In the shadow of the fascist ICE crackdown throughout the U.S., about 30 workers and students from Northern and Southern California joined together for our annual Progressive Labor Party (PLP) political retreat. New and veteran members of the Party and their base came together to discuss political theory, its relationship to practice in this period of growing fascism and looming imperialist war, and ways to build the Party and advance the fight for communist revolution.
Why capitalism can't be fixed
The first session of the weekend focused on political eonomy, a document that demonstrates that capitalism cannot be reformed to meet the needs of the workers because it is structurally based on commodity production for profit, not the well-being of workers. Party members created presentations linking theory from Karl Marx’s Capital to current-day examples. They pointed out that workers are forced to sell their labor in order to survive. They explained that only human labor can add value to raw materials. Workers’ labor is thus the source of capitalists’ “surplus value.”
We discussed how capitalists compete with each other to make as much profit as possible in order to beat out their competitors. When technology advances, individual capitalists lay off workers in order to use this change to produce commodities more cheaply than other capitalists. But soon all competing capitalists are using the new technology. And each capitalist projects that they are going to take a bigger share of the market than they will. The presenters pointed out that these basic elements of capitalism make it inherently unstable, causing cycles of overproduction, economic crisis, and mass hardship for workers. To maintain profits, capitalists attack wages, expand repression, consolidate monopolies, engage in speculation, and turn to war and fascism.
What is our role in fighting fascism?
Our Black and brown class siblings have long been terrorized by the naked brutality of this racist capitalist system. The events in Minneapolis prove without a shadow of a doubt that we are moving toward full-blown fascism. This means that the bosses are no longer able to use democracy to hide the brutality of their system, leading to heightened racist attacks on Black, Latin, and immigrant workers—and, ultimately, attacks on the entire working class. Protesting fascist ICE raids has become a death sentence for white workers, as it has always been for Black and brown workers.
The second session focused on how our Party must adapt to a prolonged period of fascism and severe capitalist crisis, as well as impending imperialist wars. We discussed why and how we should have a long-term approach to working in mass organizations.
The third session focused on the dead end of electoral politics. Even the most “progressive” politicians such as Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie Sanders cannot give workers what we need. Their role is to squash revolutionary sentiment. The liberals’ role is to convince the working class that capitalism can be reformed. But we in the PLP know that it isn’t just about government-run grocery stores or free child care. The root of all workers’ misery is capitalism, which cannot be voted out, but must be uprooted and consigned to the graveyard of history.
In the final session members of the Party and their base discussed plans for our respective areas in Northern and Southern California. May Day committees were formed so that we can plan large marches and celebrations. Our retreat was brought to a close on a very positive note when two of the workers who participated announced they wanted to join PLP. All in all, this was a very positive event for our Party, with our growth proving that our confidence in the working class to rise to this historic occasion is well-placed and with many comrades recommitting to the struggle for a communist world!
- Information
Ed workers, students, families: Smash ICE & capitalism
- Information
- 13 February 2026 294 hits
BROOKLYN, January 15 – How do we as school workers connect with our students’ families when school-sponsored events are mostly remote since COVID? At our school, we decided to organize a school-wide, in-person community event highlighting student projects, art, and music.
Over 150 family members attended our project and arts showcase organized by the anti-ICE rapid response team at our school. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are active in this team.
The turnout showed just how hungry families are for connection, solidarity, and collective action. It was a step in breaking down the isolation built under capitalism and magnified since COVID, and a step towards building a communist world run by our students who are the future of the working class.
ICE out of our schools!
Comrades have been organizing this anti-ICE committee since last year, with as many as two dozen staff members working together to create a response to safeguard our students in case ICE is in the neighborhood or shows up at school. This committee has been pushed forward by the antiracist, pro-student sentiment of a group of dedicated staff members. Most in the group receive CHALLENGE on a consistent basis, showing growing openness to communist ideas. Last year, we also organized a school-wide Know Your Rights assembly to show students that their teachers care about them and are willing to stand up against the fascist kidnappings of our immigrant brothers and sisters.
This year, as ICE raids have ramped up across the country, we knew we had to step it up and reach our students’ families directly. We wanted families to know that we want to connect with them, defend them, and organize with them. Along the way, we had a political struggle over whether Zohran Mamdani’s election would mean a safer city for the working class. There was resounding agreement that no politician will be able to stem the tide of rising fascism. We have to organize with our students and parents to fight back. This understanding reflects over 20 years of communist organizing at the school, including countless rallies and antiracist struggles to defend students against the NYPD, school segregation, and budget cuts. As communists, we understand the importance of challenging the culture of passivity that the bosses push.
At the event itself, students presented projects highlighting important social and political issues impacting society today, including gentrification, the MTA budget cuts, organized resistance against slavery and so much more. Student artwork and music were also showcased. A potluck brought together this multi-racial parent and student body, with families eating delicious food and celebrating student work together.
Our committee also organized a food pantry to support families facing food insecurity due to food stamp budget cuts or ineligibility for aid. Students helped organize the pantry, pack bags of food, and distribute them to anyone who wanted. Under capitalism, neither housing nor food, healthcare, or education are guaranteed. That is why we need to fight for communism, a society where the working class is in charge and will guarantee these basic human rights.
How to respond to fascist attacks by ICE
Over 40 family members packed into a classroom for the ‘Know Your Rights’ workshop organized by our committee; this workshop was the driving force behind the school-wide event. We presented our plans to help keep students safe from NYPD and ICE attacks. We shared how we’ve organized ICE watches in the neighborhood and had to jump into action just months ago after reports of ICE activity nearby. We also discussed a Department of Education email sent to some NYC high schools detailing plans to immediately arrest any student found with a “weapon.” While some parents initially thought this would improve safety, they were shocked to learn that “weapons” could include items like forks or safety pins. Involving the NYPD immediately opens the door for ICE to access vulnerable students. Although the DOE claimed the email was sent in error, it has not been retracted in schools.
Parents signed up to join our committee and participate in ongoing organizing efforts. Families also took part in an activity writing messages of solidarity on butterflies to build a bulletin board welcoming all students. These small acts help break down the racist and nationalist walls that capitalist media and schools work overtime to build. We ended the workshop by inviting families to join us the next morning for a before-work rally across the street from the school.
The next morning, about 20 staff members, joined by a few students, rallied in frigid temperatures. With signs in hand we chanted for working-class, multi-racial unity and fightback against the vast number of capitalist attacks we are witnessing: school budget cuts, food and healthcare budget cuts, imperialist wars, but mainly racist ICE raids and killings. This was the fourth rally we’ve held since last June, and we received enthusiastic support from passing vehicles, MTA buses, and waves of students on their way to school.
We need communism!
A teacher and Party member spoke about the society our students deserve. Capitalism, organized for the profit of a few at the expense of most, offers only war, instability, and police terror. Students everywhere deserve better. We must continue to organize worker-student-parent multi-racial unity to fight against all of these attacks. But unless we win our co-workers, our students, our families, to the understanding that capitalism must be smashed once and for all, we will be on a hamster wheel of forever fight-back.
It is the task of communists to be bold in sharing our solution, the need for communist revolution. Admittingly, it is easier to write that in an article than to struggle to overcome anti-communist ideas and develop the confidence that the working class will heed our call. There is no short cut. Fight for communism! We have nothing to lose but our chains.
On Friday, January 30th, Progressive Labor Party members and friends at a university in Kentucky decided to hold a demonstration in response to the call from workers in Minneapolis for a general strike and a national day of action. At first, the plan was to stage a sit-in inside one of the university’s main buildings where there was a Starbucks and a burger spot. Unfortunately, our numbers were too small because of the snow and ice which had kept most people from being out on campus, and so we decided instead to go out into the cold and demonstrate in the campus’ main plaza.
Despite not many students being outside due to the weather, as soon as we went out and started chanting, some immigrant workers nearby heard us chant “ICE out of Kentucky now!” They stopped working to chant with us. At first we weren’t sure whether to go over to them or not (they were a distance away and there was lots of ice on the ground between us and them) but suddenly one of the workers came over to us and asked us if we were protesting against ICE. We promptly responded yes to which he became ecstatic and immediately started asking for literature and more information. In rural Kentucky it’s very rare to see anti-racist actions like the one we held, so our presence was a surprise, especially considering the icy conditions keeping most people at home. We exchanged info and told him we’d let him know as soon as possible if we caught wind of any ICE activity.
Afterwards, we moved closer to the dining hall where there was more traffic, and we gave out flyers linking the ICE terror in Minneapolis to rising fascism and capitalism in crisis. Most people took them gladly and were supportive. Eventually we moved to another spot to try and take advantage of even more traffic and less snow on the ground to give out more literature, handing out a combined total of 100 flyers and CHALLENGEs while comrades gave as speeches.
One comrade’s voice became hoarse from leading chants which caused one of the other comrades to go into the Starbucks and grab some tea. After she returned a Starbucks worker came out behind her and gave everyone free hot chocolate in an inspiring act of working-class solidarity!
Energized from the love and support we received from students and workers on campus, comrades began to go up and give impromptu speeches on the bullhorn. One comrade gave a speech calling out the university administration for their fascist behavior, demanding that they make the university a sanctuary for migrants. Another comrade read a poem that showed the similarities between fascism in Nazi Germany and what we are seeing today in the U.S. Another comrade went up and gave a speech about working-class solidarity and how we all have an interest in fighting against fascism because we all share the horror of living under this system. And another comrade spoke about how Minneapolis is just a testing ground, emphasizing how we need to prepare and organize for the bosses’ fascist behavior to be repeated in other cities and states, and explaining that only a communist revolution can stop fascism dead in its tracks.
“Mass Struggle for a Better World”: PLP and the Radical Caucus bring revolutionary ideas and organizing once more to the annual MLA convention
Members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been organizing in the Modern Language Association (MLA) since the late 1960s, primarily in the Radical Caucus, which was founded in 1968 to protest and denounce the Vietnam War. At this year’s MLA convention in Toronto in January, Party members worked closely with MLA friends to get a Radical Caucus resolution passed condemning the doxxing, firing, and deportation of faculty protesting the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza. We also intensified discussion with our friends about what is needed to build an anti-fascist movement in the current moment. We organized three panels: a guaranteed session on “Radical Lineages,” a virtual “Just-in-Time” session, “Organizing Against the Dismantling of Higher Education,” and a third panel on normalization of the ecological crisis by global capitalism. Helped by ongoing communication with comrades unable to attend the convention, our small but bold group brought communist ideas and organizing strategies to the convention.
Pushing the MLA
Our task was harder because many MLA members left last year when the MLA leadership refused to consider a resolution calling for the boycott, divestment, and sanction of organizations doing business with Israel. We stayed because the MLA is a key site of struggle with academic workers.
Prior to the convention, we held several sessions with members and friends of the Party to discuss our tactics. Along with hundreds of Radical Caucus flyers and copies of CHALLENGE, we blitzed chosen sessions and laid out our politics in our special one-page MLA CHALLENGE:
This might seem like a strange time to talk at the MLA about the possible communist future buried somewhere under the fascist rubble. Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) disagree. . . . It is precisely because the crisis we face in higher education is rooted in the broader crisis in global capitalism—and the threat of global war--that we must think beyond the idealist myths of bourgeois democracy. Fascism is not just undemocratic authoritarianism; it is a mode of capitalist class rule resorted to in “polycrises”; of economic stagnation, fading political legitimacy and proliferating war. The only antidote to a system based upon the brutal pursuit of profit is its revolutionary transcendence by an egalitarian system of mass participation based upon the fulfillment of human needs--communism.
Now is the time to join PLP!
There is a mass base for fascism in many parts of the planet. About this we cannot fool ourselves. But there is also a mass hunger for a better world. The millions who have been marching and striking against genocide and xenophobia around the world embody what the U.S. proletarian writer Tillie Olsen called “the not-yet in the now.” Repression breeds resistance. As Palestinian author and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani wrote, “Resistance is the essence.” Communism is the future and that requires a communist party. This could be the time to join PLP!
At the Open Hearing for Resolutions, as well as at the Delegate Assembly itself, we refuted the well-organized pro-Zionist activists who repeated the familiar mantra equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. When our resolution came to a vote, the MLA Delegate Assembly voted in favor of it 61-52, no small victory given the current intimidation of faculty opposed to the new McCarthyism. However, to become official, the MLA Delegate Assembly vote must be ratified by an affirmative mail vote of 10 percent of the total MLA membership – or about 2,000 members, a new requirement instituted several years ago which makes final endorsement of any resolution difficult.
Demonstrating the increasing duplicity of the leadership of many academic professional organizations is the action taken by the leadership of the American Historical Association Convention (AHA), which met at the same time as the MLA and passed the exact same resolution as ours as well as a second BDS resolution. At their convention, AHA delegates forced its leadership -- which had earlier disqualified both resolutions -- to bring both of them back to the floor; however, despite their members overwhelmingly passing both of them, the AHA leadership once more rejected both, stating they were redundant.
At the MLA Convention we met at least a dozen interested people—and possible future members of the Radical Caucus. These new friends attended our annual meeting, leafletted with us at the Delegate Assembly, and joined us in exposing the specious claims of the Zionists.
Young comrades take the helm
One of the important developments of our work at this MLA convention was the leadership provided by younger Party members and close friends of the Party. For several decades the main leadership of Party work has been primarily carried out by senior faculty, including those who have recently retired. This year, younger comrades provided the key leadership of our Radical Caucus work at the MLA convention. Entering planning for this year’s MLA, some of us had doubts that we would continue to sustain the level of communist activism that has characterized our work for the past decade. By the time we headed home, those doubts had disappeared.
The working class in Cuba, already struggling under the failure of an economy based on partnering with other capitalists countries, is coming under vicious attack from the Trump bosses cut off of all oil imports. Power is severely rationed as is gas. Unless something changes, oil will run out in days. Meaning no power, no phones, hospitals revert to barbaric conditions, and no refrigeration for food.
The Trump fascists have threatened tariffs against any country that sends oil to Cuba, As a result all oil shipments have been halted. Cuba requires approximately 100,000 barrels of oil a day, most of it came from Venezuela. Since the Trump deal with the Venezuelan ruling class to give U.S. bosses control of Venezulan oil that source is gone. The Trump bosses also threatened tariffs against any country sending oil to Cuba, effectively shutting down all oil imports, in an attempt to force the Cuban government out or to cut a deal with Trump.
Cuban Socialism historically built an education and healthcare system that was among the best in the world at serving the needs of the majority of the working class. At the same time the Cuban ruling class relied on partnerships with capitalism around the world. Most notably through building an economy based on a separate tourist economy that celebrated inequality and encouraged corruption and exploitation.
COVID effectively shutdown tourism and with it the influx of foreign money. A second important source of foreign money was lost when Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia shut down the programs that paid Cuba to send doctors to them. The working class has borne the brunt of the ensuing crisis. Inflation has been over 30% a year since the pandemic and the Cuban peso has lost 88% of its value. Which makes the purchase of even necessities extremely difficult (Cuba’s national Office of Statistics ad Information).
Now the brutal cut off of oil brings more pain for the working class. Enough is enough! The Cuban working class after courageously overthrowing the U.S. backed dictator Bautista over 60 years ago, has been left at the mercy of U.S. imperialism by the Castro’s and the Cuban ruling class building a society reliant on capitalism instead of a society that puts the working class in power communism. The working class must never make that mistake again.
