Park Slope Collegiate, a public secondary school that has led the fight against segregation and racist inequalities in the Department of Education, is now under assault by a DoE investigation of “Communist organizing” (New York Times, 5/4). The DoE has targeted anti-racist Principal Bloomberg as a member of Progressive Labor Party (which she isn’t) and accused her of recruiting students to PLP (which she hasn’t).
But the school bosses’ baseless charges are rooted in an antiracist history. Going back to the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s and through the Civil Rights movement and beyond, communists have led the multiracial fightback against racism in the streets, the schools and universities, the workplace, and the military.
The DoE’s attack on Park Slope Collegiate echoes the intimidation tactics of 1950s’-era communist-hunter Joseph McCarthy. Two of New York City’s most powerful liberal bosses—Mayor Bill De Blasio and DoE Chancellor Carmen Farina—are counting on anti-communism to frighten and silence anyone who stands up against their racist policies, which consign the vast majority of Black and Latin children—approximately 75 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school student population—to a segregated, second-class education. In so doing, these bosses have yet again exposed themselves as the shameless racists they are.
The Struggle at John Jay Campus
Park Slope Collegiate (PSC) is one of four schools on the long-neglected John Jay Campus, which is located in the heart of a wealthy white neighborhood in Brooklyn. Three of the schools enroll predominantly Black and Latin students from low-income families outside the neighborhood. In 2010, the DoE announced plans to install the fourth school, Millennium Brooklyn, a selective, significantly white high school that would be given more funding and resources per student than its co-located schools. Principal Bloomberg led PSC’s effort to organize against this elitist, racist plan, and proposed instead that white students in the neighborhood be integrated into the existing schools. But the struggle failed, and Millennium Brooklyn opened in 2011—one more piece in “one of [the] most deeply segregated school systems in the nation” in “polychromatic” New York City (NYT, 5/17).
Since then, the principal and a group of anti-racist teachers and parents have led a multiracial fightback to demand the removal of metal detectors from the campus, to defend students against abuse by school security agents and the New York Police Department, and to challenge the cops who herded students out of the neighborhood at dismissal each day. PL teachers are proud to have played a leading role in the many battles against racism the PSC community has fought.

Most recently, in February, Principal Bloomberg sent the DoE a complaint that documented racist inequalities in the city’s funding for varsity sports teams. The John Jay Campus sports program—which serves 1,859 students, more than 90 percent of them Black or Latin—was given only nine teams. But the Millennium sports program received 17 teams for only 1,261 students—including 641 students at Millennium High School in Manhattan, which uses John Jay’s gym facilities and is only 25 percent Black and Latin.
Two weeks after the principal made her complaint, the DoE’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) arrived at PSC and announced it was investigating “communist activities taking place at the school.”  Principal Bloomberg filed a lawsuit in federal court, charging that her civil rights and right to free speech had been violated. But “rights” under capitalism are protected only when they serve the bosses’ interests. On May 16, the OSI Gestapo invaded the school unannounced and interrogated students as young as 13, pressuring them to reveal their parents’ and teachers’ political beliefs and activities. The investigators’ witch-hunt was aided by the district superintendent and a ruthless guidance counselor. She escorted the students to her office—which had been commandeered as the interrogation room (PSC Pulse, PTA newsletter, May 16).
Why the Bosses Need Segregation
John Jay Campus is a microcosm of the racist inequalities in school systems throughout the U.S. What makes PSC different is that students, parents, and teachers at this school are fighting back.
Why is this fight such a threat to the DoE? The bosses cannot stand multiracial fightback in any form. They need to preserve school segregation to prepare Black, Latin, and immigrant children for the racism that awaits them on the job or in the military—or the prison work force. The super-exploitation of Black and Latin workers is analogous to the super-deprivation of Black and Latin students. To see Black, Latin, and white students rebelling together against racist conditions puts the bosses in a panic.  
Under Capitalism, Real Estate Trumps Learning
Public schools today are more segregated than they were in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, acknowledged that “separate” could never be equal. New York State’s schools are the most segregated in the U.S. (https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu, 2009).
De Blasio and Farina are doing their part to uphold the state’s ranking by perpetuating racist “choice” policies for secondary schools and defending elementary school zones that deliberately segregate students in the service of home real estate values for the middle class and the affluent.  As the mayor said, “You have to also respect families who have made a decision to live in a certain area oftentimes because of a specific school” (Chalkbeat, 11/6/2015). And more recently: “We cannot change the basic reality of housing in New York City” (NYT, 5/11). De Blasio, who is running for reelection this fall, relies on millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the real estate sector.
Only Option: More Fightback!
Progressive Labor Party salutes the inspirational, antiracist fightback—at John Jay Campus and everywhere workers and students are daring to fight back. In attacking Park Slope Collegiate, the bosses are exposing their true racist colors. But in fighting racism, teachers and students are learning invaluable working-class lessons. They’re also boosting workers’ confidence in our ability to resist, organize, and survive in a period of rising fascism.

History has segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
Below is part I of a series aimed at reuniting the history of communism with antiracism. Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, excerpted throughout this piece, is a good supplement for those who would like to find out more.

In the years after slavery, Southern U.S. bosses used racist terror in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, police beatings, and lynching, legal and extralegal, to keep Black workers oppressed and as a source of cheap labor to drive down the wages of all workers Black and white.
Robin D.G. Kelley in Hammer and Hoe described it as the following:

White supremacist groups [including the KKK] organized by some of [Birmingham’s] leading citizens…enjoyed huge numerical and financial support…Klansmen [through intimidation and violence] sought to cleanse their city of Jews, Catholics, labor agitators, and recalcitrant African-Americans who refused to accept “their place” in the hierarchy of race

The Southern bosses police and kangaroo courts (sham legal proceedings) were the heart of this injustice system.

Fear [of the Southern injustice system] came from the knowledge that the color of your skin made you a suspect—a suspect that looked just like the prime suspect—every time the police were looking for a black man. (WNYC 2/1/2013)

When workers united and fought back against this terror, the bosses often used racism and anti-communism to try to divide the working class.
The Scottsboro Boys
On March 25, 1931 nine Black teenagers age 13 to 19 were pulled from a freight car near Paint Rock, Alabama and charged with raping two white women. Within three days, the young men were tried by an all-white jury, convicted and sentenced to death. A lynch mob gathered at the jail in Scottsboro, demanding the young men be turned over to the racist rioters.
Courthouse lynchings like this were common for Black workers and youth living in the Jim Crow south. So common in fact that the local branch of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the other civic organizations, focused on helping small business owners, didn’t even respond to the case.
Communists, First Responders
One organization did respond, the International Labor Defense (ILD), a workers’ defense organization initiated by the Communist Party. ILD was made up of communist and non-communist workers, Black and white. Within days of the sham trial, the ILD set up a defense committee, obtained lawyers for the nine young men on death row and built the defense of the Scottsboro Boys into a worldwide cause that saved them from the electric chair and after a many years-long battle eventually won their freedom.
The fight to defend the Scottsboro Boys involved several thousands of people around the world. The ILD organized mass meetings where family members of the wrongly convicted young men would speak alongside members of the ILD.
Bosses Counter with Terror
The Southern bosses were terrified of this multiracial movement against lynchings and responded with a campaign of terror against Black and white supporters of the campaign. Along with the physical terror carried out by the Klan, a campaign of anti-communism was launched to scare workers away from the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys.
The anticommunist campaign took several forms. The kkkops arrested people, and beat people suspected of being supporters of the ILD. Black and white women were arrested and threatened with rape by the police. The bosses’ press spread anti-communism.

The Birmingham Labor Advocate warned its readers to beware of outside agitators who, “under the cover of darkness,” disseminated ”Red literature preaching free love [and] inter marriage. (Hammer and Hoe)

The local NAACP was reluctant to help defend the working-class youth. But a whole year after the arrests, one of the women accusers of rape came forward and admitted there was no rape and that the police had forced her into lying. This created an upsurge in anger about the case and the NAACP finally joined the ILD in the campaign to free the young men.
In spite of the beatings, jailings and threats, the ILD kept both the mass campaign and the legal fight going by organizing meetings, rallies and raising money to pay legal fees and other expenses for the families of the Scottsboro Boys.

The All-Southern Scottsboro and Civil Rights Conference was one such mass meeting that went on in spite of Klan and police intimidation. In the days prior to the conference Klansmen organized a twenty-car motorcade through the Black community and distributed leaflets that read “Communism Will Not Be Tolerated.”
 Nonetheless some three hundred Blacks and fifty whites packed the meeting room and between 500 and 1000 were turned away because of lack of space and by the military presence of the police who stationed eighty cops equipped with three machine guns in posts across the street from the hall.
…As Hosea Hudson [a Black communist and labour leader in Deep South] recalled many stood up to the intimidation.  “[People] just walked all under them rifles, just went on in the door and on to the meeting.” (Hammer and Hoe)

The fight to free the railroaded young men took many years. Charges were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants. Sentences for the rest ranged from 75 years to death. All but two served prison sentences; all were free by 1946.
You Cannot Kill the Working Class
Angelo Herndon, a Black communist labour organizer, summed up the significance of the struggle in his essay entitled “You Cannot Kill the Working Class.”

If you know the South as I do, you know what the Scottsboro case means. Here were the landlords in their fine plantation homes, and the big white bosses in their city mansions, and the whole brutal force of [private security] and police who do their bidding. There they sat, smug and self-satisfied, and oh, so sure that nothing could ever interfere with them and their ways. For all time they would be able to sweat and cheat the [Black] people, and jail and frame and lynch and shoot them, as they pleased.
And all of a sudden someone laid a hand on their arm and said: “STOP.” It was a great big’ hand, a powerful hand, the hand of the workers. The bosses were shocked and horrified and scared. I know that. And I know also that after the fight began for the Scottsboro boys, every [Black] worker in mill or mine, every [Black] cropper on the Black Belt plantations, breathed a little easier and held his head a little higher.

HAITI, May 1—On May Day in Haiti, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continued to denounce capitalism while raising the consciousness of the masses about the conditions of workers and the atrocious exploitation and domination by the bosses. In one small city, comrades organized a day of activities, including a conference-debate during which we presented the history of May Day and the situation of the working class in this region; a dinner and cultural evening of militant song and poetry. Other comrades participated in a mass march of workers in the capital city, Port-au-Prince.
Prior to May Day, comrades had invited a local labor leader to participate in a regular weekly local radio show that they host, to speak about the May Day march. Our comrades put the emphasis on class struggle, ending capitalism and fighting for a just, worker-led egalitarian society—communism.
Every day our Party is creating confidence in the masses. More and more, those close to us are becoming class conscious and coming closer to the struggle that we fight for. In order to organize our May Day activities in the town, we relied on local and international comrades for financial support. Workers and students living abroad and in Haiti contributed what they could to make the day a success. Despite the threat of rain (there had been serious flooding in this town for the week prior to May Day), close to 100 people participated enthusiastically in the day’s activities, which lasted seven hours.
The speakers denounced the attempts of the ruling class to expropriate May Day from the workers. The bosses try to make the day one of mindless festivity, food and fairs. They call it the Day of Agriculture and Work, but several speakers noted what a lie that was, since Haiti has neither prospering agriculture—there is instead systematic deforestation and total lack of support for small farmers and farm-workers—nor work—the Haitian working class faces an unemployment rate of 83 percent, with most people involved in the below-subsistence level informal sector and the 7 percent employed in the private sector rarely earning the $5/day minimum wage (the remaining 11 percent are in government jobs).
Despite a mass struggle since 2009 for an increase in the daily minimum wage—now $5/day—workers have been suffering. Despite election box approval, the bosses, the State and the Council on Salary have continued to lie and deceive. Horrible, crushing inflation has not changed the rulers’ minds; to the contrary, there have been firings in the factories for those who dare to complain. And that’s only among the formally employed: for homemakers, market sellers, drivers, cultivators and sharecroppers, things are maybe even worse. For teachers and office workers, the situation is also precarious, especially given the devaluation of the Haitian gourde (prior to the 2010 earthquake, there were 40 gourdes to the U.S. dollar; today it’s 68.5). A high school teacher working 6 hours a day earns less than $160 (all wages cited in $US)/month (and often is owed at least 6 months wages); a bank cashier earns about $245/month; women house servants earn between $28–$80/month. So-called “free workers,” that is, those without a fixed job in the informal economy can earn $3–5/day; a mason can earn $7.8–$11.70 for a day’s labor. These workers have no benefits, unemployment nor health insurance and can be fired at will by the bosses.
Other speakers stated emphatically that this was all really just another form of slavery. Many examples were given, including newspaper reports that in some U.S.-owned businesses, workers face such intense speed-up that they have to wear diapers because the bosses don’t allow them time to take care of their needs; there are factories in the free trade zones that don’t give workers enough time to have a meal during the work day. It is clear that the capitalist system tries to dehumanize workers, who create all value and profits for the bosses. “We can’t accept these conditions!” several workers exclaimed. “We have to fight back against them and the bosses who profit!”
One leader of a local women’s group, with whom we have been working since our forum for International Working Women’s Day last March 8, noted that women must take part in the class struggle of the working class. Several participants made clear that they understood that the working class is exploited and dominated everywhere in the world and that workers must get together to fight for their liberation.
In order to end once and for all the system of exploitation and domination that is capitalism, PLP raises class awareness in several countries at the present time. We are growing, despite the problems that workers face in this dark night. It shall have its end. PLP comrades are respected and they have the confidence of many workers. Workers everywhere, join us for communist revolution.

MEXICO CITY, MAY 1—A group of 45 comrades, sympathizers, and friends of Progressive Labor Party carried the red flags of communism in the May 1st march in Mexico City. Our revolutionary slogans and chants were heard by thousands of workers. We distributed 1,500 pamphlets of Challenge. In Oaxaca, another group of 12 comrades distributed 3,000 pamphlets in the march organized by the Teacher’s Union Local Section 22.
History has taught us that workers can only confront imperialist war if we fight to get rid of the capitalist system that creates crisis, war, and fascism. That teaching is the heritage that the Russian and Chinese workers left us when they took power during WWI and WWII, respectively. We shouldn’t forget that in order to put an end to both wars, it was essential that workers took power into their own hands.
The recent attacks by the United States on Syria and Afghanistan, much like the mobilization of aircraft carriers to the Korean Peninsula, is a signal of war against the imperialists of Russia and China, their true targets. It’s a sign that the bosses are, with each action, closer to initiating a third world war, in which they will use both conventional and nuclear weapons and spill the blood of millions of workers, all for the sake of their profits. Under this reality, capitalism confirms its devastating and criminal essence.
Within the shadow of imperialist war, the ruling class of Mexico can only offer an electoral circus with increasing fascism. Workers must be very clear that bourgeois “democracy” is a dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class—a dictatorship of a few privileged parasites who exploit that great majority of impoverished workers.
Electoral democracy is a fraud. This sham tries to trick the working class into thinking they have the “freedom” to choose their rulers, but the reality is that it only serves to legitimize the new oppressors and exploiters. In no place or moment in history has the working class achieved its liberation by means of elections. The working class can  only liberate itself when it organizes itself into a revolutionary party to take power through force and establish a dictatorship of the working class.
In the electoral process, the only ones who can participate are those who have millions in resources at their disposal and are willing to represent those who finance them. During their term they have to work to comply with their commitments to those who carried them into power.
All of the electoral parties represent the interests of some faction of the capitalist class, allied or subordinate to imperialist interests, principally those of the US. No electoral party actually represents the workers. The working class needs its own party to achieve a change from the capitalist economic, political and social system – a transformation that cannot be achieved through the electoral path, as that is a process completely controlled by the capitalist class.
When the capitalist “democracy” fails, the bosses turn to fascism, the most violent form of their judicial, police, and military apparatus that invokes the spread of fear among an upsurge of intense violence. To achieve this climate of fear, it is necessary for the country to usher in repressive state institutions before the presence of some supposed enemy that intends to “destabilize peace.”
In Mexico, the supposed democracy has achieved alarming rates of robbery and murder, the deviant millionaires and the abuses of power of the governor of Veracruz through the orders of Felipe Calderon of PAN and of Enrique Peña Nieto of PRI, the killings in Ayotzinapa that they carried out, under the direction of Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD). PRD is the leader of Morena (another electoral party) and represents a nationalist sector whose win will only benefit a small group and not the mass of followers that they have succeeded in convincing. None of them represents the interests of the working class.
Drug trafficking, corruption, murder, and disappearances of journalists and fighers, the increase in poverty rates, the sexism that women suffer every day, the enrichment of a select few – all go hand in hand with the “democratic process” created by the capitalist system, the same system that has to be stopped, through the process of understanding its inner working and how to best fight it.
During election season all candidates are
labeled corrupt rats, but no one blames the capitalist system for the tragedies that the working class has to live through day to day in order for the bosses to gain more and more profit. No political platform or candidate in any election attacks the profit system of the bourgeois class. They only put ridiculous names to insufficient programs that are designed to gather votes.
The ex-mayor of Huixquilucan del Mazo Maza (the region with the most drug traffickers) represented the private sector of Banco Azteca and Grupo Servin. He has family connections with different politicians of Grupo Altacomulco, to which President Peña Nieto belongs. Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) politician Vásquez Mota is involved in allegations for his foundation Juntos Podemos (Together We Can), which has received more than $1 billion pesos (Proceso, 5/18). Although Morena candidate Delfina Gómez isn’t known for corruption in her past, her party’s connection with billionaire Carlos Slim and bosses’ union Coparmex leaves many questions to be answered (El Financiero, 5/22).
We can’t ignore the massive business of these elections. For example, according to official electoral sources, there is at least $394 million pesos that will be spent on this election (El Financiero, 5/22), and the 2017 budget for all the political parties combined is over $4 billion pesos (Excelsior, 2/15). These figures may not even be an accurate estimate, as the different ruling class parties sponsor various other activities and buy votes. It’s always necessary to consider the fact that all electoral parties spend exaggerated sums to promote themselves; to follow the money shows who really benefits.
What’s at Stake?
What drives the desire to win the electoral dispute in one of the most important states on a national level? It’s not the high poverty levels or the alarming rates of sexist violence. It’s the control of one of the most important industrial zones in the country at a key geostrategic point, with one side close to a metropolis that guarantees a cheap work force and the other side in the middle of the country’s most important commercial routes. If this were not enough, it’s also a migrant route for an exploited semi-slave workforce. We find ourselves in an upsurge of capitalist crisis, which will not hesitate to expose its fascist face and exalt the poisons of nationalism, individualism, and sexism, making it harder for workers to fight together against the international ruling class.
The bosses want to make us believe that nothing can be done to change the oppressive and exploitative system that is capitalism, but the Russian and Chinese workers showed that it is possible to wrench power from the capitalists and build a new society, led by the working class. Despite the dark night that offers imperialist war and fascism, the workers, with dedication and organization, will forge a communist future.