After weeks of militant multiracial fightback led by Black and Latin workers, the APD released body camera footage of the killing. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Atlanta’s killer kkkops, and politicians claim that Tort shot cops first, and thus, “deserved” to die. However, Tort’s family in Panama and friends in Atlanta called it: the police shot each other first and used it as ammunition to shoot at workers occupying the forest and killed Tort with 13 shots in the crossfire.
For the last two years, working-class fighters have occupied the Atlanta forest in protest of what fighters call ‘Cop City,’ a 85-acre $90 million police training facility through an Atlanta forest. Police forces from Atlanta to Israel will learn how to squelch working-class rebellion, especially any fightback led by communist fighters like Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
With bosses in the U.S, China, and Russia ramping up for World War III, and the U.S. bosses sinking deeper into crisis the last thing they need is militant multiracial working class rebellion in the urban centers.
The desperate rulers will need fascism to discipline the working class and will need to build more kkkop cities to keep workers in check as they spend trillions oiling their war machine while workers are pushed into starvation and homelessness. Black liberal mayors across the U.S. are proving they are the best candidates for the job.
Black-led city attacks Black workers
Georgia is a key state in the battle to win workers to pledge allegiance to the U.S. The bosses plan to build Cop City in “South River Forest,” called the Weelaunee Forest, “one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces, a prime example of environmental racism. The forest encompasses a three-hundred-acre, city-owned tract of land that sits in a poor and predominantly Black” part of Atlanta (New Yorker, 8/3/22).
After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, Atlanta workers responded with mass antiracist protest, marching toward and smashing the headquarters of U.S. liberal news media– the CNN building.
Keisha Lance Bottoms— former mayor of Atlanta and now part of the Jim Crow Biden administration—supports Cop City and openly shamed the protestors’ militancy and left her position to make way for liberal misleaders like Mayor Andre Dickens, Senator Reverend Warnock and Stacey Abrams.
“Most of the residents in neighborhoods around the forest are Black and municipal planning has neglected the area for decades. The plans to preserve the forest and make it a historic public amenity were adopted in 2017 as part of Atlanta’s city charter, or constitution. But the Atlanta city council wound up approving the training center anyway…” (The Guardian, 1/23)
The bosses want to ensure that they have a militarized and functioning force to attack the working class. The U.S. ruling class and bosses all over the world want to be prepared for the international uprisings that will spring up in the wake racist police murders.
Liberal politics and police murder
PLP stands with the protests against Cop City. With Cop City now being green-lighted, it is more urgent than ever that PLers connect the struggle to what’s happening locally and internationally. Antiracist leaders are calling protests the week of February 19-26.
For our class to smash racist police terror, workers around the world must commit to building a Party that will organize and shape struggle, galvanize it and focus it, and push for communist revolution.
Loudoun County, VA, February 14—“FIRE KEOLIS” rang out today as about 100 transit workers in ATU Local 689 and their allies took their over-month-long strike to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. Their demand? End the politicians’ deal with Keolis. The workers exposed a gang-up of these “progressive” political leaders with Keolis, the $6 billion French transit company perpetuating a two-tier wage system and cuts to benefits.
The Loudoun politicians, despite their crocodile tears for workers, are proving yet again that the state is a tool of capitalist class domination. By definition, the bosses’ politicians cannot represent workers’ interests. Workers must fight them and the Keolis bosses tooth and nail, defeating them and their entire system with communist revolution.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have played an important role in this strike. We have joined picket lines and brought revolutionary ideas by sharing CHALLENGE newspaper with scores of workers. We protested with workers at the French embassy and mobilized transit workers from other jurisdictions to join the picket lines (see previous strike reports in CHALLENGE, 2/1 and 2/15).
Reject cuts and wage disparity
Today’s action featured a fiery speech by a PLP member, the former president of striking ATU Local 689. He declared, to unanimous cheers, that if the workers’ demands were not met, the workers should initiate a general strike. Such an action, he said, would build on the great 1968 general strike in France that brought the French bosses to their knees and led to big increases in wages and benefits.
Multiracial workers also spoke about the desperate need for significant improvements in their contract in order to survive. The two most pressing concerns are cuts to benefits and unequal wages: one pay scale for the union-represented commuter bus drivers, and one for the non-union local bus drivers. Workers are refusing this division between local and commuter drivers.
Union leaders have begun to take a more militant line—the current Local 689 president declared that he would not be fooled by politicians again and would not support any of them in the next election.
But the International union leaders continue to emphasize relying on Democratic politicians, which ties workers to the capitalist system.
The PLP approach of building a revolutionary party within these front-line battles in the class struggle must replace this self-defeating march to the ballot box.
Strike fever
Why did the workers zero in on the Loudoun Board of Supervisors? These politicians have a contract with bottom-feeding, Nazi-linked Keolis (Atlantic, 3/18/2014) which states that the company would be fined daily for failing to provide service – something Keolis can’t do with a 95 percent effective strike! But the politicians were happy to violate their own contract and not enforce fines against Keolis. The failure of the politicians to punish the French company in this wealthy suburban area has allowed the company to stonewall the striking workers rather than negotiate to meet their demands. As we have seen in countless strikes over the years, politicians will offer aid to their real bosses, the capitalist bosses who own the means of production. Workers may vote but capitalists are the rulers.
Strike action against Keolis has spread beyond Loudoun County. Teamsters local 639 in Prince William County, VA struck Keolis this week and joined today’s rally in solidarity. Keolis was run out of its contract in Las Vegas (thisisreno.com, 2/14), and lost its contract in Raleigh, NC as well. The transit workers in Reno have struck three times against Keolis to try for a decent contract. Strikes, as Lenin said, are schools for war where workers learn to fight against their class enemy, the bosses. Strike fever is growing!
Working-class solidarity
PLP members linked this transit fight to the intense negotiations between Montgomery County teachers (MCEA) with their Board of Education,
sharing flyers from that struggle in Amharic, English and Spanish. PL’ers also brought some well-received posters reflecting the broad importance of the struggle in transit. Transit and transit workers are essential to the bosses’ ability to run society. Even during the beginning of the pandemic, the bosses understood the necessity of keeping transit running.
One of the strikers who spoke carried and waved the sign, “A GOOD CONTRACT = PUBLIC HEALTH.”
Other workers welcomed the sign, “TEACHERS SUPPORT TRANSIT WORKERS.”
Our Party fights for multiracial struggle and internationalism. A transit strike in Loudoun County impacts workers all over the world. We talked with workers about a Senegalese railroad strike in 1947 that lasted 4 months, recounted in God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembene. That story also ends with a speech calling for a general strike in Dakar, Senegal, which linked nicely to the PLP call for a general strike here.
Of course, even a general strike and militant uprisings alone cannot defeat capitalism and racism. We call on workers to channel this militancy into building a revolutionary communist Party to smash this criminal system, and create a society led by workers that guarantees a decent life, without exploitation, for all. As the major imperialist powers build toward world war, workers will be under increasing pressure to sacrifice and produce for the bosses. The workers in Loudoun County are providing the leadership we need to defeat the bosses and build a world run by and for the working class.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were also present to distribute CHALLENGE. Between the presentation and revolutionary communist politics, debates and discussions show that these working class students are more than capable of both analyzing the world and organizing to change it. Workers and students like them can and should run the world—that’s communism, and our fight for that world is expanding!
The struggle spreads and sharpens
To the New Jersey college students in attendance, the first reaction to hearing about the struggle at KCC was disbelief and stunned silence. Upon viewing an improvised skit to illustrate KCC Public Safety’s appalling assault on the student, questions and comments began to pour in with some students sharing how this resonated with their own experiences.
New Jersey students took over from the KCC students in leading the discussion and sharp debates followed. Some students suggested that the police can be reformed through “better training” and “building bridges with the community” through diverse inclusion and representation on the police force. Other students responded that the history of policing itself dates back to racist slave patrols, and an inherently racist system cannot be reformed. The murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black cops is a good example that shows how reforming the police is a dead end.
From Tyre Nichols to the KCC students’ own experiences, Black cops, under a Black police chief and (at KCC) a Black college president have only changed the appearance of capitalist oppression. The underlying essence of increasing brute force, obedience and terror disproportionately targeting Black, Latin and immigrant workers —fascism— is concealed by identity politics pushed by the very same liberal politicians today sending billions of dollars in weapons to the capitalists running Ukraine and Taiwan. Soon enough, they will be sending working class youth here to kill other working class youth in Russia and China, and die for U.S. imperialism.
At places like KCC, however, the capitalists’ bootlicking servants are letting their mask of identity politics slip enough to reveal who they really serve. As our struggle spreads, communists in PLP are organizing to channel working class resistance exemplified by these students into class war against fascism and imperialist war for communism.
‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’
The success of this college event is a political victory and reveals the potential for a mass militant antiracist student movement beyond New Jersey and CUNY. For Kingsborough students and faculty, the opportunity to return to New Jersey and share organizing experiences brought us full-circle: we first came to New Jersey last year to help pack the courts during the antiracist fightback at the Rodwell-Spivey trial.
Student eyewitness reports of the bosses’ legal system threatening Justin Rodwell with over 40 years in prison for trumped-up charges inspired mass growth in KCC’s antiracist club Common Ground in defense of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers. With one of our new student comrades bringing a wealth of fighting experience from the student movement in Haiti, the antiracist movement built last year continued growing and is now leading mass antiracist fightback at KCC.
Racist school administrations in NY/NJ can catch a fire
As the event was closed and to nurture the growing bonds of working class solidarity, students and faculty heard reports from other racist attacks and antiracist struggles and discussed how to link them together. From supporting an antiracist high school teacher recently terminated to supporting student strike organizing at Rutgers, this period of relative student growth means students and faculty have a responsibility to continue building a militant antiracist movement.
Another concluding organizing lesson was the importance of consistently waging antiracist fightback while building a multiracial base with an emphasis on Black student leadership. A New Jersey student commented on the worldwide character of the response to the mass Black worker-led rebellions after George Floyd’s murder. He reasoned that workers around the world are inspired by and look in solidarity to the Black working class for political leadership, to the extent that both Black workers’ culture and resistance are appreciated and emulated worldwide. Black student and worker leadership is key to our multiracial working class movement, and as communist leaders will be the key force in smashing capitalism once and for all.
Smashing borders locally prepares us globally
Back on the KCC students’ side, organizing and traveling to New Jersey also enabled us to bridge the psychological distance between our areas. Even though New York/ New Jersey are part of the same metropolitan area and connected at points by mass transit, many KCC students had neither been to New Jersey nor felt totally comfortable making the trip. The bosses’ media obsession with subway crime sees these divisions.
While not having the same hurdles as crossing the bosses’ borders from Haiti to the Dominican Republic or Mexico to the U.S., students and workers separated by a few miles and a river overcome these barriers and are planning to do it again. From Newark to Brooklyn and New York to Beijing, the struggle continues!
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Editorial: U.S., China up the ante in war preparations
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- 18 February 2023 55 hits
The two imperialist superpowers are accelerating toward World War III, with more brazen provocations by the day. Since shooting down an apparent Chinese spy balloon on February 4, the U.S. military has downed three unidentified flying objects over Alaska and Canada that “might turn out to be harmless commercial or research efforts that posed no real threat to the United States” (New York Times, 2/14). The Joe Biden administration blacklisted five Chinese companies accused of links to military surveillance programs—barely a week after the U.S. expanded its footprint on military bases in the Philippines less than 200 miles south of Taiwan.
As rulers in both the U.S. and China promote an orgy of patriotism, we need to remember that capitalism is a system based on theft from workers and the violent elimination of any and all competition. As Lenin pointed out in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, war between rival imperialist powers is inevitable. Driven by their relentless pursuit of maximum profits, the capitalist bosses continuously seek to redivide the world’s markets and resources. The lethal, racist U.S. ruling class is ramping up nationalism and anti-China rhetoric to prepare for the next global war. China’s vicious, racist bosses have been whipping up mass fervor to recover “lost” territories for years. Neither side can afford to lose; neither can settle to be “number two.”
The coming imperialist war between the U.S. and China will likely dwarf World War II’s death toll of 70 million and poison much of the planet. But the international working class has no side in this fight. Only a communist revolution to overthrow the warmakers and smash their murderous plans can save our class and eliminate the root of these conflicts: the capitalist system itself. In Russia and China, in the wake of both World War I and World War II, the old communist movement turned imperialist wars into revolutionary wars, seized state power, and established workers’ dictatorships. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has a long and proud history of organizing against imperialist war and for revolution for communism.
China preps for imperialist slaughter
One year ago, shortly before the start of the war in Ukraine, China declared a “no-limits” partnership with Russia. Despite pressure from the U.S., they have not backed down. While not directly involved in the fighting, China is now Russia’s biggest customer for oil. China’s bosses are also studying the Russian playbook for lessons to apply to their planned takeover of Taiwan. According to a leaked internal memo, U.S. Air Force General Michael Minihan is predicting war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan in 2025 (South China Morning Post, 02/09). China has repeatedly warned the U.S. to stay away from Taiwan, and conducted live military exercises after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the contested island last year.
Joint naval drills by China, Russia, and South Africa were scheduled to begin on February 17. China’s rulers have steadily increased military spending, to the point where their navy is now larger than that of the U.S. (CNN, 02/03). Their ships are also more capable of navigating shallow waters in the South China Sea—another potential flashpoint.
Even as the U.S. attempts to improve its military foothold in East Asia, China is strengthening its military and economic ties in its home region. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade pact that includes Australia, Japan, Indonesia, and Vietnam, gives China a clear advantage in writing the rules for business for 30 percent of the world’s population. Despite an aging population and slowing economic growth, China has one other big edge over the divided U.S. bosses: a united ruling class that is further along the path to full-blown fascism.
U.S. bosses out for blood
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class, representing finance capital, is mounting an aggressive strategy to contain China. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is demanding a “forceful” response if China moves on Taiwan (Foreign Affairs, September-October 2022). He’s calling for a massive 27 percent increase in the Pentagon’s budget, to more than $1 trillion. Haas is demanding the “promotion of order” over “democracy and human rights”—not that U.S. foreign policy ever shied away from murdering workers en masse when money was at stake.
The proposed military buildup aligns with recent U.S. maneuvering in the Pacific. Last year’s U.S.-British agreement to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia was just the beginning of a plan to surround China with a ring of fire. The U.S. has bludgeoned Japan into buying hundreds of U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and to approve a “more lethal” deployment of U.S. Marines in Okinawa, a Japanese island less than 400 miles from Taiwan and barely 500 miles from Shanghai, China’s largest city (NYT, 1/11). The new U.S.-Philippines deal was equally ominous. According to a former Biden adviser, the bases in the Philippines “would be critical launch and resupply points in a war with China” (NYT, 2/3).
The U.S.-China trade war, declared by ex-president Donald Trump, has evolved into permanent tariffs on $350 billion of Chinese exports. China has retaliated with tariffs on U.S. exports. Economic tensions escalated last October, when the U.S. banned sales to China of semiconductors and the machines that build them, and even barred U.S. citizens from working on them. The objective: “strangling with an intent to kill” China’s technology industry, particularly corporations “closely allied with China’s military” (NYT, 10/20/22).
More recently, days after the spy balloon humiliation, Biden issued an executive order to restrict U.S. investment in China in “advanced technologies that could be used in war.” The order targeted U.S. hedge funds and equity firms trying to make a quick buck at the expense of the broader needs of the U.S. ruling class. Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a reliable stooge for finance capital, complained about those “funding adversarial actions of the Chinese government” (NYT, 2/9).
The biggest problem for the warmakers is their need to win reluctant workers to fight and die for their profits. Because capitalism feeds off racism like rats on garbage, institutions like the U.S. military are racist to the core. But to create a larger “multiracial” military, the rulers desperately need to recruit Black and Latin students into the officer corps—the logic behind mandatory enrollment programs for Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps in urban high schools (NYT, 12/11/22).
We’ve got to fight back
As bosses in both the U.S. and China up the ante in preparing for war, it’s time for PLP members and friends around the world to go on the offensive by exposing the imperialists’ motivation and strategy. We can connect these war plans to every struggle we’re immersed in, from the fightback against racist cop terror to strikes to struggles for decent healthcare. We can expose university and corporate connections to the war buildup and move masses into action against these pro-imperialist institutions. The only solution to capitalist butchery is to turn the guns around—to fight to transform imperialist wars into revolutionary wars for communism. Join PLP!
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APHA public health struggle: From Haiti to Ukraine, combat imperialism
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- 02 February 2023 78 hits
Imperialism and wars
PLP and friends organized against the imperialist wars in Iraq and Central Asia. Our resolutions exposed how the war in Iraq was a grab for oil profits. In the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. tried to secure a strategic geopolitical position to counter Russian and Taliban power.
We marched militantly to the military booths at APHA meetings to oppose military recruitment for imperialist wars. We opposed booths with contraception disinformation and Nestle’s promotion of infant formula over breastfeeding.
At the 2022, People’s Public Health Conference we opposed the war in Ukraine. We contrasted the immense amount of funding the U.S. sent to Ukraine with the unmet funding needs to prevent and treat Covid-19. We advocated for soldiers and civilians to rebel and refuse to fight one another to end the war. We explained that this war was a fight between two imperialist powers competing for economic and political power that only a communist revolution against capitalism could stop. People listened with open minds about communism.
Vaccine equity
When Covid-19 hit, PLP members and colleagues joined forces with Justice Is Global and others to demand vaccines for the world. While the U.S. and European countries had vaccinated over 60 percent of their residents, poorer countries in Africa had vaccinated less than 12 percent; Haiti had even less protection. With many friends, we helped write and pass a successful resolution that attacked the trade and patent policies that prevented other countries from developing their own vaccines.
Joining forces with APHA’s International Section, we supported another resolution calling for debt cancellation and public funding of health and social services.
PLP members also attended demonstrations organized by Justice Is Global to demand that the pharmaceutical company Moderna help other countries produce Covid-19 vaccines. PLP members joined a large demonstration at Moderna’s headquarters in Boston, rallies at the White House, and a “sleepover” at the home of Biden’s Covid-19 advisor.
Liberation for workers in Palestine
A doctor in PLP joined three trips of health workers to Israel and the West Bank from 2004-2010, delivering health care and meeting with many Palestinian and Jewish political and health organizers. This doctor and another PLP member then led several trips of comrades and friends, revisiting these contacts, and recruiting a few workers from Israel to PLP.
In the U.S., a PLP member spoke at several forums to advocate for unity among workers from Israel and Palestine to establish a communist state. She emphasized that both Israel and the Occupied Territories are highly unequal capitalist societies with great internal health and wealth disparities.
Since 2014, a Party member has participated in Jewish Voice for Peace, a U.S. anti-Zionist organization, to promote JVP’s involvement in antiracist struggles in the U.S. as well as opposing U.S. support of the illegal and fascist Israeli occupation of Palestine. She also argues against uncritical support for Palestinian nationalism as opposed to building a working class antiracist alliance of Jews and Palestinians against an increasingly fascist Israeli occupation.
Immigration and Title 42
At the 2021 APHA meeting, PLP members and friends led a militant march to the ICE (Immigration and Control Enforcement) office to demand an end to Title 42 and the detention and deportation of migrants.
Title 42, implemented under Trump, allows the U.S. government to stop asylees from entering the U.S. because of a perceived health risk from Covid-19. Homeland Security returned tens of thousands of desperate people from Haiti and Latin America to countries where they faced arrest, death, and starvation. Public health and immigration organizers opposed Title 42 with demonstrations, petitions, and appeals to President Biden who deported more people than Trump.
The policy was scheduled to end in late December 2022 but has been extended.
Haiti
The Progressive Labor Party launched a summer project with medical workers and friends in Haiti. Doctors and nurses delivered supplies and medications to a large camp and campuses. We led a large rally around the hospital that was shown on Haitian TV.
After an earthquake in 2010, there was a huge outbreak of cholera brought by U.N. troops. The epidemic sickened 820,000 people, killing 10,000. In APHA, PLP worked with a nurse on a policy statement calling on the UN to pay compensation for the damage and develop a clean water system. The policy eventually passed despite the leadership’s concern about criticizing the U.N. The 2011 APHA meeting sponsored several special sessions about Haiti with the participation of local advocates.
PLP health organizers are currently raising funds for our comrades in Haiti who are providing mutual aid to workers suffering from the current upheaval while organizing study groups to involve more people to fight the exploitation from Haitian and U.S. rulers who maintain poverty and violence.
Lessons
As APHA members, we need to ensure there is action tied to these policies and recruitment to our Party. Most importantly, we need to convince our public health friends to go beyond pushing unlikely reforms and become communists to give workers the power to end war, health inequities, and wage slavery.