NEW JERSEY—Led by undocumented workers and youth, 200 protesters demanded what governor Phil Murphy had promised last year but (like the racist opportunist he is) never delivered: the basic access to drivers’ licenses. This protest exposed the hollowness of liberal politics and the potential for a workers’ movement with international communist influence. Progressive Labor Party fights for the idea that a system that uses borders, a ruling-class creation, to rob and terrorize workers deserves to be abolished.
Racist Murphy had preyed on the legal capitalist-created torment of undocumented workers and youth. He had made the point of licenses for the undocumented working class a part of his election campaign; today 500,000 in New Jersey alone still live under the threat of deportation every time they are stopped by the police for driving while undocumented. These workers refused to accept Murphy’s lies.
A PL’er talked about their experience of crossing from Mexico into the U.S with their family, highlighting the repressive nature of the U.S. border patrol. They finished with the chant “Las Luchas Obreras, No Tienen Fronteras!/The Fight Of The Workers, It Has No Racist Borders!” The hundreds of workers present embraced the chant.
Working inside the Cosecha Movement
The march, organized by the Cosecha Movement, gathered workers from ten cities in Columbus Park, in the city of Trenton. From there we marched from this mostly Black, Latin, and Asian neighborhood to where the politicians have their offices. This is the fourth and largest march that the Cosecha Movement has organized in Trenton since January, 2018, and shows the determination of the workers to escalate our fight against the capitalists and their state government to win this much needed reform!
Workers have drive for mass antiracist movement
Cosecha is a national U.S. grassroots organization that is coordinating reform campaigns around the needs of undocumented workers. The organization hopes to win workers to eventually unite around a nation-wide strike to achieve citizenship reform, which many workers believe will provide them with permanent protection from racist deportation.Marches are growing in numbers, with collective leadership. For this march, more families with children from more cities came. Taking inspiration from what a small but militant group of workers from New Brunswick contributed to the last march, more youth participated in preparation for and during the march and rally. Workers in each of the different cities made and sold traditional tacos, coordinated local festivals, partnered with various cultural events, organized yard sales, donated clothing, and held countless gatherings in homes and churches from June to September to raise funds.
These organizing activities encouraged new workers to come with us. And with the funds raised from these activities, we acquired six buses for workers from the different cities to converge at the rally in Trenton.
Politicians turn away workers, workers turn towards CHALLENGE
At one stop along the march, a mother gave a compelling speech: “Today I, because of [drivers’ licenses] I am here, because my son needs treatment and I have to travel to another state. I want all of you to grow conscious that this is a need. Not for luxury. Because it is a necessity.”
When we finally arrived at the state house, some politicians walked past and ignored the rally., and workers began chanting, and jeering at them.
The workers’ decision to take to the streets is a political victory - a literal step forward. In turning to the masses and youth in preparing for the struggle, the workers built the confidence to physically assert their growing power on the streets. And yet this is only a glimpse of what a small group of construction, agricultural, cleaning, household, factory, and professional workers, undocumented, documented, and citizen workers are able to collectively achieve.
Along the way, more than 400 CHALLENGEs in English and Spanish were sold or distributed, along with a pamphlet about the need to read and engage in discussion about solidarity with other workers’ struggles, including the need to smash racist borders.
Getting on the road to revolution
The exposure to communist ideas in CHALLENGE is key. No laws or politicians, or even a nationwide strike like Cosecha calls for, can provide “permanent protection” and/ or end the anti-immigrant racism capitalism relies on, no matter how many millions of workers might support it. Workers live in a dictatorship of capitalism- what reforms we do win are ultimately taken back when it suits the capitalists. However, when communists participate in these mass reform movements, which attract other strong working class fighters, these relationships can powerfully develop class consciousness.
Workers united across the world as a class by one party - PLP - are capable of transforming these energies for reform into a revolution for workers’ power. We do it by struggling for these reforms while introducing communist politics to the workers we meet, and showing the futility of attempting to reform capitalism.
Liberalism: main danger to working class
Liberal politicians, on the other hand, attempt to deceive workers into believing capitalism can be reformed, while channeling their struggles into the opposite direction- support for one or another sector of the genocidal, imperialist U.S. ruling class.
In 2009, liberal Deporter-In-Chief Barack Obama failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill, which he promised within his first 100 days in office. Militant reform struggles led by “Dreamers” - undocumented youth fighting for access to higher education - began exposing Obama’s hypocrisy and empty promises.
By April 2011, Obama’s approval rating suffered drastically among Latin workers (Gallup 12/2014).
In June 2012, Obama signed into law the immigration executive order Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
By the end of 2014, the nature of liberals like Obama’s service to the bosses’ increasingly fascist system was even clearer. While breaking deportation records, Obama’s administration illegally awarded a one billion dollar contract to Corretions
Corporation of America (now known as CoreCivic) “to build a massive detention facility for [immigrant] women and children seeking asylum...In 2015, the first full year [of the contract], CCA — which operates 74 facilities — made fourteen percent of its revenue from that one center while recording record profit” (America’s Voice, 10/12).
Today, the declining U.S. imperialist bosses’ reliance on the private prison industry continues to grow while the bosses’ latest mouthpiece, Donald Trump, has terminated DACA.
While the bosses’ plans for undocumented youth in the U.S. are unclear at the moment, communists in PLP will continue to learn from, struggle with, and forge international fightback by bringing workers together from across Cosecha and other movements, and continue to advocate our own plans and fight for nothing less than workers power - communist revolution!
HAMMOND, October 1 – A local university that serves mostly working-class and international students has seen a dramatic surge in fightback over the past few weeks. In response to the university bosses’ racist lies and indifference to their needs, hundreds of students and supporting faculty have built a struggle to challenge the bosses’ power.
Comrades and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been in the thick of this fight, building working-class support and helping push revolutionary communist politics. Collectively with other anti-racist, anti-sexist fighters, we are fast learning that life’s most important lessons are taught in class struggle!
Multiracial Unity against Admins’ Lies
Purdue University Northwest (PNW) is a smaller satellite campus of the much larger and highly-endowed Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. The PNW distinction reflects a recent merger of Purdue Calumet of Hammond, IN and Purdue North Central of Westville, Indiana. Both of these satellite campuses traditionally served as commuter campuses for working-class and non-traditional students, including many Black and immigrant workers. However, many top-down, anti-working class decisions from the university administration have alienated these student populations and made the university less accessible for them in recent years.
Case in point, since the merger PNW students were promised that they would receive a standard Purdue University diploma upon graduation. But on September 28, the chancellor sent an email to students stating that their diploma would in fact be different to the one received by students at the main Purdue campus. And just like that, a decision that could have serious consequences for graduates’ futures was shoved through with little to no input from students, faculty, or alumni.In response to the bosses’ shady decision, a petition began circulating to keep the Purdue degree at PNW (which 18,000 students and supporters signed), and students planned a protest to occur on the following Monday.
The protest, organized by a multiracial collective of Black, Latin, and white working-class students, turned out over 650 students and supporters from both campuses to push back against the bosses’ racist slap in the face. The action lasted about an hour as students began with chants and speeches in an open area between two main buildings. Students and supporting faculty and staff – some who serve double-duty – marched to the administration building where they soon found out that the chancellor did not show up to work that day. Students were demanding answers, and shortly after the action ended, an email was sent from the chancellor announcing an “open conversation.”
At that conversation, the chancellor admitted that PNW’s advertising has been a “bait-and-switch” all along; admitting that he has always felt “uncomfortable” with the idea that PNW was selling Purdue degrees.
Fight Racist Attacks in Education with Communism
The racist university bosses made this change in a primarily Black and Latin neighborhood, where over 28% of the Black population has dropped in the last year. Recently, at a Black Student Union cookout, when asked why there has been a decrease in Black student enrollment, one university stooge admitted to the university trying to attract more Latin students in order to receive federal funding. This same racist also said “kids from Gary, Indiana just don’t go to college” -- only reinforcing the racism that exists in higher education.
The truth is, all colleges and universities under capitalism foster and push these types of racist, anti-working class lies because their main purpose is to reproduce pro-capitalist, individualist ideology among the masses. Under the guise of “higher learning,” they serve to groom the next batch of capitalist bosses from the student body, stifle any real development of critical thinking for the majority, and charge astronomical tuition fees before throwing young people out into a highly competitive and cutthroat job market.
As communists, we fight for an education system that meets the needs of the international working class, not those of the bosses. Learning from the advances in education made in communist revolutions in Russia and China in the 20th century, we will make education free, accessible, and meaningful for all workers. Using our state power, we will completely erase any racist, sexist, and anti-scientific garbage in our schools and develop lifelong collective learning as the means to further liberate our class.
The Fight Continues
Students are planning to meet the Board of Trustees directly on October 12 at their meeting at the main campus in West Lafayette. We will come at the trustees with our sharpened understanding of our power as a multi-racial, multi-gendered fighting force. Working-class students united, will never be defeated!
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Charity can’t deliver clean water to segregated NYC high schools
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- 12 October 2018 340 hits
Protecting working class children from lead poisoning is not a priority for a U.S capitalist class in disarray and decline. The lead water crisis that has poisoned workers from Flint, MI to Newark, NJ has hit New York City’s school system and the local ruling class has no real plan to protect children here from ingesting this toxin at thousands of water fountains and sinks across the five boroughs.
Over the summer, the Department of Education (DoE) inspected the fixtures that funnel water to our children daily. Instead of accurately checking the lead levels, the water was allowed to run for long periods of time, which allowed a lot of the lead to be flushed out before measurement. These bogus ‘tests’ have ‘proven’ that the water which 1.1 million kids drink is ‘safe.’ However, even by their own admission, the DoE admits that their safety inspection did not involve switching out lead plumbing fixtures with non-toxic alternatives (WNYC, Aug 2018).
Hot on the heels of the DoE’s summertime water inspection subterfuge, locally-based capitalist Sarah Kauss (CEO of S’well bottles) decided to donate over 300,000 bottles to provide every high school student in the city with a re-usable S’well brand water bottle. The liberal political establishment is pushing for a youth campaign to “BRING IT” which “challenges New York City students to reduce waste through advocacy and activism.” By their estimates if each high school student in the city foregoes disposable water bottles waste will be reduced by up to 54 million plastic bottles (NYT 9/18).
Such ‘activism’ – where crises that capitalism makes necessary are viewed as results of ‘individual’ choice – is a type that liberal mis-leaders like NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio champion. They would have our youth believe that racism in our schools comes from ‘microaggressions’ that we carry out against each other as individuals, not from a ‘school choice’ system that has for decades cast schools with too many Black youth as undesirable.
Consumption of bottled water has exploded since the 1970s and is a major contributor to plastics production and pollution. Today’s mounting plastics crisis was entirely predictable decades ago but the pursuit of maximum profit has meant cities have been built up with no plans to supply quality water to workers who live there. Under communism access to clean water would be treated as a true human right. It’s beyond a doubt that the unbelievably huge portion of society’s wealth which imperialists have poured into arms races and war since the 1970s could have, by now, provided workers worldwide with access to clean water in an environmentally sustainable way. We have needed communism for a long time.
On top of a festering lead crisis, New York City students endure a long-running segregation crisis. Racist policing of Black and Latino youth mean that they pass through a metal detector/scanning procedure to enter school each day. (see letter). These students are routinely prohibited from bringing any liquids into school. They will be forced to fill their environmentally-friendly S’well bottles at water fixtures fed by lead pipes while their more middle-class white and Asian peers are free to bring their bottles to school with water that is (perhaps) safer.
Speaking of the rise of her company, Kauss once proclaimed:
“We’ll be a billion-dollar company,” she says. “It’s easy. I know what to do now. We have the people and the processes in place, and the market is just there.” The alternative? “We could just be a $50 million company,” she says, “but that seems kind of boring.” (Inc. Magazine, July 2016).The iron rule of capital, which spawns imperialist rivalry and requires racism to divide and super-exploit the working class, has positioned Kauss to solve the ‘easy’ problem of creating a billion-dollar company.”
Her naïve, ostentatious and self-serving campaign to expand her firm’s visibility and help ‘fix’ a plastics crisis that clogs the oceans of the globe has run up against the hard reality of segregation in New York City schools. Only liberation from the rule of capital through a communist revolution gives us a shot at clean water and integrated schools for all.
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Student Letter
We are students, not suspects!
Every high school student in New York City received a free metal S’well water bottle. This was an initiative to eliminate the single-use plastic water bottles. The highly-policed and over-surveilled high schools with metal detectors, in New York City force their predominantly Black, Latin and Asian, low-income students to dump out their water bottles before entering school premises. This effectively denies clean water to nonwhite students. Denying students their right to bring water and drinks from home forces them to drink the lead-contaminated water present in many of the city’s public schools. The inability of these students to get through school security with their water bottles lies at the intersection of three of the city’s structural, unresolved problems: the policing and criminalization of Black and Latin students, segregated schooling, and lead contaminated water in “more than 33,000 water fountains” in New York City public schools (WNYC, 3/6).
WNYC, a New York City public radio station, completed an analysis finding that despite the city’s claims of replacing all lead contaminated fixtures, only 20 percent of schools have been notified of the water being safe to drink. Despite the dangerously high levels of lead being found in school pipes, not all students have the right of bringing their own water to class.
The denial of students to bring their own bottles of water to classes feeds into the racist and anti-working class violence students are subject to in the city’s public schools. Students are not only stripped of their autonomy but also criminalized under school security and surveillance technologies. This creates a hostile, unsafe environment not conducive to our student’s education. It is harmful to their mental and physical health. Students should not be suspects in their own schools. This inequality and denial of the basic right to clean water is a critical sign calling us to fight back against school housing and segregation.
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Capitalism in Crisis! Colombia prepares for fascism
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- 12 October 2018 391 hits
COLOMBIA, October 10—Ivan Duque, the representative of the interests of US imperialism, landowners and big capital, became the president of Colombia. In his development plan he wants to impose a package of harmful reforms against workers, ordered by theOrganisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and backed by the bosses’ business agenda.
They include health, economic, and tax reforms, reducing taxes to big capitalists and increasing taxes on the products of the family basket, dismantling all the subsidies to the humble people, reforming the labor code, increasing the retirement age and permitting wages below the minimum. This will end the little job stability and the achievements we made with fight, sweat and blood.
They will dismiss teachers and close schools privatizing education to guarantee the application of these measures. They will not hesitate to continue applying police brutality and state terrorism through paramilitary groups and anti-restitution armies, criminalizing social protests, killing more than 300 social leaders and anyone who opposes them.
Electoral politics=support for class for enemies
This reactionary pol was elected in the last election with 10,365,000 votes won using a nationalist campaign of slander, threats, falsehoods, corruption and vote buying misinformation with anticommunist warmongering propaganda, driven by the media RCN and Caracol. This was noticed in the consciousness of many proletarians who, with their political and ideological ignorance, end up supporting their class enemies.
Gustavo Petro pacifist candidate of Social Democracy, got 8,029,000 votes, appeared to be a good potential for supporters who want to change their lives and are tired of paramilitary terrorism and the right-wing dictatorship. Unfortunately they believe in the bosses’ electoral promises that sound good in theory, but in practice are set against our needs defending private capitalist property, and wage slavery.
Communism, the only solution
The bourgeois class takes advantage of the setbacks, and corruption of left-wing candidates, turning them into a disaster for the proletariat making these policies lose credibility in our class, imperialism will not let this system of new socialisms practiced in Venezuela, Brazil and Nicaragua prosper. Even though they demoralize the struggle of the workers.
These warmongering bosses think that their failed bourgeois democracy and fascist terror will be able to stop the unity of the working class, but they are wrong, because many proletarians in the world are uniting in the construction of an international communist movement to put an end to oppression and capitalist exploitation.
Our party PLP is led by rural and urban workers and students that struggle to build communist consciousness with a long-term revolutionary work style to create a communist society without bosses or profits, without racism or politicians introducing revolutionary consciousness and fighting the lying influence of the bourgeoisie.
With our revolutionary program we are doing mass work educating the masses in the ideas of collectivity and proletarian internationalism, only with the strengthening of the international PLP our communist party, can we get out of this swamp of capitalist electoral fraud, crushing these fascists and defeating the ruling class with the communist revolution.
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Kingsborough fighters expose Goldstein and co’s true racist colors, again!
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- 12 October 2018 340 hits
BROOKLYN, October 6—“Honestly I didn’t think that the leafleting against Goldstein would accomplish anything or even get a reaction. I was wrong. Those leaflets really scared the administration - it’s freaking them out, and now they’re going to respond.” A sympathetic Kingsborough Community College (KCC) faculty member recently related this to a member of the Progressive Labor Party. The racists fear direct, mass confrontation and at KCC, they are getting it!
Last spring, a group of students, faculty and workers came into possession of hundreds of extreme racist, sexist social media posts by KCC administrator Michael Goldstein. Goldstein shared Facebook posts that said Islam “executes gays, chops off heads and stones women.” Another shared post said “Confederate veterans are American veterans.” Still another questioned “politicians who protect illegals who rape and murder.” In response, about 1,500 leaflets were collectively produced, printed and distributed around campus calling for Goldstein’s termination. Phone calls were made to the Human Resources office and Chief Diversity Officer to complain. Some students even discovered where Goldstein’s office was, and slid the leaflets under his door!
Students, sympathetic faculty and staff and some PL’ers found out recently that Goldstein has been removed from his position as KCC’s Director of Public Relations. The stripping of his formal power - and his embarrassment to the administration - is a partial victory for the student-led antiracist forces at KCC! The administration continues protecting him by shuffling him around, and it will take mass struggle to drive racists likeGoldstein out.
Racists show their colors
Now the racists have responded. In an article on a rightwing website Goldstein claimed the leafleting is part of a systematic campaign of anti-Jewish racism against him. Also, around two dozen KCC professors received certified letters saying Goldstein is considering legal action against them.
On September 6, an “exclusive” article appeared on a website, Campus Reform (see box) featuring an interview with Goldstein. He whined that he’s been accused of “vile, false allegations of racism,” and accused a group of faculty of being anti-Jewish. The Lawfare Project, a pro-Israeli, nonprofit law firm, sent a letter on his behalf to CUNY Interim Chancellor Vita Rabinowitz, crying about a supposed “ongoing discrimination campaign” against him. As if antiracism was discriminatory!
The Campus Reform article, faithful to its fascist heritage, made bizarre and dangerous allegations. With no evidence whatsoever, it names and blames a professor who had absolutely nothing to do with the leafleting campaign.
Goldstein threatens legal action
Then on October 3, a group of about two dozen KCC faculty received certified, confidential letters from the Lawfare Project notifying them that Goldstein is considering legal action. In “anticipation of litigation,” the professors are instructed:
“to retain and preserve all emails, voicemails, text messages…social media postings and communications as well as all other electronic or printed documents, records…in any way relating to:
-Mr. Goldstein
-Your views on Israel
-Your views on Zionism
-Your views on Jews
-Your views on Palestine; and
-the Progressive Faculty Caucus [group of left-minded KCC]
…This notification extends to all emails generated on a CUNY/KCC server.”
The fascists are on a fishing expedition. They have no idea who is responsible for the antiracist campaign against them. Like the Israeli fascists they adore, they attack indiscriminately. They feel protected by a government that promotes racism. Their “freedom of speech” is a farce that only applies to racists like Goldstein, whose connections to fascist, terrorist groups like the Leadership Institute (see box) show us how deadly serious the bosses are about defending racism and capitalism.
The leaflet distributed at KCC is 100 percent right when it states: “It will take as many of us as possible to unite and build a movement to fight back [against racism].” However many were involved, it will take many more in the struggles ahead. That’s because as communists we know that fighting racism is necessary for any progress for all workers and students. Join us!
