NEW YORK CITY, March 26—Outside of City Hall, 25 protesters marched and chanted to oppose police being the first responders to those in mental health crisis. Since June 2015, the racist New York cops have killed 14 people whose neighbors or family called for assistance. All but one of those killed were Black or Latin. Racism infects every aspect of working people’s lives.
We are demanding that teams of mental health workers be the ones who answer such calls, and that they be reached by a system separate from 911, which goes right to the police.  Several churches, the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP), No New Jails, and Jewish Voice for Peace, and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated. Mental health professionals would tend to be compassionate toward their fellow workers. Cops are thugs for the bosses. They protect the bosses and their capitalist system. Their tendency is to shoot.
Overall, the racist police kill about 1,000 people a year in the U.S., of whom a quarter are mentally ill. Black, Latin, and indigenous workers are much more likely to be killed than white workers, and the police hardly ever suffer any consequences for their actions. So blatant is this behavior that the American Public Health Association, after a four-year struggle by young members, declared police violence to be a public health issue (endingpoliceviolence.com). Next week, the Mayor’s task force on the issue is planning to announce their solution to the problem—training all police on how to respond to such calls.
This will never work. Police are trained to be violent, to behave in a military manner, and their racism and mistreatment of workers is ignored or supported by the bosses and their politicians. In fact, police are the arm of the capitalist state designed to control and intimidate workers and perpetuate the racist divisions that are necessary for U.S. capitalism to maintain its empire and profits. In several communities that have tried the Mayor’s approach, it has failed because cops cannot be turned into caring ‘social workers’. Certainly more community mental health treatment is needed but that issue is not even being addressed.
We chanted and passed out leaflets for 90 minutes and made several contacts. Representatives of every group present made speeches. The No New Jails speaker told of their campaign against the new jails being planned in each of the five NYC boroughs, saying the money should be invested in social services, jobs, education, and health care. The Progressive Labor Party speaker talked about the role of police in capitalist society and our upcoming May Day March. At May Day we will promote a vision of a communist world run by the working class for our needs with no exploitation and profiteering. Every participant and about 100 others received CHALLENGE. Our campaign will continue next week when we attend the Mayor’s announcement of his bullshit plan.

BROOKLYN, April 3—Members of a community organization where Progressive Labor Party does political work participated in a preparation meeting to collect funds and plan the participation of friends in the May Day march. Thirty people, most immigrant workers from different countries, met with PLP during this international dinner. Two PL’ers members led the political program.
A young PL’er opened the event. He related a profound review and pictures on the history and beginnings of May Day and the eight hour day. During his presentation, the young leader informed the workers that May Day is a holiday all over the world except in the U.S., even though it was born in Chicago. He talked about how the bosses are always trying to erase workers struggles by rewriting history. Workers really paid attention to this history presentation. At the end there were many questions about his presentation and pictures.
Aftwards, veteran PLP comrade with a long history of struggle began her presentation asking the workers there several questions about their work. She showed several images of workers fighting each other while the bosses laugh. She also showed images of how we can unite and fight back. The participants liked that image so they asked for copies of it. She gave them a pamphlet about May Day in English, for those who are learning the language.
Many workers participated enthusiastically during the discussion on the importance of participating not only in the march, which will be led by PLP,  but all the activities leading to May Day. This is the heritage left us by those who fought in the first May Day in Chicago in 1886 against the capitalist system. During the discussion we asked:  How can we abolish capitalism once and for all and create workers power?  Why do the bosses still rob us of our salaries and discriminate against us even though their politicians have passed “laws” against that?  The young leader asked us to participate in the international workers day, that it belongs to us even if the U.S. bosses try to take it from us.
These questions generated a good discussion amongst those present. A worker from an agency that provides homeworkers, and many times has worked up to 24 hours straight while only getting 13 hours pay and has no rights, talked about her vibrant experience in confronting her boss. This opened the way for others to share their experiences. They all told stories of exploitation and discrimination, fear of being fired, and how the threat of deportation stops them from fighting back. There were several proposals of unity, on how to organize small struggles against the exploiting bosses at these and other sites where our friends work.
At the closing, PL’ers invited the people present to participate in the May Day march, so they can see on a small scale how the workers take the streets. We also had a delicious dinner, prepared by other comrades and families. We felt optimism at the commitment of those present.
The workers left the event with enthusiasm, thirsty to know more about the history of May Day. We left convinced that this is how we can expand the base of a communist movement, led by the Progressive Labor Party. This is how you make a revolution and create workers power for an egalitarian society without bosses and to end the profit system of exploitation. We still have a while until our communist march on May Day. We hope for a solid turnout and we’ll continue to work enthusiastically to make it happen.

Manlio Argueta’s novel One Day of Life  (1980) about the exploitation of peasants by the U.S.-backed landlord government of El Salvador confronts capitalist rationalizations. It specifically counters U.S. support for fascist terror and murder, and the anticommunist ideology used to justify it.
The novel’s subject is severe exploitation in the Marxist sense – value taken from the peasants’ labor by keeping their standard of living so low that many children die of starvation. Exploitation is enforced by terror and legitimized by branding all peasants who do anything to raise their income as communists and, therefore, legitimate targets for torture and murder.
Traditional Roman Catholicism is used by the exploiters to train the peasants in fatalistic acquiescence. After the 2nd Vatican Council in the early 1960s “new priests” arrive, they teach the peasants to form buyers’ and sellers’ co-operatives that raise their standard of living. Then the National Guardsmen start to patrol Chalate, asking about the “communist priests.” The Guard tortures one of the “new priests” and we hear no more about them.
The U.S. Army Special Forces, the “Green Berets,” train the National Guardsmen in terror, torture, and murder. They feed them a U.S. diet to bulk them up, so that they look and feel superior to the peasants who cannot afford protein.
This primes the young peasant recruits to accept their indoctrination which is:
“any peasant unsatisfied with his traditional poverty-stricken life is a communist and “enemy of democracy.”
“true religion” comes from the United States, in the form of fundamentalist Protestant sects, which are imported from the United States to re-indoctrinate the peasants in fatalism and anticommunism.
peasants are poor not because they are exploited but because (a) they are part Indian, and “all Indians are lazy”; (b) there are too many peasants, because “all women are wh*res.”
Two chapters, “The Authorities” and “Them,” represent Argueta’s attempt to depict the ideology of a young peasant man who is successfully indoctrinated by the U.S. to terrorize, torture, and kill peasant families from his own village. The U.S. can trainers pound anticommunism, machismo, racism, and fundamentalist Protestantism into the heads of the trainees.
Education is used to identify peasant candidates for the National Guard. The Guardsman has made it through 6th grade, and so is recruited to be a fascist killer—another example of how capitalist education serves only the interests of the rich by indoctrinating the working class with sexist, racist and imperialist ideas to keep us divided.
Exploitation of the poor by the rich is the central theme. Lupe Guardado, the main narrator, comes to understand that the peasants are poor BECAUSE the landowners are rich. She is instructed by Chepe, her husband, Justino, her son, and Helio, her son-in-law, all of whom are tortured and murdered by the U.S.-trained National Guardsmen.
Before he is tortured and murdered by the U.S.-trained National Guardsmen, Chepe tells Lupe that God is conscience, and conscience is the poor. In short, “God is the poor.” The struggle of life is not to gain paradise after death, but to win a paradise on earth.
The “paradise” we need to struggle for is an egalitarian communist world where the capitalist ideas of sexism and racism are rejected and workers share the fruits of their own labor.
Through this novel, readers are introduced to the essential evil of the capitalist system, and the realities of U.S. brutality, mass murder, and exploitation in Latin America.

CHICAGO, March 30—Anti-deportation community organizers from three different Midwest states met in a forum to share their struggles and successes against the capitalist bosses’ racist mass detention and deportation machine.
The forum demonstrated that even small collectives of committed anti-racist fighters can effectively shut down the fascist plans of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prison profiteers, especially when they are committed to long-term struggle and building a base in working-class neigborhoods.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) put forth a communist perspective on the movement against racist deportations. We stressed the importance of connecting the fights against the bosses’ racist attacks on both Latin workers and Black workers as we build a movement against the capitalist system that exploits and oppresses us all.
Learning through the mass work
The focus of the event was to summarize the work of three fightback groups, including the groups of several Party members, and discuss ways that their continued support of each other could be beneficial. The forum was organized by a local collective with deep ties in immigrant neighborhoods around Chicago’s west side. The struggles shared today spanned as far back as 2012, taking place across Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.
Organizers from Illinois discussed how they were able to defeat a proposal to build an immigrant prison in the small rural town of Crete in 2012, by utilizing mass media and organizing a three-day march from Chicago to the town in order to build opposition. Their efforts coincided with mass anti-NATO demonstrations that were happening in Chicago at the time, and therefore were able to draw support from other anti-capitalist fighters.
Workers from Indiana shared their efforts organizing in the majority-Black city of Gary to defeat a similar proposal to build an immigration prison. By drawing a wide base of support from many organizations, including faith-based groups, workers and community organizers, they were able to build a protracted campaign against local politicians and the GEO Group, a private prison corporation.
They discussed how their struggle was boosted by the surge in national anti-racist fightback inspired by the anti-racist rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Comrades in this group talked about how their communist politics directed both their actions and line within the organization, and their collective base-building among other workers.
Members from a prison abolition organization in Michigan then detailed their recent success in preventing a prison from being built in a small town in western Michigan. They explained how the private prison corporations intentionally target smaller, economically-devastated towns with majority-white populations, and try to build support by the promise of “bringing jobs.”
A key theme tonight centered on the liberal racism and anti-working class politics of non-profit immigrant rights groups. These groups are funded by and march in lockstep with the Democratic Party. Numerous instances were brought up in which organizations such as the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) intentionally withheld information about the prison proposals and sought to undermine more radical and anti-racist efforts to oppose the prisons.
Liberal reforms will never end the racist attacks against immigrant workers because reforms seek to steer the struggle into electoral politics and ultimately win more workers into supporting the capitalist system. The bosses’ liberal fascism must be countered with a bold message of communist revolution, which seeks to unite all workers into a movement to destroy this system which profits off the detention and deportation of our class sisters and brothers.
Building working-class consciousness
Fighters also discussed the ongoing work and lessons they’ve continued to learn. PL’ers said class struggle teaches the working class to fight and build a higher class-consciousness. Wins and losses are short-lived due to the nature of the reform. The ultimate goal has to be smashing the capitalist system that keeps workers and students on this hamster wheel of reformism.
Fighting alongside the masses against the bosses, their cronies, and their institutions is a mandatory step in building revolutionary consciousness and resolve. Equally mandatory is sharing these experiences in communal spaces and continuing to be bold about the line, including distributing CHALLENGE.
Our collective knowledge and skills in fighting immigrant prisons is set to be tested once again, as the mayor and town council of the small town of Dwight, Illinois have tentatively approved the construction of a detention center by Immigrant Centers of America.
Onward to another battle against the racist capitalists! Onward to international communist revolution!