BOSTON, September 25 — The Progressive Labor Party here hosted three student comrades from New York City who brought their youthful energy and insights about campus organizing to Roxbury Community College (RCC) and University of Massachusetts (UMass), where we are building a base for communism.
Pizza and Politics, a student club exposing members to a class analysis and communist ideas, hosted a panel about fighting back against U.S. imperialism on campus. The NYC students shared their experience organizing at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the Fall semester of 2013 against General Petraeus, a leading U.S. general from the Iraq war. The CUNY administration, behaving as true lackeys for the U.S. ruling class, had hired Petraeus to recruit the mostly black, Latin, and immigrant students to support U.S. imperialism, along with reinstating Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and stepping up military recruitment. Fascism is creeping into campus, with the imposition of laws that aim to suppress organizing and enable college administrations to crack down on protests, like the CUNY administration did to the anti-Petraeus campaign. They spoke about how the struggle had transformed them into communist organizers.
Sharing fightback stories can strengthen and motivate others to organize. RCC students were inspired by the courage, clarity, and determination of the young comrades. One RCC student asked how they built the kind of organization that could sustain such a struggle and whether being PLP members helped that to happen. The young comrades responded that their membership in PLP established the trust and shared values that became the foundation of their unity. Another RCC student, who has recently begun reading CHALLENGE and meeting with PLP, spoke eloquently about how the media’s job is to confuse us and win us to a capitalist outlook. He explained that he is educating himself about the murderous history of the U.S. from the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan during World War II to the U.S.’s intentional spreading of syphilis in Guatemala in the 1940s. He and other students are interested in attending PLP’s annual College Conference on November 8 in New York City. Several signed up to meet with a CHALLENGE Reader’s Group at RCC.
Long History in Fighting Fascism
The CUNY students met at UMass, which while a small group, was inspiring to all involved. One local black student was interested in fighting back and organizing his friends to come to the Conference. He expressed deep hatred against racism and sexism.
Boston has a long history of organizing students against war and fascism. In 1969, Harvard PL’ers in Students for a Democratic Society led an occupation of the campus against Harvard University which is a critical nerve center for U.S. imperialism and was a key supporter of the Vietnam War. In the late 1970s, Boston PL students and workers built a worker-student alliance against racist terror. In the 1980s, PLP members on campuses throughout the area led demonstrations against U.S. imperialism in Central America. In the 1990s, PLP led demonstrations and actions against military research at Boston University. Today, PLP is rebuilding an antiracist, worker-student alliance in Boston to sharpen the fight against capitalism, war and fascism in the colleges. Last semester, students and workers at RCC fought off the implementation of armed cops on campus.
‘Microcosm of Communist Society’
Boston PL’ers held a dinner discussion about Ferguson, Missouri, where rebellion erupted in August in response to the racist murder of black teen Michael Brown by cop Darren Wilson. One NYC student reported on her experience meeting with the youth group, Lost Voices, that formed out of the rebellion. Youth and workers in Ferguson refused to be co-opted by black politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and other celebrities brought in as a pacification tactic. Instead, the working class in Ferguson is open to PLP’s communist solution. She described how Ferguson confirmed her confidence in the working class’s ability to fight for communism, and that black workers are indeed a key revolutionary force. They were building the kind of caring collective that is a microcosm of a communist society. Those of us in the room felt confident in our Party’s ability to organize in places like Ferguson, where unemployed and oppressed youth are wide open to our ideas.
PLP in Boston has many opportunities to take advantage of students’ growing desire to fight back. The older comrades here were heartened by the visit, confident that the Party is in good hands. The local students were exposed to a positive view of communists and committed revolutionary youth for the first time in their lives. Some can now envision for themselves a life of revolutionary organizing and service to the working class.

Port-au-Prince, September 7 — It’s 10:30 am and a tire is still burning in front of the gate of the Medical School of the State University of Haiti (UEH). Today is the day of the competitive entrance exam. As many as 11,000 students are set to take the test for 170 to 200 seats in the incoming class. But this test will not take place!
A PLP member at the medical school found out about a fraud corrupting the exam. Certain privileged students had been given advance copies to guarantee their success. The PL’er alerted other students of this plan to keep the sons and daughters of the working class from gaining admission.
The Medical School has been in crisis since the turn of the new century due to conflicts between working-class students and the administration, which is closely tied to the bourgeois elite of Haiti. One administrator declared he was “ashamed” to see medical students take a “tap-tap” (public bus) to and from the Marché Salomon, a nearby market where students share transportation with the street vendors. He said he remembered when medical students came to class in their own private cars!
In Haiti, riding a tap-tap is a sign of belonging to the working class. Owning a car signals membership in the middle class or the bourgeoisie.
The UEH has a long history of struggle between the working masses, both urban and rural, and the light-skinned bourgeoisie and their henchmen. For several decades now, the UEH has mostly enrolled children of workers, who are mainly black. The bourgeoisie and middle class send their children either to the few private universities in Haiti or to the Dominican Republic, the U.S., Canada and France. This is a consequence of a racial hierarchy and racist policies dating from the periods of slavery and post-independence.
Education to Advance, Not Escape, the Working Class
Students from different branches of the UEH, following the leadership of comrades in PLP, have stopped the entrance exam from taking place. They are also demanding that the dean throw out the disputed test and start over. Many times, the comrades recall, the college administration has tried to disadvantage workers’ children in favor of more bourgeois children. This reflects the ruling class’s effort to deny workers access to knowledge, in order to
better dominate and exploit them. This racism and elitism will stop only when workers understand the class nature of capitalist society and rise as one to smash it. We must struggle for more children of the working class to gain access to higher education. Then we must use that education to advance the working class, rather than trying to escape it.
The applicants quickly adopted this position and began chanting their refusal to take the fraudulent exam. Meanwhile, applicants at other locations, unaware of what was happening at the Medical School site, were waiting for their exam to arrive. To their surprise, the students marched to tell them about the exposed fraud and that there wouldn’t be any test that day. These applicants became even angrier when pro-administration students threatened that the SWAT police would be called in, just as they had in 2009, when the heavily armed cops brutally occupied the Medical School for several months. At that time the medical students were engaged in several struggles: against special treatment in training for those related or connected to the bourgeoisie; a demand for more seats for children of the working class; and a campaign to support an increase in the minimum wage.
With the support of communists and the solidarity with the applicants, the students have won this skirmish. The role of Progressive Labor Party is to give leadership to the class struggle on all fronts. We must win the masses to understand why this double-dealing exists, and how the bourgeoisie uses class and race to super-exploit the vast majority of the population. Most of all, we must tell people the only way this hell will end — with communist revolution, the destruction of capitalism, and the creation of a new system of equality.

I would like to congratulate PLP for the work that you are doing, some of which I read in Challenge. I would also like to tell you about how I became a communist and why I joined PLP.
As I learned in the song Bella Ciao, which we sing here in a Creole translation, I will live and die a communist.
How did I become a communist? I was really a communist before I even knew about the concept of communism. Nevertheless, it was because of the reality of my life and my family’s life, and the social and economic conditions of our class which made me choose sides and become a communist. My activities in organizing among students, my political positions and my class consciousness also helped pave the way for me to become a communist. There was really no option more humane than communism in a society where the bosses suck the blood of thousands and millions of workers around the world.
I am proud to call myself a communist.
I came to the PLP through struggles in our town. I helped organize a student reading group, named for one of the founders of the first communist parties in Haïti, Jacques Roumain. It was started by a comrade in order to recruit young communists to the Party and to work with rural workers in our town. We read and discussed the ideas of the Party and the history of the communist movement. I was very interested and talked often with our comrade after our study group and one day he asked me to join our international communist party, PLP.
While our lives in Haiti may differ a little with workers in other countries, with differences in the degree of racist exploitation, I know that we have the same enemy, CAPITALISM. In short, I find that there is an obligation to be in a communist party.
I am not satisfied with the growth of the PLP in Haïti because I expect more from the Party. I will do my best however to work with and struggle with our comrades and friends to build PLP into a mass fighting revolutionary communist party.
Again, I take this occasion to say a big thank you to the members of PLP around the world for being commited to the class struggle. Let us fight for another world, a just world, a communist world!
Comrade S

I recently started working in a county clinic with predominantly black and Latin patients and workers. The rebellions in Ferguson, as well as the local fightback against the murder of 25-year-old black worker Ezell Ford here in Los Angeles, provided an opportunity to meet my new co-workers on a political footing.
I wasn’t sure what to do or how to do it but I knew workers were outraged about what was happening in Ferguson. I also wasn’t sure if they heard about Ezell Ford, murdered only two days after Michael Brown. So I printed out a picture of a demonstration I went to. I wrote a few sentences beneath it about sending our condolences to the Ford family and standing in solidarity with their fight back against racist police murders.
I showed it to one of my co-workers, Denise, and she literally took it and ran with it. Her first comments were that we need to make this into a card and print it out in color. She then passed it to another co-worker to change the wording. For obvious reasons, the administration wouldn’t support it: they removed the name of the clinic and simply said it was from me and my co-workers. Denise definitely improved the message while maintaining the politics of “stand in solidarity with fightback against racist police murders.”
Denise then took it to all our co-workers in the clinic and in the hospital nearby. She got about 25 signatures. She then typed them up in a nice font and asked for money. We raised over $200 just in a couple of days for the family. While she did most of the leg work, she mentioned me. Folks came up to thank us for what we were doing.
I discovered one of the nurses had her 25-year-old son murdered about 10 years ago. At the time, she was a nurse at the now non-existent trauma center her son was brought to and where he later died! The county hospital, along with its emergency rooms and trauma center, has been closed for the last seven years. This means more deaths as ambulances have to travel longer distances to hospitals already overwhelmed.
When the county hospital does open sometime next year, it will still be a skeleton of its former self with one-fifth the number of hospital beds available. And with Obamacare, this “safety net” hospital will require some form of health insurance. Given that LA County is expected to have one million uninsured in spite of government subsidies and expanded MediCal (the California Medical Assistance Program), this will mean more illness and death largely on the backs of black, Latin and immigrant workers we serve.
The Ford family was very appreciative of our efforts. Since the funeral last week, the fightback has died down some. Nonetheless, we have some contact with the family and its opened doors for more struggle on the job.
Denise and I have had a couple more conversations about Ferguson and the likely war in the Middle East. Denise talked about the fascist response in Ferguson and compared it to the response the bosses took in Boston after the marathon bombing last April. I showed her the latest CHALLENGE editorial as well as articles from our comrades who were in Ferguson. From the racist cops to this racist “healthcare” system, I hope to continue this struggle in our clinic and build a base for communism among these black and Latin women workers.
Red Health