NEW YORK CITY, March 6–—The job of communists is to link workers’ struggles, making it clear that the international working class has one enemy—capitalism and its defenders. This is why we chanted “Imperialist war means—Fight Back!” across the Brooklyn Bridge with 1,000 people marching for funding for the City University of New York (CUNY).
On the bullhorn and as we talked with our students and coworkers, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) contingent connected the racist budget cuts at CUNY with the imperialist war unfolding in Ukraine; both are aspects of the profit system. Our friends also read our vision for the future in the pages of the 200 copies of CHALLENGE that were distributed: revolutionary war to end this system and replace it with communism.  
Gotta be in the class struggle
Across all five boroughs and on many campuses across CUNY, we’ve been building a base for communist revolution with students and workers. We’ve fought for lower tuition, for more funding,  and against war criminal David Petraeus. During the pandemic we’ve fought, for better health and safety measures, for lower online class size and to prevent CUNY from unfairly taking money from students who failed to adhere to CUNY’s confusing and arbitrary vaccine policy.
Even as we’ve fought for these reforms with our students and coworkers, we’ve struggled to make communist politics, such as the unity of all workers regardless of “race” or “nationality,” primary.
The hard work that we’ve been doing over many months and years was evident, as we were able to organize a sizable contingent of over 15 to attend the demonstration. The ride to the march was an opportunity, not only to connect the Russian invasion of Ukraine to our fight at CUNY, but also for discussion about where our struggles have gotten us, the possibilities and limits of these fights, and whether we need a different kind of fight—one that attacks the
capitalist system itself.  
The best possible ending
At the march, we joined with a more militant section of education workers who have rejected the union leadership’s dead-end politics: call on legislators to “do the right thing.”
Instead, the chants coming from our section of the march ended with “Strike! Strike! Strike!”
A strike at CUNY would represent a significant sharpening of the class struggle and give us a tremendous opportunity to put forward a revolutionary line. The antiracist class consciousness of these militant education workers was also on full display, as they linked the financial attack on CUNY with an incident at Queens College, where racist graffiti was found on a campus building. We’ve been active with these education workers for many years and will continue to do so as the campaign for our next contract heats up.  
The day ended on the best possible note: one of our students decided to become a member of PLP and join the fight for communism! This is most critical. We need to be active in reform fights, and we need to push these fights to be as sharp as possible.
But most importantly, as we fight alongside our students and coworkers, we need to struggle to win them to see that only destroying this system and replacing it with workers’ power will secure the future that we need.
Today we have one more member who will make this fight their own. Will you be next?

LOS ANGELES, March 6—Recently, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a forum about inter-imperialist rivalry, capitalism, and impending World War III (WWIII). About 20 comrades and friends, including members of impacted families whose loved ones were killed by police, came out to a neighborhood park. The forum was very active and rich in discussion about inter-imperialist rivalry as a basis of capitalist wars (see editorial on page 2) Only communist revolution where the international working class turns the guns around can resolve this dangerous competition over land, profit, and power between the world’s imperialist powers.
We started with a brief overview of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and a beginning definition of imperialism. Then we broke up into smaller groups to discuss more in depth, referencing recent articles about Ukraine from CHALLENGE, excerpts about soldiers rebelling in Vietnam, and a timeline of events leading up to the current war in Ukraine.
People in the group thought the discussion about imperialism and the threat of WWIII was particularly relevant given the current war between Russia and Ukraine. The workshop leader began with a detailed explanation of what imperialism is. It is not just one country taking over land of another, but can also mean economic imperialism, which is investment of capital in other countries. It also involves the fight over labor markets and resources.
After reading an editorial about Russia and Ukraine, the discussion started off with a local tenant declaring about imperialism, “It is for the rich, not the poor. They want to stomp us like cockroaches but they need workers to struggle and fight in their wars.” This led to a discussion of whether war ever benefits the working class and how to end imperialist war.
People had questions about how we can make a communist revolution and we talked about the Russian soldiers refusing to fight in World War I and turning that war into the Bolshevik revolution. We also talked about how U.S. soldiers in Vietnam rebelling, refusing to fight, and killing their officers is what led to the U.S. imperialists ending their war against Vietnam. Our discussion made clear the necessity  of winning soldiers as well as masses of other workers to make a communist revolution.
One of the main lessons of the forum was the importance of doing work in mass organizations and the opportunities it presents for us. During the monthly Flores Fight Back action we passed out a leaflet linking the struggle against police violence with the struggle against imperialist war. The leaflet included an invitation to the forum and we also announced it during the speeches. As a direct result of our work with a group of tenants struggling to get repairs made to their apartments, one comrade met a young volunteer who, the comrade learned during their conversation, considers himself a communist.
The comrade invited the volunteer and his brother to the forum. They both came and participated vigorously in their workshop. One even volunteered to be on our May Day Committee. Everyone who attended was eager to continue these discussions and be involved in more actions. On to May Day!

WASHINGTON, DC, March 11 – Following an October overnight protest at the home of Jeffrey Zients, Counselor to  President Joe Biden, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined a protest this week calling out Zients Joe Biden’s new blood soaked Covid-Czar.  The march, organized by Justice is Global, Public Health Awakened, and R2H (Right to Health),  denounced the COVAX program, the disastrous U.S. led global vaccine distribution and development initiative. With 18.2 million Covid-19 related deaths worldwide as a result of the vaccine apartheid  (Washington Post, 3/14) and only 12 percent in many of small capitalist countries having been vaccinated( ourworldindata.org).
As we marched against Zients, Biden, and capitalist disregard overall, we took aim at the entire system of U.S. imperialism and its racist sexist healthcare system. As long as the fate of the world rests in the hands of imperialist butchers and profit hungry bosses, misery and death will continue to rain down on workers across the globe. Smashing capitalism is not just a moral imperative; it’s a life and death battle. Now more than ever we need communism, a system that is run by working people for the benefit of all. Under communism the core values of health and science care will put human life and progress at the forefront, and will be available to all. Money and the profit incentive will be eradicated along with preventable deaths from treatable illnesses.
A PL’er addressed the rally by linking the racist vaccination policy failures to capitalism and rising imperialism. She pointed out that the U.S. oligarch Bill Gates, in keeping with capitalism’s profits-only goal, fought to keep the profits flowing to the drug companies by limiting the Covid-19 vaccine supply and refusing to make the mRNA vaccine recipe available to the world.
Several additional people joined us at the rally and were introduced to PLP with our revolutionary newspaper, CHALLENGE. PLP members have been working with these organizations as well as the American Public Health Association to build international solidarity and raise revolutionary politics (see CHALLENGE, 11/17/21 and CHALLENGE Letters, 3/2).
Some demonstrators and members of these organizations have illusions that we can pressure politicians into serving the working class. In reality, these cronies, Democrats and Republicans alike, are controlled by the U.S. financial oligarchs and pharmaceutical corporations and will never seek to do right by our class.
Never-the-less we fight back. We are still planning to attack the pharmaceutical companies directly with a rally in Boston at Moderna headquarters in late April.
We continue to demand that the TRIPS Agreement waiver and technology transfer (a waiver that would temporarily waive intellectual property rights protections for technologies needed to prevent, contain, or treat Covid-19, including vaccines) be approved so that there can be worldwide capacity to respond to epidemics without companies like Moderna and Pfizer amassing huge profits by selling vaccines only to rich countries.
Other speakers described the risk of new Covid variants without widespread vaccinations. One worker movingly read an organizer’s account of the impact of Covid-19 on her life as a disabled person who has lost friends because they disagree with her safety requests (masks and vaccination). Others described the struggles of health workers, the fights to keep schools safe, and international lives lost without vaccinations. The pandemic has been so politicized that public health for everyone, already a pipe-dream under capitalism, has been compromised.
At the rally, a large prescription poster calling for firing Jeffrey Zients and replacing him with a public health expert was erected next to a giant report card giving him an F for public safety but an A+ for supporting corporate interests!
Several cardboard bottles called for PUBLIC HEALTH not PROFIT. The rally ended with a two-minute die-in complete with gravestones to commemorate two-years since the Covid-19 pandemic struck the U.S.
As similar protests were held simultaneously in many cities and towns in the U.S. and internationally, we as PLP members take a moment to remind ourselves and our comrades that under capitalism there is no just healthcare or equitable care for the working class. It is only under communism, where medicine and its supporting systems are built to put the patient not profit first will we ever truly know health. Fight for communism, power to the working class!

At the beginning of February, the Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) convened a meeting of left-wing organizations called the "Resistance Conference" to promote social protest. Many groups expressed disenchantment with the Fourth Transformation policies of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and argued for the need to resume struggle and resistance.
Two comrades from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) attended the meeting where we handed out a few dozen CHALLENGE leaflets detailing why capitalist reforms are a dead end for our class. The content of those leaflets is reproduced below. The plan is to continue to participate in future meetings:

The liberal fourth transformation (4T slogan of the Mexican government) managed to renew the hope of some reformists that capitalism could be reformed to serve the interests of the masses. However, in just three years, this government showed its true anti-working class nature and subservience to the interests of big capital. The patronage structure set up in the 4T social programs has paved the way for the government’s imperialist megaprojects: the Interoceanic Corridor, the Mayan Train, the Dos Bocas Refinery and the new Mexico City Airport.
A combination of cronyism, cooptation, assassination of social leaders and militarization disguised as the National Guard on top of an economic crisis exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic has allowed bankers to reap record profits of 162 billion pesos (La Jornada, 2/3). For example, the profits of the county’s largest mining company, Grupo México, soared 70 percent in 2021 reaching 3,868 million dollars (La Jornada, 2/2). In the last couple of months, the capital of the mega-rich in Mexico grew six times more than the country's economy. The fortunes of these millionaires increased 27.3 percent (La Jornada, 11/30/21).
With all this, the AMLO government has managed to demobilize workers and to dismantle the opposition into supporting its megaprojects. For example, the re-election and legitimization of Ricardo Aldana, the corrupt union leader of the Mexican oil workers (PEMEX), serves to maintain control over the workers and reveals the anti-worker, pro-capitalist essence of the 4T.
During the last three years, in Mexico, conditions for the working class have worsened. In Latin America, one in four people lost their job and to date they have not recovered it. Employment fell from 76 percent to 62 percent, with an increase in informal work from 48 percent to 53 percent. At the beginning of the pandemic, 12 percent of households had been without food for at least a month. This proportion doubled in a year and a half of the health crisis and was accompanied by lower incomes and deteriorated working conditions (La Day, 12/30/21).
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the inability of the capitalist system to meet the needs of the working class. The profit-based health system continues to be overwhelmed by the number of patients. The capitalists focus on saving their companies over the lives of workers. The imperialists prioritize competition and their global geopolitical interests over the solidarity and collaboration between countries necessary to confront the health crisis. This individualistic, racist and sexist approach has had lethal consequences for our families and has allowed the virus to mutate causing more  outbreaks all over the world.
The effects of Covid-19 were felt more intensely by working women, who are twice as likely to lose their jobs as men. In the first months of the pandemic, 38 percent of working women lost their jobs, and this doubled for mothers, reaching 40 percent unemployment. Likewise, during all these months, the unpaid workload increased, since taking care of the sick and children was added to domestic work.
In Mexico, 94 percent of those who died from Covid-19 were women who tended to their homes, pensioners, and workers (https://covid19comision.unam.mx/?p=89342), which reflects the sexism of the capitalist system and the need to prioritize industrial production over the lives of workers. Many of the deaths were concentrated in industrialized regions (especially in the border area with the U.S.). The maquila workshops never closed and some operated clandestinely without medical or job security. A recent study has shown that workers with lower incomes have a five-fold higher risk of death (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S 2667193X 21001113? via %3Dihub), demonstrating the inequality that the capitalist system promotes and maintains.
The sectors of society (mainly the working class) that have historically resisted the onslaught of capital must resume resistance actions to confront the capitalists, including the liberals of the 4T. We need to unify as a class through a non-electoral revolutionary party (Progressive Labor Party) to seize power from capital and build a communist society.