Neither education bosses nor union misleaders care about students
There’s a reason why the club is the most important part of the Progressive Labor Party. It is the collective that we need in order to do the important work that we do. As soon as the teachers union in our city put out an email saying that they were having actions as a reaction to the Department of Education (DOE) putting out a calendar that stripped holidays away from kids and forced us into what almost amounts to a sixth class, we knew that the sellout was underway.

As soon as the email was sent, comrades in a club contacted each other. They discussed what was going on as far as the context of the DOE putting out a calendar with no regard for the negotiations with the union. This conversation then focused on answering the question of how this attack on the teachers was also an attack on students. Increasing the amount of time that students are in school, though it appears to be an improvement, is actually an attack on students by grinding them down with more work. Now, the fact that there would be a uniform starting time of 8 am would wreak havoc on bussing the neediest students. This is all a part of the need for the bosses to build fascism as they increase the workload their parents have.

The  bargaining pattern that the teacher’s union is following is the union that represents the hardest hit of the working class: laborers who are primarily women, Black, and Latin. They are jumping the gun and grabbing the deal the liberal bourgeoisie demands.

Conversations the next day with coworkers were sharp as the comrades were fresh from the collective discussion that focused them on how it was an attack on students and why the bosses were attacking now. One comrade sat down in the teachers center and wrote a chapter update with several teachers, struggling with each one to see the current issue within the context of class struggle and the union misleaders as servants of the bourgeoisie.

The rumors were that the contract was a done deal and that the whole fight the union was putting up was a smoke screen to help the teachers take a terrible deal and call it a victory. The union bosses are creating this whole façade to help them sell us a contract that will likely attack our students by speeding them up and increasing their hours; attack our healthcare because keeping us alive is too expensive; and give us an inflation-affected, pennies on the dollar raise.

It is the collective working together and sharing of understanding that allows the Party to be able to struggle with our coworkers and against the bosses. The next step is to continue to discuss this attack with our students, their parents, and continue to do so with teachers through Chapter Updates and any means we have at our disposal. And let’s not forget the fight for communism where workers will really be educated about how capitalism works and how to get rid of it with communist revolution.

In Atlanta, more than 100 people from all over the U.S. gave over 15 hours of public comment to the local City Council against a huge cop training facility, better known as Cop City. The Black, Asian, Muslim and nonbinary council members still voted yes to expanding police terror and fascism through the 90 million dollar project. This is what the Party means by liberal fascism.

The case of organizers fighting through the system and being denied is what it looks like. Placing liberals and marketing them as friendly faces in the highest offices is not enough for the ever growing masses of workers that are turning to militant fightback over the ballot boxes. The U.S. and worldwide infrastructure from schools to roadways are crumbling. The bosses need police to keep workers repressed, terrorized and focused on the ploy to blame themselves and each other for the circumstances brought on by a profit driven system.
*****

Cop city = liberal fascism
Cop City is in response to what was the largest mass antiracist protest that spurred from George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s vicious murders by kkkops. The fight around #STOPCOPCITY is one of the most critical struggles that we must not only keep our eyes on but expand in every city. Because there is a training ground for cops and military that’s being built or expanded in every city. And building up the capabilities of the police and military is the liberal ruling class’ plan as the system of capitalism becomes more unstable. Liberal politicians in Atlanta, Newark, L.A., Chicago, Mexico, Colombia are the ones side by side with the corporations funding the war and the police waging it. As communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), use the case of organizers trying to stop Cop City as a reason for why revolution will never be on the ballot and must be enacted by communist fighters in one mass internationalist Party. Our class needs leadership, our friends are learning from us and our children are watching. Let’s fight for each other and fight together!
*****

poetry vs. alienation under capitalism
I wrote this poem with all the rage I had after being humiliated by the boss at my workplace for being gay. I was told that I had to censor myself to respond to the sensitivities of anti-gay sexism of people at the workplace. People in solidarity with me had to witness this.

Fatality
The leader who misunderstands his understanding
Of his own alliances
With the system that is making him a weapon against the ghost of his own better     
ideals
Long ago sold to his masters
Exposed and corroding

Tragedy
Not the worker who was made to choke
On the pride & joy of sharing how they    
exist
In response
To the attack, the shame, the guilt
Of others’ prejudice and bigotry

Pitiful
The liberal boss who says they seek justice
In equally protecting the right of people
With violent ideas
Of having double standards
   Not thinking twice of the intent
  Emanating from white bodies,
       or heterosexual bodies
 While being trained to fire the bullet of guilt without hesitation on bodies of darker skin, on feminine bodies
Fanning the flames of division and distrust
Within the working class to distract…
Better than any open fascist can
And retaining the power of their terror concealed

Misfortune
The educator who hides their own lack of confidence in the working class…behind
Respect for cultural populations whose bigoted ideas “unfortunately cannot be changed”
When in reality it is their own racist limitations that hold them hostage from fighting for what is better

Optimism
Those who surpassed a new limit
In the courage and action
They were willing to undertake
In standing side by side
With workers being attacked
For fighting to put all power
In the hands of the working class

Forward
The people whose solidarity with the working class has forever changed
When being pierced by being witness to the visceral pain of a fellow worker who has been attacked
   While the bosses seek the justice that serves      themselves
   In the spiritual lynchings they unleash              
On the spirit of the fighters ready to  expose their masters

Victory
To the communists
Who are lodging confidence
     Deeper and deeper
   within the working class
By turning painful attacks
Into fights
And never losing sight
Of what is the win
Up against the terror the bosses use
To have us see everything but that

The following letter is a testimony given by a comrade in support of the Securing Wages Against Theft (SWEAT) bill at a New York State legislative hearing. Annually billions of dollars are stolen from workers in New York City alone. Loopholes in the state rulers’ laws make it easy for bosses to ruthlessly steal from workers and hide their assets in such a way that makes it nearly impossible for workers to recover their stolen wages. Antiracist organizers are fighting for a lien law that freezes criminal bosses’ assets.

If won, the SWEAT law may give workers the tools to recover their stolen wages, but it will never change the fact that capitalism is a criminal system and exploitation is its bedrock. All waged work under capitalism is exploitation. Profits are extracted from the necessary unpaid labor time of workers, and wage theft only  deepens this contradiction. The Wage theft epidemic we’re currently experiencing is a symptom of a system that is spiraling further into crisis.Ultimately, workers must fight for a communist revolution  to put an end to this racist super exploitation.

 The SWEAT bill is currently under attack by a powerful restaurant boss lobby called the Hospitality Alliance courtesy of its liberal fascist lackeys in Albany. Workers plan to protest Melba Wilson, a Black celebrity restaurant owner who fronts the racist Hospitality Alliance, later this month. Please look out for an article on this fightback in the next coming issues of CHALLENGE.

I'm speaking on behalf of Women Against Racist Violence (WARV) a multiracial collective of young people, organizing to address the racist violence that women experience daily in forms such as the 24 hour workdays, wage theft, and displacement.I'd like to share our perspective on wage theft along with a personal anecdote.

In my early 20s I worked at a bar where I was promised cash payments at the end of each night. After eight hours of work, the manager tells me that he can only pay me if I get male customers to buy a certain amount of drinks. I noticed that many of the girls around me were roped into this line of work, to accept being groped by drunken men out of necessity. Many had children or were undocumented. I walked out of there with $5 for a metrocard. I can't describe how violated and worthless I felt that night.

It was only years later till I began organizing with the Sweat Coalition and also with home attendants, hearing about their harrowing stories of wage theft that I was able to make sense of what me and many of my colleagues endured.

Every year bosses steal billions from workers and our state turns a blind eye and their zero response leads many to believe that wage theft is a victimless crime and that bosses can freely get away with stealing from workers. What's the use of calling  wage theft or a crime if it goes unpunished?

Part of the problem lies in how our perspective on what constitutes a crime sometimes ends up trivializing the issue. It doesn't capture the suffering and generational aftershocks that this crime causes. Wage theft destroys worker's lives, their families, and their communities. I think we need to start calling wage theft what it is: racist violence.

Let me break it down if you think this is hyperbole. Every paycheck that is stolen from a worker is a step closer to starvation and homelessness. What is this if not violence? Every paycheck stolen from a woman is a step closer to staying in an abusive relationship to survive. What is this if not violence? Every paycheck stolen is a step closer to a worker landing in prison for committing a crime out of desperation.

In the South Bronx, one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States, where many of the home attendants I work with live and where wage stealing agencies operate — every 13 hours stolen from a home attendant each year means money deprived from them and their families, impacting their ability to afford education, housing and other necessities. This traps our kids and communities in a cycle of  racist violence of poverty.

Perhaps this is why I'm so infuriated today. Wage theft continues unabated because politicians are too immobilized by bloodsucking sweatshop bosses to end this violence. They've been duped by unethical and shameful organizations like Hospitality Alliance, against their better judgment, to believe lies about how workers will abuse SWEAT and file false claims.

In the era of #metoo we're told to believe all victims of abuse, that is unless they've had their wages stolen and dare to speak out.

Shame on Hospitality Alliance for using their Black celebrity president as cover for their racist crimes. If politicians have a shred of integrity they'd stop listening to Hospitality Alliance, and pass SWEAT and be part of the solution to violence rather than an obstacle.

The two stories below are excerpts from the late Walter Linder’s memoir, A Life of Labor and Love. Wally was a founding member of Progressive Labor Party and passed away on January 3, 2022 at the age of 91, after a lifetime of principled struggle on behalf of the international working class. In addition to being a leader for the working class in school and on the job, he served as an editor and contributor to CHALLENGE, and to the Magazine of Progressive Labor Party.
59th Anniversary of the workers’ paper
The first issue of CHALLENGE (Vol. 1, No 1) came out on June 15, 1964. When we sold that first issue of CHALLENGE, most of us had no idea how significant it was AND the role that CHALLENGE would soon play in the fight against capitalism. The headline on page one  was prophetic: Police War on Harlem. Barely four  weeks later, the Harlem Rebellion started after racist KKKop Thomas Gilligan of the New York Police Department (NYPD) shot and killed young James Powell who, with his friends, was trying to cool off from the July heat by spraying water on themselves and a bystander who complained about it and eventually called the police. This killing was the last straw in a long series of racist oppression. The news media called the rebellion a “riot” but it was most definitely a rebellion!  Most of the stores that were attacked were pawnshops that had been looting the residents of Harlem for decades!

The Progressive Labor Movement (PLM), which became the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in April 1965, put out its most significant (and briefest!!) leaflet:  Wanted for Murder - Gilligan the Cop. Rebels carried the leaflet all over Harlem. The PLM couldn’t print enough of them!!  ALL of the so-called “Black leaders” had the same false message: Go home and Pray ... don’t fight back!!  But the NYC bosses knew exactly who to attack; the Harlem rebels and the PLM. So-called “free speech” went out the window. In essence, martial law was declared.

On a personal note, I sold the first issue of CHALLENGE in three  locations:  The Upper West Side of Manhattan, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the Garment District in Manhattan. The PLM held weekly rallies in the Garment District and CHALLENGE was a big help in getting our message out. We sold CHALLENGE on the street to the garment workers and when the boss wasn’t around, we went inside the shops where we could talk more extensively to several workers simultaneously. Unfortunately, most of us (maybe ALL of us) didn’t understand anything about base building so we didn’t get workers’ names. That’s a key lesson for our newer members:  ALWAYS get names so you can stay in touch and follow up with as many people as possible. That’s key to building the Party.

The police and sanitation departments harassed us while we sold CHALLENGE. They gave me quite a few tickets for supposedly “littering.” After my first ticket, the PLM got me a lawyer who taught me what to say at my trial. After my second ticket, I no longer needed a lawyer; I could defend myself and I did so!

CHALLENGE was the only newspaper, magazine, or TV and radio station that told the truth about the Harlem Rebellion, as well as the many other rebellions in Black neighborhoods  throughout the U.S. The summer of 1964 made it very clear who were the sellouts and who supported the working class. Every one of us should do their utmost to ensure that CHALLENGE continues to be a working-class beacon that will help workers to understand the oppressive nature of capitalism AND the only solution to its miseries: COMMUNIST REVOLUTION!

The workers embrace CHALLENGE
In June 1964, the Progressive Labor Movement decided to print an eight-page weekly newspaper; CHALLENGE was born. Our search for a printer led us to an outfit in Trenton, N.J.

After laying down a deposit, the printer looked at the first issue and told us that would be the last one he’d print.

We called up the Harris offset press manufacturer and asked for a list of newspaper printers to whom it had sold web offset presses. That’s how we found the Sun Publishing Co., located in the Chinese community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. We showed our first issue to the owner, Mr. Chan, and he agreed to print our newspaper. His wife and kids helped with various tasks. Milt Rosen, PLM chairperson, and I packed the papers into boxes for pick-up.

As it happened, later that month the Harlem rebellion erupted, during which the rebels were holding the front page of CHALLENGE as their flag while marching. This prompted the NYPD Red Squad to visit Mr. Chan and warn him that if he continued to print our paper he would be in for trouble. Chan told them he was within his rights to print any newspaper brought to him.

“What about freedom of the press?” he shot back at the cops’ threat. He was not about to abandon his only account. Years later, when Mr. Chan retired, our search for another printer led us to Brooklyn and Ballan Printing, a company that printed many small community and campus papers—and a huge number of pornographic ones that had sprung up since the 1960s. (The Mafia, in collusion with the owners, had coerced the workers into a local union it controlled.) But neither the owners nor the Mafia counted on the workers’ rebelliousness.

The workers read our paper and saw the various exposés we wrote about the lousy working conditions that profit-hungry bosses were pushing on workers throughout the country.

When we went to pick up the paper, the workers showed us the horrible condition of what passed for their bathroom and asked us to write about it. Our editor Luis Castro wrote an exposé for the next issue, which the workers read with enthusiastic approval.J When the bosses saw the article, they went wild. They told us it was all lies and one-sided and challenged us to print their side, “the truth.” We told them that there was only one “truth,” the “workers’ truth,” which made them even crazier. From then on, they scrutinized every issue. Soon afterwards, the owners renovated the bathroom into a halfway decent condition.

The workers attributed that improvement to the article we had written. When a pre-May Day issue came out, we printed the words of the workers’ anthem, “The Internationale.” When we went to pick up that issue, a pressworker suddenly leapt up the two flights of stairs to the top of the huge web press and in a clear, loud voice began singing “The Internationale.”

As the strains of the final words, “the International working class shall be the human race,” drifted across the pressroom, the workers spontaneously burst into applause.

We never found out how this worker knew the song’s melody, but news of the performance soon traveled to the far reaches of Brooklyn. We are now in our [59]th year of publishing CHALLENGE, and have never missed an issue.

June 7—As we go to press, wildfires are burning across six Canadian provinces and a territory and they’re still spreading, pouring more smoke throughout the Atlantic Coast as Code Red for air quality spread. The equivalent of 5 million football fields are on fire!

New York City is declared to have the worst air quality in the world today. One calculator suggested breathing in the air here for 24 hours is the same as smoking 22 cigarettes (Daily Mail, 6/7).

For almost 50 years, scientists have warned us about how global warming—climate change—will destroy our lives. But the bosses have slow-walked any reduction in carbon emissions, and now we are choking to death in Canada and the U.S. while the fossil fuel industry merrily takes its profits to the bank.

There are at least three phenomena that are caused by climate change: rising sea levels, heat waves and forest fires. High temperatures, which are typically not seen until the summer months in Canada, are causing dry conditions and allowing forest fires to break out and spread.

Even Canadian Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said, “It is a simple fact that Canada is experiencing the impacts of climate change, including more frequent and more extreme wildfires, and the amount of forests burned by wildfire is projected to double by 2050 due to our changing climate, causing longer and more intense wildfire seasons, more extreme weather conditions and increased drought.”

A classic case of Nero (the bosses) fiddling while the working-class burns. It’s capitalism that deserves to go up in smoke, not the working class. Our very survival depends on fighting for communism and burning this vicious capitalist system down. The earth belongs to us, and with the working class in power, it will rise on new foundations.