BROOKLYN, January 21—With the mounting attacks on Black and Latin working class students in NYC public schools, there’s no telling what will be the spark for students to fight back. For our school, one spark (out of the many over the years) was the removal of a special class. Student protests are inspiring and a great start on the long road to revolution.
Progressive Labor Party fights (PLP) for a communist society from each according to their commitment, to each according to their need, because that is the only way to truly get the schools that our children deserve.
Constant attacks
Working class public schools throughout the country, majority Black, Latin, and immigrant, are under attack from budget cuts. Many schools are forced into overcrowding to gain more funding while secretive admissions processes help maintain racist school segregation, which is growing more severe every day. The partnership between the Department of Education and the NYPD criminalizes our students and helps perpetuate the school to prison pipeline. Metal detectors further criminalize and traumatize our students.
A spark at our school
A very popular special class offering was taken away over a technicality by the liberal, tone-deaf school administration. These hypocritical school bosses say students have a voice, yet over and over again they shut the students’ voices down. Students see through the bosses’ politricks and continue to struggle for the school that they deserve.
Students were immediately upset when they heard that this class would be taken away. Furthering the students’ anger was a right-wing administrative henchman who lied and said that students weren’t bothered by the class cancelation.
Students quickly planned a protest. They left their classes, knocked on the doors of other classes to gather other students, mostly seniors, and chanted down the hallway to the assistant principal’s office before returning to class. The air was electric, and students were already planning their next action.
Students put antiracist solidarity before self
The next day, word spread that the racist henchman was pulling students individually to identify a leader and tamp down fightback. The administration interrogated one senior student for over an hour through his lunch period. She tried to silence him by appealing to Black nationalism, but he did not falter.
Later that day, that student leader was asked to join a meeting with the assistant principal (AP) to discuss his concerns. Word quickly spread, and seniors planned a sit-in outside the AP’s office in solidarity with that student being questioned. As the student walked down the hall to the AP’s office, he was greeted with “We’ve got your back, bro” and “You’re never alone.”
Almost the entire senior class held an hour-long sit-in outside. These seniors knew leaving class put them in danger to not finish projects they needed to graduate, but they also knew that solidarity was more important. The courage and compassion were palpable.
Another student was meeting with the student leader, and was convinced by the AP to go outside and tell the seniors sitting in to disperse. The seniors knew better, and continued their sit-in. The henchman and another bosses’ lackey tried to stop the protest with taunts and insults of “being stupid.”
The students didn’t falter, despite the bosses’ tricks. This student-led protest brought excitement and optimism throughout the entire school and gave others courage to stand up as well. Students who were not part of the protest asked how they could become involved, and the seniors regrouped to figure out their next plan of action.
Students can think & lead for themselves
Many lessons are being learned through this struggle. Students realized that planning and organization are important, as students who were unclear with the messaging were not as disciplined in their protest.
One school worker, a bosses’ lackey who only sometimes questions administration’s actions, blamed antiracist teachers for the protest. We will fight to win her to the anti-racist idea that Black and Latin kids are politically conscious enough to speak up against injustice and organize on their own.
Students aren’t brainwashed into action. The bosses’ system is full of bad ideas, and we as communists must win ourselves and our co-workers away from anti-worker sentiment.
We applaud these students, and are excited to see the next stage of their fightback. This small resistance is a good start, and we are inspired by their boldness. Making revolution means going beyond what the bosses want, and we as communists must try to find struggles and push their limits.

OAXACA, MEXICO, January 23— Striking doctors and nurses put locks and chains on the entrances to the Aurelio Valdivieso general hospital in Oaxaca city. In the last couple of days, thousands of workers of the Health Department demonstrated in a mass march to protest the direct attack against our job stability. The government intends to eliminate more than 2,200 regular jobs in Oaxaca and eventually many more in the whole country.
The strike began last week throughout the state in hospitals and health centers by workers who  have yet to be paid this month (Mexico News Daily, 1/24).
Juan Diaz Pimentel, secretary of health and state, is using the excuse that there are more than 1,000 “temporary” workers and the staff is “full.” He has made threats of layoffs and has kept the bi-weekly pay corresponding to the first two weeks of January of more than 4,000 workers.
Mass cutbacks head
The capitalist system and its bosses are preparing the path for privatization of health services that undoubtedly will bring more misery, illness and death to the working class. For those of us that work in the healthcare field, privatization will bring huge instability at our work places.
All of us workers need to realize that this putrid system called capitalism will continue its mission to make more profits from healthcare. This is why the working class must organize to face this attack from the capitalist state and understand that one mass march is not enough.
We need to create organizational strategies to fight against the capitalist system, but also to build class consciousness. To achieve this, we need to establish the base of a Party led by the working class, a party that fights for the interests of the working class—Progressive Labor Party.
Fascist ”homeland security” law
Let’s take advantage of this critical moment and understand that the state will continue its attacks.  If needed, it will use the brutal force of the army. It is no coincidence that the army was given the freedom to act under the slogan to protect “homeland security” (see next issue). The oppressing state is allowed to act to violently subdue any outbreak of dissent. However, in history we’ve seen there is no power that can stop angered workers. That is why we need to understand that there is no other solution besides building a party with Marxist-Leninist ideas that leads workers.
The Progressive Labor Party aims to build a communist party to destory the capitalist system, which is the cause of death and misery in the working class.

Klansman-in-Chief Donald Trump’s latest racist rant, his characterization of Haiti, El Salvador, and most or all of Africa as “shithole countries,” has been treated by the capitalist bosses’ media as an extraordinary event—“the lowest ebb of a presidency defined by a series of low ebbs and defining of the presidency downward” (cnn.com, 1/12).  Former CIA Director and torture defender John Brennan tweeted that “Lady Liberty, our founding fathers, and generations of right-thinking Americans are all weeping tonight.” Former Haitian President Laurent Lamothe declared that the world had witnessed “a new low today….never seen before in the recent history of the U.S. by any President!”
In reality, history—recent and otherwise—tells a different story.  The United States was born out of the genocide of native populations. Its wealth was created through the mass murder and enslavement of Black people from Africa. Its rulers have thrived from super-profits generated by imperialism and racism in the U.S. and around the world. Without racism, capitalism couldn’t effectively exploit, oppress, and divide the working class. Without racism, capitalism could not survive.
As CEO of the capitalist ruling class, the U.S. president both implements and rallies support for the bosses’ racist policies—it’s part of the job description. Trump is crude, vile, cartoonishly ignorant, and exceptionally transparent in his spewing of racist ideas. But the content of that ideology isn’t exceptional at all; it’s strictly business as usual. From the Founding Fathers through Barack Obama, every U.S. president has shared Trump’s ruling-class loyalties and his commitment to racism as the bosses’ essential weapon. Here are some examples, in their own words:

George Washington (U.S. president from 1789-1797): Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.
One of eight presidents to hold slaves while serving in the Oval Office, Washington owned 300 human beings at his plantation in Mount Vernon, Virginia. He promoted the U.S. rulers’ rationale for the genocide of the indigenous, and in particular for extermination of the Iroquois, paving the way for the early expansion of U.S. empire.

Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809): [I]n memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior…and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous….I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind (“Notes on the State of Virginia,” 1785).
The author of the Declaration of Independence held more than 600 Black people captive over his lifetime. DNA testing shows that he raped the “mixed-race” adolescent Sally Hemings, who bore him six children (Atlanta Black Star, 2/25/17).

Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865): There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together (speech in Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857).
Convinced that Black people could never live on a basis of “equality with the white race,” the Great Emancipator campaigned relentlessly for the “colonization” of freed slaves to Central America and the Caribbean. In December 1862, the day before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he met with a contractor to finalize plans to move 5,000 “colonists” to an uninhabited island off the cost of Haiti. After the first group of settlers was decimated by smallpox, and the survivors revolted, Lincoln’s ethnic cleansing project was abandoned (New York Times, 4/12/13).

Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909): The problem is … that the backward race [Black people] be trained so that it may enter into the possession of true freedom while the forward race [white people] is enabled to preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers…. or to confer the priceless boons of freedom, industrial efficiency, political capacity, and domestic morality (speech to the New York City Republican Club, February 13, 1905.)
Rivaling Trump’s gutter racism toward Muslims and Mexican workers, among others, this “progressive” Republican also said: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth” (smithsonianmag.com, 11/9/12).

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945): Anyone who has traveled to the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results (Macon Daily Telegraph, 1925).
In 1942, this liberal icon ordered the imprisonment of more than 100,000 U.S. residents of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, into hellhole concentration camps. He appointed Hugo Black, a former lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan, to the U.S. Supreme Court. A notorious anti-Jewish racist, Roosevelt collaborated in Hitler’s genocidal “Final Solution” by actively blocking Jewish immigration from Germany and other Axis-dominated countries, and by refusing to bomb the railway routes to Auschwitz and other death camps.

Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969): These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference (Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by Robert A. Caro).
Widely hailed for pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson was famous for his habitual use of the N-word and proudly voted against an anti-lynching bill in 1948. According to biographer Caro, he spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia.

Bill Clinton (1993-2001): A few years ago, this guy [Barack Obama] would have been getting us coffee (remark to Ted Kennedy in Game Change, 2008, by John Heileman and Mark Helpurin.)
Hillary Clinton: But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs….They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel (1996 speech in New Hampshire).
This husband-and-wife team beat the drum for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which directly led to the mass incarceration of generations of Black and Latin youth. They’re also responsible for the 1996 reform “to end welfare as we know it,” cataclysmic legislation that played to racist stereotypes, shredded the federal safety net, and doubled extreme poverty in the U.S. over the following 15 years (thenation.com, 2/10/16).

Barack Obama (2009-2017): Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it….You and I know how true this is in the African-American community (Father’s Day speech at the Apostolic Church of God on Chicago’s South Side, New York Times, 6/16/08.)
Michelle Obama: But today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of “separate but equal,” when it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people just can’t be bothered. Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming to be a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper (commencement address at Bowie State University, a predominantly Black college in Maryland, 5/17/13).
As the first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama was especially useful to the bosses for running their old con game of blaming the victims of capitalism and racism. Even as Obama lectured Black workers to stop making “excuses” for their problems, he was bailing out the big banks while ignoring and devastating Black homeowners in the housing foreclosure crisis. Michelle Obama’s denigration of Black youth is especially despicable in an era when public schools are more segregated than they were in the late 1960s, with racist inequalities in resources growing larger by the year.

There’s a word for the Obamas’ scapegoating. It’s the same term the bosses’ media now widely applies to Trump, whose crime—in the rulers’ eyes—is to be too obvious about what their system is really about. The word is racist. And Trump is far from the first U.S. president to fit the description—and he won’t be the last.

The newly enacted tax bill will add, by the most conservative estimate, 1.5 trillion dollars to the U.S. deficit. This was a huge setback for the ruling class. Many of their own politicians put their personal financial and political interest to staying in office ahead of the needs of the main wing bosses to prepare for war.
The politicians lack of discipline is a forewarning of more fascist measures on the horizon. The main wing ruling class response will try to force individual bosses, politicians, and the working class to fall in line on their march towards war.
Tax bill & infighting
In a blatant attempt to buy votes in the 2018 elections, the tax bill will give a small bump in take-home pay to a large section of the working class. The meat of the bill however is a massive reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Unlike the personal tax cuts which will expire in 2025, the corporate cuts are permanent. The bill depended on the votes of main wing Republicans like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell serving their personal interests in doing so.
The Tea Party domestic capitalists have shown little to no interest in keeping the U.S. top dog in the world. Their goal in supporting the tax bill is to set the stage for massive cuts to social welfare programs, making this bill a large-scale attack on the working class.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has already announced that the GOP plans to cut federal health care and anti-poverty programs because of a deficit that his party is about to balloon. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform,” he said on a talk-radio show, “which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit (Atlantic 12/19/17).
This is a volatile situation. The liberal bosses fear those cuts will increase the political problems for the ruling class in trying to win people to go along with a large-scale war and draft. The infighting will likely lead to the development of fascism in the U.S., most probably under the leadership of the liberals who are desperate to keep up with growing Chinese imperialism.
War looms
As the U.S. bosses have ceded ground to Russia in the Middle-East and China in Asia, war looms as the only path for the desperate U.S. bosses to try to regain their world dominance. War demands the U.S. beef up its military to stay ahead of the Chinese and be able to fight a multi-front war as well as repair the U.S.’s crumbling infrastructure.
Neither of these can happen without huge amounts of money being taken from the working class. The disarray evident in the fight over the tax bill will make that more difficult for the main wing bosses creating a very volatile situation within the U.S. ruling class.
Military might of China
The Chinese have significantly trailed the U.S. from a military stand point. That is changing pretty rapidly. Beside the construction of several new bases on man-made islands in the South China Sea, the Chinese imperialists are investing heavily in a military that can greatly expand its sphere of operations.
The late draft of the annual report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission contains a chapter on Beijing’s power projection development…
China is building military capabilities to deal with hostile air, surface, and subsurface operational environments in the ‘far seas,’ … the operations expand the focus beyond the two island chains off China’s eastern and southern coasts.
Given its enhanced strategic lift capability, strengthened employment of special operations forces, increasing capabilities of surface vessels and aircraft, and more frequent and sophisticated experience operating abroad, China may also be more inclined to use force to protect its core interests”(Nationalinterest.org 11/7/2016).
Failing U.S. infrastructure
A problem even bigger than the challenge posed by China’s military growth is the rapidly deteriorating infrastructure within the U.S. The bosses are trillions of dollars short in repairing the basic systems that keep the country functioning. Expansion of infrastructure to serve a major war would necessitate new roads, rail, bridges, ports, airports and the infrastructure necessary to facilitate a draft. That means trillions of more dollars that the bosses will need.
The working class has no champions among any of the bosses. We must build a communist movement to fight our way out of this mess on our own. The domestic oriented Tea Party bosses seek to starve us. Democratic Party led fascism, with a diverse face is an equally bad and more powerful threat to the working class. Liberal led world war is on the horizon as the bosses prepare by building a mass movement to try to discipline the rogue bosses and politicians and lead the attacks on the working class across the globe.