“I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers…I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.”
— U.S. Maj. General Smedley Butler

The current crisis in Haiti is the consequence of more than 200 years of gangsterism by the U.S. and other capitalist powers.

• 1915-1934: Following the assassination of President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the U.S. invaded and seized control over Haitian finances in the name of “stability” for U.S. interests (Foreign Affairs, 12/1/22). Then it violently suppressed uprisings against the U.S. occupation.
• 1994: After decades of U.S. money, weapons, and troops to support the brutal, anti-communist Duvalier gang—which massacred as many as 60,000 people —President Bill Clinton sent 20,000 troops to Haiti under “Operation Uphold Democracy.”
• 2004:Partnering with France, Canada, and Chile, the U.S. invaded Haiti to escort President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out after the CIA orchestrated a coup to oust him (Guardian, 3/13/22). The troops remained until they were replaced by the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which became infamous for mass rape (Al Jazeera, 10/6/22). This 13-year occupation also brought a siege of cholera that killed 10,000 people and sickened more than 850,000 (AP News, 10/18/22).

THIS is what the capitalist bosses mean by “order” and “stability.” The working class in Haiti has fought back at every step. They fought enslavers, imperialists, super-exploitative industry bosses, the cholera-spreading MINUSTAH, and the Tonton Macoute death squads. Haiti is a harbinger of the rulers’ decay, an example of what’s to come as the worldwide crisis of capitalism deepens and intensifies. There are no certainties in this world, except one: Our class will continue to fight.

Baltimore, Maryland, November 30—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined about 40 students, faculty and community supporters to protest Johns Hopkins University’s plan for a $10 million private, armed police force. The day’s activities included a two-hour march through the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University (JHU), an evening vigil, and then a West Wednesday rally outside City Hall. During the campus march, a PLP member distributed 20 flyers and copies of CHALLENGE, and engaged in conversations about socialism, communism and the history of racist police murder in Baltimore.  Racism is a pillar of capitalist society and that includes universities. Over policing and murder by kkkops are glaring examples of racist attacks on all workers and students, Black and white. The whole capitalist system has to go.

That night’s West Wednesday rally condemned the recent police killing of Tyree Moorehead, the main creator of Baltimore’s “no shoot zones.” Some maintain that Mr. Moorehead was threatening a woman’s life with a knife, but the police shot him 14 times, continuing to shoot even after Mr. Moorehead, lying on the street, had rolled a distance away from the woman. This is yet another case of the police acting as judge, jury and executioner.

School kkkops enforce campus fascism
At the evening vigil, a member of PLP explained that armed campus police forces, starting at private universities in the 60s, were not created to protect the safety of students or neighboring community members, which Hopkins officials claim to be their goal. No, explained the speaker, the real reason was to enable universities to suppress powerful on-campus protests supporting civil rights, and opposing the imperialist war in Vietnam.

When Hopkins started their propaganda campaign, seeking to win Maryland State approval for an armed campus police force, Hopkins Students Against Private Police researched University statistics. Hopkins already had about 1,000 unarmed security guards. It turns out, for the year researched by the students, regarding “suspects” detained by campus security, 97 percent were Black, even though the student body includes only a small percentage of Black students. Hopkins has orchestrated this racial profiling, and now wants to put guns into the mix. Two students explained that, while the university claims to uphold “democracy,” it has consistently refused to listen to the majority of students, faculty and community who oppose an armed campus force.

History of students’ antiracist fightback
The struggle at Hopkins is not new. In 2018, militant rallies, a month-long take-over of the administration building, community petitions with thousands of names, and community groups - including West Wednesday – all strongly opposed the establishment of an armed force. Nevertheless, in 2019 Hopkins succeeded in getting the Maryland General Assembly to pass legislation allowing the university, medical complex, and Peabody Institute to move forward with a private, armed police force.
However, after the horrific death of George Floyd and the millions of people who stood strong against that racist police murder, Hopkins announced it would delay implementation of the armed force for two years. Now the time is up, and JHU – figuring the sit-in students and their supporters have largely graduated and gone – is moving forward again.

Still, anti-racist protestors disrupted hearings about this issue in September. Ongoing rallies, by students and community members, have demonstrated deep feelings against violent policing and the danger it poses, especially to Black and Latin students, and to nearby community residents.

Today’s rally and vigil started with a walkout at Gilman Hall. Speakers at checkpoints included a faculty member who recounted past attacks on student protests by the administration and campus security. Several students said they have been protesting for years against Hopkins’ plans for an armed force.

Can’t reform away police terror
Another parallel development is that the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) will soon be overseen by the Baltimore City government. Until now, for over a hundred years, it has been the State of Maryland that oversaw BPD. Some organizers see this as a reform that will lead to significant police accountability.

As communists, we understand that police brutality will continue under this system, no matter which level of government is in charge. This is because police terror is essential to capitalism, just as brutal slave catchers were essential to the institution of slavery. We will continue to fight against racist police murder, from Freddie Gray and Tyrone West, to the recent murder – by a security guard – of Kevin Torres in Baltimore. And we will continue to share our understanding of the need for multiracial unity, revolution, and the creation of a new egalitarian world with real sisterhood and brotherhood.

In 2022, the international working class faced what sometimes seemed like the darkest of nights.

January saw Covid-19 deaths soar above six million worldwide with no signs of slowing. In February, Russia invaded Ukraine in what may turn out to be the spark for World War III. The pink tide of liberalism continued to infect Latin America, with leaders opportunistically working both sides of the imperialist competition, cynically promoting all-class unity, nationalism, and identity politics while simultaneously escalating racist and sexist attacks. The Monkeypox epidemic, once again, magnified the gross inequalities of the racist, sexist capitalist for-profit healthcare system which is a disaster for our entire class, especially Black and women workers. Open racists made regional and national political gains in Italy, France, and the UK.  Monstrous imperialist monarch Queen Elizabeth II died amid pomp and mass mourning, despite seventy years of crimes against tens of millions of workers. And murders at the hands of the KKKops plagued our class.

Just as gutter racists in all their disguises seek to exploit and murder us, so do the liberal fascists of finance capital, led by the likes of Jim Crow Joe Biden. We fight to remember that these wolves in sheep’s clothing, with their false promises and manipulation of social issues like increased funding for racist cops, abortion, immigration and mass deportations, and student debt, present the biggest danger.

Yet, through this dark night of capitalist decay and low class unity, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and fellow workers continued to FIGHT BACK.

A new generation of communist leadership
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) kicked off the year with an Alabama Winter Project, in which an integrated group of  workers and students supported the ongoing Warrior Met Miners’ Strike. Hundreds of multiracial miners and the Women’s Auxiliary were open to our communist politics and set the tone for a year of Party fightback.

Across the U.S., students, teachers, and workers demanded that the bosses’ public schools take their health seriously. In Chicago, working-class youth took militant action as city bosses, Big Fascist Black Mayor Lori Lightfoot, representing the liberal, dominant wing of the ruling class,  and the sellout union bosses did nothing to stop Covid-19 infections and deaths on campuses.

At City University of New York (CUNY), ongoing struggles exposed that capitalist education administrators remain the lapdogs of the liberal Big Fascist wing of the capitalist class.
And as countless workers lost loved ones, and killer kkkops like Jason Van Dyke were set free, PLP continued to remind comrades that capitalism is at the root of the violence against our class. It is the capitalist bosses who attack us with poverty and police terror, disproportionately targeting Black and Latin neighborhoods.

In New Jersey, our Party has been a thorn in the side of Newark's Big Fascist Mayor Ras Baraka by keeping the Rodwell-Spivey fight alive. Our fightback has gotten bogus felony charges against the  brothers reduced to misdemeanors, and we’ll continue to fight until they’re completely dropped.

PL’ers and friends declared there are NO GOOD MAYORS, COPS OR POLITICIANS! The only way to defend against attacks on our class by liberal misleaders like Baraka is to build toward communist revolution.

Rising inflation and an unsustainable cost of living had workers worldwide unable to meet their families’ basic needs. July saw Panama face one of its biggest protests in decades, spurred by rising food and fuel prices (LA Times, 7/19/22). Britain remains in the midst of one of its biggest strikes in recent years, with over 200,000 workers demanding better pay and working conditions (CNN Business 11/15/22).

In Greece, a 24-hour general strike called by private- and public-sector unions was set to shut down most services around the country (ABC News 11/8/22).

And in Belgium, authorities were forced to reduce airport capacity by 70 percent to avoid disruption from a strike (Crisis 24 12/10/22).

When workers of the world unite we can bring this racist capitalist system to a halt.

Shut this racist system down!
Liberal fascism looms ahead of WWIII, but working class solidarity prevails.

In 2022, both wings of the ruling class continued to splinter–particularly in the U.S., as the Big Fascists struggled to discipline themselves and the more openly racist Small Fascists as capitalism spiraled into deeper crisis.

One year after the assault on the Capitol by loyalists of Donald Trump, the vicious battle between the two factions of U.S. capitalism continues to grow hotter. In January, the Big Fascists took a clear step toward full-blown fascism by establishing a new federal unit to target “domestic terrorism.” Just one month later, we witnessed the old liberal world order disintegrated even further and the Russian capitalist bosses invaded Ukraine.

In this period, when capitalism is descending to a new level of hell, it is imperative for our class and PLP to forge a new way forward by smashing the rotten profit system with communist revolution.

In November, over 100 protestors rallied in defiance of a possible U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti.
Hundreds of thousands in Sri Lanka joined a protest movement storming the Presidential palace and chasing the president out of the country.

In response to the floods in Pakistan, PLP organized medical camps with the help of friends and is trying to build a base among displaced workers.

In Colombia, thousands of workers, enraged by the breakdown of public services, tax hikes, a plan to privatize health care, and five-plus decades of civil war, mounted mass demonstrations. where workers and youth and PLP fought alongside our class siblings  in the trenches, injecting the struggle with revolutionary politics every step of the way.

Changing the course of imperialist wars is a monumental task, but it is something our class has done before. We must attack head-on the nationalism and racism being spread among our class by the bosses.

Who’s day? Our day!
No year in review would be complete without MAY DAY - OUR DAY!

It’s a day when workers from across the globe march to commemorate our triumphs, propelled by a vision of a world without exploitation, without capitalist borders, and run by the working class.

We march for the universal demands of all workers: against imperialist war, against racism and sexism, for the unity of immigrant and citizen workers, against wage slavery, against fascist police terror, and for the communist solution to all these attacks facing the international working class.

PLP celebrated May Day internationally and then carried that same fighting spirit to our Party’s annual Summer Project, which centered around two major events: a march in in Brooklyn to protest the 2012 murder of Shantel Davis by police detective Phil Atkins, and the imprisonment of Justin Rodwell and the legal attacks on his family in Newark. The project was a show of resistance against the bosses and their enforcers, an unapologetic expression of the Party’s politics.

Only solution is communist revolution!
Our rallying cry is for international working-class consciousness and solidarity. Our marching orders are to turn the guns around, to transform inter-imperialist war into communist revolution.

Our fightbacks of the past year offer glimmers of hope that the international working class will one day be the human race. With this unwavering faith in our class, scores of workers, students, and soldiers fight for communist revolution, workers’ dictatorship, and a world free of the profit system’s horrors.

Workers of the world unite! Organize in the workplace, in mass organizations, with friends and family.
Look to our class brothers and sisters who have shut down trains, planes, and profit streams.
Smash racist chains and organize for one solution, and one solution only:
A communist revolution!

BRONX, NY, December 12– Before court officers brought kkkop/Corrections Officer and murderer Dion Middleton into court on Nov. 16, they wanted a word with the block of 18 supporters that packed the small Bronx courtroom. Looming over our group and looking directly at the mother of Raymond Chaluisant (the victim of Middleton’s racist rampage), they said they didn’t want any trouble. No one could make any moves toward Middleton, or make any noise while he was escorted in or during his appearance in front of the judge.

No one could express any emotion, they said, “no matter how you feel.” You could feel the threat of violence in their words. But there was also great fear. Because the bosses and their minions know something we must keep reminding ourselves: the working class is mighty, and if we rise up, we can overthrow them and their racist profit system!

After this stern lecture, the racist murderer was escorted into the courtroom (and later, back out again) flanked by armed bodyguards, in a display that showed both the power and panic of the state (the government).

This was but one of the lessons we have learned during our campaign as we fight this case and support the family of Raymond Chaluisant. This  18-year-old was gunned down in the street this past July in a hit-and-run by off-duty kkkop Middleton for allegedly playing with a toy water gun.

We communists know that, if we fight to build our movement, the days of racist police terror are numbered and can one day be extinguished forever. Even our relatively small group that day had the power to disrupt court and to broadcast the contempt that millions of workers have for the bosses’ criminal injustice system.

We were appearing in court alongside Raymond’s family to make a clear statement that the working class is watching these proceedings. Middleton, who is a Black corrections officer, is one of the few kkkops to be charged after murdering a Black or Latin youth or worker. But we aren’t kidding ourselves: even if he is convicted, which—even for such an egregious (extreme) criminal act as a hit-and-run, is not guaranteed—it will do nothing to change the nature of the police or corrections officers, whose job it is to “enforce” the racist capitalists’ anti-worker laws.

You can’t reform the police!
As communists, we have come to understand that we can never reform the police to somehow serve the working class. Our study of the history of capitalism and the police (including in these pages of CHALLENGE) exposes how slaveowning plantation owners in the Antebellum South formed the original police patrols to capture escaped slaves, and how factory bosses in the industrial age of the late 1800s and early 1900s expanded the cop’s role to break strikes, and, always, to quell (put down) rebellions. From post Civil War times and continuing to this day, cops were intimately involved in building and protecting the Ku Klux Klan (often occupying leadership positions)—which is why we use the nickname kkkops! Many of those right-wing fascists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—not to make revolution but to stage a fascist coup—were members or former members of law enforcement.

We continue to study history to learn the invaluable lessons from every struggle we involve ourselves in so we can improve our work to build our revolutionary movement to liberate the working class. We may be students or home health aides or transit workers or teachers, but we can all become professional revolutionaries and communist organizers.

The bosses are terrified of the power of the working class
We see over and over again, from the bosses’ fascist response to the freight railroad workers (see editorial, p. 2), or to anti-racist students at Kingsborough Community College (see CHALLENGE, 11/30 and 12/14), the bosses use their laws and stormtrooper kkkops to attempt to control the working class. They do this because they know they are outnumbered. They know their sick exploitative profit system is diametrically opposed to the needs of the working class. But they don’t care!

So they train their kkkops, their politicians, even their teachers and social workers, to fall in line and enforce their rules and laws that serve their interests.

We need to learn from this essential fact! Like the Kingsborough students have shown, when the working class unites in militant, multi-racial action, we are unbeatable!  

Our campaign to support Raymond Chaluisant’s family has been modest, but we should not underestimate its importance. We have had multiple Saturday demonstrations and marches in the neighborhood where he lived. We have spread the word, passing out leaflets, taking turns speaking on the bullhorn, and distributing hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE. We have also been reaching out to the family, offering practical support and sharing our vision for a different world.

Our work is important enough that the court is afraid of us; there’s our proof!

Smashing racist police terror: a lifelong struggle
Some of us in our group have a lifetime of struggle going back decades. We have seen over and over the same MO (pattern): kkkops murder and the bosses explain it away. Once in a while, as if to throw a dog a bone, the rulers do discipline one of the kkkillers (and then, often an Asian cop, or a Black cop like Middleton, easier to scapegoat), and make a cosmetic change or two. But as we saw in the wake of the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd protests, these “reforms” are often reversed (by the liberal Big Fascists (see page 6), it should be noted) in the very next breath. And their racist terrorizing and murder of the working class? They don’t stop!

Even if they convict Middleton and send him to prison, they can never bring Raymond back, and they cannot stop their terrorizing of the working class, because the bosses NEED the kkkops to terrorize us. When they say “protect and serve,” they mean serve their racist profit system!

But good luck trying to pacify us: we know better! In our experience, many families of slain youth and workers have become active in the struggle for a better world; some have joined Progressive Labor Party. We must acknowledge the profound trauma and cost of losing a loved one in such a shocking and vicious manner. As we continue trying to support Raymond’s family in every way we can, we have become more resolute as a collective to marshal our forces and continue the struggle for a communist world.

When Middleton has his next court appearance on Wednesday, Dec. 21, we will be there, and we plan to continue organizing in the neighborhood. As our international communist movement continues to grow, we will increasingly give the bosses of the world and their cronies something to REALLY be afraid of: communist revolution!