NEWARK, NJ, April 30 — On April 9, over 1,000 students walked out of Newark’s schools to protest the bosses’ budget cuts. The action was organized by the newly formed Newark Student Union (NSU), whose courage and organization demonstrated its ability to lead masses of students.
As Newark experiences attacks on education similar to many other cities, this new voice — the NSU — is making itself heard. Consisting of high school students citywide, the NSU has not only given leadership to other students but also to everyone fighting back against the racist attacks.
PLP has always maintained that the main contradiction in education is between the ruling class and the students. That is becoming clearer as we see more cops in schools, curriculums changing to meet the Common Core Standards, increasing class sizes and cutting student services.
The ruling class hasn’t done the best job in keeping this quiet either. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the bosses need to reform education to meet U.S. imperialism’s requirements for the 21st century.
After hearing about a $57 million budget cut this coming school year, NSU —  although only a few months old — quickly sprung into action. Their first meeting, expecting 15-30 students, had attracted over 170 from four different high schools!
Solidarity with Teachers, Unions
Last month the group held its first demonstration outside the New Jersey Performing Art Center during a Brian Lehrer (WNYC) panel on education with Newark School Superintendent Cami Anderson and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. After students listened for over an hour to Anderson and Booker justifying their dismantling of schools and the union here, they rose up in defiance and began chanting, “Newark Students, Stand Up! Fight Back!” They also showed their unity with their teachers by chanting, “Stop attacking our teachers, their unions, their tenure, and their jobs.” 
Walkout
The night before the April 9 walkout, Anderson tried to send an automatic call home to all parents telling them that their students will be suspended if they walk out. She even sent the Assistant Superintendent to one school to try to talk the students out of it. Finally, they ordered a lockdown in all schools five minutes before the walkout took place.
While in some schools students were afraid to walk out (only a dozen made it out of one school), in others, like Science High School, over 300 students walked out through the front door — right past the Assistant Superintendent!
As a result of the NSU’s courage to continue to fight, the Superintendent was forced to backtrack the next day and deny that they tried to keep students from leaving for the protest!
Organize for May Day
PLP students and teachers have participated in these actions and held a meeting to win these students to come to May Day. More than just a communist holiday, May Day gives students the opportunity to see what communism is, and that fighting to stop budget cuts is just a small battle in the much larger battle for communism.

About 250 people came out for the May Day march here. Stockton is a town of many immigrants and farm workers. By all accounts, many are undocumented. The Central Labor Council and immigrants’ rights (mis)leaders organized the march. We missed the speeches by the Mayor and other politicians. PL’ers distributed a leaflet saying, “Nothing short of equality is acceptable.” We must identify ourselves as one working class — the producers of all wealth. Therefore, we must share all that we produce with the international working-class. The only acceptable justice for immigrants and all workers cannot be anything short of a communist revolution.

At its core May Day means revolution, not reform. The future communist society which May Day embodies has been the aspiration of hundreds of millions — in truth billions — of working people in the past. This aspiration, distant though its fulfillment may be, nonetheless persists. The specter of communism Karl Marx wrote of in 1848 still haunts the capitalists and their rule.
May Day 2013, commemorated under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party for the 43rd consecutive year does more than embody the aspirations, the dreams even, of the world’s working people. 2012 May Day in the United States
May Day means we have more than a dream. We have a plan, one that has proven itself and emerged victorious in the face of the most vicious assaults the world’s ruling classes have been able to launch. Twice in the twentieth century communists have turned world war and fascist invasion into their opposite, and at the height of their influence have managed to spread workers’ power over vast portions of the globe.
PLP’s May Day events unite workers and youth worldwide under the call:
Forward to Communism!
Workers today don’t want a world that teeters on the brink of nuclear war at flashpoints from Korea to Kashmir to Syria and beyond, but that’s what we have. Workers have a sense that there is a way — within all the excess paraded in front of us on computer and TV screens — that the grinding poverty that imperialism generates need not be.
Yet we live in a world in which our brothers and sisters in eastern Nigeria are driven to pulverize lead-infested ore with hand tools to extract gold bits, producing a dust that goes airborne and poisons their children. Working people and their allies know that we must find a way to develop the planet to meet human needs without tipping it into climate disaster, and we see that the world’s imperialists are incapable of the reorganization necessary to make this possible — nor do they want to.
As we gather under PLP’s red flag in cities across the globe, we preserve and deepen our commitment to a movement that belongs to the international working class. On May Day, shoulder to shoulder with our comrades old, and new, we draw strength for the task of advancing the fight for communism in the coming year. PLP’s May Day events will cover the Americas, Asia and Africa.

2012 May Day in Berln, GermanyMay Day:One Class, One World, One Party
Our movement knows no borders. The bosses can’t live without borders, and the butchery and mayhem it enforces to establish and maintain them. U.S. imperialism rubs up against Chinese imperialism at the Korean border, with consequences we can’t predict. In Syria U.S. bosses confront Russian interests. Iranian power and influence has flowed across its border with Iraq in ways U.S. rulers cannot and will not take lying down. Despite Obama’s rhetoric of withdrawal, U.S. bases dot the Middle East in preparation for regional wars to come. To the extent that bosses worldwide can force, or worse, win workers inside their borders to spill their blood in wars for or against US imperialism they are increasingly dangerous.
Meanwhile, fascism grows at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. When it comes to the flow of capital seeking maximum profit, the Mexico-U.S. border is no hindrance. But for workers, the border has become a pretext for the rulers’ drone surveillance, racist vigilante shootings and a “guest worker” program that will only institutionalize and legitimize the fascist terror of Obama’s deportation regime. Obama, serving the needs of U.S. capitalists, has deported far more Latin American workers than any president in history.
On the streets of Brooklyn, NY, our slogan resounds:
Stop Racist Deportations; Working People Have No Nations!
Borders, nationalism and racism are natural and necessary under capitalism. Illusions of European “unity” are being dashed on the rocks of competing bosses’ national interest in the European Union’ oppressive austerity and rising anti-immigrant racism. In the U.S., residential and educational segregation has spawned a situation where according to recent polls more U.S. citizens admit to holding racist anti-black views than just a few years ago.
Working-class internationalism is the only antidote to this poison. Progressive Labor Party’s May Day sends a clear message:
‘Smash All Borders, Power to the Workers!’
Communism is the only force that can guide workers to turn the guns of the bosses’ armies back on the bosses themselves,  not on workers from another country. So we chant:
‘Turn the Guns Around, Shoot the Bosses Down!’
May Day is an exercise in this internationalism. In our anti-racist solidarity around campaigns against cholera in Haiti or in support of young rebels against NYPD murder in Brooklyn, NY, we are building a fighting foundation for the communist world workers want, deserve and will win.

Under capitalism, terror is a constant for the international working class. Workers in the U.S. have recently suffered a series of murderous attacks, in line with the global terror launched by U.S. imperialists and their allies on workers worldwide. On April 15, the day that terrorist bombs killed three people and maimed at least 170 more at the Boston Marathon, thirty people were killed in Iraq and uncounted others from Obama’s drone reign of terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see box).
Two days later, profit-driven disregard for workers’ safety caused an explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas. This crime of capitalism slaughtered 15 people, injured more than 100 others, destroyed three public schools and wrecked hundreds of homes (see page 5).
The official U.S. reactions to these atrocities battered workers even further. Obama’s Boston manhunt and lockdown became a not-so-dry run for the bosses’ imposition of martial law. House by house, elite squads kicked down doors seeking the bombers. Meanwhile, thousands of cops and troops imprisoned the city and its suburbs for an entire day, robbing many workers of their wages.
But the response in Texas proved no less menacing. The imperialist bosses put out no dragnet for mass-murdering factory owner Donald Adair — just stern warnings to heed their war agenda. Meanwhile, Adair, safe in his mansion, announced an inquisition of the very workers his greed had killed, wounded or rendered homeless (see below).
Taken together, these two disasters exposed the U.S. capitalist rulers’ intent. As they plan ever wider wars abroad, they are acclimating the domestic working class to destruction and fascist terror.
U.S. and Russian intelligence agencies first learned of Boston’s brother bombers in 2011 when the FBI, at Moscow’s insistence, investigated the elder Tsarnaev. It seems possible that the roots of the Boston blasts lie somewhere in the tug-of-war between increasingly hostile imperialist rivals.
Then again, the brothers Tsarnaev may have acted alone. We don’t yet know. But whatever motivated the Marathon attack, both Russian and U.S. bosses are seeking an advantage in its aftermath. Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes to use Boston to bolster support for his brutal crackdown on Islamic separatists in Chechnya, where the Tsarnaevs were born before being raised in the U.S. (The younger one became a U.S. citizen.)
The opportunistic Barack Obama & Co. pounced as well, quickly deploying the sports-media complex in a nationwide campaign for militaristic patriotism. After April 15, virtually every professional baseball, basketball and hockey game in the U.S. began and ended with a televised, highly orchestrated, flag-waving tribute to Boston that laid the foundation for subsequent storm trooper operations there.
On the night of April 19, when the younger bomber got caught, people actually gathered in the streets to cheer cops passing in armored vehicles. That was a bad sign for the working class. But try as they might, the media could not produce images of black or Latino workers applauding the cops.
Since 1995, these same Boston police have shot to death 20 innocent victims, all black, Latino or Cape Verdean. There are eight times more black and six times more Latino inmates than whites in Massachusetts prisons, where 76% of the population is “non-Hispanic” white (see “Sentencing Project, 2007”). Black inmates outnumber white inmates in the state’s prisons by eight to one; Latino inmates outumber whites by six to one. . A critical segment of the working class can harbor no illusions about the cops’ true role.
In Texas, it wasn’t terrorism — just routine capitalism with a distinctly fascist twist, in accord with U.S. capitalists’ coming war needs. To boost production and revenue, plant boss Adair had been storing “1,350 times the amount of [highly explosive] ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security [DHS]” (Reuters, 4/20/13). This dangerous practice could have originated only with West Fertilizer’s owner, not its workers. Workers don’t buy carloads of chemicals.
Caught disobeying Washington, Adair handed over his workers as the supposed culprits to the police apparatus he loathes, the FBI and DHS.  “We are presenting all employees for interviews....with investigating agencies,” he said.
The imperialist, war-driven wing of U.S. finance capitalists is using West Fertilizer to press for tighter, centralized government control of industry, including the dangerous substances needed for war. On April 20, the New York Times ran an op-ed column by Bill Minutaglio, a liberal professor at the University of Texas in Austin. He declared:
[I]t is finally time for this pathological avoidance of oversight to end in Texas. To understand how deep the state’s regulatory resistance runs, one need only to listen to the state’s attorney general, Greg Abbott, who often spearheads the Lone Star state’s rebuffs to federal imperatives. Earlier this year he was asked what his job entailed. “I go into the office in the morning,” he replied. “I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.”
U.S. imperialists use food as a weapon, in “peacetime” and war. They reward their friends and deny food to their enemies. Predominance in a critical industry like agriculture, in which fertilizers play a big part, was essential to U.S. imperialists’ successes in the first two world wars. They foresee a similar equation in the next one. Big finance capitalists mistrust anti-government small fry like Adair, who once sued U.S. imperialist flagship Monsanto. Until April 17, Adair was stockpiling, against DHS orders, the volatile chemical essential to farming, which also powered the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh.
From Boston to Texas, we can see common threads of sharpening domestic fascism and global war preparation. Our class enemies, the capitalists, may seem too powerful to stop. But history shows that class struggle will persist and accelerate in reaction to assaults by the ruling class. It shows that the misery created by the rulers’ wars can become the crucible for communist revolution — if workers are organized and led by a fighting party of and for the working class. That party is PLP!
May Day symbolizes this struggle. The actions of the Progressive Labor Party against racism in the cops’ killing of Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, and Ramarley Graham in New York, and in PL’ers fighting evictions of workers in Palestine by Israeli rulers; against sellout union leaders of Metro transit workers in Washington, DC; against Mexican rulers flooding workers’ homes near Mexico City; against U.S.-UN forces responsible for the spread of cholera in Haiti; against the neglect of workers in Pakistan ravaged by earthquakes. All of these struggles are building the force that can counter capitalism’s terror and will ultimately destroy the profit system to build a workers’ society: communism.
May Day represents the need to join this movement. Join PLP!