Tenants unite vs. ICE

I had the privilege of holding a meeting with a dozen of my neighbors, mostly Seniors concerned about the possible appearance of ICE on our apartment building complex. We are located just off 125th Street in West Harlem, and there is a large NYC Housing Authority complex that surrounds us on two sides with a growing Latin community.

Recently there was a false alarm here when two female policewomen arrived  and someone saw the words ICE on their jackets which, worn as they were, concealed the letters POLICE. But within minutes someone posted an alarm on our co-op blog and 10 people arrived, concerned that it was an actual intrusion.

ICE has seized several NYC school students and adults, and each week a travesty occurs at 26 Federal Plaza downtown when immigrants come for hearings on their status, are given new court dates for appearance, and then unhappily are handcuffed and forcibly removed by heavily armed and masked ICE agents. Every day, there are people that come to the court to collect contact information so the families of those taken can be contacted and legal services provided. Activists in the Professional Staff Congress, the City University union, and other groups do what they can in the face of rising fascist oppression.

In my neighborhood there is great concern about ICE. Members of Indivisible on the West Side and in Harlem have visited stores and restaurants with information on the rights of workers and employers to prevent ICE kidnapping of our fellow workers.

We have started to make plans in our co-op to ensure that there is a written protocol that trains our security on the differences between administrative and judicial warrants and to restrict ICE from trying to invade our buildings. Many of us are seniors and unable and/or unwilling to physically confront ICE, but our plan is to chant, video tape, blow on whistles, and give any immigrant workers without papers time to flee.

We plan to bring the issue of ICE and community response at a large annual meeting to be held in the next week and get a commitment from our co-op board and management to inform the community so it can respond. We also hope to join the efforts of others in the neighborhood if the federal government sends the National Guard to NYC, something that has already happened in Portland, Oregon, Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California.

The increasing violence of ICE agents and the enormous budget provided for them is symptomatic of a larger problem. As benefits won in years of struggle like SNAP food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security come under attack, while the economy is showing signs of economic crisis beyond the usual, the dangers of rising fascism must bring out increasing numbers of workers and their allies onto the streets to challenge it. 

Every week a group of us picket our busy intersection and ask drivers and passing neighbors to honk their horns in protest. Every Wednesday the cacophony of horns, drums and noise making by us demonstrates the dangers ahead. The working class needs to learn from the struggles today of the need to fight for revolutionary changes that puts the power in their hands and reorganizes humanity for a new society, a communist one. 

We think the fact that over 200 CHALLENGES distributed each issue at each of two subway lines helps. That and struggle led by comrades and friends promise increasing resistance to capitalism.
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It’s communism!

In the letter from Harlem in the 11/12/2025 CHALLENGE,  it quotes a Party member’s (partial) speech which said:  “Call it socialism,  call it communism - ... “.  I feel that this is VERY wrong and confusing!!!  One of the Party’s biggest contributions to the fight for communism is the realization that communism is NOT socialism, and that the road to communism does NOT go through socialism - whatever “socialism” is.

Especially with politicians calling themselves “Democratic Socialists” and other phony titles,  we need to be VERY clear about what communism really is as well as what communism most definitely is NOT!!!
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Cheney dies with the blood of so many workers on his hands

Al Jazeera, 11/5–And so another member of the old “war on terror” team has left the world. Dick Cheney, who served as the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States during the two-term administration of George W Bush (2001-2009), died on Monday at the age of 84…As the chief architect of the “global war on terror” – which was launched in 2001 and enabled the US to terrorise various locations worldwide under the guise of fighting “terrorists” – Cheney died with untold quantities of blood on his hands, particularly in Iraq…Until his dying day, Cheney espoused a no-regrets approach to the illegal perpetration of mass slaughter and attendant suffering...

COP 2025 convenes to a warming world…again

France24, 10/26–Each COP summit picks a primary theme for the talks to focus on…in 2023, the contentious subject was fossil fuels…the attendees…finally reached an agreement calling for “reducing” the use of oil and coal after dropping an initial pledge to “phase out” their use…Under the [2015] accord, each country pledged to submit a climate roadmap every five years detailing its strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The collective goal is to keep global warming below the critical threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels…Since 2015, the curve has flattened and we are now heading for warming of between +2.6° and +2.8°C”...

World war rarely ends in anything less than vast destruction

Foreign Affairs, 11/6–In recent years, many in Washington have focused on deterring China from invading Taiwan...But rebuffing an invasion might not end the war…“There is no scenario in which China, following an unsuccessful invasion, accepts responsibility, acknowledges that military solutions are impractical, or pivots to a fundamentally different set of political objectives toward Taiwan”...“war over Taiwan likely would become protracted, as nearly all great power wars have since the Industrial Revolution.” World War II ended only when Allied forces captured Germany’s capital and the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Japan. 

Biden Supreme Court appointee Brown gives OK to cut off workers from food

Politico, 11/7–The Trump administration scored a temporary victory at the Supreme Court Friday as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed to lift a deadline for the federal government to fully fund SNAP payments that flow to millions of Americans…In an order issued after 9 p.m. Friday, Jackson granted the Trump administration’s request for relief from a lower court order that would have required officials to tap into a separate nutrition account at USDA to deliver the usual SNAP payments for November…Jackson’s move came after the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals declined to grant the administration an immediate reprieve from the district court judge’s order…

Workers slaughtered in Sudan in one of several genocides

PBS, 10/31–Sudan’s civil war has entered a new, horrific phase. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have gone on a killing rampage after taking over the key city of El Fasher in Western Darfur after over a year-and-a-half of siege. Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring Tawila, escaping famine and mass executions…This week, the people of El Fasher, beaten and threatened, attacked and hunted, fled for their lives from a murderous militia that films itself unleashing ferocious violence. A fighter shows off his work. “We have burned them,” he says. “We have burned them.” They show off their horror and document their own war crimes with videos too graphic to show.

Healthcare workers strike as bosses rake in profits

10/14–More than 30,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and health care workers across three Pacific states started a five-day strike on Tuesday, calling for better wages and more time for patient care as negotiations between union heads and Kaiser executives remain unresolved. Members of the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP), along with members of the Alliance of Health Care Unions, picketed outside 22 Kaiser hospitals in California, Oregon and Hawaii….Union leaders claim recent layoffs, stagnant wages, unsafe working conditions, excessive workloads and Kaiser’s prioritization of profit over care — the company holds almost $64 billion in reserves acquired mostly during the Covid-19 pandemic…

Who will run New York City over the next four years? Behind Door Number One: Disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, the serial sexual abuser who killed thousands of nursing home residents in the early Covid outbreak and then distorted the data to cover it up. Door Number Two: Curtis Sliwa, the kkkop-loving Republican clown show. And Door Number Three: Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who has inspired tens of thousands of volunteers with a platform of rent freezes, universal child care, and free bus rides. 

Mamdani is favored to win the November 4 mayoral election, though Cuomo’s coarse appeals to anti-Muslim gutter racism—and huge contributions from developers and landlords—have closed the gap. But regardless of who comes out on top, one thing is sure: It won’t be good for the working class. 

Amid a worldwide capitalist crisis, this election matters. It determines who will manage the country’s largest city and the financial capital of the U.S. bloc. With China, Russia, and the U.S. on a collision course for inter-imperialist war, the capitalist rulers have no choice but to move toward fascism. Liberal democracy—with its mythical “free and fair” elections, “freedom” of speech, and an “impartial” justice system—can no longer prop up their failing empire. To stay afloat as conditions for workers keep getting worse, the bosses need hyper-militarized fascism to squash rebellion. 

They need openly racist fascism to divide our class and scapegoat groups of workers, be they Black or Brown migrants in the U.S. and Europe, or Muslims in India, or Uyghurs in China or Palestinians in Israel. Perhaps most of all, they need fascism to build rabid nationalism for the bloody global conflict to come.

Mamdani is the Democratic Party’s latest great reformist hope, a misleader and fake leftist who is all the more dangerous for his surface charm and pie-in-the-sky promises. But even if he were totally sincere in his stated concern for workers and their families, Mamdani cannot solve the contradictions of capitalism. 

In a system drowning in debt and designed to protect the interests of billionaires, Mamdani’s job—if elected—will be to placate workers with a few crumbs of reform and buy a bit more time for the bosses’ dying liberal democracy. Behind his slogans and smiles, he will be an agent of finance capital, of the imperialist main-wing bosses who finance and control the Democratic Party. He is running for an office that is hard-wired for working-class oppression, not working-class power.

We must be clear: There are no good politicians. Liberation cannot come out of a mayor’s office.   There are only two paths: to preserve capitalism or to smash it. There is no in-between. Mamdani’s clear commitment is to preserve it.

While communists have always worked in reform fights to advance the class struggle and build our movement, we understand that reforms under capitalism are limited and short-lived. Communism doesn’t mean “progressive” policies. It means transformation: the destruction of the bosses’ state, the abolition of private property and wages. It means tearing down the material basis for racism, sexism, and all inequality, and creating a society run by and for the working class. Join Progressive Labor Party in building a communist system. 

Scrambling to the right

The following are some of Mamdani’s stance and direct quotes. It’s a low bar—the working class deserves better.

On NYPD & ICE

• June 2020: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #defundtheNYPD.”
• October 15: “I apologize because of the fact that…these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day” (Fox News, 10/15). 
• Mamdani will retain NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch, under whom NYPD protected ICE from protestors on Canal Street. 
  When asked which Democratic leader would you want to be like, Mamdani said Michell Wu. That’s the same Wu who invoked anti-anarchist act against workers in Boston (NY Times, 10/10).

On Genocide

• June 29: Refuses to condemn the slogan “globalize the Intifada,” an expression of struggle against Israel-made genocide (Politico, 6/29). 
• July 16: “I will discourage the phrase” (CNN).

On capitalist inequality

• “I don’t think that we should have billionaires…we need equality across…And I look forward to work with everyone, including billionaires to make a city that is fairer for all of them” (NBC News, 6/29). 
• Tax the billionaires by an additional two percent
• Freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments. 

Of course, we must continue to fight for better living and working conditions. But, the more we accept survival as a victory, the more this profit system wins. 

Follow the money

Mamdani is at least partly financed by the very interests he claims to oppose. An advisory group of investors—including JPMorgan Chase, other Wall Street insiders, and grotesquely wealthy tech capitalists—was formed to “guide” Mamdani’s campaign and “shape policy” (Fortune, 9/23). 

They don’t seem too concerned about Mamdani’s plan to pay for his promises by taxing the rich; they know the tax would need to be okayed by the state government in Albany, where Governor Kathy Hochul has made clear that it’s a nonstarter. 

Here’s the real deal—the U.S. ruling class is a disaster of their own making. The Democratic Party is in disarray with a creaky leadership, limited options, and internal disagreements on how to best prepare for war. By contrast to the loot-and-plunder Trump forces, the main-wing bosses know the U.S. needs to make a show of reining in inequality, at least a little bit. They know they need to tax the rich—not for child care, but to fund their military and the infrastructure and industry they need to support it. They can use Mamdani as a tool to begin to discipline their own ranks. And if the winner turns out to be Cuomo, who’s been endorsed by main-wing stalwart Michael Bloomberg and has pledged to hire 5,000 more cops, the bosses will surely be able to work him, too. 

Social democracy=social fascism

The capitalist bosses have long experience in absorbing radical movements and rendering them toothless. The modern Democratic Socialists of America was founded in 1982 by Michael Harrington, who twenty years earlier had tried to inject his bitter anti-communism into Students for a Democratic Society. Harrington’s lifelong mission was to funnel working-class anger and fightback into electoral politics and the Democratic Party, where it could be controlled and pacified. He followed in the class-traitorous footsteps of the Social Democrats who ruled Germany in the early 20th century. In 1919, they sent militias to crush the Spartacist Revolt and murder over 1,000 communists, including Rosa Luxemburg. When push came to shove, they sided with capital over labor.

Mamdani follows in that same shameful lineage. Like Ras Baraka in Newark, Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Michelle Wu in Boston, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Congress, Mamdani will disarm workers into believing capitalism can serve the interests of the working class. By borrowing socialist language while preparing to knuckle under to Wall Street, he will help keep workers trapped in a cycle of false hope and betrayal. 

Reject the illusion, build the revolution

While Mamdani’s campaign is a dead end, but the workers who support him ARE part of the solution. An internationally united working class is the only hope we have to build a communist movement. 

So, who is fit to rule the world? The millions of workers on the streets could be the seeds of a powerful mass movement. They are militant, courageous, antiracist, and implicitly class-conscious. But a lasting movement to confront the bosses, even on a reform level, needs to be more than against Trump (No Kings). It needs to be for something. That’s why PLP’s task of building for communism is so critical in this moment. Join us now on this long road to revolution!

Chicago                                                 

CHICAGO, October 18—A contingent of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and an equal number of friends marched today with 275,000 fellow workers angry with the rise of fascism in the United States. This march was part of the national “No Kings” Day organized and sponsored by the Democratic Party. The national “No Kings” mobilizations represent a massive effort by the liberal Big Fascist section of the U.S. ruling class to win the working class to build more U.S.  patriotism. As such, there was a huge increase in the number of U.S. flags at this rally, and an effort to dampen the growing anger, militancy, and hatred workers around the country are expressing toward the destructive crises of capitalism.

The “No Kings” movement is an attempt to win our class to nationalism, patriotism, and back into the Big Fascist camp. We exposed these contradictions by calling for the destruction of all borders so racist forces like ICE can’t exist. We called for multiracial internationalism to connect the struggles in Gaza to the struggles in Sudan and elsewhere around the world. We called for wokers power to show that we don’t need the bosses’ political parties (Democrats or Republicans) to “save” us. One friend said, “Y’all are the only ones who call out racism.” Another friend said, “Y’all are the only ones who talk about workers actually running things.” Our friends who marched with us are clearly seeing the differences between PLP and the other groups at these rallies.

We were able to rapidly distribute 1000 leaflets, hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE, and get numerous contacts of workers who want to learn more about the Party and how to build a society where no human being is illegal, a society based on working-class need and equality – communism. 

We need communist leadership and worker power, not liberal racists

For the past month Chicago has been under siege by the ICE Gestapo and other fascist federal troops, but many of the workers who have been leading the valiant battles against these fascists weren’t a part of the carnival-like “No Kings” parade. The rally and march were visibly lacking the very sections of the working class who are being targeted and leading the resistance to brutal attacks. 

The Democratic Party is aimlessly trying to position itself as the alternative to Donald Trump’s brand of fascism, but Black and Latin workers in Chicago have lived under the Democrats’ brand of fascism our entire lives, including poverty wages, homelessness, and racist police terror. The Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor of Illinois,  JB Pritzker, have publicly talked tough against Trump and the raids, while deploying their own police departments to protect ICE agents as they kidnap and terrorize our class siblings. 

When Governor Pritzker marched past our contingent, a comrade quickly made a speech exposing his hypocrisy and collusion with the growing fascist movement. Unfortunately, a sizable number of workers at the ‘No Kings’ rallies didn’t yet see the Democrats for the wolves that they are and tried to shut our comrade down, but some workers, particularly younger workers, cheered on the speaker. 

Another comrade led a chant saying, “If we don’t get it, shut it down” and a worker responded, “Why would we want that? They already shut the government down!” Our comrade responded, “The bosses have shut the government down on their terms to hurt our class. They shut down jobs, hospitals, food, and schools to hurt us. What we are talking about is shutting down the stuff the bosses care about (profits) so that we can make sure our class gets the food, education, and health care WE deserve!” The crowd erupted and we all started chanting, “IF WE DON’T GET IT, SHUT IT DOWN!”

Not just “No Kings,” no capitalists at all!
While the overall politics of the No Kings marches are weak, their massive turnouts show that workers are disgusted by the profit system’s slide into wider fascism. It’s on us in PLP to unite with millions of other workers in the context of class struggle. Through fighting back together, we can win our class to the truth that the chaos we’re witnessing is not just limited to Trump and his goons but is a result of capitalism’s unstable nature and need for racism, exploitation and war.

Not just “No Kings” but no capitalists! The system can’t be reformed to meet the needs of billions of working-class people on the planet! Join the PLP and help build for communist revolution and a world where workers run society for our collective needs.

NEW JERSEY

Newark, October 18th—Antiracist working class fighters showed out at the ‘No Kings’ rallies, ready to stand against fascism (see glossary on page 8) under U.S. President Donald Trump’s MAGA regime. Members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) prepared to take the demand to ‘Dump Trump’ a step further by calling for workers to dump capitalism altogether. Our Party utilized a banner that displayed the words ‘TWO HEADS OF THE SAME FASCIST MONSTER”with drawings of liberal fascists, representing Columbia University, the United Nations, the AFL-CIO Union on the left and far-right nationalists like ICE, IOF, Proud Boys, and Trump on the right. The bottom of the banner read, ‘WORKERS WILL WIN THE WORLD.’ We see the millions of workers who are fed up with racist deportations, the high cost of living, and genocidal wars, with a potential to do far greater than rallying against one capitalist ruler. An organized working class has the potential to stop all these capitalist rulers and run the world. 

With this confidence, our NJ section of PLP decided to split up between three areas of New Jersey—Trenton, where a friend in the organization leading “No Kings,” 50501 invited PLers to speak, Newark, our organizing base for 40 years, and Maplewood, where brave fighters actively protest the genocide in Gaza. We used CHALLENGE newspapers as a tool to spread communist ideas, selling more than 200 copies. Even as crowds of people waved the American flag and sang the racist nation’s anthem, workers looked our way to learn more about communism.

Dare to struggle, dare to win

PL’ers have consistently attended protests and deportations at Delaney Hall, the  ICE Detention Center in Newark, and continued the fightback with collective study groups in the park. One friend who has both actively marched and studied with us shared after one study group the idea for PLP to speak at the “No Kings” rally in Trenton. Following his leadership allowed several Party members to give both direct and more subtle speeches about the need for a working-class communist movement and to tell hundreds of workers, directly, not to pin their hopes for defeating global war and fascism on voting for the Democrats. 

One 20-year-old trans person took the mic and said, “I’m not the problem; I’m being made to feel terrified for just existing. I need a country to feel protected in.” We responded within our speeches that politicians can’t save us when we’re facing an avalanche of crises. Politicians representing the ‘Democratic Party’ will swing towards fascism, or extreme repression against workers, if it means saving the rotten capitalist structure. The current NJ Democratic Party nominee, Mikie Sherrill, was boosted by the main speakers, while workers on the side shared that they had visited her office for two years, pleading that she close detention centers and stop supporting Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Despite promises to not support any more detention centers, Sherrill swiftly signed off on them anyway. Voting for Democrats and reforms may gain us the potential of legislation in support of abortion, public schools and gender affirming healthcare, but the trade off will still be more pillaging of the international working class.

Misleaders will get workers killed

History teaches us that while some material gains are made, the capitalist class will swiftly take them away to maintain their profits. To expose these lies we cannot let our work stop at protests. We need to build friendships with the working class, think through these ideas together, and struggle with one another to demand more. Looking for solutions on the ballot is the wrong place to look, and we need to be building something else with one another. We need to reach out to friends who are feeling conflicted and provide political direction on how to not only survive but how to win something long term for the workers. PLP offers concrete direction and greater engagement beyond just voting.

Workers are being made to feel more directly responsible for the impact of our decisions during this time, and we are. But whether we vote or not, we need solutions that cannot be cut by the bosses electoral system. Approaching the rallies with deliberate planning and political decisiveness made us bold enough to tell workers to join PLP, to fight alongside other workers for a communist future. Only by being committed and bold can we inspire each other to fight for revolution and run the whole world. As one PLer’s speech reminded us “we workers cannot allow ourselves to be herded like sheep. Don’t fight for politicians or reforms alone, fight for communism. Read CHALLENGE! Join Progressive Labor Party!”