November 9,Newark, NJ—150 protestors and supporters rallied outside of the Federal Building today, demanding the release of Jorge Chajón who has now been detained, for over a year now. At the tender age of thirteen, Jorge made the perilous trek from Guatemala to reunite with his family in New Jersey, accompanied by a caravan of 75 workers, fleeing the capitalist violence,that is all too pervasive in his homeland. For over a decade now this has been Jorge’s new home. Here, he graduated High School, and had it not been for his immigration status at the time, he would’ve attended Rutgers University, he later married, and recently became a father to a baby girl.
Despite sorting out his immigration status, and qualifying for DACA (Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals). Jorge’s status as a dreamer was brutally crushed when he was detained by ICE, costing him half a million dollars, and 15 months in detention facing inhumane treatment. Today at our demonstration. many blamed the Trump administration for ongoing fascist policies. Yet criminal separation of children from parents within the borders of the U.S is part and parcel of decades of systematic U.S sponsored oppression in Central America. Rulers here reap even more benefits by dividing immigrant from “citizen.”
The fear of deportation--of even more than the 2.5 millions of Obama’s regime--drives wages lower for “citizens”, too, who are pitted against immigrants for jobs. What Jorge’s experience shows us is that the capitalist bosses can only offer workers nightmares not dreams of a better life. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stands in solidarity with Jorge Chacón’s family but takes a further step into the future. We recognize that fighting for an egalitarian world has to combat policies like Reagan’s genocide in Guatemala of the ‘80’s that planted the seeds of violence Jorge and other workers in Central America fled, and continue to flee today.
The crowd today included members of Unitarian Universalist Faith Action, NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice, Make the Road NJ and members of  PLP. We held a banner displaying 2500 signatures demanding Jorge be released, and reunited with his wife and two young children. Unfortunately our rally resulted in no “justice ( the hearing is postponed to November 20). His previous hearing was scheduled for June 26th, but ICE officials failed to transport him to that hearing as well as to a previous hearing!
 Members of PLP and workers engaged in this fight say Enough to false promises! We vow to continue fighting alongside immigrant workers like Jorge, for a new system free from exploitation, that would ultimately smash the profit system and its deadly borders.

BROOKLYN, November 21—At this year’s Progressive Labor Party College Conference, a PL’er told Kingsborough Community College students and staff that “we lead by taking matters into our own hands” (see college article). This KCC contingent didn’t waste any time jumping back into action as soon as classes began on Monday! And since then we’ve been talking about the possibility of a communist future.
Here KCC students who attended the Conference describe what they did.
All for one, one for all
On Monday morning, a freshman student came to our group and explained her problem. She’s a CUNY Accelerated Study in Associates Program(ASAP) student like me, which means our tuition and books are covered. Because ASAP sends the checks to our home, this student didn’t find it strange when she received one. Then the college told her they had overpaid her for ASAP and placed her on academic hold, preventing her from registering for classes next semester.
I see students like her all the time, shy or unsure of how to stand up for themselves. At Kingsborough, some staff test your patience. They ignore you and only help when they absolutely have to.
First we went to Financial Aid. They tried to make it sound like it was the student’s fault for cashing the check. We asked to work out a payment plan; they said no. The money would have to be immediately repaid. The whole point of ASAP is to help students who don’t have money to pay for college. We struggle to pay for basic expenses. What students who need ASAP have hundreds of dollars lying around for whenever the college makes a mistake? Next we went to the Bursar’s office. We were told there was nothing they could do, and told me to mind my own business.
Standing up is our business
After it was clear we weren’t going anywhere, the staff member took a waiver form and said “ok fine, let’s just do this.” Just like that, they wrote it out for half of the amount owed!  While she still has to pay back half, why did we have to go through all that?
I asked them that, and I demanded to know how many other students this “mistake” had happened to? Will they all be receiving these special waivers? Why are academic holds placed on students, affecting their futures, when it’s the college’s mistake? And why is it our responsibility to account for the college’s money? They had no answer.
I didn’t just stand up because she’s my friend. I did it because this is wrong and more of us need to stand up. We discussed it with friends who read CHALLENGE and went to the conference. This student has to write a short essay as a part of the waiver deal. We talked about turning her short essay into an open letter protesting the college’s “mistakes,” and posting it around campus.
Always bring a crowd
On Thursday, a student’s expensive laptop charger went missing during lab. Her friend said she witnessed who took it, maybe by accident. No one wanted police involved, but the office in charge of the lab completely ignored the students’ request to look into it. We discussed it and eight students and faculty supported the student by walking back to the office and demanding that phone calls be made and the issue followed up. We said we’d return and follow up on the situation next week.
A young Caribbean student new, to communist ideas, and a PLP member had just been reading a CHALLENGE article together and talking about what it means to be a communist on a day to day. We take matters into our own hands - and when we do, we bring a crowd!
Small struggles prepare us for larger battles
None of these struggles will end the war in Yemen, lift the siege of Gaza, end racist administrators or racist police terror. Not today! However if we build a communist movement, brick by brick, and struggle by struggle united we can put an end to these evils.
From small skirmishes for waivers to mass struggles like improving public transportation, we’re training ourselves to become the leadership we need to one day run the entire world.

Wildfires are regularly occurring natural disasters whose effects on workers are worsened by the neglect of capitalism. Throughout the state of California, over one thousand workers are still missing and at least 80 have been found dead in the Camp Fire in Northern California and the Woolsey and Hill fires in Southern California. Over 11,000 homes, including the majority of the town of Paradise, have been destroyed and the fires have not been fully contained.
Under communism, we would organize the working class to plan in advance for and respond collectively to the damage and destruction that ensue from natural disasters. Instead of “everyone for themselves,” our motto would be “mobilize the masses to act together.” Most of all, we would preserve and protect our environment from exploitation for profit, and design scientific policies based on the interconnection between a viable natural environment and human progress.
A Paradise lost
While California boasts to be the richest state in the country, home to tech giants like Google and Facebook and the multimillionaires of Malibu, these blazes lay bare the inherent inequality of capitalism, especially in this state, as many poor workers have been reduced to refugee status in tent cities in Walmart parking lots much like our sisters and brothers of less developed countries. (New York Times 11/18).
Moreover, while the Woolsey fire turned around 100,000 acres into a smoldering hellscape with its fast-moving fire, one neighborhood in its path was saved. It’s a gated community with multimillion-dollar homes of celebrities like musician Kanye West who called on private firefighters to save their $60 million mansion and many of the other houses in their neighborhood (Huffington Post 11/15).
Mainly retired workers on fixed incomes lives in Paradise. Most of them never received evacuation orders; those who did found gridlock as they tried to flee (Los Angeles Times, 11/14). This is the essence of capitalism—leaving workers stranded to die. We see this time and time again around the world—the earthquake in Haiti (2010), the tsunami in the Indian Ocean (2004), hurricanes Katrina (2005), Harvey (2017) and Maria (2017) in the southern U.S. states and Puerto Rico.
For decades, workers had demanded safety
The Woolsey fire started near the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) and burned part of this nuclear waste contaminated site that has yet to be cleaned up (NBC News, 11/12). Workers who live near SSFL have been campaigning for decades for the government to clean up the site, not just because of the ongoing exposure to residents, but also because of the danger that a wildfire could pose by spreading hazardous chemicals in its smoke.
In the area surrounding the Camp Fire, workers have been wearing masks when outside to protect themselves. Despite the dangerous air quality, farm workers in Ventura County are forced to continue to work in the fields picking crops. Some farms even forced their workers to speed up the picking to avoid crops being damaged by the fires (LA Magazine, 11/15).
Workers douse fires for $2/day
For the other thousands of workers’ and their communities, these blazes were covered by over 9,000 firefighters including 1,500 incarcerated, mostly Black and Latin workers. These incarcerated firefighters risk their lives to make slave wages of two dollars a day, which only increases to $1 an hour when they are actively fighting fires (New York Times, 11/15). Even with the work experience, they cannot work as firefighters when they are released because of their criminal records.
Bosses don’t prioritize health of workers and earth
According to Cal Fire the causes of these fires have yet to be determined. Many people suspect that they were caused by power company equipment failures, which happened minutes before the start of each blaze. Southern California Edison is already facing a lawsuit stating that their negligence caused the Woolsey fire (Ventura County Star, 11/19). Pacific Gas and Electric also reported issues with two high voltage power lines in the area where the Camp Fire started. (Sacramento Bee, 11/18).
Nevertheless, while it is true that forest fires are a natural phenomenon, and while the California energy corporations might have started these fires, the magnitude and intensities of these fires represent a much larger problem that has been ongoing for generations. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) was created in the late 1800’s with the sole aim of managing timber production and was the first government agency that hired university-educated agronomists and forestry experts as opposed to other government bodies that hired based on patronage. However, after the Great Idaho Fire of 1910, which burned three million acres and killed at least 85 workers, fighting forest fires was added to its mission. Nevertheless, in spite of its best intentions, the proponents of scientific forestry didn’t understand the role of fires as serving an important function in maintaining the health of forests.
For instance, shade-intolerant trees such as ponderosa pines, lodge pole pines, and giant sequoias, require periodic fires to clear areas in which they can regenerate. Once fires were suppressed, these trees were overrun by trees like the highly flammable Douglas firs which turned forests into potential giant tinderboxes. Coupled with the Great Migration west, which resulted in larger communities in forest areas, these government policies led to more people living in areas vulnerable to wildfires. With this movement, insurance companies added pressure on the USFS to continue a bad practice in order to preserve their property.
Over time, the USFS began to take on multiple missions that were often in direct contradiction representing the competing interests of real estate developers, wealthy homeowners, insurance companies, timber interests, environmentalists and aspiring firefighters. As a result, the decline in the USFS’ effectiveness now mirrors the decay in bourgeois political institutions like the U.S. Congress (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014).
Burn capitalism, build communism
Under capitalism, the ruling class doesn’t care about whether housing is built safely in areas that are prone to fires, floods, hurricanes, or other natural disasters. During times of crisis, the working class unites to help each other evacuate and to help each other rebuild. Under communism, natural disasters would be exactly that—natural. Under the leadership of the working class, we will build infrastructure and maintain natural areas to lessen the damage to neighborhoods and destruction of workers’ lives.

As a migrant “caravan” makes its dangerous trek through Mexico, capitalist bosses worldwide continue to scapegoat immigrants for the failures of the profit system. With the dwindling group still hundreds of miles away from the nearest U.S. border, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to send 15,000 or more troops with permission to shoot (Military Times, 11/1). Two weeks earlier, when the migrants approached Mexico from Guatemala, Mexican cops in riot gear greeted them with pepper spray. As they suffer from hunger, illness, and drenching downpours, these Central American refugees must also fend off the bosses’ racism and rising fascism.   
In his vicious effort to divide workers, Trump followed up with a threat to end birthright citizenship in the U.S. Though it’s unlikely that the Racist-in-Chief will be able to deliver on this promise in the near future, the constant barrage of racist propaganda plays into the hands of all bosses. Whatever their internal disagreements, all capitalist rulers need to weaken working-class fightback. They all need super-profits from immigrant workers’ labor. They all promote rotten nationalist ideas.
Workers unite
Who is in the caravan? In the runup to the November 6 midterm elections, Trump played to his racist base. He warned of an “invasion” by gang members and “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners”—a conflation of racist lies about Latin and Muslim workers. The reality is very different, as the Washington Post (10/23) observed:
Women push babies in strollers next to clusters of teenage boys. At night, small families sleep on the ground next to middle-aged men smoking cigarettes. One man walks with his 3-month-old puppy named Muñeca on a red leash…. A little girl carries a stuffed koala on her head. A pregnant woman stops to take a break in the shade. A young couple kisses after a rainstorm. A 6-month-old girl wears a yellow dress that reads, “Little baby dancer.” A man wears a shirt he bought in Arizona, before being deported for the sixth time.
In contrast to the bosses’ relentless assault, the working class has rallied to the migrants’ cause. Poor Mexican workers have donated food, water, clothing, blankets. Churches and recreation centers have offered shelter for sleep. Volunteer nurses are treating their blistered feet and respiratory infections. “The responsibility of feeding, clothing and sheltering several thousand migrants has been embraced by the small Mexican towns along the route, with residents jumping into charity mode as if they are responding to a natural disaster” (Washington Post, 10/26).
Workers around the world are supporting our immigrant sisters and brothers. In February, a 63-year-old restaurant owner in Bosnia and Herzegovina shut down his small business to provide 80,000 free meals to Syrian refugees. “They’re people who are seeking refuge,” he says. “They want to work; they want to provide for their families just like us” (Al Jazeera, 10/23).
Many workers understand that national borders benefit only the bosses and the profit system’s exploitation. The working class has no borders!
Imperialism:  root cause of mass migrations
The caravan originated in Honduras on October 13, and soon attracted other migrants—seeking safety in numbers—from El Salvador and Guatemala. It takes a lot to move people to leave their homes. In this case, as noted by Pueblos sin Fronteras, the group that organized the caravan, the push came from “decades of political, economic and military intervention by the United States and of negligence, coups d’état, insecurity, corruption and impunity by Central America’s governments” (Politifact, 10/22).
In advanced finance capitalist nations, bosses are driven to expand beyond their borders to dominate markets, resources, and labor in other countries by force. This is what is known as imperialism, and it lies at the heart of the current crisis in Central America. The workers in this region have felt the imperialist boot on their neck for well over a century. In the absence of a mass working-class movement to challenge the blood-sucking imperialist bosses and the local rulers who sell out to them, the situation now is especially unbearable.
In 2009, a military coup in Honduras paved the way for the current fascist government of President Juan Orlando Hernández and skyrocketing murder and poverty rates. While U.S. President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, refused to formally recognize the coup, they maintained the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid. To this day, several hundred U.S. troops remain stationed at Soto Cano Air Base, under the pretense of “fighting the drug war” and providing “humanitarian aid” (The Conversation, 10/25).
Meanwhile, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), engineered by the U.S. bosses, has devastated economies and job prospects for workers in El Salvador and Guatemala. Since the passing of CAFTA in 2005, U.S. imports to Central America have increased by more than 80 percent, or nearly $15 billion dollars (Telesur, 3/1/16). This massive influx of U.S. agricultural goods has destroyed any chance of smaller domestic farmers to compete in the market. Millions of rural workers have been uprooted. They must migrate simply to survive.
Worldwide crisis of workers on the move
The migrant crisis isn’t limited to the Americas. All over the world, workers are escaping imperialist-driven civil wars, racist persecution, indiscriminate violence, and economic exploitation. The number of refugee workers worldwide exceeds 68 million, roughly the population of France (UNHCR, 5/15).
Among those recently caught up in the bosses’ lethal chaos are workers from Syria and West and Central Africa. The capitalist crisis has brought them to the doorstep of the European Union (EU). After initially “accepting” some of these workers, the European rulers quickly showed their racist colors. They essentially closed their borders while pressuring Middle Eastern and African countries to stop migrants en route (The Guardian, 7/7/17).
As the imperialist super-powers move toward a broader global conflict, and the global economic crisis intensifies, we can expect even more violent anti-immigrant racism. It will be up to the international working class—to fight back.
The fight of the workers has no racist borders!
The bosses’ assaults against migrant workers is an attack on our entire class. The profit system survives through exploitation and racist, anti-worker violence and terror. It cannot be reformed; it must be destroyed! PLP calls on the international working class to build a communist movement to seize state power from the capitalists. We call on workers everywhere to organize to support our migrant sisters and brothers with food, shelter, and safety. And to soldiers in the U.S. military: Refuse all orders to shoot our sisters and brothers!
All workers have fundamental common interests that unite them. Only a communist revolution led by a mass, international Progressive Labor Party can end this capitalist nightmare. We call on all workers, from Central America to Syria, from South Sudan to China, to help us build this fight. Join Progressive Labor Party!  We have a world to win.