97 Percent of the world lives under tyranny, according to a non-profit

Al Jazeera, 6/2–Just 40 countries representing 3.5 percent of the world’s population respect all civil liberties, a new study has found, warning that “democracy and human rights are under attack worldwide in a way we have not seen for decades.” The Atlas of Civil Society report published by the German relief organisation Brot fur die Welt (Bread for the World) on Monday said only 284 million people living in “open” countries – including Austria, Estonia, the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand and Jamaica – enjoy protection of unrestricted civil rights and liberties.

“I’m preparing you” says U.S. general to politicians about war

Reuters, 5/14–Earlier this month, U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Doug Wickert summoned nearby civic leaders to Edwards Air Force Base in California to warn them that if China attacks Taiwan in the coming years, they should be prepared for their immediate region to suffer potentially massive disruption from the very start. In a remarkable briefing shared by the base on social media and promoted in a press release, Wickert…outlined China’s rapid military growth and preparations to fight a major war…”If this war happens, it’s going to happen here,” Wickert told them…”It’s going to come to us. That is why we are having this conversation.

Starvation in Gaza increases under Israeli boots

Der Spiegel, 5/28–Ruqqia rarely cries. Usually she just lies there quietly and sleeps. When her mother drips milk into her mouth with a syringe, the little girl hardly even opens her eyes. Ruqqia weighs 2,900 grams and is 53 centimeters long, the size of a newborn. But she is seven months old. “She couldn’t move for the first 12 weeks,” says Randa Al Dohdar, 29. “The doctor told me that she might die at any moment”...Suzan Maroof, a malnourishment specialist who is also providing treatment to Ruqqia, says that 200 children come to the clinic each day…If Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip continues, up to 71,000 girls and boys could be acutely malnourished over the next 11 months…

Potential for larger war between India and Pakistan rises

Foreign Affairs, 5/23-–Nearly two weeks after India and Pakistan reached an uneasy cease-fire, neither New Delhi nor Islamabad agree on what happened preceding it…further salvos…led to the downing of Indian fighter jets and Pakistani jets...Drones and missiles whizzed across the border in both directions…Unlike India’s limited punitive strikes in the past, this offensive pressed deeper into Pakistani territory. India’s Operation Sindoor ranged far beyond Pakistani-administered Kashmir into Punjab, Pakistan’s heartland, eventually hitting not just the facilities of militant groups but also military targets, including air bases.

U.S. whipping allies into war shape

Defense News, 6/2–The United States is urging Australia to raise defense spending to 3.5% of GDP, almost a third above the target Canberra has set even for the early 2030s, the Pentagon said Sunday. “...[Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth conveyed that Australia should increase its defense spending to 3.5 percent of its GDP as soon as possible”...Hegseth said the military threat posed by China “could be imminent” and called on U.S. allies in the region to drastically increase defense spending…During his speech, Hegseth pointed to NATO countries’ recent push to reach defense budgets closer to 5% of GDP — a share the Pentagon’s head of policy has repeatedly said should be the standard for U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Most guns in Haiti come from the U.S. 

Americas Quarterly, 5/12–The continued influx of illegal firearms and ammunition, predominantly from the U.S., is a key driver of violence. Despite efforts to slow arms trafficking and seize weapons, including in ports in Miami, Santo Domingo, and Port-au-Prince, it continues virtually unabated. In March, Dominican authorities intercepted a shipment from Florida containing 23 high-caliber rifles, an Uzi submachine-gun, and 36,000 rounds of ammunition, all concealed in textile cargo…A UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) analysis confirms that approximately 70% of weapons recovered in Haitian operations originate from U.S.-licensed dealers…

A report from Pakistan is the basis for the following editorial.

While the drone war between nuclear powers India and Pakistan is on pause for the moment, the cease-fire hangs by a thread. Kashmir is a pawn in a game of war for the capitalist rulers–for the declining U.S. superpower, rival imperialist China, and regional double-dealers in India and Pakistan. Workers are trapped in the crossfire. If there is one lesson from history for the working class, it’s that regional wars will lead to bigger wars. Only a mass movement led by the international communist Progressive Labor Party can turn these wars for land, oil, and profit into a class war for communist revolution. 

On May 7, everything in South Asia exploded—again! Kashmir is one of the most hotly disputed border areas in the world, with India, Pakistan, and China all ruling parts of it. In the India-controlled part, an armed Pakistan-based nationalist group, The Resistance Front, killed 26 civilians. In response, India launched “Operation Sindoor” with missiles that killed at least 31 and injured 57 (BBC, 5/9). Pakistan hit back with artillery, killing at least 16 more. For four days, bombs and shells ripped through homes and neighborhoods. By May 10, U.S. KKKiller-in-Chief Donald Trump claimed that he’d brokered “peace” on the subcontinent. 

The butchery in Kashmir is the result of religious poison, nationalist deception, capitalist exploitation, and imperialist domination. It’s a bosses’ war fought with workers’ blood. The Progressive Labor Party calls on the international working class to reject lethal ruling-class lies and unite to overthrow the capitalist system that thrives on such carnage.

Kashmir: different rulers, same playbook

For centuries, the masses in Kashmir have faced relentless oppression. Empires, kings, and modern states have battled for control, leaving ordinary people chained to division and exploitation. 

It all goes back to the British colonial rulers, who were looting South Asia at the same time they were enslaving people in Africa.  Their global empire was built through violent conquests, brazen land grabs, and ruthless forced labor. After defeating the Sikh Empire, the British bosses found it too expensive and difficult to directly rule mountainous Kashmir. In 1846, they sold it to the Dogra monarchy, the new overseers, who ruled for more than 100 years. 

Meanwhile, workers kept fighting back. In the 1920s and ‘30s, resistance against the Dogra bosses’ brutality picked up. In 1944, a call for a “New Kashmir,” a vision for land and labor reform, was quickly betrayed by nationalist opportunists who sided with the Indian capitalists. It was another case of the futility of reformism and the dangers of class collaboration.

A second world war and the first workers’ state in Russia sent shockwaves throughout global capitalism. Inspired by the Soviet Union, workers all over the world, including South Asia, erupted in anti-colonial movements. In 1947, the British Empire—broke, in crisis, and pressed by workers’ uprisings—scrambled out of town, but not before playing its final divide-and-conquer card. 

Much like the Palestinian Nakba one year later, the British bosses spawned a bloodbath. They hacked new borders in Souith Asia overnight. The 1947 partition between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan killed as many as three million and displaced 14 million more (National Endowment for the Humanities, summer 2022). The new borders were designed to fragment workers’ anti-imperialist unity.
Since partition, India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, in 1947-48, 1965, and 1999. Each left the bosses’ conflicts over control and profits unresolved. Each left the masses suffering worse than before. 

Fast forward to 2019: The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, a nest of Hindu supremacists, revoked Kashmir’s limited autonomy. Much as fascist Israel continues to displace countless Palestinian families, the Indian rulers keep driving workers and children in Kashmir from their homes, keep looting their land, and keep crushing dissent through occupation, curfews, and terror. It’s always our class that pays the price. 

True liberation does not come through policy tweaks or parliamentary deals. It comes from smashing the capitalist system through communist revolution. Kashmir’s working class has long resisted—against Dogra kings, British imperialists, and now Indian and Pakistani bosses. But their struggles have been co-opted by nationalist and reformist misleaders. There are no good capitalist rulers, no lesser capitalist evils. Only a communist party led by and for the working class can lead us to a decent society that serves workers’ needs.

Graveyard of inter-imperialist rivalry

Rich in resources and crucial for military control of South Asia, Kashmir is trapped at the crossroads of imperialist rivalries. China’s alliance with Pakistan, India’s main regional rival, sharpens these tensions.  

During the Cold War, India leaned toward the Soviet Union, while Pakistan became the U.S. gateway to China, a backchannel to drive a wedge between the two ex-socialist giants. This dangerous chess game came at a horrific cost. In 1971, the U.S. funded Pakistan’s genocidal response to the Bengali independence movement in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. More than 50 years later, imperialist-drawn borders and lethal nationalist ideas still rip workers apart.

Today, U.S. imperialism and Chinese state capitalism both exploit the Kashmir crisis. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a cornerstone of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, cuts through Kashmir.  In response, Trump has sustained the bipartisan U.S. strategy of backing India and its virulent racist prime minister, Narendra Modi, as a counterweight to China.  But India is also a member of BRICS, a China-dominated bloc. The U.S. death machine has no choice but to hedge its bets and arm both sides of the India-Pakistan divide (Foreign Affairs, 5/13). 

This is classic crisis management for a fading U.S. empire. All the while, Kashmir remains a graveyard of nationalist rivalry—and a flashpoint where regional tensions could quickly escalate into all-out war. 

Nationalism kills, long live internationalism

Workers in India, Pakistan, and Kashmir must refuse to fight for any bosses! Nationalist “self-determination” under capitalism is a fraud. Instead, we are building Progressive Labor Party. Only by uniting workers across borders in one revolutionary party can we smash the artificial boundaries invented by imperialism. 

The road to peace and liberation does not run through the rulers’ legislatures, courts, or nationalist armies. It runs through revolutionary organization, proletarian dictatorship, and the abolition of all capitalist states. The choice is clear: communism or capitalist slaughter. We stand with the workers, youth, and soldiers in Kashmir, India, and Pakistan, and everywhere. Smash capitalist borders! Long live international communist revolution under the red banner of PLP!

Los Angeles County, CA, April 28—After months of bargaining and working almost a month without a contract, more than 55,000 workers represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 721 walked off the job for an historic 48- hour strike. Historic because this is the first time that every Los Angeles (LA) County department has gone on strike at the same time. As communists and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), we know that even the best union contract cannot get workers the wages and working conditions they deserve because the bosses can always take back what we fought so hard for. Even so, striking shows the immense power the working class has when we organize together. When we take it a step further by fighting for a workers' state, nothing can stop us!

Base-building is key

This strike is the result of months of organizing. In September, 2024, the majority of the membership voted to authorize an unfair labor practices strike. The strike was originally scheduled for October 10 but was delayed indefinitely when management agreed to begin contract negotiations early. In February and March of this year, thousands of workers held practice pickets across the 4,084 square-mile service area as the end of our contract rapidly approached with no tentative agreement in sight.

For months we fought management's blatant disrespect at the bargaining table while we continued to prepare our coworkers for the looming strike action. As workers whose jobs are dedicated to serving the public, many were hesitant to walk out. Some weren't union members, while others brought up valid criticisms of the union, feeling forgotten by it in favor of some of the bigger departments. In fact, the seeming neglect of our department by the union was one reason our members had previously been reluctant to get involved in union work. 

When the official picket sites were announced, we were dismayed to see that only two of the five sites we requested were on the list. After scouring the list to find the best sites for our department, we decided that we needed at least one of the three rejected sites. A PLP member took the lead to make the picket happen. By organizing with coworkers, members of a former mass organization, and community members, 25 people came out to picket all day. If it had been listed on the union website, there would have been even more participation because there was a large swath of neighborhoods in that section of the county that had no picket sites. In the end, our department ended up having to close half our locations during the strike, and we organized contingents at three picket lines, including the one organized and led by a PLP member.

Liberals are the main danger

Over 10,000 workers flooded downtown LA for a rally and march outside of the LA County Board of Supervisors meeting. The five supervisors, including former Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, are all women and majority Democrats even though they are elected as non-partisan candidates. Despite their so-called progressive stances on workers’ rights and public services, Democratic politicians oversee union-busting, the displacement of workers from their homes, and the maintenance of the largest prison system in the country. Democratic political strongholds like California and New York City—home to Rikers Island, the largest penal colony in the world—serve as stark testaments to the racist brutality of liberal politicians and the fascist danger that they  pose to the working class.

The future is bright

Moving forward, ten new colleagues have been exposed to CHALLENGE, and we will be following up with invitations to upcoming events. The lack of union attention for our department is slowly being changed. After the contract is negotiated, the union president promised to meet with members about our conditions and concerns. Of course, without workers coming together and putting pressure, nothing will change. Organizing for this strike has energized our colleagues to take action and not just talk.

The contract negotiations continue with no tentative agreement yet, but the organizing  won't stop there. We have shown the power of collective action and will continue to fight for better conditions for ourselves and the public we serve. At the same time, those of us in the Progressive Labor Party will organize to get rid of this capitalist system once and for all and replace it with a system run by and for the working class, that’s communism.

This article is Part I of a four-part series on the Scottsboro Boys. Parts I and II coincide with the 160th celebration of Juneteenth—the day enslaved Black workers in Texas finally learned they were “free”, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. The racist travesty of the Scottsboro case is part of a long, unbroken chain of racist violence, forged during the transatlantic chattel slave trade, and is inseparable from the capitalist system itself.

Parts III and IV will help us get ready for our annual summer project. This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Boston’s 1975 Summer Project. That summer, the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played a pivotal role in the struggle against local Nazis and their racist political allies from attacking young Black youth who were being bussed in effort to desegregate, all-white schools in Boston. The movement mobilized working-class youth and community members in an unforgettable, militant struggle against gutter racist capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.

In 1931, during the Great Depression, nine young Black men were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama.  The two poor white women were pressured into lying against the Black youths by the local racist bosses and their cops. One of these women later recanted and actually joined the Communist Party and the struggle against racism. The youth, ages 13 to 19, were riding the rails looking for work.They were quickly convicted by an all-white jury. Eight were sentenced to death— another cruel episode in a long history of lynchings and frame-ups. However, the U.S. Communist Party (CP) initiated and led a world-wide struggle involving millions of people fighting to prevent their execution and to free the “Scottsboro boys.”

NAACP ramps up anti-communism

The parents of the nine jailed youths appreciated the way Party members treated them with respect and equality, in contrast to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which tried to take over the case and called the parents “ignorant” when they rejected their anti-communist pleas. The parents spoke at dozens of CP-organized rallies in a worldwide campaign to win freedom for their children.

At the exact same time that these Black youth were being railroaded, an intense internal discussion was taking place within the Communist Party of the United States. The goal of that struggle was to unify Party members to make fighting racism a mass issue, and to lead multiracial class battles to counter its use by the bosses to divide the working class. The communists knew, in the wake of the worldwide economic depression, that unity of Black and white workers was critical to any revolutionary movement to overthrow capitalism, the source of mass economic misery for all workers.

CPUSA hits back against gutter racism 

The reds also knew that, historically, the use of racism, both before and after slavery, had always been the key to the existence of extremely low living standards for white workers and unlivable standards for Black workers. A week after CP organizers in the South learned of the Scottsboro arrests, the CP newspaper, the Daily Worker, editorialized that the frame-up was “part of a campaign of terror against the Negro workers and impoverished farmers and sharecroppers of the South, to ‘teach the n——- his place,’ lest he join with his natural comrades, the white workers and poor farmers of America in their struggle against starvation and boss rule.”

To its credit, the CP did use the case to expose the system of racist oppression in both the South and the North, including the racist “justice” system. It also used the case to advance Black-white unity in the fight against a capitalist system that had thrown millions onto the unemployment lines and into dire poverty. The CP pointed out that capitalism had created and benefited from the racist hell suffered by millions of Black workers and that the fight to free the Scottsboro boys was just one battle in the war to end capitalism and build a society without racism.

The CP explained to white workers that class solidarity was necessary to fight capitalist exploitation, and that the first step in forging this solidarity was to fight against the special oppression of Black workers. Every Party member was responsible for raising the Scottsboro case in whatever union, neighborhood group, or unemployed council he or she belonged to. 

Hundreds of these organizations passed resolutions and donated money in support of the struggle. The CP’s focus on the case was highlighted during a confrontation between a CP-led Unemployed Council and a Bronx, NY property owner who exclaimed, “I’ll fix the plumbing and paint the halls, but I can’t free the Scottsboro boys!”

The odds against stopping the legalized murders and freeing the nine youth were enormous. Almost every Southern newspaper in the region had joined in the effort to condemn the Scottsboro defendants before they were put on trial. An example of the “objectivity” of racism is the following description of the “crime”: “the most atrocious ever recorded in this part of the country, a wholesale debauching of society” The report went on to say that the rape “savored of the jungle” and the “meanest African corruption.” 

Black liberal misleaders fail Scottsboro boys

This series of articles will analyze the role of the two major defense strategies in this case, the International Labor Defense (ILD) and the NAACP. We will study the different strategies as they relate to the questions of mass protest, institutional racism, the fight for legal reforms, and the use of the courtroom to raise the level of political consciousness and struggle.

The CP-led International Labor Defense (ILD) organizers had to first befriend and then convince the parents (mostly mothers) of the teenage boys to support a strategy of mass struggle to demand freedom for their sons. They had to overcome the fear that lynch terror had inspired, particularly amongst Black workers in the South. But these brave parents enthusiastically embraced the ILD. One Scottsboro mother said that what she liked best about the reds was their promise to “get rid of this so-called government and the big boss.”

The ILD also had to fight the sell-out misleaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who fought the ILD for political and legal leadership of the case. Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP, promised the parents “the support of the wealthiest [white] people in” Alabama. White defended the do-nothing alcoholic defense lawyer, claiming that he made “an honest defense of the boys.”  

The differences between the NAACP and the ILD were basic. In the first place, the NAACP tried to ignore the case, because “rapists give the race a bad name” and only became interested in it when the ILD began working on it. Second, the NAACP and the ILD had a totally different class line on the case. White of the NAACP told the boys that it was a “working class mob of whites” which almost lynched them at Scottsboro, and promised them that if they allied with the NAACP they would have “the support of the wealthiest people in the state.” The ILD stressed both the class and racial repression in the case, and brought it to the attention of workers all over the world. 

The NAACP’s contempt for the Black working class shaped their contacts with their parents, just as the respect of the Communists for workers shaped their contacts. When the Black workers chose the ILD over the NAACP, NAACP leader Pickens described the parents as “the densest and dumbest animals it has yet been my privilege to meet.” 

The parents responded, both to personal kindness and to political ideas. “I can’t be treated any better than the Reds have treated me,” Janie Patterson wrote one of the ILD lawyers. Her letter was signed “From one of the Reds, Janie Patterson.” Another parent, Mrs. Montgomery, wrote that the part she liked best about the Communist program was the promise to “get rid of this so-called government and the big boss.” 

The parents responded angrily to the NAACP smears against them. “We are not too ignorant to know a bunch of liars and fakers when we meet up with them, and are not too ignorant to know that if we let the NAACP look after our boys, that they will die.” 

The key difference between the ILD and the NAACP strategies was that the NAACP opposed all political struggle, both inside and outside of the courtroom. They opposed rallies in defense of the framed Black youth, on the grounds that this would just alienate the liberal Southern elite, the so-called “best people” on whom the NAACP relied.