Meisha Porter, new face of liberal racism
Bad News! Meisha Porter has been appointed as the first Black woman to lead as NYC’s chancellor of the country’s largest public school system, effectively becoming the new face of liberal racism.
While Porter has been promoted as an antiracist Black woman leader, and champion for “equitable schools,” her history proves otherwise.
Three years ago, she was the Superintendent of District 11 in the Bronx. This is the same district where my child previously attended a New York City Public school. This community, composed mainly of working-class Black, Latin, and Caribbean families, has always been terrorized by racist cops and decaying schools. This is also the same neighborhood where racist cop Richard Haste murdered 18-year-old Ramarley Graham for existing while Black.
Three years ago, a white teacher, and known Trump supporter, committed an openly racist act against two Black teachers. During a small after-school training, he made a noose in front of the teachers.
Knowing this teacher wanted to make his racism clear to everyone, the two teachers immediately filed a complaint. The next day, antiracist members from the community distributed a flyer within the neighborhood and in front of the school. The leaflet displayed a photo of the racist teacher and demanded he be fired.
One of the women who was targeted had asked for the racist to be reassigned until an investigation was complete. However, instead of firing the teacher, Porter allowed the racist to continue teaching while she conducted a perfunctory investigation.
To seem as if she addressed the racism, she mandated that school staff attend “anti-bias” trainings. The racist got off scot-free! Although the leaflet from the community was a good start, Porter managed to keep the press away, and pacify any other form of fightback from parents, students, and teachers. To this day, the racist teacher continues to teach at the same school.
There have been many liberal misleaders claiming to fight for “equitable schools” throughout New York City and do nothing but pacify workers and students from fighting back. It came as no surprise that Meisha Porter did nothing to discipline this teacher and set an example for other racists to see.
Black capitalist ideas, promotion of identity politics, and provoking racist division among workers are trending in an era of U.S. capitalism in decline. Porter is part of this latest trend of patriotism, which gets workers to accept U.S. racism as part of “who we are” as long as Black and Latin workers get a seat at the table of rulers and wannabe oppressors.
PLP rejects, not makes amends with, racism. Only communism gives us a vision of how racism can be defeated; we will abolish profit and exploitation, the material basis for racist divisions.
In this public school system, communist presence inside the fight to remove metal detectors is the real good news, not the changing of this boss for that one at the top.
*****
I’m no scientist…I am a communist
I am no scientist. But what I know of climate change I get from the media and what I know to be indisputably true; capitalist society throughout the world is inclined to make profits at all cost. This drive for profits has no regard for the well-being of the planet, let alone the working class who produce all, but do not control the instruments of labor.
I am no scientist. But does it take a scientist to see the effects of Climate Change: the increase in number and intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, winter storms, etc. Can capitalist society with its “coercive law of competition” stem the tide it created?
I am no scientist. But I do know this: when the electricity goes out those who suffer the most are the working class, employed or unemployed. Those who suffer the most are the bearers of the racist attacks who are used to increase the profits of the capitalist class, dividing us into smaller controllable units and weakening our ability to stand together and fight back.
I am no scientist. But when a winter storm recently hit our community and the electricity went out, I made a discovery. The temperature dropped and we endured. Those of us who could relied on bottled water to survive, creek water to flush our toilets, propane stoves to cook. We slept in our winter clothing and waited. Time slowed down as the hours turned to days.
I am no scientist. But it seems to me that if you can land a rover on Mars, you should be able to keep the electricity flowing. What daunts me is where is the profit of a rover on Mars? And yet I know there must be or the investment necessary wouldn’t have been made.
I am no scientist. But I heard and read recently that the infrastructure of electrical cables and grids are in disrepair, that the maintenance of this infrastructure is necessary and costly. The investment has not been made in years. Profits over human lives is the priority.
I am no scientist. But I hope this letter provides some warmth in the knowledge that a day will come when we live in a society where humanity, not profits, is the priority. Long Live Communism! Power to the Working Class!
*****

 In Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy (2020), Ben Macintyre describes the evolution of Ursula Kuczynski, from an incipient revolutionary into a career of one of the most successful Soviet spies before, during, and after World War II.
Time of great conflict & revolution
Between two world wars, fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and Asia. Germany was roiling with street battles between fascists, the German Communist Party, and the Social Democratic Party.
A wide gulf existed between the ultra-rich and everyone else. The Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, was characterized by mass unemployment, economic insecurity, and savage political conflict. In one year alone, 1918-1919, roughly 900,000 Germans died of hunger. In 1920, the Nazi Party was founded. A year later Adolf Hitler became its leader. On January 1, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party but were captured and assassinated by right-wing German army officers, possibly sanctioned by leaders of the anti-communist Social Democratic Party.
In July, 1921 the Chinese Communist Party was organized in Shanghai. In 1927 a leader of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-shek, broke with the communists. In one day, on April 12, 1927, KMT military forces allied with local criminal gangs, killed 5,000 - 10,000 students and workers loyal to the communists.
The capitalist world after World War I, from Europe to Japan, was dominated by militarists, fascist heads of state, and their financial backers, all of whom espoused various forms of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, jingoism, militarism, and imperial conquest.
The critical difference between the 1920s-‘30s in Europe and today was the existence of an international communist movement. The result of the Bolshevik revolution in November, 1917, was that the working class, led by the Bolshevik (communist) Party,, held sway in the largest country in the world. And the Bolshevik’s goal was to create an anti-racist society of equality rather than one based on private property and profit
During the 1920s and early 1930s revolutionary communist movements in Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and China were battling the fascists for state power. The Comintern and the Soviet Union gave material and ideological support to these struggles.
Ursula Kuczynski
Into this political and social cauldron, Ursula Kuczynski was born in 1907 to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. When she was sixteen she was beaten by the police in Berlin during a May Day demonstration, learning a lesson she would never forget: politics is at bottom a power struggle, most often decided by mortal combat.
Ursula Kuczynski was a professional spy who ran agents and networks against the fascists in her own country, in Japanese-occupied China, in Poland, Switzerland, and then, during the Cold War period, in Great Britain. She eventually became a Red Army colonel and, among her other espionage successes, ran Klaus Fuchs, the German physicist who enabled the USSR to get the atomic bomb, thus breaking the American monopoly on atomic weaponry.
After the Second World War she continued to spy for Moscow. Often suspected, she was never caught. In 1943 the Director of Soviet intelligence said this about her: “If we had five Sonyas in England, the war would be over sooner.”
Forever a communist
She died in Germany on July 7, 2000, age ninety-three. Her son, Peter, summed up his mother’s long life this way: “There were two important things to her, her children and the communist cause.”
Urusla Kuczynski was also called Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton, Mrs. Burton, and Ursula Hamburger, but her most enduring name, her spy name, was Sonya.
The book Agent Sonya is fascinating because it contextualizes how from the 1920s to her death nearly eighty years later, a young woman born into a rich family became a radical communist and never relinquished her commitment to fighting fascism and trying to bring a socialist world into being. In February 1950, she chose to live in socialist East Germany rather than England. She believed that, however deeply flawed it was, East Germany was a more humane place than capitalist West Germany, where thanks to the Western Allies Nazi murderers remained in power. Such ideas of lesser-evil politics were a key characteristic of the old communist movement and this weakness led to its failure.
Revolutionary optimism
Even as the GDR was falling apart in 1990, Ursula reaffirmed her basic belief in communist principles. “I have no reason to feel ashamed on moral or ethical grounds.”
Her enemy had always been fascism, and “for that reason I hold my head up high.”
Even as East Germany was about to dissolve, Agent Sonya addressed a huge rally in Berlin telling the crowd not to lose faith: “Go and become part of the Party, work in it, change the future, work as clean socialists! I have courage. I am optimistic because I know it will happen.”
Learning from the victories and mistakes of the old movement, PLP fights directly for communism. We carry with us a revolutionary optimism that reminds us that however dark the current era of class struggle, we have courage because we too know communism is the future.

On  January 15, 2021, Elizam Escobar passed away, a former member of the Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña and of the  Progresive Labor Party (PLP).  Elizam was a great cartoonist and artist whose political commitment was expressed through his art work in CHALLENGE during the early 1970s.  They are of lasting value and a tribute to the communist spirit he showed during those years. We have reproduced one of them here (see cartoon).
Unfortunately, Elizam quit PLP and joined the terrorist FALN independence group. He was arrested in 1980 and spent almost 20 years in prison for planning  terrorist acts to gain Puerto Rican independence. After his release he became a well-known art teacher in Puerto Rico.
A friend remembers him this way:
Elizam and I were roommates for a number of years. I still remember us attending the Saturday morning rallies in New York’s Upper West Side, selling CHALLENGE, the PLP  revolutionary communist newspaper. Back then, we were arrested several times. I remember one particular occasion when the New York Police Department police beat the (crap) out of us - they thought that they could beat us into submission, but our fighting communist spirit was greater! We were placed in two separate cells next to one another.
We were trying to keep our spirits lifted so we started to sing from the TOP OF OUR LUNGS protest songs in Spanish and English. This pissed off New York’s “finest” to say the least! We sang “Bella Ciao”, the “International” and “Mírala que Linda viene la revolución obrera que no da ni un paso atrás!” This infuriated the NYPD and they handcuffed us to the cell bars and beat and pepper sprayed us again!
This is the spirit that I remember of Elizam, bold and militant, a true comrade , fighter and communist who was always ready for combat!  Throughout the struggle in our cells we never stopped singing!
Thanks to Elizam, I met Juan Antonio Corretjer, general secretary of the Puerto Rican Socialist League, fraternal organization of PLP. We both joined PLP in 1971.
Elizam was arrested April 4, 1980 for seditious conspiracy as a member of Las Fuerzas Armada de Liberación Nacional (FALN) and sentenced to 68 years in prison. Elizam served 19 years and 6 months in state and federal prisons. In 1999 he and 10 other combatants of the FALN had their sentence commuted and he served an additional five  years on probation in Puerto Rico .
We can still hear on the PLP-LP Elizam singing loud and proud: “Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao,Ciao!”
Long live Communism! La clase obrera no tiene frontera! (The working class has no borders!)

Thousands of workers in Myanmar (also called Burma) have taken to the streets in defiance of the Tatmadaw, the thuggish military that has ruled the country for most of the last 60 years. In a February 1 coup, the Tatmadaw ousted the racist civilian misleader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her NLD (National League for Democracy) Party. Protesters are demanding her release from prison and a return to democracy. But make no mistake about it, democracy will never liberate the working class from the horrors of capitalism.
Under class society, the ruling class dictates to everyone else. Under capitalism, a capitalist dictatorship rules for maximum profit and power for the few by exploiting the international working class. “Democratic” elections are a sham the liberal bosses use to hide the coercion and violence of their rule. We must fight for a workers’ dictatorship—for communism. Only then will workers have any control over society and their lives.
The current conflict in Myanmar, one of poorest countries in Asia, is between two enemies of the working class. It’s a fight over which group of bosses will rule the country and line their pockets with profits stolen from workers. It’s also a fight over which imperialist power Myanmar will align with—China or the U.S.? What’s happening in this small, impoverished country is part of a worldwide trend toward fascism and world war.
Workers should take no side in fights between bosses. Backing either side leads our class into the arms of the mass-murdering capitalist ruling class. We have a better alternative. Let’s channel the mass militancy workers have shown in the streets, defying curfew and dodging bullets and water cannons, to organize an international communist movement to smash this racist profit system once and for all!
Inter-imperialist rivalry and rising instability
Myanmar is an important puzzle piece in the sharpening rivalry between China and the U.S. The military’s takeover “pits the foreign-policy strategies of the two powers against each other. And it thrusts Myanmar on to the front lines of an increasingly tense geopolitical competition for global leadership” (WSJ, 2/2).
For China, Myanmar is a big part of its Belt and Road Initiative, a strategy to expand China’s influence throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania, the continent dominated by Australia. The Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Corridor gives China an overland alternative to shipping oil and gas through the vulnerable Strait of Malacca. It also reflects the steep decline of U.S. power in Southeast Asia. “The Chinese government… sees the coup as ‘a moment of opportunity’ to undercut the inroads the United States and other Asian nations made during Myanmar’s halting democratic opening” (NYT, 2/5).
What with the Donald Trump disaster, massive unemployment, and a bungled response to the Covid-19 pandemic by Republicans and Democrats alike, the U.S. is in disarray. It has long since lost its claim to any “moral” superiority. The new Joseph Biden administration may escalate sanctions against the Myanmar generals to try to bring back Suu Kyi, who’d been somewhat friendly with the U.S. while keeping her options open with China.But according to the Wall Street Journal (2/2), “...additional U.S. sanctions will have only marginal impact on the Burmese military....” With China and other Asian trade partners in hand, the Tatmadaw has little to fear from U.S. threats.
In short, U.S. liberal democracy is rapidly losing ground. The January 6 Capitol riot exposed the bosses’ biggest immediate problem, the split within their own class. Before they take on China, where the rulers have the advantage of open fascism, they must get their house in order: a prescription for more open fascism in the U.S.
Ruling class disunity leads to coup
Workers in Myanmar have long lived under brutal military rule. British imperialism “...rearranged the nation’s ethnic and racial hierarchies in order to best extract profit...” (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2020). After achieving independence in 1948, Myanmar’s military held mostly unchallenged power until 2011, when they entered a power-sharing arrangement with Suu Kyi’s civilian party. Mimicking their colonizers’ racist brutality, they orchestrated the genocide against Rohingya Muslims.
Atrocities against the Rohingya included mass killings, “babies thrown to their deaths, mass rapes, whole villages burned to cinders….Thousands of Rohingya have been killed and three quarters of a million driven into a squalid exile in neighboring Bangladesh” (NYT, 12/11/19). To stay in power, Suu Kyi alternately denied the military’s racist atrocities and defended them as a campaign against “insurgents or terrorists” (NYT, 12/11/19). But the two sides fell out when the NLD won recent elections by a landslide, and the military felt their control could be in jeopardy.
Suu Kyi, racist liberal misleader
The open brutality of Myanmar’s military is obvious. But liberal rulers like genocide apologist Suu Kyi are even more dangerous for the working class. Lauded by the world’s liberal bosses for her commitment to “democracy,” Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
Like Russia’s Alexei Navalny (see CHALLENGE editorial), Venezuela’s Juan Guaido, and Biden himself, Suu Kyi is part of a global dead-end misleadership. Putting our hopes in any of these liberal bosses will only lead us down the road to supporting the U.S. rulers’ inter-imperialist fight against China to dominate the world’s resources and labor.
Workers have no stake in this fight
The lesson of Myanmar is that there are no good bosses. “Ethnic and religious minority groups who have experienced repeated violence at the hands of the Tatmadaw for decades…saw little change under Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD” (Foreign Policy, 2/10).
But these are not the only choices for the working class! Workers in Asia, from China to Vietnam to Myanmar, have a strong tradition of fighting imperialism under communist leadership. But when workers made the mistake of embracing nationalism, their tremendous sacrifices were squandered by a new group of local bosses. It is time to fight for the real alternative, an international communist party: Progressive Labor Party. PLP is organizing to turn the bosses’ imperialist fights into revolution to liberate the working class. Join us!