COLOMBIA—In response to the delay in payment of salaries, 60 angry and courageous construction workers went on strike several months ago, demanding to get back stolen pay. Members of Progressive Labor Party have been working with these workers for more than a year, distributing the paper, discussing the situation of the working class, wage slavery and dialectical materialism. One member of PLP even participated in the activities by advising the workers and trying to prevent retaliations from the bosses.
In reaction to the strike, the bosses brought workers from other sites to sabotage the strike. The bosses tried to convince workers that he wasn’t responsible for the scabs and that “other factors” brought them in. Disgusted at his lies, the workers refused to believe him. They intensified their struggle by blocking the entrance to the site, not even letting in supplies. The member of PLP involved tried to protect workers from the bosses’ retaliation. Despite best efforts, the desperate bosses fired ten workers.
Lessons from the Strike
During the evaluation after the strike, we discussed the lessons of this action with the workers. We asked them why they didn’t take into account that the bosses might retaliate and fire workers. They responded that they did not think the bosses would respond so harshly when workers were simply demanding their hard-earned salaries. In reality, the bosses don’t care about stealing from workers. Bosses already steal from workers in order to make profits. The wages any workers receive are nothing compared to the profits that workers create for the bosses. Bosses are crooks by nature, so we can’t trust them to be nice when workers fight back.
We concluded that workers cannot trust capitalist laws, which were made to justify private property, not to defend working-class needs. We also cannot trust in pacifism, because the bosses will use violence whenever they need to in order to keep workers in line. We have to learn from this valuable experience and be more organized next time. Spontaneity cannot replace leadership and organization. We are still debating with six workers and circulating CHALLENGE at this site.
Whole Damn System Has Got to Go
While workers struggle to get paid their meager wages, Colombia’s productive sector is generating multimillions in profits due to the surge in construction and mining. None of those profits go to enrich the working class. They are going straight to the thick bank accounts of the bosses and rulers. Still worse, the bosses’ filthy mines ruin working-class neighborhoods. A UN report found that mining has taken severe tolls on “access to water, health, [and the] development of agricultural activity” and “a high rate of prostitution also occurs among young people, including high school students, and drug addiction, mainly among men” in towns where mines are created.
The Colombian government also doesn’t care about the workers affected by the expanding mining industry, most of whom come from the poorest parts of the country. President Juan Manuel Santos made mining one of the “motors” of his “Prosperity for All” economic policy, code for “Prosperity for All Capitalists.” The government is on the capitalists’ side, not the workers’.
As long as the capitalist system exists, labor accidents, premature deaths, wage theft and mass firings will continue to be an everydayoccurrence. The greedy ruling class has profited off workers’ misery and low salaries. This worksite where there are 160 workers working tirelessly for 60 hours a week is just one example of how the bosses make a profit. It is the job of PLP to organize with workers and raise revolutionary consciousness. Strikes are an important stepping stone in building working class confidence, but we must not stop there. We must abolish the entire capitalist system so that we can win working-class power.
PLP must keep building with workers in all industries and all countries, from construction workers in Colombia to transit workers in Chicago, so that we can build a revolutionary outlook amongst the international working class. We must organize so all of our actions are planned, taking into account our daily experiences, the conscience level and organization of the masses, the strength of the enemy, and our own strength.We can advance with confidence. We must make our revolutionary Party massive, as a necessary step for the communist revolution that will end the vileness of this criminal, racist, capitalist
system.

The U.S. bosses are contemplating another imperialist war on the Korean peninsula. Like all imperialists they don’t want the international working class knowing the real history of Korea. Like all imperialists they are terrified that if the workers in the U.S. and Korea knew about the “forgotten” Korean War, the workers would unite, turn the guns around, and shoot this imperialist system down.
Jeju. Koje. No Gun Ri. Daejeon. Sinchon. These are the names of some places in present-day North Korea that the international working class must never forget, alongside countless others where workers said “enough” to imperialist war and fought back.
Part of fighting to keep the memory and history of the working class of Korea alive is understanding how there came to be a “North” and “South” Korea in the first place.
Korea: From Feudalism to Fascism to Socialism
The Korean peninsula was a largely feudal kingdom until Japanese imperialists invaded in 1910. Korean workers and peasants were considered subhuman to the Japanese fascists. Japanese fascism meant Korean men grew food for the army in slave-like conditions, and Korean women were forced into sex slavery.
On August 15, 1945, the communist-led Soviet Red Army liberated the northern half of the Korean peninsula. The U.S. imperialists had just dropped atomic bombs on their Japanese imperialist rivals, and threatened the Red Army if they moved south.
What became “North” Korea literally changed overnight. On day one:

• “People’s Committees” led by women and youth, accountable to mass meetings in every village, were the new government.
• Landlords were arrested or driven out.
• Japanese fascist soldiers, police, Japanese-trained Korean police, government officials, and collaborators were thrown into their own prisons.
• All forms of sex slavery were abolished.
• Education, healthcare, childcare, housing, transportation, clothing, meaningful employment, leisure, access to culture, freedom of choice in relationships and marriage were guaranteed to all workers.
• Over the next several years, workers in the North built the foundations of socialism, modeled on the then-socialist Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, U.S. bosses kept the Japanese fascists in power in what became South Korea. They maintained every aspect of Japanese rule, including sex slavery, and opened segregated brothels for the U.S. military.
U.S. Imperialists Respond with Massacre
When workers in the South learned about the advances in the North through the Communist Party, they formed their own People’s Committees and rebelled. On Jeju island, an estimated 80 percent of the island’s 300,000 workers were communists, and in 1948 a rebellion erupted against the U.S. occupation. The U.S. burned the entire island in response.
Massacres like this occurred with greater frequency and desperation under U.S. imperialism. With a taste of workers’ power in the North, the working class refused to submit and dared to resist.
In 1950, the U.S. finally attempted outright invasion of the North. Demonstrations supporting the North erupted worldwide. The monstrous Korean war raged for three years and claimed millions of workers’ lives. The workers fought on—even under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the U.S. bosses—and showed the world the meaning of mass bravery.
Workers’ power was later reversed in North Korea, and PLP has analyzed the failures of socialism elsewhere.
The U.S. bosses call Korea “The Forgotten War” precisely because they hope it will be forgotten. But the working class of Korea will never be forgotten. PLP aspires to the legacy of the Korean workers’ commitment to revolution. Deserving that legacy means fighting onward to the final victory of communism. Our victory will be their vengeance.

Many in the U.S. believe Black and white workers live separately and attend separate schools because they want to live with “their own kind.” This belief couldn’t be further from the truth! Black, white, and immigrant workers in the U.S. live separately because of housing segregation, a history not taught in capitalist schools. Segregation means the deliberate racial separation the capitalist class enforces through their state—their government, laws, courts, schools, prisons, and racist police. The capitalist class relies on housing segregation to enable other types of segregation, which all promote racism and divisions within the working class.
Communists have a long history of leading antiracist struggles against segregation and for integration. Integration and multiracial unity build the international working-class unity we need to smash this racist, imperialist capitalist system with communist revolution!
The history of housing segregation—and the history of countless neighborhoods that workers in the U.S. live in today—dates back to the 1930s.
1930s: Red-Led Workers Fight Like Hell
During the depths of capitalism’s “Great Depression” of the 1930s, millions of U.S. workers were organized or directly influenced by the Communist Party. From California to New York to Alabama, from the cities to the fields, communism was a mass movement. Through organizing labor unions to defending the Scottsboro Boys to fighting the Ku Klux Klan and racist police terror, the Communist Party earned the respect of masses of Black, immigrant, and white workers.Communist-led rebellions and fightback terrified the U.S. capitalist class with revolution. Under liberal Democrat president Franklin Roosevelt and his “New Deal,” the bosses created social programs that provided some relief from the Depression’s devastation while preserving Jim Crow and the worst aspects of U.S. racism. In contrast with the multiracial unity of the Communist Party, the Federal Housing Authority mandated that newly established public housing “projects” across the U.S. were “whites-only.”
World War II and Korea’s Challenge
The U.S. entered World War II still in the midst of the Great Depression. To try to build U.S. nationalism for the war effort, the bosses desegregated parts of the Army. Black and white soldiers who fought Nazi fascism side-by-side returned battle-hardened, and many were committed anti-fascists who celebrated the communist-led Soviet Union’s leadership of the war.
Faced with segregation in housing back home in the U.S., they fought back. Black soldiers denied apartments in whites-only housing projects in New York demanded an end to the segregated public housing projects. At New York City’s largest public college campus, City College, Black and white returning veterans led a student strike against segregated dorms.
Soldiers who were drafted to the genocidal Korean War in 1950 bitterly opposed the U.S. One in three captured U.S. soldiers “actively supported” the communist-led Red Army of China and North Korea, causing the U.S. bosses to panic that “never before in history had so many captured Americans gone to the aid of the enemy” (NYT, 1/6/57).
Once again, an angry and united working class challenged the U.S. bosses’ racist and imperialist plans!
Bosses’ Response: “Suburbs”
The U.S. bosses’ response went further than it had in the 1930s: they adopted a plan to draw white workers into newly created “suburban” towns. Levittown, a “suburb” town outside of New York City, became the model for racist housing developments all around the country.“Bill Levitt [the developer of Levittown] only sold houses to white buyers, excluding African Americans…By 1953, the 70,000 people who lived in Levittown constituted the largest community in the United States with no black residents.Activist groups across the U.S. and even individuals within Levittown, who united under the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown, protested the Levitts’ racist policies....but [the courts] ruled that federal agencies were not responsible for preventing housing discrimination (ushistoryscene.com).”Suburbs made it possible for U.S. bosses to legally abolish Jim Crow segregation in schools in 1954, while on the other hand intensifying housing segregation. And even though schools were legally desegregated, the new suburbs allowed the creation of “de facto” segregated majority-white schools.
Nationalism and Racism are Inseparable
The U.S. capitalist class responded politically to the antiracist fightback for integration by pushing nationalism and anticommunism. In the bosses’ attempts to rewrite history, they painted communists as the enemy while throwing crumbs to the working class.“
In 1957, William and Daisy Myers, a black couple with young children, bought a house in Levittown…with little help from the local police to keep the mobs of angry racists from congregating outside their home day and night.White residents of Levittown and other still segregated communities across the country [used] “Americanism” as justification for racial exclusivity, and painted those who sought to enforce integration as…communist. Suburbs across America were closely intertwined with the preservation of the capitalist American way in the face of growing Soviet international influence (ushistoryscene.com).”
Capitalists created racism—racist divisions never existed within the working class in the first place. Segregation in any form is racist. Today, the U.S. bosses’ rule depends on convincing the working class that segregation is somehow natural, and communism is somehow unnatural.At one high school in Brooklyn where students and teachers fight for school integration and multiracial unity, the bosses desperately hope they can scare workers away by branding antiracists as “communists.” The Progressive Labor Party embraces our class’ proud history of fighting for racial integration! The capitalist class can’t rule without racism, and racism can’t be maintained without some forms of segregation. Segregation is intertwined with this capitalist system, and when workers are united once again in a mass PLP, communist revolution will destroy it!

Capitalism rules by both deception and force. This is apparent in the murder of Philando Castile, and the subsequent acquittal of the kkkop who killed him. On July 6, 2016, Diamond Reynolds live-streamed the moments directly after her boyfriend was shot multiple times by police officer Jeronimo Yanez. About eleven months later, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all three charges against Yanez.
A huge part of Yanez’s defense was the accusation that Philando was a drug user, but police reports and news made no mention of drug use. It was only later that, kkkop Yanez said, and implored jurors to believe, “I feared for my life...I thought...if he had the audacity to use marijuana...to just smoke in front of his five-year-old...if he could just do that and give her secondhand smoke and endanger her life, what did he care about me. I really felt scared.”
Progressive Labor Party has a very different view of what happened. Yanez—along with the Falcon Heights Police Department and the criminal justice system at large—is riding the coattails of an old bosses’ ploy: character assassination. As a grandson of Malcolm X wisely observed: “Character assassination is before the physical assassination, so one has to be made killable in the eyes of the public in order for their eventual murder to then be deemed justifiable.”
The vicious and racist ruling class began to make Philando Castile killable, along with all those who look like him, during the so-called War on Drugs, beginning in the 1970s. In reality, illegal drug use is approximately equal across all races, but Black and Latin workers are routinely
arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for drugs at much higher rates. So with the character, dignity, and humanity of Black workers being stripped away for decades, we are seeing widespread state-sanctioned carnage, rationalized by the bosses with racist criminalization.
Tawanda Jones, sister of Baltimore’s Tyrone West—murdered by a notorious plainclothes unit of the city’s kkkops says, “We won’t stop, can’t stop, ‘til killer cops are in cell blocks!” After he was beaten to death by more than 10 cops in July 2013, the claim was made that Tyrone had a package of drugs under one of his socks. They claimed this became evident when he was forced to sit on the curb, and his pants leg lifted.
The truth, however, is that Tyrone was wearing shorts, and his socks were just ankle height. As with Philando Castile, it was part of a smear campaign and character assassination.
Beware of the bosses’ character slander! Communism will fight racism at every level, just like the workers shut down the streets of St. Paul. Reject their lies! We need you to  join the fight for a society that has no use for racism or police murderers terrorizing the working class. We need you to fight for communism. Workers of the world unite!