HAITI,November 18—Every year on this day, we celebrate the Battle of Vertière, the last battle before the declaration of independence from France on Jan. 1, 1804. This year, however, was significantly different as tens of thousands of workers and students all across Haiti took to the streets to join the battle against massive corruption in the PetroCaribe scandal (where the bourgeoisie has pocketed billions of dollars meant to fund education, infrastructure, etc.). Demanding the ousting of Jovenel Moïse, in whom they have no confidence to find and punish the guilty, the masses barricaded the streets. Their bosses responded by sending out all of its armed might, including hooded thugs known as cagoulards, who murdered at least a dozen protesters.
Many understand that this battle is not easy to win because, just like exploitation, corruption is a disease in the lungs of the capitalist system, and to defeat the disease we have to get rid of the entire system itself. We have to  replace it with one that serves the interests of the working class.
In one provincial town, there were only a dozen Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends on the street some people were afraid to participate in the marches because the government is running a campaign of terror; in fact, there were more police than protesters. Yet in spite of police presence, our action was a success, and we continued the planned course. Although our numbers were small, we persisted with signs in hand, and we chanted without stopping. The message was clear: “the bourgeoisie and its state are anti-worker, anti-progress, and anti-well-being and they must go.”
The theft of the PetroCaribe funds is awakening Haitian workers and students. We can take advantage of this situation to strengthen our fight. The fight against corruption is a fight against capitalism.We are engaged in it! La lutte continue (the struggle continues)!

New York City, November 28—Our justice and peace coalition dramatically indicted mayor Bill deBlasio and the New York Police Department (NYPD) for Racist Murder!  We hosted a press conference organized by workers and Hawa Bah the mother of a police murder victim. In 2012 Bah’s desperate call to 911, for her mentally ill son Mohamed would prove deadly. That’s because when the police arrived, they brushed her aside, kicked in the door of her son’s apartment, and executed him with seven bullets! The movement for justice for Mohamed,whose life was senselessly snuffed out by the kkkops two years before of his thirtieth birthday, finally won a civil court victory after a relentless six year struggle.
Now de Blasio is appealing the judgment in order to reinforce a law permitting any cop to actually execute an already disabled victim if the cop deems to be in danger. This would further expand the fascist police terror the working class already experiences, and proves deBlasio to be just another craven, racist politician. It highlights that violence is the lifeblood, of this racist capitalist system, and it best protected by the leadership of liberal racists. Thus explaining that liberal politicians are the main agents for developing U.S. fascist oppression is one of the Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) major duties. We are now advancing this analysis by pointing out that deBlasio’s new “Crisis Prevention and Response Task Force” will simply serve as a safety valve to deflect  rising fury at police killings in the same way the Kerner Commission Report was meant to quell ghetto rebellions in the 1960s.
 Our project in the coming weeks is to bombard the Task Force with demands for fundamental change, including diverting funds from the NYPD in order to build up effective mental health treatment in every neighborhood, and to mandate that all first responders be trained mental health personnel NOT kkops . The speakers included clergy representing three congregations in three boroughs, and leaders of six other organizations, including the American Public Health Association.
A petition drive has been launched, both online andon paper. We will use this as an organizing tool to bring more and more anti-racists into action. Opportunities for struggle will increase in January when the Task Force presents its recommendations to the mayor.
Then during the rest of the winter and spring we will sharpen the fight as we expose how the liberal politicians will try to compromise with the NYPD’s open fascism.Most exciting is that our organizing effort includes men and women of all races.We also have an increasing opportunity to work with college-aged young people. One of them is now joining one of the churches the Party has been  building work in for years!The life and death  challenge for us is to share Challenge more widely and to redouble our efforts to build personal/political ties with the newer people  we are getting to know.  The test of this work’s success of course will be how we are able to swell our marching ranks come May Day. In the face of expanding fascism and war, communist revolution is the only solution!

SAN DIEGO, CA, November 14—Last month the working class won a victory against racism at the American Public Health Association (APHA) convention as we organized to pass a resolution condemning police violence as a public health problem.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends have attended APHA conventions for several decades, but for the last three years we have been involved with this young multiracial group  of public health workers and students to organize this fightback, and get this resoultion passed. PLP made it clear to our friends that the entire capitalist system and the cops who protect it must go.
These antiracists are committed to the idea of rejecting liberal reforms of the police such as body cameras, implicit bias training, or more Black and Latin cops. The group’s focus and the policy statement were about limiting the role of the police in workers’ lives and divesting from the police in favor of investing in communities.
Try try again
For two years, the APHA policy board rejected the resolution, always demanding this or that change, but really fearing to make an anti-police statement. Once they even suspended their own rules to delay a vote, which was not suprising, as the APHA leadership aims to function as an ally of the Democratic Party Neverthless we steadily escalated the struggle:leafleting, defending the resolution at open hearings, getting the support of many sections and holding demonstrations for the past two years.
At our action this year on the morning of the vote on the resolution we led chants, speeches, and testimonials from authors and organizers were made on the bullhorn.
A PLP member encouraged a young mother to talk about the need to support policies against racist violence internationally when countries like U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, target healthcare workers in war zones or when immigrant children are separated from their parents. Another comrade led chants and encouraged speakers to come forward.
This year the resolution organizers held a well-attended off-site conference, where the historical role of the police as agents of social control of the working class, especially Black and Latin workers, was illuminated. Ways to fight back and organize at the grass roots level were also discussed by a diverse panel of activists from California.
 A protracted political struggle
Working closely with this group led to sharp struggles and conversations about political ideas, such as explaining how racist super-exploitation hurts and divides all workers versus idea that white workers benefit from racism. We discussed the need to end capitalism, and strategies for operating within a liberal organization such as APHA.
Understanding that the liberals are a significant danger wasn’t difficult when the liberals were the ones who kept the policy statement from passing in years past. Most of the authors consider themselves police and prison abolitionists, but abolition of the police and prisons is a pipe dream under capitalism.  The police are the armed, violent henchmen of the ruling class, who will never allow the workers to control their own lives without police interference.  We need to talk about destroying capitalism and how to accomplish that.
During the convention, comrades also attended many sessions to learn and to express our views. As we do every year, we wrote a special Challenge supplement, focusing on why excellent health for all can only be achieved under communism.
This year we emphasized immigration and the migrant caravan. During the playing of the Star Spangled Banner at the opening session, we and our friends knelt in the aisle, to the delight of many onlookers. Comrades also held our annual Troublemakers’ Breakfast for our friends.
In other sessions about health inequities in the U.S. and around the world, most speakers and many audience members tended to support liberal democrats or social democrats as the solution.
We raised the necessity for revolution to overcome capitalist inequality and imminent war.
We also publicized related struggles, such as demanding that mental health workers rather than police respond to crises of the mentally ill in New York City or opposing forced confinement of homeless people with psychological problems in San Francisco.
This gathering, like that of many organizations with progressive memberships, provides an excellent forum for advancing revolutionary ideas. A protracted outlook and a plan to advance particular issues over several years provides a way to connect with organizers over a long period and to consistently raise, communist ideas. It’s a good way to struggle with workers and students to become communist revolutionaries.

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LETTER
Utilize resolution to fight violence against homeless & mentally ill workers in the Bay
I am from the Bay Area and was at the American Public Health Association (APHA) Conference this year. I participated in the struggle to pass the Police Violence resolution in APHA for three years.  Now that it has passed, I’ve started forcing the issue by using the resolution to oppose a local plan to confine and forcibly treat homeless people who are frequently sent for psych observation by the police, and whom authorities say refuse housing or treatment.  In fact, people wait months for just shelter beds or monthly mental health visits, which only assure medication compliance. The plan has no money  for improved housing or services.  City officials behind the plan are servants to real estate developers who only want clean streets and high profits.
I have only recently started working with Public-Health-Justice, the Bay Area group that pushed hard to get the Police Violence resolution passed at APHA and put together the off-site shadow conference.  I intend to become more active and involve others in the group.  Outrageous wealth and dire poverty stand side-by-side in San Francisco, and gentrification has driven thousands from their homes. Seventy percent of SF’s homeless once rented in the City.  A system that throws millions of potentially productive lives into the streets does not deserve to exist.

The bitter U.S. midterm elections exposed the all-out battle within the U.S. ruling class—and how far the two main factions may be willing to go as they prepare for fascism and war. Both sides are attacking the liberal democratic trappings of capitalist dictatorship, from the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court to the vote-counting process itself. President Donald Trump called the ballots in Florida “massively infected.” The rulers’ mainstream media are worrying that the U.S. has “arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war” (nationalreview.com, 7/31). The New York Times’ Paul Krugman warned of “a growing crisis of legitimacy for the U.S. political system” (11/8).
As U.S. bosses fight among themselves, China’s more united imperialist rulers are positioning themselves to overtake them economically and militarily, from Africa to Latin America. As the Times recently noted in a five-alarm package of articles on China: “An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union” (11/18). From aggressive tariffs (taxes on imports) to rising tensions around Taiwan to a near collision of rival warships in the South China Sea, the two superpowers are charting a collision course for global conflict.
    In periods of crisis, in order to close ranks against outside enemies while bringing workers at home to heel, the capitalists must discipline and unify their own class—by any means necessary. The midterm elections represented their latest clash over how best to keep their lethal profit system afloat. At some point, these disagreements will get bloodier.
Two parties, one capitalist nightmare
For workers, the stakes could not be higher. The U.S. bosses—Republicans or Democrats, open gutter racists or lying liberal misleaders—have nothing to offer us but racism, poverty, fascism, and imperialist war. Like fellow mass murderers George W. Bush and Barack Obama, or Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, they are two sides of the same nightmare. But in the absence of a world-wide communist movement, workers are vulnerable to the false ideology of voting as the road to social change. On November 6, the horrific racist policies of Trump and the Republikkkan Party led tens of millions to try to find something better.
Though only 47 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot, it still marked the highest turnout for a U.S. midterm since 1966 (npr.org, 11/8). There were 36 percent more voters under 30 than in 2014 (realclearpolitics.com, 11/8). Electoral enthusiasm spells progress for the bosses: “’When you have two Muslim-American women in Congress, suddenly every young Muslim-American woman sees that as a possibility,’ said Sayu Bhojwani, president of New American Leaders, an organization that helps immigrants run for public office” (NYT, 10/31). As the New York Times gloated, “Democracy did remarkably well last week” (11/14).
But there is no lesser evil under capitalism—only profit-driven evil. Capitalism cannot be reformed or voted into providing a decent life for workers. Only a communist revolution can stop racism, sexism, mass unemployment, and imperialist war. Only a communist society, run by and for workers, without money or profit, can serve the needs of the international working class.
There are no good bosses  
The international main wing of the U.S. ruling class is centered in finance capital and multinational corporations like JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil. It is predominantly represented by the Democratic Party, alongside billionaires like George Soros and Warren Buffett. The main wing derives much of its profit from multilateral trade and imperialist control over labor, markets, and cheap Middle Eastern oil. To defend their interests, these bosses need military alliances, and a mass, multiracial U.S. military—including immigrant troops—to fight an inevitable World War III. In general, they would prefer fascism with a liberal, “democratic” cast, to contain workers’ anger within the electoral system.  
The smaller, nationalist wing makes most of its money from domestically based industry. More focused on short-term profits, they oppose paying extra taxes to prepare the U.S. for a leading role in the next global war. Their strategy is to establish a “Fortress America”—a more contained, less ambitious world power. Backed by billionaires like the Koch and Mercer families, these bosses have used Trump and his white supremacist base to advance their agenda and withdraw from entangling, costly agreements like the Paris climate accord. They would use Nazi-style fascism as the way to discipline workers to accept whatever sacrifices are required as economic and political pressures intensify.
But while there are important differences among the bosses, and the political stooges who front for them, there are no good bosses. Ayanna Pressley, soon to become the first Black woman in Congress from Massachusetts, stumped for the arch-racist Hillary Clinton in 2016 (Boston Globe, 1/31). “Progressive” winning candidates like Ilhan Omar and the “fake “socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned on abolishing the gestapo-like Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Within a week of their election, they were already retracting their pledge (CBS News, 11/12). They know that the racist abuse of immigrants is fundamental to U.S. capitalism. Case in point: their political forebear, Obama, who deported more than 3 million men, women, and children.
Bosses’ infighting, racists’ terror
The main wing owns significantly more resources and grassroots support. Yet after the October confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, the domestic wing held all four centers of political power: the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. This unprecedented situation sparked vicious infighting. The bosses’ liberal democracy seemed off-balance, unstable, even unsustainable.
But after the “blue wave” that swung the House of Representatives back to the Democrats, and peeled off millions of white women and suburbanites who had backed Trump in 2016, it seems more likely that the main wing could recapture the White House and possibly the Senate in 2020. Post-Trump, the Republican Party might be reclaimed as the loyal opposition. Two-party electoral democracy might continue to serve the dominant imperialists’ purpose, at least for a while longer.
It’s another question entirely whether the domestic wing will be willing to take a back seat again—or whether Trump’s angry, racist base will continue to play by the rules. On November 9, a fervent Trump supporter named Cesar Sayoc was charged with mailing homemade bombs to 13 individuals or companies associated with the main wing, including Obama, Soros, and the TV network CNN. As Sayoc’s former lawyer said, Trump “welcomed all extremists, all outsiders, all outliers, and [Sayoc] felt that somebody was finally talking to him” (Washington Post, 10/29).
This was not an isolated case. Since the summer of 2015, when Trump’s presidential campaign took off, more than a dozen of his known backers have planned or committed acts of racist terror (theintercept.com, 10/27). More generally, the number of terror-related incidents in the U.S. have more than tripled since 2013:
In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks (NYT, 11/3).
In mid-November, in Pasco County, Florida, investigators “seized 110 illegal weapons including a rocket launcher and two functional pipe bombs … and indicted 39 members or associates of Florida white supremacist gangs” (wftv.com, 11/18).
Class struggle, not bosses’ struggles
Both wings of the ruling class want political loyalty from masses of workers, and will stop at nothing to get it. While Trump’s open racism is abhorrent, the main wing bosses are not the answer. For them, “fighting racism” is about neutralizing real struggle while building patriotism en route to inter-imperialist war.
Progressive Labor Party has a different plan.  We seek to organize sharp and principled anti-racist class struggle on the road to smashing capitalism. Our only ally in this fight is the international working class. Join us!