A communist education
Sometimes, the Party’s ideas can reach people, and have a wonderful impact, in unexpected ways.
Three days ago, I participated in the PLP-organized May Day march in Brooklyn, New York. Then yesterday, I sent videos of the keynote speech to friends who didn’t make it to the march.
One friend, who now lives in another state, wrote back saying, “Thanks. I enjoyed that. It is a good reminder of the essence of community.”
Another friend, who is a teacher, sent this especially heart-warming note:
“Thank you for sharing this! She educated me soooooooo much just now! Some things I was aware of, but much of what she stated, I did not know! This is powerful! Do you mind if I share this with my students in class tomorrow?... I think it would be powerful to show this and discuss . . . and scrap what my original lesson was going to be.”
We never know, in advance, what the consequences will be, when we do a bit of extra Party work. In this case, the lesson is we should be bold in sharing communist ideas, even more broadly than we may have thought possible!
*****
Workers will be safe under communism
The May Day March was great despite the rain, and the chaos trying to get on a commuter train from Indiana to Chicago. It was great to see comrades I have known for years. The best part of the march was taking the Party’s message that our only way forward is for the workers to take state power straight to the agents of the racist bosses, the fascist cops at the ‘Public Safety’ Center in the Bronzeville neighborhood. They now  know that we’ll be coming for them someday during the communist revolution led by workers under Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leadership. The chants condemning the imperialist Ukraine-Russian war were great. May Day inspired all of us to do BETTER to build this antiracist, anti imperialist, revolutionary communist movement!
*****
Tale of two May Days
There were two New York May Day marches, a communist PLP march in Brooklyn and a reformist (socialist, anarchist) sponsored march from Union Square to Jeff Bezos’ headquarters in Manhattan to support the Amazon union movement. Due to physical limitations I wasn’t able to participate in either march but was able to get to the May Day Union Square rally to sell CHALLENGE and talk to some laundry, restaurant and transit workers about their labor struggles. I am a retired transit worker who participated in the 1964 Transit Strike that shut the city down for 11 days and forced the city to give a pension after 20 years, which all the workers I talked to have lost.
The young workers knew about the strike. I explained that the benefits were won because the union leadership at that time received only the average pay of the rest of the workers and not the six figure salaries of today’s union misleaders, much like today’s politicians who are bought and sold by anonymous unlimited contributions. The revisionists tried to sell me their socialist propaganda which I refused, explaining it was just state capitalism.
Some workers however seemed favorable to my communist ideas by buying all the CHALLENGE issues I had and taking many pictures of my sign which read, “Capitalists worldwide need you to fight other workers for power and profits…communists want to turn profit wars into revolution for workers’ power – read CHALLENGE”.

May 11, Bogota–Colombia’s ruling class is in the midst of a shameless electoral campaign as they bring more racist and sexist attacks against mostly Black workers living in the most remote and abandoned parts of the country. Every political party under capitalism works to trick the masses into joining their corrupt electoral circus by pushing lies, anti-communism, the farce of peace, and fake anti-corruption campaigns. Electoral politics is a desperate attempt to cover up the crisis created by the profit-driven system and furthermore legitimize its discredited bourgeois dictatorship and its rotten institutions.
Local bosses are consolidating their political, economic and cultural power over the great masses of alienated workers who seek leaders to save them from misery, hunger, unemployment and environmental destruction. All the while, capitalism’s destruction of the climate is making droughts, floods, avalanches, and earthquakes much more acute.
Regardless of the outcome of the election, the bosses in Colombia will continue their deal-making with U.S. imperialists,who are given free reign for the exploitation of markets and natural resources. Imperialist institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, UN, OECD, and NATO are the ones that really rule and dictate who and how they will oppress us. Still, the capitalists threaten the workers that if they do not vote “right” they will be left without a job because businesses will flee the country.
The real advance for the international working class is a unified struggle to win a communist system that is consistent with all our basic needs, including clean water, healthy food, sustainable housing, safe transportation, and pro-working class education, all without money, profits or borders. For that, we need to build a mass communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) of millions of workers around the world.
Voting will never bring working class power
The international working class will never come to power by electoral means. To cite a few recent examples: the liberal fascist AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) government in Mexico; the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLM) class traitors in El Salvador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Every former guerrilla and trade unionist who becomes a mayor, governor or president inevitably plays the capitalist role of oppressing and imprisoning those who elected them. Capitalism’s politicians deceive workers to follow down the path of nationalism and cross-class collaboration, causing great demoralization in the revolutionary struggle.
The capitalists need elections to sell us the myth that voting will help us reform the profit system to respond to the needs of working people. But that is not the only reason. They hope to find populist, or in other words ‘most efficient fascist’ candidates who can sidetrack and pacify millions of disaffected workers and youth. For the working class, it will not make much difference if the right-wing Gutiérrez, Hernández, Ingrid Betancur or the Social Democrat Gustavo Petro is elected. In any case, our class does not gain anything by electing one or another bosses' candidate. Only with the destruction of wage slavery and its bourgeois state through communist revolution will it allow the working class to free itself from exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialist wars. We do not need the bosses and their electoral farce.
With CHALLENGE in hand,PL’ers are present in anti-war protests, in rallies against unemployment, in electoral meetings and discussions presenting to the workers our sharpest ideas  of how to build working-class unity and communist organization. Many workers tell us they agree but understand it is a long-term struggle. We respond that no matter how long it takes, the problems of our class have no solution in capitalism. We need to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Time for communism is right now
At this moment the bosses and their military, paramilitaries and criminal gangs are assassinating us in all areas of the country and sexually assaulting working-class women. Right now they are slashing wages and jobs. Right now they are gutting social services and decimating hospitals, nursing homes, schools and nurseries servicing our relatives. It is today that the prices of food and basic services are rising non-stop. Right now they are killing and imprisoning hundreds of young people who fight against the misery to which capitalism subjects us. It is today when famines and droughts are destroying the lives and livelihoods of Black workers first and hardest.
It is for all this that we say to our class that the time for fightback and development of our revolutionary communist struggle is right now!Do not vote– join the PLP and fight to meet our needs. Don't vote–distribute CHALLENGE and organize study groups! Don't vote, let's fight for workers' power! Don't vote, let's organize for revolution and build communism!

The U.S. ruling class is imploding. The leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling to destroy a fundamental part of women’s healthcare—access to abortion—reveals a deeply divided ruling class. In the desperate battle between the Big Fascists of multinational finance capital and the domestically oriented Small Fascists, the U.S. bosses are ready and willing to destroy trust in their most sacred institution.
The Big Fascist media typically describe the fight over abortion as one between compassionate “pro-choice” liberals and heartless “pro-life” reactionaries. But this framing ignores the longstanding sexism and racism that bars working-class women from life-saving access to healthcare. It also minimizes the threat posed by the dominant Big Fascist bosses as they move toward a bloody global conflict and the vicious destruction of working-class lives around the world.
Antisexists, let’s not fall into the trap of voting for the liberal rulers who oppress us. They are the greatest der, not the lesser evil. The international Progressive Labor Party seeks to win our class to understand that the capitalist profit system is fundamentally incompatible with our health and development as working people. Working women’s access to decent healthcare can be won only when a mass party destroys the profit system with communist revolution.
Supreme Court rooted in slavery, in interest of exploiters
Before we can talk about the intensification of sexism in an already oppressive system, let’s dispel the myth that the Supreme Court—and all the lower courts that follow it--were ever neutral bodies. Far from it! The courts are where the ruling class can resolve its differences and create a legal justification for its racist and sexist oppression—all of it justified by having “the national interest” at heart.
The U.S. Constitution, the bedrock for every Supreme Court ruling, was written by enslavers to protect slavery (news.Berkeley.edu, 9/17/19). Built on the blood and mass murder of our class sisters and brothers, slavery generated huge accumulations of wealth. It was the foundation for U.S. capitalism and, eventually, the U.S. empire. The Constitution was essential in legalizing the exploitation and dehumanization of our class. Consider the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that Black people were “beings of an inferior order,” or Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld racist Jim Crow laws as “separate but equal.” In the 1900s, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the forced sterilization of disabled workers, the imprisonment of ethnic Japanese families in concentration camps, and the criminalization of same-sex relationships. Under capitalism, there is only one absolute law: the law of profit. (For a look at how the bosses have used their legal apparatus to control reproduction, see page 7.)
Fascist dogs tear down their own myths
As liberal capitalist mouthpiece Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times (5/6), the Supreme Court is “acting on behalf of the Republican Party and its allies. Whatever legitimacy it had retained was sacrificed in the drive to…overturn Roe v. Wade.” But why would the Big Fascists call the Supreme Court an “instrument of oppression” (New York Times, 5/8)? It’s because they need more unity from both bosses and workers as they move toward World War III—and they can’t get it without intensifying their attack on the isolationist Small Fascists. But regardless of which side disclosed the Court’s intention to eliminate Roe v. Wade and abandon nearly 50 years of precedent, it’s a clear sign of weakness for the Big Fascist liberals. When rulers expose their naked infighting, it can only alienate the people they must enlist for the next patriotic war.
The Small Fascists have already destroyed the U.S. Congress by ignoring the “rules” to keep differences within limits. Now the Big Fascists are taking down the Supreme Court. Without trusted institutions that can manage the two factions’ disagreements, the situation becomes increasingly volatile--which spells more attacks on workers. The move to outlaw abortion could be a precursor for attacks on other sections of the working class, from undocumented workers hoping to be legalized to LGBTQ workers planning to get married. Clearly, any reforms won under capitalism can be revoked.  
Racist, sexist healthcare kills
Of course, sexist attacks on our class are nothing new. The U.S., which markets itself as a beacon of freedom and civil rights, has no guaranteed paid parental leave or universal childcare or healthcare. But it does have:

• an outrageously racist maternal death rate! Black women are three times more likely to die in pregnancy and postpartum than their white counterparts (PRB, 12/6/21)
• a racist, sexist prototype for medical research: the single white male (The Hastings Center Report)
• women in the U.S. are more likely to die from preventable causes than in other industrialized countries(Axios, 4/5)
• OB/GYNs in only half of all counties, a fraction that is projected to decline (Medicine.net, 5/8)
• doctors, regardless of gender, who refuse to believe women’s pain symptoms (Medical News Today, 10/25/21)

In reality, capitalism is the main obstacle to healthy childrearing—and the primary driver of abortion. Most women getting abortions already have at least one child. About 75 percent of abortion patients are “poor or low income” (Romper, 5/3), a big problem in a country where raising just one child costs over a quarter-million dollars (USDA, 2/18). Worldwide, these are the same women who most often get shortchanged on prenatal care and quality maternity and neonatal care (Pubmed, 7/17/19). Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this racist, sexist inequality has only grown worse.
For working-class women, capitalism makes pregnancy undesirable by turning a wonderful thing, a new life, into an impoverishing or even fatal development.
Big Fascists are big dangers
During his election campaign, U.S. President Jim Crow Biden tweeted that “as president, I will codify Roe into law” (10/5/19 at 11:35 AM). What Biden failed to mention is that he and his vice president, Top KKKop Kamala Harris. and the rest of the Democrats did nothing to protect working-class women’s access to abortion when they controlled both houses of Congress and the executive branch during the Barack  Obama administration. It would be a grave mistake to let the liberal bosses turn abortion into a “vote or die”campaign where they force our class to choose among our exploiters.
Here is how much the Big Fascist liberals care about our health: As they seek to spend $40 billion more on the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine (abcnews, 5/9), they are cutting the measly $3,000 child tax credit to help working-class families withstand Covid-19, which still rages. Workers must reject these rulers who smile in your face and stab you in your back, again and again.
What must be done?
If we want to win the fight for the working class to have access to abortions and other healthcare, we must learn the lessons of the George Floyd movement. Any reform fightback can be co-opted by the bosses and steered toward the dead end of the voting booth., Everymember of the working class needs to make revolution primary over reform and join PLP to burn this capitalist system down. What does that mean today?
We must free class struggles from the grips of the fascists, Big or Small. We must build a large base of fightback where we are deepening relationships with workers, sharing CHALLENGE, and recruiting to PLP.  That is how we will lay the foundation for a communist revolution and a new and healthier world for every child who’s brought into it.

The old U.S.-led liberal world order weakens by the day: the openly fascist and anti-NATO Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the French presidential election while anti-France, pro-Russia forces rise in former French colonies in Africa. As rival imperialists China and Russia battle the declining imperialists (Ukraine is just the beginning), it’s our class that will pay the price. We workers cannot afford to walk into the traps of nationalism and liberal democracy. The alternative vision is evident—internationalism and communist revolution.
Celebrate this vision on May Day with Progressive Labor Party (see page 1)! As you wave your red flag of internationalism and chant, “Whose day? Our day!” remember how the might of the working class under communist leadership had produced revolutions out of the rulers’ world wars. Experience the revolutionary potential by joining our march for workers’ power as we fight to build an international communist movement. One day, the wretched of the earth will become its rulers. Need and commitment, not exploitation and profit, will be the driving force of society.
Tale of two fascists
France, as well the rest of the European Union and NATO, is part of the now-floundering U.S. world order established after World War II. In competition with the former state capitalist countries China and Russia, U.S. dominance is under siege, and the E.U. can no longer be counted on for automatic support. Liberal Big Fascists are doing their best to stem the tide of the collapse of the liberal global order but they are beset on all sides (see glossary, page 6). One reflection of this decline and disarray is in the French elections.
As is the case in all elections, workers were given the choice between two oppressors. Like his Big Fascist brethren Barack Obama and Jim Crow Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron uses liberal rhetoric while unleashing state terror and committing imperialist atrocities. He has even instituted a Clinton-esque slave labor program, which forces workers to only work for less than $8 per hour to keep government welfare (Le Monde, 4/19). Mimicking his U.S. imperialist counterpart’s readiness to slaughter workers, France launched airstrikes against a wedding in Mali, killing 22 people just last year. Macron is a blood-soaked liberal fascist, and workers are no fools: just before the election, thousands protested racist police terror (France 24, 3/19) and the double rate of unemployment among immigrant workers.
If Macron is to Biden, then Marine Le Pen is to former president Donald Trump. Driven by a “French First” anti-immigrant racism, Madame Fasciste is more the same than different from Monsieur Fasciste who “cut housing benefits for the poor but slashed wealth taxes…earning him the moniker ‘the president of the rich’” his first year in charge (France 24, 4/22). Since then, he has ratcheted anti-Muslim racism: increased survellience, expanded the power of the state to shut down mosques, and terrorized girls and women who wore headscarves (TIME, 5/19/21). Moving forward, Macron also plans to create a ‘rapid reaction’ gestapo at EU borders against refugees (Euronews, 3/2). Is a liberal the lesser-evil? Hell no!
Clearly both fascists are perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives of workers. So, what is the difference? The primary difference between Macron and Le Pen is the extent of their commitment to the project of maintaining the global U.S.-led hegemony. Le Pen, admirer of Russian president Vladimir Putin, dreamt of blocking European sanctions on Russian oil and gas and withdrawing France from NATO (France 24, 04/20). That’s a failing plan for an imperialist bloc fighting to maintain their dwindling grip on the world. Le Pen’s high votes further confirms U.S. weakness.
Too much is at stake for Macron and the French Big Fascists who desperately need workers willing to fight and die in coming wars against arch rivals Russia and China. This is why they represent such a great danger to our class: for all of Macron’s apologies for French colonialism, for all of his support for universal preschool, he, like liberal Big Fascists around the world, will sacrifice millions of workers at the altar of profit and imperialist control.
The question for workers worldwide is not which of these blood-soaked capitalist servants to support; ask how we can build a worldwide communist movement that can destroy them and their profit system.  
French Empire’s bloody crimes against working class
While French capitalism festers in its crisis, its former colonies are striking back. France has dominated more than 20 countries in western, northern Africa since 1524. From Haiti to Mali to Vietnam, workers were subject to the vicious racism and genocidal nature of the French imperialist machine. In Algeria alone, they slaughtered at least 5 million (The New Arab, 10/4/21). In Haiti, workers are still punished with crippling debt for the Haitian Revolution that abolished French rule.
After “independence,” the bloody grip of French imperialism didn’t really loosen. Take the 1994 Rwandan Genocide for example. France had supplied the weapons and intelligence information to the Hutus regime that butchered 800,000 people (Anadolu Agency, 12/4/19).
The racist history of French colonialism, combined with ongoing brutality, has sparked workers in Senegal, Niger, and more to shout, “Down with France!” As they should. Still, these protests come with their own dangers.
Dangers ahead: nationalism and war
As U.S. and French imperialist control deteriorates in Africa, Russia and China fill the vacuum, signaling greater war plans ahead. The West’s growing weakness is evident: six months after the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan, Macron is set to withdraw 5,000 troops in his “forever war” in Mali. “Africa [is again] a crucial battleground in the confrontation between the West and its rivals…In economic affairs, China’s influence in Africa [via the Belt Road Initiative in 39 countries] far outweighs Russia’s. But…Moscow…directly contributed to the collapse of the French [imperialist] mission in the Sahel [African region]” (Foreign Affairs, 3/10).
Russia and local capitalists have won many workers to trade Western imperialists with a Russian one. One demonstrator was “ready to make a pact with Satan to drive out France” (Reuters, 2/5). In Burkina Faso, “tailors tore up French flags and pieced the tricolors back [to]…make Russian ones” (New York Times, 4/18). All flags, no matter how we cut it up, are made with workers’ blood. Why? National flags are markers of racist borders and an effort to shift workers’ loyalty from their own class interests to “their” local oppressor. The Pan-African nationalist movement failed workers once and will do so again. Nationalism is a deadly poison that can only be countered with communist internationalism. Our class can break our chains when we unite—from Francophone Africa to Russia to Haiti—to defeat ALL bosses.
PLP continues to advance our message: for workers in Mali and France, in the streets of Port-Au-Prince, in Kyiv basements and Russian factories, unite under the red flag of communism! We have a world to win.