INDIANA, February 9 — The Fall semester of 2014 saw a growth and renewed focus on political work on campus. This is a look into the rebuilding process of Progressive Labor Party’s presence here. Through involvement in battling racism on campus and in our neighborhoods — mainly regarding the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and murder of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico — the war against global capitalism has gained more forces.
Struggle = School for Communism
Through the semesters over the last couple of years, PLP’s work on campus has been sporadic and inconsistent. The last major struggle on our campus was our fight to remove a racist, zionist professor from campus a few years ago. That struggle was a great learning experience. We were able to create a strong multiracial collective of Black, white, Latin, and Palestinian students, that would go on to develop a campaign against the bombing in Gaza taking place at the time.
Another important struggle protested the racist murder of a young man named Stephan Watts in a Chicago suburb. PLP was instrumental in that struggle. We attended rallies, disrupted, and on a few occasions shut down, city council meetings. The battles were great schools for communism and class struggle.
People grew closer to PLP. Many of them graduated, transferred or left to work, and we were unable to keep consistent contact with them. In that time, PL’ers on campus learned valuable lessons in class struggle and base-building. We had spent so much time developing the quantity of people that we neglected the fact that in order to get a good quantity of people, we had to first look at the quality of people we were meeting. We had focused on “low hanging fruit” which distracted us from students who may have not fully understood all the theory but were ready to fight against racism and its root cause, capitalism.
PLP Leadership Builds Multiracial Unity
The Fall semester of 2014 proved to be a very rewarding one, in terms of building a sound collective of students and bringing many of these students closer to PLP. In the beginning of the semester, it appeared that we might have been too optimistic because we got involved in three student organizations: Black Student Union, the Latin student group, and a multiracial collective called Students for Social Change.
It is important to note that the protests around Ferguson and Ayotzinapa played a significant role in galvanizing the students on our campus. This resulted in forums, trips to Ferguson, marches, petitions, and three protests, on campus and a local city hall.
The Party and our friends helped provide leadership, inspired by 50 militant workers and students. We took the streets, which caught the cops off guard and showed, even momentarily, the true power of the working class. We gained many contacts after that rally, some of which have come regularly to PLP study groups. This is an important development for the working class because these things usually don’t happen in “big, bad, and conservative” Indiana. It shows that the working class is looking for an alternative, and that alternative is communism.
The most important development of this political work was a coalition developed and maintained between all three organizations, which created a strong multiracial force on campus — something that had never been done before. Black students were passing out flyers about the struggles in Mexico surrounding the 43 missing students. Latin and white students were holding “Fight Back like Ferguson” signs at protests on campus. These struggles resulted in many students from all three organizations becoming closer to PLP and being exposed to revolutionary politics.
Communism Is The Only Answer
Last semester we recruited a new member, and many more became closer to the Party and attended our study groups. Four travelled to New York for a college conference, and others have accompanied the Party on trips to Ferguson. We also saw veteran comrades, who had taken some steps back become very involved in providing leadership to the campus base.
This struggle to completely destroy capitalism is a long, frustrating, and brutal one. But it is a fight that we must fully immerse ourselves in, if we wish to build a communist society. The working class is yearning for an alternative to this system that murders us, closes our schools and hospitals, and sends us off to fight in imperialist wars. Communism is that alternative, and the Progressive Labor Party is the organization to make that happen. Join Us.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haïti, February 8 — Since early February, the streets have been filled with barricades, burning tires and burnt-out vehicles in efforts to demand lower gasoline prices. These actions follow a series of struggles over the last couple of years against the high cost of living.
In  Haiti, the price of gas has not gone down, even with a reduction in price on the international market. It has become clearer to many that the rulers here will go to great lengths to protect their racist criminal profiteering and that the government is putting even more money stolen from the working class into their own pockets.
Despite Sellout, Students Continue to Mobilize
On February 2, a confederation of transport unions and the political opposition to current president and U.S.-favorite, Michel “Haiti-is-open-for-business” Martelly, called for a two-and-a-half day strike.  They demanded USD$2.20 reduction in gas prices. The first day paralyzed almost all of the economic, political and social activities of the country. However, sellout leaders called it off after day one, having negotiated a US10¢ reduction in gas prices. The sellouts also got government jobs and other crumbs for themselves. The average cost of gas at the pump in Haiti now is about US$4.20. In comparison, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. in August was $3.60, and is now $2.20.
In the face of the sellout, some progressive forces inside the State University (UEH) called for a mass mobilization to continue the struggle. They reasoned that lowering the price of gasoline in Haiti would result in also lowering the viciously high cost of living for the working class, which gets steadily worse as capitalism continues to do its dirty work.
On Feb. 5 at 10 AM, a march was organized by students and workers to the offices of the Minister of Finance/Economy, followed by a sit-in. The police came, armed to the teeth, and dispersed the demonstrators with tear gas, water cannons (filled with chemically treated water), rubber and live bullets, and batons. No one was spared this violence by the armed forces of repression who have all of state power at their disposal. Yet, as news of the attack spread, militant student organizations from other campuses joined the resistance. The police attempt to spread terror throughout the working class was not allowed to go unanswered.
Fake Left Sides With the Oppressors
It is also becoming clearer to many here that the opposition and other political parties are organizing to put themselves in Martelly’s place. They hang onto the coattails of the working-class movement, whose demands are just but whose organizational level is not yet developed enough for the task at hand. The working class is also saddled with a so-called trade union movement that is either openly on the side of the bosses or somewhat less openly so. These forces are constantly in conflict for the leadership of struggles. But because they are all ready to sell out at the drop of a hat, they weaken the mass working-class movement.
The Progressive Labor Party in Haiti understands that this struggle is on the wrong road when workers and students let themselves be influenced by the “militant” speeches of the bourgeois politicians on the fake left (who only call for the reform of the capitalist system) and other political parties vying for power. The bosses’ press buries the revolutionary aspirations of the working class and covers every syllable of the sellouts’ speeches because they hide the true nature of capitalism and imperialism — the system depends on the super-exploitation of workers in order to make profits, and they will not give up easily. Only armed struggle for communist revolution and an egalitarian system without money, racism, sexism, wars and profits will change the lives of the billions of workers around the world.
Workers Need Determined, Communist Party: PLP
On campus, we are determined not to let the leadership of the student-worker movement fall into the hands of those close to the fake-left or openly bourgeois parties. For progressive and revolutionary-minded students, all struggles need the analysis and leadership of a well-organized revolutionary communist party, the PLP. Our Party is still young and developing in Haiti. Despite living under very difficult conditions, we are working to build a solid party, well-entrenched in the working class.
On Feb. 8, a mass meeting was held at the social science branch of UEH. The agenda was to analyze the current situation, and take stock of the progressive forces and their political line in relation to the bourgeois politicians. With leadership from PLP, it was agreed that students and workers need a determined, unapologetic revolutionary communist party to give direction to workers’ struggles in this and the coming period.
Our Party must be bold and militant in word and deed, and fight ceaselessly in the interests of all sections of the working class: unionized and non-unionized, employed and unemployed, urban and rural, young and old, women and men, worker and student. For the current fight, we need to do a better job in raising the political consciousness of workers and students. We need more literature explaining why the local and imperialist bosses have kept workers in Haiti from “enjoying the benefits” of the current drop in gasoline prices. We need to expose how the current crop of criminals in power — Martelly & Co. — serve the interests of their imperialist masters, and how to prepare the groundwork for building our international communist party. Dare to struggle, dare to win.

DETROIT, MI, February 7 — Thousands of workers here, employed and unemployed, retirees, the indigent and the disabled, were forced to appear at Wayne County show-cause hearings to try to keep their homes out of foreclosure. They were almost all Black. There were so many foreclosure notices that the hearings had to be held in Cobo Center, where just two weeks earlier the racist auto bosses spent millions unveiling their new cars at the annual Auto Show.  
More than 62,000 Detroit properties are threatened with foreclosure because the owners are three years behind on property taxes. An estimated 20,000 families own and live in their homes while another 29,000 families rent homes they do not own. The other 13,000 properties are empty lots. The total population of Detroit is just under 700,000.
“My heart got to beating so fast — it’s just very scary,” said Rebecca Miles, who said her home was put in her name after her mother’s death but had fallen about $3,000 behind on taxes. All around their East Side neighborhood, the [foreclosure notices] had gone up, said her husband, Michael Miles. “They did the whole block,” he said. “They’re kicking people out…” NY Times, (1/30)
When the U.S. auto industry ruled the world, and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) had over a million members and led national strikes to win important reforms for their members, Detroit claimed the highest percentage of private home ownership in the U.S. But those reforms were built on betting on the bosses’ success. Like all reforms under capitalism, they are fleeting at best, and the bosses start working on taking them back the day you win them. The only long-term guarantee for workers everywhere is to smash the racist profit system with communist revolution, and to replace the bosses and bankers with a communist society run by the working class.
Detroit has been in decline for decades due to the decline of the U.S. auto industry and the UAW accepting decades of concessions to try to save the bosses. With the economic crisis of 2008, Obama, Wall St., the auto bosses and the UAW “restructured” the industry, costing thousands of jobs, dozens of factory closings and starting wages being cut in half.  These factors contribute to 70,000 foreclosures between 2009 — 2014.
During this time, the City declared bankruptcy, targeting workers’ pensions in order to bail out the billionaire bankers. Now, with the auto bosses making billions in profits, and the City out of bankruptcy, we still see a record number of foreclosures.
Just last summer, thousands of residents were having their water shut off for being three months behind in their bill. A mass fightback helped to temporarily stop shut-offs, though they later resumed. Detroit stands as a ruin of the short-lived American Century that was to follow World War Two.  Black workers have been beaten down by the bosses, who can no longer offer the basics of schools, hospitals and fire houses. They have been betrayed by the union leaders, clergy and Democratic Party, and now they have become economic refugees, forced out by the tens of thousands. If you’re not sure about the need for communist revolution, look at Detroit.

On February 1, 3,800 oil refinery workers launched a health and safety strike against the deadly combination of outsourcing, short staffing, and forced overtime. The strikers are members of the United Steel Workers Union (USW), which represents 30,000 oil industry workers, at 63 refineries, oil terminals, pipelines, and petrochemical facilities. They produce 65 percent of U.S. oil.
The walkouts took place at nine strategic refineries in Texas, Kentucky, Washington, and California that produce 1.82 million barrels of fuel a day. The rest of the workers are working on 24-hour contract extensions that could end at any time, and which could shut down the rest of the organized sites. This would be the first industry-wide strike since 1980, when all the workers walked out together, and stayed out for three months.
The union called the strike after rejecting proposals from Royal Dutch Shell, the lead negotiator for the industry. The other companies involved in the strike are Tesoro Corporation, Exxon Mobil, Marathon Petroleum, and LyondellBasell Industries. The U.S. oil industry made almost $90 billion in profit in 2014.
Big Oil is notorious for spills and explosions that threaten oil workers, the surrounding community and the environment. An explosion at a BP refinery outside Houston in 2005 killed 15 workers and injured nearly 200. Regulators found BP responsible for willfully violating safety protocols, and enacted millions in fines. Four years later, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found 700 more violations, and enacted $87 million in fines for not correcting the violations that caused the explosion.
Another safety issue is that maintenance work, originally done by union members, is now being contracted out. Full-time union workers get health and safety training from both the company and the union. Lower-paid, contract workers do not.
And when workers either leave or retire, they are not replaced, forcing others to pick up the slack with overtime. “If they staffed this refinery, it would create 150-200 full-time jobs in our community,” said one striker.
So far, the strike has not seriously affected production as managers are operating the facilities. Letting anyone cross a strike picket line is a sure loss. The best way to guarantee that the sites are closed is for the workers and their supporters to occupy them. This would up the ante and expose the media, cops, courts and politicians as hired hands of the oil industry.
It could rally the support of workers and youth as we recently saw around the issue of racist police terror. It could begin to lead thousands of workers and youth off the treadmill of legal reform and onto the road to communist revolution. We aren’t holding our breath for the USW leadership to choose that path.