NEWARK, NJ, September 8— Members of the Newark Firefighters Union, Newark Fire Officers Union, Newark Fraternal Order of Police, Newark Police Superior Officers Association, and a union called Newark Council 21 held a protest to oppose a vaccine mandate ordered by Newark’s nationalist liberal boss, Mayor Ras Baraka. This debacle is between different factions of the local Newark ruling class. One side is represented by liberal racist Baraka against the gutter racist, opportunistic police department unions backed by their fascist kkkops on the other side.
When Baraka ordered all emergency workers and police to be vaccinated or face termination, the misleaders of the Newark Fire Department’s firefighter and captain’s unions were quick to assume a lead role in organizing the protest, arguing that the mayor has no right to terminate them for being unvaccinated.Both factions pit Black and white workers against one another and prevent multiracial working class unity, with both factions playing different versions of identity politics.  In a gross misappropriation of the liberal slogans of the movement for women’s reproductive rights, the anti-vaxxer protest was mostly white male emergency workers and kkkops, who marched around Newark City Hall yelling “MY BODY, MY CHOICE!”
Meanwhile, communists are fighting to build a multiracial workers’ movement led by the Progressive Labor Party to expose the hypocrisy of both sides of Newark’s local ruling class. It’s time for serious class struggle around issues that matter, rather than the red herring of the bosses’ vaccine mandate!
Emergency workers: exploited by insurance finance capital
For years, Newark Fire Dept’s union leaders have taken the path of least resistance when it comes to fighting to improve conditions for firefighters. For example, a fully staffed crew that is assigned to put out a fire normally consists of one captain and four firefighters. Because liberal misleader Baraka and his administration refuse to pay overtime, firefighters have for years been forced to fight fires while understaffed. This means a crew to extinguish fires has one captain and only two firefighters. This routine short staffing was exacerbated by the sick leaves due to firefighters getting sick from COVID-19, leaving many firehouses further understaffed.
One solution would have been to pay overtime to fill the roll calls, but the Baraka administration would let firefighters work in already life-threatening conditions while understaffed rather than pay overtime. All the while, the union hacks stand back and stand by while this happens, rarely organizing any collective fightback to defend workers. Instead, the firefighter’s union joins with the police unions, as in this recent anti-vaxxer protest, creating confusion within emergency workers’ ranks over whose side their class interests lie: with the racist kkkops who kill protecting capitalism, or with the international working class?
Modern fire departments began after the 1666 Great Fire of London, which burnt down 70,000 of the city's 80,000  workers’ homes and killed unknown thousands. For the rising British capitalists, it cost insurance underwriters hundreds of millions of pounds in destruction to commercial property. Private fire departments owned by rival insurance companies spread to what became the U.S. to protect capitalist property, eventually consolidating into the system the U.S. has today. As recently as 2013, nineteen firefighters were killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona. Tragically, the town had already been evacuated— the fire overran them while they battled to protect commercial property in the empty nearby town (Tucson.com, 6/29/18).
Communism: our class, our only choice!
As far as the department leadership is concerned, they see us as ‘lazy’, ignoring the toll that working 24 hour shifts and fighting fires while wearing 100 lbs. of extra gear takes on our bodies over time. In fact, they have recently even added medical duties to firefighters without properly training or paying them. Many firefighters have internalized the bosses’ lazy worker narrative by blaming and shaming one another for not being “tough enough” to handle the workload instead of uniting to attack the bosses.
The firefighter and captain’s unions fought the added medical mandate by filing an unfair labor practice charge. After an initial ruling in the firefighter’s favor the dispute went up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the city. The unions cancelled the protest when they lost the court decision, giving up and leaving us workers out to dry instead of using our collective power as workers to take a job action.
Firefighters must begin to see that capitalism and its managerial staff of opportunist politicians and union fakers are the real enemy. They must also understand that any alliance with the police is a dead end, as the police are the security force for capitalism and mortal enemies of the working class. Instead, firefighters should ally with other workers and students in the communities they serve and deepen their ties with them, building fightback alongside them on the way to worker’s power and revolutionary communism.

Working-class leadership, the personal is political
I lost the Condo Board of Directors’ election but advanced the political struggle just a notch. I had run for a seat on the Board of Directors at the urging of my new neighbors at the old but solid building complex I settled into last spring.
It started over a grill. I had asked a ground floor neighbor if they wanted my charcoal grill (allowable under management rules). She declined because she did not want to become a target of building management again.
“Again?” I had personally felt mistreated by management when I moved in, but then spoke with many different neighbors. People shared their own struggles with management as well as those experienced by their neighbors. Everyone - “Asian, Latin, Black and white!” felt  mistreated!
During the door-to-door campaign for the Board seat, I heard that residents simply wanted respect, dignity and unity –98 percent  of the people talked about mistreatment by management, rodent and roach infestation, inadequate parking, increasing fees, and management’s refusal to support the disabled and elderly who wish to age in place.
The election itself was shady. “Someone” tore down my posters in common areas, I wasn’t given contact information that the other candidates had access to, and the balloting site’s on-line location was communicated inconsistently. The virtual meeting was difficult for anyone with poor internet connection or limited internet knowledge to participate in. The capitalists' message is clear: Keep out!
During the virtual election forum, the President of the Board, a local, Harvard-educated politician who supports real estate developers, took 90 percent  of the time to focus on herself and what ‘she’ claimed to have accomplished, apparently single-handedly, for the entire local region. She shamelessly attacked my character. The one candidate who did not have his camera on never spoke but garnered the most votes. Clearly, capitalist investors protect their investments and pay lip service to the working class.
I had focused on what residents really wanted: respect, community, health and safety. In contrast, the Board president, when pressed about the rodent infestation, blamed the residents, claiming that they wouldn’t allow exterminators into their apartments because of the Covid-19 virus. This was a blatant lie!
The issues in our buildings are complex. They are old and need expensive repairs, like much working-class housing around the world. The whole mess is another example of why we need communism!  
I plan to regroup and work with my wonderful neighbors and not abandon the struggle for livable housing now and revolution in the not so distant future!
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Building my confidence in the working class
I'm a transit worker in NYC and about a month ago the working class in Haiti underwent and are still facing difficult times, our comrades included. Our comrades said that they needed funds due to the earthquake so I went out to ask the workers at the union meeting for help and also my coworkers at the quarters. I wasn't expecting much mostly because of my own lack of confidence in the working-class. Sometimes it's a little hard to feel hopeful. But when I started asking my coworkers, I was wonderfully surprised that they were all too willing to give what they could. Some workers said, "of course man, we gotta help especially how they been treating them at the border,” in response to the racist imagery of Biden’s troops gallavanting on horse, chasing workers with whips like the slave catchers of the past. Another worker said “Yeah we gotta stick together”. Another said,"make sure I get a receipt or something. Wanna make sure it's going to the right place."
It's easy to get caught up in cynicism when faced with the everyday visciousness of capitalism. But when we reach out to our fellow workers, we are the ones being lifted up. Keep reaching. Keep fighting. Communism is alive with every worker's sacrifice.
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Call it what it is
CHALLENGE is a wonderful newspaper!!  The only newspaper that really fights for communism! But I have a criticism. On page four  of CHALLENGE (12/1) in the article from Chicago, the term “food insecure” is used twice.  This is the bosses’ euphemism for hunger and starvation. I don’t think that it should be used in CHALLENGE except to explain its hypocritical usage by the bosses. CHALLENGE doesn’t use any other bosses’ euphemisms (such as “underserved” and “disadvantaged”) and I don’t think that “food insecure” should be used either
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Over the 12 days of the climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, fossil fuel companies extracted a billion barrels of oil from the ground. As diplomats tap-danced around the climate crisis, capitalists guaranteed that even more Earth-warming carbon would clog the atmosphere. Beneath their fake show of unity and pathetically inadequate (and unenforceable) pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the bosses did what bosses do.  The COP26 conference was driven by the capitalist law of maximum profit and by the inter-imperialist rivalry heading toward global war. The only thing that unites the world’s ruling classes is their need to build racism, sexism, nationalism, and fascism to prepare for that war. Only communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party (PLP), can save a habitable planet by putting science and workers’ needs first.
Climate change and racist inequality
Though all workers are hurt by climate change, poor Black, Latin and Asian working-class areas suffer the most. An unprecedented drought in Madagascar has left more than one million people at risk of famine (U.N.,10/21). Rising sea levels in the Indian Ocean could erase the Maldive Islands within three generations (express.co.uk, 11/15/17). In the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil, dried-out rivers are wiping out crops, drinking water, and farmers’ jobs (Yale Environment 360, 11/10). In September, Hurricane Ida swept through New York City and killed 11 workers trapped in illegal basement apartments in working-class  Asian neighborhoods—victims of both climate change and their landlords’ greed.  And let's not forget Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 killed nearly 2,000 workers in New Orleans, 52 percent of them Black.
By far the worst is yet to come. By 2050, more than a billion workers could become climate refugees (theguardian.com, 9/9/20).
As the world burns, bosses jockey for profit
U.S. bosses are locked in a battle for markets and resources with their main imperialist rivals, China and Russia. There are trillions in potential profits in the shift to electric vehicles and clean energy sources like solar and wind. But there is also big money to be made today from dirty energy: coal, oil, and natural gas. From China and the U.S., the two worst emitters, to still-developing countries like India and Brazil, the capitalist rulers are slow-walking the transition to have it both ways. As a result, the 2030 pledges made in Glasgow would warm the globe by 2.7 degrees Celsius (or 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—far beyond the 1.5-degree limit set in Paris six years ago. It’s a formula for even more powerful and frequent hurricanes, more deadly floods, more lethal heat waves and wildfires—for runaway climate disaster.
The emissions reduction goals set in Glasgow, said an official with the United Nations Environment Program chair, were “generally vague and untransparent; they are hard to calculate and hold to account; many kick the can beyond 2030, when we know that we need to halve our emissions between now and 2030 to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 C.” Or as one climate policy analyst put it, COP26 “has a very big credibility gap” (Carbon Brief, 11/10).
Even as U.S. Hypocrite-in-Chief Joe Biden was pushing Saudi Arabia and Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to ease gas prices by pumping even more oil out of the ground (NPR, 10/31), he called out his imperialist counterparts, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, for failing to show up in Glasgow (BBC, 11/2). Workers should see Biden’s Russia- and China-bashing for what it is, a blatant attempt to build patriotic fervor for World War III—in other words, a deadly trap!
Big Fascists, big problems
According to a recent poll, 71 percent of young adults in the U.S. believe that climate change will harm them personally (Pew Research, September). The dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class is cynically trying to use the climate crisis to win support from workers who are desperate for real action. These liberal Big Fascists (See Glossary, p. 6) also know that fossil fuels are linked to extreme weather, massive crop damage, and the premature deaths and disability of millions of workers from heart and lung disease—all big hits to the bosses’ bottom line. Hence the $1 trillion Biden bill and the proposed $555 billion climate package in his embattled Build Back Better plan.
The Big Fascists’ problem is the disunity and lack of discipline within their own class. Small Fascist (See Glossary, p. 6) bosses like the Koch family, whose fortune was built on domestic oil, have led the charge to deny climate science and push back against regulations to limit carbon emissions. Mobilized by Donald Trump, the Small Fascists have hijacked the Republican Party, which stands unanimously opposed to Build Back Better, a mix of climate funding and some crumbs for social services. They have a staunch ally in Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a coal baron who has already gutted Biden’s proposal to clean up the electric power sector and is now threatening to torpedo Build Back Better altogether (MSNBC, 10/19).
The Big Fascists also have deep problems within their own camp. ExxonMobil, the multinational oil company and finance capital kingpin, has been exposed for mounting a climate disinformation campaign on Facebook—and then lying about it to a Congressional committee (msn.com, 11/3). “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science?” a company lobbyist admitted in an interview covertly filmed by Greenpeace. “Yes. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders" (CNN, 7/21).  
For the liberal U.S. bosses, from Biden to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal, the biggest lie of all is their shameless pose as protectors of the environment and humanity. This is the same crew that’s planning a global war that will poison the atmosphere and slaughter untold millions of workers. Talk about toxic gases!  
Only communist revolution can solve climate crisis
The hundred thousand protestors on the streets of Glasgow last week made it clear that the international working class sees through the bosses’ empty words and phony shows of compassion. Most workers know instinctively that profit-driven capitalists can never solve the climate crisis. What they are missing is communist leadership and an analysis to turn the fight against carbon emissions into a fight for a world without money or racism or sexism or imperialist war. PLP works every day—on the job, in the schools, in our communities—to build a vision of a society run by and for the working class. Join us! Save the planet by smashing capitalism!

As the capitalist world becomes more volatile, the world of entertainment cannot escape the instability it produces. In fact, bosses use culture as a key arena for keeping workers distracted from the source of our problems. The November 5 pandemonium at hip hop artist Travis Scott’s Astroworld Music Festival killed 10 young people. This event gives workers yet another reason to see that only a society led by and for workers—where money does not exist—can prevent such needless tragedies from occurring in the future.
Profit-driven greed from the concert’s Live Nation promoters. Fascist “crowd control” tactics from Houston, Texas police. A megalomaniac mindset on the part of Travis Scott himself and the cult-of-personality worship on the part of concert participants. High levels of drug and alcohol-induced violence–in the midst of the pandemic. These factors all culminated in the literal crushing to death and murder of these young people and critical injuries to countless others.
Under communism, we too will hold large festivals and enjoy the culture of our youth, but we will not promote antisocial culture or risk the health and safety of our youth’s lives all for the sake of preserving a profit-based system of inequality.
“Live Nation” is a profit-hungry death trap
While everyone points fingers at other sources for who is to “blame,” it is the capitalist system itself which must be put on trial. The drive for maximizing profits at the expense of workers’ lives is, once again, at the core of this tragedy.  Live Nation, the official concert organizer for Astroworld, accumulated over $2 billion dollars from the week of festival events.  They sold more than 100,000 tickets within minutes even though the plan was for 50,000 ( They wanted the extra cash). Live Nation has had a long standing history of safety violations, including a previous Astroworld disaster in 2019 where three people were injured in a stampede; 200 deaths and 750 injuries have been connected to Live Nation since 2006. This is a disgusting example of capitalism prioritizing profit over the lives and well being of workers. Travis Scott himself reportedly made $65 million from the event (Yahoo, 11/10). While it is just speculation, some believe Scott to be making money off the back end in the wake of these deaths as well by promoting Betterhelp.com, an online therapy network that has been accused in the past of utilizing celebrities to promote a substandard mental health service for vulnerable youth (The Atlantic, 10/ 12/18).
Travis Scott: proof that cult-of-personality hurts our class
While the profit motive is a constant, bosses also need the political ideologies of individualism and cynical passivity put forward by musicians like Travis Scott, so this is another way in which the Astroworld concert proves that our youth deserve better.  Scott has had a history of inciting violence at his concerts.  In 2015, he was arrested at Lollapalooza for encouraging his fans to ‘rush the stage’.  In 2017, he encouraged a fan to jump off a stage. His 2018 song ‘STARGAZING’ contains the lyrics ‘It ain’t a mosh pit if it ain’t no injuries, I got them stagedivin’ out of nosebleeds.’
While hundreds of thousands of brave young people took to the streets during the pandemic to stand up against racist police brutality, Scott made disparaging remarks about Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, calling Black workers who protested their deaths ‘fake activists’.  Bosses love and promote this kind of anti-working class cynicism, and Scott was rewarded generously for his beliefs, being allowed a mass concert even as Covid-19 rages for workers across the world.  Cited as ‘Corporate America’s Go-To-Pitchman’, Scott’s many endorsements include McDonald’s, Nike, and Sony, accumulating over 100 million dollars from these endeavors. This is how the ruling class tries to indoctrinate the youth into buying into the individualist, bourgeois lifestyle, instead of learning the power of class consciousness and organizing a strong working class.
Let’s rage against capitalism, not each other
During this Covid-19 pandemic, where millions have died, capitalists have shown that profits matter more than the well being of workers. The idea of ‘going back to normal’ despite being in year two  of the pandemic, where workers have died or have lost loved ones, faced unemployment and homelessness, has shown young people that capitalism will never place the importance of the workers first. Young people have experienced or witnessed the contradictions of capitalism during this pandemic and are embittered and disillusioned by a system that offers them no hope or solution.
Very few entertainers command the cross-section of racially and ethnically diverse fans of Travis Scott, but this multiracial would-be army of young people is aligned behind a cultural force that weakens rather than strengthens the fans themselves and their working class brothers and sisters. The rage of these young fans is produced by capitalist alienation, unemployment, inadequate education, overconsumption of drugs, and racist and sexist ideas. These fans for the most part have not been exposed to communist ideas that would allow them, like so many youth before them, to apply their anger toward the overthrow of capitalist exploitation.  That’s why a communist revolution is needed.
PLP fights for true youth power
Many of the fans broke away from the raging, toxic scene by taking action to save lives and stop the viciousness that was taking place that night. Several young people mounted the cameramen’s stands to redirect their attention to the tragedies only feet away, but the cameramen were paid to literally turn a “blind eye” from everything except Scott himself. Hundreds broke from Travis’s blind following and chanted “stop the show.”  Many others rescued people who were being crushed and suffocated by breaking the rules and throwing them over the gates into the so-called “VIP” section where $1,000 ticket holders were secured from much of the mayhem.   And this is just a minor reflection of how young people all over the world have sacrificed their lives in the fight to end capitalist oppression.
Every movement in the past 100 years to abolish racist inequality and capitalism in general has seen tremendous youth leadership.The Soweto uprisings in South Africa against racist aparatheid had the participation of over 20,000 young people, with over 170 killed in the monumental June 16 protest of 1976 that was a turning point in the fight against racism there.   In Cuba, the July 26 movement to overthrow the U.S.-based Batista fascist regime was not only led by the relatively young Castro brothers and Che Guevara, but there were also hundreds of young people–literacy teachers, party members, singers, militia members–who went on to make their deeply flawed but still significant effort toward communism come to life. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in spite of tremendous political errors, one of the greatest achievements was the decision of the Communist Party to place China’s working-class youth in charge of the schools, factories and many other sectors of the socialist society.
College students in Haiti have led workers in Haiti since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and in recent years they were the first to take to the streets time and again in the aftermath of the massive natural disasters since 2010 and incessant government destabilization that costs the lives of workers every day. Our Progressive Labor Party fights to keep alive the courage and selflessness of revolutionaries past, placing young and invigorating people at the front of our annual May Day marches down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, every year. Young people have led our summer projects against racist police brutality.  Young people write for our newspaper. PLP strives to be the place for young people to grow up to be communist leaders.