NEW YORK STATE, July 18— “Shut this racist system down. If we don’t get it, SHUT IT DOWN!” A rally and march of about 150 workers and youth in the Hudson Valley region outside New York City demonstrated the extent to which the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, have angered and roused the masses. A multiracial group of women and men, student and faculty comrades and friends of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) turned up at the rally to advocate for communist revolution. Among the PL’ers was a student with years of history and several contacts in the area.

Red ideas greeted by youth at antiracist rally

The rally was organized by a local group called Chester United, a social justice organization with Christian influences with a multiracial political base in the area and led mostly by young Black workers. Speakers from their organization included local politicians and others offering various dead-end ideas for fighting racism: voting, buying only from Black capitalist-owned businesses, increased dialogue with the local kkkops, fighting for Black “representation” in the bosses’ government, etc. When they opened the floor to everyone, however, Black youth with more militant politics stepped up to share their views.

While some of the group’s misleaders advocated reconciliation and “conversations” with the police, the rally itself began late. The reason? Prior to the rally, local kkkops shut down the roads leading to the rally site, so very few arrived on time– the kkkops claimed it was for “traffic safety” for the rally!
So much for reconciliation. Kkkops defend the capitalist state, and the capitalists know a mass multiracial antiracist movement with communist ideas is the end of them. A PL’er spoke about her experiences growing up there and emphasized how imperialist war and racist police terror are essential to capitalism. She also emphasized how Black workers are key to smashing capitalism and directly attacked liberalism and identity politics. More Black capitalists or “representation” in the bosses’ system isn’t better for ANY workers, Black or white.
Connecting the Hudson Valley antiracist struggles with current PLP antiracist struggles in CUNY, she cited the intensifying racist super-exploitation of Black-majority custodial workers at Kingsborough Community College, which has a Black woman president — and the key importance of communist-led multiracial unity in fighting back.
After inviting the crowd to join the international PLP, the majority of the crowd and especially the multiracial youth present applauded. More than 150 CHALLENGEs were sold, and some approached PL’ers with extra donations and for discussions afterward.
‘To be attacked is good…’
We then marched through the area neighborhoods, and the chants gained intensity and militancy. The youth marching in front picked up PLP chants attacking this racist system. When a racist heckled the march with a U.S. flag shouting “all lives matter,” he was militantly drowned out. By the end, many contacts were made. Some had ties to the Bronx and New Jersey, and ideas for collaborating and connecting the city and tri-state area were shared.
Later, PL’ers discovered on social media that PLP and CHALLENGE were attacked by name by Chester United’s liberal misleadership. These pathetic attacks show that when desperate for influence, liberal misleaders expose their capitalist and kkkop allegiance with anticommunism. They even attacked PL’ers as “outside agitators,” despite some being from the area!
Turn the tide for communist revolution
For the sake of our class, we must continue to have a presence in these mass movements and agitate for revolution. While we made more contacts upstate where the chokehold of liberalism seems weaker, the masses at both actions (see box) were receptive to our politics. This demonstrates the importance of being bold with communist politics, because the masses are eager to hear revolutionary ideas. JOIN OUR FIGHT!

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Solidarity with Portland
The following Saturday, student and faculty PL’ers and friends attended another mass action in response to the fascist intimidation tactics by the Small Fascist-led Trump administration (see back page). Almost 500 CHALLENGEs were sold to the thousands attending in solidarity with workers in Portland, Oregon who have been abducted by secret federal police and held for weeks without charge.
Liberal misleaders once again took the stage attempting to funnel mass outrage into electoral politics for the Big Fascist-led Democrats. One speaker from Movement 4 Black Lives opened his speech with anticommunist messages , stating “Take a look at Eastern European history if you wanna know how bad secret police are” and urged workers to vote, ignoring the masses of Latin migrant workers kidnapped, terrorized and deported under liberal Obama. Our chants calling for international working class solidarity were applauded and picked up and when one of the organizers attempted to drown us out with a mobile wireless speaker, we confronted him, telling him to get lost.

Seventy-five years ago on  August 6, in a monstrous genocidal attack, the U.S. military dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan [and two days later on Nagasaki], slaughtering more than 300,000 innocent civilians in the two cities, plus untold tens of thousands who would die later or suffer the poisonous effects from the radiation unleashed by the two bombs.  
The racist U.S. rulers, murdered masses of people in Japan to intimidate their rival, the then socialist Soviet Union.  The then floated the lie that the A-Bomb attacks were necessary to “force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion of Japan involving 1,000,000 U.S. casualties.” All while the U.S. bosses knew full well Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender BEFORE the atomic bombings.
Atomic bombings not necessary to end the war
  The United States Strategic Bombing Survey reported that, “Certainly …in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. (trumanlibrary.gov, Japan’s Struggle to End the War)
 General (later president) Eisenhower said it was his “belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…and no longer mandatory to save American lives.”(Mandate for Change”; 1963)
 General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, believed the dropping of the bombs was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view.”(The Years of MacArthur; Vol. II)
 The LA Times reported in “The Myths of Hiroshima” (8/5/05) that, “The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of the air to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper’s Magazine essay that he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry Stimson.”
 On March 9, “100,000 to 200,000 men, women and children died when the U.S. Air Force doused Tokyo with jellied gasoline….In the months before Hiroshima [conventional] bombs killed up to 500,000 in Japanese cities and left 13 million homeless.”(U.S. News & World Report, 7/13/95)
By the Spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its military’s lifeline.
By June, U.S. Air Force General LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.” [In fact, Truman’s Secretary  of War Stimson told Truman that he was “fearful” that before the A-Bomb was delivered, the U.S. Air Force would have Japan “so bombed out” that the A-Bomb “would not have a fair background to show its strength.”]
So, if not necessary to end the war, why was the bomb dropped?
In May 1945, Soviet leader Josef Stalin had promised U.S. president Truman at the Yalta Conference that the Red Army would enter the war against Japan within three months after the Nazi surrender in Europe, which occurred on May 8, 1945. On August 8, the Soviets swept into Manchuria and were preparing an invasion of Japan. “It was the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing that provided the final ‘shock’ that led to Japan’s capitulation.” (LA Times 8/5/05)
The U.S. ruling class not only wanted to prevent any Soviet participation in peace settlements with Japan but also to use the bombings as a display of U.S. military might, a political warning to the Soviet Union of what awaited it in the post-war world.
Rather than the last act of World War II, the atomic bombings signaled the U.S. launching of the Cold War.
The U.S. ruling class aims for the driver’s seat vs. the Soviets in post-war world
Truman’s War Secretary . Stimson, in referring to the Bomb as a “master card,” said, “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique.” (Stimson Diary)
 Atomic bomb scientist Leo Szilard, in a meeting with Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes, said: “Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb…in order to win the war….Mr. Byrnes’s view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.” (Szilard: A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb”; 1949)
Truman and Byrnes quite plainly used the Bomb primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. As Churchill had said about the Bomb, “We now had something in our hands that would redress the balance with the Russians.” (LA Times 8/5/05)In what amounted to an indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, atomic scientist Szilard stated that, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremburg and hanged them.” (Szilard: A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb”; 1949)
It remains the historic task of the international working class to smash the most murderous war criminals the world has ever known.

I am not your ally
I am a comrade, not an ally.
It has now been just over two months since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and workers militantly took the streets. As demonstrations erupted worldwide, racism and anti-racist fightback were thrust into mainstream focus as capitalist bosses made calls for white people to “listen,” “learn,” and most loudly made calls for allyship. White workers were asked to fall back and consider their own guilt before taking to the streets.
This paralysis, however, only serves capitalist structures that benefit from racism and a divided working class.
Fighting racism is a task for all workers and we are better equipped to fight back as a multi-racial, multi-generational, international working class.
I take to the streets with my working-class brothers and sisters because the Party has taught me that this is the only way to shut this racist system down.
While, Black workers are key to revolution and their leadership is instrumental to an international working-class uprising, that leadership does not absolve white workers from joining the front lines.
Hiding behind “white guilt” with messages of “learning and listening” is not enough to fight a racist and capitalist system. Moments of sharp struggle call for all workers to join each other and fight back.
Anti-racism in the hands of the bosses will only be manipulated to keep workers divided. It will make empty declarations rooted in intellectualism that further isolate workers from each other.
Workers learn by doing. Our fightback is strongest when we resist, rebel, and revolt together. Join the working-class in the streets today! Join PLP!
*****
In response to ‘the summer of smashing racists’
I am writing in response to the article “PLP History: The Summer of Smashing Racists” (CHALLENGE, 8/5). I wanted to expand on the brief summary of PLP’s activity in Boston during the summer of 1975.
The Boston 1975 Summer Project was organized by Progressive Labor Party members working in the Committee Against Racism (CAR). CAR was a campus-oriented group that PLP members helped initiate in 1973. At the time, CAR focused on the fight against racist theories of inferiority being propagated by Nazi professors like Williams Shockley and Arthur Jensen. This racist ideology justified the vile acts of gutter racists like those in Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) in Boston, including white parents physically attacking bussed Black schoolchildren with rocks and bottles.
The multiracial group of 150 mostly student and teacher PLP and CAR members who went to Boston saw with their own eyes what it was like to live in a city held hostage by an aggressive racist movement whose political leaders were ensconced in the City Council and the School Committee and proudly pasted ROAR’s initials on their office windows. Hypocritical liberal politicians, like Mayor Kevin White and Senator Edward Kennedy, had for decades overseen Boston, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. The liberals built their political machines on the division between Black and white workers there. This divide between the workers allowed Boston’s business elite to reap huge profits.
Throughout that summer, PLP and CAR volunteers circulated an anti-racist petition that called for major improvements in the schools and the indictment of ROAR leaders for racist conspiracy to violate the rights of school children. 35,000 people, white, Black and Latin signed our petition, and over 100 Black, white and Latin Boston residents joined CAR. ,
CAR’s bullhorn rallies were frequently physically attacked by ROAR goon squads. These attacks followed a familiar pattern. Boston police, who shadowed us all summer, would mysteriously disappear just before the fascists showed up with bats and hockey sticks. When PLP and CAR members fought back, the racists would retreat and the cops would reappear, sometimes arresting some of us on phony charges.
There were also much bigger battles. Hundreds, led by PLP and CAR, desegregated Carson Beach in South Boston (ROAR’s stronghold), which the racists labeled “whites-only”. The gutter racists attacked, throwing rocks and bottles, allowed by the cops who were supposedly there to keep us separated and “protected”. As the battle continued and the PLP and CAR forces were pushed back by the cops, Black nationalists who were behind us attacked our white members. PLP and CAR members fought back, but we were forced to retreat.
Over the course of the summer, there were hundreds of arrests. Two Black members were convicted of assault and spent three  months in prison simply for coming to the defense of a white Boston CAR member who was being chased and harassed by ROAR thugs. 75 PLP and CAR members, planning to welcome Black students being bused, were arrested while sitting on buses that were pulled over by the cops.
The collaboration between the cops, politicians, state bosses and ROAR was blatant. The permit for our Monday, August 18, 1975 march concluding the Summer Project was withdrawn by the cops’ top brass (no doubt with City Hall’s approval) on the Friday afternoon before the march. Although the courts were rarely on our side, even this was too much for a Boston judge. He reinstated the permit Monday morning just before the march started. 350 PLP and CAR members marched to Boston City Hall, where thousands of curious Boston residents watched our rally. Scores of them joined CAR on the spot as the rally concluded.
The Boston 1975 Summer Project was an unforgettable three months of sharp struggle and tremendous comradeship between those of us who fought together. It is no exaggeration to say that the summer of struggle in Boston broke the back of ROAR and stopped the growth of overt fascism there. Lastly and most importantly, that summer played an instrumental role in deepening the commitment of scores of young, relatively new PLP members to both the fight against racism and (at that time) the fight for socialism, now communism.     
*****
Beware of liberalism  
CHALLENGE has been pointing out correctly that with all of Trump's fascist garbage spewing — equating him with McCarthyism, named for the anti-communist witch-hunting 1950s senator — the liberals remain the main danger, having established fascism's foundation in the U.S.
Trump’s actions and traits do resemble those of McCarthy’s — repetitive lying, bullying, outrageous charges, bluster, rambling tirades, personal attacks, egotistical self-praising, you name it. But McCarthy did not create McCarthyism.
“The blame for that rests with…[president] Harry Truman….The witch hunt that McCarthy is identified with was at its worst before he got started.” (The New Yorker, 8/3).
In March 1947, Truman — the Democratic Party's standard bearer, having become president after being selected by Franklin Roosevelt as his vice-president before FDR’s death — launched the Truman Doctrine aimed at the Soviet Union, initiating the Cold War.
As a teenager I remember how U.S. workers widely admired the communist-led Soviet Union for having  played the leading role in smashing the Nazis in World War II.
To inflame the U.S. population into anti-communism against its former ally, Truman set up a “loyalty” program to be carried out by the FBI and the Attorney-General, forcing 4,765,795 federal workers to sign an anti-communist oath. Eventually over 500 were fired.
Simultaneously, the Democratic-led Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to “investigate” whoever it designated as “subversive.”
This liberal establishment created an anti-communist/anti-Soviet witch-hunt atmosphere years before McCarthy got started. The latter just capitalized on it and used it to become the kind of fascist which Trump now personifies.
(Further case in point: Trump building on former Liberal-in-Chief Barack Obama's racist Middle East and immigration policies.)
So beware of the liberals. They will pursue any path that fortifies the profit system and attempts to blind the working class against a communist solution to capitalism’s exploitation.
*****
Non-violence is deadly
 In the midst of a nationwide, worldwide anti-racist fight back by protesters against cop and military terror, the capitalist bosses are worried and urging us to become non-violent and go back to work peacefully into their Covid-19 gas chambers using the Nazi idea that ‘work will make you free’ (this was the sign at the entrance gate to Auschwitz). John Lewis, a Black politician has suddenly been elevated by former Presidents, Bush, Obama and Clinton, as a non-violent saint in one of the most spectacular, publicized funerals since President Roosevelt. While praising Lewis for his younger organizing civil rights efforts, one Black woman activist said that Lewis, however, like all politicians, had to limit his  criticism of the system and that he was reprimanded and summoned to the Obama White House whenever his remarks got out of line.
When Malcolm X called for Black resistance to racial oppression, he was assassinated. When non-violence spokesman Martin Luther King supported striking Memphis sanitation workers and spoke out against the genocidal war in Vietnam, saying, “the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” he was also assassinated. During that time hundreds of U.S. cities like Watts in LA, Detroit, Newark and New York went up in flames and I remember a CHALLENGE  headline saying, “Non-violence is Dead, Organize!”
Black slave labor built the U.S. economy and capitalism and today Black and Latin poverty wages produce depressed communities and endangered workers to keep it running. But capitalism is a cancer requiring increasing blood soaked profits from worldwide imperialist exploitation, poverty and occupation which U.S. workers in Portland and Seattle are now getting a gassy taste of from their own brothers in capitalist uniforms. The endless bombed out countries we see on TV are part of 100 nations dominated by taxpayer funding of over 800 U.S. military bases worldwide creating a picture of what capitalism has in store for U.S. cities that resist its terror.
Protesters must begin to handle the truth that capitalism creates racism, poverty, pandemics, profits before health and endless wars that only a communist party like Progressive Labor Party can organize to destroy. Join us!
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As of July 21, according to the New York Times, more than 600,000 workers worldwide have been killed by the coronavirus pandemic. In the U.S. alone, more than 140,000 workers have died and more than 58,000 are hospitalized with Covid-19 (COVID Tracking Project, 7/21). In the midst of this deadly siege, as the capitalist rulers push to “reopen” their economy and sacrifice our class for their profit, the burden of supporting and safeguarding workers has fallen primarily on women—and especially upon Black, Latin, Asian, indigenous, and immigrant women.
The profit system creates a stark division between paid and unpaid labor like housekeeping and childrearing, and between the status accorded to “women’s work” and jobs mostly reserved for men. With Covid-19 intensifying every toxic aspect of capitalism, woman workers are the most economically and socially vulnerable and the most physically exposed to the lasting effects of Covid-19.
Capitalism cannot exist without sexism, the super-exploitation and special oppression of women. According to a 2018 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which considered both wage differentials and the gap in responsibility for childcare, women earned just 49 cents for every dollar earned by men over a 15-year period (Vox, 4/2/19). When the capitalists pay women less, they’re able to use sexist inequality to lower wages for men workers as well. Long before the pandemic surfaced, sexism infected our class through the objectification of women and gender discrimination against gay and trans workers. Most of all, sexism divides women and men workers and fractures our fightback.
Only under communism, when we abolish money and smash for-profit labor, will we see egalitarian, collectivized living. Only then will we break ourselves free from our sexist and racist chains.

The value of unpaid labor

While working men are dying from Covid-19 at even higher rates, women “make up more than half of low-wage workers in every state, leaving them in particularly vulnerable positions as the economy sheds jobs at an unprecedented rate. Almost 90 percent of nurses are women, as are the majority of child care workers, housekeepers, cleaners, maids, nursing assistants and home health aids in elder care and rehabilitation facilities” (NBC News, 4/20).
Internationally, women workers have been hit hardest by sexist and racist inequality and violence, the bosses’ deadliest weapon against our class. Thousands of women working in nursing homes and hospitals are perishing from capitalist neglect and the lack of protective gear. Millions more are unemployed after working in industries shuttered by the pandemic or needing to stay home with school-aged children. In the U.S., women account for 55 percent of the 20.5 million thrown into unemployment, with the highest jobless rates among Black and Latin women (NPR, 5/9). In India, women are more likely to lose their jobs and to be pushed into arranged marriages, which limit their future autonomy (NYT, 7/15). In Britain, Black and Asian working women reported struggling to feed their families (fawcettsociety.org). From the U.S. to Mexico to South Africa, reports of domestic violence have spiked.
Globally, women workers carry out 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work every day. If valued at minimum wage, this would represent a contribution of at least $10.9 trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry (OxFam International).

Sexist healthcare worsens in crisis

Under capitalism, health care is not only abysmal but also notoriously sexist and racist. Studies have shown that women are more likely to be inadequately treated for pain or dementia (Guardian, 11/20/17) and suffer a higher death rate after heart attacks (MedCity News, 5/4/19). Two of three pregnancy-related maternal deaths would be preventable with adequate medical care (NYT, 7/13).
Even before Covid-19, Black women in the U.S. were bearing the brunt of the healthcare system’s sexism and racism. They were 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, 22 percent more likely to die from heart disease, and 71 percent more likely to die from cervical cancer (npr.org, 12/7/17). This criminal situation has only gotten worse during the pandemic. In April, Deborah Gatewood, a Black nurse who worked for 31 years in a Detroit hospital, was denied treatment by hospital doctors four times before eventually dying from Covid-19. Murderous neglect is par for the course in a system that “routinely treat[s] black people’s pain and suffering far less seriously than that of other patients. It is the result of preposterous, anti-science assumptions [doctors] hold about black people, which their medical schools and hospitals still have not forced them to unlearn” (Guardian, 5/4).

Black women are key to revolution

As Black and Latin workers confront police violence and are killed by kkkops, it is often the mothers and sisters of these lost workers who march to the front and lead us in the fightback. They are the warriors and leaders we need against sexism and racism!
Since December 2019, the family of Alex Flores, who was murdered by the Los Angeles Police Department, has been fighting back. The political leadership of their marches and organizing is largely led by the women of Alex’s family. Many of their husbands stay home with the children, a great example of what life will be like under communism, when all labor will be collective.
In Brooklyn, the family of Shantel Davis, murdered by the New York Police Department in 2012, continues to lead antiracist fightback in the name of Shantel and so many others killed by capitalism. And this past week, we remembered and continued to fight for Kyam Livingston, a 37-year-old mother killed by medical neglect in Brooklyn Central Booking in 2013. For seven years now, Kyam’s family, led by her mother, have been calling the bosses to account.

Capitalist feminism is not anti-sexist

Only a mass working-class revolution, led by a revolutionary communist party, will free our class. Workers must be wary of the rise of women politicians who have risen to serve the capitalist class. They have been handed “power” only to use it against us.
Hillary Clinton’s shameful career as a racist misleader who championed mass incarceration and the deeper impoverishment of welfare recipients, made it clear that feminism and liberal identity politics are dead ends for the working class. Calls to break the corporate world’s “glass ceiling” are supported by the capitalist rulers for a reason. These backward ideas are designed to confuse women workers’ class loyalties and to funnel their anti-sexist anger into individualism and empty electoral reform.
Is that antisexist? No!
Michelle Obama, often touted as the feminist pinnacle of “Black excellence,” encouraged workers to vote for Clinton, saying: "The best qualified candidate in this last race was a woman…and she wasn't perfect, but she was way more perfect than many of the alternatives” (Newsweek, 4/5/18).
Is that antisexist? No!
In 2019, Lori Lightfoot, former assistant U.S. attorney, became Chicago's first Black woman mayor and the city's first to identify as lesbian. She then fought against a citywide education strike, arguing against increased school funding and staffing while handing out over a billion dollars in workers’ taxes to finance private real estate developments (see CHALLENGE, 2/20). By attacking the mostly women workers, Lightfoot also attacked those who will get hurt the most—students.
Is that antisexist? No!

Communist revolution is antisexist

The Progressive Labor Party fights against sexism and capitalist feminism. It is crucial to attack sexist practices and understand how capitalist crises heighten the sexist and racist super-exploitation of sections of the working class.
As women workers internationally fight to keep themselves and our class brothers and sisters alive, we must continue to fight for a world that follows their leadership. Above all, we must stay vigilant against liberal misleaders who try to pacify our calls for revolution with reformist crumbs and the promise of seats at the bosses’ table.
Workers of the world, unite to smash the whole damn profit system!