even discussing the poisoning of Black and Latin workers and youth in Newark.
Senators Cory Booker (the first Black senator from New Jersey and campaigner for the 2020 presidential election) and Robert Menendez have also been silent. As then-mayor, Booker’s mismanagement of the now-defunct Newark Watershed had led to today’s many problems. And while Booker voted “no” on the current military spending, he has approved it 16 of the 19 times since being a Senator. It is clear that these Democratic politicians know whom they serve—and it isn’t the Black and Latin working class of Newark.
While the country prepares for war on a national scale, the Newark government is building a police state to keep the working class in line. The City claims that they don’t have the resources for clean water; the Mayor Baraka has just put aside $23 million to hire more cops for this coming year (Tapinto.com, 7/2).
Newark workers keep fighting
The Newark Water Coalition, a multiracial and multi-generational organization led by honest, energetic, and creative youth and elders. They have organized forums, open mics, and protests around these issues. They have also worked to distribute filters and water to residents in need. Not only are they fighting back but also they are serving the working class and making sure they get what they need. This past week, the Newark Water Coalition organized a demonstration at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards (VMA’s), hosted at Newark’s Prudential Center. Fascist bosses sent every cop in the City along with state pigs to lock down the perimeter and block out protestors. Some cops were saddled up on horses and would form a formation along the barricades, ready to defend property over people.
While many are still focused on getting Baraka out, PLP is in the fight, advocating for our energy to be put towards fighting for clean water now and communism in the future. Some members have been receptive to our ideas.
Fight for communism
While we fight for filters and clean water, we must win the working class to a bigger idea— one of no more capitalists using the earth’s resources for profit and power. An idea that the working class will rule over our own resources. PLP fights for communism. That means that the working class will run society.
We will continue fighting so that our health will not be compromised by the ruling class and their drive towards war. Under capitalism, mostly Black and Latin workers continued to be poisoned by lead. Under communism, they will be the decision makers of their own lives. We urge all to join Progressive Labor Party study and action groups. Subscribe to our newspaper CHALLENGE, and fight for a communist world!

MARYLAND, August 27— “La Lucha Obrera no Tiene Frontera” and “Racism Means We Have to Fight Back” rang out in Hyattsville, Maryland to protest raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Workers demanded solidarity with immigrants and formerly incarcerated persons in this sanctuary city.
   This rally was called at a forum on immigration the previous week where Progressive Labor Party and friends joined to plan a response against the rising deportations. Participants concluded that capitalism creates borders to divide and scare workers, when in fact no worker should be considered “illegal,” and no barriers to movement should exist since the working class is global by definition. Communists insist on smashing all borders, a goal that can only be achieved by waging a worldwide working-class revolution.
Workers embrace red ideas
We distributed over 200 flyers at the rally, with contact information for building a rapid response network to ICE raids in Hyattsville. Workers in the neighborhood received 40 copies of CHALLENGE newspaper; seven signed up for further contact.
Two workers related their struggles with ICE, and we pledged our solidarity with them. Two local residents spontaneously brought us Gatorade and snacks as a token of solidarity and appreciation for this antiracist demonstration. This shows that the working class is looking for leadership and fightback. It is up to communists to give that leadership.
ICE + PD: state terrorists collaborate
The protest was organized following a petition campaign in which PLP participated to demand an end to local police collaboration with ICE. CASA, an immigrant rights organization, documented nine instances over the preceding months in which local police called in ICE, despite assurances that they would not do so.
When the Assistant Chief of Police Hector Velez was confronted with the irrefutable facts, he denied them as impossible because such actions would have violated police policy. This shows how the bosses’ laws are abided to the extent that it serves them.
The police chief himself was forced to admit to one case, but claimed that the cop was acting in good faith; the cop was “confused” over the difference between a civil and a criminal ICE warrant. Such hypocrisy is standard police operating procedure! Meanwhile, it is too late for the people deported as a result of this cop’s “confusion.” The police here exposed themselves as the ruling-class agents that they are. They serve and protect the rulers—their banks, property, and interests.
Reform is about bosses’ infighting
The petition drive was highlighted by the vocal presence of petitioners at several political events, which ultimately forced the County Executive Angela Alsobrooks to issue an official statement confirming that the police were not to cooperate with ICE for noncriminal deportations. She further announced that the General Orders of the police department would be changed to include an explicit statement to that effect, and that the policy would be presented at roll call in all police districts.
The liberal politicians would like to play themselves as the good guys. This defiance to ICE is not about protecting working-class lives; it’s about their own infighting. While Trump’s deportation sweeps represent the isolationist America-first faction of the U.S. ruling class, the Democratic-led politicians and government represent the dominant finance imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class. This main wing is spearheaded by the Rockefellers, JP Morgan, and ExxonMobil. While the main wing needs immigration and a multiracial army for world war, the subordinate wing’s interests are primarily national. These domestically oriented capitalists, spearheaded by the Koch and Mercer families, are contesting the main wing’s control. They have forged an opportunistic alliance with the unpredictable U.S. President Donald Trump and his white supremacist base. They are out to try to tear down the post-World War II liberal world order and multinational institutions like NATO. His domestic and foreign policy directives are tailored to benefit his wealthy, self-interested benefactors more than the long-term strategic interests of global U.S. imperialism.
Given that context, county executive Alsobrooks’s decision is part of a broader effort of the liberal rulers trying to inject their ideology into top-down reform movements.
This modest reform will not reverse the anti-immigrant attacks of U.S. capitalists on our brothers and sisters from around the world. The vicious ICE raids against this month’s Mississippi poultry workers alone demonstrate their determination to terrorize our class. In Maryland, we must maintain momentum in building a rapid response team to oppose ICE on the streets and in the courthouse, demand jobs for returning residents, and continue to work with our friends to support new immigrants arriving in the city and county.
These class struggles will serve as a training ground for a mass communist revolution that obliterates the bosses and their borders and unifies our class on a global scale.

New York City, August 9— On the weekend fascist Trump ordered massive roundup-deportation of immigrants, a multiracial congregation in Harlem and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) met to develop a plan with the goal of building solidarity with our class sisters and brothers under attack by the bosses fascist criminalization of migrant workers. For the last two years PLP comrades and our friends in the church work have been organizing as part the New Sanctuary coalition in response to these racist attacks. Through our efforts we’ve been able to use the church as a conduit for class consciousness, as we welcome workers seeking refuge, to show that the working class is on their side and that they do not have to live in fear.
Only workers can protect and serve our class
The decision to turn this church into a sanctuary was positive step forward in our work because we were able to win Black,white, and Latin workers to the idea that we should unite, with fellow workers who are undocumented to fight racist deportations. In these turbulent times we hope to our advance the following goals; gain the confidence of the working class and transform the character of this struggle, in order to win workers to the understanding that there is only one sanctuary for workers: communism.
    After Trump  announced that he would deploy ICE, or the modern day Gestapo, the working class in New York City immediately rose to the occasion. Workers were reportedly forming networks that would send out alerts if anyone in ICE was spotted. In Harlem and Sunset Park workers botched ICE’s attempts. Recently our church has followed sui boldly marking our organization with an S for sanctuary. We were also able to organize workers involved in our food support and outreach services –largely to Latin to lead the struggle. Several of us have listed ourselves as “on call” whenever an immigrant seeks help in the church.  We developed a working  group and a rapid response protocol for when an emergency presents itself. We agreed that in such a circumstance one of us will immediately go to the church and meet with our sister/brother. Then we will call all the possible respondents to get them “on the case.” Once help is secured we will organize temporary shelter and sustenance for our new friends.
      In addition to our response plan, we’re becoming more pro-active in politiczing our work, by raising the level of discussion around immigration with our base. This stuggle gave us the opportunity to impress upon workers that these mass migrations are no coincidence, and that their root causes are the genocidal conditions around the world stem from imperialism. Some weeks ago the NYT published an op ed piece from a Guatemalan mother: “Food No Longer Grows Here; I Must Send My Sons North to Survive!”The depredations of capitalist-caused climate emergency have brought deadly drought to significant territories in Central America.One young member of our church recently spent a year in a Guatemalan village serving in maternal/child health.  She has agreed that our church board reach out to the church she was active in there to establish regular communication.  Last night eleven of us in out Party Study-Action group began to draft a letter to the parish our member had been active in.
Fight fascism, gain workers confidence
     Among our goals is to learn much more about conditions “on the ground” there and to begin to understand in more depth how U.S. imperialist domination is causing genocidal conditions in Central America and beyond. We hope not only to learn but to act: organizing  more generally stateside against U.S. support for local fascist murder and to fight for the socio-economic aid that can begin to save lives  and to reverse the stream of immigration-for-survival.
Most of all we want to show workers that we should not only fight Trump’s brash open fascism, but we should not depend on the leadership of the liberals or Ocasio Cortez types, who only advocate for nicer and safer concentration camps but are not against ending the miserable exploitation that workers face daily under this system. Our actions and the actions of workers to protect fellow workers against these attacks speak louder, and show that when the working class is under attack we’re the first to move to defend and serve each other.Finally, we must strive to grow our base through this work, in order to build the international workers’ revolution, that is the only strategic hope for seven billion of us to begin to live and thrive on the ruins of the genocidal capitalist world!
 

For over two months, mass protests have made Hong Kong a new flashpoint in the escalating fight between U.S. market capitalism and Chinese state capitalism. Workers in Hong Kong and everywhere must refuse to be taken in by either set of imperialist exploiters. All bosses settle their disputes by shedding rivers of our class’s blood. The intensifying U.S.-versus-China trade war will inevitably give rise to armed conflict and an eventual third world war.
Images of masses of people attacking the cops and shutting down a center of global finance may seem inspiring. But in assessing any resistance movement, we need to look beyond appearances to its political essence. At their core, the Hong Kong protests are a reactionary, anti-worker movement. They serve the interests of local billionaires in a battle to resist control by the mainland Chinese capitalists and their organized crime syndicate, the once-revolutionary Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Hong Kong, exploiters’ paradise
In 1842, after feudal China’s loss to British capitalist narco-traffickers in the First Opium War, the island of Hong Kong was absorbed into a rising British Empire. It soon became a headquarters for Western imperialists and their local henchmen bent on sucking worker-generated wealth out of Asia.
In 1949, after the once-revolutionary CCP defeated the U.S.-backed fascist Kuomintang in a bitter civil war, Hong Kong remained a British colony and a crucial outpost of finance capital. By the 1970s, the Chinese capitalist bosses—a new “red bourgeoisie”—smashed the Cultural Revolution, a mass movement to restore the fight for communism. In 1997, these fake-left rulers agreed to allow independent finance capitalism to persist in Hong Kong for at least another 50 years: the “one country, two systems” deal.  
On August 5, workers called for a general strike with chants of “Restore Hong Kong, Revolution of our times!” Elements of the Hong Kong ruling class are making a bid for permanent autonomy, which the mainland Chinese ruling class will never accept. For the “Wall Street of the East,” stakes are high. Hong Kong features “[r]elatively low taxes, a highly developed financial system, light regulation….Most of the world’s major banks and multinational firms maintain regional headquarters in the city….” (Council of Foreign Relations, 6/19). Hong Kong is the key hub for investment for Chinese companies, giving them “access to global capital markets for bond and loan financing” (Economist, 10/1/14).  
Even as Shanghai and Beijing emerge as new financial capitals, Hong Kong remains of huge importance for China’s rulers’ bid to dominate the global profit system. They plan to integrate Hong Kong and neighboring Guangdong Province into a Greater Bay Area project “that could rival the San Francisco Bay or Tokyo Bay areas, …Echoing the connectivity narrative of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Greater Bay would constitute a population of more than seventy million people and a $1.5 trillion economy” (CFR, 6/10). China’s absorption of Hong Kong would spell doom for independent capitalists who have flourished under “one country, two systems.” These are the forces behind this summer’s turmoil.
“Democracy,” exploiters’ tool
The average resident of Hong Kong has a living space the size of a parking spot; hundreds of thousands of poorer workers split such a space among three people (New York Times, 7/22). But instead of fighting the brutal inequalities of the capitalist system, protesters have been infected by anti-mainland racism. They target tourists with chants of “uncivilized” and “invaders,” and intimidate elderly mainland women at their morning outdoor exercises (NYT, 7/13).
From Xinjiang to Hong Kong to Taiwan, China’s ruling class faces growing internal challenges to its authority. The turmoil in Hong Kong today echoes the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, another “pro-democracy” movement that favored more liberal, entrepreneurial, Western-style capitalism. In a period of intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry and rising fascism, China’s ruling class can’t afford to allow “two systems” much longer. Hong Kong’s “leaderless” mass action, loudly hailed in the U.S. bosses’ media, is a mask for the direct involvement of U.S. imperialism.
 Among the 40-odd NGOs backing the Hong Kong protests is a thinly-veiled CIA operation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). As its founders openly admitted early on: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly by the CIA 25 years ago” (NYT, 6/1/86).Since then, NED has penetrated every “opposition” movement that aligns with the interests of U.S. finance capital, from Russia (1996) to Venezuela (2002) to Haiti (2004). Today it is active in Nicaragua, Ukraine, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong (thegrayzone.com, 6/18). Its influence is apparent in the English-language signage and American flags held by Hong Kong’s protesters.
Nationalism and war
As the trade and currency war between the U.S. and Chinese ruling classes escalates, each side is preparing its population for open conflict. The CCP has given its stamp of approval to Chinese nationalist Hu Xijin and his Global Times newspaper, with its 30 million online readers. Hu’s treatment of the U.S.-China rivalry: “There is a sense of crisis; America cannot prevent China’s rise.”  On the trade war: “We are willing to bear some pain to give the U.S. a lesson.”  On a future shooting war: “The possibility cannot be ruled out; the danger is greater than before”  (NYT, 7/31).  
But when it comes to exploitation and slaughter, China can’t compete with Western liberal democracy. From its origins in Greece to its enshrinement in the U.S. Constitution, democracy has been a cover for the rule of a tiny, propertied ruling class.  Democracy is the tool of enslavers—chattel slavery then, wage slavery today. Workers will suffer wage slavery and imperialist slaughter until we learn to see democracy for what it is: a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Our task is to replace capitalist democracy with proletarian dictatorship and a system that meets workers’ needs. That system is called communism.
Fight for communism!
Progressive Labor Party is building a revolutionary communist movement to pick up where the Red Guards of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution left off—and to finish the job of leading the working class forward to the victory of a classless society. The Red Guards were fighting not for democracy but for centralism, for the principle that the highest expression of “majority rule” is the uncompromising commitment to the interests of the international working class. Only a mass communist party can lead this fight. Communist centralism remains our most invaluable tool. Join us!