Claude was set to graduate and enlist in the army at a time when the U.S., Russia, and China are in a collusion course towards world war. The U.S. war budget in 2021 reached $801 billion (Watson Institute at Brown University) but there are currently over 70,000 young people without jobs in New York City.

WHY are there so few options for working-class students? To kill or be killed in imperialist war. To be killed in the streets. Yes, the shooter pulled the trigger but capitalism planted the gun.

Individual violence in the streets is the byproduct of the toxicity that capitalism creates. Capitalism’s very DNA is the violent exploitation and oppression of the working class by the big gangsters: the rich and their government. The conditions in which working-class students are forced to grow up in are violent—failing schools, dirty waters, slumlord housing, food deserts, sickening hospitals, killer cops, rising homelessness, unsafe transit, inflated prices. All these attacks create a culture of hopelessness and alienation—which the pandemic only made worse—and makes our class more vulnerable to individualism and violence.

For a child who liked learning, he was not treated like one. Claude was pushed out because he wasn’t the type of kid who put his head down. No, he had a beautiful mind of his own:

• When asked to describe himself in a personal narrative unit, he wrote, “I’m funny, fast, and smart. I like to laugh and joke around a lot. I am passionate about living, and who I am today.”

• When taught to use figurative language, he wrote his best friend was “as brave as a shark.” He also loved music and word play.

• In a free-write, he wrote, “The moment I’m most ashamed of is doing online work…I think the school owes me an apology because I get bad attendance for having my camera off.”

• For his persuasive speech, he had chosen to write about how testing negatively affects students and why it should be eliminated.Instead of nurturing a child who knew how to think for himself, the public school system discarded Claude.

One purpose of capitalist education is to recreate all the inequalities of a profit system and teach obedience. It sells the fake idea that if you only work hard enough, you’ll make it so just shut up and do your job. This logic ends up blaming students for a rigged system where some have to fail in order for a very few to win (and even the winners are losers at the end). That is what we call a scam, one that disproportionately cheats Black, Brown, and immigrant students out of an education.

Claude deserves a world where we care about kids, not grades; music programs, not imperialist wars; and relationships, not suspensions. That world is not possible under capitalism.

BROOKLYN, NY, March 11–As part of our monthly series preparing for May Day 2023, a multiracial group of over 30 students, parents, teachers, and workers engaged in a sampling of historic May Day events led by Progressive Labor Party (PLP) since our party resurrected the holiday in the U.S. in 1971.
The common threads of revolutionary communist boldness, creativity, militant class struggle, confidence in the working class, and our ever-evolving line of dictatorship of the proletariat and fighting directly for communism, and our uncompromising antiracism and multiracial workers’ unity, was all in full display over a series of events we studied.

See-Think-Wonder about May Day!
After an icebreaker, we took a gallery walk in groups around the room, looking at images over several decades of May Day marches and demonstrations, each person commenting on what they “see, think, and wonder” on chart paper (see photo). Here are some initial reactions of participants:
     “Seems very militant and organized,”
    “I love the bold/ambitious vision: building a worldwide movement,”
    “They are brave!”
    “What is martial law?”
    “Workers on the streets waving their fists in support,”
    “They must have been so disciplined and organized in the days before cell phones,”
    “How did they plan this?”
    “We need this in every city!”

May Day through the decades
Then, each group sat down to investigate one of the May Day events depicted in the photos—as one comrade observed—reflecting larger struggles PLP had been involved in for quite some time.

1974 – PLP organized a nationwide motorcade (including workers from Canada) that originated in almost a dozen cities, traveling to over a dozen more, organizing scores of rallies and demonstrations around factories, universities, and communities where the Party was actively organizing, and converging in Washington, D.C. for a grand May Day march. Marchers represented 30 U.S. cities and almost 30 different countries.

1975 – As part of a long campaign to smash a rising fascist group called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights) in Boston, PLP mounted a valiant and victorious defense of our May Day march against a physical attack by racist ROAR thugs, backing up our revolutionary communist ideas with disciplined and organized physical force en route to destroying ROAR as an organization forever.

1979 – PLP went on the offensive to rout Nazis from Marquette Park in Chicago, which had outlawed Black/non-white workers from as far back as anyone could remember. Following a military-style antiracist/communist-led raid on Nazi headquarters just a month before, PLP’s bold contingent led hundreds of multiracial workers to actively integrate the park once and for all, breaking the back of Nazi organizing efforts.

1992–Amidst open antiracist rebellion by Black, Latin, and white workers in response to the sham Rodney King verdict (a Black man brutalized by a gang of racist LAPD thugs), the rulers declared martial law in Los Angeles, banning all demonstrations. But PLP didn’t let that stop us from boldly carrying out a May Day caravan through Los Angeles, defying the law, outwitting cops, and engaging hundreds of workers, youth, and National Guard soldiers with communism and militant antiracism.

2002–In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and Patriot Act crackdowns on protests and in the throes of rising fascism and imperialist war in Afghanistan, PLP boldly and creatively planned spirited May Day marches and dinners in multiple locations to confidently put forward our communist line and allow workers to participate in our international holiday.

Group participants actively debated our line and our practice to more deeply understand each event, its time period, and lessons for building the communist movement today.

In our share-out, commenting on the prominent multiracial character of our demonstrations and vital Black and Latin leadership throughout our Party’s history, one young participant made the point that these events obliterate the ruling class’s racist anti-communist lie that the communist movement is “white” or that communism is for “whites only.” One of the large banners highlighted in one of the marches punctuated the point by proclaiming “Racism Hurts All Workers.”

The presence of some high school students with their parents reflected PLP’s dedication to building a student-parent-teacher alliance in the schools.

Confidence in our class
These historic events on the whole also showed the development of PLP’s line through the years, advancing from advocating for “Socialism” in the ‘60s, ’70s, and ‘80s to fighting directly for communism over the last 35 years. Our long experience leading class struggle proved to us that workers are open to communist ideas.

In fact, studying these events, one can see how when we have confidence in the working class—that they would defend their homes from the fascists, that they would take the offensive against racist and sexist divisions, that they would travel across the country for communism, defy the bosses’ laws, even defend our party’s line with revolutionary violence when necessary—we grew as an organization capable of leading the working class to victory.

Indeed, the only way to guarantee the dictatorship of the proletariat (working class) in the long run is to fight directly for communism now.

BIG, BOLD COMMUNIST MAY DAY 2023!
After our share-out, participants shared their ideas for a May Day theme for this year’s NYC march. Some of our ideas included “Capitalism Divides Workers—Fight Back with Revolutionary Communist Optimism!” “Resilient Rebels on the Road to Revolution,” “Getting Ready for Revolt/Revolution,” and “Fight Capitalist Divisions with Communist Internationalism.”

People left the forum inspired! Now we must use our newfound understanding to inspire our friends to learn and participate in this proud communist, anti-racist, working-class heritage, for we—all of us—are making history, and EVERYTHING we do counts.

Bourgeois feminism and the movement of proletarian women are two fundamentally different social movements.”— Clara Zetkin, Die Gleichheit (Equality)

March 8 marks the 114th International Working Women’s Day since its initial celebration by NYC garments workers in 1909.

The struggle for working-class women was inextricably linked to the open call for overthrowing the czarist government. Today, working-class women’s demands are filtered into reforms that benefit bosses and their ruling-class servants. Still working women around the world are at the helm of class struggle, defying the bosses sexist and racist divisions.

From Baltimore to Brooklyn to Los Angeles to Haiti, women are leading the fightback against racist police terror and attacks on healthcare.

From Afghanistan to Russia, working women militantly defied the sexist national bosses and marched against imperialist violence.

The Progressive Labor Party fights to smash capitalism along with its special oppression against women that hurts all workers. Sexism relegates women to reproductive labor, such as cooking, cleaning, and care work, promotes sexist culture that cheapens, degrades, enables the exploitation and abuse of women as sexual objects, and ultimately pits men and women against each other, driving the global epidemic of femicide.

Across the capitalist imperialist world, the leadership and militancy of women, particularly Black women, is essential if we want to break free from the chains of capitalist oppression. Women workers—not “girl bosses”—should run the world alongside the multiracial, multi-gendered international working class.

How it began
International Working Women’s Day (IWWD) began in New York as “Women’s Day,” organized by the Socialist Party of America. After the strike of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union in 1909, women met at the international meeting of communist and socialist leaders, the Second International of 1910. They proposed establishing an International Women’s Day to commemorate their comrades in the U.S. By 1911, more than a million workers were celebrating IWWD.

We can also look to find lessons from the two great communist revolutions. The Soviet revolution was rooted in a firm rejection of sexism, from an early pamphlet by Lenin to struggles for more collective living experiments and job opportunities for women workers. Thirty years later, the Chinese revolution also began with an aggressive struggle to free women workers, most of them in agriculture, from the feudal oppression that had enslaved them. After both of these revolutions, important social and economic roles—including positions as doctors, teachers, and engineers--were opened to women workers as sexist notions of their “natural inferiority” were attacked. Divorce and abortion were made freely available. Relics of feudalism, such as the cruel binding of young women’s feet in China, were enthusiastically abolished.

Although sexism predates capitalism, all social relations under class societies like capitalism were always predicated on the idea of preserving private property and maximizing exploitation. Sexism, the special oppression of women, justifies dividing men and women into specific gender roles. Sexist divisions generate superprofits for the capitalists, oppress and objectify half the working-class population, in an attempt to paralyze any working-class unity.

International Working Women's Day belongs to the working class. Help build one world, one party for all workers by taking the lead in fights against police terror, exploitative landlords, and bosses. Painting banks pink and electing women politicians to a government that maintains the super-exploitation of women workers is far from the answer. Reformist solutions—such as  more "democracy"—will not end sexism. Under capitalism, they will only incentivize individuals to strive for their self-interest, the selfish, me-first thinking enshrined by capitalism.

Only by destroying the wage system can we bring an end to sexism. Only then will the profit system’s dogma--“Every man or woman for themselves”—be replaced by the communist principle, “To each according to need.” Only then will collective behavior overcome the selfish me-first thinking enshrined by capitalism.

A world led by PLP
Progressive Labor Party's deep commitment to seeing a world beyond the shallow gaze of identity politics is one of the tenets of our Party's line. Working class women are leading fights against the bosses’ racist and sexist attacks worldwide, including the recent nurse strike in New York City, protests against sexist political violence in Haiti, and battling sexist attacks in Iran against women who refuse to wear hijabs. Working women's power will be self-evident in a communist world, as they will be giving leadership in the fight against sexism. In a world led by millions of communists in the PLP, we have the basis for living an egalitarian life free from capitalist chains.

It is PLP’s obligation to expose and explain that women's liberation doesn’t come from voting, or electing women politicians to oppress us, or expanding the ranks of women CEOs to exploit us. J
For a deeper look at sexism, see PL magazine article “ONLY COMMUNIST REVOLUTION CAN END SEXISM” at www.plp.org/plmagazine