On June 20, 53 migrants died horribly, abandoned in the back of a truck with no ventilation or water in 100 degree Texas heat (125-135 degrees inside the truck) having just crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo, Texas. A comrade’s son called him from Peru to tell him the news before his father had even learned of it in New York City. The world’s working class watched in horror how the migrants died. Small Fascist (see Glossary on page 6) MAGA aligned Texas governor Greg Abbott blamed Joe Biden for his “open border policy.” Racist liberal fascist Biden said “No grandstanding... [we] need to go after criminal trafficking rings.” The three smugglers currently live in Bexar County, Texas near San Antonio. Their business in the profit driven system is collecting thousands of dollars from migrants to turn them over as cheap labor to U.S. bosses. Workers’ lives are cheap under capitalism, unlike the products that workers buy.
The international working class doesn’t need politicians, Congressional hearings, and courts to know that capitalism, with its racist borders, is guilty of racist genocide. The working class doesn’t need borders. We need to run the world based on our needs with no racist, sexist profiteering. Under communism workers will go wherever needed to build an egalitarian world. As the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) chant says, “The only solution is a communist revolution!”                                
Imperialism: A Genocidal System
The migrants who died were from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, including 20 who have not yet been identified. The workers were forced to flee their homes due to poverty, exploitation, terror, and devastation of resources, becoming victims of imperialism. Vladimir Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism when top capitalists seize control of labor, resources and markets of countries outside their borders. Their fascist tactics include control of production, monetary control, fake elections to install puppet governments, orchestrated coups and full blown invasions. Twenty migrants died in the Libyan desert of their war stricken country because of rivalry between major imperialist countries, the U.S., China and Russia. U.S. imperialists imposed sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s which led to the death of a half a million children followed by U.S. invasion of Iraq to steal their oil.                     
If or when migrants make it  to the U.S. or other capitalist countries in Europe, they face new horrors: super exploitation, racism, terror, deportation and possible death. The capitalist controlled media brands them as “criminal illegals” and on the other side of the coin, the liberals cry and make false promises. The world’s capitalists are gangsters on the planet, setting and breaking their own rules at will. Imperialism is guilty of the deaths of the migrants in Texas as well as millions more worldwide. The international working class needs a communist revolution where we organize society based on our needs not on profit.                      
Crisis at the border
There is a massive caravan  of workers and their families and unaccompanied children walking hundreds of miles to the U.S. / Mexico border to flee the devastation of capitalism in their countries of origin. More than 1,000 have died at the border so far this year. The majority of those who manage to cross are caught by border control and deported, with exceptions that include workers from Cuba, Venezuela, and the Ukraine. Most borders in the world are aflame due to war and emigration. The bosses use borders to restrict or increase the number of migrant workers into given countries, keeping them as a form of cheap labor to super-exploit, as their needs determine.e Borders also enforce racist ideas among workers that “other” workers are dangerous, untrustworthy, and out to steal their jobs, sowing further division amongst the working class. Since 1986 U.S. bosses Employers Sanctions Provision, Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) has functioned to criminalize undocumented workers, forcing them to work in the shadows under terrible working conditions for measly wages. IRCA has also had the effect of lowering wages for all workers and keeping unemployment high, particularly among Black workers.
Our PLP group is struggling with the immigrant community group we’re in to react to the migrant deaths as well as talking with our study group and distributing CHALLENGE. It is in this process of class struggle and fightback on our jobs, in our neighborhoods and networks that we grow our Party into a powerful multiracial class conscious fighting force for international communist revolution.

This is part nine 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 reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitlers 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. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, which resulted in only fortifying the bosses system and laid the basis for the corruption of the old communist movement.
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’ leadership is essential. That is the only way our class can destroy racism, the lifeblood of capitalism. The following is a story of one such leader, Milton Herndon.

Hendron joins the Communist Party
Milton Herndon was born on March 10, 1908, in Wyoming, Ohio to Paul Herndon, a coal miner, and Harriet Herndon, a maid. After completing two years of high school Herndon went to work as a steelworker. He also served 18 months in the National Guard. Herndon exemplified the internationalism of the communist movement and the importance of Black workers leading the class struggle, not just against the U.S, capitalists, but for the international working class.
He joined the Communist Party in 1934 and became an organizer in Chicago. In July, 1934, Herndon wrote of the struggles of the Black, single, jobless workers of Harlem in the magazine Hunger Fighter, published by the Communist-led United Action Conference on Work, Relief, and Unemployment (price 3 cents). Other articles exposed Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia’s cops who clubbed and jailed demonstrators on May 26, 1934.
On September 1, 1934, Herndon was arrested with three other Black and white workers while picketing the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue and 125thStreet, in Harlem. The demonstration was organized by the Young Liberators Club of Harlem, a Communist-led group. They protested the refusal of Empire Cafeteria’s bosses to hire Black workers in any other job except porter.
Hendron dies fighting fascism in Spain
Herndon continued his organizing efforts until he volunteered with other Communist Party members to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Using the alias "Milton Braxton" he departed for Europe on May 8, 1937.
In Spain, Herndon became section leader in the newly-formed Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades. He fought in the battles at Brunete in July, 1937, and at Belchite, on the Aragon front, in October.
During the Mac-Paps’ first action on October 13, 1937, at Fuentes de Ebro, Herndon was ordered to move a machine gun up to support the advance of the Battalion. In carrying out the order Herndon was killed along with his entire gun team by long-range machine gun fire. He was 29 years old.
Hendron’s last letter
A few days later, his last letter was received by Anna Damon, secretary of the International Labor Defense, The ILD was a legal advocacy organization established in 1925 in the United States as the American section of the Comintern's International Red Aid network. The ILD defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the anti-lynching, movements for civil rights, and prominently participated in the defense and legal appeals in the cause célèbre of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s. Its work contributed to the appeal of the Communist Party among African Americans in the South. In addition to fundraising for defense and assisting in defense strategies, from January 1926 it published Labor Defender, a monthly illustrated magazine that achieved wide circulation.
Here are some excerpts from that letter, published in the Communist Party’s newspaper Daily Worker on October 21, 1937. They give some indication of Milton Herndon’s dedication to the fight against racism and fascism.
We Americans who are fighting in Spain greeted with great joy the success of the ILD and its many friends in freeing four of the nine Scottsboro boys Yesterday we, the members of the Frederick Douglass Machine Gun Company, had a meeting and explained to our Spanish comrades the importance of joining the American ILD in its fight for the freedom of the remaining five Scottsboro boys. One of them replied in broken English: “When we get through with Franco we will go back to the states with you and help to drive out the anti-democratic forces in your country.” …
… I believe it is possible to obtain aid for the suffering people in Spain by building a world people’s defense movement against the horrors, the desperate slaughter and injustice of world capitalism.
The letter ends:
Comradely yours, Milton Herndon
P.S. Fascist planes just flew overhead and dropped some bombs.
The effort of Herndon to bring the struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys to workers in Spain, was a powerful example of international working class unity. The working class is involved in a single unified struggle against capitalism. But the capitalists are constantly trying to divide us. None more so than the fake leftists who are always trying to separate the people fighting back into smaller and smaller groups and smaller and smaller struggles.
Even as he was battling in Spain, Herndon understood the anti-racist struggle for the Scottsboro Boys was the front line and put communist ideas into practice. He saw his role in Spain was to expand the understanding and unity of the working class struggle across the bosses racist divisions and capitalist borders.
Richard Wright, later famous as the author of such books as Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children, and at this time an active member of the Communist Party, wrote three unsigned articles about Herndon for the Daily Worker. One of them announces the formation of the “Negro People's Committee for Medical Aid to Republican Spain,” made up of medical doctors and others in Harlem. He wrote that “The organization of this committee was the result of the death of a number of American Negroes in Spain, particularly that of Milton Herndon …”  
In a November 29, 1937 article Wright wrote that Ms Audley Moore, Chairman of the Woman’s Commission of the Upper Harlem Section of the Communist Party, stated:
I can think of no finer tribute to Milton Herndon than build the Communist Party which fights for that democracy for which Milton gave his life in Spain.
In the November 27, 1937 Daily Worker Wright wrote about the large number of prominent leaders of civic and anti-racist organizations who were scheduled to speak at the memorial service for Milton Herndon on November 28 at a Harlem Church.

Sources:
Daily Worker
New York Times, 10/20/1937
 ALBA-VALB biography
 Earle Bryant, Byline: Richard Wright (2015)
 Frederick Griffiths, in African-American
Review, Winter 2001.

Beautiful Country (2021) by Qian Julie Wang is a memoir of a seven-year-old girl from China growing up with her immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York beginning in 1994. Events described in her book provide an opportunity to reflect on what happened in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China from 1966 to 1969.
In Brooklyn Qian and her family lived in constant fear of being deported. They lived in unsafe apartments and worked at stifling low-paid jobs under racist and sexist attack. Qian was often hungry. She also felt the sting of racist teachers at the school she attended who felt that she was not capable of writing the papers that she turned in. Her story is full of beautiful heart-wrenching observations of life for a young person growing up in the underbelly of a racist capitalist city.
Qian was born in China in 1987. Her parents were professors at a university. The book begins with a reference to her father’s older brother, who as a teenager in 1969, had criticized Chairman Mao Zedong in writing, “for manipulating the innocent people of China by pitting them against one another to centralize his power.”
She explains further, “My uncle had naively, heroically, and stupidly distributed the essay to the public.” She tells of how there was no high school graduation for him, only “starvation and torture
behind prison walls.”Her father spent his childhood standing in front of the class every day as his teachers and classmates berated him and his treasonous family. But to be “treasonous” during the GPCR was to be for communism without any compromises with capitalism such as wages and inequality. Was Qian’s uncle a Red Guard (young communists who challenged the Chinese Communist Party leaders)?
Class struggle during the Cultural Revolution
If Qian and her family’s account is to be considered credible, it poses the need for legitimate reflection about the GPCR and the state of working-class power during that period. In the April 27th issue of CHALLENGE, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) listed the GPCR along with the October Revolution and the Chinese Revolution as the three greatest achievements of the communist movement in the 20th century. But the scope and intensity of class struggle in China at the time of the GPCR was layered and complex.
PLP in that period published a magazine article titled “The Reversal of Workers’ Power in China.” This article from 1971 points out that the official interpretation of the GPCR from the Communist Party of China was that 95 percent of the Party members were revolutionary and only a small handful of “capitalist roaders” had wormed themselves into the Party. This picture said that the left-wing forces led by Mao and those around him only had to defeat these few renegades on the right.
But the official documents about the GPCR also mention that there were many workers, students, and peasants called the “extreme leftists” who attacked all the leading cadres. The PLP article points out these extreme leftists were not a few isolated sects scattered around the country. They were a mass movement of dedicated communists that often included demobilized members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Some sources say that there were 30-40 million people in their movement. One of their beliefs was that “China was already in the hands of a bourgeois ruling class.” This so-called “extreme left” was crushed by the government and army between 1967 and July 1968.
It seems very likely that Qian’s uncle was a part of this massive leftist movement which sounds a lot like the political line of PLP. We also want to go straight to communism after taking state power, establishing social equality and not relying on wages and maintaining inequality like China did under Mao’s leadership.
If Qian has her story right, her uncle and father’s treatment as young people are clear signals that communist politics and principles were not leading China – capitalist politics were. For example, there are stories of how magnanimous the communist soldiers in China were in battle during the civil war before taking power. After a battle with the Kuomintang (the soldiers in the Chinese bosses’ army), the Red Army would talk to those they captured. They would tell them to “quit doing what they were doing” and fight for the working class instead. Then they were released! It gave the Red Army a great reputation.
Also in the famous book Fanshen, William Hinton describes in great detail the lives of peasant workers in one little village and how things developed during the revolution. The communist cadre had to “pass the gate” – that is, stand before all the villagers and criticize themselves and be criticized by the villagers to be stronger and make things better. Nobody was tortured or starved.
Qian Julie Wang’s book shows that working people all over the world deserve a real communist life, that life under capitalist roaders whether in China, the U.S., or anywhere, leads only to imperialist war, racism, poverty, and many other attacks. Learning our history well and building the Party will help us create a communist future.

Fernando Braga was born on August 26, 1982. As a child, he moved with his mother from Brazil to the Bronx. He went to Brooklyn Technical High School where he first became politically active in the fight against racism and mistreatment of students. Fernando’s first antiracist struggle came in helping organize his fellow students who wanted to re-create a “Media” major at Brooklyn Tech. High School. When the class first told their teacher what they wanted in the major, the teacher told them that they needed the students to work together with him to create this Media major. Fernando was a leader in not just figuring out what to do but in actually doing the work which also motivated the other students.
At Brooklyn Tech Fernando met Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Fernando said he had always known that we needed an antiracist, antisexist, completely egalitarian society and started organizing for PLP at Brooklyn Tech.
Antiracist student leader
In 1999 a Black 23-year-old student worker, Amadou Diallo, was murdered by the NYPD. He was shot 41 times by cops in front of his apartment while reaching for his wallet. Students from high schools around the city walked out and joined the many protests demanding justice. Fernando was one of the leaders of a large group that met after school and discussed fighting against racism, imperialist war and for true equality.
 The group at Brooklyn Tech along with a similar group from Clara Barton High School decided to organize a demonstration. Fernando and two others presented a proposal to a “progressive” sanctioned school club to have a walk-out. The advisor was afraid of a walk-out. The students decided to do it anyway. After they handed out a flyer, there was push-back and threats from the administration. Fernando and other students came up with the idea of stickers. The school is six stories high. Most students couldn’t take the elevators and the stairwells were plastered with the walk-out stickers.
On the day of the demonstration well over 2500 students walked out. Classes were empty. A massive group from Brooklyn Tech joined students from Clara Barton at Fulton Square in downtown Brooklyn. After a student-led rally in the square, hundreds crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to go into Manhattan. Of course, a militant, multiracial demonstration didn't make the news except in CHALLENGE.
Fighting the bosses on the battlefield
While in high school, Fernando developed a passion for films and screenwriting. He pursued this love as a film major at Hunter College. While at Hunter, Fernando, a member of the National Guard, was deployed to Iraq. While there he started writing a movie called Broken Soldier. In Iraq Fernando became a leader in his unit and looked out for the interests of his fellow soldiers and workers from Iraq as well.
While out on a convoy his unit came upon a truck stopped in the road with a group of Iraqis standing beside it. His Platoon Sergeant tried to force the Iraqis to move the truck. When they didn’t he told the platoon to get ready to fire on them. Fernando, who spoke no Arabic, made eye contact with one of the Iraqis who signaled him that the truck was broken and couldn’t be moved. Fernando understood the message and was able to stop the Sergeant from opening fire. The unit moved on and left the Iraqi workers to fix their truck.
Upon returning from Iraq Fernando became active in Iraq Veterans Against the War and was instrumental in creating the Winter Soldier II hearings. This conference, modeled after the anti-Vietnam War conference from the 70’s, included testimony about U.S. atrocities in Iraq from soldiers and Iraqis as well.
A working-class champion until the end
Fernando was also a NYC Transit worker and proud member of the Transit  Workers Union (TWU). He distributed CHALLENGE newspapers to his friends on the job and talked to them about fighting for communism. He was involved in several job actions when his safety and the safety of his coworkers were threatened. He also took pride in his work and enjoyed playing poker and dominos with his coworkers.
In 2013 Fernando went to Vassar College as part of the first group of veterans to attend Vassar since the end of WWII. He became a popular student who helped act as a bridge between the veterans and traditional Vassar students. On campus Fernando worked hard at his studies, learning Chinese and earning his Bachelor’s degree. He became a leader on campus who introduced people to communist ideas and participated in fights against racism.
On June 10 around 100 people gathered in Brooklyn to remember Fernando and to celebrate his life and his commitment to the working class. Many of those who knew him from high school, college, the military, and loved ones, including his young daughter, shared their memories. He will be missed.