Fight back and crush the bosses’ traps

Wage theft in New York City, despite the existence of laws that “protect” the worker, is very much a common thing. We know about the law against wage theft, but it is increasingly difficult to find justice, since for any claim they divide the workers so that they make these actions only individually.
At the beginning of this month, a group of more than 40 workers from different community organizations met, marched and held a sit-in in front of a luxurious hotel, on 60th Street near Central Park. The action was taken because the hotel bosses fired, unfairly and without reason,and stole wages from a worker with many years of service. That worker had not been informed of her dismissal and she was not allowed to go into work when she had arrived to do so.
The organization, where several Progressive Labor Party comrades are members, accompanied her and we chanted our classic slogans in the march: “Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!” … “This Fist Can be Seen, Workers in Power,”and other chants. At the door of the hotel, the letter was delivered to those in charge of the administration on duty, and we hope soon for the solution and reinstatement to the worker at this employment.
The bosses make the laws and the traps; the workers must fight and crush their traps.

*****

Capitalist disaster steals lives
After viewing daily media video on the Turkey-Syria earthquake, two contradictions emerge, the first being the total absence of any steel beams in the concrete-wire mesh debris from endless photos of modern high-rise buildings that collapsed over each other. The second contradiction was many perfectly intact high-rise buildings right across streets from rows of collapsed homes. Turkish leader Erdogan had granted amnesty to housing contractors who’d defied safety codes and regulations using wire mesh instead of steel beams to provide faster, cheaper building frames. Not only did the cheaper constructed buildings fail to prevent the earthquake from flattening them, but the wire mesh debris has prevented rescuers from digging victims out. There are also protests over a missing billion-dollar fund collected after the last earthquake to build aid stations and care for victims of future catastrophes. Because of capitalist greed and corruption, Turkey is approaching 50,000 casualties and 13 million homeless.
Meanwhile in the US, a two-mile long 150-car train crash in Ohio is flooding thousands in poor communities with toxic gasses and poisoned water. Railroad companies are profiting big time in cuts in their workforce, maintenance and safety.
Today’s events prove capitalists will sacrifice to the last worker for their own profits and will stop at nothing to stay in power. Progressive Labor Party calls for a communist revolution to replace our profit dominated social system with a communist society without wages, profits and divisions.

*****

She was a comrade to look up to
A comrade to look up to. The day after the family of Raymond appeared in a Bronx court, I called Carolyn to find out what happened. She said she debated with herself whether to go to the court and decided to go. Raymond’s mother and our comrade hugged and shared a few words. An example of Carolyn’s confidence and undying love of our working class.

*****

Workers call out China CP’s sellout
Some older people in China seem to remain boldly supportive of real communist principles, and critical of the Communist Party’s sellouts.
The following passage is from a New York Times article yesterday about recent protests in China against cuts in government-provided medical insurance.
“Video footage that circulated online indicated that large crowds gathered around Zhongshan Park in Wuhan, as the police tried to divide them by imposing barricades. When police officers tried to push the crowds back, older men and women refused to back off and shouted in officers’ faces. Some sang songs like “The Internationale,” an anthem employed by both the ruling Communist Party and by protesters, who have used it to suggest that the party has strayed from its ideological roots.”

NEW YORK CITY, February 23—NYC’s City Council held hearings on a bill that would cut city sponsored health benefits. These cuts are coming because capitalism is in crisis and at war. The bosses are trying to manage their crisis on the backs of the working class. The bosses view the lives of retirees as expendable since they no longer produce profits. At the hearing city and union leaders spoke on the need to control costs by cutting benefits. Retirees spoke against decreasing access to health benefits or increasing the costs to workers when they use these benefits. The struggle to stop the reduction of city sponsored health benefits to these and the current workforce continues. The racist cuts are also exposing once again that the union’s leadership is loyal to the bosses system and will do whatever the ruling class needs them to do.Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members active in this struggle are urging our friends to join our movement to build a communist world where healthcare will be free to all based only on their needs.
Workers are fighting back!
CHALLENGE has reported on efforts by retirees to stop these givebacks which have been agreed to by the New York City government and the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), an umbrella of all city unions having contracts with NYC. Demonstrations at city hall and union headquarters as well as mass letter writing and telephone call campaigns have expressed our anger at attempts to privatize our medicare benefits. This attempted change will mean less access to needed health treatment and will affect low-income workers the most (disproportionately. Black, Latin and women). Now this same gang is pressing for similar reductions for the active workers. Similar cuts are going on or have taken place throughout the U.S.
War and economic crisis driving attacks on health benefits
The U.S. bosses are facing the increased likelihood of war as they face off against their main imperialist rival China and its ally Russia. To prepare for war, bosses want to divert billions to the war budget. They know that healthcare costs as a share of the U.S. gross national product have risen from 5 percent in 1960 to 19.7 percent in 2020 (USA facts.org). Lowering these costs potentially would free up money for the war chests.
The war is related to the economic crisis being felt around the world as imperialist powers like the U.S., China and Russia compete for profits and power. As hospitals merge and grow into larger conglomerates, they demand higher rates for their services. For example the cost of a colonoscopy can range from $1,100 to $3,700 for the same procedure depending on where you go (Choicehealth.com). The pharmaceutical industry is charging whatever the market will pay for new life saving drugs. New cancer drugs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for those who can afford them or have insurance that will pay for them. National total health expenditures are expected to grow by at least 5.1 percent from 2021-2030 (USAfacts.org). The biggest bosses, who control policy, want to cut these costs so that they can compete against their imperialist rivals.
Fight to learn, learn to fight!
As we engage our class enemy, we need to learn about how capitalism works. We are building PLP study groups to help build more communist leaders/fighters in this battle. Join us to build a healthier world under communism!

Carolyn Eubanks, longtime Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member, died in her home in the Bronx at the age of 80. Despite her advanced age, Carolyn was brimming with life. A tireless antiracist fighter and communist leader till the end, Carolyn spent the last week of her life volunteering at La Morada’s mutual aid soup kitchen,  showing up at the courthouse to support the family of Raymond Chaluisant, a  young worker murdered by a NYC  corrections kkkop, and attending a political event at the CUNY graduate center.
Antiracist upbringing
Born in North Carolina to a working-class family who  worked in a local company mill , Carolyn often credited her upbringing with setting her on the path to becoming a communist. Despite growing up in a racist Southern town during the Jim Crow era, her parents instilled in her antiracist working class values. Racist language was banned in their home. She witnessed capitalist oppression firsthand–the differential treatment given to the children of workers and bosses in the mills in school and in the town. Carolyn’s mother insisted she learn arithmetic to calculate her wages correctly, because the mill bosses could not be trusted.
In 1958 when the Soviet Union Launched Sputnik the U.S. bosses passed the National Defense Education Act which sent thousands of young people, including Carolyn,  to college on scholarships to study math and science. Carolyn always credited the Soviet Union for her college education and her route out of the company town. After graduating from the University of North Carolina she joined the Peace Corps, spending two years in the Philippines, where she saw the effects of imperialism and the ways large U.S. multinational corporations exploited workers around the world.
Joining the Party and facing the KKKops
 Carolyn met PLP when she was in New York studying at Union Theological Seminary. She was immediately won over to the Party’s idea of smashing capitalism and building a communist world and joined the Party. In the summer of 1979, Carolyn joined a PLP summer project in Tupelo, Mississippi which the KKK had declared would be their headquarters. Along with over 40 other protestors, Carolyn participated in an antiracist, multiracial march straight through Tupelo’s town center. When the march entered the town square a racist, abetted by the KKKiller Kops, fired a shotgun into the crowd and hit Carolyn with buckshot. When a second march was organized just three weeks later, Carolyn boldly marched in the first row alongside her Black and white comrades.
Organizing Black students from Houston to NYC
Carolyn taught for many years at Worthing High School, an all-Black school in the segregated part of Houston. Carolyn attended football games with her students, organized trips and socials, and led fightbacks against the racist conditions. She helped to organize a march in Houston commemorating the 1917 rebellion of Black soldiers who fought back against their racist abuse by white officers (see the book Night of Violence by Robert Hayes). She brought students and their parents to May Day demonstrations every year. She loved to host Game Nights at her apartment, where she made her famous chili. After many years teaching in Houston, Carolyn was attacked for being a communist. The death threats were real and constant. Carolyn slept with a loaded gun under her pillow but never wavered in her fightback.
After moving back to NYC, Carolyn taught math at John F. Kennedy High School, in the Bronx for twenty-five years. She helped students organize a sit-down protest when school security physically attacked several children. She also organized students, teachers and parents to fight back against cutbacks and the use of metal detectors.
Between 2005 and 2018 Carolyn made several trips to Israel-Palestine. Alongside comrades and workers in Israel and Palestine she helped organize against the fascist apartheid state, while raising internationalist communist politics. Her work united college students, medical workers, and educators in New York City and Israel-Palestine.She built close ties with workers living there, winning several of them to join the Party. In her 2018 trip, a group of students she inspired invited her to spend the day with them at a political camp they put together for Palestinian children. In New York, Carolyn was active in the international working group of PLP and once traveled with her comrade to Dallas to participate in a One State in Israel/Palestine conference, where she and a comrade insisted that the conference’s demand was insufficient if the state remained capitalist.
Bringing communism to the congregation
For years Carolyn was an active and beloved member of St Mary's, an integrated social justice church in Harlem She participated in Sunday morning services injecting communist politics into discussions of "grounds for hope," while sharing coffee. She was a mainstay in the food distribution program and, most importantly, she was a vital leader in the church’s justice and peace organizing. Through the Congregations for Justice and Peace, Carolyn, alongside comrades and friends, fought against Columbia University’s racist displacement agenda, organized to restore the community health clinic, and demonstrated against racist police terror.
Carolyn helped lead the fight against racist cop terror in the Bronx for more than 30 years. In the 90’s, she joined forces with the Baez, Vega, Zarate, and Rosario families - all whose children were murdered by the New York Police Department. She helped build Parents Against Police Brutality (PAPB), which was one of the country’s first family-led organizations, specifically assembled to unite the families of countless Black and Latin workers murdered by the NYPD.This organizing culminated with Carolyn helping to organize and lead the very first open and PLP-led march against the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999. Her commitment to the victims’ families was an example for all as she continued to lead and organize against the murder of Ramarley Graham and Shantell Davis.
A fighter til the end
During the last year of her life, she played an important role in helping to lead  PLP’s most recent struggle against the murder of Raymond Chaluisant, organizing several rallies in his neighborhood supporting his family, and attending almost every one of kkkiller cop Dion Middleton’s court appearances. Carolyn always made a point of building relationships with the families of these victims, while struggling with them and all workers and students involved, to understand that only a communist revolution will bring an end to racist cop killings.
Bella Ciao, Carolyn
Carolyn left an indelible mark on comrades, friends, and all those who knew her.  She devoted her life time  to serving the working class.We can honor her legacy by living each day as she did—with love and concern for the working class. In Carolyn’s memory: Let’s fight for a better world, let's fight for communism!

The last issue of CHALLENGE (3/1/23) remembered Langston Hughes as a writer sharply critical of Jim Crow segregation during World War II and as a poet for the working class of the U.S.—particularly Black workers.  Now we’ll flash back to the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became an advocate for multiracial, anti-capitalist revolution.  A tradition of anti-racist activism ran deep in Hughes’ family history. In 1858, his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, married Lewis Leary, an abolitionist who died in John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Howard Langston, was an educator and ardent abolitionist.  
According to his biographer Arnold Rampersad, young Langston Hughes was influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay, along with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the anti-racist, pro-communist writer and historian. In June 1921, Hughes’ poetry was published for the first time in a professional journal. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” came out in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.
In September 1921, Hughes moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. Not yet ready for college, he withdrew before the year was out. He plunged into Black cosmopolitan New York and met Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, both writers at The Crisis, and the poet Countee Collins.  By 1924, after a journey to West Africa and Paris and an extended sojourn in Washington, DC, he’d become a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance.  In March 1925, in the landmark issue of Survey Graphic, “Harlem:  Mecca of the New Negro” (edited by Alain Locke), contained ten poems by Hughes, including: “I, too, sing America./I am the darker brother. . . .”  
In 1926, Hughes published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues, and a famous essay for The Nation (June 23, 1926).   In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes wasn’t yet ready to attack capitalism or embrace the need for militant, collective antiracism. Instead, he argued for the importance of Black identity and called for racial pride: “Why should I want to be white?  I am Negro—and beautiful.”  
    By the late 1920s, when Hughes was enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically Black institution outside Philadelphia, he was meeting communists as well as Harlem’s cultural leaders.  In December 1926, four of his poems were published in the communist monthly New Masses, though they were nowhere near as politically sharp as his work to come.   
    With the Great Depression, beginning in November 1929, communists took leadership positions in major labor unions. They had an explanation for the Depression and a solution for racist inequalities and capitalist exploitation.  They called for multiracial unity and revolution.  Hughes was drawn to these ideas in New Masses, and he put his art at the service of revolution.
    For Hughes and millions of others, a political turning point came on March 25, 1931, when nine young Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white young women in a railroad boxcar in Alabama. The arrest and trial of the Scottsboro Boys galvanized communists and anti-racists throughout the world. Eight of the teenagers were quickly tried by the racists and sentenced to death; a mistrial was declared for the ninth because he was underage.  The Communist Party USA sent in lawyers to challenge the case.  The Supreme Court overturned the convictions; one of the women recanted her accusations and even went on tour to defend the defendants. Yet they languished in jail, many of them for decades.  
    Hughes responded with a terse four-line poem, “Justice,” for New Masses (July 1931), which accompanied a drawing of a lynching by artist Phil Bard.   

  That Justice is a blind goddess
    Is a thing to which we poor are wise:
    Her bandage hides two festering sores
    That once, perhaps, were eyes.

For the November 1931 New Masses, Hughes wrote “Scottsboro, Limited:  A One Act Play.” The cast roster includes “Red Voices,” who counter racist “Mob Voices” and shout out: “We’ll fight! The Communists will fight for you./ not just Black—but Black and white.” At the end of the play, the “Red Voices” declare: “Rise from the dead, workers, and fight!”  For the finale, Hughes directs that “Here the Internationale may be sung and the red flag raised above the heads of the Black and white workers together.”  
To Hughes and others in the communist movement, the trial of the Scottsboro Boys was both the cutting-edge antiracist fight of the day and a huge opportunity to unite Black and white workers.  For the June 1932 issue of New Masses, Hughes wrote the poem “An Open Letter to the South.”

    White workers of the South: . . .
    I am the Black worker.
                Listen:
    That the land might be ours,
    And the mines and the factories and the office towers
    At Harlem, Richmond, Gastonia, Atlanta, New Orleans;
    That the plants and the roads and the tools of power
    Be ours:
    …
    Let us become instead, you and I,
    One single hand
    That can united rise
    To smash the old dead dogmas of the past—To kill the lies of color
    That keep the rich enthroned
. . .
    Let us get together, say:
    “You are my brother, Black or white.
    You my sister—now—today!”
    . . .
    We did not know that we were brothers.
    Now we know!
    Out of that brotherhood
    Let power grow!
    We did not know
    That we were strong.
    Now we see
    In union lies our strength.
    . . .
    White worker,
    Here is my hand.
    Today,
    We’re Man to Man.

As Hughes wrote the poem, in the spring of 1932, he was preparing to join a group of 22 writers, journalists, and actors to travel through the Soviet Union. He mailed back from the USSR to New Masses his rousing poem “Good Morning Revolution,” which was excerpted in the last issue of CHALLENGE. After writing a number of commissioned pieces for Soviet journals and a short book, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, Hughes returned to the U.S. in the summer of 1933.    It was a pivotal period in U.S. politics, when communists played a big role in the fight against rising fascism, both in Europe and inside the U.S.
For the remainder of the 1930s, Hugues continued writing his radical poetry. He also traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War—the topic of our next CHALLENGE article.  

Biographical information is drawn from Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford, 2002; and Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 3 vols.  Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2001.