NEW YORK CITY, January 20– A Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is very involved in the struggles of workers around housing, health, racism and workplace exploitation. As 2019 began, we have been active in support of the Central American Caravan and against the invasion of Amazon, one of the largest companies in the world, which will be building its second headquarters in Queens.
Amazon has colluded with city politicians (Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, both Democrats) to establish itself in NYC and win billions in subsidies, but the community is against the plan, knowing full well that Amazon’s presence will lead to a rise in housing costs and to congested trains, buses and schools.
At the end of November 2018, we took part in several protests against Amazon sponsored by a community organization we are active in. At one event, a Party comrade spoke to the protesters, denouncing Amazon for exploiting its 560,000 workers around the world,with low wages and dangerous working conditions, all to enrich the chairman of the company, Jeff Bezos – the world’s richest man, who earns more than eight million dollars per hour while his workers have to work overtime just to survive. (One-third of warehouse workers in Arizona are reportedly receiving SNAP benefits – food stamps.)
Our comrade pointed out another reason to oppose Amazon: it is a major contributor to the U.S. repressive state apparatus. The company is in negotiations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to sell its facial recognition software (Rekognition), which would help ICE deport even more undocumented immigrant workers (our class brothers and sisters).
Employees at Amazon have opposed the contract with ICE, horrified at the agency’s separation of families at the border with Mexico. Besides ICE, for years Amazon has supplied Rekognition to police departments, which can use the technology to identify and create a database of protesters. Amazon also has a $600 million contract with the CIA, notorious for its record of overthrowing progressive governments (Guatemala, Chile, Zaire, the list goes on), installing repressive regimes and running secret detention centers, where torture is normal.
The community organization we work in wants to force Amazon to either pay billions of dollars in taxes  or not come to the city, which doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. There are other liberal organizations in the anti-Amazon coalition that recommend boycotting Amazon and supporting small businesses–ones threatened by Amazon’s arrival–instead. But we cannot indulge in the nostalgia of the “good old days” of family businesses. Amazon started out as a small company and is now a mega-corporation. Meanwhile, most small businesses fail because of high rents and competition. Capitalism needs to be overthrown, not reformed.
The encouraging news is that Amazon workers are fighting back. Angry at low-wages, constant pressure to work faster, extreme heat leading to dehydration and collapse, and the high numbers of injuries in the warehouses, workers are organizing. Somali women held rallies outside the Minneapolis-area warehouse to protest speed-up and disrespectful treatment. Workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, NY are unionizing.  Recently, Amazon workers in Spain, Italy, Germany and Britain organized walkouts, shutting down production to protest low wages and lousy conditions.
Amazon’s treatment of its workers, and the way in which politicians cater to its needs is a clear example of how capitalist owners care only for profits and use their tremendous wealth to buy the loyalty of government officials. That’s why we need to end the profit-system and work towards communism, an egalitarian system whose goal is to create a better life for the working class. We dedicate 2019 to that goal.

CHICAGO,January 18—Judge Vince Gaughan sentenced racist killer cop Jason Van Dyke to a pathetic 81 months in prison for his brutal murder of Black teenager LaQuan McDonald in October of 2014. The day before, three other racist cops from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) were cleared of all charges in connection to their role in covering up for Van Dyke in the aftermath of LaQuan’s murder (Chicago Sun-Times, 1/17).
These outcomes are perfectly in line with the long history of racist legal inequality under the capitalist system, spanning centuries. The reality demonstrates time and time again that the working class cannot expect justice to come from the bosses’ legal system, which ultimately can only defend the state power of the capitalist class.
The international working class can only expect true justice to be delivered when we organize ourselves to take it by force. By building the international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and communist revolution, we can destroy capitalism and its legal system designed to protect property and profits. Justice comes when workers collectively run society, with laws based on protecting the needs of our class!
Racism codified into capitalism
Van Dyke’s shameful six-year sentence represents another blunt reality check to the idea that the bosses’ courts will give any real punishment to racist and sexist cops for their crimes against workers. Even a quick glance at the outcome of the many high-profile racist police murders from recent years in the U.S. drives this reality home:

• Dante Servin, who shot and killed 22 year old Black woman Rekia Boyd on the west side of Chicago in March 2012, found not guilty in 2015
• Darren Wilson, murderer of 18 year old Mike Brown in Ferguson, not indicted by a grand jury
• Timothy Loehmann, who shot and killed 12 year old Tamir Rice in 2014, found not guilty by a grand jury
• Daniel Panteleo, who choked Eric Garner to death in New York City in 2014, still not officially indicted on charges Jeronimo Yanez, who shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop in 2016, found not guilty of second-degree murder charges

The creation of race and racism was instrumental to the rise of capitalism, with the capitalist class using its state power over the legal system to write and enforce countless racist laws to maintain its rule. From colonial laws that prohibited interaction between white and Black workers, to the U.S. constitution acknowledging Black people as only “three-fifths of a person” and therefore property, to fugitive slave laws, to obscene inequalities in sentencing for drug and weapons offenses in the present day, racism has always been ingrained in capitalist law.
The courts show such leniency to the killer cops because the cops are a chief force responsible for carrying out racist capitalist law. Although the bosses may try to make an example out of a particular cop here and there, overall they know that the police are essential to their needs of dividing and conquering the working class to maintain their system.
Racist politicians cynically exploit LaQuan’s murder
From the moment the dashcam video of VanDyke firing 16 shots into LaQuan was made public in 2015, racist politicians of all stripes jumped on the opportunity to exploit his death for their own ends, whether to deflect criticism from themselves or to attack their rivals. In light of the recent Van Dyke trial and an upcoming mayoral election in Chicago, these despicable efforts have sharpened.
Long-time liberal Chicago boss and current mayoral candidate Toni Preckwinkle has shamelessly inflated her role (she was city medical examiner at the time of LaQuan’s murder) in the efforts to get the dashcam video made public, an obvious appeal to win votes that has backfired against her. Garry McCarthy, who was fired as police superintendent by racist Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the wake of the exposed video, has used the murder and the legitimate backlash against the racist CPD to promote his own “law and order” campaign for mayor.
Community “activist” William Calloway, who was promoted by the bosses’ media as the spokesperson for the grassroots struggle on LaQuan’s behalf, has responded to the recent court decisions with, “We’re not gonna protest and take to the streets. We’re gonna go to the polls” (Chicago Sun-Times, 1/19). Calloway has unsurprisingly made a campaign to run for an alderman position.
By backing any of these racist lowlifes, workers are choosing a losing strategy. Regardless of who ends up in office, we can expect more of the general trend of intensifying gentrification, the closing of more schools, increases in the cost of living, and racist police terror throughout Chicago and beyond. Nothing short of a mass communist-led workers’ movement can challenge that.
What we do counts
Although Van Dyke’s punishment hardly fits his crime, and is a racist slap in the face to LaQuan’s memory, anti-racist fighters should take pride in the fact that it was their mass anger and actions up to this point that made sure that the bosses felt it necessary to give him a sentence at all. The Black Friday demonstrations that blocked Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, the shutting down of major intersections and highways, the demonstrations within and outside the courthouse, and the march upon Van Dyke at his own home – all these bold actions forced the bosses to act out of fear to our working-class anger.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been proud to be a part of many of these actions, and honored to provide leadership to the movement whenever possible. We will continue to fight alongside our working-class sisters and brothers against racist capitalist injustice, always advocating for communist revolution and a worker-run society as the only real way to guarantee justice for our class.

Declaring “victory” against ISIS, U.S. President Donald Trump recently and suddenly announced the withdrawal of all 2,200 U.S. troops from Syria and half of the 14,000 in Afghanistan. In reality, U.S. imperialism is losing ground to Russian imperialism in Syria, and also opening the door to regional enemy Iran and its client Shiite militias there (foreignaffairs.com, 1/8). Pronounced splits among the U.S. bosses are sharpening as their empire crumbles.
Meanwhile, the outraged opposition to Trump’s planned pullout among fake leftist and liberal Democratic Party politicians has exposed them as dedicated servants of finance capital, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, which is led by the likes of ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup.
This main capitalist wing’s commitment to perpetual—and genocidal—war in the Middle East and South Asia is strategically opposed by a more domestically oriented, “Fortress America” wing, led by the Koch, Mercer, and Adelson families. The main wing, with trillions of dollars and an empire at stake in the oil and gas fields of the Middle East, favors keeping a small military presence there while regrouping the U.S. military for the bigger war looming with China and Russia. The domestic wing would prefer to disinvest in land forces and rely on mass-murdering airstrikes to defend their narrower sphere of interest.
Finance capital still has the upper hand. Nearly three weeks after Trump’s “astonishing reversal of U.S. policy” (foreignaffairs.com, 1/8), John Bolton, the national security advisor, effectively overruled his boss by “laying out conditions for a pullout that could leave American forces there for months or even years” (New York Times, 1/6). Bolton got his start in the 1980s with the U.S. Agency for International Development, an acknowledged CIA front (NYT, 4/15/14). Though he has ties to right-wingers in the domestic wing, and like Trump distrusts Europe and multilateral alliances, he was a prominent interventionist in the two main-wing Bush administrations.
The international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is the only party that represents the interests of the international working class. PLP is the workers’ only hope to smash this rotten, criminal, capitalist system. As long as the profit system exists, oil will be indispensable to imperialist warfare. Oil will continue to make the Middle East a killing field. From the 12 million refugees driven from their homes in Syria, to the slaughterhouse of Yemen, where the U.S. has helped the Saudi royal thugs starve nearly a hundred thousand children to death (NYT, 11/21/18), the necessity of building this movement is more urgent than ever.
Middle East, South Asia still crucial to U.S. imperialists
Since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, U.S.-instigated wars have killed over a million people (NYT, 4/13/2018). This doesn’t include previous U.S. conflicts in the region, or the 500,000 children in Iraq murdered by Democrat Bill Clinton’s genocidal sanctions and bombings in the 1990s.
By 2008, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became bloody stalemates, the economic crisis in the U.S. constrained U.S. imperialism. The Russian bosses’ expanded naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean, anchored by their base at the Syrian port of  Tartus, prompted the U.S. under Democrat Barack Obama to ramp up covert funding of “pro-democracy” groups. In 2011, when the U.S. capitalist-financed Arab Spring led to mass demonstrations, the U.S. was ready to exploit the unrest. CIA-connected members of Syria’s military formed the so-called Free Syrian Army (International Business Times, 6/26/15).
Obama ordered the CIA directly into Syria in 2013, supported by U.S. bombs. Russian proxies Iran and Hezbollah entered in 2015, backed by Russian bombs (Al Jazeera, 4/14/18). Both imperialist powers have backed proxy wars for profit under the guise of “fighting terrorism” and ISIS. Yet as brutal and backwards as the ISIS terrorists are, they can’t hold a candle to the big terrorists U.S. and Russian imperialists.
Trump announced U.S. troop withdrawal would hand Russia’s rulers a big victory. Whether Trump follows through or not, it’s certain the U.S. bosses will continue slaughtering workers to maintain some level of control over the region’s vast oil fields and strategic location.
Fake left hypocrisy
The main-wing capitalists’ mouthpiece, the New York Times, has provided daily roll calls of outraged Democrats slamming Trump’s push to withdraw. Its editorial board has repeatedly voiced concern for “protecting the nation,” slamming Trump for “ceding a strategically vital country to Iran and Russia” and “a gift to Vladimir Putin” (NYT, 12/19/18 and 12/27/18).
The Democrats are at present the main wing’s most reliable servants and defenders of U.S. imperialism. From 2016 to 2018, as the minority party in the House of Representatives, they voted two-to-one to give the military even more money than Trump requested (Forbes, 6/20/18). Echoing the U.S. rulers’ talking points, the Democrats’ self-styled “resistance heroine,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attacked Trump’s withdrawal as “premature” and promised Congressional review of the decision “to ensure that the president’s decisions advance our national security interests” (Independent, 12/20/18).
Pro-Wall Street Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in Congress, has never seen a war she didn’t like. She has supported every U.S. military action since her election in 1987, and secretly supported torture after September 11, 2001 (NYT, 5/14/09; CNN, 11/25/09).
Meanwhile, the silence has been deafening from the newly-elected “democratic socialist” members of Congress, like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. All three kissed the ring of arch-imperialist Pelosi, voting for her return as House Speaker.
Many workers are hoping for working class leadership to emerge from some of these newly elected politicians. But betting on any of these misleaders as a “lesser evil” than the gutter racist, sexist Trump would be a lethal mistake.
U.S. imperialism needs more fascism
As erratic and undisciplined as Trump is, he has successfully consolidated a white supremacist base around the domestic capitalist wing. When his surprise withdrawal announcement was followed by more high-profile resignations, including that of main-wing stalwart Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, it signaled that the fighting between these two factions is intensifying on the road to fascism.
For workers in the U.S., fascism will mean even lower living standards and heightened racist, sexist, and nationalist attacks to pay for World War III. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main wing’s most prominent think tank, predicted that the next major U.S. war would begin in Iran: “Syria could see increased fighting…[possibly] Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey….Things, when they happen in the Middle East, have a way of spreading around the world” (MSNBC, 12/27/18).
Smash imperialism with communism
As the world’s bosses plot for war to protect their treasure, PLP offers another solution to the international working class: communism. Workers, students and soldiers around the world have no interest in choosing one set of capitalist misleaders and terrorists over another.
We have every interest in building an international Red Army of millions to smash this racist, genocidal profit system and the racist borders the imperialists draw to keep us divided. Capitalism can offer only the miseries of fascism and imperialist war for our class. Communism means abolishing capitalism. With nothing to lose, and a whole world to gain: Will you join us?

LOS ANGELES, January 9—Thousands of education workers are preparing for a strike! Progressive Labor Party is preparing to bring communist solidarity to the picket lines. These strikes can be schools for class-conscious ideas and practices.As CHALLENGE goes to press, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union has postponed the strike from tomorrow to Monday because of “uncertainty over whether a judge could order the union to wait” (Los Angeles Times, 1/9). The union was hoping for a negotiated settlement, making the legal jockeying and courtroom glitches irrelevant.   
 While the union, courts, and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) battles out its paperwork, it’s in every worker’s interest to go on strike! The workers want higher pay, smaller class sizes, and more nurses, counselors, and librarians to create fully staffed schools (LA Times, 1/9). They also want more of a say in how charter schools share campuses, a demand the UTLA has abandoned.
To prepare, 50,000 teachers, school workers, students, parents and community groups marched “to defend public education” in mid December. The march came after 18 months of failed contract negotiations for the teachers of LAUSD, the second largest school district in the country. Teachers are fed up with the working conditions they are facing and students are fed up with their learning conditions: overcrowded class sizes, lack of resources, unnecessary testing, public funds being siphoned into private charter companies, and low pay. Many believe a strike is imminent.
Student-worker unity
One student spoke, “Let me start by saying how angry I am with Superintendent Beutner. He hasn’t done anything to reduce our overcrowded class sizes…He hasn’t done anything to end the racist random search policy of taking me and my friends out of class to search us every day. Just to be clear, he takes kids out of class starting in the 6th grade to search them for weapons…  He doesn’t have any of our interests at heart…If you all have to go on strike for these issues, students will be with you!”When the students are on the side of workers, that level of unity cannot be underestimated.
Superintendent  Beutner, a classic capitalist criminal. The Superintendent of LAUSD, Austin Beutner, is certainly a politician with ties to the charter school companies. He’s been a donor to local charter schools and has touted their successes (LA Times 10/18/18). He’s recently hired private consultants with shady backgrounds, such as the lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs, which represented former Trump adviser (and convicted felon) Paul Manafort, helped Flint, Michigan spin its poisoned water crisis, and advised Walmart on anti-union campaigns (Reclaim Our Schools, LA 11/18/18).
Billionaire charter-school advocate Eli Broad was once a business associate of Austin Beutner and contributed $3 million dollars to LAUSD as a “vote of confidence” in him when he was hired. Their connection includes Broad’s failed attempt to take over both the LA Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2016, after which Beutner was let go as publisher and CEO of both newspapers (San Diego Reader, 2/16/18).
Main problem: racist learning conditions
The main problem in the schools remains the racist learning conditions of students. Overcrowded classrooms and racist policies have plagued public education for generations. Getting rid of one superintendent, politician or CEO will not change that. Though a strike does not change the nature of capitalism, it builds our working-class muscles to smash this system and build a worker-run society.  
Education under capitalism is determined by the needs of the ruling class. They also train the next generation of workers with a prison-like environment and work-like conditions: long hours, discipline, reprimanding, and a hierarchical structure.Only by changing the system itself can we create proper learning environments that serve the interests of the working class and our children.
Strike for workers’ power
Strikes, however, can teach very useful lessons to our class. Strikes show the bosses and show us the power we have as a united working class. Strikes show us that the bosses need us, but we do not need the bosses. When the teachers of Los Angeles strike, they will join many courageous education workers throughout the country who have done the same in recent years. About five percent of all teachers in K-12 schools in the United States have walked off the job so far in 2018, the most since 1992. The stoppages include walkouts in Washington state, North Carolina, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Kentucky (Washington Examiner 10/18/18). This is a sign of an upsurge in working class fight back throughout the country, not to mention similar fight backs throughout the world.
Strikes are the first step in the long battle for working class power and a system that truly meets our needs. However, they alone are not enough. We must eventually use the lessons we’ve learned about the strength of a united working class to overthrow this system.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) believes that changing the system from capitalism to communism would give the working class control over their own lives. Under communism, decisions will be made collectively. There will be no bosses, politicians, or competition. There will be no racist or sexist exploitation. Join us on our long road to communism and learn how to make this happen!  Join PLP!