This is the introductory article of a series on climate change. Worldwide climate catastrophe is having its biggest impact on the working class, especially Black and brown workers and youth. This issue is integral to the international working-class struggle against racism, sexism and imperialism and for the revolutionary transformation of society. This means building the fight for communism- here, there, and everywhere. Our lives depend on it.

This July's global average temperature of 16.95C (62.51F) was 0.33C (0.59F) higher than the earlier record set in July 2019, when the global average temperatures hit 16.63C (32F). From Phoenix, Az. (July, 2023 average high of 114 degrees, low of 90 degrees) to fires in Greece to Iraq (Baghdad average high was 119 degrees) and Pakistan (still damaged by floods that occurred in 2022), the build-up of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere has led to scorching temperatures and massive flooding. Last summer alone, heat waves in Europe killed 61,000 people and in Pakistan 1700 people died from the worst rains in decades.

Capitalism Created the Climate Catastrophe!
Somewhere around 97% of all climate scientists in the world agree that it’s not by chance that one disaster after another has been occurring over the past number of decades. What is at the core of this rapid climate change? You guessed it. The unbridled, racist and unrestrained drive for profits, that is at the center of capitalism, has led coal, gas, and oil companies to continue their exploration and extraction of fossil fuels. The political lackeys in national governments and the financial institutions that “own” them, have all reneged on their pledges to reduce carbon emissions in the name of war (Ukraine) and profits. Most of the 59.1 million people internally displaced in 2021, (virtually all poor industrial workers, agricultural workers and often people of color) according to the United Nations, were victims of climate change events. China, to put the icing on the cake, has doubled down on the use of coal, which is plentiful in their land.

Millions March to Fight Against Climate Catastrophe!
The past year has seen 8 million people involved in protests and actions around the world demanding change. Will these demonstrations be enough? The answer is no. Leaving the decision-making to capitalist governments throughout the world is like asking a zebra to change its stripes. Much of the leadership of the environmental movement is linked with so-called liberal governments or fake leftists that will mislead people into the ballot box and not challenge the fundamental cause of climate catastrophe, world-wide capitalism.  The oil companies and all climate polluters have too much at stake to change course soon or at all. Future articles will discuss many aspects of climate change and discuss some possible solutions. However, one thing remains clear, as long as we allow capitalism to rule the world, we have little or no chance for a living and sustainable environment.  

The Progressive Labor Party worldwide, welcomes the task of providing revolutionary leadership to the climate catastrophe movement, connecting it to racism, sexism, imperialist war and the class struggle. The best hope for humanity is the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism throughout the world. Only then can we build a sustainable egalitarian economy that eliminates unchecked capitalist greed forever. Join us.

This coming October 17 marks the 163nd anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry. A multiracial group of abolitionists led by John Brown wanted to spark an uprising against slavery that would spread throughout the South. It was a revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle! The fight against racist terror continues with the rebellions sparked by police murders this summer. As workers recognize the power of unity, the cops crack down harder on protests.

The Southern enslaving class was terrified by the Harpers Ferry raiders’ militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:

I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-Slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter.

From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery
This trust among white and Black fighters did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted 
on him, influencing Brown forever.
 He believed Black and white workers were completely equal. He put 
this knowledge into action daily.

As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, N.Y., near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).

Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, reaching out to Black abolitionists and former enslaved workers.

Tubman single-handedly freed 300 enslaved workers
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown allies. Born around 1820 to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her “owner” tried selling her as “damaged goods.” Instead she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.

Over the following 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made approximately 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. This resolute, daring revolutionary declared, “I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger.” Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as “General Tubman.” Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.

Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harpers Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.

Black rebels petrified enslavers
To those today who say workers won’t fight oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal. The enslavers, although talking of “docile” Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of “outside agitators.” They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved work- ers and to keep Yankees and abolitionist literature away from them.

Today the “outside agitators” are Progressive Labor Party (PLP) communists, fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us that the impoverished working class is too ground down, too alienated to fight back collectively, saying workers hate communism. Yet they organize cops, plant security, the Minutemen, Black nationalists and sellout union “leaders” to try to keep communists out, and instantly fire them when they’re discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if the working class is supposed to be so passive?

Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds are able to overcome the “natural” segregation capitalist society promotes. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.

Today, U.S. capitalism has created its own contradictions. Workers still often live in neighbor- hoods separated by “race” but many are integrated within their workplaces and schools. The bosses try to divide us there as well, with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture to keep workers apart (e.g., soul “versus” country music). Nevertheless, workers rub shoulders every day. Class-conscious workers in PLP must develop these acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.

Class struggle trumps racism
As in Tubman and Brown’s time, racism permeates society. But rebellions and strikes reveal multiracial unity and struggle against the bosses. At the Smithfield Ham Factory in Tarheel, NC, for example, a 15-year unionization fight witnessed intense intimidation from the bosses to scare workers from signing union cards. But by organizing support from grocery workers from far and wide, Smithfield workers felt part of a larger community. When the bosses got immigration agents to raid the plant, targeting Latin workers for deportation, the workers saw through this divisive trick and, in November 2006, 500 marched out in a two-day strike protesting this raid, forcing the company to rehire all the fired immigrant workers!

In 2008 in the Bronx, NY, the Stella D’Oro workers went on strike for 11 months. These immigrant workers from across the world, men and women, overcame differences and stuck together. Not one worker crossed the picket line! PLP had organized friends, comrades, teachers and students onto the picket lines, bringing solidarity and communist leadership. PLP members steadfastly stood in solidarity with the strikers via donations, rallies and marches, and supported their fight against plant closure. The fight against police brutality is a protracted class war still being waged today. It is the same war left unfinished by Tubman and Brown. This summer PLP joined the militant anti- racist fightback against the kkkops, who in less than a year’s time, stole the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake, and countless others. The multiracial character of these protests are glimmers of the revolutionary potential of the working class.

John Brown’s raid and Harriet Tubman’s courage in freeing 300 slaves along the Underground Railroad teach us many lessons that are valuable to antiracists today. First, militancy was foremost in their thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to being a slave, that she would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Kansas, realized that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed with them, especially after the 1857 Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery nation-wide.

The second is that multiracial unity is essential in any fight. Black workers escaping from enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists to reach the North. Thousands of workers, Black and white, helped escaping slaves along their journeys and defended them when attacked by slave-catchers. These workers attended public meetings, donated money, passed word to their friends and helped harbor fugitive slaves.

PLP does similar things today. We discuss political struggles and the vital need for multiracial unity against the racist system with friends, coworkers and neighbors. We urge them to join in militant antiracist demonstrations, build a multiracial base with fellow workers or donate to CHALLENGE. Every time someone we know does one of these simple acts, they’re making a political commitment in the fight against racism, capitalism and imperialism, just as thousands of anti-slavery porters did against slavery—taking small steps to serve and defend those who had escaped slavery as well as those who fought it directly.

Join Progressive Labor Party
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in these struggles to join Progressive Labor Party. Today’s supporters of antiracist struggle understand — just as did the thousands backing Brown and Tubman 161 years ago — that revolutionaries, like the raiders then and PLP now, are the honest, reliable leaders in struggle. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. CHALLENGE constantly reports workers being won to militancy and multiracial unity in struggles against the racist bosses, hailing those joining our ranks. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other’s needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.

Fight vs anti-migrant racism grows
As reported in the last CHALLENGE, racists have been demonstrating against the housing of refugee asylum seekers in a former Catholic school on Staten Island. Led by attention-seeking “patriot” Scott LoBaido and supported by Staten Island politicians of both parties, the racists have been verbally attacking the refugees-many from Latin American and West African countries- with vile epithets, frightening some of them so much that they asked to be moved to a different shelter.

After a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member learned on Monday, August 28th, of the hate rally to be held on that evening, he notified the Party leadership, who quickly organized a pro-migrant support rally to confront the racists. More than 30 comrades and friends, including a couple of antiracists from the neighborhood, marched to the shelter, formerly St. John Villa School, chanting loudly in support of the refugees. Outside the shelter, we spoke on a bullhorn to let the migrants know that we were there to support them, not to attack them. We let the racists know that we were communists, and that we would be back in growing numbers.

The racists announced another hate rally for Tuesday, September 5th. Some Party members learned about the racists’ march from friends in Peace Action Staten Island (PASI). PASI endorsed the next migrant support rally to counter the racists. A leaflet was quickly disseminated. Antiracists from Staten Island and Brooklyn gathered at a predetermined location and marched to the rally point at the shelter. Again, we shouted encouragement to the refugees.

One of the talking points of the racists had been that there was a school with girls very near the shelter, and that they could be in danger from the male migrants. We discovered that an alumna of that school, St. Joseph Hill, had garnered over 200 alumni signatures on a petition supporting the migrants and condemning the racists. Then, on Thursday, September 7, a group of immigration organizers and  leaders of faith-based organizations attempted to hold a press conference outside the shelter in support of the refugees. According to news reports, the racists drowned them out so that few of them could be heard.

So, it appears that support for the migrants is growing on Staten Island, but the racists still dominate the scene. What is clear is that if it had not been for us communists in PLP, the racists would have had a clear field for their hate. We were the spark. Whenever racism and fascism rear their ugly heads, communists must organize to chop them off. To paraphrase what one of the participants in the latest rally said, “I just want to be able to come back with more numbers than they have!” That is what we will continue to build on Staten Island - an antiracist movement to shut the racists down.
*****

​​Big Fascists undermine workers’ education
At a community college in rural northwestern New Jersey, Sussex County Community College (SCCC), self-styled “progressive” administrators actively undermine front-line faculty members who fight for workers to receive a decent education.

In a resignation letter from the start of the fall semester, an accomplished student counselor outlined the problems at SCCC: 1) The condescending racism that the Latin counselor faced from his supposedly enlightened liberal colleagues, 2) Disconnected senior faculty and administrators who didn’t listen to faculty “below” them who actually interacted with students on a daily basis, 3) The lack of initiative to solicit student feedback — all pointing to one conclusion. Senior level faculty and administration at the college, who claim to be enlightened progressives, are more interested in their own careers than helping students.
This counselor had struggled heroically to keep working class students in school in spite of the horrendous material conditions that capitalism imposes on them. He succeeded against all odds -- only to have his more senior colleagues undermine him at every turn.

In a classic example of bourgeois individualism, other faculty members grew jealous of the relationships that he had worked so hard to cultivate with students. These more senior faculty demanded that he send more of his students to them for future counseling needs — regardless of who the students themselves actually wanted to talk to. When he refused, his supposedly “progressive” bosses at the College stripped his position of any student-facing activities, relegating this talented counselor to administrative busy work.

This, combined with the lack of support for front-line faculty who directly help students, the racism shown by more senior faculty towards an increasingly diverse student population, and the smug and condescending attitude towards his important mission to help working-class students, was too much for him to bear and he resigned.

While it’s sad to see such a talented staff member leave due to egregious burnout, his resignation letter points to a silver lining. It is the students and frontline faculty and staff themselves who can carry the struggle forward and secure decent education for workers in rural New Jersey. If they are unified in their cause and armed with the Party’s level of analysis and dedication, they will be unstoppable!
*****

Firefighters die defending the bosses profits: A tribute to Augie and Bear
On July 5th, two firemen from the Newark Fire Department were trapped and killed fighting a fire that started aboard a cargo ship bound for West Africa from Port Newark, NJ. The cargo ship was filled with over 1200 new and used cars and approximately 157 shipping containers (NJ Spotlight News).Augusto “Augie” Acabou and Wayne “Bear” Brooks entered the ship along with their captain and other firefighters. They reportedly found and extinguished the fire, but upon their way back out Augie and Bear became disoriented and trapped, and died.  The ship’s crew had been completely evacuated prior to the firefighters entering. There were no lives in danger aboard the ship, but firefighters were still sent in to risk their lives to protect burning cars that will likely be replaced. The families want answers.

At a tribute to the firefighter’s lives held at a shopping mall New Jersey on August 8, Bear’s widow stated “He went in there to put out a fire to save materialistic things, not a person, not a human being - materialistic things. And he never came home” (Abc7ny.com, 8/23).  

Urban firefighters are sent in to risk their lives to protect the bosses’ property and businesses.  In cities like Newark, fires occur predominantly in Black neighborhoods, many of which are neglected due to decades of class war against Black workers and gentrification led by self-serving politicians like Newark’s fake leftist mayor Ras Baraka.  Meanwhile, in wealthy communities, fire suppression systems are relatively efficient and adequate.
In a society led by and for the working class - a communist society - workers can take the lead on building the safest housing conditions to prevent fires from starting in the first place.  Workers can discuss how to approach extinguishing fires with minimal loss to human life and the damage to the environment.

Only a revolution led by the working class can bring about the freedom to do this. For all workers like Augie and Bear, for the countless firefighters that die every year protecting the property for the blood sucking landlord class and banks, workers must build a dedicated party whose primary objective is to smash capitalism and rid society of the profit system that will gladly exterminate the workers to preserve their wealth.
*****

Natural disasters or capitalist genocide?
Reading the editorial on the Maui fires, there seems to be a link between the wildfires in the forests of Canada. While these fires are labeled as ‘natural’ disasters, but the real issue is the capitalism and it’s continual  genocide of indigenous workers. Corporations and their sugar plantations played a large role in depleting the water sources, as sugar is a very water intensive crop. Water is crucial to Hawaiian cultural practices and they believed that water couldn’t be owned, that it belonged to all. I am seeing a connection between the fires in Maui and Canada and the forest fires that occurred in Brazil and Australia a few years ago. These fires led to the displacement of many indigenous communities. In the case of Brazil, the burning of the Amazon forest was set by the Brazilian ruling class to make way for their agribusiness. Prior to that, an Amazonian tribe had won a court case to halt the cutting down of the Amazon forest. If we’re going to discuss climate change, we need to include the role of indigenous workers and the ongoing legacy of colonialism into these topics.