April 30, Brooklyn— A stream of red Progressive Labor Party (PLP) flags flowed down Flatbush Avenue once again to celebrate this year’s May Day and the millions of workers worldwide that led the working class fightback for the 8-hour workday. In Chicago in 1886, 350,000 workers took to the streets to resist the ruling class’ demands for the "sunup to sundown" workday and demanded an end to worker’s lethal working conditions. The Chicago workers’ fight against capitalist exploitation sparked an uprising in Haymarket Square, during which cops murdered four workers and wounded hundreds more.
In 1889, the International Workers Association demanded the eight-hour  workday across borders. This push for internationalism aligns with our Party’s line. One class. The international working class. The Progressive Labor Party proudly carried the torch, marching in Brooklyn, New York, with bold, communist fightback, carrying the words written on the Haymarket  Monument in our hearts: THE DAY WILL COME WHEN OUR SILENCE WILL BE MORE POWERFUL THAN THE VOICES YOU ARE THROTTLING TODAY.
Fannng flames of revolution with class rage and optimism
Our class rage fueled our march, from the ruling classes’ callous acceptance of mass COVID deaths to reckless U.S. and Russian imperialists’ flirtation with nuclear war in Ukraine. In the year since our last May Day march, the ruling class worldwide continues to cheapen and destroy working class lives internationally. Nevertheless, our march was fueled by revolutionary optimism. While the ruling class ramps up its preparation for World War III, using Ukraine as a pawn in their inter-imperialist rivalry, dozens of workers boldly took over the streets, proclaiming we will smash racist borders and imperialist war with communist revolution.  
As we passed the Kings Theater marquee that advertised his foul name, we chanted, “Eric Adams, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” denouncing the lies and deceptions he recently spewed there regarding his first 100 days in office.  Recently, Adams  gamed workers that lost family members to gun violence on stage and vowed to ‘fight crime by unleashing his racist kkkops.As the crisis of capitalism deepens and the splits between the Big Fascist capitalists, fronted by Biden, and the Small Fascist America First capitalists, once represented by Donald Trump, intensifies the bosses will continue to intensify their attacks on workers.
For the Big Fascists, the main finance capital wing, the current play is to appoint members of historically oppressed groups to manage our class’s oppression. Black liberal misleaders Adams are managing local New York bosses’ fascist housing and wage theft crisis by criminalizing workers. His answer to making streets safe is  to ramp up racist policing and broken windows policies to crack down on Black and Latin youth,and homeless workers on trains and pitting Asian workers against Black workers.
With Adam’s plan for terror, we are witnessing the fascist disciplining of our class in real time. PLP’s response to this volatile system is to unite with workers and families in antiracist struggles and build a communist movement that smash the fascist bosses once and for all.
Honoring May Day with international worker solidarity
The entire day was a celebration of international working class unity through our collective struggles to overthrow the capitalist dictatorship. Hundreds of multiracial, multi-gendered, intergenerational workers combined forces for an international celebration of working class power. Our speeches presented political clarity on why workers fight for communism. “The working class will determine society’s future. Our Black, Latin, Asian, white and immigrant sisters and brothers will rise to end imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.”
Messages of solidarity sprouted from comrades in Haiti: “We face a government that cannot govern. We have a working class that cannot live as it once did: see the strikes and demonstrations of tens of thousands of workers demanding an increase in the minimum wage (despite the threat of police and gangs). The only thing we lack is a revolutionary party with a deep base within the working class: this is the task of Progressive Labor Party in Haiti today and tomorrow. We are ready to accept it.”
We heard messages from Colombia and Mexico: ”This capitalist democracy does not work for the benefit of the working class and cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed by workers' power,” further fueling an already energized working class crowd in Brooklyn. Provisions were made for translation of all proceedings into Spanish, and chants resonated in English, Spanish, and Haitian Kreyol.
In an inspiring moment of solidarity, construction workers interrupted their toil to hail our march. Amidst the foundation of yet another residential tower sure to contribute to racist gentrification, they held CHALLENGE newspaper high and offered a phone number to remain in touch with the communists marching by their job site.
Marching alongside PLP were transit workers, immigrants’ rights organizations, organizers struggling against displacement and police terror, and anti-racist young people from teacher education programs. All of these attendees represent  working-class potential. Under communist leadership, workers will run all aspects of society. We need these workers and many more, as well as students and youth, to join our movement. On May Day our objective is clear. We fight for workers' power through communism.  Join us!

OAKLAND, April 29 – Progressive Labor Party participated in several May Day events on Friday April 29 and Sunday May 1. Though small, PLers in the Bay Area  were able to spread communist ideas via our chants and newspaper, which were openly accepted by protesters at the demonstration. Workers are always open to communist politics.
Oakland: racist attack on students and workers
In Oakland, a primarily Black and Latin city, PLP attended protests at three schools over threatened closures.  The teachers and students connected the closure of schools to the closure of the port in Alameda (next to Oakland) to build a baseball stadium. Teachers and port workers united against privatization, a process that disproportionately hurts Black, Latin, and immigrant students and families. “The vast majority of students at the targeted schools — some 93% — are considered either lower-income, English learners or foster youth. Black students…[are] more than 40% of the student body…” (KQED, 4/29). The bosses will continue to make the working class pay for a crisis their system created.
Charter schools have a tighter control of both its students and workers.  At the Oakland rally, PLP distributed CHALLENGE and leaflets describing the way privatization further streamlines the process of producing students who have been taught not to think for themselves but rather to obey orders and conform to the bosses’ demands, training our students to become obedient workers who passively accept their exploitation. Public schools, like all schools under capitalism, are no better in their willingness to indoctrinate students with ideas that normalize racism, sexism and class exploitation. A system that treats some students as expendable does not deserve to exist!
San Francisco: workers have no borders!
On May Day Sunday, PLP attended the immigrant rights march calling for legalization for millions of undocumented workers and restoration of the asylum process at the border. These are just two of Biden’s broken campaign promises. A crowd of 400 mostly Spanish speakers heard PLP’s communist chants. “La Migra, Cochina, Racista y Asesina” (ICE, Pigs, Racists and Murderers) was well-liked. “Este puño si se ve,  Los obreros al poder” (this fist that you can see, workers to power) was new to the crowd. We promoted international working-class unity and discussed the idea of “¡Aplastar! las Fronteras” (Smash all Borders!). Relying  on the liberal bosses to lead these fights for undocumented workers will lead us into fighting in their inter-imperialist wars or in a cycle of being sifted through empty reforms (see editorial).  
PLP distributed 77 CHALLENGEs, mainly to those interested in our communist headline about May Day, some of the international reports, transit struggles, and student actions. We made one contact and gave literature to MUNI bus drivers.  
Meanwhile, other PLP members attended the May Day march called by the AFL-CIO union where we also distributed literature and met people.
We plan to follow up with our friends to discuss the role of borders and the basis of immigration policies in the capitalists’ need for a divided labor force, especially in this time of war. Slowly but surely, we are politically sharpening our forces and building the party. It was an exciting weekend!

A communist education
Sometimes, the Party’s ideas can reach people, and have a wonderful impact, in unexpected ways.
Three days ago, I participated in the PLP-organized May Day march in Brooklyn, New York. Then yesterday, I sent videos of the keynote speech to friends who didn’t make it to the march.
One friend, who now lives in another state, wrote back saying, “Thanks. I enjoyed that. It is a good reminder of the essence of community.”
Another friend, who is a teacher, sent this especially heart-warming note:
“Thank you for sharing this! She educated me soooooooo much just now! Some things I was aware of, but much of what she stated, I did not know! This is powerful! Do you mind if I share this with my students in class tomorrow?... I think it would be powerful to show this and discuss . . . and scrap what my original lesson was going to be.”
We never know, in advance, what the consequences will be, when we do a bit of extra Party work. In this case, the lesson is we should be bold in sharing communist ideas, even more broadly than we may have thought possible!
*****
Workers will be safe under communism
The May Day March was great despite the rain, and the chaos trying to get on a commuter train from Indiana to Chicago. It was great to see comrades I have known for years. The best part of the march was taking the Party’s message that our only way forward is for the workers to take state power straight to the agents of the racist bosses, the fascist cops at the ‘Public Safety’ Center in the Bronzeville neighborhood. They now  know that we’ll be coming for them someday during the communist revolution led by workers under Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leadership. The chants condemning the imperialist Ukraine-Russian war were great. May Day inspired all of us to do BETTER to build this antiracist, anti imperialist, revolutionary communist movement!
*****
Tale of two May Days
There were two New York May Day marches, a communist PLP march in Brooklyn and a reformist (socialist, anarchist) sponsored march from Union Square to Jeff Bezos’ headquarters in Manhattan to support the Amazon union movement. Due to physical limitations I wasn’t able to participate in either march but was able to get to the May Day Union Square rally to sell CHALLENGE and talk to some laundry, restaurant and transit workers about their labor struggles. I am a retired transit worker who participated in the 1964 Transit Strike that shut the city down for 11 days and forced the city to give a pension after 20 years, which all the workers I talked to have lost.
The young workers knew about the strike. I explained that the benefits were won because the union leadership at that time received only the average pay of the rest of the workers and not the six figure salaries of today’s union misleaders, much like today’s politicians who are bought and sold by anonymous unlimited contributions. The revisionists tried to sell me their socialist propaganda which I refused, explaining it was just state capitalism.
Some workers however seemed favorable to my communist ideas by buying all the CHALLENGE issues I had and taking many pictures of my sign which read, “Capitalists worldwide need you to fight other workers for power and profits…communists want to turn profit wars into revolution for workers’ power – read CHALLENGE”.

May 11, Bogota–Colombia’s ruling class is in the midst of a shameless electoral campaign as they bring more racist and sexist attacks against mostly Black workers living in the most remote and abandoned parts of the country. Every political party under capitalism works to trick the masses into joining their corrupt electoral circus by pushing lies, anti-communism, the farce of peace, and fake anti-corruption campaigns. Electoral politics is a desperate attempt to cover up the crisis created by the profit-driven system and furthermore legitimize its discredited bourgeois dictatorship and its rotten institutions.
Local bosses are consolidating their political, economic and cultural power over the great masses of alienated workers who seek leaders to save them from misery, hunger, unemployment and environmental destruction. All the while, capitalism’s destruction of the climate is making droughts, floods, avalanches, and earthquakes much more acute.
Regardless of the outcome of the election, the bosses in Colombia will continue their deal-making with U.S. imperialists,who are given free reign for the exploitation of markets and natural resources. Imperialist institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, UN, OECD, and NATO are the ones that really rule and dictate who and how they will oppress us. Still, the capitalists threaten the workers that if they do not vote “right” they will be left without a job because businesses will flee the country.
The real advance for the international working class is a unified struggle to win a communist system that is consistent with all our basic needs, including clean water, healthy food, sustainable housing, safe transportation, and pro-working class education, all without money, profits or borders. For that, we need to build a mass communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) of millions of workers around the world.
Voting will never bring working class power
The international working class will never come to power by electoral means. To cite a few recent examples: the liberal fascist AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) government in Mexico; the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLM) class traitors in El Salvador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Every former guerrilla and trade unionist who becomes a mayor, governor or president inevitably plays the capitalist role of oppressing and imprisoning those who elected them. Capitalism’s politicians deceive workers to follow down the path of nationalism and cross-class collaboration, causing great demoralization in the revolutionary struggle.
The capitalists need elections to sell us the myth that voting will help us reform the profit system to respond to the needs of working people. But that is not the only reason. They hope to find populist, or in other words ‘most efficient fascist’ candidates who can sidetrack and pacify millions of disaffected workers and youth. For the working class, it will not make much difference if the right-wing Gutiérrez, Hernández, Ingrid Betancur or the Social Democrat Gustavo Petro is elected. In any case, our class does not gain anything by electing one or another bosses' candidate. Only with the destruction of wage slavery and its bourgeois state through communist revolution will it allow the working class to free itself from exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialist wars. We do not need the bosses and their electoral farce.
With CHALLENGE in hand,PL’ers are present in anti-war protests, in rallies against unemployment, in electoral meetings and discussions presenting to the workers our sharpest ideas  of how to build working-class unity and communist organization. Many workers tell us they agree but understand it is a long-term struggle. We respond that no matter how long it takes, the problems of our class have no solution in capitalism. We need to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Time for communism is right now
At this moment the bosses and their military, paramilitaries and criminal gangs are assassinating us in all areas of the country and sexually assaulting working-class women. Right now they are slashing wages and jobs. Right now they are gutting social services and decimating hospitals, nursing homes, schools and nurseries servicing our relatives. It is today that the prices of food and basic services are rising non-stop. Right now they are killing and imprisoning hundreds of young people who fight against the misery to which capitalism subjects us. It is today when famines and droughts are destroying the lives and livelihoods of Black workers first and hardest.
It is for all this that we say to our class that the time for fightback and development of our revolutionary communist struggle is right now!Do not vote– join the PLP and fight to meet our needs. Don't vote–distribute CHALLENGE and organize study groups! Don't vote, let's fight for workers' power! Don't vote, let's organize for revolution and build communism!