Davis, CA, January 13—Several hundred students and workers at the University of California at Davis shut down a planned fascist rally featuring Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and drug price-gouger Martin Shkreli. This sharp confrontation was a small lesson on the role of the state (the government) in protecting fascists, their capitalist masters, and the whole capitalist system. The Progressive Labor Party wants to destroy this bosses’ government and put the working class in power. That’s communism!
Fascist Yiannopoulos was kicked off Twitter when he led the vile, racist harassment of “Ghostbusters” actress Leslie Jones. He also made a vicious, sexist attack on a transgender student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, leading to the student’s withdrawal from college. Shkreli raised the price of an anti-protozoal medication often used by HIV patients from $13.50 to $750, making money by killing people. Davis College Republicans, the sponsors of this event, claim the rally was about free speech. But there was no interest in debating serious issues, only in racist, sexist, anti-gay, anti-transgender harassment. This fascist event needed to be shut down—and it was.
The role of the bosses’ state in defending fascism was clear as a line of campus police separated the anti-fascist demonstrators from the building and auditorium where the rally was to be held. The cops were met with chants of “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” and “From here to Mexico, tear down walls!” Other chants targeted the fascism of Milo and Trump (but let off the hook the equally but less blatantly fascist Democrats). The strength of our action was the fierce chanting and militancy against these open fascists.
At 7 PM the administration announced that the event was cancelled. We didn’t believe them and continued our protest for more than 30 minutes—protesting for more than an hour and a half!
A Students for a Democratic Society chapter on campus had been organizing against the event for weeks. A local Black Lives Matter group, Students and Workers Ending Racist Violence (SWERV) brought large contingents to the action. SDS and SWERV members planned to stage some disruptions inside the auditorium where the rally was to be held and passed out whistles, finger puppets, signs, and banners.
At one point some protesters grabbed large plastic barricades that had been placed in front of the police line, pulling them into the demonstration. This had the effect of empowering others to be bolder in approaching and confronting the cops. Our PLP study group is reading Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Now we can combine theory with practice. We learn not just by reading and discussing, but also by doing. We invite workers and students everywhere to join the Progressive Labor Party in study groups, in fights against this sexist and racist system, and in the long struggle for a communist revolution!

OAKLAND, January 21—Progressive Labor Party and friends energized a passive crowd at the National Women’s March with our militant anti-capitalist chants and speeches. The turnout was 60,000 people marching without speeches or chants. We decided we had to turn it up. We chanted, “Hey Trump, you fascist, we’ll burn your house to ashes.”
While some appeared confused and apprehensive to join us, many joined in and asked for multiple copies of our 800 leaflets and copies of CHALLENGE. It is out job as communists to expose the whole system, not just trump.
Learning in the Streets
Our PLP contingent was a visual representation of worker unity across gender, race, and age. Two young women gave political leadership for the first time. Part of their apprehension to lead stemmed from the passive tone of the march. There were no apparent political demands or calls to action. When we tried to lead chants at first, only a few joined in. Some seemed upset that we were saying anything political because they said, “We were asked not to do that.”
The other PL comrades pushed the younger women to lead with confidence. What began as hesitation gave way to leading dozens of people with speeches and chants. When one young woman gave a speech that profits are the problem, and sexist and racist divisions only hurt us, many people cheered in agreement!
Friends helped distribute hundreds of CHALLENGEs and leaflets and lead discussions about police murders in the Bay Area. The antiracist, antisexist militancy of our communist contingent had a visible impact on the engagement and morale of the workers around us.
Democrats, Republics All the Same
It was clear the march brought out many for whom it was their first time in the streets, and who were devastated that Barack Obama would no longer be their Bomber-in-Chief. That’s why it’s important that PLP was struggling with people to understand that Obama and the Democrats have never been friends of the working class, and that the only way to defeat global fascism is by smashing capitalism.
While workers taking to the streets en masse for the first time provides the possibility for us to push their politics further to the left, it does not necessarily mean that this movement will spontaneously lead to workers fighting to smash capitalism. It is vital that PLP continues to build a Party and movement to take power and build the communist world that all workers deserve.
Marching in the streets demanding reproductive rights is important, but these demands are limited and will continue to lead us to the hamster wheel of reform unless we are building a worker led Progressive Labor Party to fight for state power.
Women & Men, Unite!
Capitalism needs sexism to divide and blind workers from the reality that we are all being exploited and oppressed by the same ruling class. The role of identity politics has been to exacerbate these divisions and to perpetuate the suppression of class-consciousness by making identity primary.
During the march a woman told a comrade, “The male race as always looked out for itself, so the female race needs to do the same and stick together.” Aside from historical and logical error in that statement, a fight that shuns half of our force is one we are guaranteed to lose. When we view ourselves as inherently different or opposed to an entire group of workers, we are doing the bosses’ work. Many of our friends were able to see how conflicting these politics were to our fight for a worker-led society.
As we continue to navigate our way through this dark night, the work of the Progressive Labor Party is essential to building worker’s confidence in their class brothers and sisters.

Donald Trump, the big-mouthed business tycoon, got elected U.S. president, running on the tide of discontent of the U.S. working class. He claimed during his campaign that the U.S. has been declining because China stole U.S. jobs. He promised that he would force U.S. companies to bring the jobs back. The first day in office, he claimed, he would label China as a manipulator of currency and threaten to put a 45 percent tariff on goods from China. Many workers in the U.S. were led to vote for him because of his tough words on China, trade and job issues.
In response to Donald Trump’s exclamations, David Barboza wrote an article in the New York Times (12/29/16): “How China Built ‘iPhone City’ with Billions in Perks for Apple’s Partner”, accusing China’s government of subsidizing Foxconn to locate its manufacturing facilities in Zhengzhou City, the capital of Henan Province. Journalists like Barboza appear to be preparing public opinion for Trump’s planned policy of getting tough with China.
But, in fact, the Chinese did not steal the jobs from the U.S. It was the U.S. multinational companies that moved jobs to China to avoid paying workers the fair wages and benefits they deserved. Fueled by their racist drive for profit, they came to China to exploit the labor force there, paying a fraction of what they would have to pay workers in the U.S..
What is missing from mainstream media reports is any acknowledgement of how it happens that Foxconn can find 350,000 well educated, healthy and disciplined workers to produce the smartphones that make Apple one of the world’s richest companies. Research in neighboring Shandong Province documented the increase in high schools in Jimu County from 1 to 87 (for a mostly rural population of 900,000) between 1966 and 1976. Without similar developments in Hunan Province during that 10 year period – the so-called “lost decade” of the Cultural Revolution – investors would never have found this huge population of trained workers now producing 350 cell phones per minute in “iPhone City.”
The willingness of new industrial workers from agrarian backgrounds to be overworked and underpaid (a “disciplined workforce”) largely rests on the residual prestige the Chinese Communist Party won during its socialist period prior to market reforms. But there have been increasing numbers of labor disturbances in China. The annual number of “mass incidents” increased from 10,000 in 1993 to 180,000 in 2010 (see graph 1), suggesting that this source of multinational profits may have its limits. Chinese workers more and more recognize that a capitalist exploiter is a capitalist exploiter, no matter what they call themselves.
Progressive Labor Party applauds the Chinese working class for its huge and growing fightback in the face of intense exploitation. Ruthless capitalist exploitation of Chinese workers enriches both U.S.-based multinational capitalists and Chinese capitalists, some of whom are members of the so-called “Communist” party of China. In 2015, the number of billionaires in China—now over 600—surpassed the number in the United States (Forbes, 2016). Meanwhile, class struggle in the U.S., at least in the form of major strikes, has been on the decline for decades, having dropped most dramatically in the early 1980s (see graph 2).
Workers all over the world want to live a decent life, free from abuse by a boss. We want to be able to raise our children and see them healthy, well cared for and well educated, not enslaved by debt or by a sweatshop boss. We want a world without racism and sexism. We don’t want to fight and die in the bosses’ profit wars. Capitalism—either the declining U.S. version or the rising Chinese version—is driven by the iron laws of the marketplace: make more profit than your competitor or die. Control markets and resources – at gunpoint where needed – or go down. Profit margins are directly tied to the rate of exploitation of the workers in whatever country they live.
These facts underlie the PLP’s strategy of one working class, one party, worldwide. Workers of the world need communist revolution to take power and run the world for our class, not for capitalist profit. Our party needs to grow explosively in every country of the world, including China, the world’s workshop and home of the greatest number of strikes today. Workers of the world, unite!

Département du Sud, Haiti—January 1 is an important date on the Haitian calendar; it not only marked the beginning of a new year, but also liberation from chattel slavery and the formation of the world’s first Black republic. Traditionally, workers in Haiti mark the day by eating pumpkin soup—soup joumou, a thick stew with meat and lots of vegetables—recalling that under slavery, they were prohibited from enjoying this soup (it was reserved only for the slave masters and other exploiters).
This year, however, because of the ravages of Hurricane Matthew last October, not only did over 1,000 Haitian workers die, but the pumpkin crop was virtually destroyed in the three southern departments affected. Thus pumpkins were rare, expensive, and unaffordable for most workers in the region.
So another tradition was born. In one provincial town, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) organized a collective “solidarity soup.” “Solidarity” because we know from our international history that the unity of our class is fundamental to our liberation and emancipation. The slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue gave humanity an example of unity in the 18th century by battling one of the greatest armies of imperialism to gain their liberty from slavery. In fact, before mobilizing armed fighters, solidarity of purpose was the cement that bound them in common struggle.
Fightback takes many forms. For our first “solidarity soup,” we solicited financial and other support from our base, both locally and internationally, bought pumpkins where available, and served soup to hundreds of workers and their children. Along with the soup, we used the opportunity to discuss why Haitian workers face the conditions they do: rampant poverty and disease, unclean water, 83 percent unemployment, occupation by a United Nations military force, death and destruction by “unnatural” disasters. Capitalism, a system of profit for the few and misery for the masses, is squarely to blame.
 “Solidarity soup” was a successful event. The participants remarked that they were served with dignity and respect. We served the people both literally and figuratively, feeding their bodies and arming them with communist consciousness about the source of their problems and how to escape the hell of capitalism and imperialism with communist revolution.
For the working class, internal solidarity and solidarity with our communist party is key. Capitalism pushes individualism, which is the negation of solidarity. Yet, while the bosses compete with one another for markets and power, they are united as a class to defend their own interests. They unite to sow divisions inside the working class, using a three-pronged weapon of racism, sexism and nationalism. Our task is to defeat those ideas ideologically and in action, build our mutual confidence, and put the working class in the driver’s seat of humanity.