NEW YORK CITY, September 9— A part-time history instructor at the City University of New York (CUNY) offers a description of “back to school” first days. “Where does the anti-racist club meet? I want to join!” Two days in class and students are already showing a great interest in fighting back as well as an openness to communist ideas. Ten students signed up to join our Activist Club, 30 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed and students have been engaging in sharp and lively discussions about the history of the United States and the kind of future we want.
On day one, we reviewed the early history of the U.S. from Columbus to the Civil War. After a brief summary of the events from 1619 (arrival of first Black indentured servants in Jamestown) to 1865, students pointed out that the main aspect of U.S. society was racism, whether the institution of slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the war with Mexico or the Civil War. A student posed the question: Can we ever stop racism? Students mentioned that racism was taught and learned and that we are not born racist. When asked to answer the question, almost the entire class thought we could not end racism. Would it take a revolution? Almost every hand went up. That was a good time to share CHALLENGE with the class.
On Day two, we started to examine the Reconstruction era right after the Civil War and look at the great achievements made by Black workers and white workers in trying to build an equal society. We talked about the changes that were fought for and the hardships that were faced. There was a debate about which was more important, voting or owning land.  I was able to point out how politicians come to our community, one of the poorest in the U.S., seeking votes but that’s about it.  A few students challenged the idea that voting is the way to change society. One student said, “The change must always come from us, not from any politicians.” So that was an opportunity to discuss student organizing, challenging tuition hikes and other issues on campus (e.g., broken elevators, long lines to get ID cards, shortage of classes, and limited healthy food options in the cafeteria).
We are looking forward to this semester on campus, discussing Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP’s) ideas with students and engaging in class struggle. We have a new study group that is discussing the history of our revolutionary communist movement and involving students in supporting the demand for higher wages for part-time teachers and challenging the bosses’ tuition increases.

Haiti, September 10– As a new school year begins across the northern hemisphere, ruling classes across the globe herd working class teachers and students back to classrooms and school systems designed to reproduce capitalist social relations: racism, exploitation, and poverty.  Communist teachers, parents and students are faced with a dual task: battle like hell now for immediate improvements in learning conditions while never losing sight of the larger fight for communist revolution.
At a recent conference run by a local reform organization, the Haiti Adolescent Girls Network, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members provided a model of raising communist ideas inside the bosses liberal reform organizations.(see box). The stated purpose of HAGN is to “support the rights and emancipation of girls and young women in Haiti.”
  It was recognized by Beyonce for its work in 2013 (haitigirlsnetwork.org; www.beyonce.com) and is allied with the Abundance Foundation, and the liberal Harvard-based philanthro-MDs Steven Kahn and Paul Farmer.  Harvard was built by slave labor, financed by slave trading (Wilder, Ebony and Ivy), pioneered the racist pseudoscience of eugenics (Harvard Magazine, March/April 2016) and to this day remains  a nerve center the U.S. ruling class imperialist main wing. The same big fascists that invented napalm at Harvard, for the purpose of butchering workers during the Vietnam war. Now they want us to believe they are friends to Haitian girls, but our comrades and friends are not fooled.
Liberal parasites prey on Haiti’s youth
Under the Harvard-led liberal imperialist world order, education for the children of the Haitian working class is a disaster. 40 percent of children aged 5-15 don’t go to school at all, and 60 percent drop out before finishing primary school to help support their families.  Only 20 percent of eligible students go on to high school. Schools for the children of the working class lack toilets, running water, walls that reach the ceiling and libraries; in rural schools, the teachers are not trained and often have not completed secondary school
In the coming school year, as liberal education bosses pose as fighters for education reform, comrades everywhere must fight to raise our Haitian comrades’ analysis of schools and capitalism, which holds true worldwide.

*****

No future for working class youth under capitalism
Education in a society which prioritizes the production of wealth to the detriment of human beings has lost its sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. Such a society cannot really produce free or liberated women and men, integrated into their society and truly productive human beings. The preparation of the child so that she/he has a “secure economic situation” in later years is nothing but an illusion. Education does not guarantee anything under a system of exploitation—capitalism—for the masses of workers and their children! Daily, in fact, schools pass from what should be their objective, developing the student fully as a human being and cultivating the ability to realize her/his full potential, to the student becoming merely a cog in the wheel of the bosses’ system. And the schools are required to reinforce the inequalities of the system as a whole. They prepare individuals to be blind to what’s really going on, who cannot see the true from the false, the good from the bad.
Children don’t all have the same opportunities in school. Your level of education depends upon what the bosses need you to become as an adult. If you are to work in a factory/sweatshop, basic reading, writing and math are all that is required. If you are to work in the fields, even less is required. If you will be needed to be a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor, then of course you will get more education.Those children who don’t even have the opportunity to go to school at all will become the unemployed workers of the future, working in the informal sector, selling a few loaves of bread or some carrots on the street.This is why the various churches, private institutions and the State want to control education: their interest is to see that school doesn’t let the children flourish as human beings who question this system based on exploitation and inequality and that is truly dangerous. It is thus necessary to really transform education, not just reform it, and members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) will fight tooth and nail alongside students and their parents at all levels in the struggle for a better life, a decent life.
But in the end, a system that is based on inequality, that creates rich and poor, bosses and workers, doesn’t deserve to exist. And that means we must fight for the destruction of the capitalist system that forges inequalities of all kinds, exploiting women and men, for the sole purpose of building or multiplying capital for a very small minority. So our struggle to end this exploitative and dehumanizing system embraces the transformation of education as well.Children are the adults of tomorrow, and you have a choice: resign yourself to being exploited or fight back , not just for yourself and in your hometown, but for all the children of Haiti and elsewhere around the world. Together we can fight back and win.

Last year in Mexico’s presidential election Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (aka AMLO) came to power in Mexico). He rode a wave of massive discontent with the previous president Enrique Pena Nieto. Also, he promised an end to official corruption which he calls Mexico’s IV transformation. The other three, he argued, were the War of Independence (1810-1821), the War of Reform (1858-1861) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). The following is a report on the reality of this so-called transformation.
AMLO’s arrival to power in Mexico must be analyzed within the obvious failure of its policies, which, in the late 1970s, represented an option to rescue the capitalist system. Around the world, this failure is evident and demonstrates that the only two options to reorganize the distribution of the world are war and the fake democratic process. The working class is either deceived to accept or openly subjected to the vagaries of the market and the consequent exploitation of raw materials and people.
In Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Greece and Mexico, the bosses have taken advantage of the distrust and depoliticization of the working class to boost charismatic politician allied to the system. These characters take advantage of the workers’ anger and frustration in the face of the ineptitude, corruption and all-out thievery of the rulers who preceded them, and based on this discontent, they get them elected.
In Mexico, AMLO’s electoral campaign got the workers to accept the candidate’s trap. The leadership of Andrés Manuel simulated an opposition to the governments that have taken the workers to the extreme conditions of exploitation in which they have lived, as well as to a war against drug trafficking that has sown the territory with bodies of the dead and soldiers.With AMLO in power, the consensus and agreements necessary to make legitimate use of force have been developed. Arguing their status as a democratic government that represents the interests of the people, the imperialist projects have been given continuity, which entails confronting the “opponents” of these projects with the use of force or co-optation, and thus obtaining the support of public opinion. In reality, the new government represents with its actions, the interests of capitalists who aspire to have a greater share of power and resources in the country.
This government’s conduct does not represent a change, it essentially benefits for the most powerful sectors of the Mexican bourgeoisie, who see the possibility of breaking with their dependence and submission to US imperialism and the opportunity to conduct business with other imperialists from Europe and Asia. For example, China aspires to have a leading role in the construction of the Mayan train.
For this reason, an adequate environment for foreign investment is guaranteed, with the support of the population gained through a new version of political patronage that promises the redistribution of taxes for the needy. In this way, conditioning the support of the people to the unsanctioned approval of the conditions for the reproduction of capitalism based on extractivism, investment-dependent production for maquiladoras, monopoly and super exploitation.
The megaprojects promoted by the previous governments were continued and multiplied in the 4th Transformation. Since they guarantee big capital’s need to reproduce and to exploit within its territory: minerals, hydrocarbons, exploitation and privatization of gas, construction of thermoelectric plants and gas pipelines.
Thus, instead of seven Special Economic Zones (EEZ), a free zone will be created with six industrial parks along the Isthmus of Tehuantepec-that connects to the ports of Salina Cruz, Oaxaca and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz- one of the most lagging areas of the country (La Jornada April 25, 2019. Alma E. Muñoz and Fabiola Martínez). It will be called a Trans-Isthmic corridor, as well as the creation of maquiladora parks in the southeast, thermoelectric plants, gas pipelines and energy infrastructure projects with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. According to AMLO, these projects will also serve to contain the wave of migrants seeking asylum who are facing violence and unemployment in their countries. The United States conditioned the imposition of tariffs on Mexican export products in exchange for Mexico becoming a dam to contain migrants.
One of the first tasks of the newly created National Guard, has been to deploy more than 6 thousand soldiers to stop migrants, but its main mission is to contain social protest, since there are more than 400 environmental conflicts being waged by many social organizations and defenders of the environment; they oppose the effects that the 26 thousand mining concessions produce. The new police state protects the mining bosses and attacks and represses the working class.
The US bosses will benefit tremendously from the industrial corridors planned in Mexico and Central America, since the transportation of goods will be cheaper to reach Asia, in particular China. This situation has similarities with what happened in the Middle East where the imperialists made war to facilitate the transfer of gas and oil where only a few benefited through the death of thousands of people.
The working class must understand that the capitalists will create wars and allow governments such as AMLO’s to guarantee their interests and continue exploiting the natural and human resources of its territory. They will try to make us believe that their shameless implementation of fascism is, in reality, the will of the 30 million people who voted for it. Many workers thought they were voting to the end of decades of social and political injustices but, in the end, AMLO is just delivering the continuation of neoliberalism.
The disappointment of the workers in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Greece in the face of the failures of the “progressive” governments to solve their problems opened the doors for fascist governments. The PLP communists in Mexico and the world fight against the plans of the liberal and fascist capitalists, but mainly we organize our class and educate ourselves so that we understand that communism is the only alternative to the hell of capitalism. Join us!

 Words of praise poured in for the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison when she died on August 5, 2019. She was lauded for her mastery of language, the depth of her characterizations, and her profound understanding of the lived consequences of sexism and racism. She was also celebrated as a national treasure. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy K. Smith wrote, “I don’t believe there is a writer who understood America better and loved it with more ferocity than Toni Morrison.” There is no doubt that Morrison was not a radical, but a liberal, and that her heavy reliance on psychoanalysis to explain her characters’ behavior fails to target the roots of their systemic oppression in the coercive power relations generated by capitalism.  
Morrison’s Black female characters: Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula and Nell in Sula (1973), Sethe and Baby Suggs in Beloved (1987) all experienced extreme suffering, physical and psychological. But the direct and indirect sources of their oppression, found in the capitalist drive to profit, remain obscure. Morrison’s idealist approach to causality is reinforced in her novels by her occasional reliance upon the supernatural to account for her characters’ motivations. In her book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Morrison ahistorically traces many white writers’ individualistic conceptions of heroism to a generalized need to dominate and marginalize a racialized “other”; the material origins of this need remain largely unexplored.
In one of her novels, however—A Mercy (2008)—Morrison quite persuasively utilizes the tools of class analysis to explore the origins of race-based social inequality. Set in late 17th-century colonial America, the novel confirms and enacts a Marxist understanding of the ways in which the category of race emerged and then hardened as capital accumulation took increasingly brutal forms. The kinds of insights into the origins of race and racism that we gain from historical texts like Lerone Bennett’s The Shaping of Black America (1973) and Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997) are amply borne out in Morrison’s fictional treatment. Theodore Allen’s biographer asserts that Morrison claimed to have read both volumes of Allen’s important study before writing A Mercy.
The novel stresses the common oppression experienced by a group of laborers in the same household: Lina, a Native American woman who survived a smallpox epidemic; Rebekkah, an English mail-order bride from an impoverished family of religious fanatics; Sorrow, a dark-skinned young woman who refuses to hate her own body; Scully and Willard, two indentured servants who may never escape their bondage; and Florens, a young woman of mixed parentage who mourns her unexplained abandonment by her mother. Moreover, Jacob Vaarck, the “master” of the household, while clearly positioned to benefit from the labor of those he controls, is portrayed as initially humane and free of racialized preconceptions. He respects as an equal the free Black man whom he hires as a blacksmith; he hardens into a racist only when his wealth is invested in the Caribbean slave trade, and he aspires to turn his farmhouse into an Old World-style mansion with wrought-iron gates.
The novel is a painful read, in that Florens, through whose consciousness much of the story is told, never understands why her mother—an enslaved Angolan brought to Barbados—chose to “give” her away to Jacob Vaarck. Only at the end is the reader exposed to the thoughts of Florens’s mother, who feared that her spirited daughter would be dragged into the whorehouse of chattel slavery should she remain on the Caribbean plantation. Ironically, the loss of her daughter was “a mercy” compared to such a fate.
Mainly, though, the novel testifies to the fluidity of conceptions of race in the colonial period; indeed, the narrative never uses the categories that would subsequently become “natural” descriptors: white, Black, Negro Indian. Moreover, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1677—the last multiracial rebellion of oppressed laborers before the hardening of racial divisions—is referenced early in the novel as a lost possibility.
The novel is narrated in the present tense: the reader knows where the nation is headed, but the characters do not. That the United States should end up being founded on racialized inequality was a function of the ideologies of superiority and inferiority accompanying the development of capitalism, not an inevitable reflection of the human need to exploit those who look different.  Tracy K. Smith’s description of Morrison as a lover of America is not borne out of the incisive analysis of the class-engendered politics of divide and conquer that shapes A Mercy. In this novel, Morrison may have “understood” America; that she “loved it with . . . ferocity” is highly dubious.