OAXACA, MEXICO — On July 21, the Governor of Oaxaca, Gabino Cué, announced the elimination of the State Institute of Public Education of Oaxaca (IEEPO) and the creation of a “new” governing body of education in the state. As Cué made this announcement, the sinister head of the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) Emilio Chuayffet was there showing his support, and that of the federal government.
These politicians state that this measure will put an end to teachers’ control of the IEEPO, held since 1992 under Section 22, won by the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) union. At the core of the announcement is a fascist hit against Section 22, openly excluding teachers from participation in decision-making on educational programs and the organization and supervision of the schools. According to Cué and Chuayffet these things must be performed by personnel as corrupt and sinister as they are, not the teachers who are responsible for the education of the children and youth in the classroom. That is the capitalists’ vision for all aspects of society.
The announcement was accompanied by the presence of thousands of federal police and the military, who have been patrolling by ground and air trying to intimidate the teachers and the community. They have canceled the bank accounts of teachers and the delivery of union dues. Teachers have responded with massive demonstrations at the state and national level, and teachers from other cities like Michoacan, Chiapas, Guerrero and Mexico City have shown their support of Section 22.
On behalf of Cué’s education reform, the ruling capitalists, their apologists and their repressive governing bodies have launched a fascist attack to get rid of Section 22. There is no doubt that this is an attack by the capitalist class against the entire working class. Its education reform has nothing to do with improving the quality of education, but to fire teachers and privatize education.
The assessment that the SEP is supposed to make does not seek to retain effective teachers who are committed to the education of children and youth, their true goal is to dismiss anyone who questions the rotten education system and defends their rights as workers. Tens of thousands of education workers will be laid off because the SEP is moving all administrative work to municipalities, who will subrogate these services and will force parents to pay for them. Teachers from Oaxaca are the ones with the strongest resistance to this repressive and privatization reform, thus they are being targeted, and eventually eliminated.
In Mexico and throughout the world, capitalists blame teachers for backwardness in the education system, but the ruling capitalists are solely responsible for this as they subject and degrade education to their needs and monetary gains. They spend public funding to sustain hundreds of thousands of military and police murderers who defend the capitalists and their profits, and commit mass murders, in particular of young people who the capitalists’ hypocritically claim to defend with this reform.
Behind the current education problem, unemployment, growing poverty rates, narco-state genocide, among other calamities, are the capitalist ruling elites who accumulate enormous wealth daily through cheap labor, seizing natural resources and privatizing basic social services such as health and education.
The capitalist ruling class exploits, represses, imprisons, tortures, disappears, spies and corrupts — it is a burdening liability to humanity. Workers have the need and the power to put an end to it. We must break nationalist borders and expand this struggle internationally, with the understanding that we are one working class and our enemy is the entire imperialist capitalist class. Workers of the world unite! It is a powerful slogan that puts all the world’s oppressed on the offense.
A true good quality education for all youth will only come when we’ve smashed this system of markets and profits, when society is run by and for all workers and their families, and where all members of the working class are provided for. The working class united and organized by Progressive Labor Party has the power to end this rotten capitalist system. PLP has already begun the fight for communism. Join us!

Beginning with our May 6 issue, CHALLENGE has run a series celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party. These articles have described the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — as well as our concentration among industrial workers; the fight against racism; our Party’s leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement; the breaking of the government ban on travel to Cuba; the defeat of the fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Here we will review the Party’s championing of internationalism.
Progressive Labor Party advanced a tradition of communist internationalism that began with the First International and the Paris Commune of 1871. We have carried the torch of internationalism to its logical and necessary conclusion: one world, one class, one Party fighting directly for communism. No retreats along nationalist lines!
PLP is an international communist party because the working class is one class everywhere, with a universal class interest. Since workers produce everything of value, we can collectively determine how to share it according to need. We don’t need bosses, a class that steals most of that value through wage slavery. We stand for the abolition of capitalism; we fight to eliminate racism, sexism, and nationalism.
Our internationalism means working-class unity that follows the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”
It means a united working class led by one mass, international Party containing hundreds of millions of communist workers. We reject the call by various national “communist” parties for nationalist “roads to socialism.” This formulation is drawn from capitalist-created countries that divide the international working class and negate its universal class character.
Unlike the old communist movement, PLP does not separate along nationalist lines. Though our circumstances and tactics may differ in the U.S. and East Africa, our political line for communist revolution is the same everywhere. We oppose nationalism, which leads to workers uniting behind “their” capitalist bosses and fighting “foreign” or immigrant workers. The concept of two opposing, worldwide classes — workers against bosses — is fundamental to destroying capitalism and establishing communism.
PLP Grows Worldwide
The following are just some of the struggles that reflect the Party’s internationalist practice:
In 1964, in solidarity with the workers and youth of Vietnam, PLP formed the May 2nd Movement to oppose the U.S. imperialist invasion of Vietnam. We organized the first mass demonstration against the war under the slogan, “U.S. Imperialism Get Out of Vietnam!” This slogan eventually was adopted by millions, challenging the calls by liberals and phony leftists to “Stop the Bombing” and “Negotiate,” neither of which indicted U.S. imperialism (see CHALLENGE, 8/12).
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, PL’ers joined the military to win soldiers to refuse to kill their sisters and brothers in Vietnam and instead to turn the guns against the U.S. ruling class.
During the 1984-85 British miners’ strike, PLP organized support campaigns, bringing miners to the U.S. to speak at rallies and on campuses. They exposed the brutal policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who ordered police attacks on strikers and laid off tens of thousands.
In El Salvador, PLP recruited from among former fighters for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, after the FMLN became an electoral party that betrayed the revolution.
In Palestine-Israel, PLP joined mass demonstrations against Israeli rulers’ demolition of Palestinian villages. We fought sub-standard wages enforced by slave traders and exposed the rulers’ racism perpetrated against immigrants from Africa.
In Mexico, PLP members in the teachers’ union fought government attacks to break their strikes and cripple the schools through privatization.
In East Africa, PLP is organizing among students and teachers and waging anti-sexist struggles.
In Colombia, PLP mobilized striking workers, from refrigerator factories to beer factories. PLP’s revolutionary line was so threatening to revisionists [fake leftists] and bosses alike that death threats to our comrades were common.
In Haiti, we grew from a club of trade unionists and students to one embedding itself into the agricultural working class. PLP fought against MINUSTAH, the UN occupation force that triggered the spread of cholera, as well as racist deportations and inadequate sewage and plumbing systems.
In Pakistan, PL’ers organized aid for workers devastated by an earthquake, while the government abandoned the victims. We are fighting to unite workers to challenge the bosses’ attacks, especially on super-exploited women working in subhuman conditions and earning little or no pay.
With the advent of U.S. imperialist assaults on the working class in Afghanistan and Iraq, PL launched campaigns attacking the murders of millions by U.S. rulers, from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Pickets were organized at embassies in U.S. cities. PL’ers enlisted in the military to spread the Party’s ideas among soldiers in Iraq and to oppose attacks on working-class families there.
Spreading Solidarity and Ideology
PLP has organized international solidarity for local struggles. Comrades in Haiti wrote letters of solidarity to City University of New York students during the campaign to oust war criminal David Petraeus from campus. In Brooklyn, PLP rallied in immigrant neighborhoods in response to racist deportations in the Dominican Republic.
Word of PLP’s actions and communist ideology have spread across the world, both through immigrant workers from Latin America and through CHALLENGE on the internet. Today, CHALLENGE is printed in English, Spanish, French, Creole, Arabic, Hebrew, Dari, Urdu, and more.
One Class, One Fight for Communism
The world we fight for is one where workers’ power will reign supreme. A communist world will wipe out borders created by the bosses to reap more profits from exploiting those they call “foreigners.” It will eradicate imperialist wars, which the rulers launch to grab resources and cheap labor. In a communist world, there will be no foreigners, no “illegal” migrants, no refugees from war or poverty.
While the reformists continue to fragment themselves with the identity politics of race, gender, sexuality, or national loyalties, PLP unites ALL workers, based on class consciousness. Over the last 50 years, our staunch internationalism made has helped us grow from an organization with a handful of workers in New York to a Party that spans 27 countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe. That is no small victory! Forward to another 50 years of communist organizing that puts the international working class above the individual.
Workers in Senegal has the same interest as workers in China or Chile or the U.S.: a society that will meet their class’s needs. An egalitarian, communist world. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for yourselves, for your children and for future generations.
We have a Party to organize and a world to win!

CHICAGO, August 5 — “If you go ahead with this plan, you are murderers!” said a speaker at a community meeting, after a secret plan was revealed to close pediatric inpatient units at Stroger Cook County Hospital. The bosses’ plan to quietly phase out the pediatric patients was disrupted when someone leaked minutes of their secret June meeting, and resistance to this secret plan has been building since. On July 31, CEO Jay Shannon’s smug arrogance was shaken at a monthly Board meeting for Cook County Health and Hospitals as scores of outraged doctors, nurses and patients packed into the meeting room. Security told the local news that they couldn’t bring in their cameras to film the public meeting, while outside the Administration Building, hospital security guards failed to silence two dozen members of the United Methodist Women demonstrating in support.
Resistance Quickly Mobilized
After the leak, doctors, nurses, patients and community people organized in a few days so that the meeting room was standing room only. Witness after witness denounced the no-longer-secret racist plans that would take away the safety net for uninsured working class Black and immigrant kids.
PLP comrades who work at the hospital pointed out among their coworkers that capitalism’s racist “market reforms” in medical care were the real murderers. The de-funding and dismemberment of the Cook County Health and Hospital System, which has already lost two of its three hospitals and half of its clinics, has hit Black and immigrant workers hardest, who are a large percentage of our patients.
Our fight is to continue linking the many examples of local corruption to capitalism. For instance, the hospital bosses engineering the closure of the newborn unit whose patients will end up across the street in the private hospital, while the bosses rake in $25 million annually. Or the sweetheart deals that allow hospitals to profit from the procedures that used to be carried out more cheaply at the County. Or the multi-million dollar contracts to “consultants” that take their huge fees and leave, having fixed nothing.
Communists Make Link to Capitalist System
The bottom line is, under capitalism where profit is king, we can never have health care that is designed and carried out to maximize our health. What is maximized under this system is profits. Period.
Our work is to channel these upsurges of anger by the workers into a mass PLP and sweep the profiteering parasites out of our hospitals and out of our world with armed revolution. We also must help people make connections between racism and capitalism.
Under communism, we will share the things we produce and the services we provide. That kind of system, run by the working class, is called communism. Every fight we engage in today can serve as a training ground for the much larger fight in the future, the fight for political power to end this racist, oppressive capitalist system.

BROOKLYN, NY, August 9 —The Shantel Davis Committee and PLP organized the third annual Hoops for Justice basketball tournament yesterday in Shantel Davis’s and Kimani Gray’s memory, two Black youth murdered by kkkops. Players waiting to compete looked through CHALLENGE as announcers mixed in play-calling with political consciousness. This tournament kicked off Progressive Labor Party’s summer project, a week of political actions concentrated among training youth to be communist organizers.
Teachers determined to see their students as more than “suspects” united with Shantel’s sister and local coaches to pull off the event. CHALLENGE is not only connecting the dots of racist, senseless murder — from Pakistan to Ukraine to New York City to Missouri. It’s also become the news source for many youth. The youth are listening. Families stricken by racist cop murders are forming bonds of fightback. We refuse to forget our working-class sisters and brothers taken from us. PLP will carry the call for justice forward to the only solution that can put a stop to racist cop murders: communist revolution.
Hundreds of people were involved in Hoops for Justice—playing basketball, organizing the food, watching the games and more. A highlight of the day was when a group of young women from the community held a Double Dutch contest and invited one of the lead organizers to jump in.
Solidarity with Ferguson
Hoops for Justice is part of our work around these police murders. The following day, we rallied in solidarity with the working class in Ferguson who staged mass demonstrations on the anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown, teen killed by cops (see front page). A multiracial, international group of PLP distributed scores of CHALLENGE with the front page headline, “Death to the Klan!” Workers joined in on our chants.
This mainly Black, immigrant working-class neighborhood has been PLP’s stomping grounds for decades. So when Kyam Livingston was murdered by disregard, while custody of the cops who ignored her calls medical attention, PLP supported the fightback. We’ve brought our revolutionary line to the working class in the neighborhoods these youth lived and where they were killed.
Why? The misleaders, supported by the ruling class, talk about “just a few bad cops,” or in Black Lives Matter, try to build a movement limited only to Black workers. We talk with workers about capitalism’s need to target and terrorize Black workers from fighting back. Cops are part of that terrorization strategy.
While this is only the third year that Hoops for Justice has taken place, it is a community tradition. Next year, we plan to feature tennis and handball clinics and continue to bring our message of multiracial unity, class struggle and communism. See next issue for a report on how we concluded the summer project!