CHALLENGE CORRECTION
In the eighth paragraph of the 10/30 front papge article on the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) there was a factual error. The article claims that AFSME removed their entire elected NYC leadership but AFSME only removed their retiree leadership.
Workers and youth are searching for a communist home
A few weeks ago, several comrades and I went to a protest in Brooklyn connecting the racist and murderous use of KKKops in the subway to the genocide in Palestine. We used the experience of comrades in our group to decide to walk alongside the rally and march, rather than follow the leadership of march organizers who would likely provoke reactions from the police. While we walked alongside the march, a young person, probably in high school, came up to us, shared that he grew up in a Zionist household and that he is trying to educate himself and asked us why we were “pro-Palestine.” Although he disagreed with a lot of our ideas, he and around eight of his friends intently listened to our responses to his questions.
Later, as we crossed a street, one person asked us what flag we were holding. We said, “A communist flag!” They replied, “Yeah!!!” excitedly. As the night went on, we befriended a college student who recently moved to NYC and is looking for a communist home. This person later attended one of our study groups. While we helped this student locate his partner, a group of high school girls saw our red flags and approached us, “Wait, you mean actual communism?” They too asked several questions about communism and took papers.
As I was traveling home that night, my train was evacuated and I ended up taking an Uber home. I mentioned to my Uber driver that I was at a protest, which led to a political discussion that lasted all of five minutes. I gave him a copy of CHALLENGE, and he was so interested that I took his contact information and he showed up to our next study group and a game night. The night was incredibly inspiring and reminded me that workers are desperate for solutions that the bosses can’t offer, for communist ideas. It is our job to be in these struggles, in the streets, in our schools and jobs, and raise these ideas.
*****
System is violent; don’t be silent
In August, one of my students was shot in the neck. Earlier this month, he died. The school was very silent and hush-hush about his having been shot despite it being in the news. A student was the one who let me know that he died, and the school said nothing until two days after that. Even still, the only official word about his death has been one email from our social worker. I am now talking with the social worker about, at the very least, raising some funds for his family.
When kids die, and their school administration, teachers, and staff are silent, it sends the message that their lives didn’t matter. This racist system reinforces that message with every breath it takes. Capitalism kills and kills and spreads bloodthirsty lies that more privacy, more police in schools, more metal detectors will keep workers and students safer. I still need to do more to connect more with students and coworkers about honoring his life and do a better job of raising just how murderous and racist capitalism is.
*****
Workers’ unity knows no borders
Our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) club and study group are at the center of our organizing. At our last meeting we acknowledged the crisis of the war in the Middle East and Ukraine and the rivalry among imperialists for fascist control of the world’s resources, commerce and labor. However, we focused on the immigration issue in the U.S. First we analyzed the capitalists, our class enemy. Trump calls for mass deportations, immigrant concentration camps, a closed militarized southern border and mass racist hate and scapegoating of all immigrants. Harris calls for closing the border, finishing the wall, stopping entry to asylum seekers who must first apply in the first country they enter on their trek to the U.S., and passing the severe bill that Congress failed to pass last spring.
Starting with Trump and continuing with Biden and Harris, detained asylum seekers have been and are being sent to for profit private prisons in various states, especially in the southern states where they are jailed as criminals, even subject to solitary confinement, although almost none have criminal records. There are contradictions for the capitalists. The bosses need cheap labor, especially in agriculture, fishing and meat packing plants. They will need immigrant children and youth as soldiers in their imperialist wars. The working class in the U.S. is deeply divided with racist hate and xenophobia spiraling sharply. Workers blaming fellow workers for all their problems instead of blaming the capitalists and their profit system. Building international antiracist working class unity is PLP’s job! Our campaign for a pro-immigrant antiracist movement is starting small. having distributed PLP leaflets in solidarity with the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and displaying signs welcoming immigrants and asylum seekers.
We led two committees in the organization we’re in to write a letter of support for our sister and brother immigrants in Springfield. Members of the organization got 80 signatures in their committees. We’re in the process of reaching out to two groups of Ecuadorian workers. Our efforts to win younger workers will require persistence and patience. At our last study group meeting we collectively committed ourselves to write a new PLP leaflet in solidarity with all immigrants in this difficult period. Along with our friends we will propose and organize a workshop at the organization in early December. We’ll continue to ask other groups and churches to display our posters. We must expand CHALLENGE readers’ networks and distribution in the street. One friend stressed the importance of strong PLP leadership in our efforts. In action and organizing the working class gains confidence and trust in each other. We have to persevere, he said. Individual workers and students can’t solve their own problems. Together we have power, added a comrade. The fight will continue until we can destroy capitalism/imperialism and build a communist society, in keeping with the spirit of fallen comrades like Derek Pearl we fight everyday with unfaltering love for and confidence in the working class!
*****
Election studygroup exposes Harris
Educators in the Progressive Labor Party held a study group focused on rejecting the false choices of electoralism. Base members including a student and teacher attended seeking clarity on the question of voting this November. These base members demonstrated sharp and advanced working-class consciousness: they said that abstaining from the ballot box was already a huge topic with left-leaning people in NYC. Indeed, many workers in NYC have expressed their refusal to look away from the genocide of Palestinians—that one cannot vote for a “lesser” evil that slaughters innocents with incendiary bombs daily is an undercurrent of mass consciousness at our workplaces.
For this reason, our study group focused on advancing mass consciousness with a communist analysis drawn from our Party’s line. Instead of viewing each candidate as a “great man” of history acting by their own volition, we examined the constraints faced by the capitalist class as their profit system decays into fascism. We emphasized that the working class can only depend on each other, not the outcome of ruling class elections that reflected two paths of fascism: Big and Small (see the Glossary, p. 6).
We discussed how Donald Trump represents the “Small” Fascists who prioritize domestic interests and wield gutter racism, sexism, and anti-queer sentiment to appeal to reactive nationalistic elements. Without underestimating the violence that the Small Fascists can unleash, we then note how Kamala Harris represented the bigger danger as an avatar of the “Big” Fascists.
With analysis of political economy, we studied how Harris drew together an inclusive multicultural coalition to wage global imperialist warfare in the name of finance capital. That is, with a veneer of progressivism, Harris more easily captures the working class and recruits them for a future of fighting World War III. Hence, Harris has repeated since her nomination speech at the DNC that she will empower the U.S. military to be the “most lethal fighting force” on the planet. For Harris, the U.S. must swell the ranks of the military to perform genocidal violence to secure key resources in a planet beset by climate crisis, inter-imperialist rivalry, and falling rates of profit.
We ended the study group by examining the necessity of organizing the working class in preparing for fascism. We agreed that we must all learn how to adapt to increasingly repressive conditions as the crisis continues to roil capitalism. To do so, we highlighted the necessity of building a militant, international communist party that can retain and debate collective means of revolution. In other words, we stressed the need to build Progressive Labor Party.
*****
