WASHINGTON, DC, April 13—Bus operators at the D.C. Circulators are fighting back—96 percent of them voted to strike for wages and benefits after holding two vigorous protests where negotiations were taking place. These 150 operators have been paid lower wages than their Metro transit counterparts for over a decade, and the workers are fed up! Their struggle shows how the racist capitalist system especially oppresses Black workers and attempts to divide workers even in the same union from their brothers and sisters.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been helping lead the fight for wage parity among transit workers in the DC area for many years, and helped organize and lead the two rallies. But wage parity is not enough. Any wages mean the capitalists are profiting off of our labor. We will keep struggling endlessly to destroy capitalism and its profiteering bosses.
Make strikes schools for communist workers’ power
Workers that can organize strikes can run society and we would run it to benefit all workers, not racist, sexist, profiteering capitalists. That’s communism. Industrial workers are key to building such a revolutionary movement and the PLP has been raising class consciousness and multiracial unity through our work in the union for decades. The predominantly Black workforce in the transit industry in DC makes any attack on this group of workers a racist one, and we are calling this out for what it is.
Despite shady manipulation by the union’s lawyer who signed off on a 30-day contract extension with the company, workers showed up on their day off to vote and spread the word throughout the company to vote Yes for a strike. The Circulator operators belong to the 13,000-member ATU Local 689 but are saddled with a separate, inferior contract with a private contractor, RAPTDEV, an international company that exploits workers all around the world, and makes billions doing so. A key part to winning any strike at the Circulator is gaining the support of Metro workers throughout the system.
The son of a Circulator operator took pride in developing an energizing playlist of fightback songs to keep the picket line at the rallies going. While we started with the classic chant of “The workers united, will never be defeated!” union members on the picket line also joined in with a new chant on the spot mocking RAPTDEV’s offer of a 30 cent/hour raise saying “30 cent ain’t sh*t!” (which we all really enjoyed chanting). At one point the company lawyers came downstairs to observe the rally from inside the hotel lobby, and militant workers yelled and banged on the window until they fled like the dogs they are with their tails between their legs.
Safety blitz upsets bosses; communism will eliminate them
Union mechanics and organizers did an early morning safety blitz to make sure Circulator workers were being assigned safe buses by management, another tactic to fight RAPTDEV. Many operators had to go from two to three buses to find one that worked! Management routinely tries to intimidate operators into taking out unsafe buses, from broken horns to non-working turn signals. One bus had such poor brakes that the bus slid! The drive for profit supersedes any safety regulations under capitalism. But bolstered by worker solidarity, operators reported all unsafe buses to management. Management was so upset by our safety blitz presence that they called the cops on us!
At each rally, PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE and expressed solidarity with the workers. One PLP member gave a speech connecting the struggle at Circulator to similar union fights at Howard University and Amazon warehouses. Many workers were inspired to hear that their fight is supported far and wide, and opens the way to understanding the need to take the road to communist revolution.

PAKISTAN, April 13—Prime Minister Imran Khan has been ousted by a no-confidence vote spearheaded by politicians aligned with the Pakistan military. The turmoil in the Pakistan ruling class is driven by competing factions within the ruling class and their ties to the big imperialists in the U.S. and China. As the bosses fight over Pakistan, the working class, suffering under extreme inflation and poverty wages, is fighting back with large demonstrations in many areas of industry . These demonstrations are demanding higher pay and other benefits people need to survive.Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is working to build a revolutionary communist movement for revolution and workers’ power among our friends and fellow workers in these struggles.
The departing ruling political party—responsible for the high rate of inflation, exploitation and fascism—has now started to say that the U.S. bosses have chalked out a plan for regime change with the help of the opposition. The reality is that Khan and his faction had managed to sour relations with both the U.S. and Chinese bosses. Khan upset the U.S. bosses by supporting the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Simultaneously the Khan faction lost the confidence of the Chinese ruling class. First in 2018 by threatening to kill the extensive Belt and Road projects in Pakistan (Yahoo news, 4/13). They backed down on that threat but in the last few months have failed to make payments owed to the Chinese bosses for electric power plants and other Chinese constructed projects in Pakistan (Eurasian Times 3/22).
Big imperialists force changes in Pakistan
Khan and his group have failed to bring down inflation and are sparking anger among the military which is one of the largest business owners in the country with assets of over $100 billion, including large amounts of oil and banking businesses (Asia Times, 3/8/19). The high inflation was also causing concern among the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which was holding up a promised $6 billion loan to the country.
All of this was too much for the military bosses whose business arrangement relies on Chinese investment and exports to the U.S. This led to the ouster of the Khan government and the insertion of Shebaz Sharif, the brother of a three time Prime Minister and one of the wealthiest families in the country. Immediately both the Chinese and the U.S. bosses sent messages of congratulations.
The removal of Khan is a prelude to a bigger struggle in Pakistan as the struggle between the Chinese and U.S. bosses will now sharpen inside Pakistan. The immediate question will be around the war in Ukraine where the U.S. will try to get Pakistan to buck China and impose sanctions on Russia. The Khan faction is also continuing to fight. Khan’s Pakistan Justice Party was able to turn out hundreds of thousands of people on April 10 to protest their ouster from the government.  
Workers fight back
While the bosses battle over control of Pakistan, the economic conditions are getting worse on a daily basis and the working class is dying because of unemployment and hunger. But the working-class fightback  against exploitation, poverty, fascism and unemployment is gaining strength. People from every walk of life are angry with capitalism. Students, workers, women’s groups and other professional organizations are demanding availability of cheap basic commodities, disparity allowances, employment, and shelters to live in but the Pakistani ruling class’ infighting is diverting their attention from poverty and exploitation.
Now the Pakistan bosses are trying to divert the working class from blaming the Pakistani bosses and the capitalist system for the crisis by getting workers to choose sides in their battles. These are old tactics of the ruling class when people start to unite against the prevailing capitalist political system. The bosses try to divide workers in the name of religion, nationalism and personality cults. The upcoming elections are shaping up to be very violent as the bosses fight each other and try to mobilize the working class around nationalism and religious differences.
Building a communist movement
PLP is involved in organizing demonstrations, rallies and strikes of students for restoration of student’s unions, decreasing tuition fees, security in the education institutions and stopping forced disappearances of student activists from campuses. We are trying to build a base in the factories where labor unions are banned and the contract (piece work) system prevails.
We are also working with teachers who are demonstrating against the government policies and are demanding a disparity allowance and a salary increase because some government departments’ workers receive more pay and allowances than teachers.
PLP strives to bring more and more people onto the streets to chant against the capitalist horrors and fascism. From Brooklyn to Pakistan PLP is trying to build a united struggle against the exploitation, fundamentalism, fascism and unemployment which is the ultimate result of capitalism. In Pakistan, our participation in reform struggles are gaining respect among the workers and it seems that our politics is inspiring them to join the hands of comrades in struggle and fight not just for reforms but for workers' power. We are building a base for communist revolution.

Staten Island, NY, April 12—Against all odds, Amazon workers in New York dared to struggle, and won! United—Black, Latin, Asian, white—these young workers have formed the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), an independent union representing the workers in an Amazon shipping warehouse  on Staten Island. While politicians, reaching up to President Joe Biden, and so-called labor leaders now congratulate the new union and pledge their support, they were almost nowhere to be found as the workers began and carried through their struggle. While unions are not the solution for liberating workers from capitalism, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) applauds the workers’ integrated fightback at Staten Island’s Amazon shipping warehouse The commitment to their fellow workers is emblematic of how  strikes and organizing become schools for communism. Until our international revolution is won, these lessons are hugely beneficial to our political growth and movement.
Whether the new union will get the support they need or mere lip service is now the question. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon giant has already begun its campaign to get the union election results thrown out and a new election held. Whether Amazon succeeds or not, the ALU then faces the challenge of getting Amazon to the table to bargain fairly for the contract provisions the workers are demanding - safer, better, more humane working conditions and wages high enough to support a family.
Workers of the world unite
At a rally before  the election, one of the ALU leaders said that as he suffered the horrid working conditions in the warehouse, he at first asked why no one could  help him and his fellow workers. Then, he realized that it was not a question of an outside savior. It was up to him and the others directly affected to begin and struggle through until they won what they needed, not allowing racist and sexist ideas to divide them. That is a lesson that all workers ought to take to heart. We need to rely on each other, not phony politicians who want photo-ops  and our votes, or labor misleaders that want to co-opt us and suck up dues money.
The ALU is rightly trying to extend its organizing efforts to other Amazon locations, and Amazon will fight them tooth and nail. The NLRB has ruled in the union’s favor and certified the election, as Biden and the rulers he represents are trying to put on a worker-friendly face. What the ALU has to realize is that the government, the state, and its organs like the NLRB are not neutral. The United States is controlled by a capitalist class, and its institutions will always bend to the capitalists’ will.
 Amazon and all other companies exist for one purpose: to make profits. To make profits, employers MUST exploit their workers. Currently, Bezos is a better exploiter, hence his staggering wealth. In the struggle against the Amazon bosses, ALU workers learned that to get what they needed, they had to fight for it  themselves. The next lesson to be learned is that to get and KEEP what they need, Amazon workers and all workers must fight to destroy the capitalist exploiters and replace their system with communism, a system run by and for workers to fulfill workers’ needs, not to generate profits for a few.
The Progressive Labor Party is organizing workers and students worldwide  with just that goal in mind. Join us!

 This is part five of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s, Spain’s urban bourgeoisie (capitalists), supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States.
But, in defending the Republic, they were defending capitalists. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists.
In the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go, and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership are essential. Without their leadership, our  class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism. The following continues that story:

Admiral Kilpatrick was born in Denver on February 20, 1898. His father worked first as a cowboy in Oklahoma and then as a miner in Colorado. When Admiral was six years old, his father got a job with a steel company and moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio. Kilpatrick’s father was a Socialist, and his son accompanied him to political meetings when he was as young as 12 years old.
He eventually joined the Socialist party and, when he was 19 years old, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). After high school he worked in mills, foundries, electrical shops, and lumber camps.  Kilpatrick joined the Army during World War I and served in France as a mechanic. Kilpatrick worked with the union in the 1919 Cleveland steel strike, in which the companies brought in thousands of Black workers to serve as strikebreakers.
Kilpatrick joins the CP
Kilpatrick joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1928. In 1931 the Party sent him to study at the International Lenin School in the Soviet Union. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he returned to the United States and helped organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO - a communist-led  union) and the unemployed movement (also led by communists).
While the CP became a tremendous reform organization during the Great Depression, unfortunately, it gave up the fight for a communist revolution. So all the evils of capitalism are still with us today, from racist killings by the bosses’ cops to homelessness and  looming nuclear world war.
Before World War II, Kilpatrick went to fight in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists. He served in a transport unit, as an ambulance driver, and in an intelligence unit. While working as a frontline driver, Kilpatrick was wounded by shrapnel from an aerial bombardment.
Back in the U.S., he resumed his union activities becoming president of Local 735 of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. In the late 1940s the union was expelled from the CIO for being dominated by communists. The liberal capitalists were starting to take back whatever reforms the CP was able to win in the 1930s. Kilpatrick was called before congressional investigators during  the Red Scare of the 1950s. He refused either to name other communists or to take the Fifth Amendment.
Kilpatrick: CP "gives up the class struggle”
Kilpatrick remained a committed Marxist. He was expelled from the CP “because I wasn’t going to go along with the fact [that] now all of a sudden you can build a Party with all classes.” His problems with Party leadership had begun during the Popular front , a coalition of working-class and middle-class parties. The very idea that the Party “was carrying on the traditions of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Douglass,” in Kilpatrick’s opinion, was “a lot of bull.” He told an interviewer:

Any Party or grouping that calls itself communist, gives up the class struggle, and won’t follow the road of Marxism-Leninism is completely out of step with what is going on in the world today. The revisionists, the scabs and sectarians have no answers to any questions in today’s class struggle.

In the late 1950’s, Kilpatrick, along with fellow Spanish Civil War veteran Harry Haywood, was involved in the short-lived Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party, aiming to found a new, revolutionary communist party. They were not successful, but in the 1960’s another group of CP members left to form Progressive Labor Movement, which today is the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Join us.
Admiral Kilpatrick in his own words:

In the class struggle you can’t stay in it when it’s good and jump out and leave it when it’s bad. You go all the way …
I don’t have to have no damn praise … about going to Spain ... But I wasn’t doing it just for Spain alone. … I was doing it because I was a member of the movement that believes in that type of struggle ... I was a Communist. A Communist fights oppression, and they fight tyranny everywhere.
As far as I was concerned, this was the only way that the common man was to have anything, was to carry out these types of actions. My understanding of the world and its problems is based on Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.
I’ve been in jail so goddamn many times, I thought I was living in jail. You get in jail for demonstrations, you get in jail for standing up in strikes, violating strike regulations about how many pickets you can have ...
But in the class struggle you can’t stay in it when it’s good and jump out and leave it when it’s bad. You go all the way. They send you to jail,what difference does it make? People have died for causes and things.

Kilpatrick continued his organizing even into retirement, serving as the chairman of the tenants’ committee in his retirement home. He never found the organization that would, as he put it, “go all the way.” Well, in the Progressive Labor Party we do want to “go all the way.” Whatever fightback you are involved in, join us and integrate the fight for communist revolution to your struggle. Let’s “go all the way!”
Source: http://alba-valb.org