NEW YORK CITY, February 12—Eight Chinese tenants, mainly women and seniors, went on a hunger strike after a forceful eviction from their homes. For five days, they camped outside the city’s racist Housing and Preservation Development (HPD), battling freezing temperatures, rain, and hunger to demand the city government repair their building’s staircase, and overturn a cruel vacate order that will leave multiple families homeless.
These workers, whose ages range from 50-70, broke their fast healthy, and with a temporary reform, thanks to the collective organizing of nearly 200 multiracial, multi-generational workers. Progressive Labor Party members joined organizing efforts to further unmask the city’s racist agenda.
Beat back slumlord Betesh
The strikers, some tenants displaced from 83-85 Bowery, fought slumlord Joseph Betesh for years inside and outside of housing court. The tenants resisted his attempt to bulldoze the buildings, and convert them into luxury glass boxes for the rich.
“Betesh, who owns the Dr. Jay’s clothing store chain, acquired the two buildings in 2013, paying $62 million for eleven properties along the Bowery. He soon began trying to evict tenants” (The Village Voice, 1/4). Betesh used every crooked scheme possible—from lying about rent-stabilization and purposely letting the building fall into disrepair. He also offered $15,000 buyouts to tenants. They refused.
He tried evicting one of his tenants in 2015, arguing their apartment wasn’t rent stabilized, and he didn’t have to renew their lease. That tenant fought back, refusing a settlement and mobilized a tenants’ association to get Betesh to address nearly 200 building violations he’d neglected for years. Betesh then sued the tenants in state Supreme Court.
These fighters also rejected a 99-year lease that Betesh offered as a settlement, which would’ve forced them to leave for repairs and prevented them from further pursuing rent stabilization.
Last December, after two years of battling Betesh in court, the Division of Housing & Community Renewal (DHCR) deemed the building rent-stabilized. This victory was temporary.
Govt works hand in glove with landlord
In mid-January, the city bosses’ agency, the Department of Buildings (DOB), colluded with Betesh to forcibly displace 75 workers from the 85 Bowery building. In under two hours, the fire department and kkkops evicted whole families—including infants and the elderly. They were funneled into a shelter. On January 24, just before the two-week repair deadline given in the evacuate order, tenants and the Coalition to Protect Chinatown and Lower East Side organized a press conference to demand HPD take up repairs.
PL’ers attended the militant rally, and joined chants shaming HPD. One PL’er led the chant, “Workers united will never be defeated!” The next step is to discuss CHALLENGE with the fighters and involve their friends in this struggle.
At one point the tenants stormed through the barricade, pushing through an HPD officer to deliver a letter to the HPD commissioner, demanding they take over repairs and prosecute Betesh. Of course, that went unanswered. After two weeks of enduring cramped conditions, with no end near, tenants announced the hunger strike on Feb 2.
Workers win an inch, bosses take a mile
Despite efforts from supporters to get them to stop, the strikers never relented. Police attack dogs tried harassing and intimidating them throughout the strike.
Police Commissioner James O’ Neil ordered the strikers to remove tarps tied to the barricades his minions placed. That apparently violated “criminal law.” The tarps kept the strikers warm in the freezing weather.
Only under an exploitative system do robbers get off scot-free and workers who fight back are criminalized. Clearly, the bosses and their protectors care about private property, not working-class lives.
The hunger strike is over, for now; the city made an agreement for management to complete staircase repairs and allow tenants to return home by March 28. But we know these capitalist promises are untrustworthy. Tenants plan to resume striking should they not return home by that date.  
A hunger strike relies on the oppressor to feel guilt for oppressing. Rather than appealing to the enemy’s morality through self-harm, workers can expose and threaten the bosses’ state power through militant multiracial unity. If we are to ever abolish racist housing and evictions, workers need all their energy for the continuous organizing needed to defeat capitalism.
Racist rezoning punishes workers
Wealth for capitalists always means utter devastation for workers. The land that is the modern-day U.S. was taken through war and genocide of indigenous people. Today, real estate bosses dispossess working-class families in their pursuit of luxury rentals, made possible by the capitalist government and its politicians.
With mayor Bill de Blasio’s blessing, the City Council in 2008 approved a rezoning plan for 111 blocks near Lower Manhattan. This racist plan protected the mostly white, Lower East Side and East Village neighborhoods from high-rise, high-rent housing, while excluding most of Chinatown. This allowed tycoons like Betesh to buy out buildings on the cheap.
Along with the government housing authorities, mayor de Blasio, the cops, and landlord Betesh, Chinatown councilwoman Margaret Chin is also guilty of racism. Democrat Chin colluded with luxury developers, leaving working-class housing, including public housing areas, vulnerable. This hurts mainly Black, Latin, and Asian tenants. Chin received $230,000 of campaign donations from the Real Estate Board of New York. Chin, former affordable housing activist, was the first Asian person to represent Chinatown. Clearly, representation byrace does not mean power for workers.
Long-haul fight
This fightback is a blow to sexism and racism. The years-long multiracial fightback of tenants is an inspiration. The tenants may get their homes back, but the fight against racist housing is far from over. Racist property owners citywide will continue displacing working-class families. The only permanent way to end privatization is to build a world where property is owned collectively by and for the working class: a communist world.

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A City of Segregation

Beginning in World War I, Black workers were forced to migrate into the cities due to labor shortages and war production.
Housing was divided along the color line and the resulting “white flight” to the suburbs in the post-World War II U.S. created cities with segregation and devastating living conditions.
NYC was largely shaped by the arch-racist Robert Moses. He, alongside billionaires and politician, built a city of segregation. “Moses’ transgressions [include] acres of sterile public housing towers, parks and playgrounds for the rich and comfortable, and highways that sundered working-class neighborhoods and dispossessed a quarter of a million people” (NYT, 5/6/2007).
As parks commissioner, all except one of the 255 playgrounds were placed out of reach of our class. The one pool in East Harlem was kept at a “deliberately icy” temperature. He designed low bridges to keep buses, carrying inner-city Black and Latin families, away from Jones Beach. To build the highways, 250,000 families were thrown out of their homes and the streets were overrun by vehicles.
Today, fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act made redlining practices and discrimination in housing illegal, New York City neighborhoods remain acutely segregated.
What the bosses call the melting pot is actually a deep segregation of housing—in some case, over 90 percent isolation of one race from another. Black and white families are the most isolated from other races (NYT, 4/15/15). “Latin families are isolated in Corona and Inwood; Asians are most isolated in Chinatown.”
As antiracists, like those in Park Slope, tackle segregation in schools, a byproduct of housing segregation, we must continue to fight racism in our neighborhoods.
The bosses offer us two toxic “choices”: deeply segregated housing as in the case of Chinatown, or gentrification, which results in mass racist displacement of working-class families and segregation just the same.
Choose integration and join the fight for communism.

TEL-AVIV, February 24—Over 20,000 demonstrators held a mass rally here against the government’s deportation plan—a plan that forces refugees to get out or go to jail. It was a multiracial crowd at the rally—primarily asylum seekers from countries in Africa and Jewish workers. Black and white, citizens and asylum seekers, stood together in solidarity to smash the government’s racism.
There are approximately 35,300 African asylum seekers living in Israel. Most fled from genocide in South Sudan and from fascism in Eritrea. The Israeli government sells weapons to both the belligerents in South Sudan and to the Eritrean regime, where it also maintains a covert military base (Haaretz, 12/2012).
In both cases, the regimes use these arms to commit atrocities on a monstrous scale: genocide and systematic rape in South Sudan and fascist slavery in Eritrea. People flee these countries—risking death at the border and along the way—and seek political asylum elsewhere. Israel ignores requests for asylum, and at best, these asylum seekers only gain temporary work visas.
Racism used to divide workers
The Israeli ruling class pushes anti-African racism—it is highly profitable for them. An undocumented African refugee has no real labor rights; bosses often pay them less than the minimum wage and no benefits. Even with a temporary work visa, most are unable to demand their rights from their employers. Many work in restaurants or housekeeping for very long hours at meager pay. Not knowing the language, many are unaware of their rights. In short, paradise for parasitic bosses looking for cheap wage-slaves.
A large majority of asylum seekers live in South Tel-Aviv, in working-class neighborhoods that have suffered decades of neglect by the ruling class. Drugs and prostitution are very common. Infrastructure is bad and schooling is inadequate. The ruling class dumped the refugees, bused directly from the border, into these slums. The bosses’ biggest fear is Black and white residents fighting together for their neighborhoods. Thus, local fascists pushed virulent racist propaganda against Black workers, painting them as “rapists” and “thugs” who “carry diseases.” This often involves the n-word and other derogatory terms. This has already led to violent attacks by fascist youth.
With fascist support, Israel now wants to deport these asylum seekers to Rwanda. The government claims that this would be a good place to resettle them. However, in reality, Rwanda also expels refugees, and they end up sold into chattel slavery or murdered (Aljazeera, 11/29). This is the fate awaiting these refugees, including many women and children, if deported. To pressure them into “consenting” to this deportation, the government began to round up refugees and send them to the Holot “residential facility,” which is nothing but a concentration camp in the Negev desert, where conditions are deplorable.
Workers reject racist lies
But the working class has had enough of this racist crap. Contrary to fascist propaganda about “local residents threatened by blacks,” the working class from South Tel-Aviv showed solidarity with their neighbors at this Saturday’s rally. The people are uniting. Working-class multi-racial solidarity and unity sent a message to the bosses’ politicians and pundits, as well as to their fascist thugs. The message is: the people will not accept these racist lies. That multiracial unity is the key to putting fear into the ruling class.
When the working class unites, and sees that workers’ struggles have no borders and that workers around the world can fight alongside each other against the ruling classes of every country, then we can win a world run by and for the working class. The ruling class creates the conditions that force workers to flee for their lives, the ruling class creates the borders that allow them to attack workers when they do, and the ruling class pushes the nationalism that convinces us that workers in different countries are enemies. We can and must smash these ideas and fight back. Some of the demonstrators brought red flags—because communism is the way to smash the ruling class once and for all—and their oppression and exploitation of workers.

A group of students at Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania have won a victory by standing up to the government and fighting for repairs to dangerous conditions in their dormitory. The struggle of these students to fight back even while coming under extreme attacks from the fascist Tanzanian ruling class is an inspiring example of how our class can gain confidence and overcome fear to unite.
The working class in Tanzania faces worsening fascist conditions. The victory of the students was in their ability to keep fighting for our class interest as much as it was about getting the building fixed. These small struggles are very important as the international working class fights to rebuild class consciousness and a revolutionary communist movement.
Divided ruling class
The Tanzanian ruling class is more divided then at any time since its independence in 1961. Driven by a fight to control the profits from Tanzania’s vast natural resources, the ruling clique, under new President John Magufuli, has been using their power to go after the businesses, media outlets and patronage jobs that support the base of the opposition capitalists. These opposition capitalists are led by many people who came out of the current governing party Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), and had been terrorizing the working class for decades. Changing capitalist parties or leaders will never stop the bosses from using their power to prop themselves up. Building a revolutionary communist movement for workers power is the only way forward for our class.
Magufuli, a fascist ruler
Magufuli rode to power in 2015 campaigning as an honest leader fighting corruption. His nickname is “The Bulldozer” and under the guise of stopping corruption he has tightened his grip on power. He has changed taxation laws to attack small businesses, outlawed exportation of food leading to a crisis among farmers, left districts without funds to provide food for school children, and forced the closure of community banks.
Magufuli has cracked down on dissent and banned opposition rallies and meetings. He uses a death squad, to abduct, jail or shoot politicians, journalists and others who dare to speak out. Although there was a brief period of mass mobilization against his fascist rule, the working class has mostly been mired in fear. But even in this environment, some students at Dar es Salaam University had the courage to stand up to the bosses.
The Magufuli wing is trying to the increase their share of the profits from Tanzania’s natural resources by renegotiating contracts with the multi-national corporations that had long been getting the bulk of the profit. At the same time the ruling class is increasing attacks on the working class by cutting jobs and public services to increase investment geared toward their mines and developing natural gas industry.
Deadly dormitory
Using cheap construction methods and materials, Magufuli built a new dormitory to house 3/4 of the 9,000 students at Dar es Salaam University. The students moved into the dormitory last Fall. Shortly after, massive cracks began to appear in the walls. The images of recent deaths from the collapse of similar buildings was causing intense fear and anxiety among students. The media reported that the University Administration dismissed the students concerns by referring to the cracks as “normal expansion joints.” A group of student leaders raised their concerns with the government, but they were ordered to keep silent. In defiance, they posted pictures of the walls on social media.
Government agents retaliated. They hunted down the student whose computer was used, abducted him to a secret location, and tortured him. Students responded with mass meetings and strikes. The student was released and continued to defy the authorities. Due to the mass unrest, the state was forced to repair the walls, and students were emboldened by the courage of their leaders.
Tanzania is a glaring example of how capitalism is in a spiral of crisis that the rulers try to manage with fascism and war. The bosses constantly try to bail themselves out by attacking the working class and forcing us to fight each other around the globe. The battle to gain confidence in ourselves as a class capable of running society without the bosses will only be won through building a communist movement in the midst of struggles like the students at Dar es Salaam University have been fighting.

COLOMBIA, March 7—The peace referundum deal was that the fake leftist group FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) would surrender their weapons in exchnage for the right to run for office.
More than a year has passed, and none of what was agreed on has happened, generating fierce debate and polarization about the agreements signed by the leadership of the FARC and the Colombian government.
Progressive Labor Party knows that capitalism means unemployment, misery, and the death of workers, and under the current dictatorship of the bosses, nothing else is possible.
Last weekend, five community leaders were assassinated in different parts of the country, and the number of murders of leftist leaders is increasing.  Last year, we saw the assassinations of 194 people dedicated to social causes, communities, and the defense of human rights.
With the support of U.S. imperialism, paramilitary death squads have been killing thousands of Colombian workers over decades. These murders have to be counted on top of the more than five million displaced by a war of imperialist pillage. We workers cannot believe in capitalist peace; all politicians want nothing more than to disarm us, so we can be killed without opposition.  
Capitalism never completes what it promises and signs on to; all it cares about is that we believe in its rotten bourgeois democracy.  The bosses only want to increase their profit margins, and this can be achieved through the misery of millions of proletarians. This is the essence of capitalism. They exploit and deny workers our necessities and do it all through the force of arms and political trickery.
Cops kill & terrorize farmers
In the month of October, members of the repressive police force fired without provocation against groups of workers that were protesting in some mountain towns like the Tumaco municipality, leaving nine dead and 21 wounded.  The farmers were protesting the slow implementation of the program meant to switch out illegal crops, something expected to result from the peace process.
According to the medical examiner, the bodies showed wounds caused from high velocity projectiles, with ballistics experts determining that the shots were fired at close range and by official weapons. Vice president Germán Vargas Lleras has gone on to say that the victims were not from the area.  This official lie spread as a smokescreen to divert attention from the accusations of repressive force and paramilitaries in the state, looking instead to blame guerilla dissidents as the parties responsible for these crimes.
CHALLENGE shows us that there are no good capitalists, and that we cannot ally ourselves with any sector of the bourgeoisie. We reject any goals other than the fight to achieve communism. Only the unity of the working class around the revolutionary politics of the PLP and the fight for communism will free us from capitalist murder and its sexism, racism, nationalism, and wage slavery.
Workers on the farms and in the cities, students, and revolutionary soldiers, everything you do matters!  Join us.