NEW YORK CITY—We can’t permit any racist actions! This thought was on my mind today, the day the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light for openly racist President Donald Trump’s fascist executive order to go into effect. The Supreme Court allowed the ban which prohibits persons from six mostly Arab, Muslim countries from entering the U.S., an attempt by the US government to further divide the working class along racial and nationalistic lines.
Some members of the Progressive Labor Party joined an emergency protest called by the NY Immigration Coalition. The protest began in Union Square as about 600 people chanted, “No Ban, No Wall” and “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” Several representatives of the Democratic Party spoke at the protest. These politicians put on a mask of being anti-racist while in reality, their political agenda differs only slightly from the Republicans who hold power in Congress, and support racist and sexist policies that serve the capitalist bosses.
After the speeches, we began the march to the headquarters of the union 32BJ where there was an immigration forum. As we marched we chanted in English and Spanish. I was in the front with my organization. At the union local, we encountered four racists in front of the police who held up signs saying “Syrians out.”
None of the “leaders” of the march said anything to confront the racists. As a communist in PLP, full of anger, I held my anti-racist sign in the faces of these KKK types and began to chant loudly. All the protesters joined in with loud chants until the police moved the fascist provocateurs to the opposite sidewalk. The anti-racist marchers applauded, gave thumbs up and fists in the air. It was very moving for me to be able to show on a small scale how a communist member of PLP can give leadership. I remembered a saying I learned in my youth, “Where a communist is born, difficulties die.”
This is what we communists must keep in mind as we prepare for the day that we are a Party of masses around the world ready to launch revolution for the seizure of workers’ power and the building of a communist society. Meanwhile these small actions show the difference between the message of communists, and reformists, who allow racists to spout their hateful rhetoric under the excuse of “Free Speech.”
At the end of the protest someone handed me a megaphone and I continued to chant energetically, joined by the other demonstrators until we entered the union hall for the forum. We must not be silent in the face of racist attacks on workers, nor be deceived by liberal misleaders who attack the working class at every opportunity, we must continue to fight for communism!

BROOKLYN, May 18—Chanting, “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Assaults have got to go!” over 50 MTA workers rallied and marched from the union hall across the Brooklyn Bridge to 2 Broadway (MTA headquarters) against the rising number of MTA workers being assaulted on the job.
The organizers who led the march are from one of the many MTA factions trying to fight for an active union to defend its membership. This non-union-led march brought together MTA workers from different titles (conductors, train operators, cleaners, bus drivers) to call on the union and MTA bosses to protect their workforce. Many workers and tourists along the march route chanted and cheered. Random yelling of  “MTA sucks!” and “No fare hikes!” and car honking in solidarity greeted the marchers.
No Safety Under Capitalism
Speaker after speaker condemned the MTA bosses for not protecting their workforce, instead using lawyers to deny worker’s compensation to those out of work from assaults. When a worker is assaulted, if they are not wearing all their protective equipment their claims can be denied, forcing many workers back to work or into debt. If you were assaulted and you weren’t wearing your gloves, we can’t pay you. That is the MTA’s mantra.
The rally and march ended when a hearse arrived and laid a casket in front of the MTA headquarters. A speaker made the point that it’s only when MTA workers die that the bosses act!
According to an internal memo from the MTA on assaults in the subways from the past five months, 76 workers were assaulted. The attacks are mostly workers being spat on. They also
include objects thrown at workers and female workers being sexually assaulted. Verbal abuse is not counted as part of the assaults although it’s a daily occurrence for workers. Since these statistics came out at least another 20 subway workers have reported assaults. The report leaves out the many surface workers (bus operators) who face a far higher rate of assault within the MTA.
Workers Discuss Solutions Centered On Bosses’ System
The solution for most at the rally all centered around the bosses’ courts and cops. People talked about fighting for an increase in police presence on buses and subways. Others added, the need to reach out to supportive politicians to change the laws to create stiffer penalties for people who attack workers. One speaker discussed building an alliance between customers and MTA workers.
But the bosses’ solutions to workers’ safety are their own tools of oppression: more cops, more convictions, and more divisions between members of the working class.
Since the rally, there have been many conversations about next steps. Though there is not much agreement on the next step. The only clear agreement is that we have to do something.
Build Class Consciousness Through Struggle
Progressive Labor Party has seen time and time again: that bosses only protect profits. The bosses only care about giving workers the bare minimum. The answer to the attacks is not fascist attacks (in the form of arrest) on riders. The system does enough killing via the racist police in our neighborhoods. Let’s not demand as workers the terrorization of members of our class. We need more class-consciousness, gained through struggle. We need rider-worker unity against the bosses. Only then will we defeat the attacks.
Members of the Transit Workers’ Union (TWU) must develop the idea that an attack on one worker is an attack on every worker. If the cops kill someone, the TWU workers must answer the call to fight back. If there is a push to lower the fare, the TWU workers must answer the call to fight back. When the bosses try to shut a hospital or make healthcare cuts, TWU workers must answer the call. When TWU workers join the fightback within the city, then and only then will the assault percentages drop. TWU workers have to stand with other workers. And the fight for communism must lead the reform struggle! Workers are stronger together and workers should fight for each other!

As ISIS loses ground and influence over eastern Syria, two larger, more lethal terrorist organizations—the U.S. and Russian capitalist ruling classes—are escalating their competition for control of this strategically vital area in the oil-rich Middle East. The inevitable result: more carnage for our working class sisters and brothers in Syria. From April 23 to May 23, more civilians were killed by U.S.-led airstrikes than in any other month so far in the six-year-old war, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (Independent, 5/23).
In the current month alone, in a move to protect Syrian rebel ground troops fighting the Russia, and Iran-backed regime of President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. warplanes have downed two Iranian-made drones and a Syrian SU-22 warplane—“the first time the American military had shot down an enemy plane since an F-16 took down a Soviet-era MIG-29 during the 1999 conflict over Kosovo” (New York Times, 6/19). In response, Russia threatened to target any U.S. or allied planes sighted west of the Euphrates River. A bloody proxy war that has already slaughtered and displaced millions of workers and children may be evolving into more direct—and more lethal—inter-imperialist conflict.
The catastrophic turmoil in today’s Middle East is a direct result of U.S. efforts to dominate the Persian Gulf region since the end of World War II. In 1980, the Carter Doctrine made it official that U.S. imperialism would stop any other “outside” power from challenging U.S. hegemony. In the words of the late mass murderer Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, “such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”  
While the blunt force of U.S. imperialism has guaranteed billions of dollars in profits for Exxon Mobil, it has also enabled regional capitalist powers to mislead masses of workers and make their own grab for bigger pieces of the petroleum pie. In 1979, Iran’s mullahs gained power by deposing the hated shah of Iran, who’d been installed to protect U.S. and British oil interests after the CIA engineered a coup to overthrow the elected president (Guardian, 8/19/13). In the 1980s, before the unreliable Saddam Hussein made the U.S. most-wanted list, he was propped up by U.S. power during the Iran-Iraq War. The CIA incubated al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. ISIS was born out of post-Saddam manipulation of mass anti-U.S. sentiment after the 2003 Iraq invasion.  
Today, as the U.S. bosses find their capacity to shape events eroding, rival ruling classes in Russia and Iran are growing more aggressive. Even traditional U.S. allies—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel—are charting more independent courses to challenge U.S dominance.   
Imperialists Murder With Impunity
U.S. rulers’ fight to control Middle East oil and natural gas has been a disaster for the international working class. According to the Washington, DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility, the death toll from the “War on Terror,” launched after 9/11, may be as high as two million (Middle East Eye, 4/18/16). That number doesn’t include the millions killed in the Gulf War in 1991 and the murderous U.S. sanctions on Iraq that followed. By themselves, President Bill Clinton’s no-fly zones of the 1990s cost the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children—a price that Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, considered “worth it.”
Now, in their quest to wrest control of territory from ISIS, U.S. coalition forces are committing war crimes in urban centers in Syria and neighboring Iraq. According to Human Rights Watch (6/4):
In both Mosul and Raqqa, the US-led forces are using US-made M825-series 155mm artillery projectiles containing 116 felt wedges impregnated with white phosphorus, which ignites and continues to burn when exposed to the air….White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and they are re-exposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal.
Refugee Crisis
The spread of fighting has led to a dire humanitarian crisis, with 6.1 million internally displaced people and 4.8 million seeking refuge abroad, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. By mid-2016, according to Human Rights Watch, an estimated 1 million people were living in besieged areas, with no access to life-saving assistance or and humanitarian aid. A recent polio outbreak punctuates the health risks to the population, and to children in particular (NYT, 6/20).
Perpetual War is the New Normal
As the conflict in Syria has grown into the most intense urban combat since World War II, living on the brink of wider war has become the “new normal” for the international working class. Atrocities by U.S. imperialism are now routine, the backdrop of daily life. This is a great danger for our class, especially in the absence of mass anti-imperialist mobilization. In the Vietnam War era, communist-led and communist-influenced movements around the world fought back against these imperialist atrocities. Today, after the reversal of the communist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, workers’ fightback has been muted or misled by fake leftists, racist nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists. This is the challenge for Progressive Labor Party—to pick up the red flag and lead the workers of the world to their only solution—communist revolution.  
Only communist revolution removes the conditions that create imperialist war.  Only a dictatorship of the proletariat enables workers to decide which wars are worth fighting.  In 1917, when the Bolsheviks led workers, soldiers, and peasants to sweep the Russian ruling class from power, an inter-imperialist war (World War I) was transformed into class war. The towering lesson of that event is that imperialist war spells doom for capitalists if working people reject patriotism and embrace proletarian internationalism. Every worker is a foot soldier in class war. When workers from the U.S. to Russia, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and beyond place class consciousness above national identity, the end of war in the Middle East will be in sight.

Ruling-class historians have segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
This series aims to reunite the history of communism with antiracism. Part I explored how the fight to free Scottsboro Boys was ignited by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party. See Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression to find out more.
Part II explored how the international communist movement was the imeptus of the civil rights movement. It excerpts from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the essay, “The Civil Rights Movement” by researcher Davarian L. Baldwin at Trinity College. Part III covered the class contradictions of Martin Luther King, Jr., influenced by the Communist Party.  
Part IV takes a look at the Harlem Rebellion and its communist influence.

The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 shook the United States bosses and resonated around the world as the struggle against racism expanded from the fight against Jim Crow in the South to the cities of the North. Once again the communist movement helped lead and was deeply influenced by the fight against racism in the U.S.
The rebellion, sparked by the police killing a young Black man in cold blood, occurred at a moment when the working class around the world was rising up, led by the communist movement centered around the Chinese Communist Party. The fledgling Progressive Labor Movement born out of the rise of the working class in China, was also shaped by the Harlem Rebellion.
In July 1964, 15 year-old James Powell was playing with friends on the sidewalk across from his school in the white neighborhood of Yorkville, when a building superintendent sprayed them down with a hose and unleashed a series of racial epithets at the Black children. The school kids ran at the super to get him to stop, and a cop, Thomas Gilligan, watching from across the street came at the group and shot James Powell in front of numerous witnesses.
Immediately about 300 Black students from the school rallied at the site of the murder and confronted the police on the scene demanding Gilligan’s arrest and inspiring the rebellion.
It began outside the walls of a Harlem police station, days after Lt. Thomas Gilligan, a white, off-duty police officer, shot and killed a 15-year-old African-American student named James Powell on July 16. Two days of peaceful protests ensued. But on the third day, a crowd surrounded the police precinct, calling for Gilligan’s arrest, and was met with swinging clubs of the New York Police Department, under a rainfall of glass bottles and garbage can lids thrown by residents from rooftops above. Gunfire broke out after police pushed thousands of demonstrators back a few blocks toward the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue” (New York’s ‘Night Of Birmingham Horror’ Sparked A Summer Of Riots, WNYC 7/18/14).
The rebellion started only weeks after the U.S. had passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act which was Lyndon Johnson’s response to the growing Civil Rights Movement in the South. That movement and the world-wide movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was politicizing the working class. The working class in China, had been victimized by the brutality of British, Japanese and U.S. imperialism.  The history of imperialism was inseparable from the racist theories of the British ruling class. The victory of the working class in China inspired workers all over the world to rise up against imperialism and sharpened the struggle against racism. In Vietnam, the working class was in the process of defeating the largest imperialist power the world had ever seen, the war machine of the U.S. bosses.  In the U.S., even as legal segregation and racism was being brought down in the South, Black workers in the North were taking on the imbedded racism of liberal capitalism.
The overwhelming majority of black New Yorkers saw their quality of life decline, whether it’s school segregation, housing segregation, unemployment, earnings… [in the] period between the end of World War II and the 1964 riot… “This was Northern racism, which was quite different from Southern racism, in that Northern racism was covert,” says Joseph Boskin, history professor emeritus at Boston University.
Boskin, who conducted interviews in Harlem after the [rebellion], says the unmet expectations of Black Americans in the North were starting to push some of them toward more militant routes for change, despite a national narrative of what seemed to be progress in the country’s laws” (New York’s ‘Night Of Birmingham Horror’ Sparked A Summer Of Riots, WNYC 7/18/14).
The Progressive Labor Movement, the young forerunner to PLP, grew out of the rebellion and played a leading role at the same time. PLM produced a poster, ‘Wanted for Murder - Gilligan the Cop” that became the banner of the struggle carried by thousands of people in the streets. The PLM organized marches and rallies even after the NYC bosses tried to ban all political activity.
The ruling class in New York, who thought of themselves as the “decent” bosses compared to the Jim Crow Southern capitalists, were caught off-guard by the anger of Black workers in Harlem who suffered under extreme inequality.
The Harlem median family income was $3,995 compared to …$6,100 [for NYC], that unemployment in Harlem was 300% higher than in the rest of the city, that sub-standard housing was 49% while in the rest of NYC it was 15%, that infant mortality was 45.3 per 1000 births but only 26.3 in the rest of the city…Life magazine lamented that “the only force that had the guts to give political direction to the spontaneous rebellion was PL.” (Progressive Labor, Vol. 10, No. 1, August-September 1975)
The Harlem Rebellion exposed racism as part of capitalism, even in U.S.’s most liberal center, NYC. After Harlem, within weeks, rebellions broke out in Rochester, Jersey City, Chicago and Philadelphia and over the next few years there were major rebellions in Watts (1965), Newark (1967) and Detroit (1967). Then in 1968, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, rebellions broke out in cities across the country and workers and students around the world, most notably in France and Chicago shook capitalism.
The ruling class has tried to write off the rebellions by calling them riots and dismissing the contribution and courage of the tens of thousands of Black workers who were part of the movement. But even now, 50 years later, the truth of the Harlem Rebellion has not been erased.
Part of the problem is that in the North, many of the laws were not openly discriminatory,…It made it harder to seize the moral high ground and argue that nonviolent civil disobedience was justified.
So, growing frustrations found an outlet on the streets, according to Billy Mitchell, historian of Harlem’s Apollo Theater.
“It wasn’t just people just wildin’ out, you know, and just going crazy. They understood what they were doing,”…
Looking back, Mitchell says he doesn’t completely condone the violent response. But he says it was necessary.
“Sometimes you have got to really do something extraordinary or uncommon to get the attention of people,” he adds.
 (In the Heat of the Summer: The Harlem Riot of 1964 and the Road to America’s Prison Crisis).
The U.S. ruling class responded to the mass demonstrations and anti-imperialist movements with both terror and political crumbs. Police and soldiers fired on and killed civil rights demonstrators and students fighting racism and war in Orangeburg, SC, Jackson State, MS and Kent State, OH (see CHALLENGE, 6/28).
Combined with the brutal attacks, the ruling class enacted a series of reforms in cities with concentrations of Black workers. Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty funneling millions of dollars to create community programs. The Democratic Party and northern capitalists spent millions getting Black mayors elected across the country.
The FBI revved up its Cointelpro Program. A covert operation to target PLP and other groups to try to destroy the anti-imperialist movement. Leaders of PLP were arrested and some were convicted and jailed, others harassed and fired. Through those struggles and in the years since we’ve tried to keep up the fight against racism and build an integrated organization.
Black workers who have borne the brunt of racism and led the fight against it must be in the leadership of any working-class struggle and movement for communism. There will be no forward progress for the working class without the leadership of Black workers and a massive struggle against racism.