NEW JERSEY, February 7—“I know we should try to stop police brutality, but it seems like all these revolutions we are learning about show us we need a more revolutionary approach.” This was the conclusion a college student in New Jersey shared while summarizing an event featuring multiracial women and men student leaders from Kingsborough Community College (KCC) in Brooklyn, New York. KCC students gave a presentation and a skit reenacting the racist attacks on students by college public safety officers (see article in 11/17/22 CHALLENGE) and participated in discussions with over 50 New Jersey college students. One thing became clear: students are eager to challenge the racist and sexist system. Antiracist fightback is spreading, and the more it spreads, the more this racist, sexist, imperialist capitalist system is doomed.

Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were also present to distribute CHALLENGE. Between the presentation and revolutionary communist politics, debates and discussions show that these working class students are more than capable of both analyzing the world and organizing to change it. Workers and students like them can and should run the world—that’s communism, and our fight for that world is expanding!
The struggle spreads and sharpens
To the New Jersey college students in attendance, the first reaction to hearing about the struggle at KCC was disbelief and stunned silence. Upon viewing an improvised skit to illustrate KCC Public Safety’s appalling assault on the student, questions and comments began to pour in with some students sharing how this resonated with their own experiences.  
New Jersey students took over from the KCC students in leading the discussion and sharp debates followed. Some students suggested that the police can be reformed through “better training” and “building bridges with the community” through diverse inclusion and representation on the police force. Other students responded that the history of policing itself dates back to racist slave patrols, and an inherently racist system cannot be reformed. The murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black cops is a good example that shows how reforming the police is a dead end.
From Tyre Nichols to the KCC students’ own experiences, Black cops, under a Black police chief and (at KCC) a Black college president have only changed the appearance of capitalist oppression. The underlying essence of increasing brute force, obedience and terror disproportionately targeting Black, Latin and immigrant workers —fascism—  is concealed by identity politics pushed by the very same liberal politicians today sending billions of dollars in weapons to the capitalists running Ukraine and Taiwan. Soon enough, they will be sending working class youth here to kill other working class youth in Russia and China, and die for U.S. imperialism.
At places like KCC, however, the capitalists’ bootlicking servants are letting their mask of identity politics slip enough to reveal who they really serve. As our struggle spreads, communists in PLP are organizing to channel working class resistance exemplified by these students into class war against fascism and imperialist war for communism.
‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’
The success of this college event is a political victory and reveals the potential for a mass militant antiracist student movement beyond New Jersey and CUNY. For Kingsborough students and faculty, the opportunity to return to New Jersey and share organizing experiences brought us full-circle: we first came to New Jersey last year to help pack the courts during the antiracist fightback at the Rodwell-Spivey trial.
Student eyewitness reports of the bosses’ legal system threatening Justin Rodwell with over 40 years in prison for trumped-up charges inspired mass growth in KCC’s antiracist club Common Ground in defense of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers. With one of our new student comrades bringing a wealth of fighting experience from the student movement in Haiti, the antiracist movement built last year continued growing and is now leading mass antiracist fightback at KCC.
Racist school administrations in NY/NJ can catch a fire
As the event was closed and to nurture the growing bonds of working class solidarity, students and faculty heard reports from other racist attacks and antiracist struggles and discussed how to link them together. From supporting an antiracist high school teacher recently terminated to supporting student strike organizing at Rutgers, this period of relative student growth means students and faculty have a responsibility to continue building a militant antiracist movement.
Another concluding organizing lesson was the importance of consistently waging antiracist fightback while building a multiracial base with an emphasis on Black student leadership. A New Jersey student commented on the worldwide character of the response to the mass Black worker-led rebellions after George Floyd’s murder. He reasoned that workers around the world are inspired by and look in solidarity to the Black working class for political leadership, to the extent that both Black workers’ culture and resistance are appreciated and emulated worldwide. Black student and worker leadership is key to our multiracial working class movement, and as communist leaders will be the key force in smashing capitalism once and for all.
Smashing borders locally prepares us globally
Back on the KCC students’ side, organizing and traveling to New Jersey also enabled us to bridge the psychological distance between our areas. Even though New York/ New Jersey are part of the same metropolitan area and connected at points by mass transit, many KCC students had neither been to New Jersey nor felt totally comfortable making the trip. The bosses’ media obsession with subway crime sees these divisions.
While not having the same hurdles as crossing the bosses’ borders from Haiti to the Dominican Republic or Mexico to the U.S., students and workers separated by a few miles and a river overcome these barriers and are planning to do it again. From Newark to Brooklyn and New York to Beijing, the struggle continues!

 

The two imperialist superpowers are accelerating toward World War III, with more brazen provocations by the day. Since shooting down an apparent Chinese spy balloon on February 4, the U.S. military has downed three unidentified flying objects over Alaska and Canada that “might turn out to be harmless commercial or research efforts that posed no real threat to the United States” (New York Times, 2/14). The Joe Biden administration blacklisted five Chinese companies accused of links to military surveillance programs—barely a week after the U.S. expanded its footprint on military bases in the Philippines less than 200 miles south of Taiwan.
As rulers in both the U.S. and China promote an orgy of patriotism, we need to remember that capitalism is a system based on theft from workers and the violent elimination of any and all competition. As Lenin pointed out in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, war between rival imperialist powers is inevitable. Driven by their relentless pursuit of maximum profits, the capitalist bosses continuously seek to redivide the world’s markets and resources. The lethal, racist U.S. ruling class is ramping up nationalism and anti-China rhetoric to prepare for the next global war. China’s vicious, racist bosses have been whipping up mass fervor to recover “lost” territories for years. Neither side can afford to lose; neither can settle to be “number two.”
The coming imperialist war between the U.S. and China will likely dwarf World War II’s death toll of 70 million and poison much of the planet. But the international working class has no side in this fight. Only a communist revolution to overthrow the warmakers and smash their murderous plans can save our class and eliminate the root of these conflicts: the capitalist system itself. In Russia and China, in the wake of both World War I and World War II, the old communist movement turned imperialist wars into revolutionary wars, seized state power, and established workers’ dictatorships. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has a long and proud history of organizing against imperialist war and for revolution for communism.
China preps for imperialist slaughter
One year ago, shortly before the start of the war in Ukraine, China declared a “no-limits” partnership with Russia. Despite pressure from the U.S., they have not backed down. While not directly involved in the fighting, China is now Russia’s biggest customer for oil. China’s bosses are also studying the Russian playbook for lessons to apply to their planned takeover of Taiwan. According to a leaked internal memo, U.S. Air Force General Michael Minihan is predicting war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan in 2025 (South China Morning Post, 02/09). China has repeatedly warned the U.S. to stay away from Taiwan, and conducted live military exercises after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the contested island last year.
Joint naval drills by China, Russia, and South Africa were scheduled to begin on February 17. China’s rulers have steadily increased military spending, to the point where their navy is now larger than that of the U.S. (CNN, 02/03). Their ships are also more capable of navigating shallow waters in the South China Sea—another potential flashpoint.
Even as the U.S. attempts to improve its military foothold in East Asia, China is strengthening its military and economic ties in its home region. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade pact that includes Australia, Japan, Indonesia, and Vietnam, gives China a clear advantage in writing the rules for business for 30 percent of the world’s population. Despite an aging population and slowing economic growth, China has one other big edge over the divided U.S. bosses: a united ruling class that is further along the path to full-blown fascism.
U.S. bosses out for blood
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class, representing finance capital, is mounting an aggressive strategy to contain China. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is demanding a “forceful” response if China moves on Taiwan (Foreign Affairs, September-October 2022). He’s calling for a massive 27 percent increase in the Pentagon’s budget, to more than $1 trillion. Haas is demanding the “promotion of order” over “democracy and human rights”—not that U.S. foreign policy ever shied away from murdering workers en masse when money was at stake.
The proposed military buildup aligns with recent U.S. maneuvering in the Pacific. Last year’s U.S.-British agreement to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia was just the beginning of a plan to surround China with a ring of fire. The U.S. has bludgeoned Japan into buying hundreds of U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and to approve a “more lethal” deployment of U.S. Marines in Okinawa, a Japanese island less than 400 miles from Taiwan and barely 500 miles from Shanghai, China’s largest city (NYT, 1/11). The new U.S.-Philippines deal was equally ominous. According to a former Biden adviser, the bases in the Philippines “would be critical launch and resupply points in a war with China” (NYT, 2/3).
The U.S.-China trade war, declared by ex-president Donald Trump, has evolved into permanent tariffs on $350 billion of Chinese exports. China has retaliated with tariffs on U.S. exports. Economic tensions escalated last October, when the U.S. banned sales to China of semiconductors and the machines that build them, and even barred U.S. citizens from working on them. The objective: “strangling with an intent to kill” China’s technology industry, particularly corporations “closely allied with China’s military” (NYT, 10/20/22).
More recently, days after the spy balloon humiliation, Biden issued an executive order to restrict U.S. investment in China in “advanced technologies that could be used in war.” The order targeted U.S. hedge funds and equity firms trying to make a quick buck at the expense of the broader needs of the U.S. ruling class. Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a reliable stooge for finance capital, complained about those “funding adversarial actions of the Chinese government” (NYT, 2/9).
The biggest problem for the warmakers is their need to win reluctant workers to fight and die for their profits. Because capitalism feeds off racism like rats on garbage, institutions like the U.S. military are racist to the core. But to create a larger “multiracial” military, the rulers desperately need to recruit Black and Latin students into the officer corps—the logic behind mandatory enrollment programs for Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps in urban high schools (NYT, 12/11/22).
We’ve got to fight back
As bosses in both the U.S. and China up the ante in preparing for war, it’s time for PLP members and friends around the world to go on the offensive by exposing the imperialists’ motivation and strategy. We can connect these war plans to every struggle we’re immersed in, from the fightback against racist cop terror to strikes to struggles for decent healthcare. We can expose university and corporate connections to the war buildup and move masses into action against these pro-imperialist institutions. The only solution to capitalist butchery is to turn the guns around—to fight to transform imperialist wars into revolutionary wars for communism. Join PLP!

Loudoun workers: Transit strike vs pols & boss

Loudoun County, VA, February 14—“FIRE KEOLIS” rang out today as about 100 transit workers in ATU Local 689 and their allies took their over-month-long strike to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. Their demand? End the politicians’ deal with Keolis. The workers exposed a gang-up of these “progressive” political leaders with Keolis, the $6 billion French transit company perpetuating a two-tier wage system and cuts to benefits.
The Loudoun politicians, despite their crocodile tears for workers, are proving yet again that the state is a tool of capitalist class domination. By definition, the bosses’ politicians cannot represent workers’ interests. Workers must fight them and the Keolis bosses tooth and nail, defeating them and their entire system with communist revolution.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have played an important role in this strike. We have joined picket lines and brought revolutionary ideas by sharing CHALLENGE newspaper with scores of workers. We protested with workers at the French embassy and mobilized transit workers from other jurisdictions to join the picket lines (see previous strike reports in CHALLENGE, 2/1 and 2/15).
Reject cuts and wage disparity
Today’s action featured a fiery speech by a PLP member, the former president of striking ATU Local 689. He declared, to unanimous cheers, that if the workers’ demands were not met, the workers should initiate a general strike. Such an action, he said, would build on the great 1968 general strike in France that brought the French bosses to their knees and led to big increases in wages and benefits.
Multiracial workers also spoke about the desperate need for significant improvements in their contract in order to survive. The two most pressing concerns are cuts to benefits and unequal wages: one pay scale for the union-represented commuter bus drivers, and one for the non-union local bus drivers. Workers are refusing this division between local and commuter drivers.
Union leaders have begun to take a more militant line—the current Local 689 president declared that he would not be fooled by politicians again and would not support any of them in the next election.
But the International union leaders continue to emphasize relying on Democratic politicians, which ties workers to the capitalist system.
The PLP approach of building a revolutionary party within these front-line battles in the class struggle must replace this self-defeating march to the ballot box.
Strike fever
Why did the workers zero in on the Loudoun Board of Supervisors? These politicians have a contract with bottom-feeding, Nazi-linked Keolis (Atlantic, 3/18/2014) which states that the company would be fined daily for failing to provide service – something Keolis can’t do with a 95 percent effective strike!  But the politicians were happy to violate their own contract and not enforce fines against Keolis. The failure of the politicians to punish the French company in this wealthy suburban area has allowed the company to stonewall the striking workers rather than negotiate to meet their demands. As we have seen in countless strikes over the years, politicians will  offer aid to their real bosses, the capitalist bosses who own the means of production. Workers may vote but capitalists are the rulers.
Strike action against Keolis has spread beyond Loudoun County. Teamsters local 639 in Prince William County, VA struck Keolis this week and joined today’s rally in solidarity. Keolis was run out of its contract in Las Vegas (thisisreno.com, 2/14), and lost its contract in Raleigh, NC as well. The transit workers in Reno have struck three times against Keolis to try for a decent contract. Strikes, as Lenin said, are schools for war where workers learn to fight against their class enemy, the bosses. Strike fever is growing!
Working-class solidarity
PLP members linked this transit fight to the intense negotiations between Montgomery County teachers (MCEA) with their Board of Education,
sharing flyers from that struggle in Amharic, English and Spanish. PL’ers also brought some well-received posters reflecting the broad importance of the struggle in transit. Transit and transit workers are essential to the bosses’ ability to run society. Even during the beginning of the pandemic, the bosses understood the necessity of keeping transit running.
One of the strikers who spoke carried and waved the sign, “A GOOD CONTRACT = PUBLIC HEALTH.”
Other workers welcomed  the sign, “TEACHERS SUPPORT TRANSIT WORKERS.”
Our Party fights for multiracial struggle and internationalism. A transit strike in Loudoun County impacts workers all over the world. We talked with workers about a Senegalese railroad strike in 1947 that lasted 4 months, recounted in God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembene.  That story also ends with a speech calling for a general strike in Dakar, Senegal, which linked nicely to the PLP call for a general strike here.
Of course, even a general strike and militant uprisings alone cannot defeat capitalism and racism. We call on workers to channel this militancy into building a revolutionary communist Party to smash this criminal system, and create a society led by workers that guarantees a decent life, without exploitation, for all. As the major imperialist powers build toward world war, workers will be under increasing pressure to sacrifice and produce for the bosses. The workers in Loudoun County are providing the leadership we need to defeat the bosses and build a world run by and for the working class.

In 1943, the New York City government expected a huge demand for affordable housing from returning soldiers. It approved construction of 1,232 middle-income apartments to be named Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village. The new apartment complex was built by the notoriously racist Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. that “had two million Black policyholders carrying $77 million in insurance while employing no Blacks.”

This involved demolishing 18 square blocks of the “gas house” section of lower Manhattan’s East Side, displacing 11,000 low-income workers and their families. No more than 3 percent of them would be able to afford even the modest rents in the new development.

Bosses’ stooges back racist exclusion
MetLife “developed Stuyvesant Town with the understanding that better living conditions would improve the company’s mortality numbers and therefore annual earnings”(nycurbanism.com). “Both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune argued passionately for the right of Met Life to bar Blacks from the complex” (Horne, page 126). 

Communist councilman Benjamin Davis and allies got a City Council bill passed fining corporations that discriminated. But Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Port Authority Chairman Robert Moses, and MetLife chairman Frederick Ecker made sure MetLife was exempted. MetLife agreed to build the Riverton Houses in Harlem for Black residents – but these were much smaller and substandard. Of course, this in no way excused MetLife’s refusal to rent to Black workers at Stuytown.

Davis and a few others insisted that “Stuytown” be integrated. Frederick Eckert, president of racist MetLife, refused, saying:
"Negroes and whites don’t mix … If we brought them into this development, it would be to the detriment of the city, too, because it would depress all the surrounding property."

Reds lead fightback
In a 1947 lawsuit filed by three Black veterans, the court sided with MetLife. No Black families were allowed to rent. Davis kept up the pressure on MetLife even after he was defeated in an anticommunist campaign in 1949. He called MetLife chair Ecker “the white supremacy architect of Stuyvesant Town [and] head of the biggest Jim Crow oligarchy in the world.”

Lee Lorch, a Communist Party member and a leader of the antiracist struggle, said it was well known that Stuyvesant Town:
"was going to be an all-white project… going there carried an obligation to fight discrimination. That’s the way a lot of people felt."

In a 2010 interview, Lorch added:
"When you got into Stuyvesant Town, there was a serious moral dilemma … In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, people had seen the end results of racism."

Committee formed to combat racist attacks
In 1948, with communists in the lead, residents formed the Town and Village Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town. The poll they took proved that 62 percent of Stuytown residents supported integration.

The Committee published a pamphlet titled A Landlord vs the People … The cover photo shows all the Committee’s leadership.

Liberal courts defend racists
When the court denied the lawsuit, the Committee swung into action. First, they arranged for the Hendrixes, a Black working-class family, to stay in the apartment of the Kessler family while they were away. Jesse Kessler, an organizer for the union District 65, CIO, was a communist too. When he returned, the Lorch family invited the Hendrix family to live in their apartment.

Led by communists and union activists, the Tenants Committee put out flyers and pamphlets attacking MetLife’s racism.

Leo Miller, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where “the courage and sharp shooting of a Negro machine-gunner saved my life with a dozen other white GIs,” asked, “Can anyone of us who live in Stuyvesant Town say he may not be my neighbor? I can’t.” Another veteran and his wife said: “We don’t want our children growing up as part of a privileged group and believing from their experiences that Negroes are a people apart.” (Biondi, page 128)

MetLife refused to renew the leases of the Committee organizers and scheduled their forcible evictions. Lorch recalled:

"We had decided -- and this was the general feeling on the committee -- we weren't going to go quietly, that we would resist, they'd have to throw us out by force."

The Committee and activists from pro-communist unions guarded the apartments and prevented the evictions.

MetLife finally gave in – but only a little. It permitted 15 Black families to move in. However, it insisted that “in return” the Committee organizers move out! The Lorch family and others did so, so that Stuytown would no longer be “Jim Crow.”

Red-baiting of an antiracist fighter
City College fired Lorch because of his antiracist work in the Stuytown committee. He then moved to Penn State, where the president told him:

.. to explain this stuff about Stuyvesant Town  they'd been getting phone calls from wealthy alumni essentially wanting to know why I had been hired and how quickly I could be fired.

Lorch lasted only a year at Penn State.  A college official told him that his decision to permit a Black family to live in his New York apartment was “extreme, illegal and immoral and damaging to the public relations of the college.”

One thousand students signed a petition saying that his dismissal was “unacceptable.” The world-famous scientist, Albert Einstein, also weighed in on his behalf. (Bagli)

Lorch and his family then moved to Fisk, a histroically Black university in Nashville, TN.

At Fisk, Mr. Lorch taught three of the first Blacks ever to receive doctorates in mathematics. But there, too, his activism, like his attempt to enroll his daughter in an all-Black school and refusal to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his Communist ties, got him in trouble.

Fired from Fisk in 1955, he moved to Philander Smith, a small Black college in Arkansas. There Grace Lorch, who had organized teachers in Boston, organized help for Black students who were integrating Little Rock’s Central High School, walked with the Black students and tutored them. She and Lorch enrolled their daughter in an all-Black school and became active in the NAACP.

Lorch was fired here too because he refused to cooperate with the anticommunist Congressional committee. The field secretary of the NAACP wrote him:

The best contribution you could make to the cause of full citizenship for Negroes in Arkansas at this time would be to terminate, in writing, your affiliation with the Little Rock Branch, N.A.A.C.P.

 Meanwhile, Lorch said, “Thurgood Marshall has been busy poisoning as many people as he can against us.” Marshall later became a Supreme Court justice.

Ethel Payne, of the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender wrote:

Because he believed in the principles of decency and justice, and the equality of men under God, Lee Lorch and his family have been hounded through four states from the North to the South like refugees in displaced camps … And in the process of punishing Lee Lorch for his views, three proud institutions of learning have been made to grovel in the dust and bow the knee to bigotry.

Communist Black poet Langston Hughes had written about the promotion of anti-Black racism by these and other Black colleges in the essay Cowards From the Colleges.

Unable because of racism and anticommunism to get a job anywhere in the U.S., the Lorches moved to Canada, where Lorch taught and did research for the next 60 years. He does not regret the decision he made at Stuyvesant Town six decades ago.

I would have paid a higher price living with my conscience if I hadn’t done it … I thought then, and still do, that it was an important struggle worth any sacrifice in pursuing it. I have no regret over what we did, or what it cost us …

“Stuytown” remained open to Black residents until it was “privatized” 20 years ago.J

Sources: Martha Biondi. To Stand and Fight (Harvard, 2003); Liz Fox, “Desegregating the ‘Walled Town’ (online); Amy Fox, “Battle in Black and White;” Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects (Oxford, 2010); Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money (Dutton, 2013); Bagli, New York Times 11.21.2010; Obituary of Lee Lorch, L’Humanité March 5, 2014 (in French); Lee Lorch obituary, New York Times March 3, 2014; Gerald Horne, Black Liberation, Red Scare (Newark, DE 1994). “Lee Lorch”, “Grace Lorch”, Wikipedia; CHALLENGE January 30, 2002.