GARY, IN—The brave actions of working-class youth in the majority-Black city of Gary have sharpened the struggle against racist capitalist attacks in education. The students of Westside Leadership Academy showed everyone the power of active fightback against the profit system’s injustice and racist neglect by staging a protest walkout on March 3. They have since been supported on a weekly basis by antiracist fighters demonstrating outside the school.
The 1972 National Black Political Convention was held at this school. Since then, the city has been controlled by one pro-capitalist politician after another. Black workers in the city have long been at the receiving end of racist legislation that affects the working class statewide. These students have pushed back against the anti-worker ideas taught to them, demanding a better existence than what capitalism can ever offer.
Members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), who are active in mass organization struggles in the area, have joined and supported these students. Young people have positively received CHALLENGE and been encouraged by PL’ers to speak loudly on the bullhorn about school conditions.
While learning much from the bold actions of these youth, we can never hold any illusions that the capitalist education system can be reformed to serve our class interests. Its racist and nationalist core serves to prepare working-class students for a life of exploitation, alienation or military service.
Education can only serve our needs as an enlightening and collective force when it’s freed from capitalism’s constraints. We fight for an egalitarian communist world where young people actively help lead society for the advancement of all.
Working-class youth express their needs
On the day of the walkout, students didn't hold anything back about their demands. Some shouted that they wanted better food, college information, better teachers, and water. The corporate shill superintendent has said that water fountains were closed to prevent further Covid-19 infections in the school. Instead, each student was given one small bottle of water for the entire day.
Also being protested are cases of sexist harassment, including accusations of one staff member sending inappropriate photos to students, and other staff members trying to engage in relationships with youth. Far from being opposed, this predatory sexism has been routinely brushed off by the school bosses.
Support services – already minimal before the pandemic – have been virtually nonexistent in the last two years. This includes the overbearing corporate climate that already existed in the notoriously corrupt city leadership. Students bravely spoke about the futures they wanted and how they knew officials weren't acting in their interests. PL’ers spoke candidly to the crowd about capitalism and its racist disregard for workers and youth. Students understood the role of the school-to-prison pipeline and talked about their real fears due to lack of support in all directions.
Capitalism continues to sacrifice our youth
In the wake of the student walkout, the school bosses have worked overtime to try to silence and intimidate. They immediately lied about how many students were involved in the walkout, while trying to cover up how they locked students out of the school to punish them. For the time being, the administration promised an ongoing dialogue with students to try to address their concerns, putting future actions on hold.
If one looks at the history of the school system in the city, there will be little optimism that this “dialogue” will go anywhere. Since 2017, three different emergency managers have been appointed by MGT Counseling, the company chosen by the state to manage the district to control the Gary school system. This was after many years of mismanagement by members of the Gary community school corporation and the distrust they earned from workers in the city.
Living under capitalism proves the bosses will always center their profit growth and working-class youth will not be spared in that pursuit. The corporate takeover of the school system has little to do with better support and performance of the majority of Black and working-class students, more so lining the pockets and boosting influence among the rotten capitalists.
Politicians, their cop enforcers, and public school administrators in Northwest Indiana have proven that their commitment is to money and systemic power. Youth are disenfranchised in their poverty-stricken communities, and many have lost their lives. Kemonte Cobbs, 15 years old, and Vincent Smith Jr, 16 years old, are two Black youths murdered by the kkkops in Gary.
Communism, not capitalism, is our future
Communists from PLP are active in these struggles by building relationships with teachers, students, and families, by sharing CHALLENGE and our political line. Being residents of the area, former students in these schools, and workers in the neighborhoods give us the opportunity to show youth that capitalism and all its destruction does not have to be their future. Continuing resistance and learning about communism for the defeat of the profit-driven system of capitalism are the needed lessons we will continue to push.

 This is part four of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, 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 re-establish 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. 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 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 is essential. Our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership. The following continues that story:

Eluard Luchelle McDaniels was born in Mississippi in 1912. Escaping an abusive household, he left home and headed west to California to complete high school there and later study art at San Francisco State College. The social connections that McDaniels was able to develop with politicized artists soon led him to the labor movement and the Communist Party, which he joined in 1930.
As workers, none of us are predestined to take on the class struggle and become leaders in the fight against racism, sexism, and fascism. Rather, life under capitalism rains oppression and exploitation on our class and individuals make the choice to join in a collective battle against the bosses. The story of Eluard McDaniels shows how a commitment to the working class and a communist political line positively shape our life experiences towards the path of equality and liberation.
Eluard’s antiracist stance sharpens the class struggle
In 1929, McDaniels traveled to Montgomery, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana because he had heard of streetcar strikes over pay increases, better working conditions, and break time. He learned that there was a white headquarters and a Black headquarters, which he recognized as a fatal and flawed strategy that would doom the strike.
According to McDaniels, he approached the white strikers and said, “Negroes across the street and you across over here, and you both striking the same concern… That make no sense.” White workers were receiving 25 to 30 percent more than Black workers, doing practically the same work.
McDaniels was able to utilize an antiracist political line that convinced workers to integrate the strikers and to make sharper demands that would benefit all workers. Eventually, the police ran him out of New Orleans. But the workers won the strike. The police had to fight the white workers to get to McDaniels, who concluded that their unyielding defense was the only reason why the police couldn’t make an example out of him.
Shortly after, as the capitalist world sunk deeper into the misery of the Great Depression, he returned to the South to help organize the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union. He also made a trip to New York to bring the Scottsboro boys (nine Black youth who were falsely accused by racists and sentenced to death) to the Communist Party’s attention.
Around this same time he became involved in the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), writing short stories for a WPA publication. Far from seeing art and literature as things abstract and separate from the class struggle, McDaniels understood culture as a weapon in the hand of the working class to not just reflect but to help shape the struggle against capitalism.
To be antifascist is to be internationalist
As capitalist governments across the globe decayed into fascist dictatorships as a response to the system’s crises, McDaniels was convinced that anti-fascism and anti-racism were one and the same. “I saw the invaders of Spain [were] the same people I’ve been fighting all my life." Historian Peter Carroll quotes McDaniels as saying, "I’ve seen lynching and starvation, and I know my people’s enemies.”
In Spain, McDaniels was assigned to a transport unit as a truck driver. In early 1938 he was transferred as an infantryman to the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and then to the (U.S.) Lincoln-Washington Battalion. Rising to the rank of sergeant he led white troops into battle, while capitalist militaries worldwide were still operating using segregated units.
During the Ebro Offensive, Spanish Loyalist troops (anti-fascist), awed by his skills at tossing grenades, gave McDaniels the nickname "El Fantastico." Wounded in his left leg, he spent the remainder of his time in Spain in hospitals.
A lifelong commitment to revolution
Upon his return to the United States, McDaniels headed for his native Mississippi, where he spoke to integrated audiences. “I told them that we have to stand together and build a human brotherhood and they applauded. It made me happy,” he later said.
McDaniels continued to face and fight racial discrimination. In 1941, he led a protest at a segregated lunch counter in Durban, South Africa. After his return from active service in World War II, he spoke on behalf of the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards at the National Convention of Maritime Unions in May 1946, denouncing the anti-union activities of the War Shipping Administration and the Coast Guard.
During the 1960s, McDaniels led protesters to City Hall in Sacramento, California, to protest muddy sidewalks in the all-Black sections of town. Like many other Black veterans, he did not agree with the non-violence of most of the Civil Rights leadership. Since capitalism is a system that is inherently violent towards the working class, we have every right and duty to use revolutionary violence in order to defend ourselves and take state power from the bosses!
McDaniels stayed committed to struggle through the remainder of his years, working in industry until his retirement. He died in San Francisco on December 6, 1985, having left his exceptional mark on the long fight for international working-class liberation.

Sources: Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; David Featherstone, “Black internationalism, international communism and anti-fascist political trajectories: African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War” (2014); http://narratingmemory.com;http://historynewsnetwork.org; http://alba-valb.org

Less screens, more fightback!
Just recently I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker that ended with an opportunity to introduce CHALLENGE.
We were discussing all the different ways in which we can get glued to our phones and computer screens. For her, she was admitting how an addictive flash game was sucking her in so much that she felt the need to eventually delete the app from her phone. I commiserated, stating that it wasn’t so much video games that ate up a lot of time for me, rather I had a habit of scrolling article after article of online news content.
This co-worker replied that while she used to make a point to follow the bosses’ news, she didn’t even bother anymore because she couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of negativity presented. I replied to her that she was definitely not the first person to share that sentiment with me. I shared my opinion that the bosses will always push the most sensationalist garbage to grab the most attention and through that generate the most advertising revenue (aka profits). As the saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
I then shared how reading about all the countless ways that capitalism destroys our lives doesn’t feel as demoralizing when one is armed with tools with which to fight it, namely through analyzing world events collectively and critically, and being active in a militant international Party. At the end of our shift, I came back to that co-worker with a copy of CHALLENGE, and introduced it as a communist newspaper where workers make their own news, not as passive victims but as revolutionaries fighting to build a better society.
The bosses definitely work nonstop to make us feel powerless and cynical. For this worker and so many others, I hope that CHALLENGE represents an important first step towards overcoming a sense of alienation and recognizing the potential for an egalitarian future.
*****
Imperialist world war is coming
Capitalist powers are once again preparing for imperialist world war to re-divide the world among themselves. Russia has already gone to war against Ukraine, a pro-Nazi government installed by a U.S. backed coup. Ukraine is being used to prevent further Russian economic advancement into Europe and is being supplied with billions in U.S. and NATO weapons.
Capitalist China, which is said to  become the biggest economic power by 2050, and a threat to U.S. hegemony, has been surrounded by U.S. nuclear submarines and 80,000 U.S. troops, missiles and air bases in Australia, South Korea and Japan.
The U.S., economically devastated by almost one million Covid-19 dead, economic recession, inflation, a divided government and rebellious workers, is desperate to retain its superpower status. That could come in the form of a massive humanitarian, patriotic “democracy” campaign against Russia to finance the military industry, resupply the war makers and indoctrinate U.S. workers for imperialist wars against Russia and China.
The only solution for the international working class is to organize a revolutionary Party to turn imperialist wars into class wars for a communist, egalitarian,
anti-capitalist system without national
borders, racism, sexism or profit wars.
*****
KKKops say “a-ok” to racist graffiti
Recently a family was assaulted visually when the parents accompanied their two young children  to a public school playground  in the Bronx.  The “N” word was prominently printed all over the spiral slide, front and back. They immediately called the 52nd precinct and were told that it was probably a few kids’ “prank” and to call 311 instead. Still two uniformed cops showed up and minimized  the outrage. After fully photographing the desecration, several parents washed the vile writing off.
Our antiracist coalition immediately contacted the office of Eric Dinowitz, our City Council rep to demand a meeting about overseeing the investigation and involving the Hate Crimes Unit. We met on ZOOM with five of his staff members who  gave us a run-around.
They had organized a community meeting at Manhattan Community College from which we had been excluded.  According to an ally of ours there, Dinowitz dominated the meeting and made sure NO action steps were agreed upon - no surprise!
Clearly our history of taking  on the local precinct for their own acts of racist oppression and inaction in the face of blatant hate crime acts have made us unwelcome to any official gathering concerning these issues.
So we will continue to reach out to anyone suffering from or aware of virulent racism in our neighborhood and to expand our anti-racist organization.
We will not give up the fight. We have only started!
This teaches us two things—
1) A racist system can’t solve racism. The cops can’t solve this incident, since they are agents of racist violence and a tool of control for the ruling class. When organized as a class for itself, the working class can solve problems.
2) The limits of reform are evident. The mouthpieces for the capitalist class expose themselves as enemies of our class. It is up to communists in these fights to turn this working-class anger at the system towards building a party.
So we will continue to organize anyone suffering from or aware of virulent racism in our neighborhood and to expand our antiracist organizing. We will not give up the fight. We have only started!

*****

“The first casualty of war is truth.”

With Ukraine on fire and Russia and NATO flexing their military forces within a handful of miles of one another, the capitalist bosses of the world are accelerating their momentum toward global war. None of the top imperialist powers—the United States, Russia, and China—are in total control over what happens next in Ukraine. Their desperation to protect their power and profits makes this a dangerous and volatile period for our class. As the rival rulers use their media as capitalist propaganda to rally workers around democracy and nationalism, their tools for racism and worldwide devastation, we must use our communist tools—including CHALLENGE—to combat them. Our rallying cry is for international working-class consciousness and solidarity. Our marching orders are to turn the guns around, to transform inter-imperialist war into communist revolution. Then we will have the opportunity to create the world the working class deserves, a society run by workers to meet workers’ needs—communism.
Slippery slope to World War III
The post-Vietnam decline of the U.S. ruling class, as evidenced by their debacles in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, has opened the door for the Russian imperialists to push the limits of their power through the invasion of Ukraine. President Joe Biden’s response—to revive NATO and other U.S. alliances with sanctions against Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine—has had mixed results. “The giants of the Global South – including India, Brazil, and South Africa – are hedging their bets while China still publicly backs Putin” (Washington Post, 3/10). Even Mexico is proving an unreliable U.S. ally as it keeps its doors open to a tightening Russia-China alignment (Reuters, 3/4).
On top of its weakening international ties, the U.S. ruling class is dealing with a deepening internal division between its two factions: the “Big Fascists” of finance capital and the more domestically oriented “Small Fascists” (See glossary, page 6). Finance capital’s fear of ceding power to the bosses who control domestic oil and gas has been exposed by their attempts to ease an international oil shortage by resurrecting relations with bitter adversaries like Venezuela and Iran (Washington Post, 3/7). But while the rulers’ loyalties bend as they lurch from one crisis to the next, one thing never changes. We know that none of these bosses—not the market capitalists in the U.S., not the state capitalists in Russia, not the profit-hungry bloodsuckers in Mexico or Venezuela or Iran—will hesitate to slaughter workers if it serves their interests.
It remains uncertain as to whether the imperialist war in Ukraine will become the first shots of World War III.  But it’s safe to say that weakness and divisions in the U.S. ruling class are increasing the possibility of a much larger war, with nuclear weapons now openly on the table (New York Times, 3/13). China’s invasion of Taiwan and a move to take over the oil-rich South China Sea seem all but inevitable, leaving the U.S. bosses two bad choices: a war for which they're not prepared, or a surrender of the strategically vital “Indo-Pacific.” In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are moving more closely toward China, from trade deals to arms purchases (al-monitor.com, 3/14).
Though world events may seem more volatile and unpredictable by the day, two things are clear. The first is that no empire has ever relinquished global supremacy without resorting to war. The second is that a worldwide communist revolution can put an end to the bosses’ wars once and for all.
Blood, gas, and precious metals
Make no mistake about it! This latest bloodbath in Ukraine is just one more example of capitalist global competition over the transport and exploitation of natural resources. The bosses are always willing to sacrifice our class for their profits. In addition to Ukraine’s untapped reserves of natural gas, the second largest in Europe, the country contains vast quantities of lithium (third-most in the world), gallium (second-most), and titanium (20 percent of total world reserves). All of these metals are critical to capitalist commercial and military technologies and development.
Lithium is essential to the shift to electric vehicles. Titanium ores are required for airplane and aerospace construction. Gallium is vital to the development of 5G networks, military radar, lasers, and satellites. Classed as a national security concern by the U.S. government, 95 percent of the world’s gallium is currently extracted in China (Fierce Electronics, July 2019). Further, the Patriot Missile Defense Systems that NATO has activated to assist Ukraine in its war with Russia were upgraded with gallium semiconductors (Breaking Defense, 2/20/15). These resources are used to line the capitalists’ pockets and gain an advantage over rival rulers. We cannot let the bosses spill workers’ blood to secure them!
Nationalism, death trap for workers
Nationalism is a crucial tool for the bosses’ bloody war plans. The ruling class attempts to win workers to unite based on capitalist borders. This sets workers against their class sisters and brothers, those who share their same interests: the international working class.
In the few weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, workers in the U.S. have been deluged by commercials and billboards to “Stand with Ukraine.” U.S. schoolchildren are urged to dress in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. But we know that workers living in Russia are no more our enemies than Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky is our friend.
As imperialist powers jockey for global control, they will demand our blood to stay on top. The demonstrations of workers in Russia and the U.S. show us the potential for working-class solidarity in response to this death trap. We call on workers from Ukraine and Russia to turn imperialist war into a class war for communism just as the Bolsheviks did more than 100 years ago! We call on the rest of the world’s workers to join them. Only as one united class can we realize the true aspirations of working people everywhere: communism and an end to imperialist wars for all time. Join us!