BROOKLYN, February 26—On a weekend afternoon in Flatbush, workers heard the chants of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) as war exploded on the European continent. “Asian, Latin, Black and white! Workers of the world, unite!” These words are now even more important to workers in Brooklyn to Kyiv to Yemen to Haiti. While workers from Haiti strike for increased wages in the bosses’ sweatshops, workers from Yemen live and die under U.S. made missiles and bombs, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians are fighting and dying to decide which bosses earn the right to exploit workers in Ukraine.
Attacks on workers are ramping up throughout the world. More than 20 members and friends of PLP chanted and marched in solidarity with our working-class sisters and brothers all over the world. We expressed anti-imperialist and internationalist politics and brought a message of revolutionary hope.
Not the nonsense coming from the mouths of local and national politicians and liberal apologists for capitalism who preach about equity and then stab workers in the back.
Making revolution through protracted struggle
PLP has been a presence in this neighborhood, especially over the past year. The oppression and murder of workers from Haiti is felt in Flatbush, where a large number of immigrant workers live and work. Many send money and supplies regularly to family members suffering under the control of U.S. imperialists. In Brooklyn, workers suffer from slumlords, racist cops, and say-everything-do-nothing politicians. Capitalists and their cronies work to convince workers to become cynical of fighting for change and cynical of each other.
PLP’s regular presence in the community is the antidote to these vicious lies. During our rally, a worker with a young child joined us and marched, yelling out “we will be back!” Another worker told us that we need “to be out here all the time because the suffering isn’t just overseas, it’s here.” As we march, as we distribute CHALLENGE, we build confidence in the international working class to one day overthrow this vicious racist imperialist system. We build confidence to build a communist world- one without nations, borders, and war.
Building internationalism is key to our plan
Each corner of the busy intersection where we rallied had PLP members distributing CHALLENGE. It was an opportunity to talk with workers. The war in Ukraine may seem far away, workers are suffering everywhere. Many of the workers who took the paper commented on how workers fight to survive while the top dogs benefit from capitalist war. Many workers in Flatbush work for transit and in healthcare. Those essential workers took the brunt of the pandemic at the start and any suffering they experience is now long forgotten by the bosses. Many of these workers are Black and many are women. This exposes the racism and sexism of capitalism and will be an Achilles heel for the bosses’ plans to convince us to fight in their wars. It is our job to make that contradiction clear to workers and to convince them to join us to turn the guns around and fight for communism instead of bosses’ profits.Workers demand minimum wage: only HOPE is revolution.

NEW YORK CITY,  February 14—Despite bitterly cold weather, 200 retired city workers demonstrated today against the racist, profit-driven privatization of their health insurance. This fight against this latest attack by the bosses on our health reflects our anger at this first opening shot in the reduction of health coverage. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) points out that the entire healthcare system is driven by the profit motive. From medical practices to hospitals to labs to the pharmaceutical industry, capitalism determines who has access to good health.
If we’re serious about optimizing our collective health, we need to be fighting to build the mass international PLP and the struggle for communist revolution.
Only in a communist system, run for and by the working class, can there be a healthy life with less stress and alienation. There will be opportunities for exercise and a healthy diet. Quality healthcare will be provided equally to all based solely on need.
Racist unequal society= Racist unequal healthcare
Speaker after speaker blasted the change from traditional government-run Medicare to a for-profit Medicare (dis)Advantage plan run by insurance companies. Most expressed support for universal single-payer Medicare, a government plan without insurance company middlemen sucking out profits.
So far, between 45,000 to 50,000 retirees have opted out of this new plan. They have chosen, under duress, to pay about $2,300 per person per year to keep the plan they have today. Those who have made this choice are mainly higher-income white workers. Lower income, disproportionately Black and Latin, retirees will be forced into the new plan if and when it goes into effect.
Racism also means that segregated living patterns continue to mean harder access to quality health facilities generally not found in predominantly Black and Latin working class neighborhoods. The coronavirus pandemic in less than two years slashed three years of life expectancy from Black and Latin workers in the U.S. (NYT, 7/21/21).
But ultimately, racism and racist inequalities drag down standards across the board to ensure that most workers receive inadequate health care, as evidenced by decreasing life expectancies for white workers as well. We need to recognize racism as capitalism’s chief attack against the working class, and fight for multiracial unity and the Party as our strongest weapons to fight back.
Don’t rely on politicians, courts or capitalism
Asking newly elected Mayor, the Black ex-police captain Eric Adams, to have a heart on Valentine’s Day is an example of wishful and misguided thinking on the part of the liberal organizers of the rally. Big Fascist Adams has already shown whose side he is on (see editorial, page 2). One of his first actions was to cut all city services except for the police and corrections. The corporate-sponsored Citizens Budget Commission called these plans “important, welcome, and refreshing initial steps in the right direction”(NYT, 2/16).
The court case initiated by rank-and-file retirees has delayed the privatization plan, but is unlikely to succeed in stopping it from taking effect at some time. The court is unlikely to buck the trend toward Medicare privatization. Throughout the U.S., retiree health benefits are being moved from publicly run Medicare to privately run Medicare (dis)Advantage plans steering profits to insurance companies tied to financial capitalists. Over 41 percent of all Medicare enrollees are now in such (dis)Advantage plans (Chatis group, 2/21). That is an astonishing 28.5 million people and growing (Axios, 1/22).
Retired New York City workers have shown over the last year that they won’t watch this racist attack go down without fighting back. As we say, we are retired but we haven’t expired. Learning lessons in this struggle, we can help build the movement for communist revolution!

BALTIMORE, February 19—Transit workers are in multiracial solidarity with their Alabama sisters and brothers who have been on strike since April of 2021. Our locale, learning from the Party’s efforts last year, continued this solidarity by demonstrating at Metro locations. Progressive Labor Party strives to organize millions to smash the wage system.
Win or lose their strike, the coal miners have demonstrated once again the crucial leadership of Black workers and women, and also the dangers of relying on liberal misleaders like the rotten sellout United Mine Workers of America president, Cecil Roberts.
Their fightback has been a model of multiracial unity for workers across the U.S. and the world. They show us the road to communist revolution, where a united international working class smashes racism, sexism, nationalism and imperialism with communism once and for all!
Dare to struggle, dare to win!
The workers in the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 voted “YES” to support the 1,000 multiracial Warrior Met coal miners who have been on strike fighting scabs and other management attacks for almost one year (see box). They also donated $2,500 to the strikers. Readers who would like to support the UMWA strike can donate to https://paypal.me/UMWAStrikePantry
ATU 689’s support and donation to the UMWA strike fund is a reform win for the miners. Today’s demonstration is a small but revolutionary win for the international working class.
 Following the communist principle of relying directly on the working class, we distributed CHALLENGE and flyers about the strike to about 75 Metro workers at the Silver Spring, MD and Ballston, VA Metro locations.
Our strike-support signs and our boldness helped get the word out in support of the striking miners and called for international working class communist revolution.
The world’s capitalists today are arming themselves to the teeth to defend their empires, with new wars erupting such as in Ukraine.
Bringing multiracial fightback home
Since last summer, PLP has sent members and friends to Alabama to support the strikers (see previous editions of CHALLENGE). A new leader from the DC/Baltimore Party who made this trip quickly saw the will of the UMWA workers and the greed of the Warrior Met Coal bosses. She returned determined to raise more support for this militant multiracial strike. Her report to the collective led to this month’s actions and ongoing efforts to support the miners
Smash borders, build international fightback
From Tuscalooosa County, Alabama to Ukraine to Somalia to Yemen, with the support of the working class and additional mobilizing efforts to support fightbacks like these miners, it’s clear that the bosses will never work in the best interests of the working class These actions show the need for and logic of revolution, since only a communist society will meet the needs of the working class. We have plans of mobilizing at additional stations. We will not stop exposing the greedy bosses at Warrior Met Coal and calling on the international working class to join PLP and smash Warrior Met, racism, imperialist wars and capitalism once and for all! JOIN US.

There is an interesting documentary called College Behind Bars that explores a college program for incarcerated workers called the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). The program illustrates the contradictions between reform and revolution in the criminal injustice system under capitalism.
This program is helpful to the incarcerated workers who can enroll but it also sends the message that they have to be rehabilitated so they can reenter society. As you listen to their stories, it’s clear that it was poverty, racism, lack of health care, lousy education, and all the evils of capitalism that led these young men and women to commit the “crimes” that are the reasons for their incarceration.
At the same time, capitalists commit crimes against the working class and go free. Recently there was a fire at an apartment building in New York City with numerous safety violations that the city and the owners ignored. Seventeen tenants died, including eight children. No one has been arrested or even charged for this racist crime. The real estate investors in this building included a member of Mayor Eric Adam’s transition team. That’s capitalism. The capitalists exploit and profit and the politicians serve and protect them. Crimes against property and the ruling class are prosecuted and punished, crimes against the working class are aided and abetted.
College Behind Bars= Prison Reform
The documentary shows how BPI aims to “educate” the incarcerated workers and then aim them toward working within the system to make improvements. As one participant said, “if we want a better world, then we must first change ourselves.” But in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) we say the rebels in Ferguson were more truthful when they said: “the whole damn system has to go.” If we want a better world, we need to organize and fight to overthrow the capitalist system. We need a communist revolution so that the working class can run the world. That’s what communism is, a world run by and for the working class.
From this four-part documentary, it is immediately clear that BPI is a traditional college program. The classes are rigorous. They read, analyze and write about Othello, Moby Dick, Plato, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The classes include Environmental Science, Calculus, Biology (genetics and evolution which requires three prior courses), Spanish, German, American Politics, Public Speaking, Art and Philosophy. They have a debate team that defeated Harvard. This shows the lie of capitalist education, that only some workers are hard working or smart enough to be college educated.
In New York State, there are 51,000 incarcerated men and 2,400 incarcerated women. BPI has 300 workers enrolled mostly in the Associate degree program and 37 in the Bachelor degree program. Nationwide almost 50 percent of incarcerated workers who are released get rearrested within three years. In the Bard program it’s four percent. This reform, though helpful to those fortunate enough to enter the program, reveals that it is a band-aid on a rotten system of racist mass incarceration.
The working class can and must run the world
Now, according to BPI, these incarcerated workers have reentered society. Some are working in nonprofits, in one case organizing for criminal justice reform. Some are finishing their Bachelor degrees and one is in a PhD program.
In PLP, we want more. These workers and millions around the world can and must run the world for the benefit of the working class. One of the incarcerated workers says that BPI “has great professors teaching you how smart you are” whereas right now we have a “dual education system, one for individuals who will rule and one for everyone else.” Under communism we will incorporate all workers’ skills and smarts to teach and learn from each other. Join PLP and help organize for a communist revolution. Power to the working class!