The company I work for is located in the northern part of the State of Mexico, one of the poorest areas of the state. The company pays $600 MXN a week to women and $650 MXN to men (one U.S. dollar is equivalent to 12.78 Mexican pesos); these are starvation wages, miserable and also humiliating. This company is one of many that exploit workers, taking advantage of conditions in the area, because this is one of the most deprived regions. The majority here doesn’t own the lots where they reside, living precariously in brick and mud houses covered by cardboard or aluminum roofs, and out of necessity are forced to accept dangerous jobs for very low wages. Most never even finished elementary school.
The majority of workers in this company are women and many are under age; there are only three men in the production line. Women do all the heavy work, risking injuries, without safety equipment or social security benefits. Because of the scarcity of jobs, compounded by the low educational level in which this accursed system has kept them, many women have to tolerate abusive bosses who humiliate them, scream obscenities at them and try to destroy their dignity and make them feel like trash.
When I realized a young woman was crying because our boss had insulted her for something insignificant, I loudly challenged the boss, denouncing him in front of our co-workers, telling him he couldn’t talk like that to a person, a woman, and even more so, to a young person; I was so angry that I struck him.
When the contractor learned of this situation, he demanded to know why I had struck the boss, saying that he couldn’t tolerate that type of violence in his company, even though the bosses’ violence is much more serious, because humiliating and degrading words can cause injuries that often never heal.
In the end, I was fired, and the supervisor threatened me with court charges. But what’s good about this situation is that it allowed me to discuss the Party’s politics with some of my co-workers, who are now receiving CHALLENGE. We workers have the possibility of freedom in our hands; we must fight for dignity, eliminating racism, individualism and sexism that destroy us while the capitalists enjoy the wealth that we produce. We must fight for our children to save them from this suffering, for the dignity of our lives, for our freedom, for a communist revolution. Workers of the world unite!
Communist Fighter

Los Angeles, June 7 — When President Obama showed up here today to give a fund-raising speech to the people he really represents — the wealthy of this city and the fat-cat donors of the Democratic Party — he was met by 150-200 protesters, mostly young Latino college students. Many came to the U.S. with parents and relatives in search of a way out of the desperate poverty in Central America and Mexico. A group of us PLP members joined our friends from immigrant rights groups at the rally, to protest an administration that is working 24/7 to detain (jail) and deport an all time high number of immigrants, 1.7 million, in the last four years.
These anti-immigrant policies and actions have prompted anger and demonstrations around the country against the “Deporter-in-Chief” as rally organizers labeled him. But it’s important for workers in these groups, and all workers, to understand that it isn’t just about Obama’s policies or his friends — it’s built into the bosses’ system.
The hangover from the recent capitalist crisis of 2007-2008 has left the U.S. with several million new U.S.-born jobless piled atop the mountain of workers who were already unemployed before the crash. These workers roam the streets and “job fairs” looking for work. By the tens of thousands they enroll in schools hoping to upgrade the sales value of their labor power. Often the only result is debt from student loans.
Yet capitalists, from the biggest corporate manufacturing bosses to the smallest subcontractors, will not and cannot put them to work. The law of maximum profits leads the bosses to look for the lowest costs and wages, and these young workers are unwillingly competing with workers in China, Brazil or Bangladesh for the lowest costs and most dangerous working conditions.
The real purpose for borders is to divide the working class and build racism. All bosses and their capitalist governments are free to export capital the world over wherever and whenever it buys the cheapest labor and resources. They are free to exploit the workers in any area of the world, any time, free to murder innocent people in imperialist wars, free to poison the earth, to lie, spread famine, disease, poverty, push sexism, patriotism, and nationalism.
And that’s why Progressive Labor Party turned out for this protest, because we reject this idea, and believe our young friends can be won, through our communist ideas, to see that capitalism has never, and can never, work for the great majority of us that sell our brains and strength for a wage.
Join us in Progressive Labor Party to put an end to the plague of capitalism. Fight for a communist world without borders.

In response to the CHALLENGE article on the Boston Marathon bombings 4/21), about the tragedy that killed three people, it has been useful for Boston comrades in discussing and agreeing with our friends that capitalism is at the root of terrorism (explained well in the article). The bosses’ pursuit of creating a police state is currently strong evidence of an increasing fascist hold over the masses. Some of us have gathered reactions of students and workers at one urban community college here.
After the bombing some students without “legal” immigrant status feared coming to school. There was a heightened awareness at the college of the police “out there looking for the perpetrators” endangering many students who immigrated here. They were wary of appearing publically. This fear is legitimate and those comrades who were born here must become sensitive to, and respectful of, such reactions. We must find ways to work with them and enable them to trust us and feel safe to express themselves about PLP’s politics.
With the media praising the police and “first responders,” and using this tragedy to build U.S. patriotism, the general public appears very tolerant of this new police state. As anti-Muslim terrorism runs rampant in Boston, a Muslim woman from Malden was beaten and a woman from Newton, a wealthy Boston suburb was forced out of her car by the police while they searched her vehicle and questioned her. One Muslim professor who works at the college lives in an apartment complex in Newton among a small community of Muslims described their fear of leaving the house. Since the Marathon, some of her non-Muslim neighbors have snubbed her, which shocked and hurt her and her husband. There’s a police car parked outside the complex which was never there before during the day.
However, many working-class students, staff and instructors at the college have cautiously voiced ideas close to those of PL’s. In one class, the professor encouraged an open discussion about the events.
A Latino student said the lockdown in Boston the Friday after the shooting was even worse than her experience several years ago in a police crackdown in a Los Angeles working-class neighborhood. She reported that curfews were set and Latino male youth were pulled off the street into police cars at gunpoint and interrogated while cops looked for suspects described as young Latinos. Others said they’d heard similar stories from family and friends.
In addition to the state-sponsored terrorism described in the CHALLENGE article, the state’s bullying tactics seen after the 9/11 attacks and in the days following the Boston bombing become the new form of terrorism imposed on working people. All students who participated in these discussions agreed that the police had too much power. Only a few thought the complete lockdown was necessary to apprehend the two young bombing suspects.
Several scholars at the college (Honor Society students) are starting an “underground” magazine in response to these discussions, enabling students to submit ideas and poems anonymously, to get them out to the general public without feeling threatened. A student who emigrated from South America will be the editor. She explained that the work of poets like Pablo Neruda of Chile, Nicolas Guillen of Cuba and Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua — although advocating reform politics — described excellent tactics of how to mobilize the masses for a cause. She explained we could use them as models to promote revolutionary ideas and educate everyone in the college community about communism.
At the same time, contributors would have anonymity and therefore at least temporarily feel somewhat safe from persecution. In this way many more students could be drawn in and eventually become advanced enough to fight openly for communism.
In the weeks following the marathon tragedy, a U.S. citizen employed at the college working with PL received more inquiries about PL, May Day and CHALLENGE than in any previous years. However none were confident enough to join us openly or to march on May Day this year.
This shows the need to become sensitive to workers and students who support our ideas and to find ways to work with them until these potential comrades develop enough to fight alongside us for communism to smash this fast-developing fascist police state.
Let’s fight to keep revolutionary communist ideas expressed and circulating to the masses as widely as possible and urge workers and students to fight for these principles. Truly, the only solution is communist revolution!
Boston Comrade


PL’ers in the mass orgaization Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations are attending the UU General Assembly in Louisville, KY. At last June’s General Assembly, in Phoenix, 3,000 UUs demonstrated outside racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigrant detention center, chanting “Tear it down!”
The progressive aspirations of Unitarian Universalists are codified in seven principles. They are achievable — but not under capitalism. Take these four principles as an example.
The inherent worth and dignity of every person. Despite endless heroic struggles to reform it, capitalism has been destroying the lives of working people for five centuries. Often this takes the form of mass murder, as it did this spring in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In their relentless push for profit, garment factory owners forced employees, mainly women, to work in a dangerous building by threatening to withhold their ($37 a month!) paychecks. The building collapsed, killing 1,127 workers.
Capitalists use both racism and sexism to divide workers and reap even higher profits. The same sexism used to sell women’s fashions abetted the mass murder of women in Bangladesh. For the European and U.S. corporations that were the ultimate employers of these women, racism also played a role in justifying below-poverty wages and deadly working conditions.
To stay competitive, the capitalists impose wage, pension, and health benefit cuts. They resort to layoffs, speedups, unpaid overtime, unsafe working conditions, and outsourcing — whatever it takes to keep them profitable. Democrats are no better than Republicans in this regard. When the Obama administration took over General Motors, it slashed the base pay of new hires in half, from $28 to $14 per hour.
UUs often attribute low wages and unhealthy or unsafe working conditions to the greed of individual bosses. But it’s the laws of capitalist development that undermine the worth and dignity of working people. Companies that maximize profits can expand their operations and gain more access to capital from banks. As a result, they capture market share from less profitable companies, which eventually get taken over or run out of business.
Justice, equity and compassion in human relations. In the 17th Century, John Locke claimed that society was the product of a “social contract” among isolated individuals. This incorrect idea is implicit in the UU principles. In fact, human beings evolved through cooperation in production, beginning with hunting and gathering. In today’s capitalist society, every individual is a member of one of two classes: the small group of people who own and control the means of production (factories, mines, oil fields, transport), and the much larger group who creates value through their work. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans worked together to produce food and shelter for all. No one tried to “get ahead.” This was primitive communism. PLP’s goal is to nurture humans’ nature to work collectively and build communism based on a scientific understanding and practice.
For capitalists, “justice” means the right to exploit workers and profit from their labor. It’s the right to benefit from racist and sexist wage differentials. It’s the right to stay in power by dividing workers with racist, sexist, and nationalist ideas — and through religion. Capitalist justice is enforced by the apparatus of the state: armies, cops, courts, laws, and prisons. Government may take the form of electoral democracy (the U.S. or Bangladesh), or monarchy (Saudi Arabia), or rule by a single party (the state capitalist rulers of China). But the content in each case is the dictatorship of the ruling class.
As for “equity,” capitalists believe it is equitable for the richest 1 percent of the world’s population to own 40 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owns 1 percent. They believe it is equitable for hundreds of millions to suffer from unemployment, despite the desperate need for education, health care, home construction, infrastructure repair, and pollution abatement.   
Do capitalists feel “compassion” for workers? Even as they announce layoffs or pay cuts, they are busy importing cheap products from starvation-wage countries and exporting capital to exploit workers in those countries. Their exploitation forces workers to emigrate to the U.S. and Europe, where they are both criminalized and forced to accept substandard pay and working conditions. “Justice, equity and compassion” are under siege by capitalist social relations.
The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. No matter your age, you have not lived one day of your life in a world without war. Since around 1900, the beginning of the era of monopoly capitalism, the imperialist powers have fought endless wars to seize territory, markets, resources and access to labor. At least 160 million people have been killed in these conflicts. (For death tolls, see www.war-memorial.net.) From the 1860s to 1975, peasants and workers in one small country, Vietnam, fought against imperialist occupiers — first France, then the Japanese, then the French again, then the U.S. and its puppet regimes. In the war against U.S. imperialism alone, three million Vietnamese were killed. A recent book about U.S. military policy in Vietnam takes its title from what many soldiers were ordered to do: Kill Anything That Moves.
The murderous tradition of U.S. imperialism is alive and well today. With the U.S. wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan maintaining smaller numbers of troops, the Obama administration is presiding over a “pivot to Asia,” a move to line up allies and prepare for conflict with their main imperialist rival, China. Cyberwarfare between the two rivals is already underway. If an all-out war erupted between the U.S. and China, it would undoubtedly involve nuclear weapons and result in tens of millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — of fatalities.
War is the ultimate expression of capitalist competition. It’s also the ultimate solution to capitalist crises of overproduction, known as depressions. Through war, capitalist governments destroy excess productive capacity — including “excess” workers — and rebuild.
To achieve “world community with peace,” we must fight to end capitalist rule.
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Most UUs try to some extent to “live green.” Meanwhile, the world’s capitalists pour over a million pounds of carbon per second into the atmosphere, mainly through unnecessarily dirty power plants, factories, cement production, and ships. The stated goal of the 2012 UN Climate Change Conference was not to reverse global warming, but merely to slow it down – and it failed to reach agreement even on that. Why? Because the attendees all represented a capitalist class that places profits over the health of the atmosphere, water, or forests — or of people like us. 
We live in a capitalist world. The only cars, bicycles, or walking shoes we can buy are products of capitalism. So are church pews, and the paper in hymnals. Most of us must work for capitalist institutions. We cannot achieve dignity, justice, or peace on UU islands in a sea of capitalism.
But we have an alternative. We must work together to fight for a world based on production for use, not for profit; on equality, not privilege; on cooperation, not “getting ahead.” In other words, we must fight for communism. “What we fight for” on page 2 of CHALLENGE, outlines the goals of the Progressive Labor Party and the need for mass, armed revolution to achieve them. Road to Revolution IV, available at www.plp.org , explains why the working class has to fight directly for communism rather than socialism, which inevitably leads back to capitalism. Join us to turn the aspirations in the UU Principles into reality.