Staten Island, NY, April 12—Against all odds, Amazon workers in New York dared to struggle, and won! United—Black, Latin, Asian, white—these young workers have formed the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), an independent union representing the workers in an Amazon shipping warehouse  on Staten Island. While politicians, reaching up to President Joe Biden, and so-called labor leaders now congratulate the new union and pledge their support, they were almost nowhere to be found as the workers began and carried through their struggle. While unions are not the solution for liberating workers from capitalism, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) applauds the workers’ integrated fightback at Staten Island’s Amazon shipping warehouse The commitment to their fellow workers is emblematic of how  strikes and organizing become schools for communism. Until our international revolution is won, these lessons are hugely beneficial to our political growth and movement.
Whether the new union will get the support they need or mere lip service is now the question. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon giant has already begun its campaign to get the union election results thrown out and a new election held. Whether Amazon succeeds or not, the ALU then faces the challenge of getting Amazon to the table to bargain fairly for the contract provisions the workers are demanding - safer, better, more humane working conditions and wages high enough to support a family.
Workers of the world unite
At a rally before  the election, one of the ALU leaders said that as he suffered the horrid working conditions in the warehouse, he at first asked why no one could  help him and his fellow workers. Then, he realized that it was not a question of an outside savior. It was up to him and the others directly affected to begin and struggle through until they won what they needed, not allowing racist and sexist ideas to divide them. That is a lesson that all workers ought to take to heart. We need to rely on each other, not phony politicians who want photo-ops  and our votes, or labor misleaders that want to co-opt us and suck up dues money.
The ALU is rightly trying to extend its organizing efforts to other Amazon locations, and Amazon will fight them tooth and nail. The NLRB has ruled in the union’s favor and certified the election, as Biden and the rulers he represents are trying to put on a worker-friendly face. What the ALU has to realize is that the government, the state, and its organs like the NLRB are not neutral. The United States is controlled by a capitalist class, and its institutions will always bend to the capitalists’ will.
 Amazon and all other companies exist for one purpose: to make profits. To make profits, employers MUST exploit their workers. Currently, Bezos is a better exploiter, hence his staggering wealth. In the struggle against the Amazon bosses, ALU workers learned that to get what they needed, they had to fight for it  themselves. The next lesson to be learned is that to get and KEEP what they need, Amazon workers and all workers must fight to destroy the capitalist exploiters and replace their system with communism, a system run by and for workers to fulfill workers’ needs, not to generate profits for a few.
The Progressive Labor Party is organizing workers and students worldwide  with just that goal in mind. Join us!

 This is part five of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s, Spain’s urban bourgeoisie (capitalists), supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States.
But, in defending the Republic, they were defending capitalists. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists.
In the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go, and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership are essential. Without their leadership, our  class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism. The following continues that story:

Admiral Kilpatrick was born in Denver on February 20, 1898. His father worked first as a cowboy in Oklahoma and then as a miner in Colorado. When Admiral was six years old, his father got a job with a steel company and moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio. Kilpatrick’s father was a Socialist, and his son accompanied him to political meetings when he was as young as 12 years old.
He eventually joined the Socialist party and, when he was 19 years old, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). After high school he worked in mills, foundries, electrical shops, and lumber camps.  Kilpatrick joined the Army during World War I and served in France as a mechanic. Kilpatrick worked with the union in the 1919 Cleveland steel strike, in which the companies brought in thousands of Black workers to serve as strikebreakers.
Kilpatrick joins the CP
Kilpatrick joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1928. In 1931 the Party sent him to study at the International Lenin School in the Soviet Union. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he returned to the United States and helped organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO - a communist-led  union) and the unemployed movement (also led by communists).
While the CP became a tremendous reform organization during the Great Depression, unfortunately, it gave up the fight for a communist revolution. So all the evils of capitalism are still with us today, from racist killings by the bosses’ cops to homelessness and  looming nuclear world war.
Before World War II, Kilpatrick went to fight in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists. He served in a transport unit, as an ambulance driver, and in an intelligence unit. While working as a frontline driver, Kilpatrick was wounded by shrapnel from an aerial bombardment.
Back in the U.S., he resumed his union activities becoming president of Local 735 of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. In the late 1940s the union was expelled from the CIO for being dominated by communists. The liberal capitalists were starting to take back whatever reforms the CP was able to win in the 1930s. Kilpatrick was called before congressional investigators during  the Red Scare of the 1950s. He refused either to name other communists or to take the Fifth Amendment.
Kilpatrick: CP "gives up the class struggle”
Kilpatrick remained a committed Marxist. He was expelled from the CP “because I wasn’t going to go along with the fact [that] now all of a sudden you can build a Party with all classes.” His problems with Party leadership had begun during the Popular front , a coalition of working-class and middle-class parties. The very idea that the Party “was carrying on the traditions of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Douglass,” in Kilpatrick’s opinion, was “a lot of bull.” He told an interviewer:

Any Party or grouping that calls itself communist, gives up the class struggle, and won’t follow the road of Marxism-Leninism is completely out of step with what is going on in the world today. The revisionists, the scabs and sectarians have no answers to any questions in today’s class struggle.

In the late 1950’s, Kilpatrick, along with fellow Spanish Civil War veteran Harry Haywood, was involved in the short-lived Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party, aiming to found a new, revolutionary communist party. They were not successful, but in the 1960’s another group of CP members left to form Progressive Labor Movement, which today is the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Join us.
Admiral Kilpatrick in his own words:

In the class struggle you can’t stay in it when it’s good and jump out and leave it when it’s bad. You go all the way …
I don’t have to have no damn praise … about going to Spain ... But I wasn’t doing it just for Spain alone. … I was doing it because I was a member of the movement that believes in that type of struggle ... I was a Communist. A Communist fights oppression, and they fight tyranny everywhere.
As far as I was concerned, this was the only way that the common man was to have anything, was to carry out these types of actions. My understanding of the world and its problems is based on Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.
I’ve been in jail so goddamn many times, I thought I was living in jail. You get in jail for demonstrations, you get in jail for standing up in strikes, violating strike regulations about how many pickets you can have ...
But in the class struggle you can’t stay in it when it’s good and jump out and leave it when it’s bad. You go all the way. They send you to jail,what difference does it make? People have died for causes and things.

Kilpatrick continued his organizing even into retirement, serving as the chairman of the tenants’ committee in his retirement home. He never found the organization that would, as he put it, “go all the way.” Well, in the Progressive Labor Party we do want to “go all the way.” Whatever fightback you are involved in, join us and integrate the fight for communist revolution to your struggle. Let’s “go all the way!”
Source: http://alba-valb.org

I’m excited for May Day!
I was excited to see the announcement for May Day in the April 13 issue of the paper and hear workers’ voices extolling  its importance to them.
I went to my first May Day march in 1986. I was 22 years old. It was my first real political demonstration and it blew my mind. Never before had I seen people from so many different backgrounds united in common struggle. We marched as one force: militant, resolute, enthusiastic! It was thrilling and invigorating, a taste of workers’ power.
I met people who came from many different countries, spoke different languages and had different customs, but who all realized that our world is gripped by a system that has utterly failed, and were unafraid to say, “Capitalism’s gotta go!”
This year May Day is more important than ever as we confront yet another major imperialist war that threatens to erupt into world war. Bosses worldwide spend so much time and effort sowing nationalist divisions among the working class. But International Workers’ Day is OUR day! It’s our time to announce our presence throughout the world. WE ARE THE MIGHTY, UNITED WORKING CLASS!
Thank you, CHALLENGE, for continuing, in every issue, to hammer home the reality that capitalism cannot serve the needs of the world’s workers and that the only true solution is communism. We have a lot to learn on this road, but we truly have A WHOLE WORLD TO WIN. March on May Day!
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We exposed imperialist drive in Ukraine war
My comrades and I in the DC-Baltimore area recently held a Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  cadre school. Three of us led it, although it was a full Party effort. Because of the current Ukraine conflict, we discussed imperialism, militarism, and racism. While I tend to get nervous with public speaking, I know it is important to practice speaking. The audience consisted of about 30 people, 10 of whom were friends of PL. We were able to record all the presentations to  share with workers who couldn’t make it. PL’ers and friends  alike were receptive to our message, offered great feedback, and asked engaging questions.
My presentation on imperialism showed how it is the logical extension of finance capitalism. Another comrade showed how the military industrial complex was self-perpetuating and how the capitalist U.S. military is oppressive. The last presentation demonstrated how racism played an integral role in propaganda, justifying war and attempting to convince people how wars are or are not justified, based on a given boss’s interest.
Then, we broke into small discussion groups. We discussed how, while it may appear that workers in the imperial core benefit from imperialism, it ultimately hurts all workers because it divides the working class and prevents communist revolution.
Finally, we applied our knowledge to the conflict in Ukraine in a discussion. The conflict is due to a variety of rival capitalist pursuits, fueled by NATO expansion, Ukrainian International Monetary Fund debt, and the 2014 coup in Ukraine (facilitated by the U.S.).
Meanwhile Russia is still an imperialist power that escalated the conflict. We also talked about the importance to the U.S. imperialists of the strength of the U.S. dollar and how this conflict is undermining it.  
There is not a workers’ side in this conflict. We need to build the working-class voice  through communist revolution.
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World war is coming
The war in Ukraine shows that U.S. imperialism is declining relative to Russian and Chinese imperialism. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin pointed out that wars to divide and redivide the world are inevitable so long as capitalism exists. At the moment, the U.S. is the preeminent imperialist power, and the dollar reigns supreme. Any country that dares to deviate from subservience to U.S. domination is bombed to total destruction or starved with sanctions. But the U.S. has not won a war since WWII and now it has to prepare for war with China and it must have allies.
The U.S. depends on NATO members, all without exception dependent on Russian energy and raw materials. Now imperialist bosses in  Russia  have required the bosses in Europe  to pay for fuel with rubles (see editorial, page 2). The sanctions imposed on Russia have resulted in a major threat to the dollar’s hegemony [dominance].
U.S. imperialism needs the war in Ukraine in preparation for WWIII. The longer they can prolong this war, the more false flag Russian “atrocities” they and their NAZI allies can create, and the better their chance  to pry the Europeans free from Russian dependence.
Our Party must focus on the relationship between the war in Ukraine and the preparation for world war by the imperialist powers, especially the declining imperialist power, the U.S., a paper tiger with nuclear teeth, a giant with feet of clay.
We must emphasize the colossal racism underlying the news media response to the war in Ukraine and the Ukrainian refugees being welcomed in Poland while refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq freeze in the forests of Belarus. We must point out to our friends the incredible subservience of the mainstream media to U.S. imperialist lies and propaganda. And we must build the Party, the only hope for the working class to emerge victoriously.

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 Whether in Russia, China or the U.S., the capitalist bosses use the media to oppress, mislead, and manipulate the working class. In wartime, in particular, the media’s job is to sell the bosses’ lies and hide the ugly truth about imperialism. The historic task for Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the international working class is to turn inter-imperialist war into communist revolution for workers’ power. Workers have the capacity to do just that, but only if we reject the bosses’ fictions and are clear headed about what is really happening in the world.
In vilifying Putin and beating the drum for the victims of Russia’s invasion, the U.S. media isn’t helping the working class in Ukraine or anywhere else. In fact, it is just the opposite. Although the U.S. bosses are saying—for now—they want to prevent World War III, their goal is to build mass support for wider warfare to protect their profits against their imperialist rivals. While they may seem to have less formal control over television or newspapers or social media than in Russia or China, the liberal big fascists who own and run the mass media (with the exception of Fox) share the same class interests as ExxonMobil or JPMorgan Chase. Their phony claim of “objectivity”—an impossibility in class society—makes U.S. media more deceptive and even more dangerous. When push comes to shove—in Kuwait in 1991, in Iraq in 2003, in Ukraine in 2022—they guarantee that their “news” coverage serves the interests of finance capital.
Let’s look at three big lies the U.S. bosses’ media are spreading in their efforts to mobilize our class to die in their next global conflict.
Lie #1: The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a war crime and moral atrocity, far worse than the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or the U.S.-backed devastation of Yemen.
The U.S. ruling class media is working overtime to convince workers that nothing compares to the atrocities perpetrated by Russia on Ukraine. Images of maimed and murdered workers and children are heartrending. But coming from the U.S. bosses, who are guilty of the slaughter of millions upon millions, this is racist hypocrisy of the first order.
The U.S. bombed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq for decades. According to the Lancet, the top British medical journal, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq killed more than 600,000 people (10/11/06). After a United Nations official estimated that half a million young children in Iraq were killed by UN/U.S. sanctions, Madeleine (Died Too Late) Albright, a leading architect of U.S. imperialism, infamously defended this atrocity by calling it “…a very hard choice, but …the price is worth it.” What Albright left unstated were the stakes for the liberal fascist bosses: U.S. power in the Middle East and control over the region’s oil.
Today, as the media bombards us with blood-soaked images from Europe, a mostly overlooked war is raging on the Arabian Peninsula. Armed by the U.S., a Saudi-led coalition has killed over 375,000 people in Yemen (Al Jazeera, 2/9). The horrendous racism of U.S. news coverage couldn’t be more blatant. While workers are conditioned to identify with fair-skinned people in Ukraine, Muslim workers are either ignored or even blamed for their plight. The coverage of Ukraine is preparing us to die for U.S. imperialism.
Lie #2: The war in Ukraine proves that Putin is a madman who will stop at nothing.
Over and again, the U.S. media are screaming that Putin is an unhinged megalomaniac. But in reality, in the context of imperialist competition, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is completely logical. The Russian, U.S., and Chinese bosses are fighting to redivide the world’s resources and markets. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the U.S. bosses expanded NATO while denying Putin's request to join it—all to keep their military advantage. Now, with U.S. imperialism on the downslide after defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia is trying to claw back some of its old sphere of influence. Beyond Ukraine’s strategic location between Russia and Germany, the country is a critical source of wheat, natural gas, and metals like lithium, an essential element of electric car batteries.
Imperialists are driven to war not by psychosis, but by the drive for profit. By painting Putin as a madman who may soon turn to “weapons of mass destruction,” the U.S. bosses are laying the basis for their own use of nuclear weapons. Representing the only country in history to drop atomic bombs on a civilian population, President Joe Biden confirmed that the U.S. would not rule out a first-strike nuclear attack (dailymail.com, 3/26).  If the U.S. bosses are losing a conventional war with Russia or China, and they consider the stakes high enough, they won’t hesitate to press the nuclear button.
Lie #3: The fight to defend Ukraine is a noble war for democracy and Ukrainian national sovereignty.
The U.S. ruling class media has worked hard to build support for Ukrainian nationalism, which has been riddled with open fascism and anti-Jewish racism since the 1940s (huffpost.com, 12/25/14). The whole concept of nation states serves only the rulers who created them to define and protect their wealth. Nations are a disaster for the working class. They lead workers to identify with “their” bosses and to shed the blood of their class sisters and brothers in other countries. Our class has no side in an inter-imperialist war.
As President Joe Biden and the bosses’ media try to rally workers around a war for “democracy” versus “autocracy,” they don’t mention how the U.S. has subverted and overthrown democratically elected governments whenever its imperialist interests are threatened--in Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, Iran, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, just for starters. Then there’s Ukraine itself, where the current crop of bosses inherited power after President Viktor Yanukovych leaned too hard toward Russia and was kicked out in a coup the media now calls “The Revolution of Dignity.” The U.S. invested more than $5 billion to destabilize the Yanukovych government and pave the way for regime change (Counterpunch, 4/14/15).
Liberal democracy or Putin-style “autocracy” is a distinction without a difference. They both represent a dictatorship of the capitalist bosses. And they both lead to fascism and war. The ruling class will say and do anything to preserve their power. We must expose the truth and build the fight for communist revolution. Under communism, the media would serve the interests of the class that creates all value—the working class. Join us!