Gazan children continue to starve under genocidal conditions

World Health Organization, 7/27–Nearly one in five children under five in Gaza City is now acutely malnourished, as reported by Nutrition Cluster partners. Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM), which measures the percentage of children aged 6–59 months suffering from acute malnutrition, has tripled since June, making it the worst-hit area in the Gaza Strip. In Khan Younis and the Middle Area, rates have doubled in less than one month. These figures are likely an underestimation due to the severe access and security constraints preventing many families from reaching health facilities. So far in July, over 5000 children under five have already been admitted for outpatient treatment of malnutrition in just the first two weeks, 18% of them with Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM), the most life-threatening form. 

Egyptian student murdered by police prompts workers to fight back

MiddleEastEye, 7/28–A university student has been tortured to death inside an Egyptian police station, a rights group told Middle East Eye. The Egyptian Network for Human Rights (ENHR) said that 21-year-old Ayman Sabry Abdel Wahab died on Friday while in custody at the Belqas Police Station…following “a week of deadly torture”. Riots erupted in the aftermath of his arrest, with journalists sharing footage of protestors clashing with security forces outside Belqas court…so far in 2025, 15 prisoners had died in Egyptian custody, the majority of them due to medical negligence.

China continues competition with U.S. to control minerals

Financial Times, 7/6–Chinese mining acquisitions overseas have hit their highest level in more than a decade as companies race to secure the raw materials that underpin the global economy in the face of mounting geopolitical tension…The country’s huge demand for raw materials – it is the world’s largest consumer of most minerals – means its mining companies have a long history of investing overseas…Some military governments in Africa have sought to take control of Western mining assets and are demanding higher royalty payments. 

Bank CEO tells Democrats get with the program

The Hill, 7/11–JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Thursday knocked Democrats for pushing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies instead of “real world” solutions. “I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots”...“I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works…As Democrats look to rebuild after suffering a major defeat in 2024, the CEO suggested they lean away from candidates who resemble New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination. “He’s more of a Marxist than a socialist...the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world.”

Liberal think-tank report says it’s time to move beyond the illusion of a fair world

Foreign Affairs, July 2025–The liberal international order is dying, and its transatlantic backers are grieving. During the first Trump administration, many were in denial, but few are now. Some are angry, denouncing a villain—usually U.S. President Donald Trump—for having unnecessarily destroyed what they hold dear and vowing to step forward to bolster global institutions…Praying for its resurrection is not just naive; it is counterproductive. All of these responses misdiagnose the order’s deepest illness and thus prescribe the wrong remedy. The liberal international order’s crisis cannot be blamed on Trump’s peculiar brand of nihilistic politics…

Worshippers in DR Congo killed in mineral-rich region

BBC, 7/28–More than 40 people were killed in an attack by an Islamic State affiliate in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN and the military said. Most of them were worshippers taking part in a night vigil at a church in the town of Komanda when they were attacked by Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) fighters. Nine of those killed were children, the UN peacekeeping mission said… In 2021, DR Congo invited Ugandan troops into the country to help tackle the ADF. Attacks however still continue. Komanda is in DR Congo’s mineral-rich Ituri province, which has been fought over by various armed groups for many years.

With capitalism in deep trouble around the globe the bosses are responding with more vicious attacks on the working class. President Donald Trump’s One Big Billionaire’s Bill is an openly racist blueprint to scapegoat immigrant workers and force workers to pay for the rulers’ crisis. The bill moves the U.S. closer to full-blown fascism and an inevitable world war with its imperialist rivals. To balance tax cuts for the filthy rich, it will steal healthcare and food from tens of millions of workers and children. And it calls for billions of dollars for building a federal police force to discipline and intimidate the entire working class. 

The bill sharpens the fight between the domestically focused Small Fascists fronted by Trump and the Big Fascist finance capital wing that controls the Democrats. Both of these bitterly clashing factions need fascism to try to prop up their failing system. Both are cynically targeting immigrant workers to sow fear and division within our class—and to deflect the anger of U.S.-born workers away from the bosses and their brutal profit system. The two wings’ differences are rooted in where they make their money and in their strategies for war. Trump’s lavish tax cuts for fossil fuels and his spending on military hardware align with the Small Fascists’ plan to build a more isolated Fortress America. The Small Fascist wing wants to protect their interests with long-range missiles and bombers and a bigger navy, but without the even higher costs of massive overseas ground forces. The Big Fascists need a larger military with more soldiers on the ground to defend their global imperialist interests against a rising China (breakingdefense.com, 7/3).

But neither Trump nor the Big Fascists can solve the contradictions of capitalism or halt the decline of U.S. imperialism. Neither side will meet workers’ basic needs or safeguard our children’s future. The choice for our class is clear: to drift along with the tide of war and fascism, or to fight for the liberation of our class with communist revolution. 

Bosses turning ICE into national terror force

The bill Trump rammed through Congress allocates $170 billion for anti-immigration state terror over the next three and a half years and triples the outlay for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enough to hire 10,000 more masked gestapo goons. ICE now stands to receive more money than the rest of the federal policing, surveillance, and prison agencies combined (politifact.com, 7/8)—and more than the annual military budgets of Italy, Israel, or Brazil (newsweek.com, 7/2). According to Kristi Noem, Trump’s sadistic “homeland security” chief, the plan is to expand on the cages built by Obama and Biden and double the number of immigrant detention beds. The bosses’ latest concentration camp, a disease-ridden state facility stuck in the remote Florida Everglades, is officially named Alligator Alcatraz (miamiherald.com, 7/3).

Under pressure from Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top nazis, to meet a deportation goal of one million people per year, ICE has expanded its raids to courthouses and train stations, to orchards and carwashes and Home Depot parking lots. To sow maximum fear, they’re seizing documented and undocumented workers alike. Not even native-born U.S workers are safe (AILA, 1/29).  The ICE invasions of Los Angeles and more than a dozen other cities, backed by local kkkops and at times the National Guard, have turned civilian policing into a military operation, complete with armored vehicles and flashbang grenades. As anti-immigrant terror is normalized, the liberal bosses will use it for their own purposes as soon as they get the chance. As a former “border management” director under Biden observed, the new level of funding for immigration enforcement “likely changes it forever even if Democrats come into power” (New York Times, 7/12).

Regardless of the uniform they wear, more cops have never made us safer. There’s a long history of working-class resistance to the oppression of workers who’ve been brutalized by slavery, marked by yellow stars, forced to carry passbooks, or penned into camps or reservations or Bantustans. These fights have steeled us and prepared us for bigger battles. The courageous fightback against ICE is a glimpse of the power of antiracist, multiracial, working-class unity. The more we stand together, the stronger our class becomes. We rally around no politicians, no bosses, no flags but the red flag of communism! 

Imperialists clash over energy

The OBBB consolidates U.S. investment in fossil fuels over solar and wind. Not only does the bill enrich Trump’s billionaire backers in the coal and domestic oil industry with a $65 billion tax break, it decimates tax incentives for solar, wind and electric vehicles—and exposes the fragility of reforms like Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (msn.com, 7/10). Perhaps most important, it advances a strategy to eliminate U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources while leveraging other countries’ dependence on fossil fuels for geopolitical advantage. In short, it aims to prepare the U.S. for war.

Since World War II, the U.S. has dominated the globe by controlling the flow of oil and gas. In recent years, however, China has made huge strides in harnessing solar and wind power and creating batteries that can recharge an electric car in five minutes. As the price of renewables keeps dropping, the balance of power is shifting. Today, China exports about the same value in clean energy technology as the U.S. exports in fossil fuels (NYT, 6/30). 

Though the anti-Trump finance capitalists need to protect their multinational oil companies and keep other countries dependent on them, they also want to compete in clean energy and block China from total domination of production, markets, and supply chains. Trump’s bill cedes “the future of wind, solar, hydrogen and battery investment to China. . . . a stunning acquiescence” (Atlantic Council, 7/3). The stage is set for an open confrontation between the two superpowers. As China restricts the exports of critical rare earth metals and expands clean technology exports to Pakistan, South Africa, and Brazil, the U.S. has countered with steep tariffs and trade restrictions to force its allies to purchase U.S. oil and gas. Something’s got to give.

Workers foot the bill for fascism and war

As the fossil fuel bosses get huge handouts to poison and cook the atmosphere, over 10 million workers—many of them white rural workers who voted for Trump—will lose their Medicaid healthcare (NYT, 7/3). Millions more will lose the food stamps they need to feed their families. The callous strategy is to kick people off the rolls with mounds of paperwork and rigid new work requirements. As U.S. Senator Joni Ernst told her worried constituents, “We all are going to die” anyway. If that sounds inhuman, remember the sign that Hitler’s bureaucrats posted above the entrance to Auschwitz: “Work sets you free.” 

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party politicians and their ruling class masters have attacked the bill’s cuts to social services while shamelessly delighting in the prospect that the misery to be heaped upon workers will help the Democrats beat MAGA in the next elections (NYT, 7/3). 

Every day we see more clearly the disaster that is capitalism. To build a police state and serve their endless drive for profit, the bosses condemn workers and our children to sickness and starvation. As we organize to smash fascism, we must recognize that only communism–a system run by and for the world’s working class–can protect us from detention, deportation, death and despair. Join Progressive Labor Party! Join the fight for communism!

BROOKLYN, NY, July 10—Klan-in-Chief Donald Trump’s gestapo has detained over 57,000 members of our class, including Dylan Josue Lopez Contreras, who was the first New York City high school student kidnapped during a routine court check-in. In response, workers and students at a local school revived their antiracist efforts to defend undocumented youth. Initiated by a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) teacher and made into a reality through the unity of teachers and students, we are transforming fear into fightback. Building a culture of resistance under growing fascism requires persistence and imagination, and leaning on communist principles of solidarity and antiracism paves a path forward. 

Build art and solidarity

The week of May Day (International Workers Day), a communist teacher had organized an art build (a collectively-created art project in support of a cause) in a park near school. The idea was to create a large display of antiracism that can be used in and outside the school. Together, we decided on the wording and design. The banner read, “Education Has No Borders.” A few letters were painted in. 

Upon finding out about Dylan three weeks later, the PL’er transformed the back of their classroom into a fightback space. For the entirety of June, the banner was splayed out, along with information about who Dylan was, and a way to write him a letter. Students from all grades visited during lunch to paint, write, chat, and learn.  The plan is to display the banner in a prominent place next school year. 

Fight fear with fightback 

In the face of virulent racism, students need to witness, and join, staunch antiracism. A wave of struggle started after the fascist inauguration when a communist teacher and their co-worker circulated the school with meeting invitations that read, “In the face of deportations, what does it mean to protect students?”  Twenty workers attended—multiracial, mainly women, tenured and untenured. The PL’er began with a talk about rising fascism. They concluded with excerpts from a CHALLENGE editorial, titled, “Smash racist deportations and borders.” 

They also had an honest conversation about fear. A teacher added, “We’re conditioned to freeze or obey” and how it’s hard to think of what to do in the moment. Fear—a natural response to state terror—flourishes in isolation. While it may feel lonely, we are never alone; all members of our class share the same enemy and the same interest.

Building antiracism day by day

Over months, this Sanctuary Committee expanded to a campus-wide effort. While the quantity of people reduced, a core group formed. Here are some things they did:

• Distributed “smash all borders” stickers. 
• Wore solidarity buttons that read “stop deportations!”
• Posted Know Your Rights cards in multiple languages on a bulletin board.
• Displayed six non-negotiable values inside classrooms of at least ten teachers. One core value is “We (students, staff, and families) are united in standing up against deportations” (see photo).
• Raised money to host an immigrant-youth-led workshop on teaching educators about immigration law. 
• Planned multi-tiered responses if ICE was in the area, at the school gates, and inside the school with a warrant.  
• Composed a solidarity letter to parents, which was shut down by administration before distribution. 
• Created a hub of antiracist resources for educators, families, and students. 
• Connected to a citywide network of educators, laying groundwork for next school year.

Lessons from the struggle

To protect students, the Sanctuary Committee learned they needed to organize outside of the bosses’ channels, and they needed a network of trust among the entire campus. The biggest gap in this struggle is family organizing and building closer ties. The fight slowed once the fear of ICE raids shifted from school sites to neighborhoods.  

But, multiple teachers and students (former and current) became CHALLENGE readers, some (re)connected via Party study groups, a few attended citywide PLP events—including a recent fightback celebration (see next issue)—and many more confronted illusions of who we can rely on to keep us safe. The road to communism is long, but together, we will persist! 

Liberals built it, Trump expands it

The might of Trump’s modern slave patrol was built by his liberal predecessors. There’s an average of “14,700 deportations per month” now, but that pales in comparison to “ 36,000 in 2013, the year with the most deportations during the Obama administration” (CBS, 7/10). 
Both wings of the U.S. ruling class—the imperialist Big Fascists and the isolationist Small Fascists—use anti-immigrant racism to divide workers. The bosses need scapegoats when their system is in crisis (see editorial). 

We’re pausing our series on the groundbreaking 1975 Boston Summer for this issue to bring you the conclusion of our luminous four-part series on the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. 

In 1931, during the depths of the Great Depression, nine young Black men were falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a freight train in Scottsboro, Alabama. In response, the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) initiated and led a worldwide campaign involving millions of people to prevent their execution and demand their freedom. In Part III we learned about how the ILD (the legal arm of the CPUSA) sharpened their strategy to combat racism in the racist kkkourts largely by building a multiracial campaign and rejecting unity with reformists like the NCAA. In Part IV the CP abandons this strategy and dilutes the fight by forming a United Front against fascism.

We launch Part IV in the thick of our annual summer project and in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Boston’s 1975 Summer Project. That summer, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played a pivotal role in defeating Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR), the local Nazis and their racist political allies, and in stopping their campaigns of racist violence against young Black students who were being bused in an effort to desegregate Boston’s all-white schools. The movement mobilized working-class youth and community members in an unforgettable, militant struggle against gutter racist capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.

This series analyzes the roles of the two major defense strategies in the Scottsboro case: the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and the NAACP. We will examine how their differing strategies addressed the questions of mass protest, institutional racism, the fight for legal reforms, and the use of the courtroom as a site to elevate political consciousness and struggle.
Please stay tuned for Part II of the Boston ‘75 summer project series in the next issue of CHALLENGE available online and in print  July 31st. 

United front strategy undermines communist politics

Soon after the trial the defense strategy changed radically. The roots of this change were contained in a pronounced shift in the line of the Communist International in the summer of 1935. To fight the rise of worldwide fascism, the International said, it was necessary to make alliances with the organizational leadership of the Social Democrats, formerly considered to be “bourgeois reformists.” In the U.S., this meant such groups as the Socialist Party, the NAACP, and the Urban League.

The key to this “United Front Against Fascism” was common unity around “democracy” and against fascism. As this theory related to the practice of the Scottsboro case this meant forming a united front defense committee very different from the ILD. On the initiative of the ILD the Scottsboro Defense Committee (SDC) was formed in December 1935, consisting of the ILD, the League for Industrial Democracy (a Socialist Party-led group), the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Episcopal Federation for Social Service. On the initiative of Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party, the Reverend Allan Knight Chalmers was appointed chairman of the SDC. The new defense committee immediately ruled out mass demonstrations as contradictory to the freedom of the defendants.

The memorandum of agreement between the organizations gave the Executive Committee of the SDC, which consisted of one representative of each organization, full power to make decisions in publicity and hiring of counsel. No organization in the SDC could publicly criticize SDC policies.

The ILD pamphlet, Scottsboro: Shame of America, which attacked the racism in the case, was not republished.

The ILD agreed with this arrangement. Despite the ILD assessment that mass protest had saved the defendants from the electric chair and won significant legal reforms while involving millions of people in struggle and the raising of antiracist consciousness, it now indirectly accepted the argument that injecting radical politics into the case would only hurt the efforts of the SDC.

In effect, the ILD was succumbing to the politics of Chalmers, the NAACP, and others. Chalmers exercised substantial control over day-to-day decisions of the SDC. Chalmers' strategy was to form a local defense committee in Alabama composed of “distinguished good people” and “respectable” citizens of Alabama (i.e., newspaper editors, lawyers, ministers, businessmen, and college deans).

In an initial agreement between Chalmers and the ASC, it was stipulated that “control of the case by the communists makes acquittal impossible” and “Communist propaganda can be held up during the conduct of the case.”
The fact remains that by October 1937, because of the SDC strategy, Scottsboro was not the mass issue it had been from 1931 until 1935.

Conclusions from the Scottsboro battleground

The ILD proved in four years the strength of mass protest and the tremendous effect it had on the racist courts. Although the ILD in 1931-1935 was unable to free the defendants, they made tremendous inroads worldwide against the factors that caused the Scottsboro case to happen in the first place, racism, and economic exploitation. They alone saved the defendants from the electric chair. The total of the ILD work was a formidable display of legal and political brilliance which has since rarely been outshone.

The Scottsboro case played a key role in both attracting, recruiting, and giving leadership opportunities in the CP and the broader workers' movement of the time to Black workers, and particularly young and Black women workers, including the parents of the defendants themselves. This led to a qualitative change in the CP membership, from being a mostly white and European immigrant party, to being a genuine multiracial party.

The Scottsboro case also contributed to the rapid growth of the CP in the U.S. from a party of thousands to a party of tens of thousands. The Scottsboro case, along with all the other Depression-era struggles they were part of or led, put the CP on the “political map” in the U.S., particularly in the U.S. South.

One of the most exciting things about the Scottsboro case was that, after the initial conviction and sentencing to death of the Scottsboro Boys by the racist Jim Crow system, one of the original accusers, Ruby Bates–– who of course was white ––decided to tell the truth about what really happened. She admitted she had lied– there was no rape, only sex with white youth before the nine defendants got on the train.
This subjected her to vicious attacks by the entire legal and political establishment behind Jim Crow, which she withstood. She traveled to other countries with the Scottsboro parents, speaking at rallies, denouncing Jim Crow, and praising the Communists. She was a splendid example for unity between white and Black workers, especially as the Depression deepened and unemployment and evictions soared.

Finally, the two U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the Scottsboro case, Powell v. Alabama (on ineffective assistance of counsel) and Norris v. Alabama (on the systemically racist jury pool) were decided by a conservative-dominated Court, clearly to try and quell the mass outrage and mass movement that had built up around the case and helping the CP grow dramatically. This helps us undermine the argument that the solution to attacks on “civil rights” is to get more liberals in the U.S. Supreme Court, instead of seeing this case as an example of how the ruling class uses the Courts to serve its purposes and to maintain racism.

PLP carries antiracist torch of communist movement 

PLP stands on the shoulders of giants. Since our founding in 1965, we have always made the fight against racism in all its many forms key to our political program. We could not have taken that struggle to the point where it is now without the courageous and death-defying efforts of Black and white workers who fought Jim Crow in the 1930s. We continue to fight for the communist revolution which will eventually destroy racism and consign its sordid past to the dustbin of history.