CHICAGO, January 14 – Hundreds of multi-racial, working-class youth took over the streets downtown to challenge a racist capitalist education system in crisis. Students across the U.S. staged walkouts from their campuses and students from across the city converged for a militant and spirited rally in front of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) headquarters.
This inspiring action was organized as negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the racist education bosses of CPS and Big Fascist Mayor Lori Lightfoot fell apart. Working-class youth took this militant action upon themselves, as the city bosses and union hacks have done nothing to stop Covid-19 infections and deaths.
Communists from the international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) proudly supported these bold youth in their fight. But the profit system offers no future for our youth other than unemployment, exploitation, or imperialist war. PLP offers the only real route out of this capitalist nightmare: that of an international communist revolution. Under communism, the initiative, creativity, and leadership of youth will help steer society forward, instead of being trivialized. The working-class youth that took the streets today are future generals in the Red Army that will bury capitalism forever!
Antiracist youth lead the future
As soon as we learned that CPS students were planning a walkout, enthusiasm grew among our local collective. In contrast to the closed door negotiations between CPS and CTU, this direct action represented a more militant and grassroots protest against racist education conditions.
We organized to support two high schools on the city’s south side where the Party has a presence. As the walkout started, the young people were met by PLP members distributing CHALLENGE, holding signs, and joining in on pro-student chants like, “When I say, ‘Youth voice,’ you say, ‘Youth voice matters!’” and “Get up, get down – We’ve got to tear this system down!” Many eagerly took copies of CHALLENGE.
The energy increased as students from many schools joined forces at the CPS headquarters. The front entrances were blocked, as the youth gave speeches and led more chants. Black and Latin students – those most viciously attacked under this racist capitalist system – delivered some of the most passionate speeches and militant leadership.
The protest closed with a short march to shut down traffic on nearby State Street. Despite a heavy presence of the kkkops, the young fighters were able to safely marshal the march in order to prevent any confrontations or arrests. Many students hung around to talk about communism and the Party with us, gave contact information, and even shared the link for our 1/17 forum on Revolutionary Violence on social media!
Liberal capitalists remain the principal danger
The working-class students leading this movement are demanding more social distancing measures, more testing, masks and therapy, as well as laptops for those in remote learning (Block Club Chicago, 1/14). But under the capitalist profit system even the most simple health and safety measures for workers are routinely denied. Under a communist society run by the working-class, basic health and safety measures will be routinely provided.
This social murder is being committed under the watchful eye of the dominant liberal capitalist bosses, particularly the racist Black misleader Lightfoot, who has been relentless in pushing working-class youth and education workers back into unsafe schools (see page 3). She’s following the lead of the Big Fascist wing (see Glossary, page 6) of the U.S. capitalist class. These Wall Street finance capitalists are currently fronted by Joe Biden. They are eager to return to their “normal” profiteering ways, while millions of workers get infected and thousands get sick and die.
And now these Big Fascists are promoting the idea that an ongoing pandemic will be normal for the foreseeable future. They want us to accept our deaths, and the deaths of our class brothers and sisters, as normal, as they live on and profit. As domestic Small Fascist rivals threaten them from within and imperialists in Russia and China threaten them abroad, they are desperate to control the youth they know will be needed to fight and die in their future wars for profit.
Class struggle is in session!
Workers and students must not accept this fate. Let’s keep this youth-led anti-racist fightback alive and connect it to our collective need to build the mass international PLP and a new communist world. Class struggle is in session! Join PLP!

Only weeks into the New York City (NYC) mayoral administration of Eric Adams, capitalism has revealed once again that Black politicians are on the front lines of fascist police terror and deadly living conditions for workers in NYC and around the world.  Police raids of Black youth in Brooklyn on January 4 followed by a massive fire killing at least 17 workers in the Bronx on January 9 prove the point.
 In Progressive Labor Party (PLP) we know that especially under the cover of a Black mayor, much like President Barack Obama as former president, our class must be more courageous than ever at our jobs and in our neighborhoods in calling out the atrocities committed by those with the same skin color and from the same “communities” that we come from.   
Eric Adams is no different. The capitalist warmongers running the Democratic Party need politicians like Adams in NYC and Ras Baraka in Newark, New Jersey, to play leading roles in keeping Black workers disciplined and submissive to the needs of an ever-more-volatile capitalist system.  
Politically-backed slumlords to blame for Bronx blaze
In the aftermath of the January 9 fire at Twin Parks North West Tower, Eric Adams invoked the age-old blame-the-victim mantra of “personal responsibility,” accomplishing  exactly what the flailing main imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class needs right now.
Adams blamed the deaths of children as young as four or five not on his firetrap landlord buddy Rick Gropper (NY Mag, 1/13, cityandstateny.com 1/12) but on Black immigrant workers themselves running for their lives and neglecting to shut doors that would have closed on their own if Gropper had properly maintained them. A tenant interviewed after the blaze put it best:
They’re sending up just enough heat to say they’re sending up heat, but it’s not enough to keep you warm, and if you don’t use a space heater, then you use your oven (NYPost, 1/10).
This is capitalism in a nutshell: the landlord’s disregard for safety protocols led to needless
death– what Freidrich Engels called “social murder.’”
Police raids terrorize Black youth
Days before the deadly Bronx fire, on January 4, the Adams gang set the stage for this new wave of social murder forced onto workers by increasing the tempo and intensity of New York Police Department (NYPD) raids targeting Black and Latin youth. Plainclothes ‘anti-crime’ units that murdered Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray and Saheed Vassell in Brooklyn have been reinstated by his administration (NYT, 1/5).
The bosses were forced to disband these units during the anti-racist protests following the death of George Floyd, but they quickly restored their brutal policies of shoot to kill once the protests subsided. Only communism can accomplish the goal that all workers seeking justice are fighting for: a world without any racist cops empowered to defend capitalist inequality.  
Raids, like the one on January 4 where 17 Black youth were arrested by the cops, rely on weak “guilt-by-association” conspiracy laws that use social media and cyberspace collaborations with law enforcement to round up workers by the hundreds. The newly appointed Black female NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell gives us a sense of the Big Fascist (see glossary, page 6)direction that the desperate ruling-class is headed in: “There will be more cases like this one, not just here in Brooklyn but in every borough” (Brooklyn DA/YouTube, January 10).
Sewell received high-grade training in counterterrorism with the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA, so she is savvy enough to acknowledge the “lack of choice” Black youth face, but her actions speak louder than any words—for the youth aged 17-23 targeted in this raid (PIX 11, 1/4).
These Task Forces are responsible for a 20-year campaign of terror targeting Muslim communities with kidnap-style street arrests, summary deportation and targeted infiltration of community centers and houses of worship.
Whether it is Sewell’s compatriots persecuting Muslim workers or former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s over-decade-long “stop-and-frisk,” workers have suffered from racist political repression at the hands of NYC mayoral administrations.
In promising “more cases” Sewell is building on a high bar the NYPD set for fascist, repressive terror. Bloomberg’s stop-and-friskpractices recovered a paltry number of weapons (The Atlantic, 7/24/13) but terrorized a generation of Black and Latin youth (NYT, 1/5). As with stop-and-frisk, the Big Fascists’ aim to target gang members under the guise of Black conservative leadership is not safety; it is terror.    
Angry youth must join PLP to fight racist policing
Long-term investigations prove that city governments are aware of exactly which young people are in deepest crisis. Educators have similar insight, yet schools remain sites of repression and neglect for uncounted thousands.  
While the bosses forced youth into unsafe educational conditions during the pandemic, PLP supported student anger and protest in NYC and beyond (see page 3). Students at Brooklyn Tech high school (see letter, page 6) led the way for protests from Chicago to Boston with students standing up to capitalist failure in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. All we can expect from the bosses is a steady dose of aggressive policing in our schools modeled in the image of the Sewell/Adams regime.
Young people are in crisis, a crisis so deep that, for some, gangs appear to be their best option. But students don’t need street gangs or the gang in blue; they need PLP!  
Calls for more Black leaders for capitalism only feed the illusion that there is a version of capitalism that can work for us, and this has proven true from NYC to Newark to the working-class communities in the Caribbean and Africa where politicians meet angry youth with guns and state repression. “Community engagement” with the likes of Adams and Sewell is the kiss of death. Identity politics blinds us to this truth and hence is poisonous. The future of our youth is an afterthought for the ruling class Sewell and Adams front for.
Black youth, from Minneapolis to Baltimore to Ferguson and beyond, have led uprisings recently that rocked the world. The racist U.S. ruling-class tremble in fear at the potential explosive force which rests in the heart of their crumbling imperialist world order. Their great nightmare is our great hope. The leadership of Black workers and youth remain a key force for communist revolution.

DECEMBER 4—The Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA)  opened its mini-conference Keywords: Climate/Capital with a question: “How does understanding that capitalism is the key cause of the climate crisis help us address the immediate urgency of dealing with its effects?”
At the Dec. 4 meeting Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  members argued that we urgently need a communist revolution as an answer to the impending climate crisis, not the dead-end reformism of the Green New Deal, which assumes that capitalism will and can continue only in some new green mode.
Most of our friends’ presentations were urgent, informed, provocative—but reform-oriented. Then one speaker quoted from David Walker’s 1829 abolitionist tract Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, and a heated discussion began about violent resistance and direct action in climate struggles.
The crux of the debate being: Do we need revolutionary violence to end the global capitalist climate crisis?
Capitalism is the crisis
Someone pointed out that land defenders like the Wet’suwet’en in Canada were already the targets of state violence. Another decried the pacifism embraced by some climate organizers. There was a vigorous defense of non-violence as both tactic and philosophy from other speakers. But David Walker’s fighting abolitionist spirit increasingly shaped the discussion. Even the speaker who had praised the Green New Deal was moved to say that maybe we did need “a radical edge.”  PLP members argued that capitalism and its destruction of the environment and workers’ lives could never be abolished peacefully or by elections, and that we need a communist party to organize a mass armed revolution.
Building a mass revolutionary party
For those of us in PLP who are longtime organizers in the Radical Caucus, a significant development this past year has been that a number of younger faculty and graduate students have joined and now work with the Party in the RC. This is important because many militant antiracist, antisexist, and anti-capitalist faculty, workers, and students recognize the connection between the crisis of climate collapse, racist capitalist exploitation, and the pandemic.
 But the reversals of the two major communist movements in the 20th century, in the Soviet Union and China, have made it difficult for even radical anti-capitalists to embrace communism and a communist party as anything other than utopian. They often hold their noses and vote for liberals because they see no alternative.
Our role as communists is to overcome this skepticism; share our analysis of the setbacks of past communist movements; explain why PLP views liberals as more dangerous than overt conservatives; and uphold revolutionary communism as the only realistic alternative if life on the planet is to survive and thrive.
We need to become more skilled at bringing class consciousness and building a communist movement to the fight against climate change. Our links to friends in the MLA Radical Caucus are a two-way street.  We learn from them, they learn from us and our class will win through struggle and revolution.

In the 1967 movie “In the Heat of the Night,” Virgil Tibbs, a Black detective played by Sidney Poitier, is slapped across the face by Endicott, a white plantation owner he is interrogating in a murder investigation. Tibbs immediately retaliates with a slap of his own—a gesture that has gone down in history as “the slap heard round the world” (Guardian, 1/7). Never before had the Hollywood screen allowed–let alone affirmed—such an expression of Black antiracist anger. We want to cheer.
Yet, even this feel-good moment is directed by the ruling class. Working-class movie-goers need to be skeptical of the pleasures afforded by popular culture. We may think movies are “just entertainment,” but we are being strategically positioned to view some characters and actions as villainous, and others as admirable: nothing could be more political. So, how do movies reflect the historical pressures of their times? What ruling-class ideologies do they affirm? How do we apply communist criticism to the propaganda of the bosses—capitalist entertainment, after all, is part of the state apparatus.
Impossible stains status
The films of the recently-deceased Sidney Poitier (1927—2022) provide an excellent opportunity for communist critique. Poitier is best known for several films from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s in which he played characters transcending racial antagonism through near-impossible displays of individual integrity, stoicism, and moral generosity.
In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), he and Tony Curtis co-star as escaping prisoners chained together; at the end, Poitier’s character gives up the chance to hop onto a freight car to remain with his wounded friend. In “Lilies of the Field“ (1963)—for which Poitier was the first Black man to win the Best Actor Oscar award—he plays an itinerant handyman who, free of charge, constructs a church for a group of German nuns. In these sentimental films, multiracial solidarity is linked not with antiracist struggle, but self-sacrifice.  
As James Baldwin caustically commented about the finale of “The Defiant Ones:” “Liberal white audiences applauded when Sidney, at the end of the film, jumped off the train in order not to abandon his white buddy. . . . The Harlem audience was outraged and yelled, Get back on the train you fool! “ (The Conversation, 1/7).
In 1967, three of Poitier’s films were top box office hits. In “To Sir, with Love,” Poitier plays a teacher who tames and edifies rebellious youth in a tough London neighborhood. “In the Heat of the Night” shows Virgil Tibbs not only slapping the plantation owner but also challenging the racist condescension of the Mississippi sheriff who calls him “boy.” “They call me Mister Tibbs,” is his famous response.
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” features Poitier as a brilliant doctor who confronts—and triumphs over—the liberal racism of the parents of the young white woman he plans to marry. While the film challenged near-universal taboos on representing interracial relationships it aimed to portray Poitier as an impossibly perfect suitor, feeding into respectability politics.
Poitier furthers myth of individual success
In preceding decades, such heroic roles had not been available to Black actors. Poitier ostensibly broke the mold, clearing the way for Laurence Fishburne and Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett and Viola Davis.  But Poitier’s aura of near-saintly “dignity” came at a price. The heroes he portrayed were “well-dressed,” “well-spoken,” and “self-controlled”; they never organized collective resistance to racism.
Indeed, they embodied the myth of individual success: Virgil Tibbs insists upon being called “Mister Tibbs.” Moreover, despite his matinee-idol good looks, Poitier was almost never cast as leading man in a romantic role; even his role in “Guess who’s Coming to Dinner” contains near-zero erotic charge.
Poitier’s films appealed to hesitant, white liberals by making it possible to identify with a Black man who did not require them to do anything more than admire him. (See Sharon Willis, The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and the Fantasies of Reconciliation).  
In his offscreen life, Poitier hardly conformed to the pacifist image he projected in his most popular films. He and his closest friend Harry Belafonte together risked their lives to bring desperately-needed funds to Mississippi after the 1963 lynchings of civil rights fighters (Dallas News, 1/22)).When racist mobs gathered outside his Mississippi motel room while he was filming “In the Heat of the Night,” he slept with a gun under his pillow—and told the movie’s director, Norman Jewison, "I got a gun under my pillow and I'm going to blow away the first guy who comes through that door" (People, 1/22).
But Poitier insisted on only taking roles that would refute inherited stereotypes, even if this committed him to playing the same hero over and over. “I felt I was representing 15, 18 million people with every movie I made,” he once commented (NYT, 1/7).
Poitier and actors like him help legitimize U.S. capitalism
Many of Poitier’s obituaries noted that his career traced the arc of the Civil Rights Movement. What they failed to mention is the role he played in stifling the very antiracism to which his films gave expression. The U.S. ruling class was fearful of a working-class uprising, and especially of Black rebellion (see Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns). Ultimately, the typical Poitier hero supports the capitalist state; Virgil Tibbs is, after all, a cop, bent on restoring law and order. Like their predecessor, current actors like  Angela Bassett also help workers buy into a more diverse face of capitalism.
Furthermore, Poitier’s films legitimized U.S. imperialism by shoring up the image of the United States in the eyes of the world. Starting in the mid-1950s, the U.S. was competing for the hearts and minds of the vast nonwhite populations rising up against colonialism and drawn toward the Soviet Union (See Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy).  
There was a division in the ruling class: southern landowners wished to retain the highly profitable practice of Jim Crow, while more far-seeing imperialists wanted to sanitize the nation’s image by proposing that the nation was overcoming its racist past. The “slap heard round the world” was part of this ideological project.
In the final analysis, Sidney Poitier was no culture hero in the working-class struggle against racism. From this era, far more important—and for this reason maligned and harangued to the end of his life by the U.S. government—was the communist Paul Robeson (See CHALLENGE, 1/5).