BROOKLYN, August 29—This summer, a multiracial group of more than 30 Kingsborough Community College students and workers held a beach barbecue called “Unity in the Community,” to review and celebrate the past year of struggle, and plan for the year ahead. Short speeches summarizing the past year, political discussions about CHALLENGE, good food, and sports were the orders of the day as old friends reconnected and new friendships were kindled!
Anti-racist and anti-sexist political struggle are what unites these workers and students, who hailed from Africa, across the Middle East and South Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Many of them participated in various struggles throughout the past year, while others were relative newcomers.
A year of building struggle
In late 2017, Kingsborough cafeteria workers suffered under incompetent and racist management. They endured the indignities of obeying orders from lazy sexist supervisors and incompetent administrators at the College. The workers, many of them parents, saw the absurdity of their working conditions. As we engaged in discussions over the semester, their political awareness began to grow, culminating in a bold and powerful rally. Students and staff banded together in a direct confrontation with administrators and NYPD at the President’s office.
At the end that semester, we made contact and began to build relationships with students of the Muslim Association on campus. We learned of their struggles on campus. In the spring semester we built on those discussions to take action against a racist stooge of the administration who admitted to spying on the Muslim Association. Students took the lead in confronting the racist and the administrators who supported him, resulting in his ouster. The leadership in the Muslim Association has to deal with years of history of control by faculty and administrators as well as sexism in their own group. The success of this struggle led to the beginning of another struggle to call out and oust a racist, sexist and homophobic administrator on campus, Michael Goldstein, who is protected by a network of Zionists among the faculty.
Building collective leadership
Students at the barbecue explained the collective process that went into writing the leaflet calling for Goldstein’s termination, and the collective decision-making that went into how best to distribute them and involve more students. A strength of the struggle against Goldstein is that it is drawing in and developing strong women leaders among students who have never participated in political struggle before.
PL’ers who have been involved alongside the KCC students and workers commented on the development of strong women leadership through the struggle, and talked about how important CHALLENGE has been in sharing news about these struggles among the students and workers on campus. They connected the cholera outbreaks in Yemen or Haiti to imperialist rivalry and capitalism’s insatiable need for profits and labor to exploit. They stressed that the bosses’ media always buries these stories, and that is why everyone must help sell and write for CHALLENGE. As students passed around CHALLENGE, several new contacts were made, as well as plans for new PLP study groups.
Struggle continues
Students and workers brainstormed on how to build on and sharpen the struggles of the previous year, and how to reach out to more of the 10,000 or so students on campus. They unanimously agreed that this event should be held annually! As one student put it, “we needed this. With everything going on in the world, we need to keep doing this every year for the students after us.”
Political struggle shows that education is far more than just about sitting in a classroom and learning from books or lectures from professors. Political struggle gives us a vision of a world to fight for, and a goal for our education in all subjects.
This barbecue served to break down barriers and expand the bonds of solidarity among the segregated groups of students, as well as the workers who came: the custodial, cafeteria and faculty.
With stronger personal and political ties, we head back to school this semester with the promise of struggle and hopefully even greater victories.

While Imran Khan, Pakistan’s next prime minister, is already leaning toward China, the regional power’s old bedfellow, U.S. imperialism, still has cards to play.
Since the collapse of workers’ states in Russia and China, the rivalry between the world’s leading imperialist powers continues to drive world events. Today, as a declining U.S. struggles to fend off a rising China, various smaller powers are jockeying for alliances with either one or both.
The latest hotspot is Pakistan, where the local capitalist bosses selected Khan, a one-time cricket superstar who rolled to a heavily rigged election victory July 25 (see page 5). The erratic celebrity candidate was backed by the military, which has ruled Pakistan for half its history. He was chosen for his popularity and support among young workers in particular, and most of all because Pakistan’s rulers are desperate to keep the impoverished masses and a growing middle class in line amid economic crisis.
Leading up to the election, members of opposition parties were harassed and arrested. Others were forced by military intelligence agencies to join Khan’s  Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Criminal cases have been opened against nearly 17,000 opposition party supporters, and corruption investigations launched against several opposition party leaders (Guardian,7/21).
Workers in Pakistan are fed up with poor sanitation, roving black outs, high unemployment and religious violence.  The reality, however,  is that their material conditions will continue to deteriorate unless they break with dead-end politicians like Khan and join a movement to build a communist world, free of imperialist conquest and exploitation.
Big terror, little terror
Not so long ago, Pakistan was a major pillar of U.S. imperialism and a hedge against Soviet-leaning India. By 2001, after 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, U.S. military aid to Pakistan amounted to billions of dollars a year. The Pakistani bosses’ threw their public support behind the U.S. rulers’ “War on Terror” against the U.S. bosses’ own former creation, the Taliban, and its Al Qaeda offshoot, even as they privately hid and funded the Little Terrorists against the Big Terrorists of the U.S.
As the inevitable boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism hit Pakistan, the country’s bosses were forced to repeatedly turn to the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) for billions in economic aid—a total of fourteen times since the 1980s (Bloomberg, 7/26). In 2015, as the IMF began pressuring Pakistan to repay the loans and dictated harsher attacks on the working class and its standard of living, masses of workers fiercely fought back (CHALLENGE, 5/20/16).
U.S. decay paves way for China’s rise
Pakistan’s bosses have seen U.S. imperialism kill hundreds of thousands in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without anything resembling a U.S. victory. They are witnessing the turmoil under U.S. President Donald Trump, who tweeted: “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit….No more!” (1/1).
Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to fall behind on its loan repayments. Militant workers are demonstrating and striking for a better life. As Pakistan’s bosses began looking for an alternative, neighboring China saw an opening to weaken U.S. control over Pakistan and extend its own imperialist reach through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also known as One Belt, One Road.
New money, same old imperialism
In 2015, China announced the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $62 billion effort to modernize Pakistan’s infrastructure to serve China’s rising economy:
The project is branded around the theme of connectivity: power stations, ports, dams, transmission lines, roads and fibre optic cables linking Pakistan to the Chinese internet. Among projects to be completed in 2018 are a mass-transit light railway in Lahore, and a coal-fired power plant in Karachi (Guardian, 8/3).
In 2016, in return, Pakistan leased control of an entire city to China for over 40 years, the deep-water port of Gwadar. Over the next several years, new rail, road, gas, and oil pipeline networks will align Pakistan with major cities in western China, oil-rich Iran, the U.S.-dominated Middle East, and Africa.
Muhammad Zubair, governor of Sindh Province in Pakistan (including the commercial hub of Karachi and two gigantic seaports), is a close ally of Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister who was arrested on corruption charges 12 days before Khan’s contested election. He openly acknowledges that the Chinese relationship is about more than economics: “It gives China the security leverage they desperately need. Obviously they want to compete with America….They have global ambitions, and we have been their friends long before anyone else” (Guardian,8/3).
But all that glitters is not gold. Chinese imperialism may seem less ruthless at the moment than the U.S. variety, but a wolf is still a wolf. In Sri Lanka, after their $8 billion dollar investment in various port projects failed to turn a profit, Chinese banks forced the island country into a 99-year lease on the port in Hambantota, with 70 percent ownership going to China (New York Times, 6/25).
This is classic imperialism in action, and U.S. bosses are worried. They are stipulating that any future IMF loans cannot  be used to pay off Pakistan’s debt to China. The inter-imperialist rivalry in Pakistan exposes how big powers use “legal” banking institutions to keep nations impoverished and strong-arm them to do their bidding.
With U.S. imperialism in decline and China accelerating its challenge, the storm clouds of global war are fast approaching. The various rulers know they need to win workers to nationalist ideas to fight that war. But the international working class cannot be fooled by nationalist rhetoric. Whether it takes the form of liberal democracy, state capitalism, or openly fascist authoritarianism, all forms of capitalism are dictatorships of the bosses. All of them exploit workers’ labor. All of them will slaughter millions to protect their profits. With the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party, workers must organize and unite to create a new society that serves the needs of our class.
As PL’ers in Pakistan recently declared: “Our local struggles have an impact on workers all over the world. Only international communist revolution under our international communist party can free the working class from the daily miseries of capitalism. Join us!”

This review contains no major spoilers. Submit your own analysis of the film to CHALLENGE.
The pro-revolutionary rapper-turned-director/writer Raymond Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You captures the madness and absurdity workers are forced to live in every day under capitalism. This is a must-see anti-capitalist movie filled with revolutionary potential and optimism that centers a Black worker-led multiracial cast fighting for a greater truth.
This trippy genre-breaking film is about a Black working-class anti-hero Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) who moves up the corporate telemarketing ladder by “sticking to the script” and using his “white voice.” Riley combines workplace comedy and a messy existential, political drama with a sci-fi dystopia not far from our own reality. The conclusion is nightmarishly poetic and a true show of multiracial unity and fightback—all done through real working-class characters that resonate with the masses.
There are so many ideas this film touches on, including: the racist nightmare you can’t wake up from when you choose your individual success over the collective; the billionaires that exploit workers in what is basically prison labor and hide it through their hippy New-Age-type maxims; how the logic of capitalism (drive for profit) inherently leads to churning human beings into workhorses; real characters who have contradictions and struggles; a fully-formed female character, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), who has a struggle between organizing and art; the art scene that’s doomed when isolated from class struggle; and the impossibility of making change by yourself. There is no way we can explore them all (that’s where you, dear reader, come in!)
A scab is the scum of the earth
It is very significant that the central action around which the story develops is a work stoppage. This event presents the main characters with the choices that force them to confront their main contradiction, one the director has posed as one of individualism versus collectivity.
Sorry to Bother You re-introduces the term “scab” into mass consciousness, and does so in a way that retains the utterly reprehensible character of the scab established over many decades of bitter class struggle, much of it communist-led. A work stoppage is posed as the only meaningful political intervention, voting as a strategy for real change is dismissed in a masterful minute of the film. Riley in an interview with the New York Times says,

All we’re taught is that those who are rich deserve to be rich because they worked harder than the rest of us or they’re smarter… [B]ut there are definitely very poor people who are very smart and work hard. It’s just that this system can only have a few people on the top. Yes, maybe you can make better choices and be the crab that gets out of the bucket — but that’ll be at the expense of all the other crabs in the bucket.
Also, can we recall a major film where the police are so irredeemably brutal, so unquestionably on the wrong side?  

 The main characters are all Black —Cassius and Detroit—but this is not a “Black film” that panders to identity politics. Rather, it is a film where, very intentionally, class politics eclipse race politics, and Black people take the lead in the class struggle. This is another choice that cuts against the grain of dominant bourgeois consciousness today.
Why would Hollywood back this?
We should ask the question, why does Hollywood promote this movie? Why now? The short answer is that capital wants to control everything, including anti-capitalism. This dynamic is not under Riley’s control.
Hollywood is an engine of ideological production and it does not practice “free speech.” Hollywood has a long history of smashing communists. The old communist movement, though mortally wounded by self-inflicted revisionism, presented a threat that nonetheless could not be tolerated.
At the moment, Riley is being treated differently. The big difference is that, for now, he has renounced the need for a revolutionary political party and hews more closely to the more (in the long term) harmless decentralized style of activism of the Occupy phenomenon. (Let’s not forget that Occupy was orchestrated by the CIA and its brutal crackdown was coordinated by the FBI.)
The bourgeoisie can try to smash its enemies or absorb them. The latter works just as well as the former from the perspective of capital.
It is not a knock on Riley to say big media network pushing for Sorry to Bother You in a major way maintain direct lines of communication with the State Department and Pentagon. Hollywood has a state-coordinated program to produce films that result in a more patriotic U.S. populace versed in a diverse set of war scenarios, both present and future.
To his credit, Riley is careful to shine a light on the depravity of the “art” scene both high and low in Sorry to Bother You. Take a look at what big media outlets bombards society with and even what “cultured” folks are willing to pay money for in the film and you are horrified by the moral rot of a society in the grips of growing fascism.
Though Riley has a long-term relationship with major media outlets and the art scene, his film directs a withering critique at those same institutions.
Liberal bosses want to control the narrative
The press that represents the main liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class is all over Riley. The New York Times published a long reverent piece of Riley and even did a special screening and a conversation with Riley and Lakeith Stanfield. Part of that conversation was about the “presence of labor” in film and the importance of art to reflect and advance reality:

NYT’s mouthpiece Logan Hill: A film that talks about labor, something we don’t talk a lot about in movies—
Riley: Which is weird because they are in our lives. They are in all of human being’s lives since the beginning of work but they are not in film. How much editing has there been in writers’ heads and producers’ to keep these issues out? How many noon-time cafe dates have you ever had? How many noon-time cafe dates are in films?

The bourgeoisie seems to want to absorb Riley. They aim to launch a very broad-based movement for a more inclusive imperialism, a more multicultural fascism. The Trump phenomenon has deeply alienated many people, some so greatly that for perhaps many millions, Sorry to Bother You will come as a breath of fresh air. These millions are up for grabs, and our Party is small.
‘You have to join with other people’
Sorry to Bother You is another chance for communists to make our case, to show how powerful our ideas can be. Boots Riley was, after all, raised by Progressive Labor Party. His pro-revolutionary ideas were forged in PLP. He was introduced to us at 14 and he participated at a Summer Project around organizing farm workers in Delano, California. His father Walter Riley was an auto-industrial organizer and leader in Detroit.
Short of calling for communism and joining the Party, this is THE film to watch and discuss with your friends, co-workers, family, and community members. As Riley said in an interview with Vox (6/6):

You’re not going to change any of this by yourself. You’re not going to change it by making a cute art statement, you’re not going to change it by just figuring out how to be there, to do something that gives you more power on your own. You have to join with other people and make a movement.

Does that inspire you to join a mass organization and present communist ideas in a way that’s accessible to everyday people? It sure inspired us.

CHICAGO, July 23—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined over 100 multiracial hospital workers downtown to protest racist and sexist working conditions promoted by the bosses’ healthcare industry. They led chants and blocked traffic, directly challenging the profit-hungry hospital bosses. This action planted seeds for future revolutionary communist struggle.
Workers organize to confront the bosses
The action was months in the making, organized through the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare local. Our main target was the downtown office of the Illinois Hospital Association (IHA), a powerful lobbying group of hospital bosses from all over the state. These bosses regularly meet to scheme on how to influence local government bosses and collectively agree upon the lowest standards of pay and benefits for hospital workers across the board. These mainly women workers make poverty wages under disgusting working conditions, despite serving and saving patients’ lives every day.
Comrades in working at a nearby hospital have been active in a campaign to unionize with our co-workers, and therefore have been connected with SEIU and were able to help plan this action. Workers decided to include an element of surprise against the IHA. Clearly visible were the hospital workers gathering in front of the IHA’s corporate office to hold a press conference; what the bosses didn’t expect were the workers and organizers on the edges of the lobby inside waiting to strike!
Black workers key to revolution
At the given signal, twenty hospital workers swarmed into the lobby and linked arms in a circle. A PL’er helped lead a mic check in the center of the circle, calling out the IHA for its racist, anti-worker attacks. Some Black women workers issued the collective demands of the hospital workers throughout the city area: a $15 per hour minimum wage, the right to unionize, dignity and respect on the job, and affordable health insurance from the bosses.
The scant building security was unprepared. They tried to break up the protest with intimidation, but the workers just locked arms tighter and chanted louder. The most inspirational moment came when dozens of hospital workers who had been standing outside spontaneously rushed the front doors to completely crowd the lobby and demonstrate working-class solidarity.
The demonstrators then spilled out into the street. They marched across the Adams Street bridge, temporarily blocking traffic. It ended at the nearby Presence Health System corporate office, which despite raking in millions in profits, was recently given a $5.5 million dollar handout in tax money from the racist city council (Chicago Sun-Times, 1/17). These are the same hospital systems that try to claim that they’re broke when workers ask for raises, new equipment, and more staffing!
A woman worker took to the bullhorn to detail the sexist working conditions that she faces while working for Presence Health, including intimidation from the bosses and wage freezes. Personal stories like these really drive home the rotten nature of the capitalist profit system.
Understanding reform limits and revolutionary change
Practically everyone who participated in the action came out of it feeling fired up. It’s important to analyze the balance of forces at play, and what signifies a lasting victory for the working class.
Even at their most militant and progressive, the role of trade unions under capitalism is to negotiate the terms of workers’ exploitation by the bosses, and to put a cap on any workers’ struggles that seek to directly challenge the existence of such an exploitative system. To achieve true workers’ power and an egalitarian society, the struggle needs a revolutionary mass movement led by the communist PLP to completely destroy the profit system.
What’s more, if the bosses were to provide a $15 per hour minimum wage, they would use their state power over the capitalist economy to regain those lost profits through charging more for our living essentials, such as housing, education, and medical care. In other words, what the bosses give up with one hand, they take away with the other.
We will continue to share ideas like these with our working-class sisters and brothers as we build the fight not only against our specific hospital bosses and the IHA, but also against the entire racist and sexist capitalist system. Black and Asian women hospital workers have been among some of the most active and outspoken organizers in the campaigns in which we’ve been involved, reinforcing our Party line that these sections of the working class have always represented a key revolutionary force.
Today, reform may have won. With struggle we will win our class to understand how workers create everything of value, and that communist revolution is the only way to ensure our needs are met.