BROOKLYN, NY, April 12—After a 17-year-old former student Claude* was killed in the streets, it forced the working class—students and teachers—of a small school to choose: fightback or passivity. While the final verdict is still out, the struggle has become a test for pro-communist ideas in the face of liberal fascism.
School, union, city: all gangsters for capitalism
The racist Black principal has been able to get away with blood on her hands (see boxed letter). When Progressive Labor Party says liberal fascism is the greater danger for the working class, this is what we mean. This principal—in a liberal city run by a Black ​​mayor Eric Adams—has successfully created an environment where students and education workers feel pressured to “lay low” and accept the expendability of Black youth as “normal.” This is one way the school stays one of “America's Best High Schools” in the U.S. News and World Report. To stay on top, the Black leadership throws out Black students like they’re trash.
But, it’s not just her.  The UFT District Representative—the educator workers’ union that prides itself on putting the needs of students on the back burner—was silent when one teacher had said, “The union needs to make a fight against these racist pushouts.”
This is the same district rep who spent what felt like hours detailing his diligence in keeping his teacher file up to date.
While this seems small, it’s a reflection of the limits of unions. The UFT leadership cynically puts electoral politics and teacher salaries over students’ learning conditions. This was no surprise considering the racist strike of 1968, when the UFT walked out as a response to the efforts of Black parents to exert community control over schools in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. A union that sacrifices Black and Brown students is a racist one.
One tenet of fascism (an old capitalist system in crisis headed for world war) is the idea of accepting expendability.
As the future of capitalism becomes more uncertain (see editorial, page 2), the bosses need a tighter control of their class and the working class. Capitalist schools train us to treat our class as disposable—to accept that some youth will just be homeless, unemployed, jailed, killed in war, erased. The ones who can make this fascist argument most convincingly are the ones who present themselves as pro-worker. This is the same type of idea that threw workers into gas chambers.
We will always remember him
How do you respond when a Black principal makes it taboo to discuss and honor a victim of capitalism and pressures a mainly-white-teacher force and a mainly-Black-student force to simmer down?
Several teachers have stepped up in the reform struggle—one organized a card and funds for the family, another made photos of Claude, another printed the poem “Kids who Die,” and yet another helped blow up balloons for the third memorial wall. Every teacher also received a la​​minated tag, “we will always re​​member [Claude].”
Several have now made a small memorial with all these items inside their classrooms. Some have also folded Claude into their lesson plans.
Some teachers and students wore a button on their shirts or bags. It was made using printed text, clear packing tape, and a safety pin.
However, through one-on-one conversations, approved personal days, bending of some dress codes for “good kids,” and awarding field trips to previously banned students, the administration has pacified many staff and students.
One described the niceness as “the calm before the storm.”
The working class is not dumb. We understand the administration was threatened by the show of worker-student unity. And it will be our unity that the administration will come after. They will pit “good” students against struggling students, new teachers against tenured teachers.
This divide-and-conquer strategy will be no match for a politically conscious working class. That’s why linking this fight to capitalism and war is key. CHALLENGE readership has grown tremendously compared to its meager distribution before Claude, and building relationships with co-workers and students is needed more than ever. We need to win the masses to see the fight for communism as the only answer deserving of Claude’s memory. Communism means we serve ALL kids. No child is expendable.
Kids over capitalism
If Claude weren’t pushed out, would he have been alive to walk on graduation day in three months? An administration that cares more about data and awards than a Black child has got to go. Claude’s killing has exposed a criminal policy that we need to fight.
Claude was not a number. He was a member of the working class, and he deserved better. A system that treats certain students as expendable DOES NOT deserve to exist. For our students, shut this racist system down.
*The pseudonym Claude is inspired by the communist fighter and writer, Claude Mckay.
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Letter: Fight to stop student pushout!

The following letter is written by a new teacher who became involved in the fight for Claude and against pushout.
As a person new to teaching and new to Brooklyn, the treatment of the legacy of a former student who was fatally shot near the school where I teach opened my eyes to not only how the school to prison pipeline functions, but to how treatment of working class students in a capitalist system kills.
When Claude was killed, the school that I work for not only did nothing to memorialize their former student, but fought hard against students and teachers who wanted to memorialize him themselves. Students created a memorial for Claude that was hung in the hallway. It was taken down by administrators the next day. When they hung it back up it was taken down almost immediately. Students overheard their principal admonishing Claude to other students and teachers, using racist rhetoric and accusing him of being in a gang in order to justify erasing his memory from the school after his death. The principal even antagonized teachers who took a personal day to attend their former student’s funeral.
This strange response can be explained by the fact that Claude was pushed out of our school. Our school boasts a 95 percent graduation rate which is very rare for our district, and one way that they achieve this is by pushing out students who threaten this misleading statistic. Student pushout is incredibly common in New York City, and this event has opened my eyes to how it unfolds in real time. Students are suspended with little reason, harassed by administrators, and working class parents are consistently asked to leave their jobs to attend disciplinary meetings at the school. Since forcing students to leave is illegal, employees of the Department of Education instead harass and bully children and parents until they decide that it is best to leave. Often administrators will convince parents that their students' needs would simply “be better met at another school.”
But this is not the truth.
Suspensions and push outs follow students, making it difficult to keep up with classwork, maintain good grades, and apply to college. It is already widely understood that suspensions, which is a critical aspect of the pushout process, are damaging to students and greatly increase their likelihood of being incarcerated. In a racist school system these practices disproportionately affect Black and brown students. So why do schools continue this practice?
Capitalism forces schools to compete with each other for scarce funding, resources, and even for students. Graduation rates and test scores are important to school bosses, and one way to keep high scores with limited resources is to get rid of students who threaten their scores. Instead of viewing students as fully formed humans, they are viewed as pawns to be traded, bargained for, and cast off. But schools don’t have to be this way!
Teachers should understand that this system not only harms students, but harms us as well. When we treat students like numbers, like problems, and pawns, we create a hostile environment that affects our lives too. We watch students that we care for be harassed, excluded from our classrooms, and disappeared from our schools without our consent. Teachers need to understand that this is a problem that is worth fighting about. Together, with parents and students we can fight for schools that care for all students, not just students who are willing to follow the status quo.
Parents, teachers, and students unite to end this violent, racist practice. Unite to end capitalism!

The history of the communist movement is fighting for the working class. The communist movement was born out of the struggle for a better world. It was born out of the fight by the working class to resist their exploitation and demand equality. As the communist movement grew the capitalist ruling class quickly realized the existential threat posed by a conscious working class.
As long as the working class has fought for a better world the ruling class has attacked the movement. It’s hard to be attacked. The bosses attack us to scare us and our class and stop us from fighting back. Their goal is to demoralize the working class so it doesn’t see its own power as a class to get rid of capitalism.
We have learned that the best way to respond to attacks by the bosses is to fight back. In Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) history there have been many struggles, many attacks, often firings and sometimes harsher consequences. All these battles are part of the struggle for the working class to gain confidence in itself, to see its power and learn that we don’t need the bosses or capitalism.
In this article we’ll look at two places where teachers and students were fighting back under the leadership of PLP, the teacher’s union in Oaxaca and Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn.
Fighting back in Oaxaca
This May Day will mark 43 years of intense struggle by teachers in Oaxaca. PLP has been active in this struggle for all those years, fighting for the needs of students and parents to get a decent education and to build a communist movement that fights for a world where all students are educated. In response there have been intense attacks by the bosses against the teachers, in the 1980’s, and around 2000, 2006, 2013 and 2015. Some of these attacks have been very severe including dismissals, imprisonments and even murders.
In each of these periods we’ve responded by going on strike, setting up barricades and building alliances with other groups of workers. There are 80,000 teachers in Oaxaca. During some of the struggles we’ve mobilized as many as 60,000 people, including workers from other sectors. One of our strongest responses was in 2002 when after a very militant fightback we brought about 1000 people to march on May Day under PLP’s leadership.
PLP has spread our line among the masses. Many people in Oaxaca know CHALLENGE. In the teachers union leaders' assemblies we have promoted the class struggle, we have distributed flyers denouncing the policies of the government  and we have attacked imperialism. As a Party we have built an alternative leadership to the bosses. Our advances are still small and slow and attacks continue. We have led very militant fights against reformist ideology, though political progress is still slow in this area.
Throughout these years of struggle we’ve always tried to build a base for communist ideas and now many people know the Party. We’ve lost members because the bosses have cut the number of teachers and others have retired, but we are still fighting. We have made progress in building a new younger leadership for our work in the union which bodes well for the future. We also know that while building a base for communism we’ve also fought off even more dismissals and jailings which has helped preserve and grow our base and keeps us in the fight.
Teachers, students and parents fight back in Brooklyn
Our teachers’ collective at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn came under attack by the administration after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August of 2005. PLP organized people to go to New Orleans and help Black workers there who had been left to fend for themselves by the bosses’ system.
A racist, careerist Assistant Principal hated that communists were organizing people to go to New Orleans and building PLP while helping Black workers abandoned by the ruling class after the hurricane. He reported us for taking students on an “unauthorized trip” even though students had permission slips from their parents.
One parent wrote a glowing letter supporting our efforts. “As a parent…I give my full support to this hard working team… I wish to commend the teachers, parents and students for their commitment to their goals and holding strong to their beliefs…” The lesson here is to be bold. Working class students and parents will support you.
Another attack occurred in the fall of 2010 when teachers and students fought racism together. As a student was entering school through security and the metal detectors a copy of CHALLENGE was found in the student’s possession. The administrator wanted to know how and where the student got the paper- and learned that students and teachers had been to a rally in D.C. against racism with PLP members.
This racist principal had been after the PL’ers for years. As the principal was harassing both students and parents trying to get information about the trip, we organized a walkout and rally outside the school with hundreds of students. All the parents said that their young people had their complete permission and some brought them to the busses early in the morning. Now 18 years later we are still in touch with some of the parents, and students who went with us to New Orleans and also those that protested in D.C. Some are leaders of the Party today. We got Unsatisfactory ratings for that school year and they were well earned! But all of us who were involved in these struggles emerged stronger with more confidence in the working class and our ideas.
Fight to Win
These days the working class is often on the defensive more than going on the offensive against the bosses. When the demonstrations against racism, against the bosses’ imperialist wars and for workers power and communist revolution are relatively small it can be difficult when the bosses attack but the lesson is the same.
The small battles will lead to bigger ones and the small victories of the communist movement growing out of the struggle are where the big victory of communist revolution is born. Whether it is a big struggle or small, our class can only win when we fight.
When the bosses attack, we have to fight back. That is what com​​munists do.

‘When bosses cut back, we say fight back!’

On April 11, although New York City Mayor Adams and his friends, the leaders of the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), finalized their agreement to privatize retiree health coverage, retired city workers continue to fight back. On March 31st and again on April 11th demonstrations were held in front of City Hall. Hundreds rallied on March 31 and over a thousand rallied today. A loud chorus responded to a speaker's call, “Bosses say cut back, we say fight back”.  In the midst of this struggle we are getting out CHALLENGEnewspaper to our friends and inviting them to our Progressive Labor Party study group. We are learning from these older workers that you can’t retire from the class struggle and in turn are teaching them how this racist capitalist system works.

As CHALLENGE has pointed out, the bosses throughout the U.S. are shifting health care costs onto the backs of workers. This is because they are preparing for war with their capitalist rivals in China and Russia and need to build their war chests. Union leaders are playing the role of willing accomplice as they “save” money for the bosses. Older workers face greater hardships when health care is denied, delayed or made too expensive for them to afford.
As this struggle plays out in street demonstrations, court suits, proposed legislation and union meetings, we will have ample opportunity to point out how the capitalist state apparatus and its agents in the mass organizations are used to keep workers, old and young, under the oppressive heel of the ruling class. Our involvement in all aspects of this struggle allows us to build schools for communism among workers fighting back.

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‘My first communist dinner’

Growing up here in America, I always thought I knew what communism was and what a communist looked like. Communism was something that was the work of the devil himself and anyone who dared call themselves a communist was a traitor to all that was right and good  in the world and that they should be turned into the C.I.A. immediately. I never believed all that of course but I did grow to dislike the movement after learning about men like Joseph Stalin, and Lavrentiy Beria so when it came to meeting my U.S. history teacher I was very surprised to hear that she was a communist.
Here was a woman who fought for what was right and goes out of her way everyday to make sure that every student gets what they need and challenges the authority who neglects and (many times) abuses the students’ rights. This woman led me to the place that I volunteer with now and later led me to my first communist dinner.
I had no expectations going into the dinner. I had met many of the people organizing the event just the day before and they all were incredibly welcoming. Setting up for the dinner was fun as I got to know more of the people I was helping. Once people started to trickle in I got to see the nice community that has been made in that small building in Brooklyn. The hugs were only matched by the smiles people gave one another. I was introduced to many great people who talked with me about college and how they got involved with the movement.
As we ate the amazing food, we heard fantastic speeches from the organizers explaining the importance of the Party. After, came the main event of the night, the auction, in which all proceeds go to preparing for the big event of the year “May Day” or “International Workers Day.”
A massive show of force by workers all over the planet. The auction was filled with an insane amount of content, ranging from a communist history walk tour to posters made by the organizers celebrating community and working together. By the end of the event hundreds of dollars were raised and while I myself am not a communist, I believe that the community work that they are doing is absolutely critical in making sure we have a better tomorrow.

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It takes a village to make a banner

The collective process at work produced communist banners today.
We had a victorious banner-making this afternoon where comrades as well as folks not yet in the Party--children as well as someone over 80—traveled miles to participate.  The surprising aspect to me was not only the beauty of the many finished products but how the banners were perfected.  The main banner, huge at about 4 feet by 10 feet, was sketched in advance by a practiced graphic artist who could not attend.  It took a literal army of most of us participants to color in the red silhouetted army of marching workers and the illustrating words.  Later, some smaller, poster-board sized creations revealed true communist principles in the making.
During poster making, a worker worked with three children who were arguing over who should color in the words at the top of a poster board. The adult worker simply suggested turning around the poster itself so that no one needed to reach over the others and thus avoided a squabble.
Finally, on this very day in an email there appeared a summary from an article discussing the errors and lessons from the Soviet and Chinese Revolutions.  Specifically, the Cultural Revolution brought out how “Struggle over capitalist versus working-class ideas is best when it fuses theory and practice. The theoretical side (the ideas in our banners) is conscious understanding of class relations.
The practical side is how they operate in the village, the work unit, etc. The struggle is not over ideology by itself; it is about how we run things, overall (i.e., how the banners were produced)."

As communists we know that billionaire capitalists run things in our world and in the city of Chicago. The recent election of Brandon Johnson for Chicago’s mayor won’t change that. The election was seen as a win for progressives and antiracists by many (Johnson is Black and his opponent white). Antiracist, working class wins don’t happen through elections—they are the result of protests, strikes, and ultimately, communist revolution.
Brandon Johnson defeated Paul Vallas, a former head of Chicago Public Schools. Vallas worked to privatize public schools in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport, Connecticut after leaving Chicago.  More recently he spent time serving U.S. imperialism in Chile and in Haiti. His school policies are in line with those in the ruling class (be they Democrats or Republicans) who promote charters and school vouchers to replace public schools. Johnson’s policies are in line with those capitalists who support public schools as the best way to prepare working class youth to be future workers and soldiers. Only communist revolution will create spaces that truly educate all.
Johnson was backed by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the Chicago Teachers Union, and many other politicians and unions who are considered progressive. The outlook of their movement is that through elections and protests, the working class can diminish racism and improve  education, health care, housing, and working conditions. Progressive Labor Party’s analysis is based on history and science, which indicates that U.S. capitalism is in an economic crisis. Until the capitalists are defeated with communist revolution, racist attacks will continue, and the rich will take back any gains we make as soon as they can. Under capitalism, inter-imperialist wars as well as wars against the world’s working class, will continue.
While open racists like Trump and Vallas appear to be our main capitalist enemies, liberals are actually the main danger. Whether they are well-intentioned and naive, or manipulative and brutal, liberal politicians, including Johnson, serve  the capitalist class.  As the capitalist system falls deeper into crisis and chaos, Johnson too will have to make budget cuts and ignore or crush dissent when it inevitably arises. Capitalism is a brutal system regardless of the face serving it, and there is no election that can change that.
Johnson and most of his supporters believe that his election will improve conditions for Chicago’s workers. Chicago has about equal shares of Latin, Black, and white residents, and also contains a growing Asian population. In general, Chicago’s white population is much wealthier than the other populations. Johnson has pledged to prioritize housing, education, and public safety. At the same time, he calls for a city that “respects the workers who keep it running and supports the entrepreneurs who keep it growing” (from his acceptance speech). This is an irreconcilable contradiction: the rich got that way because of their exploitation of the workers!
Crime was an important issue in the campaign. Johnson pointed out that many calls to police would be better handled by social workers and talked about the relationship of poverty to crime. However, he backed off previous support for “defunding police”, even though 40 percent of the city’s budget is spent on policing and Chicago has twice as many police per capita as the typical U. S. city. Under capitalism, police always “serve and protect” the rich— we won’t need them under communism.
Some members of PLP were active in the Johnson campaign even though we don’t agree that this racist, capitalist system can be changed through electoral politics. We join reform movements so that we can build relationships with workers who may later join our fight for communism. This election campaign is over, but the struggle continues, and we will invite many of those we worked with in the campaign to our upcoming May Day march.