Carolyn Eubanks, longtime Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member, died in her home in the Bronx at the age of 80. Despite her advanced age, Carolyn was brimming with life. A tireless antiracist fighter and communist leader till the end, Carolyn spent the last week of her life volunteering at La Morada’s mutual aid soup kitchen,  showing up at the courthouse to support the family of Raymond Chaluisant, a  young worker murdered by a NYC  corrections kkkop, and attending a political event at the CUNY graduate center.
Antiracist upbringing
Born in North Carolina to a working-class family who  worked in a local company mill , Carolyn often credited her upbringing with setting her on the path to becoming a communist. Despite growing up in a racist Southern town during the Jim Crow era, her parents instilled in her antiracist working class values. Racist language was banned in their home. She witnessed capitalist oppression firsthand–the differential treatment given to the children of workers and bosses in the mills in school and in the town. Carolyn’s mother insisted she learn arithmetic to calculate her wages correctly, because the mill bosses could not be trusted.
In 1958 when the Soviet Union Launched Sputnik the U.S. bosses passed the National Defense Education Act which sent thousands of young people, including Carolyn,  to college on scholarships to study math and science. Carolyn always credited the Soviet Union for her college education and her route out of the company town. After graduating from the University of North Carolina she joined the Peace Corps, spending two years in the Philippines, where she saw the effects of imperialism and the ways large U.S. multinational corporations exploited workers around the world.
Joining the Party and facing the KKKops
 Carolyn met PLP when she was in New York studying at Union Theological Seminary. She was immediately won over to the Party’s idea of smashing capitalism and building a communist world and joined the Party. In the summer of 1979, Carolyn joined a PLP summer project in Tupelo, Mississippi which the KKK had declared would be their headquarters. Along with over 40 other protestors, Carolyn participated in an antiracist, multiracial march straight through Tupelo’s town center. When the march entered the town square a racist, abetted by the KKKiller Kops, fired a shotgun into the crowd and hit Carolyn with buckshot. When a second march was organized just three weeks later, Carolyn boldly marched in the first row alongside her Black and white comrades.
Organizing Black students from Houston to NYC
Carolyn taught for many years at Worthing High School, an all-Black school in the segregated part of Houston. Carolyn attended football games with her students, organized trips and socials, and led fightbacks against the racist conditions. She helped to organize a march in Houston commemorating the 1917 rebellion of Black soldiers who fought back against their racist abuse by white officers (see the book Night of Violence by Robert Hayes). She brought students and their parents to May Day demonstrations every year. She loved to host Game Nights at her apartment, where she made her famous chili. After many years teaching in Houston, Carolyn was attacked for being a communist. The death threats were real and constant. Carolyn slept with a loaded gun under her pillow but never wavered in her fightback.
After moving back to NYC, Carolyn taught math at John F. Kennedy High School, in the Bronx for twenty-five years. She helped students organize a sit-down protest when school security physically attacked several children. She also organized students, teachers and parents to fight back against cutbacks and the use of metal detectors.
Between 2005 and 2018 Carolyn made several trips to Israel-Palestine. Alongside comrades and workers in Israel and Palestine she helped organize against the fascist apartheid state, while raising internationalist communist politics. Her work united college students, medical workers, and educators in New York City and Israel-Palestine.She built close ties with workers living there, winning several of them to join the Party. In her 2018 trip, a group of students she inspired invited her to spend the day with them at a political camp they put together for Palestinian children. In New York, Carolyn was active in the international working group of PLP and once traveled with her comrade to Dallas to participate in a One State in Israel/Palestine conference, where she and a comrade insisted that the conference’s demand was insufficient if the state remained capitalist.
Bringing communism to the congregation
For years Carolyn was an active and beloved member of St Mary's, an integrated social justice church in Harlem She participated in Sunday morning services injecting communist politics into discussions of "grounds for hope," while sharing coffee. She was a mainstay in the food distribution program and, most importantly, she was a vital leader in the church’s justice and peace organizing. Through the Congregations for Justice and Peace, Carolyn, alongside comrades and friends, fought against Columbia University’s racist displacement agenda, organized to restore the community health clinic, and demonstrated against racist police terror.
Carolyn helped lead the fight against racist cop terror in the Bronx for more than 30 years. In the 90’s, she joined forces with the Baez, Vega, Zarate, and Rosario families - all whose children were murdered by the New York Police Department. She helped build Parents Against Police Brutality (PAPB), which was one of the country’s first family-led organizations, specifically assembled to unite the families of countless Black and Latin workers murdered by the NYPD.This organizing culminated with Carolyn helping to organize and lead the very first open and PLP-led march against the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999. Her commitment to the victims’ families was an example for all as she continued to lead and organize against the murder of Ramarley Graham and Shantell Davis.
A fighter til the end
During the last year of her life, she played an important role in helping to lead  PLP’s most recent struggle against the murder of Raymond Chaluisant, organizing several rallies in his neighborhood supporting his family, and attending almost every one of kkkiller cop Dion Middleton’s court appearances. Carolyn always made a point of building relationships with the families of these victims, while struggling with them and all workers and students involved, to understand that only a communist revolution will bring an end to racist cop killings.
Bella Ciao, Carolyn
Carolyn left an indelible mark on comrades, friends, and all those who knew her.  She devoted her life time  to serving the working class.We can honor her legacy by living each day as she did—with love and concern for the working class. In Carolyn’s memory: Let’s fight for a better world, let's fight for communism!

The last issue of CHALLENGE (3/1/23) remembered Langston Hughes as a writer sharply critical of Jim Crow segregation during World War II and as a poet for the working class of the U.S.—particularly Black workers.  Now we’ll flash back to the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became an advocate for multiracial, anti-capitalist revolution.  A tradition of anti-racist activism ran deep in Hughes’ family history. In 1858, his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, married Lewis Leary, an abolitionist who died in John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Howard Langston, was an educator and ardent abolitionist.  
According to his biographer Arnold Rampersad, young Langston Hughes was influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay, along with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the anti-racist, pro-communist writer and historian. In June 1921, Hughes’ poetry was published for the first time in a professional journal. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” came out in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.
In September 1921, Hughes moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. Not yet ready for college, he withdrew before the year was out. He plunged into Black cosmopolitan New York and met Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, both writers at The Crisis, and the poet Countee Collins.  By 1924, after a journey to West Africa and Paris and an extended sojourn in Washington, DC, he’d become a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance.  In March 1925, in the landmark issue of Survey Graphic, “Harlem:  Mecca of the New Negro” (edited by Alain Locke), contained ten poems by Hughes, including: “I, too, sing America./I am the darker brother. . . .”  
In 1926, Hughes published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues, and a famous essay for The Nation (June 23, 1926).   In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes wasn’t yet ready to attack capitalism or embrace the need for militant, collective antiracism. Instead, he argued for the importance of Black identity and called for racial pride: “Why should I want to be white?  I am Negro—and beautiful.”  
    By the late 1920s, when Hughes was enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically Black institution outside Philadelphia, he was meeting communists as well as Harlem’s cultural leaders.  In December 1926, four of his poems were published in the communist monthly New Masses, though they were nowhere near as politically sharp as his work to come.   
    With the Great Depression, beginning in November 1929, communists took leadership positions in major labor unions. They had an explanation for the Depression and a solution for racist inequalities and capitalist exploitation.  They called for multiracial unity and revolution.  Hughes was drawn to these ideas in New Masses, and he put his art at the service of revolution.
    For Hughes and millions of others, a political turning point came on March 25, 1931, when nine young Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white young women in a railroad boxcar in Alabama. The arrest and trial of the Scottsboro Boys galvanized communists and anti-racists throughout the world. Eight of the teenagers were quickly tried by the racists and sentenced to death; a mistrial was declared for the ninth because he was underage.  The Communist Party USA sent in lawyers to challenge the case.  The Supreme Court overturned the convictions; one of the women recanted her accusations and even went on tour to defend the defendants. Yet they languished in jail, many of them for decades.  
    Hughes responded with a terse four-line poem, “Justice,” for New Masses (July 1931), which accompanied a drawing of a lynching by artist Phil Bard.   

  That Justice is a blind goddess
    Is a thing to which we poor are wise:
    Her bandage hides two festering sores
    That once, perhaps, were eyes.

For the November 1931 New Masses, Hughes wrote “Scottsboro, Limited:  A One Act Play.” The cast roster includes “Red Voices,” who counter racist “Mob Voices” and shout out: “We’ll fight! The Communists will fight for you./ not just Black—but Black and white.” At the end of the play, the “Red Voices” declare: “Rise from the dead, workers, and fight!”  For the finale, Hughes directs that “Here the Internationale may be sung and the red flag raised above the heads of the Black and white workers together.”  
To Hughes and others in the communist movement, the trial of the Scottsboro Boys was both the cutting-edge antiracist fight of the day and a huge opportunity to unite Black and white workers.  For the June 1932 issue of New Masses, Hughes wrote the poem “An Open Letter to the South.”

    White workers of the South: . . .
    I am the Black worker.
                Listen:
    That the land might be ours,
    And the mines and the factories and the office towers
    At Harlem, Richmond, Gastonia, Atlanta, New Orleans;
    That the plants and the roads and the tools of power
    Be ours:
    …
    Let us become instead, you and I,
    One single hand
    That can united rise
    To smash the old dead dogmas of the past—To kill the lies of color
    That keep the rich enthroned
. . .
    Let us get together, say:
    “You are my brother, Black or white.
    You my sister—now—today!”
    . . .
    We did not know that we were brothers.
    Now we know!
    Out of that brotherhood
    Let power grow!
    We did not know
    That we were strong.
    Now we see
    In union lies our strength.
    . . .
    White worker,
    Here is my hand.
    Today,
    We’re Man to Man.

As Hughes wrote the poem, in the spring of 1932, he was preparing to join a group of 22 writers, journalists, and actors to travel through the Soviet Union. He mailed back from the USSR to New Masses his rousing poem “Good Morning Revolution,” which was excerpted in the last issue of CHALLENGE. After writing a number of commissioned pieces for Soviet journals and a short book, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, Hughes returned to the U.S. in the summer of 1933.    It was a pivotal period in U.S. politics, when communists played a big role in the fight against rising fascism, both in Europe and inside the U.S.
For the remainder of the 1930s, Hugues continued writing his radical poetry. He also traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War—the topic of our next CHALLENGE article.  

Biographical information is drawn from Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford, 2002; and Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 3 vols.  Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2001.

WASHINGTON, DC, February 19—As the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion approached, over 2,000 people rallied against the war at the iconic Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Workers from Russia to the U.S. must push back against nationalism and imperialist war.  Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members attended the march with a flyer headlined, “The only good imperialist is a dead imperialist.” The PLP flyer declared that to end bloody wars that turn workers into cannon fodder for profit,  the entire imperialist system has to be destroyed with a communist revolution. All major wars today are battles over profit and empire. The global working class has no dog in these inter-imperialist fights. We say, No War But Class War, to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat—workers power! By distributing over 200 flyers and 100 CHALLENGE newspapers, we reached many earnest anti-war forces who attended, contacting several who will help build an anti-imperialist movement.
Without working-class political leadership, hundreds of workers will see themselves as having the same class interests as bosses, marching generations of workers into the battlefield. The Progressive Labor Party has been fighting to show and build leadership in the working class since the Vietnam War. We will continue pushing multiracial groups of workers to turn the guns against imperialist bosses, especially as  World War III gets closer.
 The rally was organized by Libertarians, an organized group that prides itself on being anti-government and strong individualists. The differences between these groups and PLP were on full display. Members of PLP noted that no non-libertarian groups of workers took the mic. Yet, the rally billed itself as an attempt to unite workers, a necessary initiative that needs to happen amongst workers to drown out left and right-wing media that pits us against each other. Still, another weakness is that none of the speakers – “right” or “left” - advanced an anti-imperialist analysis for it being an anti-war rally.
While Libertarians oppose foreign oil wars and promote the Fortress America vision of  building a small government to protect the interests of the American people, what they really mean is to protect the right of  bosses to exploit workers and keep their profits within their borders.They directly play into the hands of domestically oriented billionaires like Charles Koch who represent the Small Fascist, America First isolationist wing of the U.S. ruling class(see glossary page 6). In contrast, being anti-war for PLP means fighting for communist revolution to end  all imperialist profit and build a collectively run society that benefits all.
At each new level of imperialist war, politicians, union bosses, and reform leaders are used to squelch working class unity, especially multiracial unity between Black, Latin, and white workers. Although politicians Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard railed against U.S. arms for Ukraine, liberals in Biden’s camp have shown their potential to get more nation-focused bosses like Paul and Gabbard in line as World War III drums beat closer. Ron Paul cited concerns about inflation and rising energy and gas prices as a reason for his objection against providing foreign aid to Ukraine last May (New York Times, 5/22). This division highlights an ideological difference between factions of the U.S. ruling class. To better understand the direction imperialist bosses will forge, we classify this division as a split between big and small fascists. Small nationalist fascists like the Koch brothers primarily appeal to a gutter racist, Christian base.  Domestically oriented corporate leaders shame liberals for not opposing Biden’s extensive liberal imperialist backers ready to nuke Russia for another 200 years of economic dominance.
Neither side of these bosses are friends of the working class. Each will terrorize workers, be it in the U.S. or worldwide, to make the most profits. Small fascists like Ron Paul, a former Texas Congressman, are considered the "intellectual godfathers" of the Tea Party movement and headed the Koch brothers' Citizens for Sound Economy, an ideological front for anti-government and pro-privatization companies to sway policies and politicians.
To push these policies, small fascists like Paul and the Koch brothers use gutter racism against Black and Latin workers to fool white and multiracial workers into believing these politics will serve them, too. Paul opposes affirmative action and uses the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to shame liberal politicians for failing to promote racial unity and a “color-blind society.” U.S. representatives, including Dennis Kucinich and Green Party leaders Jill Stein and Cynthia McKinney, help liberal fascist bosses use politicians’ gutter racist public displays to win honest anti-racists to vote for their leadership. To smash racism indefinitely, struggling for internationalist communist leadership from the Progressive Labor Party is our class’ best chance.
The ten demands of the march criticized U.S./NATO roles in aggressively encircling Russia since 1991, mainly since the U.S. supported the coup in Ukraine in 2014, but were entirely uncritical of Russian imperialist actions in Ukraine. A genuine concern for the world’s workers requires supporting workers’ resistance to imperialism in the U.S., NATO, Russia and Ukraine. Rebuilding an internationalist communist movement with the stance that workers across borders have more to gain with worker-led fightback than the imperialist war funded by bosses can make this a reality. By attending this misleading rally, PLP members were able to reach hundreds of people with just such an analysis and will fight to continue to push this line and win workers to fight for it too.

Millions of workers have been devastated by earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio–and most of all, by capitalism. These tragic events were not “natural” disasters or accidents. Corrupt building practices and neglected infrastructure are part and parcel of  a system that’s based on the ruthless drive for maximum profit.
On February 6,  the mass collapse of flimsy buildings in Turkey and Syria killed 50,000 workers and displaced millions. Three days earlier, an oversized Norfolk Southern train with inadequate brakes burst into flames. Fifty cars derailed, spewing toxic chemicals into the air, killing thousands of fish in nearby waterways and potentially contaminating the area’s drinking water (Newsweek, 2/17).
As imperialist rulers hoard resources to prepare for their next global conflict, more corners will be cut at the expense of workers’ health and safety. To get workers to passively accept these disasters and then agree to fight in World War III, the capitalist bosses will need increasing fascist repression.  ‘Lesser evilism,” the idea that some bosses are less racist, less sexist, or less profit-driven than others, will be a literal “dead end.”.  
Under the leadership of Progressive Labor Party, the international working class must turn the guns around and seize state power. Only then can we guarantee that the construction industry, the railroads,  the chemical plants, and the water treatment facilities serve workers’ needs. The only solution is communist revolution!
Turkey’s bosses: profits over workers
Instead of going all out to save and help workers after the earthquakes, the Turkish ruling class went all out to prepare for their regional oil wars with neighboring bosses in Syria and Iraq. Because of decades of racist displacement by the Turkish rulers, the Kurdish and Syrian populations were hardest hit by the disaster.  Predictably, Turkish President Recep Erdogan dodged all responsibility: “What happens, happens, this is part of fate’s plan” (The Guardian, 2/09). Days later, Turkey resumed its bombing of Kurdish forces in Syria and resumed its pursuit of a $20 billion deal  for F-16 fighter jets from the U.S. (Associated Press, 2/20). As the U.S. bosses square off against Russian imperialism in their proxy war in Ukraine, they’re doing all they can to strengthen NATO and consolidate its relationship with the Turkish ruling class. But Turkey has become an unreliable regional ally, as evidenced by its purchase of $2.5 billion in Russian missiles in 2017.
Like all capitalist rulers, Turkey’s bosses have long placed profits over people. To deflect the masses’ rage after a previous earthquake killed over 18,000 people due to faulty construction,  Erdoğan promised tighter building safety codes. But in 2019, he boasted of granting zoning “amnesties” to contractors,  40,000 of them in the hard-hit city of Gaziantep alone (NPA Syria, 2/23). Warnings from disaster specialists were ignored (Birgun, 2/06). After the most recent earthquakes, Erdoğan’s regime moved quickly to funneling relief efforts into the corrupt Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, which is notorious for rewarding patronage jobs to Erdogan supporters.
U.S. infrastructure strategy a train wreck
President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Plan focused on the U.S. infrastructure crisis over  helping workers survive the bosses’ latest economic crisis. As the U.S. rulers drive toward more full-blown fascism, they are calling for workers’ “sacrifice” and funneling more resources toward war preparations.One big problem for the bosses is the lack of discipline within their own class, including the railroad bosses. A core principle of Precision Scheduled Railroading, the operating standard for major railways in the U.S. is to eliminate “unnecessary” costs. In practice, this translates to fewer workers per train line, fewer safety measures, and less inspection time. Fronting for the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, Biden is squeezed between  the railroad bosses’ push for maximum short-term profits and the rulers’ broader need for reliable transportation infrastructure for the coming global war, most likely with  China. Regardless of how the bosses’ internal struggle plays out, workers stand to lose. Last December, cheered on by union misleaders, Biden signed legislation designed to kill a potential strike of over 100,000 railroad workers (CNBC, 12/12/22). Once again, we saw that workers’ allegiance to liberal capitalist politicians leads only to the betrayal of our own class interestsThe only thing that can save us from the rot of capitalism and the bloodbath of imperialist war is to fight back against all bosses and to build PLP.
A related example: Every two days, the bosses’ chemical companies have accidents.  When workers fail to fight back, it’s more profitable for the capitalists to absorb the cost of these accidents than to pay for rigorous safety measures (CNN, 2/22). The bosses at Norfolk Southern are well aware that their accident rate has increased each of the last four years (NS Corp, 1/25). From 2016 to 2021, there were 13,000 violations relating to hazardous materials, or triple the number in the previous five years–a clear reflection of weak federal oversight (NYT 2/17). With over 12,000 chemical facilities across the country, many nearby residents have reason to live in fear. The predominantly white working class population of East Palestine and the surrounding area have been, systematically segregated from their Black and Latin class sisters and brothers. They are chronically unemployed, under-employed, and underpaid. Capitalism’s racist system hurts the entire working class.
For safety, workers need communist revolution
Over and again, we see workers saving workers. In Pakistan, workers risked their lives by wading through toxic, deadly flood waters to distribute vital donations. In Haiti, workers are funding and running community kitchens, and providing clothing and shelter for striking garment workers.. In Turkey and Syria,  thousands of workers and youth are breaking through the border to help other workers after the earthquakes.All of these efforts are courageous and essential.  But ultimately, they will be futile if we fail to understand that we can save ourselves and our class only by smashing capitalism, the root of all these problems.  
Earthquakes will keep happening under communism. But when the working class gains state power, and enforces strict rules for development and building safety, the human toll of these disasters will be far less. Transportation accidents will also occur under communism, though there will surely be fewer of them when workers are empowered to oversee the production and maintenance of these systems. When the means of production are owned by and for the working class, rather than by private individuals and corporations, a strong and resilient infrastructure will be viewed as a social necessity.  By working together and sharing resources, liberated from the divisions of private property and wage slavery, workers will create a safer, freer world. Join us! Build Progressive Labor Party!