In late July, hundreds of courageous workers responded to the latest crisis of capitalism by storming United Nations outposts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Workers’ lives everywhere have been made even more precarious by the imperialist bosses’ war in Ukraine, which has triggered astronomical hikes in the costs of fertilizer, food, and fuel. In recent months in the DRC,  an additional million people have fallen below the poverty line (ebrary.ifpri.org). These workers also face ever-mounting terror from mineral-hungry local gangs, government thugs, and Chinese imperialist mining companies. They declared to the world they’d had enough by raiding and setting fire to buildings in three cities that house MONUSCO, the UN’s “stabilization” mission—which has done nothing to make the DRC more stable since it entered the country in 1999. The UN “peacekeepers” responded with live fire that killed more than 30 demonstrators (msn.com, 8/2).
     Much like the storming in Sri Lanka two weeks earlier, the uprising in the DRC reflects the disgust of workers everywhere with the bosses’ political repression, bottomless greed, and vicious exploitation. Capitalism can never provide stability or peace for the international working class. Only communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party, can solve the never-ending capitalist crisis of inflation, depressions, and inter-imperialist wars for profit. Only a communist world can stamp out racism, sexism, and the rulers’ state terror.

United Nations “aid” sham
Since the end of World War II, a period of global domination by U.S. imperialism, the United Nations has proven at best ineffective and at worst complicit in making horrific conditions worse for our class. Throughout the world, workers have developed a deep hatred of the UN armed criminals who protect U.S.-aligned imperialist profiteers at the expense of workers’ lives and safety.  After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, racist military forces in MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti) raped and terrorized workers. Then-president Bill Clinton and the local crooks in the Haitian ruling class skimmed millions from “aid” projects at the height of a cholera outbreak. In Indonesia, UN-backed gold-mining operations by U.S. and Japanese capitalists used hundreds of tons of toxic mercury that continues to cause birth defects to this day. Today, the UN’s largest military presence, 16,000 uniformed personnel, is stationed in the DRC—not to stop a long-running conflict between warring groups of local bosses, but to help secure the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, an essential ingredient for electric vehicle batteries, computers, and cell phones.
     The deadly battle between rebel guerrilla groups like M23 and various ruling-class factions is about how to best control the super-exploitation of masses of workers in extracting valuable resources. The fury of workers against MONUSCO was manipulated by the DRC Senate president, Modeste Bahati Lukwebo, who has personally welcomed Chinese investors in mining and the beef industry with open arms (All Africa, 12/21/2021; China Mining Association, 3/14).  Ten days before the anti-UN uprising, he led a rally to attack MUNESCO’s failure to pacify M23—and to win his base over to join the Congolese national army, the FARDC, which represents DRC ruling-class interests (The Conversation, 7/28). This is just the latest chapter in a long history of capitalist infighting--instigated by bosses in Rwanda and Uganda as well as in the U.S., Russia, and China—that have made the DRC a tinderbox for decades.

Minerals and mass murder
The DRC has an estimated $24 trillion in untapped deposits of cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, zinc, tin, and potash. The Congo and its riches have played a major role in the modern history of imperialism, from the European imperialist competition of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the U.S. imperial expansion after World War II. In The African Roots of War (1915), the great Black historian W.E.B. Du Bois noted that the scramble for natural resources and cheap labor in Africa in the 1880s was a big part of the tensions that finally erupted in World War I. In a relentless hunt for ivory, rubber, and diamonds, King Leopold of Belgium led the imperialist scramble that created the “Congo Free State”—and a genocide of 10 million deaths.
     During World War II, the U.S. ruling class outmaneuvered Nazi Germany in the Congo to seize control of the world’s top uranium deposit and force workers to labor in radioactive mines. The raw materials from this deadly toil were used in the atomic bombs dropped on children, women, and men in Japan.  In 1961, the U.S.-Soviet race for uranium and copper led the CIA—under an apparent directive from President Dwight Eisenhower (New York Times, 8/2/1981)—to plot the assassination of pro-Soviet Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and consolidate the rule of the pro-U.S. Mobutu Sese Seko (Project Syndicate, 7/29). Today, as the U.S. and Russia remain locked in battle in Ukraine, the Chinese bosses are making inroads from Egypt to the DRC to the Horn of Africa. All three imperialist powers are vying for regional support in an increasingly unstable world order. The inevitable outcome is World War III.

Chinese rulers: thieves and exploiters  
Chinese imperialism is no less dangerous or exploitative for workers across Africa. From 2000 to 2018, the DRC’s capitalist rulers went to China for more than 50 loans, totaling $2.4 billion, to fund power, transport, and mining projects (Ventures Africa, 7/25). As these local bosses failed to repay their loans on time, Chinese companies seized the controlling shares of producing mines.
     While the Chinese imperialists can benefit regardless of which local faction comes out on top, a recent agreement between bosses from the DRC and Uganda for roads threatens to undercut the profits of Rwandan bosses. This is the detonator that reactivated both state-sanctioned and proxy militias like M23 in recent months. MONUSCO, the largest peacekeeping operation in the world, has been useless in containing this two-sided terror, leaving workers with no good choice among misleaders (Deutche Welle, 7/28). As workers stormed multiple MONUSCO offices, the most telling response of the Chinese imperialists was to award its own unit of UN peacekeepers with UN Peace Medals for doing their part in maintaining the status quo (China Military Online, 7/29).

East African comrades: fight for communism!
In recent weeks, in response to years of capitalist super-exploitation, workers across sub-Saharan Africa have been protesting for double-digit wage increases. Their struggle for a decent life has grown even harder with the rising cost of living from the bosses’ war in Ukraine.  But just as local politicians in the DRC misled workers into attacking just the United Nations and not the entire capitalist class, union misleaders from Nigeria to South Africa to Uganda have kept workers in a dead-end reform struggle for higher wages instead of fighting to annihilate all capitalist production.  In East Africa, a group of workers celebrating May Day pointed out the futile nature of all reforms and stressed the need for more workers to join Progressive Labor Party as the only way forward for our class (see CHALLENGE, 8/3). PLP fights to build a mass international base within the working class. We fight to replace the profit-hungry system of capitalism with a society based on our needs as workers. That’s communism. Join Us!

THE BRONX, NY, August 3—The racist, capitalist system struck again on July 21, this time robbing the working class of 18-years-young Latin teen Raymond Chaluisant. Dion Middleton, an off-duty Black kkkop shot Raymond in the face for playing with a toy water gun. The murderer then fled the scene, leaving Raymond dead in a pool of his blood. A system that breeds racist murders of our class does not deserve to exist. Seek justice for Raymond by smashing racism with Progressive Labor Party. 

Racist system strikes again
Members of PLP visited Raymond’s family and friends shortly after the murder. We brought CHALLENGE to show support and draw a connection between what the family has endured and the experiences of other families terrorized by the criminal injustice system. These families include the family of Shantel Davis in Brooklyn who was also  murdered by Black kkkop detective Phil Atkins in 2012 and the Rodwell-Spivey family who have been brutalized by police and face legal attacks in Newark. We also discussed the history of racist police murder in the Bronx specifically, including Ramarley Graham’s murder in 2012.
     Raymond’s murder is another example of a senseless murder at the hands of a brutally racist system. Middleton, a cop in the Department of Corrections, has been trained to view Black and Latin children and workers as criminals that he can kill. PLP charges him and the whole system with genocide. It does not matter if the cop is Black or Latin if they are still carrying out racism. Having a city with a Black mayor, Black Attorney General, and a multiracial police force doesn’t change the fact that racist terror is the name of the game.

Family, friends and PLP confront fascist court system
PLP joined Raymond’s family and friends at the courts, where racist rule was on full display. Every time Middleton was brought into the courtroom, cops in uniform packed the room. Meanwhile, the judge told Raymond’s supporters that anyone who made a disturbance would be asked to leave, that we must remain silent, and that our movements would be read as a threat so remain seated until told otherwise. The family had pictures and protest signs that they were prohibited from bringing  inside. The racist intimidation, along with social control that demands respect for an utterly disrespectful system, points to who the government serves and protects—the capitalist class.
     For capitalists, public murder is a time-tested tool of social control and discipline of the working class. It is designed to frighten other workers into submission and stop rebellions before they start. In the U.S., the fugitive slave catchers are the ancestors of the police system. Yesterday's ku klux klan is today’s klan in blue.

Justice = no more racist murders
Middleton was indicted for second degree murder, first-degree manslaughter, and second-degree manslaughter. He has been suspended without pay, but he made $221,684 last year (New York Times, 7/22). Regardless of whether or not Middleton ends up being convicted, there is no justice in a racist system that makes such murders a daily occurance. Nonetheless, we will stand by the family at the next court appearance (which is scheduled for August 22) and never forget what happened to Raymond.
     It is possible that the racist city government, whose officers regularly criminalize and brutalize Black and Latin workers and youth, may scapegoat Middleton for the murder since he fled the scene of the crime.
     A city commissioner claimed his actions were “in no way a reflection of the [corrections and police] officers'' despite the racist and sexist jail practices that have left a trail of dead bodies in NYC. These include our working-class siblings Kyam Livingston, Layleen Polanco, and too many names.

KKKops and kkkourts blame the victim
The NYPD quickly came to Middleton’s aid by blaming Raymond for having a gel-bead water toy gun they considered an “air rifle” and illegal. The cops announced the same day on Twitter that anyone with such a water gun would be considered a criminal.
The kops, kourts, and klan officers’ union would love for us to ignore that Raymond’s water toy gun found with his body was white and orange. The racists also want us to ignore the lack of evidence that he even used the water gun on Murderer Middleton. The bosses’ media has also repeatedly blamed a TikTok trend for Raymond’s death, misleading workers to blame youth, rather than the killer kops for his death.
     As Raymond’s sister Jiraida pointed out, local Black and Latin youth were “just having fun…The whole neighborhood was having a water gun fight. It was 90 degrees.” In a capitalist system that super-exploits Black and Latin workers, criminalizes the behavior of our children, and brutalizes the sections of the working class with the least to lose—even kids having fun is dangerous under capitalism. A system that criminalizes and KILLS youth for having fun does not deserve to exist.

Fight for communism
This is why PLP fights for communism, a system run for and by the whole working class, where racism and sexism will be the things that are considered illegal. True justice will mean not only jailing murderers like Middleton but ensuring that nothing like this ever happens again. We know this will not happen tomorrow, but we can fight and win a communist future where it is a reality.

 Epifanio Camacho, a courageous and militant farmworker, loyal member of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), and lifetime fighter for the international working class, died on July 4 at the age of 98. As an early leader of the United Farm Workers (UFW), Epifanio organized a strike of rose grafters in the San Joaquin Valley in 1965. He went on to play a central role in the historic strikes against the grape vineyard bosses in the late 1960s.
     In the mid-1970s, Epifanio was purged from the UFW by the class traitor and sellout Cesar Chavez. Their split was inevitable. Chavez was a pacifist who made a religion out of non-violence. He allied with reformist politicians like Robert F. Kennedy and racist AFL-CIO boss George Meany, and relied on boycotts and the bosses’ legal machinery. He was a nationalist who attacked undocumented workers and turned them in to be deported. By contrast, Epifanio believed in the unity of the entire working class, and that no boycott could rival the power of a strike at the point of production. He was fearless in captaining a picket line, in fighting strikebreaking scabs and the Teamster thugs sent to protect them. He sabotaged countless police cars with his secret weapon: children’s toy jacks, strewn across roads with their pointed side up to puncture the cops’ tires. He was arrested more times than he could count. His sister and brother workers knew they could count on him to put their class interests first.
      Even before Epifanio joined PLP , in 1974, Chavez had accused him of being a communist—a label he wore proudly for the rest of his life. He played an instrumental role in building the Party among farmworkers in California and, by extension, in Mexico. Though Epifanio had no formal education, he was a brilliant thinker, a true worker intellectual who made enormous contributions as both a writer of leaflets and a distributor of CHALLENGE. (In the space of 11 months in 1982, his network sold more than 20,000 newspapers, with each sale carefully recorded.) While the pacifist misleader Cesar Chavez may be featured in the capitalist history books, it is Epifanio Camacho who made a historic contribution to the international communist movement—who did his part to change the world.
     Here are some excerpts from Epifanio’s talk on base building at a PLP summer project in 2008 in Delano, California:

"After I started organizing other workers, one day I was arrested and taken to jail, and then to the bosses’ court. On that day, the role of the bosses’ state became clear. On one side there were the rich bosses with their legal system and other means of oppression.
    "And on the other side there was the working class. And the day that I walked out of the courthouse, I realized that the workers would sooner or later lose every battle against the bosses unless we organize a  revolution against the capitalist state.
    " I spent five years next to [Cesar Chavez] as a UFW leader. He was scared all the time, and all the workers saw it and knew it. Most workers met secretly and took their own initiative. For example, we decided that no one in our community should rent a house to a scab. When this happened, their houses were burnt down!
    "Racists organized by the Teamsters Union started showing up to pickets with baseball bats. The UFW was urging everyone to kneel in the face of violence. The bosses’ television only showed the pickets held by the workers won to pacifism, being beaten and bloodied while they were kneeling. The racists bragged they were coming for us next. We had a big meeting and I said to the workers, ‘We’ll be waiting for them! Tomorrow not even a housewife should come to the picket without a weapon.’ On the morning of the battle, all the women were showing off how carefully they’d hidden their blades! We were ready for them in one day, and we met violence with violence. To this day, over 30 years later, the Teamsters never returned to Delano. Not long after the fight, the local government disbanded the local police and left the area to the state troopers.
    "What had changed for me was during that time I met the PLP. Our struggle continued from ‘below,’ from the ranks of the workers. Most of the workers were used to fighting and the most militant of us formed a new working-class leadership. What kept this leadership together now were revolutionary ideas. The UFW was afraid of the PLP, and afraid of the ideas in our newspaper, CHALLENGE. Chavez publicly prohibited any UFW member from buying CHALLENGE, and anyone caught reading it was threatened with immediate expulsion.
     “We were in a tough spot. We knew everyone, but they feared being thrown out of the UFW. Now, I am a communist. I learned how to write communist leaflets for the workers. We had many meetings discussing how to reach the workers, and we started reaching them. Workers began joining PLP. Before long, the workers started placing communist ideas above the reformism of the UFW and Chavez.
     "Over time our base grew, and we got up to selling 500 CHALLENGEs a week. Can you imagine the sight of hundreds of workers reading CHALLENGE at lunchtime? Imagine! Well, that’s what happened. Our whole community was affected by communist ideas. An entire family would share one paper. The workers’ children organized PLP clubs in the high school. Right here in my home we had many PLP dances and events. We would have red flags everywhere. Workers would let their children go to our events because we all knew each other, and they trusted my security abilities.   
     "One thing PLP does that you never saw from Chavez or the UFW was criticism and self-criticism. Every time we came out of a meeting, I felt like I’d taken a shower. And the work always improved. And it was easier to organize this way.
     "In PLP we’re building a base for communist revolution. You can’t say it’s easy….Sometimes we’re not aware of how little things impact the future. Years ago, two coworkers from Oaxaca joined the Party. Then they got deported and built the Party in Oaxaca. Later they became inactive, but along the way recruited other people to the Party. Just yesterday I met two young comrades participating in this Summer Project from Oaxaca who are very strong. They joined as a direct result of those first two! Now our work there is getting strong. Everything we do counts.
      "What’s the key to organizing? How do you start when you’re all alone? Wherever you work, you always start by finding the worker who’s most discontented with the boss…Listen carefully to what they say. Use their discontent as an opportunity to explain why things are this way. Eat with them every day, or as often as you can.
     "Beyond that, there’s no formula. You should be bold and lead by example. Go to the bathrooms when no one’s around and leave literature. Go to the parking lot and put leaflets on every car window or in the windshield wipers, including your own. Then, on your break, feel them out. If they support our ideas, show them it was you! Now they’re contacts…You’ll find out that when things really get going, even occasional readers and friends who haven’t appeared to show much interest will step up and risk their lives for us. You’ll see. It all starts with you! You need the initiative to find a way to get communist ideas around.
     "I like talking to the younger comrades because the potential is in the youth. I’ve never been to school, but I’ve always wanted to go because I love to learn. All workers want to learn. Inside of all of us is a struggle of opposites, between ignorance and wanting to learn more. If your education is inadequate in school because of racism, sexism, and nationalism, you must organize against it. Learn as much as you can but remember that everything you learn, you must put at the service of the working class."

__________________________

PLP-Mexico remembers Epifanio
The PLP Collective in Mexico is saddened by the death of our comrade Camacho. His living example, his teachings, and his commitment and confidence in the international working class were proof of the power of communist ideas and actions when workers make them their own. We will honor his memory fighting tirelessly against this criminal capitalist system. In what follows, two comrades detail their experiences with comrade Epifanio.
     From Mexico City: I met Epifanio when I first joined PLP in 1975, while visiting Rodrigo, his comrade-in-arms in the fields. Rodrigo was bedridden, but eager to learn. He asked Epifanio, “Who was Lenin?” Epifanio explained how the Bolsheviks led rural and urban workers to take power. The same day, we carried a bundle of CHALLENGE newspapers  to Cortez, another one of his comrades, who right away asked, “Are you sure this is the right way? My friends have many questions about the paper.” Epifanio reassured him, “Don’t be afraid, we have nothing to lose, and we could win! We need to be daring. Next time we will meet with your friends to clarify any doubts.” On other occasions when we went to distribute the paper house to house, workers kept asking for the “supplement”—a one-page flyer using the simple language of the fieldworkers, where Epifanio explained communism, nationalism, racism, and imperialism. Truth be told, workers demanded that flyer. Through the distribution of CHALLENGE and the flyers in the fieldworkers’ communities, and in the fields where Epifanio lived and worked, this process led to a mass understanding of communist ideas.
     Epifanio challenged the owners, the police,  la migra, the liberal politicians, the religious leaders, and all sorts of capitalist vermin. An undocumented worker who knew him once told me, “Many undocumented fieldworkers knew that Epifanio’s house was a sanctuary for them.” In reality, it was so for all those ready to fight for communism.
     Epifanio’s unassuming character, determination, and deep confidence in the workers have been lessons for life. To remember Epifanio Camacho, long live communism!
    From Oaxaca, Mexico: I met Epifanio when I was an undocumented worker in Delano, California. Comrade Camacho was a communist teacher for us campesinos, because he was always looking for the best ways for us to understand dialectical materialism in our study groups. He and Luis Ventura were responsible for bringing the revolutionary communist ideas of PLP to Oaxaca, which today inform our work. We remember his commitment to promoting the party line in a massive way in Delano and McFarland, and the insight he developed to transcend the reformist politics of Cesar Chavez and embrace communist revolutionary ideas. ¡Hasta siempre camarada Epifanio!

CHICAGO, July 22– A multiracial, intergenerational group of around 30 Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends gathered for a forum today as a means to educate and organize against capitalism’s worsening racist and sexist attacks on workers’ reproductive and family health. In the wake of the historically racist and sexist Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, building the Party and fighting for international communist revolution remains the only real path forward for liberation and optimal health for our class.
     As capitalism globally spirals deeper into crisis, the bosses’ need to resort to open fascism to salvage their profit system becomes more acute. Different factions of the capitalist ruling class seek to mobilize workers around the issue of abortion, but to follow their leadership guarantees only more misery, murder, and imperialist war.
     In a movement dominated by pro-capitalist ideals of individualism, voting, and “autonomy,” the international working class must instead choose collectivity and the power of a worker-run communist state as the solution. To be a part of PLP is to be the fighting alternative to build an antisexist and antiracist world!

Communist panel highlights real reproductive justice
The first half of the forum was a panel presentation from three PLP members. The first panelist, a veteran healthcare worker, gave a condensed history of centuries of racist and sexist attacks on workers’ health under capitalism in the U.S. She detailed how getting medical treatments such as abortion has always been determined by race and class, with Black, Latin, and Asian and white workers suffering from little to no access. She shared a heart-wrenching personal story as a young worker who witnessed an involuntary surgery on a Black woman, a consequence of racist medical violence.
     The second panelist gave an analysis of the political motives of the different wings of the U.S. ruling class regarding their approach to abortions and reproductive health. Of course the domestically-oriented, church-supported Small Fascist wing (see Glossary, page 6) of the U.S. bosses obviously deserve to be destroyed for their assault on workers’ health. But,  it is the openly-liberal, internationally-oriented, imperialist Big Fascist wing who in fact are more sinister and deadly. The panelist shredded these Big Fascists for not disregarding abortion rights over decades, but for their present and future plans to win our class over to imperialist war by offering some minor reforms.
     The final panelist concluded by pointing the communist way forward. She shared her own progression from chanting “My body, my choice” to her eventual conclusion that the individual “choices” that we make as workers cannot be separated from the overall political and socioeconomic structure of society. Since the capitalists dominate the economic and political landscape, their rotten influence infects all dimensions of our lives.
     She argued that we need to see ourselves as part of the entire working class and fight for collective solutions. She concluded that only a worker-run communist state could guarantee worker rights, safety, and health, such as when the Soviet Union became the first place on earth to legalize abortion in 1922.

“Fighting for communism is the best way I know to fight back”
After the conclusion of the panel, the forum transitioned to an engaging open discussion. Many comments and questions were made about the struggle between reform and revolution, individualism versus collectivism, and voting versus direct workers’ action.
One PLP member asked the panel about alternative actions for workers and the Party to take in the immediate sense, since voting has always been shown to be a dead end for our class. A panelist responded with the example of mostly women workers in Mexico in recent years, militantly squaring off and battling with riot police in different state capitols after the bosses there tried to roll back abortion rights. Because they organized in a mass way to confront the attack head on, the bosses were forced to retreat.
     Another forum participant stressed the importance of women workers educating others of the dangers of sexism and winning more people to be advocates on behalf of women’s wellbeing. One of the PLP panelists agreed, but advanced the argument further that as workers we need to be fighting to take state power away from the capitalist bosses. Similar to the points made during the presentation, only by fighting for working-class power everywhere can we create lasting solutions to our collective needs.
     Perhaps the most inspirational moment of the evening came from the veteran panelist when she shared what brought her back actively into the Party after some time away: “I just couldn’t keep away, based on what I know. Fighting for communism is the best way I know to fight back.”

Always fighting for communism
As we fight shoulder-to-shoulder alongside workers for expanded reproductive health access, childcare, and a thousand other reform struggles, we must never shy away from connecting these fights to capitalism. The working class continuously demonstrates an openness to communist politics when we advance them boldly and consistently. This forum was just one of the many ways to advance communist revolution in a mass way and motivate ourselves to fight back. Onward to more class struggle.