BROOKLYN, NY, June 19—“Leave these kids alone, they were just playing!” “NO ONE wants you here so LEAVE!” “Back away from these kids NOW!” About two dozen Kingsborough Community College students, plus faculty, friends and members of the communist Progressive Labor Party were gathered for our Juneteenth barbecue at a park surrounded by families and children. When two NYPD officers pulled up and ordered a nearby group of children to play elsewhere, we sprang into action gathering our forces!

As the officers got right in the face bullying one twelve-year-old shouting if they were a “tough guy”, we surrounded the kids in protection and commanded the kkkops to leave. The kkkops appeared to retreat, but then followed the children toward a playground and continued threatening them. We organized a crowd again and after a second confrontation, where an exasperated officer said he wished he could beat us up, they’re the ones who beat it!

This incident summarizes our year of struggle at KCC. And after ups and downs, sharp discussions alongside strengthening confidence and unity, KCC’s struggle and our Party have grown and given us a taste of real victory: our multiracial, multigender students’ determined leadership in confrontation with the kkkops IS that victory, a year in the making! Amidst a dark night of imperialism and fascism, a new generation is fighting back and leading the international working class closer to communist revolution.

Spring ’23: Antiracist class struggle in session!
The year of struggle began with our response to a police attack on our friend Adrian and continued as weeks became months of resistance to police and administrative harassment throughout the winter (see previous CHALLENGEs). When we returned to campus in the spring, students continued to struggle through the campus police and administration’s months of daily and ongoing harassment, lies, gaslighting, and academic charges against both students and faculty in Common Ground.

We continued mass leafleting to counter the administration’s lies, while in PLP study groups we analyzed the KCC struggle and the world situation through CHALLENGE editorials and Party documents like Reform and Revolution. A student supporter created a website for us, and we formed a legal defense committee to handle the numerous charges and investigations against us.

KCC admins harass Black student; are taught a lesson
Our main task during this period was “court support.” The KCC administration outrageously charged the Black student who was called the n-word by the racist student in November. So, for each interrogation with the college attorney, we organized a crowd of friends and supporters to walk with them and wait outside in solidarity. When the administration —led by a liberal Black woman president and college attorney— tried bullying the student into accepting a disciplinary letter for “moving threateningly” in response to being called the n-word, this solidarity helped build their confidence they had done NOTHING wrong as the victim of racist attack. At the final interrogation, the student demanded a hearing in front of a tribunal of students and faculty. The administration caved in and agreed to a deal on OUR terms!

Revolt is necessary! Rutgers strike solidarity
Spring Break was spent at the Rutgers – Newark strike (see CHALLENGE, 4/26). KCC, other CUNY students and faculty, and PL’ers came over three days, bringing food, drumming skills, and CHALLENGE to the striking graduate students. KCC students also played an enthusiastic role in anti-scab duty, volunteering to patrol campus buildings in response to reports of scab classes, interrupt and occupy the scab classes they found, and invite the students and staff to join the strike.

Striking Rutgers students shared their lessons in building a movement through years of base building, communist political struggle and uniting workers through rank-and-file leadership. While liberal “democratic socialist” union misleaders sabotaged the strike movement at every opportunity, a victory was in convincing workers that if we want change, “revolt is necessary.”

Discussing the powerful Rutgers experiences, we resolved to strengthen the student-worker alliance needed to prepare for actions like walkouts, increasing CHALLENGE distribution, and build for a mass NY/NJ strike movement against racist police, racist tuition increases and worsening learning conditions. In Common Ground, we proposed and collectively drafted a May Day leaflet calling for student-worker unity. We collectively translated it with the help of two of our Chinese-speaking students, and shared it with our Chinese-speaking cafeteria workers.

May Day: Students walkout!
After speaking at PLP’s May Day event, on Monday, May 1, 31 KCC students and faculty walked out of class into the cafeteria, and marched chanting “Racism means? WE GOT TO FIGHT BACK!” out through the campus gates. A group of students and faculty continued onward to a demonstration of several hundred mainly Chinese and Spanish-speaking home health workers at New York City Hall demanding an end to 24-hour shifts and 12-hours’ pay. 500 copies of our English/ Spanish/ Chinese leaflet were gone within an hour! We will stay in touch with these workers.

Afterwards, students and faculty joined with other CUNY students and faculty at Hunter College. We made it just in time to greet Hunter students and faculty staging their own walk-out. In a speech addressing over 100 CUNY students, a KCC student defiantly addressed how the police represent this racist system demanding our obedience, but we will never obey! KCC students concluded May Day helping lead the CUNY student march from Hunter College through Central Park.

Following the police confrontation on Juneteenth, we reflected on our year while gearing up for PLP’s Summer Project. The more we dared to struggle and build confidence in each other and in the working class, the more we dared to fight back. We have a whole world to win! The struggle continues, and we’ll see you at the Summer Project. JOIN US!

Prince George’s County, Maryland, July 5—Since 1977, Progressive Labor Party here has joined and led workers to fight against government-sponsored terrorism by police, prosecutors, judges, and jails. Today was no different!

Antiracists, PLP, and the family are demanding justice for William Green and conviction of killer kop Michael Owen. William deserves nothing short of a communist revolution, for all reforms are a dead-end plan for the working class.

Who was William?
On January 27, 2020, William had been in a car accident. He was searched, handcuffed behind his back, and put in the front seat of the police cruiser. None of the bosses’ typical racist excuses for killing applied—William was not resisting, he was not armed, and there was no warrant for him. Yet, kkkop Michael Owen entered the police cruiser and almost immediately fired seven shots, killing William, who was only 47 and a father.
Killer cop Owen was charged with second degree murder and other offenses related to the killing and has been in prison for three years, but he is still on the Prince George's County Police Force on administrative leave!

Slow-walking the murder case
The prosecutors and the cop’s attorneys seem to be determined to drag out the case against Cop Owen, hoping people will forget this racist murder or get tired of protesting. The family, however, as a result of the efforts of Nikki Owens (William’s cousin and family spokesperson), has doggedly stayed on the case. No advocate from the States Attorney’s office was assigned to the family as is usually the case, so Nikki kept checking the PG County Case Search to keep abreast of changes to the case. When she noticed changes in the trial dates, she demanded more information about the change from the prosecutors.

After multiple emails and notifying the press, her diligence forced the prosecutors to reach out to the family just two weeks before the start of his trial to schedule a meeting. At the meeting, one week before the trial, they told the family that they offered Owen a plea deal and he accepted.

That was unacceptable to Nikki! She made “NO PLEA DEAL" for this killer cop the theme of a hastily-called rally on the court day. A week of press conferences and interviews with Nikki, other local fighters, and non-profit groups all had the same demand to prosecute the killer cop fully. Ironically, the plea deal was so bad that the judge declined the deal and set a trial date of November 27, 2023.

State-sponsored terror
PLP describes police brutality as a key part of state-sponsored terrorism because police act as agents of the capitalist class and their state apparatus. Their role in capitalist society is to oppress and terrorize the working class, especially Black workers.

The rulers fear that Black workers, super exploited and oppressed by capitalism, will fight back militantly as they have in the past. Police are to protect capitalism, property over people and attack all working-class people who oppose them with strikes, rallies, protests, and rebellions.

Broadening the fight
PL’ers have joined Nikki’s family at hearings on procedural motions leading up to the trial. Recent efforts by the cop’s lawyer to move the trial to a more conservative location in Maryland failed, as family and supporters filled the courtroom.

Baltimore PLP comrades and friends active in the West Wednesdays (a struggle to seek justice for Tyrone West who was killed by  police in 2013) joined local supporters in the courtroom. One is a young leader who is quickly learning about the court system! Nikki’s family and other community members welcomed the West Wednesday brothers and sisters to this fight for justice.

On September 28, 2023 at 9 am, there will be another hearing. The cop’s lawyer is trying to  have evidence against Cop Owen ruled inadmissible. This type of lying lawyering led to Zimmerman's acquittal in the Trayvon Martin murder case. PLP will continue to mobilize more people to attend all hearings leading up to trial and the trial itself on November 27.

The antics of prosecutors and defense attorneys in cases that involve victims of police violence should themselves be considered criminal. Families are experiencing repeated trauma by court systems that allow trial delays for frivolous reasons, toy with the time of the court and families with unnecessary motions, and have families sit in court as defense attorneys criminalize victims in hopes of getting reduced sentences or charges dropped. And most families endure years of this government-sanctioned treatment as they fight for some resemblance of justice for their loved ones.   

Reformism a dead-end
Reform groups that PLP members participate in fought in the state legislature to establish county-based Police Accountability Boards (PAB). Predictably, no county in Maryland gave their Board investigatory or subpoena powers, so such toothless organizations will, like civilian review boards across the country, rubber stamp police reports.

These groups keep focusing on who to elect and then pressure them to push a police accountability agenda. They organize many trips to Annapolis, Maryland’s state capital, to testify on bills and meet with state legislators. Canvassing to bring out workers to vote is crucial to them. This is an example of how reform misleaders dull the fightback and steer workers away from revolution.

PL members involved in all of these efforts constantly point out how these strategies are dead-ends in the struggle and that militant, revolutionary struggle for communism is the only strategy that makes sense. Some fighters are tuning in!J

The Progressive Labor Party in Haiti takes this opportunity to greet our comrades on the occasion of the PLP convention this month. We would like to be there with you, discussing the way we can build our Party into a fighting force for communist revolution, and building the PLP’s influence in the working class and among students and soldiers around the world. However, the phony borders erected by the capitalists around the world have prevented us from sending representatives to our Party’s gathering. We know that one day, those borders will be smashed, and workers will be able to move freely around the world, based on the needs of our class and our Party.

We invite you to participate in Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) international convention on July 14 to July 16. From a meeting of barely two dozen members of the old U.S. communist movement in 1964, PLP has grown into an international party now organizing in five continents. Even as our class faces a dark night and growing inter-imperialist rivalry and fascism, we continue our fightback because this is just the beginning of a worthy struggle towards an international communist revolution.

Over its first first years, PLP has propelled the march to communism—first by leading antiracist, working-class struggle, and then through that struggle advancing communist ideas. This two-pronged strategy—practice and theory—is the basis for winning masses of workers to fight for communism.

Why communism? In our vision, the working class will determine society’s future. It will destroy the capitalist world and its brutal exploitation. It will smash a system that drives us into constant unemployment and poverty. It will stop the racism that drags down all workers. It will terminate the racist cops who break our strikes and kill workers, especially our Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant sisters and brothers. And it will end for all time the imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.

A communist world
Here is our vision for a communist world:
A society run by workers and for workers. After all, the working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need.

Abolition of the exploitative wage system and the money that runs it. We have no need for the parasitic bosses who steal most of the value of our labor through wage slavery.
Multiracial unity and death to the racism that divides the working class. Racism is rooted in capitalism; the bosses rely on it to steal trillions in super-profits worldwide. Fighting racism is part of the lifeblood of PLP.

The destruction of sexism and the systemic exploitation, oppression, and cultural degradation of women workers. Sexism is a pillar of class society, and capitalism has only furthered this lethal weapon against our class. Women and men must unite to smash sexist ideas and practices. PLP emphasizes working-class women’s leadership in making revolution, particularly Black women’s leadership.

Eliminating all borders, artificial lines the bosses draw to make even more profits from workers they call “foreigners.” Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor. Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag.

This is the world the PLP has fought for from the start. We will continue to fight until our class prevails. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, and all the world’s children.

Struggle and theory
From our earliest beginnings in the 1960s, PLP has fought tooth and nail against attacks by the ruling class. We have organized and supported Ford workers and striking teachers in Mexico; wildcatting miners in Hazard, Kentucky; longshore workers in New York City; jute (fiber) workers in India; miners in Britain; garment workers in Los Angeles; bank workers in Colombia; transit workers in Washington, DC; Chrysler sit-down strikers at Detroit’s Mack Avenue plant; farm workers in California, and bakery workers at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx. We have stood with evicted workers in Palestine-Israel, earthquake victims in Pakistan, and hurricane victims in Haiti and New Orleans.

Antiracism is a hallmark of PLP.  We backed Black workers and youth in the 1964 Harlem Rebellion, and fought off racist school segregationists in Boston in 1975. In 1976 we integrated Chicago’s Marquette Park while smashing the Nazi headquarters there, and have led more than a hundred thousand protesters against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis across the United States. We have mobilized against racist killer cops from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Ferguson, Missouri.

PLP has led fierce fightbacks opposing the  bosses’ wars. In the 1960s, we were the first to organize mass demonstrations for the U.S. to “Get Out of Vietnam!” We formed the Worker-Student Alliance in the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society. PLP broke the U.S. travel ban to Cuba and undermined the rulers’ House Un-American Activities Committee to the point of collapse. More recently, working both within the military and on the streets, we exposed the U.S. rulers’ invasions of Iraq as a murderous oil grab.

None of these developments came out of thin air. They grew out of our Party’s analysis of past class struggles and the achievements of millions of workers. PLP studied the strengths and weaknesses of the communist movement led by—among many others—Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. In 1917, this movement created a revolution in Russia; in 1949, a revolution in China. It defeated the Nazis in Europe and fascists in Japan in World War II. It reached its highest point in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which attempted to push back a growing elitism in the Communist Party leadership and put the masses in charge of society.

PLP is the only group on the left to point out what went wrong in the Soviet Union and China. We are the only organization to analyze how socialism in those countries led back to the unvarnished profit system, where all workers are now mired.

A communist society will have no bosses or profits. It will be led by the working class through its Progressive Labor Party.

Marxism: An evolving idea
The history of the Progressive Labor Party began in 1962. A small group of communists left the Communist Party USA and organized the Progressive Labor Movement. They rejected the CPUSA’s capitulation to capitalism and its abandonment of the open advocacy of communist revolution. The old communist movement proposed that the bosses would peacefully relinquish control of society and allow what the CPUSA called “socialism” to be “voted into existence.” The communists who formed PLM refused to mislead workers and broke away from the old guard.

In the course of PLP’s history, we have rejected some traditional Marxist concepts and advanced a number of new ones, all based on our practice and our examination of world events and the decay of the old communist movement. These new principles are expressed in a series of documents, including Road to Revolution I, II, III and IV; Revolution Not Reform; and “Dark Night Shall Have Its End.” (These are all available on PL’s website or in pamphlet form.)

Above all, Progressive Labor Party stands for the principle that the working class must fight directly for communism rather than moving first through a transitional phase of socialism. We reject this two-stage theory, a central premise of classical Marxism, because events have shown that socialism inevitably leads back to full-blown capitalism. In both Russia and China, socialism preserved capitalist features like money and the wage system, leading to inequalities that divided the working class. In both of these countries, the communist party became a new ruling class where privileges were attained through party membership. We believe the working class can be won before the revolution to fight directly for communism—to abolish the wage system, the cult of the individual and other capitalist relics.

Core principles
PLP’s main principles are:
Internationalism, under the slogan “Smash All Borders,” where workers’ class unity is represented by a single mass, international Party;

The fight against racism, a strategic necessity in the struggle to overthrow capitalism;     
The fight against the special oppression of women, another critical component in uniting the working class, a prerequisite for revolution;

A concentration among industrial workers, who produce the capitalists’ profits and the weapons for the bosses’ imperialist wars;Workers’ power through armed struggle, since the rulers will use their armed state power to violently suppress the working class.

Organizing in the military
Throughout its existence, PLP has fought for these principles in unceasing class struggle. We have learned that building the Party is the first order of business for communists. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Whatever gains workers make in reform struggles are limited and temporary; sooner or later, the bosses always use their state power to take them back. Communists strive to turn reform struggles into schools for communism and building the Party. Winning workers to PLP is the one and only victory the ruling class can never take back. We therefore urge all workers and youth to join us in the next half-century in this historic task: to organize a communist revolution.

If you would like to attend the convention, contact your local PL’er or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.