LOS ANGELES–The 12 months since last May Day have been a hell of a year for the working class of the world. With Covid-19, imperialist wars, continued police murders and terror, unemployment, and lack of housing ravishing working-class communities, especially Black, Latin and Asian, it can be hard to imagine creating a better world for all of us. But May Day reminds us that we have a communist world to win and we can join together with our class brothers and sisters to fight to achieve that goal.

Celebrating struggle
This year in Los Angeles the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) hosted our own dinner in a local park. Our May Day event was organized by a committee made up mostly of students and close base, several of whom were attending their first May Day. On May Day, a multiracial, multi-generational group of 50 workers gathered to celebrate with speeches, songs, poetry, and food. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon filled with the collective efforts of comrades, friends, and family to bring together nourishment for the mind, body, and soul.

The program was emceed by a comrade and an enthusiastic student celebrating her second May Day. Another group of students shared a skit depicting the history of May Day. In between, musician comrades led us in lively renditions of Bella Ciao, Too Many Names, and Deportees. There was the ever popular Table Talk and CHALLENGE Quiz where we discussed what PLP is and fights for and what communism is and how we can achieve it. Even though not everyone agreed, we had lively discussions that will continue as we move forward.

Another highlight was a poetry performance hono
ring the first May Day fighter, Frederick Holder (who was killed by LA County Sheriffs two years ago), and all the impacted families out in the streets. We continue to fight alongside impacted families in Los Angeles and link their struggles to the world-wide fight against police killings.

The struggle continues
PLP has been involved in struggles against police terror for many years. In LA, we have continued to work directly with several victims’ families during the past year. These families have led regular rallies and protests, recently bringing the fight directly to the District Attorney’s neighborhood and very doorstep. Not only do the families speak about their experiences with the racist LAPD and the LA County Sheriffs, but we show our strength by taking over the street and collectively confronting the police. We have also been active in a tenants union campaign organizing in a building where the slumlord is refusing repairs and trying to evict tenants who are leading the struggle. All of these actions continue to be welcomed and supported by workers who live in these areas.

Many attendees were excited to learn more about communism and PLP. Two students are already planning to participate in next year’s May Day program and others are ready to come to the summer project. As a result of our ongoing work, many hundreds of people have been exposed to communist and antiracist politics and more people understand the strength of the working class when we unite. The future here looks bright for the growth of PLP and our movement to rid the earth of the capitalist exploiters and their henchmen in “law enforcement.”

Brooklyn, April 29– In the midst of steady rain, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends marched through Brooklyn to commemorate the day that calls for workers to take power around the world: May Day. This year’s theme was a call for the international working class to unite to smash inter-imperialist war in a time of rising capitalist crisis around the world. Rather than die in the bosses’ wars, PLP fights to bring together the strengths of the working class to organize for a world worth fighting for, a communist world. May Day is an expression of our collective efforts to build that egalitarian, just world in which workers will make sure that our entire class is fed, educated, sheltered, and taken care of communally.

Smash racist borders
For this reason, the fight for communism knows no borders. Regardless of where you are, you are a member of the working class—our May Day march is for all of us! This affirmation of unity was front and center at our march. International greetings from Colombia, Pakistan and Haiti helped inspire marchers with the class struggle waged by the Party around the globe. Speeches before the march echoed this call for workers to organize and join PLP so that the working class can seize state power. In the face of the bosses’ rising fascism, our class must turn the guns around and build towards revolution. In line with the party’s internationalism, each speech was translated into Haitian Creole, Spanish, and English, reflecting PLP’s multiracial fight for a communist future. Though many were wet and cold, 200 marchers from numerous places along the East Coast of the United States showed up to express their commitment to the international working class.

Communist optimism drowns out the rain!
Wearing red ponchos to match red flags, we raised our fists to show the unity of workers marching down Flatbush Avenue. Demonstrating that workers have what it takes to adapt to any situation, members of the PLP carefully wrapped CHALLENGE newspapers in plastic grocery bags to keep them dry and to sell. Hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE were distributed to supportive working-class Brooklynites in this way. When chanters on the front truck could not use the onboard sound system because of the rain, comrades took turns making a beat with an umbrella, which energized those at the front of the march to maintain a passionate chanting spirit. Marchers showed their indomitable strength chanting together, “We don’t care about the rain! Flush these bosses down the drain!”

Many workers dared to be soaked as they walked towards the doors of shops, paused to listen, dance, put their fists up, and smile, commemorating the moment by putting their phones up or waving to their class marching by. A lot of others opened their windows and watched with awe and joy from high story buildings and encouraged us when we noticed them. One worker waved two red roses out of her window in a show of solidarity with the march.

Fascism means… Build communist leadership
At the close of May Day, onlookers cheered on as they heard the speech of a new Haitian comrade who spoke about how the party’s dedication to internationalism and antiracist class struggle won her over to communist revolution and to join PLP. Young comrades from Kingsborough Community College also spoke of PLP’s fight against racist police violence within education. They exposed the liberal bosses’ attempts to split the working class by appointing a Black college president to arrest and harass Black students. Though the liberal misleaders attempt to make us treat the openly fascist white supremacists like Trump as the main danger, PLP understands that it is the multicultural face of liberal fascists that is most venomous to our class. We call these liberal capitalists Big Fascists (see Glossary) because they are more capable of building support for imperialist war and convincing our class to make sacrifices to preserve their profit system in crisis. Against the Big and Small fascist bosses’ efforts to divide and conquer, PLP fights to unify all members of the working class towards a communist horizon.

Against the bosses’ dreary, gray world of capitalist exploitation, marchers left with a renewed optimism of revolutionary potential—that though the night is dark, we can be the sun that breaks through. Ending with a recitation of the Internationale, marchers sang with resounding conviction even as rain tore through paper sheets with lyrics. Because rainy days mean… we got to fight back! 

Our event shows PLP’s continued commitment to fostering new leadership within our organization. Most of this year’s May Day planning committee was new to the committee and confronted unforeseen challenges. We want to develop millions of students and workers to become leaders of the international working class in the fight for communism. Join PLP!

At least 500 workers have been killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced since the start of a bloody civil war in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. This will always be the fate of the working class under capitalism, a system built on competition and exploitation, and which in times of crisis resorts to fascism and war.  As the U.S. bosses—the most criminal rulers of them all–call for “democracy,” we remind our working-class brothers and sisters to not be fooled by this trap. The capitalist bosses will never have our interests at heart. We call on workers in Sudan and across the globe to join Progressive Labor Party in the fight to smash this profit-driven system and create a communist world.

Imperialism creates instability in Sudan
Less than four years ago, the two current warring generals and capitalist thugs, Abdel Fatahl al-Burhan and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, were championed by millions of Sudanese workers (and the U.S. ruling class) as they partnered in a coup d’etat against Omar al-Bashir, the blood-soaked dictator aligned with the Chinese imperialists. But as CHALLENGE pointed out (7/27/19), this fake campaign for “democracy” was in reality a violent push by the U.S. ruling class to limit the Chinese bosses’ influence over the region’s energy and trade routes. 

As we noted at the time, the main contradiction in Sudan is the same one shaping events worldwide: inter-imperialist competition among a rising China, a resurgent Russia, and a declining U.S.  We warned that workers in Sudan will be “sharing” power with the very forces responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of workers in Darfur and Yemen. Whenever workers are duped into compromising with the bosses, the consequences are deadly. Sudan, the third largest country in Africa, is now a tinderbox for an expanding regional war. As the desperate U.S. rulers keep losing ground to their rivals, their inability to control events will inevitably lead to a global conflict that will sacrifice millions of workers. The working class needs international communist consciousness more than ever to turn imperialist war into class war against the capitalists! 

Russia, China target Sudan’s riches
Sudan rests between two critical choke points on the Red Sea, a passageway for 10 percent of all global trade. The Suez Canal connects markets in Asia and Europe; the Bab-el-Mandeb strait links the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea. Sudan is also where the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers converge, a critical intersection for trade and access to fresh water. Additionally, it contains large reserves of gold and uranium, and houses critical infrastructure for refining and transporting oil from South Sudan. No imperialist power will easily let go of such a large prize. Russia’s interest in Sudan predates the current conflict.

In 2017, President Vladimir Putin joined with al-Bashir to form Meroe Gold, a subsidiary of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries. After al-Bashir was deposed and jailed, Putin strengthened ties with General Degalo, a criminal best known as a leader of the genocidal Janjaweed militias in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. Degalo built a vast pool of wealth and political power by leveraging his ties with al-Bashir to seize some of the richest gold mines in Darfur (Guardian, 4/17). The Janjaweed evolved into the Rapid Support Forces that are now at war with Sudan’s military.  Sudanese gold now appears to be financing Russia’s war with Ukraine in return for weapons and training for Degalo’s militia (CNN, 4/21).

Meanwhile, China has long relied on Sudan’s minerals for Chinese industry. Between 2011 and 2018, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, China made hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Sudan and invested in oil pipelines, textile factories, railways, and bridges across the Nile. China is Sudan’s largest trading partner and their biggest supplier of goods. Stability in the region is a priority for the Chinese bosses.

U.S. complicity in Darfur genocide
Ever since Chevron discovered oil in Sudan in the 1970s, the U.S. ruling class has kept a hand in the country (Human Rights Watch, 2003). Under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency worked closely with the notorious General Salah Gosh, who rose to become head of intelligence for Sudan (The Daily Beast, 1/9/2019). Between 2003 and 2008, al-Bashir, al-Burhan, Degalo, and Gosh were responsible for the mass murder of at least 300,000 workers in Darfur and for displacing 2.7 million more. In return for al-Bashir’s help with a “counter-terrorism” campaign against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the U.S. bosses turned a blind eye to the genocide and kept sharing intelligence with Sudan.

Before the latest armed conflict broke out, the Joe Biden administration continued to negotiate with these war criminals to find a path back to “democracy,” the bosses’ word for capitalist dictatorship. But like the CIA support for U.S.-friendly pro-democracy coups in the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Syria, U.S. moves in Sudan have backfired and further exposed the weakness of the U.S. ruling class.  

Fight for communism!
Liberal democracy is a nationalist tool to mislead and pacify the working class. From Sudan to the U.S., we are asked to choose between one mass murderer and another. When we are fooled by the bosses into thinking that their fight is our fight, we lose sight of the essence of capitalism: imperialism and war.
The only solution is communist revolution and a dictatorship of the working class, a society run by and for workers. It is our task to expose this dogfight between the bosses and the slippery slope to World War III. We must connect the attacks on workers in Sudan to attacks on workers everywhere. Join us! Build a fighting PLP!

NEW YORK CITY, May 10—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members demonstrated with workers, charged Daniel Penny, a white ex-marine for lynching Jordan Neely, a displaced Black worker-artist, with racist murder. Using a “banned” chokehold on the NYC subway May 1, bigoted Penny killed our class brother when he needed help the most. In an expression of class rage at the system that commits countless murders, we distributed over 200 CHALLENGEs, connecting Neely’s murder to capitalism and providing an alternative with the headline “May Day: Power to the Workers!”

Under communism, all workers would have safe housing and resources, instead of being discarded like trash if they cann’t produce profits. They wouldn’t have to seek shelter in subway cars and fall victim to mental illness and suffer from substance dependency. And they wouldn’t be galvanized to see other workers as their enemies.

Displaced workers not disposable
Neely was having an mental outburst when racist vigilante Penny lynched him. The bosses’ racist ridden system murdered Neely, and Penny dealt the deadly blow. The ruling class’s racist conditions brainwashed Penny into seeing a displaced Black man as disposable.

This crime represents the rise of fascism. U.S Imperialist bosses are going head to head in a desperate competition for the world’s resources. They will stop at no cost to defend their profits on the backs of workers. As more funding goes towards imperialist competition against Russia and China, the bosses are cutting even more critical services for workers-especially Black and Latin ones-and simultaneously increasing direct attacks on them.

Liberal pols response with fascism
Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul predictably released statements either trying to appear “neutral” or giving lip service to helping workers.

From one side of his mouth, racist Adams said, “we cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that” (Hell Gate, 5/4). Later, he said Neely was “Black, like me.”

But actions speak even louder. Adams just last year announced plans for a $2.8 billion spending cut to the Department of Homeless Services while increasing the NYPD budget to $11.1 billion (CItyLimits, 2/18/22). Last November, he issued a directive that emboldens city agencies and kkkops to involuntarily institutionalize anyone who “looks like” they are having a mental crisis.

It’s clear which class Adams serves. And it’s not the working class!

Meanwhile, Hochul played dumb: “I will look at it more closely to find out whether the state has a role.” Liberals love to present themselves as antiracists, but their actions and words always prove otherwise! They’re no better than these republicans spouting openly racist rhetoric about Neely. WIth Adams and Hochul’s plan to flood the trains with more kkkops and force the displaced into unsafe shelters, it’s clear the working class can’t rely on these bosses’ pawns to give us the support we need.

Capitalism attacks
This capitalist system in decay created the conditions for a racist Penny and a distressed Neely. Penny was stationed at Camp Lejeune during his time served. This is no coincidence, as the camp was tied to a Neo-Nazi plot to attack power substations (Fox 8, 4/18).

As capitalism spirals into crisis, low wages and a lack of affordable housing or decent health care are scourges that plague the entire working class. But, they fall hardest on those targeted by capitalist racism and sexism. The capitalist ruling class needs the racism that empowers cops and vigilantee racists to criminalize, dehumanize, and murder Black workers.

Workers rage justified, need PLP
Workers are outraged at Neely’s murder. At the Broadway-Lafayette station, where Neely was murdered, workers had a vigil and occupied the train tracks, chanting, “Justice for Jordan Neely.” The kkkops made arrests, and bruised and bloodied in a pindown.

To understand what’s to come, we just need to look at what happened after mass uprisings in 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Many workers had desperately hoped that capitalism could be reformed to the point where Living While Black would no longer be a crime. But Neely’s murder proves once again that as long as we allow the profit system to exist, the capitalist rulers will keep siccing their racist mad dogs on Black and Latin and immigrant workers. Once the bosses diverted the reform movement to defund the police into the election campaign for Jim Crow Joe Biden, the liberal politicians flipped, as usual, to serve their capitalist masters. Despite the fact that the U.S. murder rate fell last year and remains far below what it was in the 1980s and ‘90s (usatoday, 1/26), the bosses are using a trumped-up “crime wave” to pour more money into police terror and put more cops on the streets. The results? In 2022, at least 1,176 workers and youth—a record high—were slaughtered by the cops.

That’s why we need to channel antiracist fightbacks into the class struggle, and build a movement to direct that anger into destroying capitalism and establishing a workers’ state. Otherwise the bosses will just redirect our fightbacks into more do-nothing reforms. The only way to bring safety for all workers is for us to run a communist society without these bloodsucking scum! Help us make that world a reality.