It does not end. The victims of one mass shooting aren’t even buried and we are faced with another.  The shootings over the last three weeks have been too much to bear. Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, Philadelphia. It has been a devastating time. An unbearable time. Yet as hard as it is to think about, we have to take on the task.
Our future and the futures of our children are being shaped at this moment. We must engage in the struggle because, as we mourn the deaths of the children and workers and innocent people, the rulers’ propaganda machine is trying to shift the blame away from the bosses and onto the working class. All while desperately trying to salvage the murderers in blue, the police who proved once again to be useless when it comes to helping the working class.
U.S. capitalism was forged in genocide and blood of Indigenous people and enslavement of Black workers. The violence we witnessed in Uvalde, Buffalo,and Philadelphia, are all reflections of a violent system spiraling into deadly decay. Individuals, motivated by the racist, anti-working class and individualist ideology, kill members of our class.
 The bosses’ laws and their racist cops will never bring security to the working class. Our security, our safety, our future lies in relying on our class to smash the capitalist system that is breeding this hatred, and in its place building a society that values the working class: communism.
Rampant anti-working-class ideology
In Buffalo an 18 year-old, fueled by extreme racism and looking to kill Black people murdered 10 of our brothers and sisters in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood. In Uvalde, another teenager, deranged with hatred, walked into a school and killed 19 children and two teachers. In Tulsa, a mentally ill patient took out his anger at the healthcare system that couldn’t treat his pain by killing the surgeon and three others in the hospital. Most recently in Philadelphia, unknown people, without any concern for others, started a shootout following a dispute. In the middle of a massive crowd, outside bars and restaurants, they killed three and wounded 14 others, almost all of whom were bystanders. The bosses point their bloody fingers at the just individuals or guns or call for more background checks. But in all the cases, the driving force was capitalism, a system where workers' lives are routinely cheapened and discarded for the sake of profit.
While the media plays the photos of the children of Uvalde who were robbed of their lives, workers are murdered by capitalism daily. In the U.S. there are over 17 million children officially below the poverty line, a 41 percent increase since last year when the child tax credit was ended (Center on Poverty and Social Policy, 2/17). The bosses’ schools fail to educate our children, and the health care system fails to give us the care we need. Covid-19  exposed the complete disregard the bosses have for the working class as the poorest and the elderly, the most vulnerable of the working class, were killed by exposure to the disease to keep the economy open, while the wealthy sheltered in safety. We live in a society where our class has been made invisible and left to die. In a society that makes the working-class expendable, killing workers through attacks motivated by racism, mental illness and individualism becomes inevitable.
Bosses shifting blame to the working class
Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, Philadelphia. The bosses might as well have pulled those triggers themselves. Those shooters were filled with the bosses’ contempt for the lives of the working class. Now the ruling class' response is to attack our class. The news carries the message that we must scrutinize our children to see if they are killers. We must watch our neighbors and blame each other for these terrible murders. That is how the bosses are turning us against our own class, the working class.
Will they shut down the gun industry that makes billions in profits? Not in a million years. What they will do is pass laws that attack the working class even more. They will turn teachers and social workers into cops charged with reporting children to the police. It will not be the children of the ruling class, safe in their immaculate private academies who will be under scrutiny. It will be the Black and Latin and white working-class children who will come under more pressure at school.
The homeless and mentally ill will be further treated as criminals and more will be killed by the police. The schools and streets will be filled with ever more murderous cops and we will be urged to trust the bosses state and their laws to keep us safe. Yet, we know how flooding cops in schools and communities only results in racist attacks, greater divisions amongst our class and despair. The bosses’ system has only hatred and contempt for the working class. They have no desire to keep us safe. They are only interested in keeping us passive and fearful of each other.
Police will never make us safe
While Salvador Ramos stood in a classroom and killed 19 children, 19 cops stood in the hallway for 47 minutes and did nothing (Yahoonews.com, 6/1).  All the weapons showered onto the police in recent years, all the Kevlar vests and battering rams and assault rifles and armored personnel carriers are not there to keep us safe. How do we know? We saw it play out in Uvalde. The police don’t stop mass shootings. They do the opposite. With each murder committed by the cops, our class is inundated with justifications and articles and news stories about rising crime. The police exist to serve and protect the wealthy, the ruling class, and the bosses. We, the working class, are their targets; we are not the people they are protecting.
The only thing that we can do to keep the working class safe is build a revolutionary movement that bolsters  the working class and fights for communism. We must overcome the fear of each other and turn our anger and our pain into building a movement that throws off the bosses’ leadership and deadly ideology of racism and individualism. We must turn our anger and our pain into fighting for workers' power, into building confidence in the working class, and into the fight for communist revolution!

As workers struggle with isolation, depression, and anxiety magnified by the bosses’ disregard during Covid-19, students and workers at the City University of New York (CUNY) have demanded better mental health services. The student-led CUNY Rising Alliance demands, among other things, more counselors and advisors.  Problems like illness, death, and job loss shared by so many working-class youth have created a collective trauma that is endemic to the structural racism, poverty, and fractured social system these students—and their class sisters and brothers worldwide—were already facing. In other words, students are suffering from capitalism. The best therapy for our mental health is building connection in the midst of class struggle.
Capitalist Education: A Collective Trauma for All Youth
The stress is apparent when students struggle to show up or participate. And these are the students who have managed to enroll. All the trauma talk can sometimes feel like a competition to see “who has it the worst.” Then there are those who say, “just get over it.” Both reactions are symptoms of individualism that makes our collective trauma so much more damaging. During the pandemic, while educators were encouraged to “check in” with students, the overwhelming expectation from the capitalist education system was to go to “business as usual,” essentially ignoring the horrid conditions such as poor internet access, insufficient computer supply, and crowded living conditions that working-class youth had to endure. Trauma is a product of a violent system based on exploitation and profit. As long as capitalism exists, we will continue to feel alienated.
Capitalist conditions create trauma
 For decades, doctors and psychologists resisted the idea that war caused trauma, but too many soldiers returning from World War II were unable to integrate back into their lives. The diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was finally accepted by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1980. Since then, there’s been a growing recognition that war was not the only cause of PTSD—our capitalist-created living conditions also contribute to trauma. The CDC has supported research that shows long-term health consequences for anyone with four or more “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs), and 61 percent of U.S. adults have experienced at least one ACE. These advances help us understand mental illness as not an individual problem,  but one that has a social basis. This is apparent in the idea of collective trauma. When an event disrupts the foundations of society, a collective trauma occurs that impacts all in the affected community, albeit individuals will impact individuals vary. The Covid-19 pandemic—along with climate change, nuclear war, racist police terror, and attack on reproductive health—have created a disruption that reveals the many ways capitalism creates trauma. Of course, capitalism in and of itself is a trauma-inducing system, and a profit system in decay only exacerbates mental illness. That’s because an unhealthy system creates unhealthy behaviors.
Trust Our Class: let’s struggle for communism
The ruling class offers false solutions that further isolate and pacify our class through just individual practices. One of the capitalist myths that keeps us trapped is the idea that if we work hard enough, we can achieve happiness. That happiness is impossible, and it’s worsened by leading us to blame ourselves and give into the individualism that isolates us from the very people we need for the creation of a better world. It is in the effort to create a better world together that can also make our lives better now: in our efforts to solve the immediate problems and our progress toward bringing about a communist revolution.
This collective trauma demands a collective solution. By struggling together, we can overcome the isolation that breeds suffering.  We need to get better at inviting those around us to share difficult emotions. We need to create space for talking about pain, anger, and hopelessness because we often think we are protecting one another by not naming these bouts of darkness, yet it is in naming them that we can begin to see we are not alone in these feelings and find our way back to the collective.
More therapists might help CUNY students, but if they are left to struggle alone in a world that threatens their very existence, one therapist for one hour can’t compete with a trauma that’s 24/7. PLP is fighting alongside students and countless others worldwide to remind all working-class youth that a communist world is a goal we can all believe in and build—together!

Communist ideas have no borders
I am writing to you to share a reflection about an exchange that took place in the south of Mexico. Communist workers from the Progressive Labor Party who live there hosted a political event with others visiting from central Mexico and New Jersey. We are fortifying our political base with workers who are learning about our ideas and how we put them in practice in different parts of the world. Equally as important, our event gave these workers who are being exposed to PLP an opportunity to put to the test and reaffirm the difference our analysis makes in guarding the future of the international working class.
As an education worker of less than three years, and who was recently fired, seeing the determination of communist teachers in that part of the world to not give up after kidnappings, and other threats to stop fighting back on behalf of the working class raised my morale.
It was incredible to see the level of courage and confidence from the comrade that my comrade from Jersey and I stayed with had, both in bringing together us visiting comrades and the workers in his base, as well as his three children. It was powerful to see the confidence in the same political analysis being shared by comrades from different parts of the world. We mainly focused on, and workers were most interested in, discussing the following 5 points:
We believe that we need to fight for communism as one Party across the world, because our force as a working class crosses all borders, and therefore requires a united struggle.
Intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry is the common force by which all working class attacks are extended. Our class must fight to turn this into international working class consciousness and unity.
The liberal fascists, born out of the divisions within national capitalist classes and competition between capitalists from different nations, are the most dangerous obstacle to workers winning themselves to fighting for communism and smashing capitalism.
Multiracial unity and fighting racism has been important in forging new communist fighters.
Long term base building is key to maintaining political morale and building confidence in the working class for communist politics.
I am trying to use this inspiration and all the wisdom learned from education workers in the south of Mexico, to turn the attack against me as a communist teacher in New Jersey into an opportunity to struggle with other workers and youth in my community to expose the limits of this horrible system in being unable to create the conditions our kids and us workers need to reach our fullest potential.
*****
Azovstal: workers must steel themselves vs. nationalism
News of the recent battle for Mariupol between Russian and Ukrainian forces is filled with irony. Much of the battle was fought over the Azovstal steel works, a massive industrial complex built by Soviet workers and later turned over to Ukrainian capitalists who became part of that nation’s ruling class. Communists can learn from this disaster.
Azovstal opened in 1933 during the second five-year plan in the Soviet Union (USSR). The plant was modern, large, and included 12,000 homes, schools, movie theaters, a hospital and maternity clinic, as well as two parks. In 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Mariupol. In 1943, after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and expulsion of Nazi forces, the factory was repaired and again put to the task of producing steel for Soviet citizens.
When the Russian army attempted to seize Mariupol this year, their soldiers found stiff resistance from a group of Ukrainian fascists called the Azov Battalion. These fascists are officially integrated into the Ukrainian military, despite their ideology of carrying on the traditions of Ukrainian nationalists from World War II who collaborated and fought alongside the German Nazis. That the Azov Battalion exists today and is part of the Ukrainian military speaks to the cynicism of nationalism. Nationalism and fascism are natural extensions of each other.
The war we see in Ukraine today reflects mistakes of the past communist movement in the USSR. The Soviet leadership in the 1930s attempted to build unity among workers by building nationalism among the workers of different regions.
The Ukrainian nationalism, Russian nationalism, and other pro-nationalist sentiments we see today in the former USSR states are, at least partly, a result of this failed strategy. The very unity the Soviets hoped to build has turned into its opposite. Now Russian and Ukrainian workers are killing each other instead of fighting together to kill the capitalists who order them into battle.
The Progressive Labor Party is now leading the way for workers to achieve the unity the Soviets strove for, but ultimately, lost. Fighting for internationalism, instead of nationalism, will help us greatly in that struggle.

*****

Armed with a military-grade assault rifle and the rulers’ racist ideas, Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old monster created by capitalism, traveled 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, to murder Black people. Donned in body armor, he began firing in the parking lot at Tops Friendly Market—the only supermarket in Buffalo’s largest Black neighborhood—before walking inside. He shot 13 of our working-class brothers and sisters, 11 of them Black. Ten were killed; the killer, treated far more carefully by the kkkops than many unarmed Black workers, was arrested without a scratch.
By then the camera attached to Gendron’s helmet had livestreamed the atrocity to a popular gaming platform. Like photographs of lynchings in the early 1900s, the graphic footage found a ready audience. The butchery drew more than three million views, and was still generating revenue for Facebook a full day later. Under capitalism, the bosses’ media and social media eagerly amplify the profit system’s racist terror.
Segregation and slaughter
Racist slaughters are anything but random amid the rot and segregation of capitalist society. According to the 2020 census, there are only 48 Black people in Gendron’s hometown of Conklin, barely one  percent of the population. While it’s been widely reported that the killer waded into online cesspools of racism, Broome County and Central New York State have their own long history of racist terror (New York Times, 5/22):   
[I]n the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan briefly relocated its state headquarters from New York City to Binghamton….In 2018, swastikas were found spray-painted on walls at Binghamton High School. Last winter, a Black teacher at Windsor High School, a short drive from Conklin, complained after students in the mostly white community dressed in racist costumes for a “Gangsta Night” at a school basketball game. And in Oneonta, a rural community between Binghamton and Albany, two students were filmed firing a gun at a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. while shouting racial slurs…
[A]fter the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, racial tensions ran high again in Binghamton….Hundreds turned out to protest in June 2020, said Shanel Boyce, who helped organize the event. As the protesters gathered, Ms. Boyce recalled, others showed up dressed in tactical gear and carrying guns, standing nearby to watch. “They shouted and spat at us, saying: ‘Go back to where you’re from,’” said Ms. Boyce, who is Black. “The racism here is commonplace.”
In other words, Broome County—which Jim Crow Joe Biden carried over Donald Trump in the 2020 elections—is typical of a sick and decaying capitalist society.
Racist Biden rides to liberal bosses’ rescue
The Big Fascists, the dominant finance capitalists of the U.S. ruling class, sent Biden to Buffalo two days after the massacre to proclaim that “white supremacy will never have the last word.”  But this is the same arch-racist who wrote the bipartisan 1994 Crime Bill that intensified racist attacks on Black and Latin workers, one of several Biden-sponsored laws that led to the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration (Vox, June 2020). As a new senator, he worked hand-in-hand with segregationist politicians like Mississippi’s James Eastland to attack school busing for integration. Biden’s latest budget proposal would hand out an additional $30 billion to shore up state and local police departments across the U.S. Here is the liberal bosses’ answer to mad dogs like Payton Gendron: attacks on Black and Latin workers will be controlled and organized by the state.
Taking his cue from Biden, Byron Brown, Buffalo’s Black mayor, is pushing to increase the budget for Buffalo’s cops, the same state terrorists who fractured a 75-year-old protestor’s skull in one of the mass demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd. Like Eric Adams, Lori Lightfoot, Ras Baraka, and a long train of Black mayors and police chiefs, Brown is a class traitor who serves and protects the interests of finance capital.
  These Big Fascist bosses, the ones who control the Democratic Party, are an even greater danger to our class than open racists like Trump or Tucker Carlson, or the gun-toting white nationalist militias that do their bidding. The Small Fascist Republicans have paralyzed Congress and seized the U.S. Supreme Court. They promote virulent sexism, racist vigilantism, and the “Great Replacement Theory,” the Nazi myth that spurred Gendron to shoot and kill as many Black workers as he could. But at least for now, the liberal Big Fascists still control the police and the military. They’re the ones leading the charge toward an inter-imperialist war with rivals China and Russia. They will stop at nothing to protect their global profits. Both Big Fascists and Small Fascists use racism to build fascism. They use electoral politics to offer themselves up as the solution for the danger of the other side.
The long-term strategy of the U.S. ruling class is to keep white workers’ allegiance with a few reform crumbs while turning their misery under capitalist life into anger against their Black and immigrant working-class sisters and brothers—to exploit, divide, and conquer. These bosses and their rotten system can be defeated only by a mass communist movement, a movement for workers’ power. We cannot smash racism and sexism until we put capitalism in its grave.
Multiracial fightback     
Buffalo has a long history of multiracial unity in the fight against racism, dating back to its days as the last stop before Canada on the Underground Railroad. By hosting the Niagara Movement in 1905, a conference organized by W.E.B. Du Bois and other anti-segregationists, Buffalo gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. The city has a proud history of militant class struggle that won significant gains for industrial workers. It was in Buffalo, in 1962, that the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) was founded by workers who refused to follow the old communist movement in its retreat into reformism. In 1965, PLM became Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which continues to fight for communist revolution and a society run by and for the international working class.
Nothing inspires fear in the ruling class like militant, multiracial, antiracist, and antisexist class struggle led by Black workers and youth. Their greatest fear is our greatest hope. In a period where outrageous assaults on our class are met with silence, our efforts to mobilize even modest workplace responses are significant (see letter, page 6).  Where outrage overflows into spontaneous action, we see our bold leadership and communist ideas embraced by workers and youth in motion. No matter the scale or intensity of the struggle, we seek to up the ante by injecting communist consciousness.  
In the face of escalating attacks, we cannot retreat into cynicism or the dead end of elections. As we fight racist and sexist assaults from Small Fascist forces like Gendron, we must join mass movements that the Big Fascists will be determined to control. But these liberal rulers are the same bosses who have segregated and choked to death the working class--from Buffalo to Brooklyn, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis. They have nothing to offer but more fascism and wider war. The millions they have watched die from Covid-19 worldwide pale in comparison to the numbers they’re planning to shepherd to slaughter in World War III.  
Communists must never again lead workers into the arms of the ruling class. The great replacement that workers of the world need is a dictatorship of the proletariat. Only when armed struggle has driven the capitalist class from power worldwide will we establish new conditions - communist social relations - where racist mass murder first becomes impossible and then a distant memory. If this is the world you want to see then the Progressive Labor Party is your political home.