LOS ANGELES, April 30–The 12 months since last May Day have been a hell of a year for the working class worldwide. With COVID-19, imperialist wars, unending police murders and terror , unemployment, and a housing crisis  ravaging working-class communities, especially Black, Latin and Asian, it can be hard to imagine creating a better world for all of us. Yet, May Day reminds us that we have a communist world to win if we can join together with our class brothers and sisters.
Building struggle for a communist future
This year we in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) hosted our own dinner in a local park. A multiracial, multi-generational group of 60 workers gathered to celebrate May Day with food, speeches, songs, and poetry. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon filled with the collective efforts of PL’ers, friends, and family to bring together nourishment for the mind, body, and soul.
The program was Emceed by a PL’er and an enthusiastic, artistic student who shared her poetry and free-style rap during the program. Another group of students shared an illustrated history of May Day. In between, musician comrades led us in lively renditions of Bella Ciao and Señor Inversionista. There was the ever popular Table Talk and CHALLENGE Quiz where we discussed capitalism vs. communism and whether the working class ever benefits from capitalism.
Another highlight was a sculpture of Helen Jones, the mother of John Horton, who was murdered by LA Sheriffs in Men’s Central Jail. It captures her revolutionary struggle for her son and inspired another comrade to write and perform a poem honoring her and all the families impacted by a system that fails us time and time again. This was followed by a moving performance of Too Many Names. We continue to fight alongside families that have been forever changed by police murders in Los Angeles and link their struggles to the world-wide fight for an antiracist, antisexist, communist future.
Build confidence in the working class
PLP has been involved in struggles against police terror for many years. In LA, we work directly with several families whose loved ones have been murdered by killer kkkops, some in this last year alone. Together, we have led regular rallies and protests in South Los Angeles. Not only do the families speak about their experiences with the racist LAPD and the County Sheriffs, but we build the confidence of our class to take state power by taking over the street and collectively confronting the police.
PL’ers  are also active in a tenants’ union campaign to make needed repairs to apartments where the slumlord refuses to make the workers’ units habitable. Workers always support us.
Leading up to May Day, one worker from the tenants’ union campaign joined our May Day committee and is learning more about the Party. Hundreds of people were exposed to communist, antiracist politics, and more people understand the strength of the working class when we unite. The future here looks bright for the growth of PLP and our movement to rid the earth of the exploiters and their henchmen in “law enforcement.”

From its earliest days capitalism has used its state power in the courts and the law to control the working class’ ability to have children. The brutal enforcement of the bosses’ policies and practices on childbirth have been intertwined with their building of a racist society. The latest move to ban abortion is no isolated attack on women. It is an attack on all workers and a warning of more fascist discipline for the working class on the horizon, with Black, Latin and indigenous women disproportionately bearing the brunt of these sexist, racist attacks (see editorial on page 2).
The foundations of a racist U.S.
In the English colonies the colonial ruling class was focused on controlling how the population grew. The first law relating to population control was passed in 1662 in Virginia which enshrined that slavery would be passed onto the children based on the status, enslaved or free, of the mother. This preserved the rulers’ ability to produce enslaved workers through the rape of enslaved Black women. Around the same time, the first laws were passed that banned the marriage of white and Black workers as equals. This forced the creation of separate groups of workers, white workers as indentured servants or wage labor, and enslaved Black workers (Reproductive Justice, UC Press, 2017).
Genocide of the indigenous
While the early U.S. ruling class was using rape and enacting racist laws to increase the size of the enslaved population, they were using legalized genocide to destroy the indigenous population. The colonial and early U.S. governments authorized over 1,500 wars and legal raids against indigenous people. After 100 years of attacks the Indian Removal Act of 1830 further legalized what had already been the practice of the U.S. rulers: forced death marches as the U.S. rulers expanded their country westward. After forcing indigenous workers onto reservations, a new attack was started where the U.S. ruling class began a campaign of forcibly seizing indigenous children from their families and sending them to government-run boarding schools and then to white families. All to increase the amount of white workers in the west and eliminate the indigenous population. All told, the indigenous population, estimated to be between 5 and 15 million in 1492, was nearly wiped out, leaving only 230,000 by the end of the
19th century (history.com).
Racism and population control
After the Civil War the ruling class maintained the separation of white and non-white workers through a series of laws that enforced segregation and population control. Racist laws were enacted that prevented Black and white workers from integrating. Once Black workers were no longer enslaved, the ruling class began a campaign to stop their reproductive growth. They accomplished this by distributing contraception and using forced sterilization on the Black and immigrant working class. The U.S. sterilization laws targeting anyone the government deemed “unfit” were eventually copied by the Nazis to justify their genocidal policies (Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman).
Birth control became another method against reproduction. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement that became Planned Parenthood, was a proponent of eugenics, the racist idea that white people were genetically superior to non-white people. Sanger, supported by the ruling class through donations to her birth control clinics, toured the country speaking about the need to limit the number of children among Black and immigrant workers (NPR, 8/14/2015).
Eventually, as the depression of 1929 created armies of unemployed workers and the ruling class feared that the growing communist movement would overthrow U.S. capitalism, birth control campaigns and forced sterilization were expanded to include the poorest groups of white workers as well (Reproductive Justice, UC Press, 2017).
The bosses’ only interest in the working class is as a tool to make profits. Our lives, our wellbeing and our children mean nothing to the ruling class other than making money. To this day their healthcare policies are limited to the minimal necessities to keep enough workers able to go to work to make money for the bosses. The bosses fight and resist anything beyond that. The fight over control of having children is part of this battle between our class and the bosses. They use the laws and the courts to control as much as they can who has children and what happens to our children after they’re born. The working class will only gain control of our lives and our future by smashing the capitalists and their racist system with communist revolution.

The following are post May Day reflections from workers in Haiti. Look out for an article about their Day celebration in  our next issue of CHALLENGE.

Think like a communist
I first met communist members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) following the earthquake in my hometown in the summer of 2021. I could see that these people want us to have an egalitarian society, where everyone can get what they need and want. Here in Haiti (and I believe elsewhere too) there is a greedy and a brutal bourgeois minority which monopolizes almost all the wealth of the country. This goes back not only to slavery, but the period after too, when the mixed race children of the French slave masters demanded and gained , through fraudulent maneuvers, property and power. Now workers want a real redistribution of wealth so that everyone can live life as it should be.
A few months after I met PLers, a friendly relationship developed between us. We often talk about how the capitalist system works, why “tout koukouj klere pou je yo” (everything is about looking out for self-interest), and about how we are going to advance to eradicate this rotten system. I can say that through these discussions,
 I see the world in a different way. The world would surely be different if capitalists thought like communists, but of course that’s not possible. Our class interests are in direct opposition to one another. Our membership in the working class makes us think about the world differently from the bosses.
My thinking skills are increasing and I am becoming more and more confident in these ideas and in myself. I helped organize today’s May Day conference at our university and discovered new experiences in leadership, being responsible for carrying out tasks necessary to make the day a success. I really enjoyed doing it and helping bring these ideas to a wider audience.
Being a communist is not an easy thing. If it was, we would have won our final victory already. I realize that the battle is long and we have to fight until the end, and do a lot more. Not only expand our base in the university, but among the working class as a whole. We have to study and we have to engage in class struggle (there is no end to what we are justly angry about!). We have to win young and old alike to the cause of communist revolution and an egalitarian society free from racism and sexism, war and exploitation, kidnappers and brutality.
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Find motivation in the midst of class struggle
It was really great to have the chance to participate in this May Day conference and learn more about the labor movement and the role of communists. It is a good opportunity to tell our brother and sister comrades not to give up the struggle, because only the working class in this capitalist world can make revolution to change it. I have read elsewhere that imperialism is the final stage of capitalism, which hinders social progress in all forms. We believe this is true and we find our motivation in the struggle of workers. And one day, the working class in our country (and around the world) will no longer be a reserve army of labor and a tax haven for the rulers. Finally, in the same way that we fought and won against being chattel slaves, we will fight and win against being wage slaves: we will decide for ourselves and we will take our destiny in hand where we will all live equal as humans.
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Revolutionary flavor, a real pleasure
It was a real pleasure for me to participate in the May Day celebration. At first I thought it would be the usual Agricultural Festival that the government organizes every year. But boy, was I wrong. I learned a lot of things about the workers’ movement, why our living conditions are filled with such misery, and how to change that through struggle. I also loved the musical interlude; the musicians really added revolutionary flavor to the day. I expect that the next time we meet will be even more fruitful.
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Washington, DC, May 5—Circulator transit workers in  the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 forced RAPD, a private contractor of the public Metro Transit system, to increase wages 25 percent (still below parity with other transit workers), make modest improvements in health coverage and retirement, and limit contracting out. One hundred and sixty mainly Black workers struck solidly for three days (only one scab) after months of management stonewalling negotiations. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members in the ATU were intimately involved in this action, organizing and leading pre-strike rallies and marching on the picket lines, with other comrades bringing sandwiches and CHALLENGE newspapers to the three Circulator garages.
Limits to reform
This advance in the class struggle may only be temporary, though, as the transit bosses are exhausting the federal funds they got from the Covid-19 appropriation, and management counter-attack will surely happen. With contracts of hundreds more transit workers expiring in two months, the strike preparation lessons from this battle will be valuable. While fighting for reforms may improve conditions for our class for the moment, history shows us that reform gains are fleeting and with every capitalist crisis these gains are always reversed and supplemented with attacks on our class.
The most valuable lesson for workers is to measure the success of strikes, not just as an improvement of our immediate conditions, but as a practice run to prepare us for the day when we overthrow this rotten system that forces us to negotiate the terms of our misery and exploitation. Strikes are schools for communism and through them we unleash our revolutionary potential. Derailing the bosses profiteering, we put our ability to shut down capitalism and regain control of our labor to the test.
PLP’ers in the ATU jump-started the process of growing our revolutionary potential, ensuring every striking worker received a copy of CHALLENGE. Our participation in the strike as workers and communists deepened PLP’s ties to the most militant, class-conscious workers. We urge fellow ATU workers to keep fighting, keep striking, but don't stop there! Join and build a revolutionary party, the PLP, to lead the overthrow of capitalism and its wage system, must become the primary step in the class struggle in transit.
 Strike rooted in communist fightback
The ATU strike was triggered by  management’s trickery and intimidation tactics on workers, but we said, “Lies and tricks will not divide, workers marching side by side.” First they refused to seriously negotiate for months. Then, when we voted 96 percent to strike, they essentially offered a nickel, and said they wouldn’t be available to negotiate for almost a month. Then, to disarm workers from going on strike, they offered to negotiate the day before the strike. Workers said forget that, we’re striking. Suddenly management came to the table with some concessions. Nevertheless, the  Circulator strike, representing a fraction of the 8,000 strong active union members, was partly a fruit of these decades of organizing.
PLP has played an important role in the class struggle at Metro. In 1978, PLP members organized for over a year and led a wildcat strike that literally shut D.C. down for a week. Since then, PLP has fought for intensified class struggle against racism and capitalism and for building a revolutionary communist movement at Metro. PLP members were also active supporters of the 2019 transit strike at Cinder Bed Road, and workers at that site joined the picket lines for the Circulator in solidarity.
Building a stronger PLP club, with new militant transit workers, at Metro is needed to address the capitalist horrors that lie ahead, from imperialist war to inevitable savage racist attacks against the working class in the transit industry. Join us!