New York City, May 18–Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades joined 300 workers and students in a powerful march sponsored by Make the Road NY in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We were protesting against high rents, displacement and evictions in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Comrades connected with many friends in the march and on the streets. The demand of the organization and politicians who spoke was that the state legislature pass “Good Cause” legislation. “Good Cause,” if passed, would supposedly mean that landlords across New York state with buildings with less than six apartments can’t evict or raise rents dramatically without good cause.
                
Migrants not our enemies
As we marched, comrades chanted with the marchers and distributed 150 CHALLENGE papers about May Day around the world and 200 PLP leaflets  demanding low rent housing for all homeless people in shelters and arriving migrants. New York City is now housing new migrants in the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, paying the hotel owners $200 a night per room! The liberal bosses and their lackey politicians in NYC are deviously using these migrants to divide the working class and to distract us from the real enemies (the capitalists). The same way racism affects the entire working class, so does unemployment, which the bosses use in order to bring down wages for the entire working class, including for white workers. We can’t let the bosses divide us and that’s why all workers need to unite, Black, Latin, Asian and white. The bosses want to use migrants as  scapegoats and want to blame them for their problems, but we need to direct our anger against the capitalist bosses.

Reform is never enough
Marchers enthusiastically took CHALLENGE and our leaflets which stated, “Workers need power, not crumbs! A worldwide system that won’t provide jobs, housing and healthcare for the working class doesn’t deserve to exist. The working class needs to destroy capitalism with revolution. We need a system that will collectively and globally eliminate exploitation, war, racism and sexism. We need communism, community in its essence.”
                                                    
The contradiction between reform and revolution was on display. While desperate, angry workers support reform, they know from experience that even if “Good Cause” is passed by the state government, it will largely be ignored by the landlords without long, drawn out cases in landlord court.

“Why are so many politicians speaking?” asked a participant.

“To direct and control the workers’ movement,” answered a comrade.

“Why can’t they pass a law forcing the landlords to open up empty buildings and apartments the landlords are holding?” a friend asked.

“Landlords are part of the capitalist ruling class and dominate all aspects of our lives,” the comrade answered. Some workers say the fight for reforms is a step toward revolution. That’s an illusion. There is no peaceful transition from reform to revolution. PLP’s role is to participate in the reform fight while sharpening the revolutionary side of the contradiction. It’s happening now!

Here in Colombia the new government of Gustavo Petro has managed to curb the militancy of the workers, who are waiting for the campaign promises that will never be fulfilled. Our class must not fall for the illusions of change and postpone our revolutionary communist fight in favor of parliamentary and electoral illusions.

Meanwhile, the movement behind former president Alvaro Uribe has not resigned itself to losing its power. It tries to channel the phony promises of the new government and the discontent over the measures that affect the workers into backing their faction. They make statements appealing to easing the cost of living, health and education. They even call for mobilization against the new government.

Some from the former Uribe government even speak of coup intentions and audios have been published that would support these rumors. Although they currently do not have the strength to prepare a coup attempt, with their rhetoric of hate and war they are gaining the support of warmongering soldiers. They are also training their drug-trafficking gangs and even pay vulnerable migrant workers to carry out violent provocations during their rallies and demonstrations, attacking those who disagree.

The current government -- seconded by their congress and union misleaders -- have called to the streets to “support the reforms” without even publishing the content of said reforms. This is because they prefer to arrange things with capitalists and other class enemies, negotiating for the approval of capitalist development “with a human face.” In reality, their reforms are not radical at all but this wing has succeeded in blunting the militancy of workers here nevertheless. The ability of these social fascists to deceive our class while attacking us even harder than the gutter fascists is what makes them more dangerous. We are being called to take to the streets to support and defend the government’s reforms which in fact means mobilizing to support capitalism, wage slavery, racism and private property.

We in PLP are convinced of the need to destroy the current capitalist society entirely. We are committed to root changes that really point towards the structural solution of the problems of the workers, the poor and the oppressed. The reforms proposed by the Government will continue to preserve the privileges of the powerful, which are in turn arranged and haggled over and over again in Congress, with the exploitative capitalists along with representatives of US imperialism. No workers’ or youth input is seriously considered regarding the true nature of this society.

While they make us promises and call us to support their projects, the cost of living skyrockets, wages stagnate, and police continue to kill with impunity. More than 300 young people and workers remain in prison for participating in the struggles of the recent years. Figures report that there is 58% “informality,” that is, unemployment, and millions more with racist contracts of super-exploitation.

The demands that we need from below are not going to come from the negotiation with the bosses and imperialists. The demands for health, employment, wages, the destruction of racism and sexism will not be resolved by concerting to preserve bourgeois and political interests. The streets should be ours, but not to defend the government, much less to support fascism. The streets must be reoccupied to fight in revolutionary unity, to resolve the demands and needs demanded in the multiple popular uprisings.

For more than 20 years we have been supporting different types of workers’ struggle, making space for discussion, and building a base of friends and readers for communism. The current struggles of the farm workers, drivers, builders, the unemployed, housing workers, women’s organizations, students, and sports clubs must unite in a great solidarity struggle to achieve revolutionary class consciousness, advancing the revolutionary process. The anger of the workers has a growing understanding that the profit system of destroys the life of the workers all over the world by radicalizing the current struggles from Peru to France to England and beyond.

Our newspaper CHALLENGE gives us the understanding of what these battles are about; our task is to create a mass base for communism by helping new leaders emerge and fighting to destroy capitalism and its racist, sexist wage system! We have no other choice –Join us!

Washington, DC, May 6-8–PLers met with antiracist fighters from across the U.S. at The University of California Washington Center for a 3-day abolitionist conference. Conference organizers brought together theorists, students and organizers working to abolish police, prisons, ICE, racist child “protective” services, and other institutional structures that capitalism has built to attack and repress the working class.

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members led a panel on abolishing capitalism, the undergirding of all repressive institutions of the capitalist state. We do not just want to abolish or outlaw capitalism, we want the system fully smashed and guaranteed to never be introduced back into existence. In order to crush capitalism and its state, we need many of these serious organizers in attendance to join a revolutionary fighting party, the PLP, in order for it to grow and lead class struggle against the ruling class. This strategy is really the only way to achieve the abolitionist goals they so fervently desire.

To abolish cops, we must abolish capitalism
Participants in the conference were extremely open to a revolutionary perspective. Many already had this idea, but were not sure how to develop it further. Even two of the keynote speakers agreed, when questioned from the audience by a PLP member, that a revolutionary party was needed to achieve abolitionist goals. You just cannot abolish capitalist institutions without abolishing capitalism!

PLP maintained a literature table throughout the conference. In addition to CHALLENGE, the table featured flyers and information about many of the mass organizations in which PLP is active. The fight for justice for William Green and other Black workers murdered by the police and numerous public health struggles were featured.

Over 40 participants received CHALLENGE from the table and from other comrades throughout the conference and many connections were made. Many of these fighters are already engaged in various forms of class struggle.We will continue to make ongoing connections with these fighters, and try to win them to our radical abolitionist vision of society– a communist world rid of the capitalist ruler’s racist and sexist kkkops, kkkourts, and prisons.

While the Joe Biden administration has ended the use of Title 42, a public health law that was perverted to stop migrants from claiming asylum in the U.S., the criminal abuse of immigrant workers at the border with Mexico continues unabated. Liberal racist Biden is following in the lethal footsteps of open racist Donald Trump and deporter-in-chief Barack Obama. The crisis of capitalism that displaces workers from their homes is only getting worse. Whoever gets elected as the next capitalist stooge in the White House won’t change that hard reality. Only communism—a new society run by and for the working class—can end this mass misery.

Breaking his campaign promise to create a humane border, liar Biden has instead accelerated deportations by adding a transit ban. His new policy requires proof that a migrant has tried and failed to get asylum from a country they passed through en route to the U.S.—in most cases Mexico, where the bosses refuse to provide safe conditions or a reasonable path to legal residency. Any migrants breaking this bogus rule can be deported summarily and blocked from reentering the U.S. for five years. These workers are forced into lives of utter instability and daily degradation, all for the ‘crime’ of trying to survive. The recent death of an 8 year old Honduran migrant girl, seeking ayslum on the Texas border after being denied medical assistance is just one of the many racist horrors committed by the liberal fascists on a daily basis (NBCnews.com, 5/19)

The cages Obama built are still full of migrant workers and families, with more than four thousand people a day booked into immigration detention centers (Washington Post, 5/19). Undocumented workers are sorted for immediate deportation or bused to inhumane conditions in mass shelters. They sleep on police station floors with no beds in Chicago, or in “respite centers” without showers in New York (Chicago Sun Times, 5/1). Terrorizing migrants coerces them to take jobs with low wages and to accept potential pathways to citizenship that enforce loyalty to the bosses, often by joining their military.

As the bosses’ profit system crumbles all around us, the international working class continues to bear the brunt of its failure. The migrant crisis is part of a broader crisis of global capitalism. Sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry and the war in Ukraine have made the situation even more desperate for the working class.

We, the communists of the Progressive Labor Party, affirm that workers have no borders. We must fight back against racism, nationalism, and the bosses’ brutal attacks against migrant workers. In unity with the international working class, we are building an international communist movement that will smash the bosses’ borders with communist revolution.

Workers uprooted by capitalism
Immigrant workers have been uprooted by the misery generated by capitalism–by unemployment and hunger, by criminal gangs in league with the bosses, by the violence perpetuated by this ruthless system. In countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Honduras, workers have long been struggling under extreme poverty. Over the last three years, with jobs lost to the COVID pandemic and living standards eroded by inflation, conditions have gone from bad to horrific.

The working class in the U.S. has not been spared. In New York City, the world’s greatest center of wealth, half the population lacks adequate income to meet basic needs (Citizens Committee for Children of New York).

To divert workers from the reality of the disaster of the profit system, the bosses are criminalizing poverty and displacement. Their targets are the homeless or those forced to make a dangerous trek across thousands of miles to find work. These are the people that capitalism deems most expendable. The racist rulers have sent the message, and the most racist elements of the working class are following their lead. Jordan Neely was murdered on a New York subway for demanding food. To protect the real estate developers’ profit margins, people without homes are refused shelter in liberal-run cities where hundreds of thousands of apartments sit empty (City Limits, 11/17/22). In fact, there are 28 vacant homes for every homeless person in the U.S. (United Way, 3/28).

Bosses’ economy depends on undocumented labor
Capitalists ignore borders every day. They freely span the globe to fight their wars and to exploit workers and raw materials. They use borders to restrict or expand the numbers of migrant workers allowed into their countries, as their shifting economic needs demand. Meanwhile, workers are held prisoner by these arbitrary dividing lines, and used as cheap labor and cannon fodder in the bosses’ wars.

Even as the bosses attack immigrant workers across the globe, they cynically rely on undocumented labor to extract profits. Whole sectors of the U.S. economy would fall apart without undocumented labor: “The vast majority (96.7%) of Mexican undocumented workers are working and contributing to the economy and are vital to critical American industries including agriculture (11.5 percent of the workforce), construction (6.7 percent), and the tourism and hospitality sector (3.4 percent)” (New American Economy Report, 3/8/2021).

One hallmark of capitalism in crisis is rising fascism, as the bosses seek to scapegoat certain workers for the system’s spiraling failures. Trump and his billionaire backers built a movement on attacking immigrant workers. Now that Biden and his band of liberal Democrats and their own billionaire backers find themselves pathetically unable to alleviate the crisis, they are out-Trumping Trump in their racist anti-migrant attacks. The bosses can’t admit that capitalism cannot possibly serve workers’ needs. As the world spins toward global war, they will become increasingly vicious and organized in their assaults.

One international working class
The capitalist bosses have carved up the world through war and genocide. They build nationalism to enlist the working class to defend the lines that imprison and divide us. Every national border has been drawn with workers’ blood. By keeping workers fighting each other, the ruling class ties us to their thieving, murderous rule.  The time has come to erase the bosses’ borders and to unite the international working class. The time has come to smash racism, sexism, and nationalism–to smash capitalism itself.

PLP knows that migrant workers are a critical element in this fight. They have deep knowledge of the horrors of capitalism from their own experience. They possess unlimited potential to turn their collective power to endure into a force for revolution. We must unite with migrant workers wherever we are.

Workers everywhere, on all sides of all borders, suffer from the exploitation, incompetence, and brutality of capitalism, from its callous indifference to human life. Communism means abolishing all nations. It means serving one world, one Party, one international working class. Join us!