Haiti, January 1—It is a tradition to eat pumpkin soup (“bwe soup joumou” in Creole) every January 1. This soup, sometimes called “Independence Soup,” is a symbol of liberty for the Haitian masses because prior to January 1, 1804, enslaved people were forbidden to have soup. It has also become an occasion to show solidarity: you get up at four o’clock in the morning to prepare the pumpkin soup in the largest pot you can find. It is shared with all your family, neighbors and friends, who come by to have soup and share the news of the day.
But for a long time now, because of the impoverishment of the working class and the strengthening of the capitalist ideology of individualism, some families, especially the most vulnerable, can’t afford the ingredients for the soup. Little by little, the feeling of liberty and solidarity that the practice represents is being lost.
It is in this context, that for the last three years, every January 1,Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has organized a “solidarity soup” in a small provincial town. Party members and friends raise money and families guarantee the cooking. When the soup is done and piping hot, we distribute the soup in our working class neighborhoods and on the public square, using the occasion to talk about what is really going on in Haiti and in the world, from a communist point of view. Hundreds of people share the soup—turning the social inequality created by the capitalist system on its head, if only for a little while, allowing our friends and neighbors to savor their traditional soup in dignity and respect.
More and more, the workers of this town understand the importance of class solidarity, which is essential for the struggle of workers against the class of exploiters, both domestic and international, which threaten their daily existence. In essence, there is no victory without unity and the communist concepts of sharing and collectivity among the oppressed workers of the world. We are all living the same reality, in differing degrees: if we want to win the class struggle we must unite, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels remind us in The Communist Manifesto. There is no better way for our class to win than to build solidarity in all aspects of life.
In Haiti, 2018 was a year of intense mass struggle against a viciously corrupt system. While many politicians and bankers and bosses are complicit in the theft of funds in the PetroCaribe affair, they are all guilty because they all defend the interests of their class against the working class. Workers have no friends in this den of thieves. But the struggle was mostly spontaneous, with workers, students and youth pouring out into the streets by the thousands over and over to demand an end to capitalist corruption. Many were killed and injured by cops and their death squad agents. But it will take more than spontaneity to defeat the capitalist system, and that is what PLP in Haiti and around the world is organizing to do. Let 2019 be the beginning of the end of the dark night of global capitalism. Let us, the international working class, commit to becoming united into a single fist, to arming both ideologically and militarily, to carrying the red flag of communist revolution, to fighting for an egalitarian world, under the leadership of the PLP. Then we will truly be able to savor our pumpkin soup, knowing that we have changed the world.

NEW YORK CITY, December 23—When General Motors announced the closure of four U.S. and one Canadian auto plant late December, workers in Canada walked out!  Almost 16,000 jobs were at stake. As capitalist corporations compete with each other to maximize their profits, workers suffer. Investors loved the cost-cutting news as GM stocks shot up by almost eight percent.
At the GM assembly plant in Oshawa, Canada, workers had a different response. They walked out and then blocked the gates to prevent supplies from getting in and finished cars from getting out. Auto workers from Canada, the U.S.,Mexico and worldwide will have to organize many more such actions to fight the auto bosses. They will get no help from politicians or even their own union ‘leaders.’ Canadian President Justin Trudeau tweeted “I spoke with GM (Chief Executive) Mary Barra to express my deep disappointment in the closure” (Reuters.com, Nov 26, 2018). President Trump said “he was ‘not happy’ with the decision and spoke ‘very tough’ to Barra about the moves” (Autonews.com, 12/23/2018). The union leaders also talked tough with no plans for action.
Auto bosses get government bailout; workers get layoffs and low wages
The auto industry has had eight straight years of big profits thanks to the $60 billion Barack Obama bailout of 2009 and billions more from United Auto Workers (UAW) union concessions. But now comes the crisis of overproduction, a regular feature of capitalism and the auto industry in particular. The plants slated to close are all operating below full capacity. In the global cutthroat competition for markets, resources and cheap labor, the bosses ruthlessly pursue profits. At some point those factories not functioning at full capacity become a drain on those profits. In these closings, all five plants were operating on one shift. Entire shifts had already been laid off. And according to the Detroit Free Press, GM has four of 12 plants, Ford has three of nine plants, and Fiat Chrysler has two of six plants operating below capacity. More closings are likely.
This reflects yet another restructuring of the global auto industry. Sales have dropped in North America and China and the world’s auto bosses have been losing money in Europe and South America. More than 1,000 Nissan workers are losing their jobs in Mexico and Ford could soon announce its own job-cutting plan, which could wipe out as many as 25,000 jobs.
Fight for more jobs,
higher wages and communism
With the GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler contracts set to expire in the U.S. and Canada in Sept. 2019, the bosses and the UAW leadership will use these cuts to divide workers and play them against each other.After the national contracts are resolved, each local plant negotiates its own local agreement. That is where the union and the company “whipsaw” the workers against each other into accepting labor agreements that boost corporate profits, each hoping that the most profitable arrangement will get more work assigned to that factory.
As we head toward the contract talks, let’s follow the lead of the workers in Canada and make 2019 a year of militant fightback. Workers are already angry after a major corruption scandal involving UAW officials accepting bribes from Fiat Chrysler officials during the last contract negotiations. While UAW officials accepted tens of thousands of dollars in cash, gifts and trips, sell-out auto contracts opened the floodgates to lower paid, temporary and part-time workers in assembly plants. This, in an industry already flooded with low wage jobs in the supplier industries. Workers could decide to take matter into their own hands. Wildcat strikes could return.
As communists, members of the Progressive Labor Party will support any rebellion in the ranks against the bosses. At the same time we fight for a communist world where production is based on the needs of the international working class, not the profits of the war-making bosses and bankers.

The Yellow Vest anti-government movement in France is driven by the rage of masses who are profoundly dissatisfied with capitalist society, its politicians, and above all, with banker-president Emmanuel Macron. But lacking revolutionary communist ideas and leadership, these working-class fighters will be funneled into dead-end political options: passivity, electoral politics, cynicism, even open fascism.  
As the rebellion continued into its fifth week, a multiracial movement of high school students has put forward some of the most anti-racist and class-conscious ideas in the movement. Little noted in the bosses’ newspapers, the students are having a multiracial fight in defense of open admissions. From what we can tell, their resistance is more integrated than the protests in Paris and other cities, where super-exploited workers from immigrant neighborhoods are mostly conspicuous by their absence.
Students in over 350 schools nationwide barricaded their schools and took to the streets, blocking roads and fighting back against the cops’ brutal attacks. Students are angry over the change in exit exams instigated last year by Macron, which makes it more difficult to graduate from high school or attend college. They are also protesting a proposal for forced national service (France 24, 12/11). Rejecting the inequality and nationalism inherent in capitalism has earned these students a brutal response. Images of dozens detained on their knees, hands laced behind their heads tore across social media last week. The pictures stoked mass outrage against Macron’s police state, where cops use tactics reminiscent of Nazi roundups of resistance fighters during World War II.
Worker-Student Alliance
The Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) take their name from the roadside hazard vests the protesters have adopted as a symbol of their class anger. In the largest and most militant protests in France since the 1968 general strike, hundreds of thousands of workers have been in the streets for over a month.
The protesters have demanded an end to the “efficiency” program Macron promised in his 2017 campaign and ruthlessly implemented after his election. The rebellion began in rural areas and the suburbs, where a heavy gas tax hurts workers chased out of the cities by gentrification and the resulting increase in the cost of living. Macron’s “solution for people who can’t afford food by the end of the month is to buy solar panels and electric cars” (Washington Post, 12/5).
The French bosses are trembling at the potential of an anti-capitalist student-worker alliance. They remember the May 1968 general strike that forced President Charles de Gaulle to flee the country. It began with students taking over universities and eventually spread to workers taking over factories. More than two-thirds of the French working class actively participated in this near-revolution. Will history repeat itself? “Worryingly for the Macron administration, there are tentative signs the unrest may also be spreading to universities, where students are angry at the government’s plans to hike fees for non-EU nationals in a bid to make French universities ‘more competitive’” (France 24, 12/11).
We want the whole baguette!
After the third week of protests, Macron attempted to pacify the Yellow Vests by repealing his hated added gas tax. He added some negligible tax cuts for pensioners and a $114-a-month bump in the minimum wage. The bosses hope to buy off workers with crumbs—far short of the whole baguette that the more militant protests have demanded.
History shows us that unless workers seize state power, the bosses will steal back reform concessions. To end the general strike of 1968, the French ruling class increased wages for industrial workers by 35 percent and for others by 10 percent. Fifty years later, most workers are again struggling to make ends meet.
Without a clear antiracist, internationalist outlook, workers will continue to be divided and vulnerable to rotten capitalist ideology. Open racists like Marine Le Pen and her fascist National Rally party are attempting to sway the Yellow Vest movement to anti-immigrant ideas. The far right “has sent its own activists to join—critics say infiltrate—the protests, pushing its line that immigration is the central problem and that Mr. Macron sold out the country by agreeing to a nonbinding United Nations pact on migration recently reached in Marrakesh, Morocco” (New York Times, 12/16).
As little fascists like Le Pen square off against big fascists like Macron and fake leftists like Jean-Luc Melenchon, workers in France have no good choices—unless they break with liberal “democracy” and are won to a movement for communism.     
This weakness in the Yellow Vest movement gives the bosses maneuverability to proceed with their top priority: preparing for inevitable world war.
Uniting native-born and foreign-born, white, Arab, and Black workers throughout France would shake the capitalist rulers to the core—and far beyond the halls of power in Paris. Working class power will come when our class realizes that we can organize the world to meet the needs of all, not for the profit of a few at our expense.
Liberal world order teeters
The liberal fascists in the European Union know they are in crisis. “While Britain’s political class is, rightly, in the spotlight for having made a mess of Brexit, the EU’s establishment is in a similar bind over its colossal failure to civilise the eurozone—with the rise of the xenophobic right the hideous result” (The Guardian, 12/13).
The EU bosses had high hopes that Macron could lead the way in forcing “economic structural reforms” to maintain the EU’s clout in its inter-imperialist competition with the U.S., China, and Russia.
If [Macron] can loosen hiring and firing rules, overhaul a deeply indebted unemployment benefit system and stick to deficit-reduction targets, he will effectively have robbed Germany of a major excuse not to press ahead with eurozone reform plans (Politico, 7/18/17).
As Macron’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, put it more recently: “France’s attractiveness for investors is at stake. That is why it is important to remain on the path of reform” (BBC.com 12/11). 
But the Yellow Vest protests have weakened Macron’s standing among bosses throughout Europe and the world. The repercussions could be severe. “Macron was the European establishment’s last hope. As a presidential candidate, he explicitly recognised that ‘if we don’t move forward, we are deciding the dismantling of the eurozone,’the penultimate step before dismantling of the EU itself” (The Guardian, 12/13).
Red vest of communism
In the absence of determined, internationalist, class-conscious leadership—in a word, communist leadership—workers in motion will be open for co-optation. Yet the working class remains the wild card that can force bosses to recalculate their plans for war and fascism. An unorganized movement to break the bosses’ laws is not enough. Our next step is to gain confidence as a class to overthrow the ruling class parasites—to trade the Yellow Vests of reform for the red vests of communist revolution.
Under communism, we will reorganize society to meet workers’ needs and end exploitation forever. National borders and imperialist war will be abolished. In each militant uprising, we see a flash of the strength we will need to accomplish such a task. While the goal of communism remains distant, the forces that will create it refuse to be extinguished. As Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “Let the ruling classes of the world tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. We have a world to win.”

*****

Worldwide, workers break bosses’ laws

France is far from the only country where workers are mobilizing to break the bosses’ laws. In recent months, workers fleeing capitalist chaos in Central America crossed into Mexico with no regard for the bosses’ borders.
In Haiti, tens of thousands of workers and youth, incensed by rotten PetroCaribe corruption and robbery, overcame the Haitian ruling class’s best efforts to crush them. In November, they organized the biggest demonstrations in Haiti since 2004, paralyzing the island in what amounted to a one-day nationwide general strike.
In China, meanwhile, thousands of “mass incidents” are erupting each year, threatening to derail the efforts of the capitalist Chinese “Communist” Party to pursue its program of ruthless profit-seeking and imperialist expansion (Economist, October 2018).  
The caravan movement suffers from religious pacifism and the misguided aspiration of “making it to America.” In Haiti, illusions over the possibility of an “uncorrupted” capitalism limit how far workers and youth can go. The left in China is still small and heavily repressed.
Yet, in each case, workers’ courage in the face of police terror has forced the rulers in their countries to take notice—and to fear the wrath of the working class.

BROOKLYN, December 3—When high school bosses suddenly suspended three Black football coaches, one without pay and health insurance, over a hundred students and parents rallied to call out the systematic racism of the Department of Education. As a result, 11 police cars, vans, an ambulance and a fire truck rushed to the school. They are so quick to treat working-class Black and Latin children and parents as criminals!
Despite the Department of Education’s (DoE) talk of equity, the liberal DoE and the New York Police Department collaborate to attack working-class Black and Latin students. They demonstrate over and over how fearful they are of organized Black and Latin students and parents.
In a climate of intimidation and fear, antiracists and communists are working to create an atmosphere of fightback. The Progressive Labor Party fights for the political outlook that Black and Latin students are key to an antiracist and egalitarian future. We cannot be silent as this capitalist institution dehumanizes and crushes the leadership potential of our youth.
Climate of racist intimidation and hypocrisy
Three football coaches, all Black men respected by the community, were suspended from work after one of them reported a fight in the boys’ locker room. The DoE prohibited the coaches from contacting students and parents but did not tell the workers the reason for the investigation. The football team, students, and education workers were shocked and angered by the DoE’s withholding of information. Two coaches have been suspended without pay and have had their families’ insurance cut since they are not members of the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers’ union.
The school administration claims to value and support student leadership; when students took the lead in organizing fightbacks, these mainly Black and Latin teenagers were threatened with suspension from both the school and football team. Administrators spent an entire morning calling parents of students who were suspected of fighting back.
Why has this urgency and persistence not been used to fight the DoE against the racist metal detectors that criminalize our students every day, or to fight for a change in the lead pipes contaminating our students’ drinking water, or to fight the underfunding our school faces?
Some people in the school community are hoping that the bosses’ politicians will make changes and save us. Yet, the politicians have not and cannot give the working class the schools we deserve. This clearly demonstrated that this racist education system can never serve the needs of our students and families.
Never meant to liberate
During this investigation, students have been arrested. Families and the school community have been given little to no information about what happened to these children. Despite the liberal bosses’ talk about “restorative approaches to discipline” as an alternative to the school-to-prison pipeline, the DoE and NYPD work hand in hand to control Black and Latin students. This collaboration with the number one terrorist organization in the country, the police, exposes this ruling-class institution of education for what it is—an instrument of control.
The main goal of schools is to serve the class in power. In other words, schools under capitalism serve and protect capitalism. While DoE actively silences and suppresses youth, struggles teach us that fightback is the only viable response in the face of that suppression.
The liberal bosses are the main danger. They used advisory groups, which are taught to be discussions where students are viewed as “equals,” to temper working-class anger. This shows that liberal school bosses have the same goals as any other capitalist administration. They just use different weapons of ideological control to maintain a division between the future workforce. Many in the school are fearful, but others have not lost their fighting spirit!
Yet, we fight back
One teacher in a union meeting said we need to show solidarity for our co-workers who have less protection than teachers in the union. Two years ago, this teacher refused to sign a petition to support a Black veteran teacher who was reprimanded for neglecting to post information on the board. He realized that his silence benefits the bosses and that it’s impossible to be “neutral” when a fellow worker is being attacked. He promised to be more active and to stand up when he can. His speaking out at the union meeting about racism is a good start.
Some students continue to protest, decorating and wearing shirts in solidarity with the suspended staff. They chanted in support of the suspended staff at a school event and confronted the principal. In response, the principal said the situation was out of their control. The student bravely retorted, “Did you stand up for them?”
This effectively exposed and silenced the racist principal.
Though many are fearful, some understand the need to fight. They stand up and encourage others to do the same. As more students struggled to fight through the fear, one student felt discouraged.
Another student said, “Don’t worry. Remember the novel we are reading in class? The character showed us that movements take time to build. Sometimes it just starts with one person standing up and then it grows. Just keep trying.”
Lesson of the day
The Progressive Labor Party has been fighting along with students and co-workers for years. We will continue to build a culture of fightback and student leadership in our school. When a multiracial group of students, parents, and teachers are united, we disrupt the natural pattern of this system. In these fightbacks lies the germ of a communist culture.