BRONX, NY, September 7—On August 22 the bosses’ courts once again denied the working class justice by letting racist murderer and KKKop Dion Middleton out on bail for the racist murder of 18-year-old Latin teen Raymond Chaluisant. Middleton had shot Raymond in the face for playing with a toy water gun. The murderer then fled the scene, leaving Raymond dead in a pool of his blood.

Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) visited Raymond’s family and friends shortly after the murder. We brought CHALLENGE to show support and draw a connection between what the family has endured and the experiences of other families terrorized by the criminal injustice system. Raymond is another example of a senseless murder at the hands of a brutally racist system.

Join us as we unite with Raymond’s family on Saturday, September 10 and begin our fightback against this racist murder.

Like many others, I’ve been following with disgust and anger the two deadly climate disasters occurring simultaneously in the southern US state of Mississippi and across much of Pakistan. Both disasters are drenched in the naked racism and anti-worker realities of capitalism. Both are the direct consequence of racist legacies of the capitalist state that go back decades, if not centuries.

In Jackson, Mississippi, the majority Black worker population has been left without clean water safe to drink or bathe with after heavy flooding knocked out the city’s main water treatment facility. Shipments of potable water into the state can’t keep up with demand, in a crisis that many are likening to the racist devastation inflicted on workers in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Across Pakistan, an especially heavy monsoon season has flooded an estimated one-third of the country, murdering over 1,000 workers to date and displacing millions more. Overflowing waters have destroyed bridges almost instantly. The slum housing where workers are forced to live hardly stands a chance when confronted with these ecological events exacerbated by industrial capitalism.

As workers, we need to connect these acts of state violence against our class to the need to build more internationalism. This is exactly what we mean in  Progressive Labor Party (PLP) when we say the workers in North America have everything more in common with workers in South Asia, Africa, or South America than we ever will with a boss in “our” own region. Bosses everywhere are ready at any moment to send us workers to our death.

The only way to reverse this reality is to continue to build the Party and fight for global communist revolution. From Jackson to Karachi – Workers of the world, unite!

PAKISTAN, September 6—Workers in southern and north-western Pakistan have been devastated by severe flooding over the last several weeks. Thirty-three million people are affected, mainly being displaced, by what may be the worst flooding in the history of Pakistan. The official death count from the floods is at about 1,400 people; unofficially, the estimate is over 4,000 people killed by the floods. There is nothing natural about the scope of this disaster. The blame is squarely on capitalism. Namely, climate change, mass poverty and neglect of developing infrastructure, all caused by the drive for ever increasing profit at the expense of the working class. Many reforms, like decent housing and new sewers, would save many lives and spare many workers the loss of their homes, but those reforms seem like a distant impossible dream as capitalism goes from bad to worse and they won’t change the fact that the situation keeps repeating and will continue until the working class takes power with communist revolution.

Boss-made climate crisis
Capitalism has been unable to check the emission of pollutants across the globe into the atmosphere and the worsening climate change brought heavier rains than usual into this region which destroyed the homes and belongings of the working class. The capitalist media is focusing on the climate change aspect because it takes the heat off of the basic nature of capitalism as a system that sees the working class as expendable.

Many of the workers displaced and killed in the recent floods were among the millions of workers in Pakistan who were forced out of the countryside by the abject poverty of the agricultural system under capitalism that leaves small farmers on their own. Recent droughts, also worsened by climate change, left family farmers in the impossible position of staying on their barren land to starve or heading into the cities to find work at poverty wages(ARY News, 9/2). These workers were forced by the conditions to settle on the banks of rivers, among the riskiest places to live but one of the few ways in the cities for the working class to have access to water.

Infrastructure in the poor areas of the cities has not been invested in at all. Karachi, a city of 25 million people, which was severely affected, is relying on sewer pipes laid 100 years ago when the population was 200,000 (ARY News, 9/2). The death and displacement of the floods became an inevitability caused by the inherent brutality of capitalism.

Add to this deadly mix the bribery and nepotism that are part and parcel of a system based on accumulating wealth. For instance, a government program to ostensibly plant one billion trees along river banks as a flood prevention tool became a handout to government cronies who ransacked the program to put money in their pockets while planting only a small fraction of the promised trees (Business Standard, 9/3).

Disaster response: only the working class can protect itself
The bosses are inspecting the situation from the sky by using sophisticated helicopters. The only time they come down is for big photo ops. They are spending millions but have nothing to support the displaced population. Food and non-food items are thrown from the air and aren’t packed properly which causes half of the items to be ruined; most of the food items are not edible because of improper storage  and handling. Most of the rich people donated cheap and damaged items. It seems that they just cleared their warehouses!

Now the international community has started to send their help for the displaced population, but, past experience is being repeated this time as well. The officials who are responsible for distributing the items to the needy are keeping the good stuff for themselves to sell in the open market or to gift to their relatives who are not affected by the floods.

We in the Progressive Labor Party are reaching out to the workers in greatest need; we organized some medical camps with the assistance of our friends in a paramedical association, we collected food and non-food items, tents and provided some logistical support to bring people out of water and mud with our limited resources. We are building a base among these displaced workers. This disaster along with our activity is helping people to understand that the capitalist system cannot help them out of this catastrophe.

Our friends are also seeing that only the working class can help them. We are trying to establish a permanent group among the affected people to bring them into the Party.  Where we helped organize aid and assistance along with our political ideas of building a revolutionary communist movement, people praised the efforts by saying these people were the only ones who came to help and not just to promote themselves.

HAITI, September 8–Ignorance of the history and modes of capitalist culture and ideology constitutes one of the greatest obstacles to the engagement of young people in the revolutionary struggle. Moreover, young people know little or nothing about communism, communist-led struggles and movements, and what they may know are often laced with the bosses’ lies. To combat this ignorance and shed light on the differences between communist and capitalist ideologies, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Haiti organized a political cadre (training) school for twenty young people.

From August 19 to 21, in a small hotel in a small provincial town, Party comrades and young students studied and discussed Party and other texts on historical materialism, capitalism, communism, revolutionary struggles and on the relationship between reform and revolution.

There was spirited discussion and debate about social class and the need to engage students and their parents in the struggle against the racist and sexist capitalist system, and to build an egalitarian communist society where the international working class and its communist party rule in its own interest. The participants wrote short letters, some of which are in this issue (with more to follow for next issue). The school ended on a high note, with two students joining PLP, eager to grow their commitment for revolutionary struggle, and at least three others are seriously considering making this commitment. We welcome them warmly. La lutte continue!  (The struggle continues)!