The following is an excerpt of the speech that’ll be given on May Day in Flatbush, Brooklyn on April 29.
Happy May Day to the international working class!
May Day is that day! The working class’s international holiday. It’s the day when workers from across the globe commemorate our triumphs, propelled by a vision of a world without capitalist exploitation and borders, run by the working class.
On May Day Progressive Labor Party (PLP) gathers its forces under one flag, the red flag, of communist revolution.
A communist society means one that is run by the working class and serves the working class–free of money, wages, bosses, and exploitation.
May Day is that day! The day in the year when we remember, celebrate, re-dedicate and affirm our determination to fight for a world full of potential. A world where our children can grow up and bask in creativity and curiosity, but most of all to be fighters in a world where they look out for each other. A world where workers are fed, housed, challenged, and loved, that world is communism.
This rotten, decaying, vile system of capitalism that we currently live under does its very best to pit workers against each other. Ultimately leading us to choose sides in their wars for profit. We can’t let the bosses win. We must unite to smash imperialist war with communist revolution. May Day is that day!
Capitalism in crisis
Since last May Day, it’s been another year of mass attacks on our class. The imperialists ruling the U.S, Russia and China are firing what could be the opening shots of World War III, and preparing our working class youth to be food for their missiles.
If you’re in Ukraine, the bosses tell you workers in Russia are responsible for the war. If you’re in Russia, the bosses tell you workers in Ukraine are responsible for the war.
All while the U.S. Media ignores the thousands of Black and Brown children slaughtered in Yemen and Africa during recent wars. As in all imperialist wars, workers have no side in these conflicts. We have no class interest in fighting and dying for the capitalist rulers.
As these imperialist rulers hoard resources to prepare for their next global conflict, workers’ health and safety will suffer. To get workers to passively accept more disasters like the floods in Pakistan and Mississippi, and agree to fight in World War III, the capitalist bosses will need increasing fascist repression.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis in preparation for world war. When the bosses’ profit system starts breaking down, they become desperate to keep it afloat—at all costs.
It’s capitalism that’s driving the rise in homelessness and the epidemic of mental health problems. It’s capitalism that’s forcing millions around the world to flee their homes in the face of war and deadly poverty. The liberal rulers can’t reform their way out of these disasters; their system creates them in the first place.
Liberal politicians use the fear of Trump to scare the working class into looking the other way as migrant workers and the homeless are terrorized. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and her fake-left Squad railed against Trump for ripping children from their parents’ arms and putting them in cages in Texas. Now these so-called progressives sit on their hands as Biden does the same as Trump and worse. If we let them get away with these outrages today, tomorrow they’ll be targeting the rest of our class.
“Lesser evilism,” the idea that some bosses are less racist, less sexist, or less profit-driven than others, is a literal “dead end.” It’s under a democratic president and a Black mayor that 16 year old Ralph Yarl was shot for ringing the wrong doorbell.
Under the leadership of Progressive Labor Party, the international working class must turn the guns around and seize state power. Only then can we guarantee that the work that we do, let me say that again, only then can we guarantee that the work that WE DO serves workers’ needs.
Celebrate!
We salute workers across the U.S. who took to the streets to fight back against the police murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. We stand in solidarity with Tyre’s family and countless names of workers slain by this murderous system. Another heartbreaking death in a city with a Black-led democratic ruling class. Proving once again the shallowness of identity politics that bosses use as a tool to divide us and that reforms don’t work. We don’t need more Black cops, mayors, or governors, we need a world run by workers!
Over and again, we see workers saving workers. In Pakistan, workers risked their lives by wading through toxic, deadly flood waters to distribute vital donations.
In Turkey and Syria, thousands of workers and youth are breaking through the border to help other workers after the earthquakes.
Fight for communism
All of these efforts are courageous and essential. But ultimately, they will be futile if we fail to understand that we can save ourselves and our class only by smashing capitalism, the root of all these problems.
Earthquakes will keep happening under communism. But when the working class gains state power, and enforces strict rules for development and building safety, the human toll of these disasters will be far less.
By working together and sharing resources, liberated from the divisions of private property and wage slavery, workers will create a safer, freer world.
We salute comrades fighting back!
Fight like our comrades at Kingsborough Community College who after being attacked by racist campus police bravely led many militant multi-racial marchers through campus forcing those very same cops to shut the campus down.
Fight like our comrades who are fed up with NYC bosses' attempts to cut retired workers' health care benefits.
Fight like transit workers in D.C and Virginia against cuts to benefits and unequal wages.
Fight like our comrade-teacher in Jersey who was fired for encouraging his students to be militant in the face of racism.
Fight like Carolyn, a lifelong party member who dedicated her life to serving the working class—fighting the KKK in Tupelo, spending the last week of her life volunteering at a soup kitchen, showing up at the courthouse to support the family of Raymond Chaluisant, a young worker murdered by a NYC corrections kkkop.
These fightbacks are the bright spots we look to because here, the Progressive Labor Party is active! Here, workers and youth are being won to the only answer to the attacks of capitalism—communism.
Rededicate & Affirm
Today’s struggles where the party is active and winning our class to the fight for communism are the seed-bed for tomorrow’s participation in mass struggles.
Under capitalism, buildings sit empty while millions are homeless. Food is thrown away as people starve.
The education, healthcare, and transportation systems are failing. A system that cannot feed, shelter, educate, or cure does not deserve to exist.
Under communism, all production will be organized through a communist party to serve the needs of the working class. There will be no profits, no money— and no bloodsucking bosses. Without money to warp our priorities, everybody will be valued. Everyone will be helped to find ways to contribute. The time has come for the working class to say “Enough!” The time to fight for communism is now.
PLP is growing and developing the next generation of leadership. Our international working class needs to build the Red Army that will destroy this entire capitalist hellscape once and for all! We want all of you to join us! May Day is that day! Today is that day!
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Editorial: KKKapitalism kills kids, Communism means death to racism!
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- 27 April 2023 64 hits
Under capitalism, it is no crime to shoot an unarmed Black man 46 times as he tries to run for his life. That was the law laid down by a grand jury in Akron, Ohio, which refused to charge the eight kkkops who assassinated 25-year-old Jayland Walker last June. It was one more outrageous example of how deadly capitalism is for Black workers, and for young Black men and youths most of all. The capitalist bosses use their criminal injustice system to defend racist murder because it serves their interests to divide and terrorize the working class. Only when the working class takes power through communist revolution will all workers have a future to live for.
After chasing Jayland Walker for the capital offense of a broken taillight, the cops in Akron cornered him on foot in a parking lot and gunned him down with nearly one hundred bullets. The grand jury’s despicable failure to hold these murderers accountable exposed how young Black workers are blamed for their own assassinations at the hands of the state.
Racist terror epidemic
After mass uprisings in 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, many workers desperately hoped that capitalism could be reformed to the point where Living While Black would no longer be a crime. But Jayland’s killing proves once again that as long as we allow the profit system to exist, the capitalist rulers will keep siccing their racist mad dogs on Black and Latin and immigrant workers. Once the bosses diverted the reform movement to defund the police into the election campaign for Jim Crow Joe Biden, the liberal politicians flipped, as usual, to serve their capitalist masters. Despite the fact that the U.S. murder rate fell last year and remains far below what it was in the 1980s and ‘90s (USA Today, 1/26), the bosses are using a trumped-up “crime wave” to pour more money into police terror and put more cops on the streets.
The results? In 2022, at least 1,176 workers and youth—a record high--were slaughtered by the cops. Fewer than a third of these killings involved even an alleged violent crime. The lynching of Jayland Walker was no aberration. Nearly one hundred murders-by-cop involved traffic violations; nearly four hundred involved people fleeing—workers mostly shot in the back. And 24 percent of these victims were Black workers and youth, nearly double their proportion in the general population. Over the last ten years, Black residents were three times more likely to be killed by cops than white residents. In Chicago, the rate was 25 times higher; in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, 28 times higher (The Guardian, 1/6).
Capitalism can’t exist without racism
The capitalist ruling class needs the racism that empowers cops to criminalize, dehumanize, and murder Black workers. They count on the terror that these armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries unleash on the most exploited sections of the working class. For hundreds of years, the U.S. bosses have reaped obscene profits from the unpaid labor of enslaved workers and from the wage slavery in their factories and fields. Today, as capitalism worldwide spirals into crisis, hard-won gains by the working class – led by Black workers and the communist movement – are quickly disappearing. While low wages and a lack of affordable housing or decent health care are scourges that plague the entire working class, they fall hardest on those targeted by capitalist racism and sexism. The median wage of Black workers is 20 percent lower than that of white workers (lending tree.com, 2/7). For Black women, the difference is 46 percent (AAUW.com). The official unemployment rate for Black workers is 60 precent higher than for white workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4/7).
To justify their system’s terror and racist inequalities, the capitalists trot out their tired old lies about Black workers, and particularly about young Black men. The bosses’ more openly racist faction, now fronted by the Republican Party, explicitly courts the allegiance of the likes of Andrew Lester, the racist vigilante in Kansas City who shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl for ringing the wrong doorbell. But the liberal Democrats are also eager to convince workers to fear and scapegoat one another and to rely on the bosses for protection. Black mayors like Eric Adams in New York and Karen Bass in Los Angeles are leading the push to put more killer cops on the streets (LA Times, 4/18).
These misleaders and apologists are appealing to workers made cynical by the chronic failures of capitalism. Their job is to deceive our class into trusting that the problems in their neighborhoods—drug abuse, homelessness, gang violence—can be solved by the very same capitalists who created those problems in the first place.
Profits, war, and fightback
Workers in Akron and Kansas City are right to be taking to the streets, marching shoulder to shoulder, demanding change. They are joining a wave of working-class anger simmering across the globe. From France and Britain to Canada and South Korea, workers are rising up and fighting back. Miitant protesters against Amazon and Adidas are calling out the billionaires who exploit our class from Seattle to Southeast Asia. Though the working class is not yet organized, not yet confident in its own enormous power, many are seeing that capitalism is an abject failure. The more we unite with each other to confront the bosses, the more confidence we build in our class.
At the same time, we must understand that capitalism cannot be fixed or reformed to serve workers’ needs. As a system driven by maximum profit, it must constantly lower labor costs. But as the working class becomes more impoverished, we cannot buy what the bosses need to sell. This basic contradiction fuels the inter-imperialist competition for resources and markets that will inevitably lead to the next global war. As the capitalists gear up for that conflict, they will need workers’ allegiance more than ever. As their crisis deepens, they will be forced to drop the mask of liberal democracy in favor of open fascist terror. The racist violence the bosses are now directing at Black workers is a reminder of what lies in store for all of us. The capitalists will stop at nothing to try to save their rotten system.
The bosses’ greatest fear is that the working class—armed with multiracial unity and the bold leadership of Black workers within a communist party—will transform the reform struggle against racism into a fight for communist revolution. The hard fact is that the working class has no need for capitalism or its bosses. Even if Jayland Walker’s killers had been indicted, like the murderers who killed George Floyd, we would all too soon be mourning another lost brother or sister. Under capitalism, the bosses need cops to keep them in power and sustain their profit system. Under communism, the working class will organize society to enable us to look out for one another. With no ruling-class parasites to protect, no exploitation to enforce, we’ll have no need for cops. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party! Power to the working class!
International Workers’ Day, represents a day of unity for the working class, but not as an end in itself. Despite our diversity as an international class—women and men; young and old; workers and students; rural and urban; Black, Brown and white; immigrant and native-born—we should use May Day as a catalyst in our struggle to thwart the will of all the bosses—the worldwide ruling classes and their flunkeys. Their aggressive attempts to trample on all the needs and aspirations of workers everywhere will, in the end, fail and capitalism/imperialism will come crumbling down and be replaced by an egalitarian society through the means of communist revolution.
And make no mistake about it: ruling classes everywhere are becoming more and more aggressive in the race for power, where imperialist war (or war between the imperialists’ proxies) would be one of the surest strategies to increase not only their capital but also their control of the world’s resources. If we follow the strategies put in place by the bosses, our class will pay the cost: the lives of workers (soldiers and civilians), more racism and sexism, more economic and health misery.
The bosses need to increase social inequality to try to save their crumbling system, while workers need to fight back to stop them. There is no other choice. It’s “them” or “us,” and we want “us” to be the winners—short-term and long-term—in this struggle.
Rebellion needs communist focus
Workers in France are currently fighting back valiantly against the cutbacks in pension benefits that the rulers need to impose to save their system. Students are fighting side by side with them, against the class enemy, because they know that their own future is in the balance. And we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them as well. But we need to fight for more than reforms of the capitalist system. Reforms won can be taken away if the same capitalist system remains. Yes, we can win this battle but lose the war if we don’t fight to rebuild the international communist movement, fight to smash the capitalist tread-mill of reformism once and for all. This is the goal of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP)—one working class, one mass party, all fighting for the same political line!
Our world to win
Solidarity between all comrades, among workers on a planetary scale, is the only way we can win. By building the PLP, we will fight for communism everywhere, following the leadership of the most advanced among us, and fight for the emancipation of our class and transform society on an egalitarian basis.
To our comrades in the PLP and our friends everywhere: Let this May Day be the beginning of a new year of revolutionary struggle on the part of the foes of capitalism and imperialism. To all comrades, current and future: Our struggle against the bosses/ruling class will inevitably lead to a transformation of society on an egalitarian basis.
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Spring Break Project for May Day brings red blossoms
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- 13 April 2023 60 hits
NEW YORK, NY, April 10–For several days, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends in New York City and Newark, New Jersey held events to prepare for May Day and build our confidence in the working class. We united students, workers, and retirees in anticipation of the most important day on the international working class’s calendar: May Day! Several newer members gave leadership to the spring break project, which included a film screening, a fundraising dinner, banner/sign making, and discussions—all to build our communist movement.
In part because of these events, one student rekindled their connection to PLP and joined, and two workers are considering joining. Ours is a movement that is dedicated to smashing capitalism along with the racist terror and imperialist war the system creates.
Fighting Racism from the Screen to the Streets
One of our first events of the week was a film screening that sparked discussion about our internationalist and antiracist political line. It was chosen by a newer member who also led the post-movie discussion. The film, La Haine, was about a group of French working class youth who were tired of the rotten system that had failed them and the racist police who brutalize them. While the young men in the film are full of contradictions (such as the racist, sexist, and reformist ideas they’ve been taught), their lived experiences as part of the working class eventually turns them all against the racist police.
In our discussion afterward, several people pointed out that a Black youth in the film advocated nonviolence and passivity but this ultimately led to his friend being killed by police. On the other hand, another youth argued for individualist violence that, as his friends pointed out, wouldn’t change the nature of society by ending police terror for everyone. We took yet another stance: We need revolutionary violence, not individual adventurism, in order to change the situation. One friend of PLP asked “How do we get everyone on the same page?” We must put revolutionary ideas and practice at the forefront of class struggle while exposing the many types of misleaders that capitalism produces. Only by fighting for communism can we finally end police terror.
The following day, we had a May Day organizing meeting, CHALLENGE newspaper sale, and fundraising dinner. At the meeting, a new member led the discussion, and she encouraged all friends and members to contribute based upon their commitment. Newer comrades prepared speeches about fighting back against racist attacks and experiences that led them to join PLP.
Dinner and Door-to-Door Organizing Bring PLP Ideas to Workers
The fundraising dinner that night was definitely a highlight of the May Day preparations. Over 70 new and veteran comrades met to bolster enthusiasm for our big day. The responsibility for hosting was shared in a collective way. We sang songs dedicated to the international working class and our fight for communism. Workers of all ages contributed food, decorations, words, activities (to be auctioned), and funds to ensure our march on May Day would be a success. One comrade spoke about the history of May Day going back to the 1886 Haymarket “Riot” when workers fought for the 8-hour workday - noting that we carry on that struggle today.
The next day, we went door-to-door in Newark housing projects to do our third Challenge sale of the spring break project. Our ongoing involvement in struggles against the racist police, landlords, and politicians in New Jersey and around the world were at the forefront of our conversations with workers about why they should march with us on May Day. Between this event and two sales we had along our May Day march route in Brooklyn, we distributed around 400 papers as part of the spring break project.
After the sale, we held a banner-making event that highlighted the intergenerational character of our organization (see photo). Comrades took time to paint the banner and signs, share a meal, and take turns in childcare.
Wrapping Up with an Eye on Fascism
On the final day of our pre-May Day events we held a study group on fascism, or a stage of capitalism when the bosses struggle to maintain their power under the facade of liberal democracy. During our discussion, we deepened our understanding of what fascism is and how we can build our communist movement as it develops. One comrade shared their recent experiences in a high school, where a principal has used scare tactics and bribery to pacify students from fighting back against the administration’s racist response to the murder of a former student after he was pushed out of the school. We discussed the idea of having a citywide campaign to reject school push-outs and to fight the bosses’ lie that students are expendable.
Afterwards we took time to write submissions for our newspaper CHALLENGE - since it is a paper that is written collectively by members and friends of the PLP (see letters on page 6). Throughout the project, we socialized and connected based on our shared goal on the long road to a communist future.
In a period of increasing imperialist conflict between the U.S., Russia, and China, our hard work towards building a revolutionary communist movement is more important than ever. While the bosses have nothing to offer our class but death and destruction, we stand prepared to build a society determined to meet the needs of all members of the working class around the world. Join us and march with us on May Day!
The history of the communist movement is fighting for the working class. The communist movement was born out of the struggle for a better world. It was born out of the fight by the working class to resist their exploitation and demand equality. As the communist movement grew the capitalist ruling class quickly realized the existential threat posed by a conscious working class.
As long as the working class has fought for a better world the ruling class has attacked the movement. It’s hard to be attacked. The bosses attack us to scare us and our class and stop us from fighting back. Their goal is to demoralize the working class so it doesn’t see its own power as a class to get rid of capitalism.
We have learned that the best way to respond to attacks by the bosses is to fight back. In Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) history there have been many struggles, many attacks, often firings and sometimes harsher consequences. All these battles are part of the struggle for the working class to gain confidence in itself, to see its power and learn that we don’t need the bosses or capitalism.
In this article we’ll look at two places where teachers and students were fighting back under the leadership of PLP, the teacher’s union in Oaxaca and Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn.
Fighting back in Oaxaca
This May Day will mark 43 years of intense struggle by teachers in Oaxaca. PLP has been active in this struggle for all those years, fighting for the needs of students and parents to get a decent education and to build a communist movement that fights for a world where all students are educated. In response there have been intense attacks by the bosses against the teachers, in the 1980’s, and around 2000, 2006, 2013 and 2015. Some of these attacks have been very severe including dismissals, imprisonments and even murders.
In each of these periods we’ve responded by going on strike, setting up barricades and building alliances with other groups of workers. There are 80,000 teachers in Oaxaca. During some of the struggles we’ve mobilized as many as 60,000 people, including workers from other sectors. One of our strongest responses was in 2002 when after a very militant fightback we brought about 1000 people to march on May Day under PLP’s leadership.
PLP has spread our line among the masses. Many people in Oaxaca know CHALLENGE. In the teachers union leaders' assemblies we have promoted the class struggle, we have distributed flyers denouncing the policies of the government and we have attacked imperialism. As a Party we have built an alternative leadership to the bosses. Our advances are still small and slow and attacks continue. We have led very militant fights against reformist ideology, though political progress is still slow in this area.
Throughout these years of struggle we’ve always tried to build a base for communist ideas and now many people know the Party. We’ve lost members because the bosses have cut the number of teachers and others have retired, but we are still fighting. We have made progress in building a new younger leadership for our work in the union which bodes well for the future. We also know that while building a base for communism we’ve also fought off even more dismissals and jailings which has helped preserve and grow our base and keeps us in the fight.
Teachers, students and parents fight back in Brooklyn
Our teachers’ collective at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn came under attack by the administration after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August of 2005. PLP organized people to go to New Orleans and help Black workers there who had been left to fend for themselves by the bosses’ system.
A racist, careerist Assistant Principal hated that communists were organizing people to go to New Orleans and building PLP while helping Black workers abandoned by the ruling class after the hurricane. He reported us for taking students on an “unauthorized trip” even though students had permission slips from their parents.
One parent wrote a glowing letter supporting our efforts. “As a parent…I give my full support to this hard working team… I wish to commend the teachers, parents and students for their commitment to their goals and holding strong to their beliefs…” The lesson here is to be bold. Working class students and parents will support you.
Another attack occurred in the fall of 2010 when teachers and students fought racism together. As a student was entering school through security and the metal detectors a copy of CHALLENGE was found in the student’s possession. The administrator wanted to know how and where the student got the paper- and learned that students and teachers had been to a rally in D.C. against racism with PLP members.
This racist principal had been after the PL’ers for years. As the principal was harassing both students and parents trying to get information about the trip, we organized a walkout and rally outside the school with hundreds of students. All the parents said that their young people had their complete permission and some brought them to the busses early in the morning. Now 18 years later we are still in touch with some of the parents, and students who went with us to New Orleans and also those that protested in D.C. Some are leaders of the Party today. We got Unsatisfactory ratings for that school year and they were well earned! But all of us who were involved in these struggles emerged stronger with more confidence in the working class and our ideas.
Fight to Win
These days the working class is often on the defensive more than going on the offensive against the bosses. When the demonstrations against racism, against the bosses’ imperialist wars and for workers power and communist revolution are relatively small it can be difficult when the bosses attack but the lesson is the same.
The small battles will lead to bigger ones and the small victories of the communist movement growing out of the struggle are where the big victory of communist revolution is born. Whether it is a big struggle or small, our class can only win when we fight.
When the bosses attack, we have to fight back. That is what communists do.