LOS ANGELES, CA, September 7—Progressive Labor Party (PLP), families from police murder victims, and friends from here and Balitmore joined the PLP in Washington, DC for the National March Against Police Brutality. Communist leadership in the movement against police terror is bringing fighters closer to a communist outlook and PLP.
Fighters get closer to communism
At the march, a young Latin worker mentioned her family was struggling after her youngest brother returned from war with PTSD. Last March, she witnessed the Los Angeles sheriff murder her other brother. Now, our sister-in-arms and her family struggle with mental health. This is just one of many examples of how imperialist war abroad and fascism at home have struck deadly blows on this family, like so many Black, Latin, immigrant and working-class folks around the country! Meanwhile, the kkkops continue to protect this racist, capitalist system, using terror to intimidate workers from fighting back.
The woman is one of the 40 family members representing 25 young Black and Latin workers murdered by kkkops in the LA area that travelled to Washington DC to attend the reformist Mass Action protest.
She seeks mental health support and helps destigmatize mental illness in her community and with other families.  She’s also making the political connections between police funding and their function in society. She sees how their exorbitant government budgets, including direct donations from Wall Street banks and major corporations, continue to soar, as cops continue to kill workers.  
Since returning from the Mass Action Protest in DC, she’s asked comrades and supporters to help her organize a protest to demand justice for her brother and expose the funding of the police. In the Party,  we say that the capitalist class needs cops to defend their racist system. The only way to “defund” the cops is to smash the profit system with the hammer of communist revolution.
In addition to fundraising and organizing mass actions for families through the mass organization, PL’ers used communist literature as an organizing tool with the families. We have written multiple articles together and now have three families meeting in a Party club. The trip to DC was one more way in which to embed our communist analysis into the reformist mass action and “abolitionist” politics that permeate the mass organization.  
LA families unite with Antwan’s family
These murderous pigs continue to kill us and kill us and bring families together (see page 8). Two nights before we arrived in DC, multiple cops murdered Antwan Gilmore in his car after being startled awake by guns pointed in his window in the middle of the night. It turned out he was killed just outside of the hotel where we would be staying for the weekend. He was only 27 years old.
After we finished the main mass action at the “Dept. of Injustice,” multiple families from Los Angeles joined the family of Antwan Gilmore and occupied the intersection for hours, exchanging condolences, solidarity, and a fighting spirit. When the racist pigs kill, they unwittingly force families to unite coast to coast. Our goal is to win these families to our Party and be revolutionary leaders in our fight to destroy capitalism with communist revolution!
Communist influence spreads
PL’ers  from DC and Baltimore brought much-needed supplies, offered rides, and brought a communist banner. Their work for the last eight years organizing with the family of Tyrone West (killed by police in 2013) has shown us a path in this fight. It was especially important for our LA families to see comrades from the East Coast in their PLP T-shirts, distributing CHALLENGE openly (75 papers and 150 flyers) along with a banner.
One of the Mass Action leaders tried to get our East Coast PL’ers  to relocate their literature table. An LA comrade was able to talk with him, and given the fact that he knew the number of families we brought and the support we have among them, the organizer was forced to back down and allow our comrades to operate openly.  
Our leadership was illustrated in all aspects of the trip.  Although we were unsure whether our mass organization could pull it off, leadership from PLP yielded in donations to cover flights and hotel expenses. One PL’er  celebrated her birthday by asking for funds and dozens of supporters of this mass organization created art to raise money.
Another comrade gave logistical leadership—organized the tickets, hotels, and more. She was also asked by the Flores family (family of Alex Flores, murdered by LAPD in 2019) to give the English translation of their speech, which highlighted their trust in this PL’er that developed over nearly two years.
It also helped dispel some of the anti-white working-class sentiment that tends to come up inside and outside our mass organization. She is seen as a leader, comrade, and trusted confidante of many families, and her leadership role in DC has helped strengthen this.
Longhaul fight
The families appreciated the role PLP and the LA mass organization played in getting them to DC.  The families closest to the Party mentioned that it was emotional and overwhelming being on stage and speaking to so many other families and hearing their stories that were all so similar, particularly with folks being murdered while in a mental crisis. “It was difficult to speak, like I had a knot in my throat, but it was a blessing to meet with so many other families from all over the country.”  
It was especially hard for one PL’er; the next day marked the four-year Angelversary of her brother who was murdered by killer cops after being thrown in front of a moving train! We had a small ceremony for her with a few of the families we are close with that was led by the aforementioned sister whose brother was killed in front of her. It was a powerful moment. Heartbreaking and yet the pulse of the masses could be felt.  
Another mother’s class anger helped her ask the PLP to organize with families for a nationwide march. While it is true that the mother has some faith in reforms, she also says that we will likely need a revolution to really stop these killer cops.
If we are immersed with these families for the long haul, these lifelong fighters will become the gravediggers of this racist, sexist, murderous capitalist system!  It has been an honor to fight alongside these families!
PLP fights for a communist revolution. Join the fightback!