Newark, NJ, June 5 - The Rutgers-Newark encampment was squashed by liberal university bosses in cahoots with Black nationalist misleader Mayor Ras Baraka. Although students and workers did not win their demands after 40 days of demonstrating, winning workers closer to the Party is a victory. To steel our minds and morale for inevitable fascist attacks, NJ school teachers within Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a fiery teach-in on fascism at the encampment days before. 

With many workers and students one emergency away from homelessness and one ruling class conflict away from genocide, liberal misleaders are struggling to sell the idea of keeping capitalist democracy alive. Despite well-intentioned words and reforms,  liberal misleaders are marching our class into the hands of fascism and World War III. To reverse and smash this plan, workers, students, and soldiers must channel mass fightback into a single internationalist fight for communism. Only a united multiracial, multi-gendered, multigenerational working class of millions organized under the red banner of a communist Party—PLP—can smash this genocidal system for all time.

From the masses to the masses: learning to identify fascism to smash it

The PLP-led teach-in began with questions from two dozen multiracial, working class fighters. How is fascism connected to Newark? What does fascism look like in schools? Afterward, we read a May Day speech from a Brooklyn-based PLer who was reprimanded by the school administration for encouraging his students to fightback against the genocide in Gaza. PLers mobilized students and teachers against the bosses who violently forced him to stop teaching. He won his job back.

The shared working class wisdom revealed the following: What we associate with fascism, be it violent racist, sexist, or anti-working class tendencies within our families, neighborhoods, or workplaces, is always linked with the competition of ruling bosses across nations. For example, a principal firing a teacher for encouraging students to take a stance against the genocide in Gaza is acting on behalf of U.S. bosses. We discussed how the popular conception of fascism as attacks from the far-right on progressives is just the tip of the iceberg. Fascism involves a larger process of class warfare responding to the changing conditions of capitalism. 

Our collective conclusions were put to the test in determining Mayor Ras Baraka’s roles. Two older workers argued Baraka was not fascist because he implemented reformist initiatives, including temporary shelters for some unhoused workers. In response, a Black community member revealed those small deeds didn’t change Newark’s economic apartheid. Baraka is allowing a division to grow between Black and Latin workers facing evictions and the more stable base of multicultural workers for capital being used to replace and isolate them. A high school student brought the teach-in home by declaring: “Ras and these people are still participants in a fascist system and cannot ultimately avoid having to play their role in developing fascism when it is needed.”

Fascist Baraka shows himself

Days later, antiracist fighters woke up to a blaring bullhorn, warning demonstrators to clear the encampment or face arrest. While most of the city was home asleep, Newark PD mobilized to close off all traffic surrounding the encampment so that the Rutgers PD could move in. PLers met campers at nearby Harriet Tubman Park, where many young people started to see the role that Baraka plays for the ruling class. Some took to social media to blast the Mayor. Baraka distanced himself and the Newark PD from the incident, but the fighting workers and students shot back with photos and videos of Newark PD on the encampment clearing them out. 

As the Black community worker expressed in the teach-in, this isn’t about one person. If it isn’t Baraka, it would be someone else. These encampments are teaching the working class lessons about internationalism and multiracial unity as anecdotes against fascism, be it from a liberal or outright racist. The danger of the Trump-led racist and sexist movement is real, but the attacks from the liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class (the Big Fascists) exposed their willingness to be servants to ruling class bosses when capital is on the line. 

As comrades reflect on this teach-in and the end of the Rutgers encampment, we are reminded that what we do counts. Only by fighting alongside the students and workers at the encampment and within our schools were we able to have a great turnout and enthusiasm at the teach-in. Several of our friends advanced their political understanding as a result of not only seeing the need for internationalism and multiracial unity but also a communist, internationalist party to keep up the fight. The quantity of these efforts qualitatively advances the fight for communism.

In a community east of the Valley of Mexico, a group of comrades and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have organized with our neighbors to fight the water shortage that has affected our neighborhoods for years. Recently the shortage has worsened, due to the overexploitation of wells and the criminal negligence of the bosses who refuse to maintain the hydraulic network, instead favoring the business of selling bottled water or workers needing to pay for supply through pipes.

Capitalism is incapable of meeting workers’ basic needs, even access to clean water, that under this system becomes a commodity that you can only have access to if you can buy it. Under a system of social equality like communism, workers’ needs would be the top priority, as our collectively organized society will ensure access to healthy water for all.

Bosses monopolize water

The capitalist ruling class in Mexico has privileged the business of selling bottled water. The country ranks first place in the world in consumption of bottled water (and sweetened drinks) because only around 60 percent of homes have a reliable daily supply (El País, 9/8/2023). Additionally, the bosses prioritize the water supply for agricultural use, the brewing industry and mainly for agroindustry and industrial zones.

The Valley of Mexico, where 22 million people live, is supplied with water mainly extracted from wells (75 percent), which are overexploited and of poor quality (La Jornada, 4/1). The rest is brought from the Cutzamala system, which is at critical levels due to low rainfall, overexploitation and pollution of the basins.

Within the community in struggle, the neighbors first organized a protest to demand that water be supplied to the area's hydraulic network, but the municipal government responded that the pump to extract it is useless and it will take months to repair, so they offered to extend the water pipes to homes, free of charge.

While the authorities agreed to install enough pipes to supply each household with two thousand liters of water, the municipality only sent three to four water pipes which only supplies half of what they promised – an insufficient amount to provide water for the working class here.

Workers can and must take control 

In an example of how the working class can organize society collectively, neighbors formed brigades to direct the supply of water in pipes to the homes where it is needed most, those with children, elderly or workers with illnesses. Our comrades meet every week with neighbors to evaluate and organize actions and report on the problem. We have helped organize marches where chants like “Water is not for sale, it is cared for and defended” ring furiously in the streets. But capitalism, which makes everything about profit, can't help but exploit and destroy nature and put a price tag on it. 

In places like Ecatepec’s fifth district, a municipality in the state of Mexico, water comes from the Cutzamala system, a complex network of canals, tunnels, pipelines, pumping plants, dams, and reservoirs, yet around 90 percent of the water pipes have been privatized (Sin Embargo, 6/25/22).

The system has been overexploited as the local bosses smuggle the water out of the systems and resell it back to the working class for profit. The local authorities have exposed this criminal business, but are “powerless” to stop it.  Also, there are car assembly companies that, in collusion with the municipality, steal water that they pay an average of 1,500 pesos for when they should pay close to 2 million, due to their high consumption. This is another clear example that capitalism is based on corruption, violence and theft, above the needs of workers.

Smash capitalism to liberate resources

Our comrades have put forward the communist analysis of this water struggle in our community by showing that capitalism promotes companies to monopolize water and profit from the need for the vital resource, putting the health and lives of millions of workers and their families at risk. But at the same time, we show in practice that these problems must be faced through the fight against capitalism, a harmful and deadly system that needs to be overthrown, so the working class can organize and run a superior communist society.

The following article was excerpted and from PLP 
history, a five part essay  published in PL Magazine Spring 2018 Vol. 15 No. For the full article visit www.plp.org. 

In the early 1960s, class struggle was heating up. The U.S. bosses embarked on a genocidal war in Vietnam. The  leadership shown by the working class in Vietnam after decades of resistance to French imperialism inspired millions of workers worldwide. Black workers led rebellions in almost every major U.S. city and rocked the capitalist class back on its heels. In the midst of intensifying class struggle in March 1964, a Yale University conference on socialism was attended by many pseudo-left organizations, including the “Communist” Party USA and various Trotskyite groups.

The conference was geared for a scholarly debate on theory. Only Progressive Labor Movement (PLM)  broke through this nonsense to advocate building a militant anti-imperialist movement! PLM leader Milt Rosen electrified the audience of 500 students and faculty by focusing on opposing U.S. imperialism’s efforts to crush the revolutionary movement in Vietnam. He called for a nation-wide mobilization on May 2 to protest U.S. aggression there. The proposal was approved overwhelmingly and a May 2nd Committee was organized under PLM’s leadership.
PLP launches anti-war movement

On May 2, thousands of workers and students marched and rallied in cities nationwide. In New York City, 1,000 heard PLP speeches about the necessity for communist revolution. They broke a police ban on demonstrations in midtown Manhattan, winding their way through Times Square to the United Nations, demanding: “U.S. Get Out of Vietnam Now!” It was the first national demonstration against the U.S. imperialist invasion and the forerunner of countless protests against U.S. rulers in the years ahead. 

The Committee became a national organization called the May 2nd Movement (M2M). Hundreds joined. They played a major role in popularizing the struggle against U.S.  imperialism’s war against workers and peasants in Vietnam. They issued hundreds of thousands of leaflets, buttons and pamphlets; initiated numerous university teach-ins; organized rallies and marches; and developed “Free Universities” as an off-campus alternative to the rulers’ educational system.

PLP steers anti-war movement in a militant, communist direction

Following a massive Washington, D.C. anti-war rally of 25,000 organized by Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) in the spring of 1965, PLM’s leadership fought inside M2M to dissolve it and join SDS, a move supported by the overwhelming majority within M2M.

M2M did play a vanguard role in opposing U.S. imperialist aggression in Vietnam and successfully broke with the old pacifist “peace movement” dominated by the Communist Party USA. That movement was never anti-imperialist but rather championed ruling-class collaboration behind slogans like “Ban the Bomb”; “Peaceful Co-existence”; and “For A Sane Nuclear Policy” — as if the working class could ever make peace with imperialist rulers! PL’s slogan--“U.S. Get Out of Vietnam Now!”—was eventually adopted by millions.

M2M helped move the emerging anti-war forces to the left and toward anti-imperialism. Many youthful fighters joined PLM, having learned from their mass struggles in the M2M.  It was youth of this and many mighty struggles against racism and imperialism that our Party— Progressive Labor Party (PLP) was born.

Fast forward 60 years, once again youthful fighters around the world are  lifting their fists and voices in defiance against the imperialist war machine which sacrificed  tens of thousands of working class lives in Palestine to its deadly meat grinder in less than a year. Students are hungry for an alternative to this racist genocide system and are searching for solutions  that can never be  found in nationalist movement or the rulers’ blood soaked ballot box. The solution to genocide can only be found in joining the only Party with 60+ years of experience, steeped in the working class, who continues to learn  from  the lessons and mistakes of the past, evolving through struggle and theory. Together students, workers, and PL’ers, united under the red flag, have the power to smash this system and create the world our class deserves from Congo, Gaza, to the U.S.A. Until then read and spread CHALLENGE widely, join a study group, become a member of PLP. We have a world to win!

Salute to working-class fathers in Gaza and beyond

This Father’s Day I celebrated part of the day with my family at a protest honoring Palestinian fathers killed or struggling to survive. As the intensified genocide in Gaza has continued into its nine month, countless family members have lost fathers and father figures. Several speakers at the event in NYC raised money for Palestinian workers who have been devastated by the U.S.-financed atrocities. While the bosses media will occasionally describe the tragedy of working class children and women killed in Palestine, there is a tendency on the part of the racist news outlets to belittle the lives of working-class Palestinian men killed by Israeli bombs.

I had the chance to speak as a member of Progressive Labor Party and a mass organization from my neighborhood that has been holding weekly vigils for those killed in Palestine. I shared a song about being a dad under capitalism, the alienation I’ve felt taking time off from my regular job, and how we are all hurt by the sexist, racist, Zionist system. “Let’s raise this generation to not use quick fixes, band-aids or sutures /But cure the whole world with communism as their future” I concluded. I then distributed over 20 CHALLENGE newspapers to the small but spirited crowd and exchanged contact info with several folks I met.
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Beat back kkkourts’ attack on Mohawk

Last issue contained a letter describing the spirited defense in court of working class fighter Mohawk. The bosses tried to use their courts and jails to ruin his life for defending fellow workers under attack by the bosses’ violent lapdogs, the cops. If you have been involved with the Party for any amount of time, or even if you haven’t, you know the bosses and the police use the courts as a formality to fining, imprisoning, and even murdering working class resistance. We workers are often fed propaganda about the so-called neutrality and objectivity of our legal system, that “justice is blind.” Well the bosses seem to have their eyes wide open to the reality of class warfare and so when the working class came to the trial in numbers to support Mohawk,the bosses and judges knew they better back off! That is the only reason six of Mohawk’s eight felonies were dropped. The rest of us need to take the same lesson away: we are in a war between workers and bosses (and their errand boys the police). The courts did not protect Mohawk, it was the working class who made the judges and police retreat from their attack. Don’t let the misleaders trick us into trusting the bosses’ courts. Keep on building our red army of workers and keep up the fight!
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DC protesters open to communist ideas

I wanted to share some thoughts on my conversations at the “Red Line” pro-Palestine rally at the White House in Washington, D.C. recently. There are many opportunities for Party building at these big demonstrations. One conversation was with a recent graduate who had earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and his friends had been able to land jobs that did not involve defense contractors, either for bomb making or designing planes with bomb storage. I asked him to write a letter about these growing war preparations to CHALLENGE. 
He graduated from Clark University in Worcester and knew about the long strike at St. Vincent’s, but was intrigued to learn of Progressive Labor Party’s involvement in that struggle. Another protester I met attends the University of Maine. She also was interested in our Party. She is interning in Richmond, VA along with another student from Richmond. 

I gave both of them our nearby comrade’s number and I sent him their numbers for follow up along with CHALLENGE. Three young men from Cincinnati came on a bus sponsored by PSL. We discussed the pitfalls of socialism and the need to abolish the wage system by a direct fight for communism, so they have a lot to think about now. Interestingly, one of their friends works at a Honda factory. Hopefully we’ll stay in touch.

The most hilarious encounter I had was with a woman who asked,  “Do you follow Bob Avakian?” I explained he was a cult leader and PLP fights against revisionism and cults of personality. She was visibly relaxed and took the paper. Overall, our PLP team got over 10 solid contacts. Comrades are already meeting with two of them with more to come. The future is bright!
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No more Riot Fest—what we do counts!

On June 11th the residents in my neighborhood and I received some uplifting news: the despised and destructive for-profit rock festival, Riot Fest, would NOT be returning to the west side of Chicago for September of this year. Since 2015, the concert has been held in Douglass Park, blocking off access to green and recreational spaces for mostly Black and Latin workers and youth for weeks at a time (see CHALLENGE, 7/5/23).

This outcome represents a significant victory for working-class residents of the area. Up against a well-equipped foe with media savvy, loads of money, and connections to local bosses, a multiracial group of residents organized tirelessly to expose the exploitative and racist nature of Riot Fest and mobilize a base of support. Countless letters were written, petitions were circulated, park district meetings attended, and damage to the park in the aftermath was documented. Every seemingly small action contributed to the goal – what we do counts!

I personally have been inspired and honored to take part in the anti-Riot Fest organizing in a very modest capacity. As a communist, I understand that every reform victory that the bosses give up to us workers is almost always temporary. I know that because we still live under capitalism that other capitalist businesses are going to keep working non-stop to make profit in racist and sexist ways. 

The victory that the bosses can’t readily take away is the multiracial unity, collectivity, and elevated class consciousness that has grown through the organizing work. That we can work and struggle together for common goals without material incentives. These are the communist ideals that I have worked to try to insert into our group discussions.

What hasn’t hurt either to raise consciousness of the nature of the capitalist system is the gross opportunism of the city’s bosses, including the “people’s mayor” Brandon Johnson. upon hearing the news he asked if there was a way to “salvage” the relationship with Riot Fest! When we see the system for what it is and have confidence in our ability to run society better, we are making steps towards an egalitarian world. The struggle continues!
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