Indiana — Progressive Labor Party’s political work here has become immersed in the Black Lives Matter Movement. We have begun to merge our campus and community bases in Indiana to focus collectively on organizing in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) struggle. The political line in the BLM movement is very nationalist at times and reformist in nature, but it is filled with many workers who want to fight against injustice. Moreover, it is our job to win these workers. If Black workers are a key revolutionary force, then the Party must organize in these struggles and provide revolutionary leadership to them.
In our local BLM movement, Party members provide key leadership. We struggle within the organization to pull it further to the left, and to keep the focus from becoming sucked into an electoral campaign. We fight against reactionary ideas like “Black Lives Matter” or  “All Lives Matter” and instead assert that “Workers’ Lives Matter,” regardless of whether they are Black, Cambodian, or Palestinian. Being involved in this mass organization has given us the opportunity to unite workers in northwest Indiana, with the focus being the economically devastated and super-oppressed workers there.
‘Stop These Racist Sweeps’  
Black workers here, like others in majority Black cities in America, are targets of traffic “sweeps” which have resulted in predatory fines, and mass stop-and-frisk tactics. Indiana police target youth for jaywalking. This has become a moneymaking tool in a number of cities, and Black Lives Matter, with leadership of PL’ers, has fought these polices.
Our fightback led to a town hall meeting with the community, where many workers told their stories of racist police encounters. The mayor and police chief were in attendance and spoke. People in the audience, however, saw through their lies and called them out. A comrade gave a speech that called out capitalism as the culprit, and ended with, “stop these racist sweeps.” A criticism was that there was no open PLP speech made. However, some contacts were made and two young Black women workers have been invited to a study group.
We must lead the struggle
With the recent struggle in Baltimore heating up, it can only make us wonder: Could places like Detroit and other super exploited cities be next? Building a base in high-unemployment areas is a critical task for the Party. Ferguson and Baltimore are great examples of this.
When we get involved in these mass struggles, the Party becomes stronger. Younger comrades learn how to lead and veteran comrades are sharpened as well. We also get a glimpse of communism. Through organizing rallies, marches, and events, we see how workers can and will eventually organize a society where everyone has a say and uses their skills to contribute to the collective need.
But with this look at collectivity, we also get a glimpse of fascism. The continued militarization of police shows us that the bosses in the U.S. are getting workers ready for complete fascism. But it also shows that workers are ready to fight against it. The Progressive Labor Party must be ready and in position to lead this fightback.

BROOKLYN — Medical care for working people, and the jobs of the workers who provide it are under attack in Brooklyn, as elsewhere. The good news is that workers are fighting back against layoffs, cutbacks and hospital closings.
At Downstate Medical Center, part of the State University of New York, workers are now suffering layoffs in every department, even as the state spends tens of millions on an outside consultant, PITT Management, hired to orchestrate the layoffs. Despite the construction of two big new buildings, the administration claims there’s no money!
No money for workers’ health, that is. In an area that’s heavily populated by Black and Latin working-class families, where racist cops have killed young Black workers including Shantel Davis and Kiki Gray, and where more, not less, health care is needed, Governor Andrew Cuomo has cut funds for this safety-net hospital. Long Island College Hospital has been closed. Interfaith and Brookdale workers are fighting to stop closings.
Inside the remaining hospitals, conditions are deteriorating due to the layoffs. The cleaning department is so depleted that workers are exhausting themselves with mandated overtime. Other workers have also been loaded with more work, including nurses. Large areas of maintenance have been contracted out. And yet, despite having three unions, the only advice these bosses give workers is to keep their heads down and hope that lawyers can get them reinstated! The unions hide the number of layoffs and collaborate openly with the bosses to keep us pacified.
But workers and neighborhood residents are far from pacified. In the past, we organized protests outside of the hospital with many community members joining hospital workers against layoffs and the closing of the hospital. That’s the spirit of struggle that we need to re-awaken now to stop the racist layoffs. The bosses use us as pawns for profit; only a communist system can take us out of the chaos of the capitalist system. And only the working class, united and led by its communist party, PLP, can win that future for our class.

DILLEY, TEXAS, May 21 — On May 8, a federal judge in Texas refused to protect hunger-striking immigrant mothers from retaliation by jail guards at Karnes County Residential Center. Strike leaders had been placed in isolation, fired from jail jobs and accused of insurrection.
The 78 women on hunger strike are leading the fight for freedom by thousands of immigrant women and children who have crossed into the U.S. since last summer. Obama’s sexist and racist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers claim that the women pose a significant “threat to U.S. national security” by their mass migration. Therefore all were held initially without bail.
 In support of the women’s release, 1,000 marched on the new jail here. PLP led the strikers with anti-racist and anti-capitalist chants, but the strikers were sometimes misled by others chanting to improve U.S. democracy. Nevertheless, dozens protested yesterday at the ICE office to deliver petitions demanding freedom for all jailed women and youth. Liberal church groups call the mass incarceration of women and kids an immoral act by the U.S. government.  Civil rights lawyers in the federal court action argued without success that the women’s hunger strike was an exercise of free speech.
PL members and friends attended the court hearings and worked to support the strikers.  But no reform group leaders are willing to identify the real cause of the problem — U.S. imperialism’s fight to maintain the profits of the ruling class worldwide. Racist and sexist prison guards are only one symptom of U.S. imperialism.
Mass Incarceration for Profit
The mass incarceration of Latin women and youth in Texas is part of the mass refugee crisis affecting 50 million people around the world.  U.S. drone attacks force millions to flee their homes in Syria, Yemen, and other countries. City police from Ferguson to Baltimore incarcerate millions. In almost every case, the underlying cause of the displacement, incarceration or murder of millions of working class people is the fight to defend or expand markets and resources by the United States.  The U.S. bosses will stop at nothing to maintain dominance.
Legalistic fights for “asylum” and inmate “free speech” for women fleeing U.S.-funded oppression in their original countries are well-meaning dead ends.  The U.S. government doesn’t readily grant asylum to people fleeing U.S.-backed fascist regimes. Nor will it allow hunger strikers to shut down prisons under court-ordered First Amendment free speech doctrines.
Striking women must expand their fight. We should not physically weakening our forces through a hunger strike, which runs on the incorrect assumption that our oppressors will be pressured or moved to act by witnessing our suffering. As the 2,000 rebelling immigrant prisoners in the Willisey, TX prison demonstrated earlier this year, physical destruction of prison facilities and attacks on guards by inmates are an even more serious threat to the U.S. fascist immigration system. When prisoners strike at once, with strikes in solidarity by industrial workers who can shut off profits to the ruling class, the system will be more seriously threatened.
But in this period of capitalist crisis caused by long-term decline, bosses have little ability to reform the system, even temporarily. When the working class in Baltimore rebelled last month with violent attacks on the cops, Obama panicked, calling the Black youth of Baltimore “thugs.” Obama, Baltimore’s Black mayor, and the new U.S Attorney General then followed the ruling-class script by mobilizing cops, troops, and sell-out community programs. The rulers brought a few charges against Baltimore cops and declared the crisis over. In fact, the rulers can recover quickly from any crisis short of working-class revolution to destroy the capitalist system once and for all.  
Liberal Pols: Capitalist Flunkies
No demands for reform can fix the problems created by capitalism. A few racist cops do not cause the mass incarceration of Black and Latin workers.  Likewise, the mass deportation of families is not the byproduct of a “broken” immigration system. These are the products of U.S. imperialism in a period of decline.  This system, actually controlled by bank owners and corporations through their money and their military, depends on racist super-exploitation to survive. To foster the illusion that reform is possible, the capitalists use the media to spread the illusion that elected politicians control the system.  Thus, liberals proclaim that voting is key to reform.  But Democrat and Republican flunkies all take their orders from the capitalist class.
In this period of impending imperialist war, the electoral circus will serve only to revive faith in reform and get people ready to fight on the side of their country. History has shown that reforms are always taken away and that world war is inevitable.  Don’t be suckered. The only solution is to fight for communist revolution based on multi-racial unity of the working-class of the entire world!

What an image of the misery of the world’s working class under the rule of imperialism: the unseaworthy boat abandoned or sinking, with thousands of migrating workers left to starve or drown, and hundreds of thousands lined up to follow them.
The boat pictured above was in the Mediterranean Sea, where African and Middle Eastern workers seek in Europe work and refuge from war and famine.  It could also be in the Andaman Sea, where workers flee Myanmar and Bangladesh for work in Malaysia or Indonesia. And earlier, it could have been in the Caribbean Sea, where starving workers sailed in rickety boats from Haiti to find work in Florida.
Even Basic Necessities Impossible Under Capitalism
This year alone, 25,000 have crossed the Andaman Sea from Myanmar and Bangladesh. In the Mediterranean, that “moat” protecting the European castle, 170,000 migrants were rescued from the sea in 2014, and nearly 500 have already drowned in the first quarter of 2015. Meanwhile, Malaysia has found 28 illegal trafficking camps where the workers were brutally managed like caged animals. Mass graves were also found in these sites. The cruelty of labor migration shows the reality of capitalist terror against the working class.
As of May 27, Indonesia and Malaysia have reluctantly agreed to take in up to 7,000 migrants for up to a year. Thousands are now being held detention centers and camps. The workers from Bangladesh who are considered “economic migrants” will be deported back to Bangladesh, where their punishment for trying to flee poverty awaits them. Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina degraded those seeking to flee the country as “mentally sick” and blasted them for “tainting the country’s image in the international arena,” declaring they “should be punished.” The Rohingya migrants from Myanmar are considered to be seeking asylum and may be settled in a different country.
While the capitalists were busy with their war plans (see editorial, page 2), it was the working class who stepped up to help the migrants at sea. Workers in an Indonesian village provided food and water to hundreds of migrants. “We treated them like family,” said one villager.
Communists work for the day when workers throw off their chains and win power, knowing their duty is to make a civilization which outlaws forever capitalist exploitation and all its cruelties. Those migrating workers now abandoned to the sea are the very ones who will become the gravediggers of imperialism.
Workers migrate at such peril to their lives from their original countries, devastated by imperialism, knowing what racism and repression await them at their destinations. Ultimately, labor migration profits the capitalists, who welcome the surplus of labor to keep racist wages driven down. For the bosses, the migrant families dead at sea or at camps are just “business as usual.”
Migrant Workers: Potential Revolutionary Force
The international working class refuses to accept a world where murder of Black and brown workers is the order of the day. Communists believe that these migrating workers are a key element in abolishing capitalism and that we have a duty to unite them with the workers they leave behind and the workers they find in the new places — to build on them as a base for a newly conscious internationalism among all workers. They are not mere victims but workers who, if they become politically conscious, hold in their own two hands the key to ending not only their own misery but every worker’s who is exploited by global capital. PLP’s  attitude is that labor migration is a seed of international working-class revolution.
These migrant workers have a deep knowledge of the capitalist system from their own experience, and possess deep pride in their own collective power to endure and survive. The militancy and determination they bring with them to the workers they join in their destination countries, and the knowledge they send back with their remittances to those they left behind, is our key to seizing power.
Someday, this reservoir of knowledge and passion in the hearts of migrating workers will flow into the communist philosophy of armed revolution. Our communist Party will grows to become capable of remaking the world in our image. Then we will have the answer in blood and fire to the atrocities we see today. Every new migrant’s death impels us to continue the international fight for workers’ power. PLP in every region, from Pakistan to Los Angeles to Colombia, should organize solidarity actions with workers in Southeast Asia.