NEW YORK—At a Brooklyn high school, comrades have been organizing against the attacks of capitalism for around two decades. What appear to be isolated events are in fact flashpoints in a single struggle: this semester has seen a faculty protest against deportations, student resistance to anti-Black racism, and ongoing fight-back against fear and censorship around teaching about Palestine. At stake is whether schools will reproduce racist, sexist capitalism or become sites of multiracial, working-class resistance and revolutionary communist possibility.

As the capitalist ruling class leads society in a headlong rush toward climate catastrophe and imperialist war, schools become sites for recruiting young people to kill and be killed, unless communists can offer an alternative horizon in which students and workers organize to overthrow the ruling class itself. The capitalist status quo cannot allow students to reach their full potential.  A system built on disposability must train young people to accept sacrifice, competition, hierarchy, genocide, and mass death as normal. Schools are tasked with normalizing this brutality.

Communists intervene to disrupt that training. Without our leadership, anger is individualized, resistance is scattered, and reform becomes a pressure valve that leaves the genocidal capitalist system intact.

Organizing, basebuilding, and communist leadership

Teachers and students recently took collective action to oppose deportations and immigration terror, making clear that schools are not neutral spaces but battlegrounds in the class war. This did not happen spontaneously. A comrade organized through the teachers’ union to build a collective of educators willing to act openly together. Through one-on-one conversations, union structures and even boss-provided professional development time, teachers were organized to co-write and publicly sign a statement condemning deportations and calling for collective action.

That statement became a tool for organizing, helping lay the groundwork for a rally and picket line one Thursday before the school on a cold December morning. Teachers, students, and community members stood together declaring that immigrant students are not disposable and that families torn apart by the state are members of our class. Students later told their teachers they were overjoyed to see that solidarity modeled so clearly.

A month prior, Black students led a mass protest against the daily reality of anti-Black racism embedded in the structure of the school itself. Despite its claims of neutrality and excellence, this school operates to reinforce racism, as Black and Latin student numbers are kept low year after year by a test-based admissions regime. Racist harassment is normalized, Black enrollment shrinks by design, and Black students are subjected to constant scrutiny, isolation, and behavioral management.  Students named this clearly: neutrality is violence, and the system itself is the problem. Meritocracy is a lie that launders racism through exams and “objective” standards to protect ruling-class interests.

A comrade advises the Black Student Union, helping students think about the power of multi-racial unity in bringing parents, teachers, and community members into the struggle. The Department of Education has responded with investigations, not to dismantle racism, but to contain working-class rage. Students continue organizing, actively discussing how to expand the movement by drawing in non-Black students to build multiracial unity and collective power.

After October 7, 2023 students demanded to understand Palestine, genocide, settler colonialism, and U.S. imperial power. Communists defended students’ right to protest genocide in Gaza even as administrators and bosses moved to discipline teachers and suppress discussion. Capitalism demands ignorance. Being attacked by the enemy is good. It confirms the ruling class understand that it cannot survive if students draw the line from Gaza to the Bronx, from occupied land abroad to occupied lives at home. 

Educating for communism

Communist organizers reject fragmentation. We insist that the struggle against deportation, anti-Black racism, and imperialist war is one struggle. Capitalism survives by dividing U.S. citizens against immigrants, Black against Asian, student against teacher, domestic against foreign. Our task is to build unity across these false divides and to ground politics in material reality: who benefits, who is exploited, and who has the power to transform society.

Communists understand that everything we do counts. This organization does not appear overnight. It is built through workplace struggle and base-building, through advising student organizations, organizing parents, activating union structures, and consistently siding with students in daily conflicts over discipline, curriculum, tracking, testing, and surveillance. It is built by showing, again and again, that communists do not try to manage capitalism more humanely; we fight to expand a scientific understanding of society that will enable the working class to overthrow it once and for all.

The ruling class wants schools to be factories for compliant labor and nationalist ideology, preparing students to accept genocide, endless war, and permanent climate crisis as inevitable. Communists fight to make schools sites of struggle, clarity, and preparation for a world beyond capitalism. From opposing deportations to exposing anti-Black racism, from defending Palestine to organizing multiracial unity, comrades are proving that revolutionary politics belongs everywhere working people are, including the classroom.

West Virginia—Huntington is a city in southern West Virginia (WV) and has been the center of the opioid epidemic in the state. The opioid crisis is a result of the capitalist pharmaceutical industry’s drive for maximum profits, and workers in WV were especially susceptible due to the decline of the coal industry over decades, leading to a high unemployment level (and many people having painful conditions due to the punishing nature of work in the mines). 

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members in nearby Kentucky, on the border with West Virginia, have held cadre schools connecting the opioid crisis to capitalism. We know that a system rooted in profit, individualism and mass alienation can never provide any real and lasting solution to the social problem of addiction. Like the communists in revolutionary China who fought to eradicate opium addiction as a legacy of British colonialism, so shall we fight to build collective solutions that get to the root of what is destroying our class. Fighting for communism means we ensure decent and healthy lives for all workers.  

Capitalist bosses weaponize addiction, refuse to fund treatment

Overdoses have ravaged Huntington, as shown in the documentary “Heroin(e)” available on Netflix. The sharing of syringes is another problem caused by the opioid epidemic. The re-use of syringes led to an HIV cluster in Huntington in 2018-2019. The spreading of disease was controlled in large part by the needle exchange program (West Virginia Watch, 11/19/25). There is also evidence that many of the HIV cases have gone unreported and that many people in Cabell County are undiagnosed (Mountain State Spotlight, 11/28/22). 

Needle exchange programs allow people to get clean needles and dispose of dirty ones. This is extremely important in Huntington where dirty needles are often found in public spaces. This program was introduced there in 2015 but has faced significant challenges due to restrictions from local politicians. So, the program has always been limited and difficult to access, especially since 2021, when it faced increased challenges from the WV Senate. Now, due to an executive order from the Donald Trump administration and reduced funding from philanthropic organizations, the program officially ended in December 2025.. 

The program was always dependent on the funding it got from charitable donations, so now that those donations have decreased, the program cannot continue. A program like this was always weak and could not truly help all the working-class people who suffer from addiction. Under capitalism, instead of programs like this being a collective responsibility, they depend on the good graces of a few rich philanthropists who may or may not choose to donate to them. That does not even begin to get into the reasons why people become addicted to drugs under capitalism in the first place. 

A prime example of how drug addiction and capitalism go hand in hand are those countries where revisionist “communist” governments like those of the former Soviet Union fell and were replaced with the “shock therapy” of capitalism. Suddenly stripped of any kind of social safety net, inevitably there was a dramatic increase in alcoholism, hard drug use, and prostitution. Furthermore, the U.S. government has been involved in the drug trade all around the world, despite its attempts historically to shift blame to Mexico, and most recently to Venezuela. For example, Trump recently pardoned the infamous drug trafficking ex-president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández (BBC, 12/2/25). All of this happens while capitalist governments refuse to fund community-based solutions to drug addiction and instead turn to mass incarceration. 

Uproot capitalist-caused addiction, fight for communism

We in PLP know more must be done to organize about this issue. West Virginia and Kentucky are both historical battlegrounds between the workers and the bosses. But when so many workers are dealing with addiction, and in turn infectious diseases, it makes fighting back against this rotten system much more difficult. Only a mass communist party can organize workers around the line that the source of the opioid crisis, and all that results from it, is capitalism. 

The liberal bosses have often overlooked West Virginia, meanwhile the Small Fascists have had easy victories in the state. As communists, it is our job to provide a real, revolutionary solution and expose both factions of the ruling class as racist murderers. But it is only possible to organize workers in West Virginia, and everywhere, by growing the Party. Join the PLP and fight for communism!

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) activity  at the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting (CD 11/26/25) focused primarily on the demands for APHA to reinstate the leader of the International Health Section and speak out for an end to U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Two events inside the conference showcased our ongoing work in mass organizations.  

A PLP speaker presented a slide show on the organizing in Maryland to stop the state from funding the Maryland Israel Development Center (MIDC) which brings military and surveillance technology from Israel into the state. Israeli Companies like Rafael Advance Defense systems work closely with Lockheed Martin on missiles, and others like AIRIS labs, an Israeli tech startup company, pursue surveillance and associate with Palantir. Others develop robotics and drones for warfare with sophisticated targeting mechanisms. Since Maryland is close to the White House and the Pentagon, it is a prime location for these companies. Presenting this work at the APHA along with one of the local leaders led to a lively discussion about U.S. imperialism and strategies to fight back with a standing room only crowd. The presentation outlined the inter-imperialist struggle over oil which underlies the uncompromising support of Israel by the United States. The presentation did not call for communism and revolution but our literature was handed out to many attendees and we were able to share our politics in multiple conversations afterwards.  

We also built on our work with University of Maryland students by presenting a poster session on health care in the Philippines. Fifteen public health workers and students joined a discussion with the PLP member and a friend from Hawaii who is also in the ICHRP (International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines). All got CHALLENGE with the article about the ICE attacks on seafarers from the Philippines(10/15 /25). We will use the poster at  multiple local programs.  Struggles in the Philippines have heated up with demands for “BoomBoom” Marcos and Sara Duterte to resign and for a transitional government to plan a new course for the government. The corruption by the ruling families is now out in the open and more intense organizing is ongoing. 

Recent earthquakes and typhoons in Cebu, Philippines have revealed the failure of capitalist politicians to provide flood control while operating “ghost contracts” and pocketing the money meant to protect the workers. As the movement grows to end this Marcos regime, students and workers in the United States have joined in protests around the country including in DC at the embassy of the Philippines. The demands of these groups for “national democracy and a just and lasting peace” fall short of the call for international communist revolution. So we have now begun discussing the limits of fighting for liberal democracy (even with a socialist outlook) which has never led to the next step of a communist society. 

The history of the Philippines is one of ongoing struggles against colonialism by Spain and now the United States. Replacing Marcos Sr. and his tyranny of martial law has not led to working class control, and now his son rules the country. As we join in the struggles against the Marcos family and other “nepo-babies” and a few ruling families, we will continue to share CHALLENGE and debate the next steps.  Taking advantage of our presence at the APHA to raise these issues has given us opportunities to talk about communism and revolution and share our literature while contributing to the ongoing struggles against fascism here and in the Philippines.

It is January in Toronto, Canada. It is very cold outside. Several thousand scholars and teachers in the Humanities are attending the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA).  They are huddled in conference sessions where they attempt to find some light in the darkness. Those who aspire to teach the literature that they love face a future of precarity and poverty. Those who have jobs are painfully aware that they must be careful not to talk about “critical race theory,” “gender politics,” colonialism and imperialism, and the class struggle. 

Those who have protested the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza are paying the price for telling the truth.  With few exceptions, their university administrations have shamefully acceded to the transit into fascism. And too many professional associations--the MLA, AHA, and APHA--have been complicit in this transition, preventing discussion and debate over the government assault on the freedom and funding of universities. Fascist politicians silence students and fire our colleagues, suspend students and deport international scholars.

Turning loss into its opposite under growing fascism

Radical activists in the MLA have witnessed some painful defeats in recent years.  The  Executive Council has undermined all efforts to take a stand against the Palestinian genocide. Scores of members have quit the MLA in disgust, though the Radical Caucus persists. The antifascist playwright Lillian Hellman described the descent into McCarthyism I as “Scoundrel Time.” We are now in the midst of McCarthyism II. Scoundrels are everywhere, riding high in Washington, state capitols and university administrations. 

This might seem like a strange time to talk at the MLA about the possible communist future buried somewhere under the fascist rubble. Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) disagree. The Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani said after the defeat of the 1967 war:  “What is happening now is only the labor pains of something great that will be born from the rubble of defeat like a volcano born from under the cold ashes of a forsaken mountain.” Dark times are the best times to think ahead.

As capitalism leads to greater crises we must offer an alternative

It is precisely because the crisis we face in higher education is rooted in the broader crisis in global capitalism—and the threat of global war--that we must think beyond the idealist myths of bourgeois democracy. Fascism is not just undemocratic authoritarianism; it is a mode of capitalist class rule resorted to in ‘polycrises’ of economic stagnation, fading political legitimacy and proliferating war. The only antidote to a system based upon the brutal pursuit of profit is its revolutionary transcendence by an egalitarian  system of mass participation based upon the fulfillment of human needs—communism. 

There is a mass base for fascism in many parts of the planet. About this we cannot fool ourselves.  But there is also a mass hunger for a better world. The millions who have been marching and striking against genocide and xenophobia around the world embody what the U.S. proletarian writer Tillie Olsen called “the not-yet in the now.”  Repression breeds resistance. As Kanafani wrote, “Resistance is the essence.” Communism is the future and that requires a communist party. This could be the time to join PLP!