COLOMBIA, February 24—The embattled imperialists, feeling the pressure from the current over productive crisis and the costs of war, are busy with their policies of super exploitation, racism, fascism, sexism, cultural degradation, and the pillage and destruction of the environment. All of this is done in order to try and solve their financial crisis. This has always been done with the aid of their puppet regimes all over the world.
In the case of Colombia, this means the imposition of miserable conditions for the working class; helped along by the sellouts in the trade unions who are totally complicit in these murderous policies.
The paltry minimum salary of about $207 (USD) a month is a far cry from the $8,000 monthly salary of congressmen, further evidence of the fascist and oppressive capitalist regime.
The commercialization of life in the health sector, where our class sisters and brothers are nothing more than statistics and thousands agonize and die waiting for a simple medical appointment, is still not even the worst that capitalism offers.
Hunger strikes millions who often live malnourished, not even eating what the pets of the wealthy enjoy. The setting could not be worse for our class who are left at the bottom of the social pyramid only to maintain this miserable, corrupt, and oppressive system. This system that uses sleight of political hand to fool workers into thinking capitalism is just, and where economics of “plenty and peace” reign supreme; all the while unleashing violence on those who do not tow the line.
The working class knows though, that the solution to our collective problems does not exist in this society. Workers know that the laws of capitalist profit contradict the peace or quality of life they deserve.
We in the PLP organize in the interest of the international proletariat and support all of their struggles. We do this with the recognition that only the eventual communist revolution will see an end to the dark night of capitalism. We do not fight to reform the system, but rather we organize for worker’s power. What we want is everything we produce. We want no more fake pacifism between classes; the peace of the rich is oppression, death, and the decimation of the poor. JOIN PLP!

CHICAGO, February 4— Sixteen educators were arrested for sitting in at Bank of America.
Members Progressive Labor Party and thousands of school workers, parents, students, and other fighters filled the streets of downtown Chicago to protest a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announcement of $100 million in new layoffs and pay cuts.
Bank of America is one of the banks that have pocketed a billion dollars from CPS that should have gone to fund the schools. These racist cuts primarily target Teachers’ Assistants, who are among the lowest paid school workers and are mostly Black. However, the brunt of the attack falls on CPS students, who are mostly Black and Latin. They will receive fewer resources, larger classes, and less support in school.
CPS says they’re Broke, Charity for Bankers is a Joke
The cause of these cuts? The racist CPS and the parasitic banks that feed off the working class. Banker and former school board chair David Vitale led CPS into a “toxic swaps” scheme, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned out of CPS and into banks’ pockets. CPS refuses to take legal measures to get any of this money back, as governmental bodies in other cities have done successfully. They won’t even ask to renegotiate the toxic swaps.
For too long, CPS has made financial deals that benefit banks and corporations at the expense of the city’s mostly Black and Latin students, but lately it has gotten worse. The number one CPS cost is “debt service”, representing billions of dollars in interest paid to banks and bondholders. The capitalist system is rigged this way: the rich pay little in taxes to support public services, and then make millions off the loans that service providers must take out to meet operating expenses.
Attack on One Is an Attack on All
Teachers in the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) have responded to this theft by organizing demonstrations and sit-ins. A key element of the CTU’s strength is its alliance with other sections of the working class: the most recent demonstration involved not only education workers, but also members of several other unions and Black youth from the ongoing fight against racist police murders. The next day, teachers, transit workers, and home care workers distributed a common flyer calling on all workers to fight against state and local cutbacks.
Chicago teachers refuse to stick to demonstrating. In December, the teachers voted to allow leaders of CTU to call a strike, and now it’s only a matter of time until it happens. Union members at many schools don’t want to wait. They are ready to follow the lead of Detroit teachers and organize collective sickdays (see CHALLENGE 2/10).
Strike Against Capitalism
Strikes are an important step in building fightback and class-consciousness, but are limited. In 2012, Chicago teachers went on strike to demand, among many things, no layoffs and funding for smaller class sizes and key programs for students. Only four years later, they are fighting the same fight against the same budget cuts!
Unions also push the illusion that a different politician will make things better, when all politicians actually serve the interests of the capitalist class. “Hey hey, ho, ho, Rahm Emanuel’s got to go” was a popular chant at today’s march. Though Mayor Emanuel is a fierce supporter of the interests of the capitalists, focusing on electing some other capitalist representative obscures the root problem and stops workers from fighting to destroy the system.
Unions and strikes organize to make life minimally better for workers under capitalism, and any gains won through those means can be quickly taken away. When someone has cancer, doctors don’t remove only part of the tumor; it will only grow back! The working class must fight to remove the entire cancer of capitalism and build a system where we can get all of our needs met. To smash racism and build schools that are actually set up for students to prosper, we need to destroy capitalism with a communist revolution.
Only Solution is Communist Revolution
Educators, students, parents, and other workers throughout the city are determined to continue the fight for better schools, but under capitalism, that is a limited fight. The capitalists promote schools that continue racist divisions (Chicago’s schools, as well as others, are as segregated now as 40 years ago) and teach individualism and loyalty to the U.S. government. They prepare students to be good workers or good soldiers or in the most segregated, least wealthy schools, good prisoners. Until the working class runs society, the schools will serve the interests of the rich.
The militant actions will no doubt continue to develop in Chicago and open the door for more workers to learn about Progressive Labor Party and join us in our revolutionary struggle. At the march, hundreds of CHALLENGEs were distributed, and this is only the beginning. As the struggle heats up, we look forward to building the membership of PLP and spreading these ideas widely.

NEW YORK CITY, February 17—Retired workers celebrated Black History Month by studying the Haitian Revolution and its influence of slave revolts in the U.S.
The group of multiracial retirees are part of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 371. Twenty-five retirees braved the inclement weather to listen to a former hospital worker about working-class heroism to not only overthrow slavery but also to fight for the complete liberation from the yoke of colonialism and imperialism. A lively question-and-answer period followed the presentation.
Masses Make History, Not One Leader
While many of us can name leaders, we don’t know the many of as many 400,000 slaves in Haiti who fought and died for freedom. We were all aware of Toussaint Louverture, who led an army of masses of slaves in a successful revolt against French slavemasters from 1791-1794. But, it was the masses who made history, not the few leaders whose names have come down to us.
In 1794, because of the fight launched in Haiti, slavery had been abolished in all of the French colonies. When Napoleon’s army invaded Haiti in 1802, it re-established slavery in all its colonies. Slavery was abolished in Haiti in 1804. But in the other French islands, slavery didn’t end until 1848. The French bosses forced Haiti to pay crippling reparations for the loss of property—people and plantations—in return for recognition, 20 years after liberation.  And the Haitian bourgeoisie forced the peasants, through taxation, to bear the cost of paying those $40 million, in today’s U.S. currency. It was a warning for those who dared to fight back. The U.S. didn’t recognize Haitian independence until 1861 in the midst of the Civil War and didn’t abolish slavery in within its own borders until 1865.
Haitian Revolution Prompts U.S. Slave Revolt
We discussed the influence the Haiti Revolution and fight against colonialism had throughout the slaveholding world. It is important to understand how events that occur far away impact events locally. The slaveowners certainly understood that and trembled at the thought of slave uprisings.
In the U.S., one of the most famous was in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, led by Denmark Vesey. News of the successful slave revolt in Haiti was widespread in the area after French planters fled Haiti with their slaves to the U.S. South. In fact, the plan of Vesey’s rebels was to sail to Haiti after freeing themselves.
John Brown, the well-known abolitionist, was also influenced by the Haitian Revolution. The group Brown assembled chose to attack the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Viriginia in part because it was located in a valley. They knew that Haitian rebels went into the mountains to regroup after their attacks on slave plantations. Brown consoled himself when he was arrested by reading the biography of Toussaint Louverture.
History Informs Today’s Politics
Some of the comments made by the audience were interesting as well. One retiree noted that to fight against slavery was a human trait, and that slaves even rebelled against the “good slavemasters.” Someone else explained that there is no such thing as a “good” slaveowner.
One retiree stated that union members should support the Democratic Party to fight the good fight.
However, the speaker clearly noted that the only way to end any and all of the misery that capitalism creates is to unite and fight back in the heroic manner of the revolutionaries in Haiti. We must go all the way and get rid of this system once and for all. No capitalist party can eradicate racism; only an internaitonal communist party like Progressive Labor Party can—with the leadership of millions.
While Black History Month is a token time for the bosses to recognize Black workers’ contribution to capitalism, the working-class should celebrate and study antiracist working-class history and the role of Black workers all year long. Let’s take inspiration from the history of class struggle and resolve to fight against racism all year long!

 New Jersey, February 7—A Progressive Labor Party leadership school helped over 50 workers and students to become more committed, anti-racist fighters. Over two days of sharp and principled struggle, comrades and friends learned about the roots of racism in the New World.
The leadership school was a valuable experience of collectivity. It was mainly led by young women. For three days, we cooked, cleaned, played, taught, and learned together. The experience was shared by Black, Latin, Asian and white workers and students, ranging in age from 9 to 70 (see letters). There was sharp struggle, and not all of our disagreements were resolved. But we all vowed to keep talking and fighting together. On Sunday, four people joined the Party—the most powerful way to combat racism.
We discussed the invention of “race” as a ruling-class tool to divide workers and make super-profits from the enslavement of Black people. We also analyzed the dangerous dead end of identity politics, which further divides workers and deflects working-class anger into capitalist-led, reformist organizations. Most important, we clarified the necessity of a multiracial fight for communism, the only way we can smash capitalism and its racist atrocities.
After welcoming people to the campsite Friday night, including a number of workers and students who were new to the Party’s ideas, we kicked off the leadership school Saturday morning by reading a section of Lerone Bennett’s The Road Not Taken. Bennett showed how the rulers of the American colonies systematically created laws in the 17th century to control and separate the people they aimed to exploit: white, Black, and Native American. The colonial bosses laws outlawed intermarriage among these groups and differentiated between white indentured servants (who could buy their liberty in some places) and Black slaves (who were chattel property forever). These laws represented the roots of modern U.S. racism.
On Saturday afternoon, we discussed “Dear White America,” by George Yancy, a Black writer whose research has been underwritten by The New York Times, the capitalists’ most important mouthpiece. As a defender of white privilege theory, Yancy makes the fatal error of blaming all white people in equal measure for the racist society we live in. He makes no distinction between the capitalist bosses (of all “races”) who hold state power and the workers who are exploited and oppressed by them (see next issue for a larger discussion about racism vs. white privilege theory).
By contrast, Adolph Reed, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that liberal identity politics can only redistribute the stolen wealth of capitalism. The ultimate goal of the leaders of groups like Black Lives Matter is to share in these capitalist spoils. The ultimate goal of the revolutionary communist PLP is to smash the capitalist system and create an egalitarian society without money or privilege of any kind.