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Collectivity must win over competition Student athletes lead in fight against racism
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- 09 January 2022 271 hits
BROOKLYN, NY, December 15–In the ongoing struggle to make antiracism primary in the varsity sports at the multi-school John Jay Campus, students took the lead in a virtual forum that drew nearly 100 participants. Organized by parents, teachers, and students, the forum—“Are We One?”—gave students an opportunity to push adults on campus, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), to be self-critical about the athletic program’s integration efforts, which have disappointed a number of Black and Latin student athletes. In their drive to improve those efforts, the students also demanded that antiracism and collectivity—not wins and losses—should be the main measures of a successful season for a sports team.
The leadership of Black youth—the ones most brutally targeted by this racist system–continues to be central to this process. Building antiracist, integrated teams on and off the court is one way to crack the racist divisions that are normalized by the Department of Education (DoE) and the Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL).
Under capitalism, competition is so commonplace that we rarely notice its harmfulness. It fosters selfish individualism and undermines class solidarity. Communists fight for a world where all workers can reach their full potential in body and mind.
Multiracial unity vs. elitism
Armed with a proud history of fightback, the John Jay girls’ volleyball team has been at the crux of the struggle against the racist opportunity gap in youth sports. If anything, these tensions have intensified during the pandemic. In the 2020-2021 school year, most public high school students in New York attended school virtually, and varsity sports programs were suspended. Many of the Black and Latin athletes who’d played on the successful John Jay girls volleyball team the year before had no way to practice or develop their skills. Then, in the fall of 2021, the PSAL integrated a fourth campus school into the John Jay athletic program: the elitist Millennium Brooklyn High School. It also shoehorned the even more elitist Millennium High School from Manhattan into the John Jay program. (In previous years, the two Millennium schools had followed the DoE’s apartheid playbook and formed their own segregated team, though they used John Jay’s facilities.)
In this past fall’s tryouts for girls’ volleyball, the impact of capitalism’s racist inequality was brutally obvious. Players from the two Millennium schools, who are predominantly white or Asian and middle-class, had the advantage of playing for private club teams when public school sports were shut down. For the most part, the Black and Latin players from the other John Jay schools lacked that opportunity—they couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars charged by the private clubs. They were effectively pushed aside by the programs’ merger. The coaches and PL members at John Jay had failed to think ahead about how to support them.
During the forum, players and their coach painted different pictures of the season. Crediting two Black players for bringing their concerns and ideas to him, the coach acknowledged that his old way of coaching was problematic. He said he recognized that he was caught in a contradiction between fighting for antiracism and playing the girls who’d sharpened their skills on the private club circuit. There were some positive developments over the season. The coaches and athletes worked to strengthen bonds among the players. Some multiracial friendships were formed.
But on the court, most of the Black and Latin athletes played relatively little during the regular season—and even less in this year’s playoffs, where John Jay lost in the city championship finals. The drive to win—to be “elite”—took precedence over antiracist unity and the entire squad’s development. This error was most hurtful to the Black and Latin players who rarely played. But it also hurt the girls who played the most, because it put them above the team and prevented them from truly uniting with the players on the sideline. It also fed into the elitism and de facto segregation that plagues the John Jay campus, where a racist Millennium assistant principal is notorious for surveilling the stairways and shooing away Black and Latin students off “his” floor, even when they’re trying to see the school nurse.
Students hold the power!
John Jay’s student athletes are powerful. Sometimes the victims of racism feel only rage and frustration, and powerlessness to make a difference—but not these young women. As one of them said, “The administration and PSAL failed Black and Latin children this year. They told them they’d protect them, and they didn’t.” These antiracist organizers have been bold in their demands and leadership to push John Jay’s integration efforts beyond the sports program. Several brave students stepped forward at the forum to expose other racist incidents. When a “Free Palestine” poster was stolen from a club’s “solidarity wall” at Millennium, and then burned on video, the response from the do-nothing principal was to ask the club to add a “Protect Israel” poster to the wall—to defend the Zionist bosses and their own vicious apartheid! When Black students reported that a white student at John Jay Law was posting gutter racist comments on social media, the administration told them not to let “words” hurt them.
But students are fighting back! They rebuked the Law administrators and pointed out that racist words have historically led to racist terror in this nation built on the savagery of slavery. They spoke of their unwillingness to be passive in the face of anti-Black racist state terror, and of how much they’d learned from the millions of protestors who took to the streets after George Floyd was murdered by the racist kkkops. They have distributed a list of demands to advance multiracial unity throughout the campus. Plans are in the works to unite the fightback at Millennium with the rest of John Jay by inviting the protest’s leaders to join the Campus Council, the student government for all four schools.
The main contradiction in capitalist schools is between the students and the education bosses. To smash this rotten system, students must be mobilized to unite with the international working class to destroy the rulers’ state and all of its institutions—to make a communist revolution. For now, our job is to support these students’ reform efforts, to help them organize, and to deepen their understanding of racism and how it can ultimately be defeated.
All workers win with communism
We know that capitalism feeds on racism and will never get rid of it . Only a multiracial fight to smash capitalism can lead us to a new society free of racism, sexism, and exploitation. That system is communism!
The opposite of capitalist competition is communist collectivity, a system that creates winners with no losers. PLP is organizing in more than two dozen countries for communism, drawing inspiration from the first workers’ states in the Soviet Union and China, which promoted mass participation in sports in the spirit of working-class solidarity. The slogan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution said it all: “Friendship first, competition second.”
Communists fight for a world where all workers reach their full potential in body and mind. Fight for communism! Join PLP!
LOS ANGELES, December 23 - Just two days before Christmas, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) murdered 14-year-old Valentina Orellana Peralta and 24-year-old Daniel Elena Lopez in a Burlington Coat Factory in North Hollywood. These two young Latin workers join the long list of workers, including Alex Flores, whose lives have been stolen by the racist LAPD. By the end of 2021 the murderous LAPD had taken twice as many lives as in the prior year (LA Times, 12/27/21). Even in the face of these rising numbers, Progressive Labor Party (PLP), alongside the families of lost workers, continues to fight back against this whole damn capitalist system.
Fight back for Valentina
Like many workers, Valentina immigrated seeking a new life in the U.S. But as her father put it, and as is true for so many workers internationally, “this is what my daughter found here: death (NYT, 12/28/21).”
Valentina was in a dressing room with her mother trying on dresses for her upcoming quinceanera (15th birthday celebration) when a cop’s bullet pierced the wall and struck her in the chest. She was left dying in her mother’s arms.
Valentina’s story has received national news, including crocodile tears from U.S. president Joe Biden offering “deep condolences.” The blood of Valentina, however, is just as much on Jim Crow Joe and his Top Cop Kamala Harris as it is on the killer cop William Dorsey Jones who pulled the trigger!
For decades Biden and Harris have been instrumental architects in the violent and racist war on all workers, but especially on Black, Latin, indigenous, and immigrant workers particularly in LA.
Only charge being a worker
Unlike the feigned sympathy shown for Valentina, Daniel Elena Lopez, also shot at the scene, was immediately criminalized. The media and police immediately and falsely labeled him a suspect with a deadly weapon. In truth, no gun was recovered. He only had a bicycle lock and was clearly mentally unwell.
The LAPD quickly released the video of the shooting. They had Cheryl Dorsey, a retired Black woman cop, review the video and described the shooting as being “within policy.” The LAPD thinks they can hide the racism on which they are built because Dorsey Jones is a Black cop. However, there is no such thing as an antiracist KKKop and PLP charges Dorsey Jones with MURDER.
Struggle and sympathy over sorrow
The family of Daniel courageously joined the protests and vigils that were organized in the name of Valentina. His sister, fighting through tears, humanized her brother who the KKKops and press had criminalized. Like so many of our working-class sisters and brothers beaten down by capitalism, she said that he was distraught as he was facing an eviction, and had been incarcerated for three years, only recently released. She said he was in a mental health crisis and needed help, not to be killed. She picks up the mantle of women leaders, just as we’ve seen with the Flores Family, who defiantly speak out for workers.
About one third of all police shootings in LA (including non-fatal) are of workers exhibiting signs of mental illness (LA Times, 12/28/21). At the national level, “more than one in five” workers killed by the police have mental illnesses and 1,400 people with mental illnesses have been murdered by the cops since 2015 (NBCNews, 5/21/2021) ).
This is what fascism looks like!
Last year the LA mayor and City Council voted to both increase the LAPD budget in spite of calls to defund, while simultaneously voting to remove police from so-called “non-violent mental health response teams.”
None of these changes, however, would have saved the lives of Alex Flores, David Flores, Daniel Hernandez, Nicholas Burgos, David Ordaz Jr. or Marco Vazquez Jr., who were all experiencing a mental health crisis and purported to be “violent” when LA cops and sheriffs murdered them. These reforms are merely tools to win our class to support the capitalists’ police state.
As communists, we know that the state, particularly the armed body of the state (the police), was born out of the inherent class antagonism between the capitalists and the working class. Capitalists need the kkkops to maintain their exploitation of the working class.
Since their inception as racist slave patrols in the south and strike breakers in the north, the function of the police has been to terrorize our class, especially Black, Latin, indigenous and immigrant workers, into obedience. Their job was to put down the rebellions when we fought back and to force us to accept our exploitation.
No amount of reform can ever change this reality. We must organize and build our fighting PLP, grow our own Red Army, and destroy this whole rotten system. PLP members and friends will continue to join with the families impacted by racist state terror and raise our communist analysis within the fightback.
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In 2021 the international working class said: STAND UP FIGHT BACK!
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- 09 January 2022 286 hits
The year 2021 affirmed how workers worldwide are fed up with this diseased system. Capitalism functions on this logic: capitalists profit from exploitation and division, thus mangling or killing us, then use reforms to strangle any rising working-class consciousness. When we recollect that 281 million workers have been infected by Covid-19 and 5 million are dead, we realize just how deadly reforms are for our class. Nothing short of communism will immunize workers and youth from the horrors of this profit system.
U.S. President Joe Biden is giving war-mongering vibes; he signed his intentions for the New Year with a $768 billion military bill, the largest since World War II (NYT, 12/21). Goodbye 20-year war in Afghanistan, hello World War III preparation. As the U.S., China, and Russia bosses prepare to nuke it out, it will be at the expense of the working class. Haven’t workers experienced enough? Could it be that our lives only matter when bosses say they do?
The despicable ruling class pushes for us to go “back to business as usual” (see page 2) while in our schools and jobs, we are getting sick en masse, hospitals are filling up with Covid-19 infected children, evictions are coming, with police enforcement.
If we learned anything from 2021, it is that if one section of our class is under attack, that attack will soon spread to another. That is the way the infectious system of capitalism works. In order to smash Covid-19 and this racist, sexist system for good, we must think and act collectively across borders. That is what Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights for – an international, communist world where the needs of ALL workers are primary.
Awaken ye workers—strike, rise, revolt!
As bosses are demanding more productivity during the pandemic, workers declared NO MAS (no more) and striked against killer working conditions, turning their workplaces into schools for communism.
Colombia: PL’ers protested beside workers and students in the midst of capitalist crisis and are going underground to build communist fightback. Our class led national strikes on the ground against pandemic death, unemployment, tax hikes that line the pockets of President Iván Duque Márquez. We rebelled against the electoral circuses while pushing workers to fight for a worker-led revolution.
Alabama: Workers in Washington D.C., New York City, and New Jersey responded to PLP’s call to join in solidarity with Black warehouse workers unionizing in Bessemer, AL and made trips to unite with Black and white miners right up the road from the Amazon warehouse.
A delegation of students and City University of New York (CUNY) faculty met with striking Warrior Met Coal miners. Since April of last year, miners have been striking for higher wages, benefits and time off after the company broke off negotiations with their local union. One of Warrior Met Coal’s owners is Black Rock, a major investor in ICE detention centers and an honored guest at a CUNY college event. Same enemy, same fight! Students traveled down and learned from their efforts, building confidence in workers ability to feed and care for each other in the midst of struggle (see page 8).
New York City: CUNY students and faculty members marched to remove the Klan in Blue from John Jay college and the carceral state altogether.
After the assassination then-president Jovenel Moise PL’ers in Brooklyn showed solidarity with workers in Haiti and the raging issues of mass unemployment, hunger, need for clean water, decent housing, medical care and education on the island.
Haiti: After another devastating earthquake, PL’ers led mutual aid efforts with food, water, surveying of damage and an exchange of communist ideas.
Chicago: 2,000 workers protested against Chicago’s Democratic and Black leadership led by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and State Attorney Kim Foxx for their hand in the police murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo and state terror against Black and Latin workers.
Thousands of health care workers, majority of them Black and Latin women, in Cook County striked against racist service cuts and hospital closings.
Newark, NJ: New and veteran comrades are building with and offering communist leadership to Black and Latin working class familes fighting back against police terror and deteriorating housing conditions. This past summer PL’ers led a summer project with study action groups based around these struggles, calling out the liberal misleadership of Mayor Ras Baraka.
Only solution is communist revolution
Although this is a period of mass death and detriment, it’s been a time of responsibility for communists to maintain ties and unity with workers, lead dialectical study groups, and turn reform fights into schools for communism. Workers CAN run a communist society; we’re putting that potential into practice already but we need to struggle with each other against selfish, individualist ideas that say workers are to blame for our conditions. Nothing will ever change if we rely on capitalist, self serving politicians.
For some, January 2021 was filled with wary relief that U.S. President Biden would steer away from Covid-19, erase student loan debt, and workers, documented or undocumented, would receive some protection and support in the pandemic. Yet, each day we wake, the more capitalist bosses' profit intentions and disarray are exposed (see page 5).
With this realization, paired with collective leadership, workers must continue to rise up and strike for better wages, worker protections and provide a glimpse of how we can turn an impending world war into a class war, a class war for a communist future. A communist world where international, collective thought, building, and strategy is the only way to break this heavy, racist, sexist ball and chain! Join PLP to make it happen!
As the ruling-class owned CDC announced that Covid-19 infections only require a five-day quarantine instead of 10, workers worldwide can see that this decision is profit driven (see editorial, page 2).
Following their conversation with the Delta airlines CEO, the CDC reinforced that cashing in on overpriced airline seats was more important than the lives of the workers who are now being required to return to work, sick, exhausted, and infectious to their fellow class sisters and brothers.
In the face of exploitation, these humorous memes all shed light on one thing: because of our class position and the experience of exploitation, our class can see through the lies that ruling class bosses throw at us. With struggle and conversation, these memes can be an opportunity to develop class consciousness and unity among our co-workers, friends, classmates, and family.
To put it bluntly in the words of Malcolm X, truth is on the side of the oppressed.
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Letter
CDC: criminal, diseased, capitalist
This is not the first time the CDC has implemented violent recommendations in favor of the bosses and their profits. In the summer of 2021, while Covid-19 cases were at a record-low since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC carelessly recommended that vaccinated individuals not be required to wear masks while in public spaces even though vaccinated people could still contract and spread the virus to others regardless of vaccination status. All to create more profits in the bosses’ economy. Of course, cases skyrocketed nationwide by the end of the summer.
This latest surge comes as healthcare workers across the board continue to battle racist and sexist staffing shortages, burnout, and overflows of hospital admissions. Although health care under capitalism has always essentially been about profit, the pandemic has truly laid bare how inadequate and ill-prepared the system really is.
We as workers keep each other safe. The CDC is not the epitome of scientific knowledge. In fact, their scientific pursuit is inherently tied to the profiteering of U.S. imperialism. They’re a tool of the capitalist state that does not fundamentally care if workers live or die.
This is why Progressive Labor Party needs you! As we continue to build a base with more scientists and healthcare workers, we can better understand science from a materialist-communist lens and organize to destroy capitalism’s racist violence.
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Letter
Sickening working conditions
How would you feel if you were forced to work involuntary overtime for a different city agency after you worked a full work week at your regular job? Well that is the reality that I faced after having Covid-19, being vaccinated, and returning to work.
I am a bit of a trouble maker so when I was asked if I had done the required 10 hours of weekly overtime I said “no, working my regular hours is all I can do with my family responsibilities.”
I felt that my coworkers and I were being tricked into doing work we hadn’t been hired to do. When I asked to see written documentation of requirements for overtime, there was no response. When I called my union reps, I also got no response.
Bosses try to trick us every day to force us to do more work. If we are doing two different jobs we should get two paychecks or better still, hire a second worker to do the extra work. I look forward to reading and sharing how others in the Progressive Labor Party and their friends are confronting similar attempts by bosses to use Covid-19 conditions to increase workloads. Here in my office, my co-workers and I need to sit down and plan on how we can fight this.
Jan 1 soup celebrates liberation from slavery
January 1 is an important date for the working class in Haiti, but not for the reason you may think. There is a tradition of eating soup joumou today, which celebrates the victory of the revolutionaries of Haitian independence in 1804 over racism, slavery, and colonialism, and therefore against the domination and exploitation of capitalism. January 1 marks the liberation from chattel slavery and the formation of the world’s first Black republic, Haiti. Under slavery, this thick stew with meat and vegetables was reserved only for the enslavers and other exploiters.
For the working class, international solidarity and solidarity with our communist party is key. Capitalism pushes individualism, which is the negation of solidarity. Yet, while the bosses compete with one another for markets and power, they are united as a class to defend their own interests. They unite to sow divisions inside the working class, using a three-pronged weapon of racism, sexism and nationalism. Our task is to defeat those ideas ideologically and in action, build our mutual confidence, and put the working class in the driver’s seat of humanity.
So workers of the world unite, gather ye strength with a bowl of joumou, and get ready to fight back!
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John Brown’s legacy: violent revolution necessary, not ‘crazy’
We have to finish the job of defeating systemic racism, and after our trip to Harpers Ferry we are even more inspired to do so. On Sunday December 10, a small caravan of Baltimore and DC comrades and family spent the day at the historic site bonding and enjoying the John Brown Museum and the John Brown Wax Museum, along with a short hike and lunch.
Among us were members of the Baltimore West Wednesday Coalition, which has been fighting for accountability in the police murder of Tyrone West on July 18, 2013. One of our first stops was the federal armory, which Brown and his allies used as a fort for their raid. Together, we stood with fists raised as one of our comrades took a picture. The museums were undertoned, but John Brown’s resolve to end slavery resonated clearly. “I have only a short time to live and only one death to die and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no peace in this land until slavery is done for.”
In fact one comrade said that while he noticed the capitalist attempts to revise him and even call him insane, “What is certain is that true change may require violent struggle.” Truly Brown’s commitment is a rallying cry for those of us to our cause. The capitalist system must be done for!
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Bosses’ Omicron put workers’ lives on the line
I recently began attending a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) study group and it has taught me so much. One of the first things that communism opened my eyes to is that capitalism can only breed racism and misery.
The latest Covid-19 Omicron spike has only amplified the racist divisions between low-income predominantly Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods, and less integrated, higher income neighborhoods. I saw this play out while waiting on a Covid-19 testing line in Brownsville, Brooklyn that snaked around the block. I overheard people saying that they had been waiting for hours. Rather than wait on the line and expose others, I began calling local pharmacies in search of a home rapid test. I was disgusted to discover that there were no test kits in the Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Bushwick neighborhoods. They were not accepting appointments and were turning people away. After calling about ten pharmacies I finally found a test in Park Slope, and later found another where I work on the Upper East Side, two neighborhoods known for being wealthier and whiter.
I began noticing a pattern in these last two weeks. Testing is more widely available in richer and whiter neighborhoods compared to working class Black and Latin areas. The wealthier, mostly white areas seem to have a constant stock of over-the-counter tests and shorter lines. Meanwhile workers in Brownsville and East New York have to stand on lines for hours without proper social distancing.
Workers in areas ravaged by Omicron are more heavily policed, and this limited testing often results in workers facing rude security guards. To maintain their profits, the capitalists are currently attempting to avoid another lock down, going so far as to lower the recommended quarantine mandate. How many lives will be lost to keep this death machine running?
Omicron is more proof that we must continue to expose and fight back against this system that forces workers to work sick, and die for profit. I’m beginning to understand that as long as capitalism exists, racist and preventable disparities in death and illness will never end. That’s why I will continue to attend study groups and learn more about how we can create a better world by fighting for communism.
With the Omicron variant of Covid-19 spreading like wildfire in the U.S. imperial core, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) changed its recommendation of quarantining, if one tests positive for Covid-19, from ten days to 5 days…and workers are awake and upset! We know that U.S. airline companies asked the CDC to make this recommendation to keep their businesses open as Omicron surges at record-breaking rates. Workers infected by coronavirus are already being forced by their bosses to come into work even though they are still contagious at the five day mark of their quarantine. This recommendation has shown millions of working-class people everywhere that the capitalist bosses prioritize profit over human life.
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Hunger strike leaves workers starving for revolution
Comrades, greetings from New York! We continue to be involved in community organizations. One of the latest actions in which we participated was a “Hunger Strike for Excluded Immigrant Workers’’ (excluded from funds during the pandemic). Although the “leaders” of this strike declared victory, in reality the state funds allotted to these workers was not enough, so those of us in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) raised that crumbs are handed out to the working class in an attempt to pacify fightback from the masses. Following this initial action, the alliance of organizations involved called a rally and march to demand funds for the thousands of workers who were left empty handed. Many workers attended! The rally started with testimony from immigrant workers against oppression explaining how they’ve received nothing from the “authorities.”
After the rally we marched to the governor’s office where “invited politicians” gave speeches and select workers wore indigenous clothing. Our comrades, however, called out that these events laced with liberal fascism and identity politics won’t solve workers problems.
We do continue to participate though as a way to connect with our friends and build future comradely bonds. We use these opportunities to share Party changes and pass out copies of CHALLENGE.
This is all done in the name of raising international class consciousness on the road to communist revolution. The workers united will never be defeated!
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