NEW YORK CITY, August 13—“Why do police killings, especially of Black and Latin youth, continue despite mass protests and uprisings? Is it even possible to stop these murders without also getting rid of the system of capitalism, which depends on racism to exist?” More specifically, capitalism needs racist cops. They enforce all the racist inequalities that capitalism needs from wage and income inequalities to mass incarceration. These were some of the ideas discussed by more than 70 people at a screening and discussion of the documentary film Profiled. The film tells the stories of families and friends of youth killed by police, and the multiracial struggles they continue to lead against these racist killings (See Page 8).
Come to “Hoops for Justice”
Two of the organizers featured in the film spoke at the screening about becoming antiracist fighters. One of the fighters, Natasha, was outraged by the way the media portrayed her sister Shantel Davis as a criminal when police dragged her out of her car and murdered her in 2013. She turned her anger into organizing the “Justice for Shantel” campaign, supported by growing ties and friendships with members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Natasha invited everyone to the 6th Annual “Hoops for Justice” 5-on-5 Basketball Tournament on Saturday, August 28, to fight racism and honor the legacy of Shantel and Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old Brooklyn youth also killed by police in 2013.
The other organizer said a key turning point in her understanding of why police killings continue to be rampant was when a PLP member introduced her to Lerone Bennett’s essay, “The Road Not Taken.” This essay outlines how the “race problem was a deliberate invention of plantation owners who systematically separated Blacks and whites in order to make money.” Plantation owners who enslaved Black workers passed laws to separate European, African, and Indigenous workers who intermarried, lived together and united to rebel against their common enemy. This was crucial to her being optimistic about the possibilities of defeating racism.
A lifelong struggle against racism
These stories demonstrate how developing personal ties with communists in PLP helps keep antiracist organizers positive even when the possibilities for change seem dim. Attending May Day marches, study groups and witnessing firsthand the dedication to the long term struggle against capitalism and racism points to a communist future where workers run society. Building these close personal ties while fighting racism was a key takeaway from this screening of Profiled. Racism is crucial to capitalism. In particular, cops are the racist thugs that protect the capitalists from rightfully angry workers.
During the several months of planning this screening of Profiled we made new friends who share our antiracist views. Organizers also reached out to high school and college teachers, including some in PLP who have been deeply involved in building ties with family members who are organizing antiracist campaigns against police violence. More than a dozen high school and college students participated in the discussion.
PLP, the real alternative
This event was organized primarily by members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party active within the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), a fake left organization whose leaders serves the main liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class. Thousands of primarily young people have joined DSA since the 2016 Presidential election because they want to see more progressive change, and saw no other alternative. But the capitalist ruling class and their bought-and-paid for politicians cannot and will not abolish the kkkops. The DSA promotes the circus of electoral politics and leads us into working within the capitalist system.
They helped to elect Joe ‘Jim Crow’ Biden president, calling him a “lesser evil” but he is in fact a greater evil. Biden, a longtime archracist in Washington, helped push then-President Bill Clinton’s crime bill that led to the mass incarceration of mainly Black workers. Now he’s trying to do a better job than Donald Trump to organize for war against China and Russia (see editorial, page 2). In other words, the DSA is part of growing fascism within the U.S.
These young people have another alternative—the communist PLP. Party members call for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Let’s fight for communism where the working class rules. As we develop personal ties with people who want to fight racism, we find they are often open to communist ideas.
Since the Profiled screening, we are organizing to continue to raise the struggle. From the annual Hoops for Justice to fighting to to keep cops out of schools, these antiracist fightbacks help deepen our personal ties, as we build the Progressive Labor Party to fight for a communist world.

As Japan sets daily records for Covid-19 cases, the Tokyo Olympics is exposing an anti-worker system in crisis. The International Olympic Committee’s cynical new motto—“Faster, Higher, Stronger—Together”—can’t hide the  vicious lies the capitalists use to keep workers loyal to “their” nation and “their” bosses. “National pride” is built to suppress class consciousness. In a period marked by a declining U.S.-led order and a rising China, imperialists need intensified nationalism to prepare the working class for world war.
Workers in Japan and everywhere need a society organized around the needs of the working class, not the exploitation of the many by the few. Join Progressive Labor Party to build one communist world!
Japan’s profit over workers’ needs
Once a poster child for an efficient capitalist democracy, Japan now reflects the decay of the U.S.-led liberal international order. In the wake of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, a trio of disasters all caused or made far worse by capitalism, the Tokyo Olympics were sold first as “The Recovery and Reconstruction Games” and then as a symbol of “peace.” The reality was something else: the eviction and displacement of 300  families (Washington Post, 7/29), a spike in Covid-19 cases, and steadily worsening conditions for local workers. Since 2013, when Japan was named the Olympic host, the city’s bosses have attacked homeless workers by locking and lighting up public spaces.
Tokyo is currently in its fourth state of emergency of the pandemic. While Japan boasts about its universal free healthcare, less than 13 percent of the country is fully vaccinated (CNBC News, 7/5). The unvaccinated include thousands of workers at an Olympics that cost $25 billion (AP News, 12/22/2020). A ruling class that spends billions on games and robs workers of their health does not deserve to exist.
The working class in Japan is not having it, with 83 percent against the Games (New York Times, 7/23). In fact, six of ten workers in the country rate the Japanese rulers’ response to the pandemic as poor, the most negative assessment of any nation  (Pew Research Survey, 7/20).
Working-class rage is clear in Tokyo. Chants of “Go to Hell, Olympics!'' could be heard from inside the nearly empty opening ceremony (NY Post, 7/23). The week before, hundreds marched by the Olympics Village Plaza to the headquarters of the Tokyo Olympics Committee to denounce Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for gutting social services.  A banner read, “Olympics Kill the Poor.” These protests contain the seeds of communist ideas to organize society around working-class health and needs. To make these ideas a reality, our class needs an international communist revolution.
Rich people’s games exploit workers
Capitalism has perverted the positive striving for physical health and fitness into a two-tiered system of winners and losers. It’s no coincidence that the top five winners of gold medals are among the wealthiest nations: China, the U.S., Japan, Australia, and Russia.
Before every imperialist world war, the capitalists set the course by revving up nationalism, racism, and sexism—all anti-worker ideologies promoted by the Olympic Games. Japan’s entrenched racism, from school policies to public harassment, cannot be hidden by their few Black Olympians (Washington Post, 7/31). China’s a win-at-all-costs policy takes thousands of children away from their families for gruelling training in government-run “sports schools” (Daily Mail, 5/19/16). The Chinese bosses’ world-leading pile of gold medals reflects their rise as an imperialist power now challenging the U.S.
Conditions for U.S. Olympians are no better. Children are funneled into intensive, specialized programs at a young age,  leading to social isolation and psychological damage. Sexism is rampant, with women gymnasts starved into eating disorders and serial rapists enabled as coaches and—in at least one case—the team doctor.
The remarkable athletes on screen—pushed to perform amid a pandemic that has killed more than 4 million people worldwide and the surging Delta variant—are a sad reflection of the hollow promises of a capitalist system in crisis. Under the profit system,  superstars are chewed up and spit out once they can no longer build TV ratings. Even the winners are losers.
As inter-imperialist competition intensifies, these Games are a prelude to a more lethal rivalry: the next global war.  A U.S. Senate committee just approved a bill to require women to sign up for a draft (Military.com, 7/22).
Capitalist disregard for workers’ health
The capitalists’ dictatorship funds sports for a handful of athletes while ignoring the basic needs of billions of workers. For every Simone Biles, the U.S. superstar gymnast forced to choose between her own mental health and the pressure and rich rewards of winning gold, countless children are deprived of nutrition, physical activity, and basic healthcare.
Even before the pandemic, the bosses’ system denied access to essential health services to half the world's population (World Health Organization, 2017). The stark inequalities in health and fitness have nothing to do with individual failures. They’re caused by an abysmal healthcare system; a lack of facilities, infrastructure, transportation, and childcare; low wages, superexploitation, pathetic union benefits, budget cuts, and more. In a word, they’re caused by capitalism.
Athletics for all
Instead of competitive sports for a few, the dictatorship of the working class will have athletics for all. Progressive Labor Party organizes across five continents for communism, drawing inspiration from the first communist revolutions. In the Soviet Union, workers fought the “win at all costs” mentality by building fizkultura (physical culture). Every factory in every industry gave its workers access to physical education and activity. This was an integral part of Soviet life, an intentional way of rallying masses of workers to engage in social and political activity.
In the 1960s, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, leftist workers and students fought for mass participation in sports under the slogan, “Friendship first, competition second.” They emphasized the fundamental unity of our class over the temporary rivalry of competition.
But because these workers’ states failed to abolish all capitalist relations, anti-worker ideas crept back into every aspect of society, including sports. When the Soviet Union and China began making international competitions primary over mass athletic participation, their standards of health began to decline. The reversal of the old movement is illustrated by China’s and Russia's emphasis on Olympic medals and rivalries over workers’ wellbeing. When the working class settled for less, we lost in every way.
Physical culture for communism
Communists fight for a world where all workers can reach their full potential in body and mind. Where the capitalists hope that every worker waving a national flag is a potential soldier for imperialism, we have one world and one class: the international working class.
While the road to communism is a marathon, PL'ers and friends must respond with urgency by organizing for multiracial unity and internationalism. That's the spirit of communism, where “winning” for the working class means seizing state power and building a communist world. Fight for communism! Join PLP!

CHICAGO, July 21—Today, communists from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined organizations #FreedomForMohawk, #NoMore Foundation, and #DefundCPD for the spirited “From Mohawk, With Love” Anniversary Rally (see CHALLENGEs from 12/3/20). The event, which brought almost 40 people out, was created to highlight the struggles and triumphs of Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson in the first year since his arrest in August of 2020.
Workers, students, and community organizations banded together in a show of support and solidarity for Mohawk’s case, while sharing donated food, clothing, household items, and literature. Those of us in PLP helped set up tables and supplies, lead chants, give speeches and distribute over 200 copies of CHALLENGE newspaper.
Throughout the last year, we have helped organize within a citywide defense committee to maintain a militant presence in front of the Cook County jail and courthouse, a bedrock of the capitalist bosses’ racist and sexist legal system. But this time we opted for a change in tactics, taking the fight right to the office of Scott Waguespack, the alderman (city councilman) who represents the city ward where Mohawk currently lives.
Predictably, Waguespack has done nothing to assist in getting the charges against Mohawk dropped, despite our appeals. But given politicians’ role in maintaining this racist profit system that thrives off state terror and incarceration, this should come as no surprise.
The abolition of oppressive class structures and the liberation of the international working class necessitates mass revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the communist PLP. The fight to free Mohawk is intertwined with the broader fight to smash deportations and imperialism, in order to  establish an egalitarian communist world.
Put capitalism in its grave, join PLP
During one of her many speeches given while leading the rally, Mohawk’s close friend and former roommate spelled the situation out clearly: “They (the bosses) are never gonna stop.” It’s true that we cannot have any illusions that we can appeal to the bosses’ “moral sensibilities;” their use of state terror against our class will only sharpen as capitalism spirals deeper into crisis.
That is why we must continue to stand with, not only Mohawk, but all of our fellow workers within the prison and court systems that continue to be tortured, abused, and murdered by the capitalist state. Mohawk has been on EHM this long because the courts want us to forget about him so they can just throw him in prison, but we will not let that happen.
We will rally in front of every alderman’s office, court house, and street corner until Mohawk’s charges are dropped. We are committed to fighting with our entire class against a racist capitalist system that can never serve our needs, and building the international Party that will one day put that system finally in its grave!

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here recently hosted a screening and discussion of the documentary PROFILED about the fight against police killings in New York. A group of comrades and friends gathered to eat and watch the movie, including three families impacted by racist police violence. Even though the movie came out five years ago, the movement against police terror still faces the same issues: What is justice? And how do we get there?
Despair to revolutionary optimism
After the movie there was a discussion that ranged from grief and despair to revolutionary optimism. One impacted family member brought up how futile the fight seemed when presented with families that have been fighting for justice for decades with seemingly no results.  “I thought it was a sad documentary.  It seemed like no matter how many baby steps or changes we make, things have gotten worse...It did show a great deal of unity between families that I loved how they helped each other, like what you guys (PLP and mass organization) do for us.”
When asked about the revolution versus reform discussion, she said, “I think something big has to happen in order for things to change and eventually we need a revolution and I feel that it is coming.  Do I think it’s needed?  Yes, I just hope something positive comes from it.”  
Veteran comrades chimed in with their experiences of organizing for communism over the decades and how they keep their optimism as they continue to plant seeds. There was wide agreement that the problem of police brutality could not be solved under capitalism which led to a lively discussion of reform versus revolution.  
Two women workers join the fight for communism
It was good that earlier that week, two of the young women—the kkkops murdered their brother—joined our club in which we read excerpts of PLP’s Reform and Revolution.  In one instance, her brother was killed while hospitalized last year while in a mental health crisis.  It is more and more clear to her the complicity of not just the killer cops, but also the hospital bosses, and that simply “defunding the police is not enough.”  
The other young woman has been a militant fighter for nearly two years since her brother was murdered in South LA and has grown close to the Party as we have with her.  She and her family have seen the documentary twice, including last year when the sister of Shantel Davis came to Los Angeles for our Party forum.  This year she joined our club and said she recognized how these “pigs are connecting families all around the country and world and is inspired by the families dedication to keep fighting even though they won’t get ‘justice’ under capitalism.”
She joined Party members in Minneapolis last year and said, “It was only because we fought militantly and the workers rebelled that Chauvin went to jail, but that reforms only build illusions in this system while revolution changes the system.”  
She also liked what one friend said about how he was recently taken out of his bubble and now is a committed organizer who is open to learning more about alternatives to capitalism and how to get there from here.  She said this “light switch” moment in him was inspiring and shows how we can “expand this movement.”
As PLP’s involvement in the anti-police terror campaigns in LA has expanded from one family to a coalition of 30 families, between almost daily actions and meetings it is difficult to not get caught up in just the day to day of the reform struggle.  We have made a recent decision to be more intentional about raising revolutionary communism as an alternative with certain families and base members as our relationships have deepened.  
Fight builds working-class leaders
It is heartbreaking and infuriating at the untold pain these families suffer at the hands of kkkops and capitalism. Most reform organizations rely on the families to simply share the horrors that happened to them over and over again, which is re-traumatizing. Of course, the families want every opportunity to use these platforms to share the story of their loved one. Yet it is heartening and inspiring at how this mass work, with our leadership, has grown. Dozens of families are uniting and finding ways to support each other. They are becoming organizers and leaders. They have moved from not only talking about their tragedy, but also fighting for other families. Most importantly, they are discussing how we need to change this whole damn system of capitalism.
We still have a long way to go in this fight, but we are in the trenches with these incredible families and supporters, raising our revolutionary communist ideology and practice with them.  We have a world to win!