TEXAS, October 9—The national prison strike is heading into its second month, prompting the Department of Injustice to make a show of an investigation in Alabama prisons.
To celebrate the 45th anniversary of the biggest prison rebellion in U.S. history at Attica, New York, thousands of worker-prisoners in 40 jailhouses covering 24 states went on a labor strike this past September 9. Outside groups helped prepare for this strike for months. The tremendous ability of workers to organize actions, even separated in different prisons, was deliberately blacked out by the major capitalist media.
A spokesperson for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, explained:
Overseers watch over our every move, and if we do not perform our appointed tasks to their liking, we are punished. They may have replaced the whip with pepper spray, but many of the other torments remain: isolation, restraint positions, stripping off our clothes and investigating our bodies as though we are animals.
Federal prisoners make 12 to 40 cents an hour, while many state prisoners are paid nothing. If anything has changed in the last 45 years, the exploitation and treatment of prisoners is now worse. There’s an increase of overcrowding and convictions for the victimless crime of drug possessions, for which no other imperialist country imprisons its population.
In preparation for this nationwide strike, there have been many smaller local strikes over the last few months in prisons throughout the U.S. Prisoners realize that without their labor—cooking, cleaning, and maintenance—prisons come to a halt. Private manufacturing and commercial corporations also exploit their labor, in conditions approximating outright slavery.
Prison Labor is Slavery
In Douglas Blackmon’s 2008 book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, he described this altered but continued form of slavery. But it didn’t end with World War II, as it continues in force today with the highest prison population in the world, both absolutely and proportionately. U.S. prisons house 2.2 million men and women, with Black and Latin workers disproportionately represented, due to the racist injustice system, but with roughly comparable total numbers of white workers. But today unity across racial lines led by Black prisoners stands out just as it did in the 1971Attica rebellion.
Mass imprisonment was revived with the “War on Crime” begun during the Johnson administration in the 1960s and continued with Bill Clinton’s tremendous acceleration of incarceration and enlargement of city police forces around the country—both liberal Democrat presidents. Both liberals and conservatives push for racist increases in prison populations, whether through “law and order” campaigns, “war on drugs,” or other forms of mass incarceration. We have only ourselves, the working class, to rely on.
Exploitation and extreme oppression of workers, both inside and outside of prisons, will only end when millions of workers everywhere join and help to build the PLP to lead a global revolution to rid the world of capitalism. In its place, we must organize a worldwide communist system run by workers, for the benefit of humanity as a whole (minus the former bosses and their supporters). Communism will be based on our vital needs, with no possibility of profitmaking.

Haiti, October 8—Hurricane Matthew has struck Haiti with a vengeance this week, and the working class and the masses are the main victims. According to the latest reports, over 900 are known dead, and more than 500,000 affected by the collapse of tens of thousands poorly built “little box” houses, totally uprooted crops, and untold thousands of farm animals in mainly three departments, South, Southeast and Grand’Anse. With a wholly inadequate infrastructure to begin with, now smashed bridges, washed out roads and mudslides are making recovery of people from rural at-risk areas even more difficult. This disaster is not “natural” as the bosses want us to believe but rather the result of the systematic impoverishment of the Haitian working class by the racist capitalist system. Why it is they who are the victims of the disaster?

Workers and peasants cannot build houses to adequate standards, earning less than $5 a day minimum wage, with which they must feed, dress, pay school fees for their children, etc. How could they not be vulnerable? In communist society everyone will live in a protected place in well-built houses, for the lives of all will be equal.

Workers along the coast who could evacuate moved to higher ground; however, they weren’t safe from rains, winds and mudslides. They didn’t have the safety of concrete houses of the bourgeois. The masses were left to the mercy of the storm and were left largely unprotected. They certainly didn’t have an efficient disaster preparedness system, such as in the U.S. or Cuba, for that matter, where there were well-organized responses and very few fatalities.

To add to the burdens of our class, there has already been a resurgence of cholera. In the last year alone, 26,000 people have become ill. As a result of Matthew, in one town alone, there have been over a dozen deaths and several dozen people sick. Cholera was imported to Haiti in 2010, 10 months after the earthquake, by UN occupation forces (MINUSTAH) from Nepal, where there was an active cholera epidemic. The UN did nothing to test their soldiers as carriers of the disease, but did let them dump their waste into a river in the Artibonite Valley that Haitian workers use for bathing and drinking water. To date, 842,304 have become ill and 10,624 have died from cholera (http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/haiti-cholera-counter). A few months ago, the racist UN finally admitted what we all knew and scientists confirmed, that they were guilty of bringing cholera, but so far can’t come up with a plan to do anything to repair the damage. In fact, almost all of the cholera treatment centers have been closed despite the ongoing epidemic. One year’s budget for the UN’s occupying army would pay for a modern and adequate sanitation and clean water infrastructure throughout Haiti. We say , MINUSTAH out of Haiti now!

A hospital in the South visited during this hurricane was horror; no doctors, water flooding all rooms, patients left alone without electricity, nothing. Instead of protecting the masses, capitalist institutions consider themselves a source of their own wealth: NGOs (mainly charities), traditional leaders and politicians are now fighting among themselves for control of projects and funds in the post-storm period. Instead of taking action to prevent the effects of storms, they prepare to exploit and take advantage of the masses’ woes. In a communist society, no one will benefit from the misfortunes of others, workers will build homes, schools, roads, bridges, etc. that serve their needs under all kinds of conditions. When there are no more classes, racial or gender inequality, humanity will be protected.

Moreover, it is the consequences of excessive exploitations of capitalist bosses that the working classes are now paying. Climate change is the result of greed of the exploiters. Water levels are rising, coastlines becoming shallower, and storms will become more dangerous to human populations. Communist society will exploit nature without abusing it, only to meet the needs and ensure the well-being of all.

Join us, workers and peasants everywhere, fake projects and illusions of the leaders in this system will not bring any solution to the problems of our class. They will result in even more to enjoy. Building together a communist world, under the red flag of the PLP!

The September 17 bombing in New York City left 31 wounded, and the working class, especially Muslim workers, terrorized. While the capitalists’ cops apprehended the alleged bomb-maker, the biggest terrorist—U.S. imperialism—remains at large.
Media + Arms = Fascist Drill
At 7:54 a.m. Monday, September 19, every phone in New York went off to signal an alert by the New York Police Department: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-year-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.” The description fit hundreds of thousands of men. Mayor Bill de Blasio seized the chance to use the local population as an extension of the racist police force—to put the bosses’ “see something, say something” slogan into practice. That day, the police received 406 calls on “suspicious packages,” none of which turned out to be explosives.
Normalizing collaboration with the NYPD, the largest state terrorist force in the world, is a great danger for the international working class. This is the same police force that has been spying on Muslim students and workers wherever they hang out—colleges, mosques, community centers, restaurants. It’s the same NYPD that routinely terrorizes Black and Latin working-class men and women. But this latest attack by our common enemy can also be an opportunity for Muslim, Arab, and South Asian workers to unite with Black and Latin workers.  
Following their 9/11 model, the bosses respond to terrorist acts (or purported terrorist acts) with heightened fascism. They mobilize anti-terrorist police units, SWAT teams and the FBI. They militarize U.S. cities, from Ferguson to New York to Charlotte. In Chelsea, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, the FBI and other gangs of government thugs all descended on the bomb site.  
As they move to pacify the working class with guns and tanks, the bosses also use their news machine. The New York Post wrote an outright racist piece that claimed that terrorism ran in Rahami’s family (9/24). (In the 1980s, Rahami’s father fought with the Mujahideen, the Islamic “freedom fighters” funded by the CIA in their war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.) Every minute of the day, every day of the year, the network and cable news channels create more terror by spitting vile bigotry about Muslim and Arab workers, the front line of their war to divide us.
Racist crime against Muslim workers is at its highest since 9/11: “New data from researchers at California State University, San Bernardino, found that hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 percent over the course of 2015 (New York Times, 9/17). According to the same report, anti-Arab hate crimes rose by 219 percent. The epidemic of individual violence stems from the systematic racist violence perpetuated by the capitalist U.S. government, police and military.
These abuses and atrocities are all part of the capitalists’ drill for war. Breeding anti-Muslim racism enables the ruling class to build the patriotism it will ultimately need to butcher Muslim and Arab workers throughout the Middle East.
U.S. State Terrorists: Mass Murders by the Day
While the recent bombings in New York and New Jersey were indeed cowardly acts against innocent workers, we must not forget that thousands are murdered by capitalist state terror every day. The finance capitalists of the U.S. ruling class are the world’s biggest terrorists, by far. With one hand, they sign “peace treaties”; with the other, they drop another cluster of bombs on civilians. During World War II, U.S. imperialists killed hundreds of thousands with the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Today, when U.S. bosses aren’t bombing hospitals in Afghanistan, they are wiping out whole families with reckless drone strikes across Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia. Nearly half a million have been slaughtered in the proxy war in Syria (Frontline, 2/11), and more than 4.8 million displaced (Syianrefugees.eu).
On their home front, the bosses are shattering the lives of millions with mass racist incarceration, deportation and unemployment. To divert attention from their own monstrous crimes, they are exploiting fears of ISIS and Al Qaeda to provoke anti-Muslim racism and divide workers against one another.
At stake is the immense oil wealth of the Middle East. The imperialists in Russia and China want to control this cheaply extracted oil themselves; U.S. and European capitalists will stop at nothing to secure it.
As the great Soviet communist leader Vladimir Lenin pointed out, imperialist rivalries can be resolved only by war. No matter how many remote-control drones they have on military bases, the bosses know they will need real-live soldiers to fight for and hold oil-rich territory in the Middle East. Their problem is that they haven’t been able to win the workers to support this bloody mission. Nor can the U.S. capitalists control their so-called allies, including Turkey and Iraq.
The Progressive Labor Party must organize workers to stop imperialist war by fighting to smash capitalism and build a communist society. Under communism, workers will supply their own needs without bosses or money. They will construct a world free of terrorism, racism and sexism.
Fight Through the Dark Night
While it is true that we remain—for now—in the dark night of unchecked imperialist horrors, with no mass workers’ movement to challenge them, the international working class is stirring. The bosses’ ideological control—the crucial element for their continued dominance—is visibly shaky. When the working class rebels as it did in Charlotte, against yet another murder of a young Black man, it hurts U.S. imperialism. If multiracial rebellions were detonated across the United States, with the bold leadership we saw two years ago in Ferguson, they would seriously hinder U.S. war plans. Throughout the world, workers are fighting back. From solidarity marches in New York and Chicago to strikes in India, France and Spain, workers are raising their level of struggle against the capitalists.
One Red Flag
With red leadership, these protests eventually will move to a more conscious level. As we know from practice, every protest deepens workers’ understanding of the world as it truly exists. The anti-racist movement alive in the streets today is preparing our class to face fascism and world war—the potential levers for revolution. Led by communist ideas, the workers’ revolution will smash the capitalists wherever they now stand, from Ferguson to Charlotte, from India and Patagonia to Africa and China.
Only communism can forever cure the lethal disease that capitalism has inflicted upon the working class: racism. Under communism, workers will have no need to fight over natural resources. There will be no “ours” and “theirs.” All resources will be shared, according to need. The state terrorists of capitalism will be eliminated for all time.

BROOKLYN, September 22—“Can I have a sheet of those stickers Miss? I want to help give them out” That ‘s what we heard from at least a dozen students Thursday morning as we handed out anti-racist stickers to wear at a local high school. Some students and teachers also made a plan to hold a rally after school in response to the rash of racist police killings this last week. To abolish racism and build a better world, we must fight back!
At lunchtime, teachers and students gathered to make signs for the rally after school. As we searched for slogans on the Internet, we came across a website that tracked the amount of police killings in the U.S. There were 13 in the last 6 days! This led to a discussion where students pointed out that it’s not just a few bad cops, but the whole system that is racist. We were outraged at the murders of Keith Lamont Scott in North Carolina, Terrence Crutcher in Oklahoma and 13 year old, Tyre King in Ohio. But these racist killings expose a capitalist system that is a daily horror for billions of  people around the world. And life will get even worse as competing capitalists around the world bring us ever closer to world war.
Learning to Fight, Fighting to Learn
So it’s more important than ever to fight back and not just go on with business as usual. Even if one rally, or wearing a sticker will not stop innocent people from being killed at the hands of the police, these small acts help to raise everyone’s consciousness. When others see people fighting back, they think about the racist inequality in our world. That has an impact on people even if we don’t see it immediately.  
In some English classes, students made posters for the rally as part of the lesson. In those classes they have been reading the biography of Malcolm X and discussing the fight against racism during the Civil Rights Movement. In U.S. history classes, all students received a copy of CHALLENGE as we discussed these racist killings in connection with the bigger question of “What is Race?” and “Why Does Racism Exist?” Racism is the biggest tool of billionaire bosses around the world. They use it to divide the working class as they reap huge profits. We must fight racism now as we build a revolutionary movement for communism. Only under communism will we be able to finally destroy racism, sexism and all the other evils of capitalism.
Schools, like the cops, are run by the government; they are part of the “state apparatus.” The cops try to control us by intimidation and terror. The schools try to brainwash us into being obedient workers who think only about ourselves.  They want us to salute the flag, do as we are told, and don’t rebel or think for ourselves. Yet here we have young people thinking, discussing and organizing with leadership of communist and antiracist education workers. This can be a step towards joining the lifelong battle for a better world, communism.
Student Leadership
After the end of the last class, some teachers and students headed out with the signs made earlier in the day. At first, many students were intimidated and felt unsure, but a group of senior girls gave leadership by taking signs and beginning a picket line. More students gathered, many watched as we chanted, took pictures and held up our signs.  Although the rally was not as big as some in past years at this school, we were happy because some new students, teachers and staff participated. We have a planning meeting coming up for future fightbacks. The fight for communism continues, sometimes one small step at a time. Join us!