SOMA, Turkey, May 19 — “This is not something that suddenly happened. I can tell you that there are people here who are dying, people who are injured and it’s all because of money…They send us here like lambs to slaughter. We are not safe doing this job.”
That’s what a surviving coal miner told CNN Turkey about the fire that officials claim killed 301 miners. The actual number will be much higher. He also accused a supervisor of giving the wrong directions to trapped miners, leading them away from the oxygen supply. This fire was not a random accident. It was mass industrial murder.
On May 13, just days after two U.S. coal miners were killed in a collapse in West Virginia, an underground coal fire in Soma knocked out the mine’s elevators and ventilation system, trapping the miners in toxic fumes. It happened during shift change, with 787 miners in the mine. Some of the 301 bodies recovered so far were burned beyond recognition. More are still underground. Many who were rescued may not survive their injuries.
Another miner said of the official numbers, “We are not even counting outsiders who come here as part-time, unregistered workers,” including many youth who turn to the mines due to extreme poverty and the high cost of education.
On April 29, during a hearing in Parliament, the government of Prime Minister Erdogan rejected a call for a safety inspection at the mine. And when he travelled to Soma the day after the explosion, Erdogan told angry mourners and relatives, “Explosions like this in these mines happen all the time.”
Anti-government demonstrations broke out across the country. Student protests in Ankara and Istanbul led up to a one-day strike by the major trade unions on May 15. A march was held in Ankara from the Middle Eastern Technical University to the Energy Ministry.  The marchers erupted in a rock-throwing protest in front of the headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development Party. In Istanbul, there were demonstrations in Taksim Square and young people laid down in the metro station, representing those killed in the mine. A demonstration of thousands was attacked by hundreds of riot police firing tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
As a result of the mass actions of workers and youth, four mining company executives, including the manager, were arrested charged with causing multiple deaths and injuries through negligence.
U.S. Investors Reap Millions
Soma, with a population of around 100,000, is a major center for lignite coal mining. Turkey has rich supplies that are used for domestic power. The Energy Minister recently announced that Turkey would invest $118 billion by 2023 to meet their doubling energy consumption. According to Pieter Verstraete, a Türkiye Burslari Researcher at Bilgi University in Istanbul, these investments have been accompanied with privatization, deregulation and wage-cuts, to keep the mines profitable and attractive mainly to U.S. investors. The average wage for miners is only $500/month.
What these investors also find “attractive” is cutting safety costs, “flexible” work conditions, less training, and subcontracting unskilled and unregistered under-age workers. And it’s not just the privatized mines. A report by the General Miners Union in March 2010 stated that between 2000-2009, there were 25,655 “accidents” in the state-owned mines of the Turkish Coal Corporation (TTK), and that 98 percent could have been prevented with proper training and safety inspections.
Such mining disasters due to bosses’ profiteering at the expense of safety also occur worldwide. In 2010, 29 miners were killed in West Virginia.
But what’s proper to the bosses is anything that generates more profits. Whether its hundreds of miners in Turkey — or more than 1,000 garment workers  buried/burned alive in the factory collapse in Bangladesh, or coal miners in the U.S. —our lives are just the cost of doing business. And as horrible as these numbers are, they pale in the face of those being slaughtered by growing imperialist wars, poverty, and curable disease around the world. The best way to answer these murders is to rebuild the international movement for communist revolution. The truth is, nothing less will do.

NEW YORK CITY, May 1 — There were two marches here today. The one in Union Square was dominated by pseudo-left parties and groups and included some immigrant and community organizations. The one at City Hall was led by the NY Central Labor Council and the Democratic Party. On the surface, they appeared to be very different. But in essence, they were similar. Both stripped May Day of its revolutionary content and both reflected their lack of confidence in the working class.
And this is no surprise! These marches were organized by professional misleaders who seek to divide our class and fight for scraps instead workers’ power. A small PLP contingent marched, calling for a communist revolution. Many workers and passersby took the paper. A group of young women joined our chant, “Democrats, Republicans, All the Same. Racist Murder is the Name of the Game.”
Reformist May Day
The rally in Union Square was a May Day marathon, with groups coming and going and speaker after speaker going on and on for more than 5 hours before marching down to Foley Square. There may have been 50 organizations participating, but few had more than two dozen people with them.
Meanwhile, at City Hall, about two dozen of the city’s largest unions had signed on to the May Day Coalition for “Labor Rights — Immigrant Rights — Jobs for All.”  But with the exception of the Laborers’ Union and CUNY Professional Staff Congress, there was little rank-and-file presence. With all the City unions entering contract talks, there was only a handful of transit workers and teachers. Healthcare and city workers’ unions — with more than 350,000 mostly black and Latino workers combined, facing jobs cuts as a result of racist cutbacks — turned out only staff and officers and little else. A painfully long list of union honchos shared the stage with elected officials, sending the message that the future is bright with Mayor DeBlasio in City Hall.
Neither march mentioned racist police terror. Neither march had more than a handful of fast food workers or other low-wage workers. Neither march warned of the threat of growing imperialist wars. Neither march called for an end to racist unemployment. And neither march called for the building of a mass revolutionary communist movement.
Have Confidence in the Working Class
The PLP May Day march in Brooklyn was the exact opposite. It put revolutionary politics up front and for a few hours, took the streets in the black and immigrant neighborhood that on every other day is controlled by the racist police. People on the sidewalks saw themselves in our ranks, joined our chants English, Spanish, and Creole and embraced Challenge, over thousands distributed.
Yes, we have a long way to go. But the contrast in the two days’ events is a testimonial to our confidence in the workers and youth to grasp revolutionary communist ideas and make them their own. It is a testament to the strategy of building a base for communist ideas and for PLP. We have a very long way to go, but we are winning!

Excerpt from NYC’s Why I Joined PLP Speech

What does capitalism mean?
You gotta fight back!
All of us, every single one of us has gone through the indoctrination machine, the behemoth which attempts to crush you from all sides, the machine which tries to dehumanize you and destroys any semblance of hope in our unity. The monster that makes it seem that going down capitalism lane is the only way forward, even though we’re carrying the entire world on our backs, seeing ourselves dying every step of the way. I knew that things were bad but I was told to put my faith in the system which causes this destruction, that I’d just have to wait as either a politician, or the market, or a charity, or god fixed everything that was wrong with our world!
I was told to put my faith in capitalism as I saw my family break their backs to support us.
I was told to put my faith in capitalism as I lived one paycheck away from homelessness every week.
I was told to put my faith in capitalism as I saw my mother work harder and harder, yet have less self-worth every day.
I remember asking my mother why she thought we were poor. She told me that it’s because she wasn’t smart enough, that she didn’t work hard enough. And our entire life she had been bearing the burden of our poverty completely on her shoulders, blaming herself every step of the way.
I told her that it wasn’t her fault — that the system wasn’t set up for us to be happy. It was set up for us and those like us to be slaves and the few to be the slavemasters. And she understood, because she isn’t stupid even though capitalism tells her she is every day. And we aren’t stupid. We can see how capitalism is destroying us and we know it needs to be taken down and yet still, I was told to put my faith in capitalism.
Long had I realized the very thing which I’ve been told would solve all problems in our world was in fact the root of the issue and — I was done waiting for capitalism to solve all our problems. I was done watching as capitalism destroyed humanity. I was done seeing my life become more and more commodified, objectified, and meaningless under this system of oppression. And for a long time, I just didn’t know what I should do to fight back.
But a year ago I was met with this beautiful idea, one that was quite compelling, that had me slapping my forehead saying, “Why wasn’t I able to articulate this before?”
The people I met, who helped me learn about it, spoke with such fervor it was hard to ignore. For the first time since the years my mother would tell me, “Hijo, you could become anything you want, anything that’ll make you happy,” I was filled with hope a rare and wondrous emotion which capitalism makes much too uncommon.
And one year ago today, I did become something that made me happy. I became a communist, and joined the struggle with my working-class brothers and sisters. I dedicated my life to the pursuit of a world which actually makes sense and takes care of everyone and everything in it.
Since I joined I’ve grown as both an individual and as a part of the collective. I’ve made friends that I will have for life. And I know when s*** goes down, all of you will have my back as I will have yours. Because this isn’t some club of loosely connected people. This is the working class this is a communist party ready to take it all down. That’s why I joined the Progressive Labor Party.
Now, even if you’ve been in the Party for long time, I ask you to recommit to the working class. And if you haven’t joined yet, I ask you to think about it, because no one is going to fight this fight for us. If we don’t do it soon, they’ll be nothing to fight for. So join the Progressive Labor Party, and fight for communism!

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the sequel to 2011’s The First Avenger, set records for an April movie opening, bringing in close to $100 million. The movie is a two-hour long special effects blow-out, which Hollywood expects to bring in massive revenue.
Trading on the recent trend of comic-book movies that take their source material seriously, The Winter Soldier dabbles in some current themes that might surprise those skeptical of Hollywood blockbusters. SHIELD, the super-secret security agency that Captain America belongs to, is revealed to be not all that it seems, as its secrecy is shown to make it prone to extraordinary abuses. It is clear that SHIELD’s mission is a metaphor for the war on terrorism and the abuses that have come from it. Revealing SHIELD’s secrets is seen as a great act of heroism, an allusion to Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents.
Still, these themes play second fiddle to the most popular notion in American action films, the siege mentality. At no point in The Winter Soldier (or any film in the Marvel Comics empire) is the world — and by world they naturally  mean the United States, since no other part of the world is ever shown on screen — not in mortal danger. Even as we learn that a secret military organization threatens our “freedom” (that amorphous concept at the center of all patriotic films), we discover that there actually are massive evil conspiracies to enslave people. So where does that leave us?
Whether the enemy is terrorism, the national enemy du jour (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, take your pick), crime, drugs or the fiscal cliff, we are kept in a constant state of fear by the media, and politicians. With so much fear-mongering it is easy to forget that the United States spends more on its military than the next ten biggest spenders combined. Movies like The Winter Soldier show a U.S. in constant danger of attack, but the historical facts show that it is the rest of the world that is in constant danger of attack from the United States.
In short, The Winter Soldier helps to perpetuate an image of the U.S. military as the victim of a dangerous world rather than as the imperialist villain that makes the world more dangerous. This inversion of victims and victimizers is an important ideological victory that justifies absurd military expenditures while quieting dissent against increasing U.S. military adventures abroad.
In The Winter Soldier the U.S. military mission can be salvaged so long as noble soldiers like Captain America are in charge of it. This is a vision of the world in which imperialism doesn’t exist as a concept and the villains are not bankers out to maximize profits, but evil-doers who do evil for evil’s sake. These movies construct a fantasy that the U.S. working class is supposed to live within, where uncomfortable questions of class and power never crop up. Far from mindless entertainment, these movies present an oversimplified view of the world that serves capitalism.