After more than 10,000 refugees from Haiti risked their lives to journey through South American jungles and gang-infested territory to reach the Texas border, they were met by a wave of racist terror. In a throwback to the 18th-century slave catchers, U.S. border patrol agents, mounted on horseback, whipped and kidnapped members of our class—men, women, and children. But this shocking display of inhumanity was nothing new. It was part of a long tradition of liberal atrocities toward immigrant and Black workers. In the United States of Amerikkka, Democrat and Republican rulers alike use racism to divide, exploit, scapegoat, and demonize the most vulnerable workers.
After U.S. President Joe Biden campaigned last year to address “the Trump-created humanitarian crisis at our border” and to stop “denying asylum to people fleeing persecution and violence” (joebiden.com), many were deceived into thinking his administration would be a change from open racist Donald Trump, and that he would welcome immigrants with open arms. The reality exposes the fallacy of “lesser evil” wishful thinking. The fact that liberals are the main danger to the international working class. In fact, Biden is following the same playbook used both by Trump and by Biden’s nightmare Democrat predecessor, Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama. Like Trump, Biden is cynically exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic and using “Title 42” to authorize his nazi border agents to deny migrants their asylum “rights.” Like Obama, he is expelling migrants en masse—more than 700,000 since February (BuzzFeed, 9/23).
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights these racist expulsions and stands in solidarity with workers who are fleeing the instability and destruction caused by capitalism. The international working class must reject all forms of nationalism and borders. The fight to destroy capitalism and imperialist exploitation must be led by Black workers under the banner of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
Bosses’racism leads to mass desperate, migrations
Anti-immigrant and anti-Black racism are essential to all capitalist rulers. Since the devastating 2010 earthquake, Haitian bosses have partnered with U.S. and other imperialist thieves in skimming tens of millions of dollars for business “development” while leaving workers in Haiti worse off than ever. This, in turn, has led to the latest mass migration out of Haiti (Current Affairs, November 2016).
In Brazil, the bosses super-exploited these immigrant workers to build stadiums for the 2014 World Cup (Reuters, July 2014). In Chile, they faced racist super-exploitation and terrible poverty; in Venezuela, the collapse of the state capitalist economy caused more of the same. Heading north to the U.S., they had to pass through Mexico under the fake-socialist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who collaborated with the U.S. to keep migrants penned in Mexico while waiting indefinitely for their asylum claims to be processed in the U.S.
Abused, humiliated and rejected, these refugees trekked on from the frying pan into the fire: to the United States, with its horrific history of brutalizing immigrants in general and workers from Haiti in particular.
From Carter to Clinton: racist incarceration
Former U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan worked hand-in-hand with the arch-criminal Duvalier dictatorship(Papa Doc and Baby Doc, ruthless ex-Presidents of Haiti) They deported asylum seekers back to Haiti, sending many to their torture and death.
In 1991, after Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a coup, thousands of fleeing workers were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and penned in an overcrowded camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to await processing. Then President George H.W. Bush ordered the Coast Guard to turn back ships directly to Haiti—a policy denounced as “cruel” by Bill Clinton in his 1992 campaign for president. But after taking office, Clinton reversed course and kept Bush’s policy in place.
He also continued to use Guantánamo Bay for the racist detention of hundreds of refugees from Haiti. His administration justified this racist detention by claiming that they were carriers of the HIV virus, even though the rate of HIV transmission was lower in Haiti than in the U.S.(refugees.org, 9/21).
Obama to Biden: continued racist assault
Under the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton focused on building a favorable climate for business in Haiti. In the name of “free trade,” the U.S. embassy engaged in a joint effort with Haitian elites, factory owners, and big U.S. textile companies to cap the minimum wage in Haiti at 31 cents per hour (COHA.org, 7/11).  
After the 2010 earthquake, the face of the international relief effort was United Nations “special envoy” Bill Clinton, who channeled “relief” efforts to attract foreign investments and profits. At the time, Port-au-Prince lay in ruins. Haitian workers were crowded into filthy tent cities, where thousands died in a cholera epidemic triggered by United Nations “peacekeepers” (pri.org, 10/27/20). As Current Affairs (11/2/16) noted, “the Clinton-led recovery was a disaster.”
Shortly before Obama left office, his Homeland Security Department rounded up thousands of refugees: “Immigration facilities have been so overrun that hundreds of immigrants have been moved to criminal jails, in violation of international norms” (Miami New Times, 12/14/16). Obama’s solution was to ramp up and fast-track deportations to a country then in shambles from Hurricane Matthew and rocked by “violent post election unrest”(Miami New Times, 12/14/16).
Communism = No Borders
In the face of the relentless attacks by Biden and other capitalist bosses, the refugees from Haiti organized migrant caravans to protect themselves from police and gangs, and to take care of one another to the best of their ability.
 As usual, the international working class has turned out in support, with rallies in solidarity throughout the world. At the U.S.-Mexico border, workers from Mexico cooked for the refugees stuck under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas (Mexico Daily News, 9/27). On the U.S. side, community organizations have raised money for them.
As this border crisis continues, we must fight for no deportations—and to build a revolutionary communist party. Borders were created by the capitalists to define which workers were theirs to exploit. But workers have no borders!  We must fight for communism to create a world without nations or exploitation. One class, one world, one Party. Join PLP!

BROOKLYN, NY, October 6—What does winning mean for antiracists in competitive sports within a racist society? That’s the big question in a struggle involving coaches, players, teachers, and parents, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), in the newly integrated John Jay and Millennium High School sports program.
Under capitalism, a system that feeds on inequality and applauds individualism, winning games against rival teams is the be-all and end-all of sports. But communists see winning in a different way. Our victories are defined by antiracism and collectivity. We win by developing people to value the long-term needs of the group over individual achievements.  
At John Jay-Millennium, the girls’ volleyball players and coaches have a special responsibility to help lead and integrate the school as it transitions from two teams—one with mainly Black and Latin players, the other with mostly white and Asian players—to one. This program has a proud history of fighting racist treatment of Black and Latin players by out-of-control school cops. It has also called out the racist funding inequities in the Department of Education’s varsity athletics.
What does antiracist struggle look like on a sports team?
Tryouts for the volleyball team began in August, shortly before the start of the school year. Most of the young women trying out were from Millennium Manhattan school, which in previous years had shared a sports program with the Brooklyn Millennium school at John Jay. When it became clear that John Jay’s Black and Latin students would be left with few spots on the varsity team, antiracism needed to be put front and center.
Though tryouts were extended into the first weeks of school to give more opportunities to students from other John Jay schools, coaches conducted the tryouts as they had in years past.
Less experienced players were sent to a second gym within the building, with the intention of providing targeted support to improve their chances of making the team. But in this case, the result was that most of the Black and Latin athletes went to the second gym, while the head coach remained in the first gym with most of the white and Asian athletes. Many of these students had gained an advantage by playing volleyball on private club teams during the previous year, when public school teams were shut down because of the pandemic. Club volleyball costs serious money, as much as $10,000 per player plus travel expenses—which means that most working class Black and Latin youth don’t have access.
In short, there needed to be a vigorous struggle to discuss and act on the importance of uniting the two programs to create an antiracist, integrated team. Some bold Black players came forward to point out how racist inequities were exposed by the tryouts, and a sharp struggle ensued. What does it mean to have a winning team? Should the most experienced players get all of the meaningful playing time to give the team the best chance to come out on top? Or should the team on the court consistently play more and less experienced players together to advance integration, unity, and the entire squad’s development?  
Make antiracist integration primary over winning
We are up against a segregated and inherently unequal society and public school system. This system is no accident. Capitalism needs racism to survive. It needs to divide white from Black and Latin students and workers so that all can be oppressed and exploited for profit.
Building an antiracist, integrated team on and off the court is one way we can begin to crack the racist divisions the Department of Education
(DOE)trains us all to accept as normal. Since the Black players initiated this struggle, the volleyball team has held multiple discussions about putting antiracism front and center and building team unity. These meetings will continue through the remaining weeks of the season. They are at the core of what we will be most proud of when looking back on this season, whether John Jay Campus wins a championship or not.  
For the first time, players are being asked to evaluate how the team is doing politically as well as athletically. They’re being encouraged to suggest specific strategies for making the team more equitable. The leadership of Black youth—the ones most brutally targeted by this racist systems–is key to this process. A truly integrated team, with more and less experienced players sharing the court together, is happening more consistently. Although fewer Black players than usual tried out for the team due to vaccination requirements and the vaccine hesitancy of many Black families, the team now has as many Black and Latin players as white and Asian players. As they practice volleyball, they’re also practicing antiracist, multiracial unity.    
History of segregated sports teams
The John Jay Campus, a historically Black and Latin school in the heart of a wealthy white neighborhood in Brooklyn, is a model of racist capitalist inequality. It houses three schools that enroll predominantly Black and Latin students from low-income families outside the neighborhood and a fourth school, Millennium Brooklyn, a selective, significantly white high school that has received more funding and resources per student than the other three.
Racist inequalities in sports access were a stunningly obvious feature of the segregated package deal forced by Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio. The John Jay Campus sports program served 1,859 students, more than 90 percent of them Black or Latin, and was given only nine teams. But the Millennium sports program got 17 teams for only 1,261 students—about half of them from  Millennium High School in Manhattan, which uses John Jay’s gym facilities and is only 25 percent Black and Latin.  
As part of a long-running struggle to integrate the programs and get Black and Latin students their fair share of resources, PLP parents joined with others in designing a sharp antiracist leaflet that rocked the racist status quo. After the killing of George Floyd and the mass protests that followed, the DOE’s blatant racism was too much of an embarrassment even for the shameless school bosses. The two sports teams were integrated–a huge reform victory. But the real work of building antiracist integration is just beginning.
For athletes, coaches, teachers, and parents, the real victory comes every time we stand up to the racist ruling class. Racism isn’t going anywhere as long as we have capitalism. Only under communism, a society where the whole working class will work together for the benefit of all, will racism ever be smashed. In the meantime, all students and workers need to be ready to take action over and over again. If we can make antiracist sports integration the main goal for students, parents, and staff, we will be one step closer to building working-class consciousness and one step closer to smashing capitalism. Stay tuned for more!

This coming October 17 marks the 162nd anniversary of abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. It was a revolutionary revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle!
1850s: U.S. capitalist class splits violently
The setting of John Brown’s Raid is the U.S. of the 1850s, with dueling factions of the U.S. capitalist class fighting each other. To the Southern slave-owning planters, harvesting cotton depended on enslaving Black workers indefinitely, even if it meant seceding and forming their own country. The Southern capitalists had a stranglehold on U.S. state power, controlling the Supreme Court and the presidency for decades. The logic of the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court case of 1857 gave a green light to expand slavery, and in 1859, John Brown led his multiracial raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
The Southern plantation-owning U.S. capitalists were terrified by John Brown’s Raid’s militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:
"I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter."
From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery
This trust among white and Black workers did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever. He believed Black and white people were completely equal. He put this knowledge into action daily.
As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, NY near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as "Mr." or "Mrs.," sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).
Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist and former enslaved worker.
Tubman: Liberator of 300 enslaved workers
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown close. Born around 1820 of enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her owner tried selling her as "damaged goods." Instead, she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.
Over 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as "General Tubman." Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.
Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harper’s Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the Southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.
Black rebellions petrified slave owners
Like all forms of class society, slavery relied on ruling class violence. But to those who say workers won’t fight back against oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal.
Nat Turner’s 1831 armed rebellion catapulted abolition as an immediate demand.
Abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and many others, joined this fight. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act extended the reach of the enslavers into the North to capture accused runaways, but abolitionists often attacked these kidnappers, sometimes freeing the runaways. Frederick Douglass said, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”The enslavers, although talking of "docile" Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of "outside agitators."
They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep abolitionist literature away from them. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas
 cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.
Revolutionary mass violence
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in antiracist struggle to join Progressive Labor Party (PLP). PLP stands on the shoulders of Brown, Tubman, Douglass and the masses of workers who supported John Brown’s Raid and the Underground Railroad. These antiracists and their politics, however, were not without limitations.
John Brown correctly analyzed that only direct action and violence could end slavery — and on the eve of his execution, even admitted he underestimated how much violence it would take. PLP applauds the merciless violence shown by Brown to racists like plantation owners and kidnappers but rejects small-scale guerilla warfare. We fight for a mass militant communist movement whose soldiers will come from workers in the factories and fields. Communist revolution means millions of us —eventually all of us — must become communist organizers at our jobs, campuses, barracks, and mass organizations.
Mass violence is the opposite of John Brown’s religious-based outlook of individual martyrdom. History has shown that wherever the working masses have stood and fought, they are invincible. Mass violence means millions of workers are organized and armed, first, with communist ideas. It means fighting to win workers to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and analyzing the world from the perspective of class struggle and smashing racism with communist revolution for workers’ dictatorship.
The working class’ historic task is to overthrow capitalism. Violence cannot be avoided. However, this means neither dwelling on death nor on individualistic “revolutionary suicide,” but on organizing and preserving our forces to continue the struggle.
Join PLP!
Today there is again a split within the U.S. ruling class, but the world situation is much different. U.S. imperialism is declining while Chinese and Russian imperialism grow more assertive. The Big Fascist (see glossary box), imperialist section of the U.S. ruling class has no Lincoln to unite their faction of capitalists, just the feeble Joe Biden. The Big Fascists want to build liberal fascism under the guise of saving a democracy that never existed while building for war with China and or Russia. Meanwhile the domestically oriented, Small Fascist capitalists have unhinged egomaniacs like Donald Trump who want an isolationist “Fortress America.”
Both capitalist factions mean sharper racist, sexist, and open fascist attacks on the international working class. PLP fights to follow John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s example and lead the working class to revolution where workers run the world, without racist bosses and their profit system. JOIN US!

Worcester, MA—Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continue to stand by the 700 nurses and other members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), who have proudly been on strike since March 8. Recently this collective passed the 200-day mark, making this the longest strike in Massachusetts history! Party members championed these workers with a bull horn rally at the picket line in front of St. Vincent Hospital and distributed copies of CHALLENGE newspaper. We also created and distributed revolutionary flyers, calling out the hospital bosses for their racist attack on healthcare standards and putting forth that while this historic moment is one to be celebrated, a healthcare system under profit driven capitalism will never serve the working class. We proudly chanted FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM, POWER TO THE WORKERS!
Improper working conditions, Improper patient care
The strike demands are primarily centered around safe staffing ratios (no more than 4 patients per nurse on medical floors) and better patient care. Nurses on the picket line have been drawing attention to the deteriorating quality of healthcare for workers in Worcester and around the country. PLP also made the connection to the deterioration of healthcare for the international working-class.
Like so many capitalist institutions, St. Vincent Hospital is owned by Tenet Healthcare Corporation, a for-profit outfit headquartered in Dallas, TX, which owns 60 community hospitals and 460 other healthcare facilities, including surgical hospitals and imaging centers. They make billions providing substandard healthcare.
Now, in an effort to improve their profit margins, they’ve minimized hospital staff, pay the lowest wages, and bust unions. In fact, Tenet is so determined to break the strike that they have spent over $65 million, including $100 an hour to pay “replacement” nurses (eg. scab nurses hired specifically to break the strike).
Capitalism in crisis robs the working class
The greed of the Tenet bosses is deep and vicious. During the pandemic, Tenet took $2.8 billion of taxpayers money from the CARES ACT in 2020, and then proceeded to lay off and furlough thousands of desperately needed hospital staff as hundreds of thousands of workers were losing their lives to a deadly disease.
As a result of this opportunistic corruption, Tenet has made $500 million in profits since the beginning of the pandemic, while reports from hospital staff revealed that “patients suffered preventable falls and bedsores, dangerous delays in receiving medications and other treatments,” all due to staff shortages (telegram.com).
The money, which now lines Tenet’s pockets was designated to fund the extra expenditures needed during the pandemic. Instead it is being used to pay for scab nurses and police protection, and to assault the working class, both as patients and healthcare workers. Now Tenet, blaming the nurses, has cut back services and 80 inpatient beds, intensifying the Covid-19 surge in Massachusetts.
This is why a capitalist healthcare system that is motivated by profits will never be designed to serve the sick and in-need. The working class must design and call for a healthcare system that puts the health of their fellow class brothers and sisters first. A communist healthcare system in which all workers are encouraged to champion each other and the only compensation is a healthy working class.
The medical monster machine
Tenet, the “Amazon of healthcare,” represents everything that is wrong with profit driven healthcare in the U.S. It treats patients and healthcare workers' lives as expendable, as it boasts to its shareholders about holding three billion in cash - 10 times what it had in 2019, while patients and staff members suffer.
If Tenet is able to crush this strike, it will set a dangerous precedent for reducing staffing ratios across the state and the country.
Over the course of the strike, PLP members and friends have walked the picket line consistently, have called for increased militancy, and exposed the racism and sexism endemic in our healthcare system. The drive to improve profit margins under this racist system has led to far worse outcomes and inhumane treatment for Black and Latin workers.
Community hospitals like St. Vincent, which disproportionately serves Black and Latin workers, has become the testing ground for ever more dangerous cost-saving measures that drag down the quality of healthcare overall, while insurance premiums skyrocket.
The only way to end this attack for good is for the working class to revolt against for-profit healthcare and fight for communism. Under communism, we can prioritize the lives of hospital workers and patients and not the petty greed of a handful of wealthy capitalists.
PLP is calling on other hospital workers, other unions, and particularly MNA unions in other hospitals: to strike in solidarity. Our strikes become schools for communism, teaching the working-class how to fight arm in arm for one another! The fight for safe staffing and conditions in healthcare institutions is all our struggle and our responsibility.  We must rally to ensure these brave working class fighters emerge victorious from this struggle until a communist revolution is on the horizon.