Cumberland COUNTY, NJ — For a lesson in Racism 101, you don’t need to take a college course. You can just take a trip to Cumberland County in southwestern New Jersey.  In the wake of workers’ outrage to the non-indictments for police who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner, videos went viral of a police murder last December of Jerame Reid in Bridgeton, New Jersey.
Jerame’s family refused to take this murder lying down. In late February, as many as 200 protesters marched to the local Bridgeton courthouse to protest this legalized lynching.  The protest was full of young workers and youth — many from the Bridgeton community and others from nearby cities, including Philadelphia, where family members of other Black youth executed by cops came to show their solidarity.  
County Built on Racism
The political economy of Cumberland County is built around the racist prison industrial complex.  The majority of New Jersey’s prisons are located here.  From across the state, tens of thousands of unemployed Black and Latin youth — from as far away as Newark — are imprisoned in these so-called “correctional” facilities.  Whose job is it to oversee them? The local workers who rely on the prison industry for their livelihood. The main source of employment and business in Cumberland County — where unemployment is rampant—is the prison system.  Most small business owners, many of them Latin, have contracts with the prison industry.
This is not a new story. For over three hundred years, Cumberland County has been home to concentration camps for oppressed workers.  The Lenne Lenape Indians were systematically forced into plantations in Cumberland County after their land was stolen from them elsewhere in New Jersey by Dutch and British colonizers.
The roots of racism are so deep here that even the local Quaker community — defying national Quaker policy — held slaves here into the early 19th century. (New Jersey was the last state in the North to abolish slavery.) The county’s agricultural base led even these supposed humanitarians to stay committed to forced plantation labor for kidnapped Africans.  Cumberland was the perfect New Jersey headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Even today, the Klan remains an open force across Cumberland County. In January, in neighboring Atlantic County, KKK flyers were secretly left on people’s lawns, part of a regional outreach campaign  from Maryland through Pennsylvania to New York.  
Meanwhile, Bridgeton’s cops, local Black elected officials, and the courts are all in bed together to keep the working class divided and repressed.  Indeed, it was a Black cop who killed Jerame Reid.
Workers Ripe for Rebellion
But Bridgeton is not just a site of racist capitalist repression. It’s also a sleeping giant for revolt led by Black workers. Even though police brandished semi-automatics and posted snipers outside the courthouse during the February rally, the youth and elders did not let up.  They testified to the racist system of entrapment, going back their whole lives.  What the cops failed to recognize is that the state’s bullying tactics have created more angry, anti-racist soldiers.
From Newark to Philadelphia, the Progressive Labor Party has been winning youth to the idea that a long-term, multiracial movement must wage class war to obliterate the killer kkkops in communities like Bridgeton, along with their crony officials and judges.  PLP is that movement!
With the leadership of the Reid family, especially Jerame’s wife, PLP will continue to work with others across the region to point out how dead-end reforms will only buy time for the bosses while more youth are slain in yet another city. As workers rise to the occasion to fight back, PLP will be there to take leadership and learn from workers. And as more workers learn about our Party’s vision for a future without capitalism and racist terror, we will accelerate our building of a mass movement for communist revolution!

Washington DC, March 14 — Over 40 public health workers and students attended an anti-racist gathering today. It was led by three Black workers who addressed disparities in mental health and solitary confinement for incarcerated Black and Latin workers, racism and police terror, and the upcoming arbitration hearing in June on the DC transit system’s racist background checks.
During the discussion period, people denounced capitalism and the profits it makes from prison slave labor. Others condemned the arrests in Ferguson, and called for a fight for jobs. One Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member declared that mass incarceration, generated by the war on drugs — a war on Black workers — jailed tens of thousands of young Black men to take potential militant fighters off the street.
PLP members met many new students, workers, and health professionals. Ten signed up to help on the Metro campaign against racist background checks and to join the upcoming conference on mass incarceration, mental health, and homelessness.  
Earlier, on February 28, a PLP leader and a friend of the Party addressed 100 students at the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) convention session on mass incarceration and the history of racist oppression. The students responded with enthusiasm to the presentation and vigorously discussed strategies to organize against racism. Students in Maryland had organized a social justice discussion group while others organized medical student “die-ins” to oppose racist murders by cops.  Local students as well as those from other states gave their contact information for anti-racist campaigns in health care. The Student National Medical Association (SNMA) chapter at George Washington University (GWU) organized a “die-in” and sponsored programs to train student activists.  
For the past two years the Disparities Committee of the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA) has been campaigning against Metro’s background-check policies. The organization has been fighting to get former prisoners hired and not fired. PLP members have been important in this work. The issue has become well-known in DC and now the leaders of MWPHA and the GWU School of Public Health have joined in activities to broaden the struggle.
During the upcoming National Public Health Week in April, the Dean of the School of Public Health at GWU will speak on mass incarceration. In the coming fall, MWPHA’s annual conference will focus on Incarceration, mental health and homelessness.  The Public Health Student Association (PHSA) will also present a session on grass roots organizing. They have invited a PL’er to speak.  
Members of AMSA, SNMA, and PHSA are planning to work together on these issues. This will be an important step towards multi-racial unity and student health activism.
Despite these encouraging developments, a sharper discussion of capitalism and the need for communist revolution must develop with the many antiracist workers and students who have participated in our work. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Communism is the way to abolish the ills of this racist society. These truths must be raised more clearly in our forums, so that we can offer the vision of a communist society to the broad masses.
PLP is launching a study group with many of these new activists to address these points.  We want these new activists to join the Party, participate in May Day on May 2 in New York City, and to come to the national American Public Health Association Meetings this fall to build on these struggles with the Radical Public Health students in Chicago (see CHALLENGE, 3/11).
Fight Racism in Public Health and Medicine
The rebellions stemming from the Ferguson and Staten Island police murders have made an impact on the thinking of medical and public health organizations around the country. Take a look at these two items from the New England Journal of Medicine to get an idea of the opportunities from struggle that PL health workers can embrace:
“#BlackLivesMatter — A Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities”, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1500529
“Bias, Black Lives, and Academic Medicine”, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1500832

PLP comrades should entwine communist politics into this anti-racist movement.

LOS ANGELES, February 26 — Fifteen thousand teachers and supporters rallied in front of Los Angeles City Hall today to demand smaller class sizes, full staffing in the schools, and salary increases. Class sizes in regular subjects are now around 42 students per class, up to 55 in some specialty subjects.
Many schools have nurses only two days a week, and counselors are asked to take up to 500 students each semester. Working-class Black and Latin parents in segregated schools are unable to supplement the school budget, and students are hit even harder. Extremely segregated schools and decades of racist policies against Black and Latin schools and communities, have resulted in large disparities in education and an excuse for the bosses to continue super-exploiting the Black and Latin working class.
All of this has angered students, parents and teachers. Many are ready to fight back. The teachers’ union is using this righteous anger to “bargain for a better contract” with the school district. As usual, they are attempting to divert our anger away from our true enemies — the ruling class and the racist, exploitative system of capitalism — and focus it on getting a pay raise and possibly a few concessions, such as 39 students per class.
Instead of encouraging workers to strike and directly confront the ruling class, they are going through a long and arduous process set up to erode our power as workers. After bargaining, we are being told that there has to be “mediation,” then “fact-finding,” and only then can we strike. By then, the school year will be over. The union is also calling for boycotts of faculty meetings to vent teacher anger and head off a strike. We are going to channel their anger and organize rallies on campus and build up our revolutionary work in the schools.
A PL’er at the school has been building the party here and has recruited one parent and is respected by her co-workers and students as an anti-racist fighter. CHALLENGE readers at the school don’t yet see communist politics as critical to the struggle. We plan to spend more time talking to them on and off campus about why communism is the solution.
We are going to have weekly gatherings after school called “Fight Back Fridays,” where we socialize and discuss organizing struggles in school. Over time, we want to convert this, or separately establish, a study-action group that discusses CHALLENGE and plans how we can use the reform struggle as a school for communism.

The Red Army plants the communist flag over Berlin’s Reichstag building in May 1945. The Soviet Union under Stalin defeated the fascists in World War II. Celebrate the power of the working class at PLP’s 50 anniversary this May Day.

Most working people have heard of Hitler and Nazi Germany, and the concentration camps like Auschwitz, which occurred under fascist rule in Germany. Workers in the United States will have definitely heard of the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror, and witnessed the police terror unleashed on Black workers in Ferguson, Missouri and in cities across the U.S. Klan and police terror, like the Nazis, reveal capitalism’s true face, with the mask of capitalist democracy removed.  “Fascism,” a word that is used often and rarely defined, is a vital concept that enables us to understand capitalist rule in its most racist, violent form.
Fascism is the open, naked rule of capitalism, a type that the capitalist ruling class turns to in times of crisis when their sham democracy no longer can serve their needs. Today fascism is increasing around the world, and the Progressive Labor Party is organizing the international working class to defeat it with communist revolution!
Imperialist Rivals Use War to Become Top Dog
Imperialist war, racism, sexism and global devastation are business-as-usual for the capitalist class. Contrary to what hypocritical politicians say, competing capitalist factions and competing imperialist powers must use military and police violence in vieing to control the world’s natural resources and position themselves to become the world’s top dog imperialist power.  
Fascism results from a type of crisis that is specific to the capitalist rulers. Each country’s capitalist class contains many factions, representing capitalists who derive their profits from different groups of banks and industries. The rivalries between different imperialist country sharpens (as for example, the current U.S. rulers’ desperate struggle to maintain control over Middle Eastern oil resources). At the same time, the internal rivalry between capitalist factions in each imperialist power also sharpen. The usual form of capitalist “democracy” breaks down. (Take for example the current government paralysis reflecting the fight between the older finance capital and Big Oil, which supported Obama and the newer upstart capitalists led by the Koch brothers who created and support Tea Party forces.)
Many severe problems plagued the ruling class of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Following its defeat in World War I, the German economy was in shambles. Millions of workers, including war veterans, were unemployed or desperately struggling. As the volatile post-war German economy sank, work became increasingly scarce, runaway inflation made money worthless and massive strike waves rocked the country.
Bolshevik Revolution Inspired Millions
Even worse for the German ruling class was the creation of a communist-led working-class state in 1917, the Soviet Union, which inspired millions of workers in Germany. Many began looking to the Communist Party of Germany for political leadership, even to the point of staging a revolt and declaring a short-lived Soviet Republic in Bavaria in 1918.
The largest political party in Germany at the time was the liberal Social-Democratic Party (SPD), which declared itself on the side of the working class in speeches and in election campaigns to earn the loyalty and votes of the working class. Behind the scenes, the pro-capitalist SPD leadership regularly met with representatives of the German banks and industries like Deutsche Bank, steel giants Thyssen and Krupp, Volkswagen, the pharmaceutical monopoly I.G. Farben (Bayer), and other companies still around today. This dominant section of the German capitalist class became increasingly concerned throughout the 1920s that the SPD would be unable to control the working class and prepare it for another imperialist war.
Throughout this time, Adolf Hitler was busy organizing right-wing, nationalist World War I veterans, small shopkeepers and business owners to build a movement called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” or Nazis.  The Nazi movement had nothing to do with socialism, workers’ power, or the Soviet Union. Very few actual German workers belonged to the Nazi Party before the 1930s. The Nazis blamed immigrants, Jews, and the Communist Party for betraying Germany.
Hitler’s Bosses: Ditch Social Democrat, Destroy Communists
In private speeches made to the German capitalists, Hitler persuaded the biggest bosses that their strategy of using the Social Democrats to control the working class was failing. Militant strikes and the growing Communist Party’s relentless attacks on the Social Democratic Party as tools of the German ruling class increased capitalist rulers’ fear that workers in Germany would follow the example of workers in the Soviet Union. Hitler declared that Germany’s solution lay in following fascist Italy’s lead: ditching the liberal Social Democrats, violently destroying the Communist Party and all trade unions and workers’ organizations, to terrorize and discipline the working class into obedience.
Not every faction of the German ruling class went along with Hitler’s proposals, but when the liberal Social Democrat-supported Chancellor legally appointed Hitler the new Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Nazis, with the backing of Germany’s largest banks and industries, arrested the heads of those businesses that refused to cooperate. The German ruling class was brought into line first.
Then, the Nazis turned their attention to the working class by first destroying its most powerful organization, the Communist Party. The communists were the first to go into the concentration camps and the first inside the gas chambers. Once the Communist Party and its supporting organizations were smashed, the Nazis were free to round up trade unionists, Jews, homosexuals,   the handicapped, Christians, Romanis, and immigrant groups — even workers associated with the Social Democratic Party, all to be used as slave labor or, later, sent to the death camps like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau.
The Nazis eventually launched a war of annihilation against the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. Bosses in the United States and Europe armed the Nazis to the teeth and pinned their hopes on them to defeat the Soviets. However, it was millions of communist women and men organized by the Soviet Union who ultimately beat the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. The Soviet Union also led the communist resistance movement’s fight against fascism all over the world, and during that time was a beacon of hope for workers on every continent.  
U.S. Bosses Supplied Gas for Nazis’ Ovens
Communists defended the working class against fascist violence and racist terror at the same time as capitalist leaders like Henry Ford (U.S. auto boss) made under-the-table deals with Hitler to share fascist-made profits. U.S. chemical companies sold Germany the poison gas for use in genocidal gas chambers. While the failures of the old communist movement, including its fight for socialism which retained wages and inequality, eventually allowed capitalism to be restored in every socialist country, those failures do not detract from the courageous sacrifices of millions of communists and their friends in the fight to defeat fascism’s terror.
Fascism is not something unique to Germany, or any other country. It grows out of capitalism. Many capitalist countries like the U.S., members of the European Union, South Africa have a democratic facade, where some workers are allowed certain amounts of freedom. But, in truth, all workers live under a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Fascism is not different from capitalism. It is a tactic that the capitalist class uses to stay in power and maintain its class dictatorship over the working class.
Communism is the opposite of fascism. Communism means the dictatorship of the working class. After the working class has overthrown the capitalist class and abolished wages and money, the workers will run society for the good of the workers, and protect it with force to prevent the capitalists from ever regaining power. This is what Progressive Labor Party fights for.