Staying bold in the Bronx

CHICAGO, January, 24– This racist profit system has stolen yet another child, this time the life of eight-year-old Melissa Ortega. She and her mother were walking down the street in the Little Village neighborhood on January 22 when they got caught in a gang-related crossfire. Melissa was struck twice in the head. A system ruled by the biggest gangsters of all time, the bosses, will foster violence against our class.
To amass profits, bosses must force our class to work under dangerous working conditions, and endure equally miserable living conditions, pushing millions of workers into an early grave. These horrific capitalist conditions—social murder and imperialist wars—create the perfect storm for gang violence.
Capitalism is a genocidal system propped up by racist, sexist exploitation, inequality, and war. Violence enables rulers to oppress workers, ruling over us with fear and impunity. ONLY in a society where education, resources, and means of production are all in the name of nurturing and fostering from each according to commitment, to each according to need we will no have conditions that lead to gang violence. The ultimate murderers are the bosses, who must be smashed through communism.
Communists fight back against capitalist terror
Little Village is primarily a Spanish-speaking lower-income working class community. The bosses are trying to gentrify this historically neglected area, with an added effort to rid gangs. The bosses want us to buy into the racist myth of Black-on-Black crime, to convince us that Black and Latin workers are “violent” and “criminal” to justify police terror and mass incarceration.
However, we must not forget it is the capitalists who make wars, and glamorize and sell violent culture. It is the capitalists who attack us with poverty and police terror. It is the capitalists who sell the guns, and who place them in the hands of arms dealers and gang members, degraded workers, killing our class sisters ,brothers, and children in mainly Black and Latin neighborhoods.
The following Monday, a friend of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and a resident of Little Village texted a Party member to attend a press conference called by his organization to demand justice for Melissa. Word was quickly spread; four PLP members and two longtime friends of PL, attended. Everyone was outraged and called on local politicians to demand mental health clinics for their community but predictably none came.
Those of us in the Party have been working in this area for years in various campaigns, workplaces and mass organizations in order to win workers to the necessity of communist revolution to crush this rotten system and all its misery.
 No more victims of capitalism!
We distributed 30 copies of CHALLENGE while speaking with many workers present. One woman thought that we’d have a better society if we all had the same religion. Another woman thought that lack of mental health clinics was the problem. Over half of the city’s public mental health clinics closed in 2013, under the watch of racist former mayor, Rahm Emanuel. This lack of access definitely plays a part, as many working class youth who are oppressed and alienated are deprived of resources that could help them emotionally and socially.
Melissa’s mother, Aracelia Leanos, said in a statement that the shooter was a victim of the system himself and forgave him, knowing that he will have to live with her daughter’s murder for the rest of his life. But the fact is that we are all victims of capitalism with its racist and sexist culture of individualism, unemployment, underemployment, rotten schools and medical care.
And yes, the shooter, 16-year old Emilio Corripio and his 27-year-old accomplice, are victims of capitalism. But we still have a choice: become communists and join PLP in building a communist movement where we turn the guns around on the bosses to get rid of this rotten system of capitalism. We have to intensify our efforts to win our class to the Party or we run the risk of more workers joining the reformist dead-end of capitalist politics and becoming politicians for the super-rich capitalists, turning to religion, racist cynicism, or even joining the predatory street gangs.
The list of casualties keeps getting longer. Under capitalism, “justice” looks like killer cops like Jason Van Dyke serving a six year sentence then being set free for “good behavior” after shooting Black teenager LaQuan McDonald 16 times. Kyle Rittenhouse being declared ‘innocent’ by the U.S. court system after killing two antiracists in Kenosha,  Wisconsin. Which side are we on?
Choose the working class
Be they the cops and sheriffs, the “legal” foot soldiers for the capitalist class who killed working-class youth like Adam Toledo in the streets of Chicago or Valentina Orellana Peralta and Daniel Elena Lopez in Los Angeles. Or whether they are the petty capitalist-influenced gangs, we have to ask ourselves which side are we on—the capitalists or the international working class?
If you choose the international working class, join PLP and continue to build the international communist movement to achieve a better world—a communist world where we take care of each other and help each other reach our human potential. It is our responsibility as communists to win our young friends in Little Village and everywhere to join PLP and fight for a just future.

On January 11, the U.S. Justice Department—a lethal weapon for the world’s most deadly state terrorists, the U.S. ruling class—announced a new division to target “domestic terrorism.” One year after the assault on the Capitol by loyalists of Donald Trump, the vicious battle between two factions of U.S. capitalism is getting even hotter. Controlled by the liberal fascist bosses and their Democratic Party, at least for now, both the Injustice Department and the U.S. Congress have launched sweeping investigations of Trump and his top confederates. These finance capital liberals, also known as the Big Fascists (see glossary, page 6), are taking another step toward full-blown fascism.
To date, more than 700 people have been arrested for their roles in the January 6 rebellion, including 375 for felonies (Washington Post, 1/11). Eleven Trump associates have been charged with crimes (CNN, 7/21/21). The New York Times, the liberal bosses’ leading propaganda machine, is making a case to charge Trump himself with a scheme to confiscate voting machines (2/1). This is just the beginning. The Big Fascists’ media are calling for new laws to more severely prosecute any and all threats to their agenda (TIME, 1/24).
In the fight between Big Fascists and Small Fascists, our class must be clear-eyed about capitalist democracy. We do not hold state power. Capitalism is a dictatorship against the working class, while communism will mean the dictatorship of the working class. Only then do we get to decide how to run society.  Make communist revolution with the international Progressive Labor Party.
Big Fascists, big problems
The Big Fascists, represented by the largest banks and multinational companies like ExxonMobil and Google, are tied to the old liberal world order and expansive U.S. imperialism. To protect their trillions in profits, and to counter rising imperialist gangs in China and Russia, they bankroll 750-plus armed bases around the globe and spend more on the U.S. military than the next 10 nations combined (aljazeera.com, 9/10/21)—a big potential advantage in the next world war.
But unlike China and Russia, the Big Fascists are hobbled by splits in their ranks. The myths of liberal democracy--“free and fair” elections, a government that “plays by the rules”--constrain them. Meanwhile, the Small Fascists, the domestically oriented capitalists fronted by Trump, are free to more openly cheat and steal their way into power while leveraging gutter racism and sexism to mobilize their base. The January 6 insurrection was a warning shot of more to come. To prepare for war and build a united, patriotic, multiracial military, the Big Fascists need to use their legal apparatus to crush the Small Fascists and discipline the whole capitalist class.
If and when they succeed, the liberal rulers will proceed to the second essential element of fascism: an all-out campaign to mislead, pacify, and attack the working class, first by eliminating communists and anyone else not with the program. The Joe Biden administration’s offensive against "domestic terrorists," including modern Klansmen like the Oath Keepers, is aimed both to destroy the Big Fascists’ enemies and to confuse the working class. As CHALLENGE consistently points out, the liberal bosses are the most virulent racists and our most dangerous class enemies. Why is that? Because they have a greater ability to deceive honest, anti-racist workers, and a far greater--and proven--capacity for mass murder, from Hiroshima to Vietnam to Iraq.
While the liberal rulers still have the loyalty of their generals and more “dark money” than the Trumpers to buy elections (NYT, 1/29), there is no guarantee they will come out on top. After continuing to bungle the bosses’ response to Covid-19, Biden is deeply unpopular. Though the Republicans are a minority party, they already control the U.S. Supreme Court and most state legislatures. They appear likely to retake the U.S. Senate (cnn.com, 11/21/21) and the House of Representatives this fall (New York Post, 12/31/21). Trump is a narrow betting favorite to be returned to the White House in 2024 (bonus.com, 2/1).
For the Big Fascist liberals, a Small Fascist sweep would have dire implications for what's left of the old U.S. empire. As president, Trump was soft (to say the least) on Russian President Vladimir Putin. He showed disdain for traditional U.S. allies and is distrusted by liberal bosses in Europe and NATO. As more than a hundred thousand Russian troops have massed on the border with Ukraine, Small Fascist Republicans in Congress are showing no appetite for inter-imperialist confrontation. Said Congressman Matt Rosendale of Montana: “Despite claims by war hawks on both sides of the aisle, it is not in our national interest to spill American blood and treasure in Ukraine” (msn.com, 1/22).
As Russia advances on Ukraine and expands its military influence in Africa (cnbc.com, 9/13/21), and China becomes the ally of choice for bosses in the Middle East (New York Times, 2/2), the Big Fascists may be running out of time.
Liberal democracy = liberal fascism
In the history of class society, going back to the ancient Greeks (the slave-owning forerunners of the U.S. Founding Monsters), democracy has always been a dictatorship of the ruling class. Today's liberal democracy is an absolute dictatorship of the finance capitalist bosses. When the Big Fascists cry that democracy is under threat, it means they are fearful that their control is in jeopardy.
Voting is a con game to foster the illusion that workers decide what happens in society. Little more than a year after Biden was elected as the “compassionate” alternative to Trump, he’s committed one anti-worker atrocity after the next: normalizing Covid slaughter, caging children at the border, cheerleading for more funding for killer kkkops.
But that’s business as usual under capitalism. What's new is that the liberal rulers--divided, corrupt, getting weaker by the day—are seeing that they can no longer govern in the old way. Though they’d prefer to keep the charade of democracy, they can’t allow it to usher their Small Fascist rivals into power. (It’s worth noting that Adolph Hitler became Germany’s chancellor through democratic elections, though the Nazi Party never polled more than 37 percent of the vote.)  The U.S. Justice Department’s renewed focus on domestic terrorism is a preliminary move to put the liberals’ internal competition out of business—and, sooner than later, to go after other “enemies of the state,” including Progressive Labor Party.
We will never liberate the working class from the bondage of capitalism as long as we hold illusions about what we control. Under liberal democracy, the capitalist bosses own our labor and the means of production. The rulers control the institutions of the state: the government, the media, the schools, the military. What we control is our ability to build class unity and consciousness by advancing class struggle. Our Party and our class are fighting back from Haiti to Colombia to Pakistan, from Mexico to East Africa. We’re exposing the dead-end identity politics that Black mayors are weaponizing against Black and Latin workers in Los Angeles and Chicago and New York and Newark. Smash the rulers’ democracy! Fight for communism! Join PLP!

Torrance, CA, January 30—Workers and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members refused to stay silent since racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic text messages by Torrance police officers, going back to 2018, were revealed to the public. In the spirit of fightback, two mutual aid organizations, which PL members work in, called for a rally at Torrance City Hall. The rally called attention to the racist and sexist history of not just the Torrance Police Department (TPD) but the entire capitalist system that policing upholds. Under capitalism all KKKOPS protect the ruling class and their property and uphold a system that relies on racist super-profits. They routinely criminalize Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant workers to ensure that our class brothers and sisters remain exploited and fearful. Only with communist revolution will workers have the power to weed out capitalism, the root of all crime and oppression, and smash racist police once and for all.
A history of racism in the Torrance PD
This whole texting scandal came to light when the department started investigating former officers Cody Weldon and Christopher Tomsic, who spray painted a swastika on a car impounded in a mail fraud investigation. So far 13 officers have been named by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office as being active in the text exchanges, including Anthony Chavez and Matthew Concannon, who murdered a Black man, Christopher De’Andre Mitchell, in 2018. No one has been charged but thus far 85 criminal cases these officers were involved in have been dismissed (LA Times, 12/08/21).
These disgusting text messages show the contempt cops hold for the working-class communities they patrol. This isn’t a case of a few bad apples but a system that is rotten to the core.
Racism means: we have to fight back!
About 30 people showed up for the rally, which had a loose plan for chants and speeches. Select reform demands included firing all officers involved in the text messages, creating a civilian oversight commission; and, ultimately, abolition of the police. While we understand these measures won’t solve the crisis for the working-class, making these demands helps our class instill confidence in each other, our fellow comrades, and sharpens our consistent struggle and fightback.
A PL member led most of the chanting and encouraged people to speak on the bullhorn. The PLer gave a brief speech about the history of police and argued that to ultimately get rid of racist policing we need to organize to overthrow capitalism. Participants responded enthusiastically and some said later that this was the first action they had attended and they were eager to participate in the future.
The mass groups who organized the action mainly focus on direct mutual aid but also see homelessness, poverty, and police harassment as tied to this oppressive, capitalist system. Party members must be bolder in pushing for our revolutionary line as we build community support and fight side by side for reforms.
Eventually our class will see a communist revolution, but we can only do that by building an international working-class party. Join PLP and worker by worker, we will smash this racist system!

This article is a republication and originally appeared in CHALLENGE in February 2020. The lessons here are worth reprinting, revisiting, relearning every year.

It was out of my Jim Crow  experiences as a young Negro woman, experiences likewise born of working-class poverty that led me to join the Young Communist League and to choose the philosophy of my life, the science of Marxism-Leninism—that philosophy that not only rejects racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them. - Claudia Jones

One of the biggest lies the capitalists have ever tried to teach generations of working-class people is that Black workers did not play a critical role in communist history. This is because the bosses will ALWAYS try to perpetuate the idea that workers should remain divided by race. However, we in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) know that multiracial unity has ALWAYS been the most effective way for workers to overcome the effects of racial exploitation and oppression. Claudia Jones, a Black female leading member of the Communist Party (CP) for decades, represents the heroic efforts in fighting racism and sexism from the 1930s to 1960s, just as her politics also point toward the weaknesses embedded in the strategy of international communism many years ago. The main weakness in the old communist movement that is evident through looking at Claudia Jones is that they did not understand the need for one international party LED by women and Black and Latin workers to unite and fight directly to overthrow capitalism and establish a communist workers’ state.
Formation as a communist
Like thousands of other workers in the early 1900s, Jones and her family emigrated to New York City from Trinidad in the Caribbean. Jones was an avid student and started writing early on. She had dreams of college, but as a daughter of a garment worker who died too young, she started working herself at a young age. The revolutionary vision and struggle of the communist movement appealed to her, and in 1936 she joined the Young Communist League and became active in the movement to defend the Scottsboro 9, a group of Black teenagers, who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama.
A multiracial, communist-led movement turned the  “Scottsboro Boys” into an international cause for millions of workers all over the world to win their freedom. But just as the communist movement was at its sharpest point of winning workers around the world to workers’ revolution, they began to retreat politically into a “popular front against fascism” and Claudia Jones became part of that larger retreat.
Leadership in the Communist Party USA & fascist McCarthyism
In 1937, Jones joined the editorial staff of the communist Daily Worker, rising by 1938 to become editor of the Weekly Review. After World War II, Jones became executive secretary of the Women’s National Commission, and secretary for the Women’s Commission of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In 1953, she took over the editorship of Negro Affairs, a CPUSA journal. However, if anti-racism and internationalism had been the central premise of the CP’s strategy, they would not have had the need for a separate journal to address “Negro Affairs,” because all affairs of the working-class are touched by racist capitalism and super-exploitation.
Despite the shortcomings of the party’s line, Jones organized women workers and gave leadership within the Communist Party USA on the ways super-exploitation of women could become central to the Party’s theoretical development. She is perhaps best known for her seminal essay appearing in Political Affairs, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”  in which she took to task liberals, progressives and her own Party for not sufficiently recognizing the super-exploitation of Black women under capitalism and their leadership in working-class struggles, writing:

The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced….Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women.

In 1948, Jones, along with several other leaders of the Communist Party USA, was charged for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. Over the next seven years, the federal government  convicted, imprisoned in Ellis Island, and ultimately deported Jones—but not without an international movement launched to free her and thousands of other communist and progressive working-class organizers imprisoned during the fascism of the McCarthy period.
Fighting British racism & imperialism
Following WWII, Caribbean immigration to the United Kingdom increased and Black and Asian immigrant workers faced brutal racism upon arrival. Signs reading “No Irish, No Coloured, No Dogs” littered the streets of London businesses and apartment buildings for rent. Attacks on Black youth by white mobs and police officers were common. Working in London in the 1950’s and 60’s, Jones, a lifelong communist and self-described Marxist-Leninist, tirelessly organized several anti-racist, anti-imperialist campaigns.
Realizing the importance of celebrating working-class culture, Jones founded the West Indian Gazette, a popular newspaper that built a base among Caribbean diaspora workers in Britain and back home, with a circulation of 15,000. In 1958, following the killings of Black youths and riots instigated by racist white mobs in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London, Jones and others organized a carnival in response to the violence as a means of unifying the Black Caribbean community.
Claudia Jones died in December 1964, her health gutted by the years of political persecution and incarceration in the U.S. Her legacy was immediately felt by working-class communities around the world and condolences poured in, from W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Amy Ashwood Garvey to Mao Zedong, whom Jones had met on a delegation to China. Claudia Jones remains an example of how the leadership of Black workers, especially Black women, is key to the future of building a communist society. Paul Robeson expressed his admiration for Jones thusly:

It was a great privilege to have known Claudia Jones. She was a vigorous and courageous leader of the Communist Party of the United States, and was very active in the work for the unity of white and coloured peoples and for dignity and equality, especially for the Negro people and for women.

It is fitting that Jones is buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in London. Following her deportation, Jones wrote:

I was deported from the USA because as a Negro woman communist of West Indian descent, I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow racist discrimination against 16 million Negro Americans in the United States, in my work for redress of these grievances, for unity of Negro and white workers, for women’s rights...

As communists we should all be that thorn in the side of capitalism—so sharp as to make it bleed.