French bosses face angry workers as they dismantle capitalist welfare system
BBC, 3/22–More than a million people took to the streets across France on Thursday, with 119,000 in Paris, according to figures from the interior ministry. Police fired tear gas at protesters in the capital and 80 people were arrested across the country. The demonstrations were sparked by legislation raising the retirement age by two years to 64.

"I oppose this reform and I really oppose the fact that democracy no longer means anything,"...The unrest also disrupted train travel, oil refineries and saw teachers and workers at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport walk out of work.

In the northern city of Rouen a young woman was seen lying on the ground after sustaining a serious injury to her hand. Witnesses said she lost her thumb after she was hit by a so-called "flash-ball" grenade fired by police to disperse demonstrators. There were other clashes in the western cities of Nantes, Rennes and Lorient.

Hunger rises in U.S. as bosses shift to war production
Urban Institute, 3/21–With significant food price inflation in 2022 and the expiration of COVID-19 pandemic aid, food hardship has increased for many households across the country. In this brief, we examine trends in food insecurity and receipt of charitable food using data from the Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey (WBNS), a nationally representative survey of more than 7,500 adults ages 18 to 64.

Between December 2021 and December 2022, the share of adults reporting food insecurity in the last year increased from 20 percent to 24.6 percent. The rate of food insecurity in 2022 was not statistically different from the rate in the year just before the pandemic (23.4 percent in 2019).

Hispanic/Latinx and Black adults were consistently at greater risk of food insecurity than white adults between 2019 and 2022, reflecting longstanding disparities in opportunities and access to resources.

NYPD pigs feast on City budget
Gothamist, 3/20–The NYPD’s ballooning overtime budget faced scrutiny from City Council members on Monday…Overtime expenditures were $2.2 billion last fiscal year, 93% higher than budgeted…last month, halfway through the current fiscal year, the NYPD had already exceeded its budgeted allotment for the year, spending $472 million on overtime for uniformed officers.

[City Comptroller Brad] Lander’s office found that NYPD annual overtime totals have skyrocketed $700 million over the last decade. One large chunk of overtime through the last three years went to what the NYPD categorizes as “anti-police protests” — $225 million in all..

The NYPD’s $5.44 billion allotment in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2024 stands in sharp contrast to the flat funding proposed for the city’s public defenders, who also testified at Monday’s budget hearing. The defense attorneys say salaries are so low that attorneys are quitting, even as there are 450 pending homicide cases that their lawyers are handling.

U.S. struggles to maintain territory in Middle East
Al Jazeera, 3/27– The governments of Iran and Syria have condemned the United States for attacks on Syrian soil that reportedly killed 19 people, which Washington said it carried out following a drone attack on US forces. Both the Iranian and Syrian foreign ministries late on Saturday slammed the US air attacks that targeted the strategic region of Deir ez-Zor bordering Iraq.

In a statement, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said the “terrorist” attacks by the US hit civilian targets and constituted a violation of international law and Syrian sovereignty. “The US claims that it is present in Syria to fight Daesh [ISIL] that itself had a major role in creating is just an excuse to continue its occupation and loot Syria’s national wealth, including its energy resources and wheat,” he said.

The latest confrontation with the US comes as Tehran works to re-establish formal diplomatic ties with regional rival Saudi Arabia and potentially other Arab states. Syria will reportedly restore its relations with the kingdom after Tehran and Riyadh review an agreement reached earlier this month with Chinese mediation.

April 17 marked the 58th  anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). From a meeting of barely two dozen members of the old U.S. communist movement, PLP has grown into an international party now organizing in five continents. Even as our class faces a dark night and growing inter imperialist-rivalry and fascism (see editorial, page 2) we continue our fightback because this is just the beginning of a worthy struggle towards an international communist revolution.

Over our first half-century, PLP has propelled the march to communism—first by leading antiracist, working-class struggle, and then through that struggle advancing communist ideas. This two-pronged strategy—practice and theory—is the basis for winning masses of workers to fight for communism.

Why communism? In our vision, the working class will determine society’s future. It will destroy the capitalist world and its brutal exploitation. It will smash a system that drives us into constant unemployment and poverty. It will stop the racism that drags down all workers. It will terminate the racist cops who break our strikes and kill workers, especially our Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant sisters and brothers. And it will end for all time the imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.

A Communist World
Here is our vision for a communist world (also see May Day speech, page 1):

A society run by workers and for workers. After all, the working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need.

Abolition of the exploitative wage system and the money that runs it. We have no need for the parasitic bosses who steal most of the value of our labor through wage slavery.

Multiracial unity and death to the racism that divides the working class. Racism is rooted in capitalism; the bosses rely on it to steal trillions in super-profits worldwide. Fighting racism is part of the lifeblood of PLP.

The destruction of sexism and the systemic exploitation, oppression, and cultural degradation of women workers. Sexism is a pillar of class society, and capitalism has only further this lethal weapon against our class. Women and men must unite to smash sexist ideas and practices. PLP emphasizes working-class women’s leadership in making revolution, particularly Black women’s leadership.

Eliminating all borders, artificial lines the bosses draw to make even more profits from workers they call “foreigners.” Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor. Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag.

This is the world the PLP has fought for from the start. We will continue to fight until our class prevails. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.

Struggle and Theory
 From our earliest beginnings in the 1960s, PLP has fought tooth and nail against attacks by the ruling class. We have organized and supported Ford workers and striking teachers in Mexico; wildcatting miners in Hazard, Kentucky; longshore workers in New York City; jute (fiber) workers in India; miners in Britain; garment workers in Los Angeles; bank workers in Colombia; transit workers in Washington, DC; Chrysler sit-down strikers at Detroit’s Mack Avenue plant; farm workers in California, and bakery workers at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx. We have stood with evicted workers in Palestine-Israel, earthquake victims in Pakistan, and hurricane victims in Haiti and New Orleans.

Antiracism is a hallmark of PLP. We backed Black workers and youth in the 1964 Harlem Rebellion, and fought off racist school segregationists in Boston in 1975. In 1976 we integrated Chicago’s Marquette Park while smashing the Nazi headquarters there, and have led more than a hundred thousand protesters against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis across the United States. We have mobilized against racist killer cops from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Ferguson, Missouri.

PLP has led fierce fightbacks opposing the  bosses’ wars. In the 1960s, we were the first to organize mass demonstrations for the U.S. to “Get Out of Vietnam!” We formed the Worker-Student Alliance in the anti-war Students for A Democratic Society. PLP broke the U.S. travel ban to Cuba and undermined the rulers’ House Un-American Activities Committee to the point of collapse. More recently, working both within the military and on the streets, we exposed the U.S. rulers’ invasions of Iraq as a murderous oil grab.

None of these developments came out of thin air. They grew out of our Party’s analysis of past class struggles and the achievements of millions of workers. PLP studied the strengths and weaknesses of the communist movement led by—among many others—Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. In 1917, this movement created a revolution in Russia; in 1949, a revolution in China. It defeated the Nazis in Europe and fascists in Japan in World War II. It reached its highest point in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which attempted to push back a growing elitism in the Communist Party leadership and put the masses in charge of society.

PLP is the only group on the left to point out what went wrong in the Soviet Union and China. We are the only organization to analyze how socialism in those countries led back to the unvarnished profit system, where all workers are now mired.

A communist society will have no bosses or profits. It will be led by the working class through its Progressive Labor Party.

Marxism: An Evolving Idea
The history of the Progressive Labor Party began in 1962. A small group of communists left the Communist Party USA and organized the Progressive Labor Movement. They rejected the CPUSA’s capitulation to capitalism and its abandonment of the open advocacy of communist revolution. The old communist movement proposed that the bosses would peacefully relinquish control of society and allow what the CPUSA called “socialism” to be “voted into existence.” The communists who formed PLM refused to mislead workers and broke away from the old guard.

In the course of PLP’s history, we have rejected some traditional Marxist concepts and advanced a number of new ones, all based on our practice and our examination of world events and the decay of the old communist movement. These new principles are expressed in a series of documents, including Road to Revolution I, II, III and IV; Revolution Not Reform; and “Dark Night Shall Have Its End.” (These are all available on PL’s website or in pamphlet form.)

Above all, Progressive Labor Party stands for the principle that the working class must fight directly for communism rather than moving first through a transitional phase of socialism. We reject this two-stage theory, a central premise of classical Marxism, because events have shown that socialism inevitably leads back to full-blown capitalism. In both Russia and China, socialism preserved capitalist features like money and the wage system, leading to inequalities that divided the working class. In both of these countries, the communist party became a new ruling class where privileges were attained through party membership. We believe the working class can be won before the revolution to fight directly for communism—to abolish the wage system, the cult of the individual and other capitalist relics.

Core Principles
PLP’s main principles are:

• Internationalism, under the slogan “Smash All Borders,” where workers’ class unity is represented by a single mass, international Party;
• The fight against racism, a strategic necessity in the struggle to overthrow capitalism;      
• The fight against the special oppression of women, another critical component in uniting the working class, a prerequisite for revolution;
• A concentration among industrial workers, who produce the capitalists’ profits and the weapons for the bosses’ imperialist wars;
• Workers’ power through armed struggle, since the rulers will use their armed state power to violently suppress the working class.

Throughout its existence, PLP has fought for these principles in unceasing class struggle. We have learned that building the Party is the first order of business for communists. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Whatever gains workers make in reform struggles are limited and temporary; sooner or later, the bosses always use their state power to take them back. Communists strive to turn reform struggles into schools for communism and building the Party. Winning workers to PLP is the one and only victory the ruling class can never take back. We therefore urge all workers and youth to join us in the next half-century in this historic task: to organize a communist revolution.

Newark, February 28––“I am a worker!” These words were echoed again and again throughout the Coalition of Rutgers Unions’ day long “Take Back the University” event at the college’s Newark Campus. The three-part day of protest, which marked the beginning of the faculty union’s strike authorization vote, included two teach-ins about solidarity and striking, as well as a rally aimed to disrupt the meeting of the university’s Board of Governors (BOG).

On the heels of the Take Back the University day of protest, and after months of fruitless negotiations with the bosses, the 8000 academic workers of Rutgers AAUP-AFT faculty union have officially authorized a strike. Many reforms are on the table, including pay equity, health care, maternity leave, and job security for adjunct professors and graduate students. Though these reforms would certainly benefit those who receive them, strikes are best measured by their ability to mobilize and raise the consciousness of the working class.

Despite freezing rain and fresh snowfall, and the university bosses’ last minute cancellation of in-person classes and the BOG meeting, nearly 200 people made it out. While union misleaders spoke in support of electoralism and the bosses’ capitalist system, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members provided key political leadership by consistently pushing discussion and chants beyond the specific problems facing Rutgers’ faculty and graduate students, and toward communist ideas of class consciousness and multiracial unity.

Cowardly bosses are a no-show
The night before the Rutgers AAUP-AFT “Take Back the University” day of protest, Rutgers’ Board of Governors announced that it would be switching its only meeting set for the Newark campus this year to Zoom. The Newark administrators also took advantage of the light snow conditions and moved all classes that day from in-person to virtual. They claimed this was for the safety of students and workers, and yet janitors and dining hall staff still had to come into work despite the weather. This differential treatment by the bosses, meant to divide and isolate the members of the working class from each other, was the subject of the first teach-in of the day.

PLP members made clear connections between the shallow identity politics the university and unions advertise, and the neglect, displacement, and mistreatment of the Black and Latin working class in Newark. Our members explained about the university’s role as a capitalist institution, one that exploits Black and Latin maintenance workers while also conditioning students with the nationalist and identity-based ideas needed to recruit our class to fight in WWIII. Our comments were then quoted by other workers in their rally speeches. The bosses’ cowardice was not shared, and workers were present, receptive, and encouraged by this communist-led action.

Cult of personality on display
While unions offer workers an important tool for organizing our class against the bosses’ racist exploitation, they also contain contradictions that cannot be overlooked. Like all reformist organizations, they ultimately work to prolong the lifespan of capitalism.

By endorsing liberal politicians and negotiating “in good faith” with our exploiters, unions work to win our class to this terrible world order. This was clear at the Rutgers day of protest, where Association of Flight Attendants president Sarah Nelson lied on stage about receiving a phone call from liberal misleader Bernie Sanders, and falsely declared that “workers can control capitalism.” Amazon Labor Union president, Chris Smalls was also in attendance, and only repeated the same played out phrases about union work being a “marathon, not a sprint,” and arguing bureaucratic union density is our class’s most important fight.
Both Nelson and Smalls played on their own notoriety by taking selfies with fans and starting chants disparaging Jeff Bezos and other billionaires. They both advocated for the replacement of famous bosses but not their total defeat. These are opportunist lines for those looking to advance their political careers.
Members of PLP helped to shift the dialogue away from these misleaders’ talking points, moving the chants away from specific U.S. bosses and toward multiracial unity, at one point having everyone in attendance shouting, “Asian, Latin, Black and White, workers of the world unite!”

Our Party refuses to lean on the cult of personality and lie to workers this way, arguing that our class already runs the world, and that agreeing to the terms of our exploitation at the bargaining table only helps the ruling class keep us under their boots longer. The only solution is a communist revolution!

Strikes are schools for communism!
More than 50 Rutgers workers and supportive community members received copies of CHALLENGE at the union event, and our Party is committed to continuing to provide leadership to our class on the picket line if a strike is called. PLP views strikes as schools for communism. Striking is an important first step in understanding our power to fight back against the bosses’ exploitation, and the more workers–inside and outside academia–that come to understand their class position, and the power we have when we work together as a united, multiracial, and international communist party, then we can finally begin to come out of this dark night and one day win the world. Join us!

BRONX, NY, February 16–“If you love CUNY so much, why don’t you take a pay cut?”

City University of New York (CUNY) students militantly challenged University Provost Wendy Hensel at her administration’s “Listening Tour,” a liberal sham of an event with the intent of squelching the rebellion of antiracist, working class youth. Along with students, CUNY professors and staff members are fighting back against tuition increases and racist austerity in the higher education system. One young comrade led chants for the first time, ensuring the administrators could hear us from outside.

This is the fighting spirit workers worldwide need to see, especially on International Workers’ Day, May Day! Fellow antiracist fighters at Kingsborough Community College joined with CUNY students later in the week to share their organizing experience against police terror on campus and in the streets. It’s important for the future of our class that students make connections across campuses as a way to gain confidence in our class’ ability to control our own education and labor.

Liberals: The wolves in sheep’s clothing
CUNY is a perfect example of liberal bosses being a greater danger to our class. Every political leader involved, from the president of KCC, the CUNY Chancellor, the mayor of New York City, to the governor of New York State (who is pushing for a raise in tuition at CUNY), are liberals. They are hiding behind their “identities,” planning to launch wave after wave of racist attacks while hoping to diffuse the anger of students and workers. Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party have consistently exposed these misleaders for what they are: agents of capitalism and enemies of the working class.

Capitalism is the deficit
According to the racist administrators of CUNY, the university system has a $194 million “structural deficit.” During the Covid-19 lockdown, the federal government provided hundreds of millions of dollars to CUNY – which they promptly used to cover previous deficits and to buy equipment they could use to push unproven online teaching practices. The torrent of federal funding did nothing to improve the education of the more than 200,000 primarily Black and Latin students at CUNY. Class sizes increased, despite the clear evidence that online courses need to be smaller for students to learn effectively (see study, Oregon State University, 11/1/2021). Furthermore, administrative offices such as the registrar and financial aid suffered a loss of staff that was not replaced. Now that these federal dollars have dried up, the racist austerity at the core of the entire system has reared its ugly head.

CUNY’s answer to this deficit is two-fold: the first is to fire as many part-time professors (adjuncts) as possible, and the second is to harass our students to pay the tuition that they owe. Capitalists always try to make us pay for the crises in their system. In this case, the University Provost, who makes $488,000, was there to explain why the students and workers of CUNY will have to tolerate even more racist cuts. We met her with a loud protest, highlighting that these rapacious vipers saw fit to give themselves 30 percent raises right before the cutbacks were announced! We stressed both the need for multi–racial unity to fight back and the need for students and workers to fight together. As part of our ongoing struggle within the group, we raised the question of whether education under capitalism will ever be willing or able to properly educate our class.

Fightback forum – KCC leads the way!
In  the Bronx , workers and students have taken inspiration from our class brothers and sisters at Kingsborough Community College (KCC), who, as reported in the pages of CHALLENGE, have taken on the racist administration at KCC. Later in the week, the brave students of KCC visited our campus to describe the ongoing fight against their racist administration, which continues to target antiracist students and professors while giving an openly racist student a security detail as he moves about the campus. Forty students and professors had a chance to learn about organizing and fighting back against fascist attacks from the KCC administration, which happens to be Black and Latin. We discussed how to counter identity politics, how to maintain the fighting spirit after months of work, and how to build a multiracial group that can respond to every attack with strength. Students from both campuses got a chance to exchange ideas and experiences and also enjoy some delicious food prepared by the mutual aid kitchen, La Morada, which has been supporting workers in the South Bronx community with hot meals, clothing drives, and solidarity. The forum ended with a group photo – students and workers from across CUNY, fists up in solidarity, giving a glimpse of the power that our class possesses.

Another world is possible!
The students and workers of CUNY need communism. We need a system where workers can truly be educated on what’s best for our class and how to organize society around our needs. No more racist administrators protecting racist students, no more racist cuts in education, no more precariously-employed adjuncts scraping by before being unceremoniously dumped into unemployment. This week, students and workers in the Bronx were nudged closer to seeing this future as one they are willing to fight for. We hope to bring a large contingent to May Day and bring them even closer!