July 3, 2024, Philadelphia, PA—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends joined other members of the National Education Association (NEA), for their annual convention. On the agenda were several new business items (NBIs) related to Palestine that education workers have been fighting for including specifically teaching about the Nakba and genocide, undoing the NEA's endorsement of Genocide Joe Biden for president, building solidarity between education workers and anti-genocide protesters, and calling for more funding for education instead of war. 

We have been struggling against war budgets in one district where they were underfunded by $55 million but managed to contribute more than $400 million for nuclear weapons to weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Then the district laid off teachers, closed its virtual academy, and cut back pre-kindergarten programs. Just another example of the priorities of capitalism to fund profit and imperialist wars over educating working class children. PLP linked their local struggles to the struggle against capitalism which can only be destroyed by organizing workers for a communist revolution.

Rally against genocide

To kick-off the convention, attendees organized a rally and march in support of the NBIs and against the genocide in Palestine. The rally was inspirational and energetic. The multiracial group of educators held signs, flags and wore keffiyehs in support of the proposed NBIs. Zionists staged a counter-rally a mere 50 feet from us, where they were (of course) protected by the police. At our rally, each NBI proposer came to the microphone to explain the rationale and importance of their proposal to cheers and applause. Jewish teachers spoke passionately about their support for the end of the genocide. A PLP member spoke about attempting to pass a ceasefire resolution in their local union that was ruled “out of order”(CHALLENGE,3/16). When they denounced capitalism and made the call for the working class to break free and create a new life, where we would all get what we need, the crowd applauded and shouted words of support. 

As the Zionist counter protests became louder, the speaker yelled at them to shut up! Our group showed that we were unafraid and ready to fight back. They ended the speech with the chant “Arab, Jewish, Black, white, Latin, and Asian - to free Palestine and all nations we must unite!” Other PLP members distributed about 30 CHALLENGES headlined “Communism is Liberation.” A leaflet also detailed the demands of teachers who are fighting back against false charges of antisemitism because of their support for Palestine and criticism of the U.S. and Israel's role in the genocide.

After a few more teachers spoke, it was time to march! The multiracial, multi-generational group of educators marched enthusiastically through the streets of Philadelphia chanting, “Not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel's crimes!” and “Not another penny, not another quarter, no more money for Israel's slaughter.” At the park, we engaged in more chants and then heard from teachers who have been experiencing repercussions for speaking out against the war. One teacher's students created a podcast to discuss the genocide in Gaza and, despite being approved by the administration, another teacher leaked the students’ photos and address to dangerous Zionist groups. Two more teachers talked about their experiences of being placed on administrative leave for speaking or posting in support of Palestine and against the ruling class of Israel and the IDF.

Convention canceled

Fortunately, the conference did not go on as planned; it was shut down  by the workers who make the NEA, and the imperialist system it defends run, so none of the NBIs were debated. Conferences like these provide an opportunity to advocate for our class siblings in Palestine, and also to meet and befriend more educators who are interested in good causes and with whom we can discuss alternatives to capitalism.

We need to continue to bring our message of antiracist, working-class solidarity and class war against the capitalists. A united working class is an unstoppable force that can truly make a change. Joining the PLP is the way to create worker unity and topple capitalism once and for all! Power to the working class! Join us!

This August marks the 79th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history when the U.S. ruling class—the only rulers to ever use nuclear bombs—dropped atomic bombs on two civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This obliterated a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in a matter of seconds, injured hundreds of thousands more, and left future generations with everlasting genetic defects.

The racist U.S. rulers launched this heinous attack as a political warning to the then-socialist Soviet Union, signaling U.S. imperialism’s launching of the Cold War. Capitalists will stop at nothing when their domination is at stake. This is the natural outcome of a system rooted in the violence of exploitation. 

Today capitalist violence is worldwide and growing. Workers are being slaughtered in profiteering wars from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine. And the imperialist powers are preparing for world war to redivide the world for plunder. The working class instead needs to turn their guns on the imperialist bosses. Then we can build a world based on human need. For that, we need millions worldwide to organize under an international communist party, Progressive Labor Party (PLP,) to turn the next capitalist atrocity and war into a class war for communism.

The lies and the reality

For over seven decades, U.S. rulers have tried to justify the A-bomb attacks by maintaining they were needed to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion and a million U.S. casualties. In reality, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before Hiroshima:

 • According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a board of military and civilian experts established by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

   • A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, later the U.S. National Security Adviser, “confessed that he had pulled those numbers out of the air to justify the bombings” (LA Times, 8/5/2005).

   • By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”

   • General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, considered the A-bombs “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (James Clayton, The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II).

A genocide aimed at the USSR

If overwhelming evidence shows that the genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was militarily unnecessary, and that Japan was on the verge of unconditional surrender, why did President Harry Truman order the A-bombs dropped?

The true purpose was to warn the then-socialist Soviet Union that the U.S. had a new and devastating weapon, and was ready to use it against any threat to the U.S. imperialists’ world dominance. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the beginning of the Cold War between capitalists in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Some supporting evidence:

• With the Soviet Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier, to play what Stimson referred to as a “mastercard”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson diary).

• In an implicit indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, Leo Szilard, creator of the the idea of a nuclear fission reactor said, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”

The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the U.S. ruling class will stop at nothing to preserve its state power and profit. Which means the next world war is only a matter of time. It remains for the international working class to mete out justice to the most murderous criminals the world has ever known.

This article is reprinted from the September 28, 2016 issue of CHALLENGE. Although September 9, 1971, marks the beginning of the Attica Prison Rebellion, this month we commemorate Black August, a holiday honoring the bravery and sacrifice of the Attica prisoners, as well as the bold and militant leadership of Black workers from the prison galleys to the streets around the world, fighting against the imperialist system and its violently racist policies.

Today, the U.S. imprisons more workers than any other country in the world. More than 2 million-primarily working-class blacks-are incarcerated. This is a 500% increase since 1973, equivalent to 5% of the world’s population (American Civil Liberties Union). This is no accident; mass incarceration is one of the racist tools used by the bosses to solve the crisis of their declining system. The rulers use prisons to extract racist super-profits from the near enslavement of black workers, while maintaining a surplus of marginalized unemployed workers whom they deprive of benefits and jobs. More importantly, the rulers use prisons as a means of crushing black worker revolutionary potential and the unity of the working class.

The exponential growth of mass incarceration was the result of the U.S. rulers’ manufactured war on drugs, which they saw as their solution to the Black worker-led rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of racist murders of workers in prisons - from Rikers Island in New York to the Elmore County jail in Alabama - the Attica jail rebellion remains tragically relevant. Liberal rulers are trying to scare working people into voting Democratic with the prospect of a Trump presidency and Project 2025. The mass incarceration policies they warn are coming with Project 2025 are already here, thanks to a long list of Democrats, including Big Fascists Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Then as now black workers remain central to working-class liberation as the key fighting force for communist revolution.

Not only are conditions worse today than they were during Attica,… Attica once again…. is synonymous with prisoner resistance.
—Heather Ann Thompson, history professor at the University of Michigan, (Jacobin, 9/9)

Fifty-three  years ago, Black imprisoned workers led their white and Latin counterparts in a rebellion against the racist deplorable conditions at Attica prison in northwestern New York State. Today prisoners nationwide are organizing once again. Capitalism is a never-ending disaster. For workers, students and prisoners worldwide only communism is a solution: a world without racism, sexism or imperialist wars.
Concentration camp

In September of 1971, the conditions at Attica prison in the northwest corner of New York State were brutal. Inmates suffered from starving bellies, untreated infections, falling teeth, lack of toilet paper, and showers only once a week often without any soap (Jacobin, 9/9). With about 2,300 inmates, Attica was overcrowded to almost twice its capacity. The prisoner population was 54 percent Black, 9 percent Puerto Rican and 37 percent white. All 383 guards were white.

So the prisoners organized. They read Marx and Frantz Fanon. They formed the Attica Liberation Faction uniting different political groupings. They had educational rap sessions in the prison yard. They put together demands for improved conditions and sent them to state, city and prison officials. All demands for change by the prisoners were ignored.

Rebellion

After a prisoner fought back against a brutal guard, the prison bosses ordered a crackdown that led to a violent fight. The prison guard was beaten and eventually died. But a small group of more politicized prisoners immediately changed it into an organized rebellion. Meetings were held, demands were discussed and formulated, and leaders were chosen. A central part of the prison called Times Square was fortified. They chose a negotiation committee. They figured out how to feed 1,300 people and obtained medical care for those most in need.

Rockefeller’s fascist savagery

But New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and various authorities were not interested in negotiations. They had a two-pronged racist strategy: spread vicious lies about the rebellious prisoners and viciously attack them as soon as possible. Both the media and various officials spread racist lies about supposed atrocities committed by the rebels, including slitting the throats of the hostages. The attack by the state involved hundreds of state cops, National Guardsmen, and both current and former prison guards. They were handed weapons from a supply truck without regard to serial numbers and they had their own personal weapons.

Road to mass incarceration

The attack started with a gas that incapacitated the rebelling prisoners. This was followed by fifteen minutes of indiscriminate shooting that slaughtered 29 prisoners and 9 guards. After the prison was totally secured, four more prisoners-leaders of the rebellion- were hunted down and killed. That was followed by vicious beatings, torture and no medical care. Heather Ann Thompson: “In the aftermath is when the real brutality begins. The doctors are trying to help prisoners, while guards are dumping them off of stretchers, kicking them, urinating into wounds, making the most horrific scene unfold.” (Democracy Now, 7/9).

President Richard “Nixon repeatedly assured Rockefeller he did the right thing, because Attica was “the Blacks,” and part of a nationwide conspiracy by the communists and Black radicals to undermine [U.S.]” (truth-out, 9/9). Within a year, Rockefeller enacted a law that formed the seeds of the “war on drugs” (racist war on workers) operation.

Attica scared the bosses, and they reacted with more terrorization of the Black and Latin working class. In 1970, the year before Attica, there were nearly 200,000 people in prison. By 2015, that number was 2.3 million people, a 400 percent increase in the rate of incarceration (Five-Thirty-Eight, 2/12/16).

Attica is a symbol of working-class rebellion and viciously racist aftermath. Attica today means fightback against racist state terror.
Prisons can be a site of struggle and fightback. At the Kinross Correctional Facility in Michigan 400 prisoners protested today to commemorate Attica. And more are organizing again against deplorable prison conditions throughout the country. Nationwide protests are growing against racism and sexism. More than ever, we need to fight for communism to end these capitalist atrocities once and for all.

Chiapas: migrant caravan needs antiracist solidarity

A new multinational caravan of migrants has just left Chiapas to travel through Mexican territory and reach the border with the United States to see if they can cross. They are humble, hard working people, women and children full of dust and sweat, thirsty and hungry, many of them possibly sick, but all with  the same goal, to reach U.S. territory to have a better life and get a job to help the families they leave behind.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden signs an executive order to deport on the spot those who do not meet the requirements for asylum and other measures comparable to that of former President Donald Trump, whom he vehemently criticized when, during his term, he took horrible measures against migrants, especially those coming from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.                         

We are at a point within the territory, with the arrival of hundreds of migrants who entered during this period  that most of them are in limbo, hundreds of them in shelters, others on the streets homeless without work and without a permit to work, so what do we do? What do our community organizations in which we are involved do to help our immigrant brothers and sisters?  There is a great silence. No one says anything; there are no actions, no calls for protest actions in favor of our brothers who are fleeing their countries, hoping to have a better future in the so-called land of liberty and freedom.

A land in which they are super-exploited and where bosses use lies that migrants steal jobs from Black and Latin who are already here. In this period in which they are scapegoating migrants to win electoral votes. Trump is threatening to carry out mass deportations and liberals quietly promise the same.

All this leads us to think and to assure that neither one party nor the other, that there is no lesser evil candidate. Regardless of who wins, it is a lose-lose  situation for our class siblings who are fleeing from the countries, the vast majority of which were former colonies, plundered and exploited by the colonizers. After centuries of slavery and exploitation, these countries are still suffering the horror of capitalism, imperialism and fascism that is exported from the developed capitalist countries,whose working class is also suffering the horror of exploitation and fascism of the bosses, who repress any sign of uprising and protests to ensure their political and economic interests.    

Therefore the only way to resolve this horror, is to organize and fight within community organizations, industries and wherever our Party can organize and grow, until we become a mass party, ready to lead the international working class to make  communist revolution   and establish workers’ power which will liquidate once and for all the borders that separate us, resolve all the needs of the working class and build a better world for all and where we will give the final burial to capitalism and  imperialism.
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Oppose “beautiful” (profitable) Bloomington

On July 17th, four comrades visited the Southside camps in Bloomington, Indiana. Located along the B-Line trail, these camps demonstrate the indomitable spirit of the most oppressed citizens in Bloomington. Community thrives even while this system does its utmost to destroy the spirit of the people. While the city claims to be the most progressive and liberal town in Southern Indiana, we see the true nature of Mayor KKKerry Thomson and the kkkops. Bloomington relies on the influx of 40,000 students to Indiana State University-Bloomington, marketed as the “most beautiful campus in the world” to make its profits. As such, the city must follow suit and make Bloomington as a whole “beautiful”. But, we know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the only thing a capitalist has eyes for is profit. Therefore, in order to make Bloomington as “beautiful” (profitable) as possible, the impoverished must be hidden from view. And so, before all the impressionable students come back to town, the City “cleans up town”. 

An eviction notice has been served and the Bloomington Pig Department will take action on August 3rd, but we will not let them do so in silence. From this park to the next, they are being told that they can’t be here, nor there. Meanwhile, more and more cheaply built, overpriced apartment complexes are built to hold more students, and generate more profit. This process is a continuation of the settler-colonial project called Amerikkka and is not dissimilar to the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the rest of the occupied territories.

We must come together in defense of the oppressed masses of the world. This depraved system must not be allowed to continue its violent attacks on our communities! Comrades, we can only defend the people through a violent destruction of the capitalist system that keeps us in chains. There is no time left to discuss long term strategy. We must be prepared for what is to come!

CHALLENGE Response: A red salute for your efforts to build solidarity and political struggle with displaced workers in your area. What is happening is undoubtedly part of a broader trend of violent state oppression by the world's capitalist ruling classes, and as you claim, it cannot be any other way as long as the profit system exists. The solution remains to build a mass international Progressive Labor Party that openly fights for communist revolution. Not just in defense of the oppressed masses, but a revolutionary movement led by those most attacked by racist capitalism and imperialism, particularly Black workers around the world.

To build a communist movement and PLP, we must understand the dialectical connection between short-term and long-term political strategies and never sacrifice one at the expense of the other. CHALLENGE looks forward to hearing more about the struggle in Bloomington and ways other workers and students can support this struggle!

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MTA: Racist speed-up & terror tactics kill worker

During a recent training practical for new train operators in New York City, a student train operator collapsed. He was taken to a nearby hospital where officials later pronounced him dead.

This, however, wasn’t just some tragic isolated incident. The racist environment surrounding the majority Black and Latin workers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the agency that operates the city’s trains and buses, undoubtedly played a role.

Before the operator collapsed while taking the practical, he told supervisors he was feeling very anxious. 

While his cause of death has not been revealed as of this writing, many transit workers who have endured the stressful training practices the MTA forces its new hires through can relate to how he felt before his exam.

From the beginning of training throughout, the focus is on scaring new train operators through fear based tactics. They’re constantly told they will be severely punished or even fired for the smallest infractions--a complete lie. Some supervisors tell new recruits that half of them will not make it. 

This is completely normalized as, “It’s just how it is down here.”

Couple that experience with the MTA bosses cutting training time to push more operators out faster, due to the Covid hiring freeze THEY implemented, and giving a signal exam train operators are supposed to get a perfect score on (or possibly be fired), and you have a recipe for incidents like this worker’s passing.

This shift in the training process represents MTA bosses’ efforts to speed up train service off the back of their workforce, our lives and health  be damned. During the pandemic, the MTA shortened train operator training by seven to eight weeks. 

TWU Local 100, the union that represents NYC transit workers, is in bed with the bosses, and has done little to nothing to address the way train operators are trained, or treated on the job. They have also worked with management to force more train trips into the operating schedules, leaving operators with less recovery time between their runs. While operating in and of itself isn’t necessarily physically demanding, it can be mentally strenuous. Operators have to be mindful of safe operation to ensure passengers aren’t thrown around the train, signal and track conditions on the route, and passengers on the station platforms as well.   Several things can go wrong if we aren’t paying complete attention to the task at hand. Consequently, sufficient breaks after each trip are necessary to properly reset before making the next departure to the other terminal. Less break time leads to an increased likelihood of making mistakes, and receiving “plantation justice” (a term some in Transit have coined for the racist punishments MTA workers receive for infractions).

The job environment can put an immense strain on workers’ bodies. Many of our crew rooms are filthy and hazardous, with conditions such as mold and even silica dust. Many die shortly after retirement. It’s not uncommon for those who survive to suffer from ailments such as carpal tunnel, shoulder issues and knee problems in later years. The transit bosses will give their crocodile tears over this young worker literally getting stressed to death, then continue on with business as usual.

It’s clear that MTA workers and all workers need a better alternative that takes our lives into consideration, and that’s one where we don’t generate profit for the ruling class, but one where we collectively work to better the world for one another-communism.
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Book review doesn’t mention I’m in PLP!

The review of Anti-Racism as Communism left out two important things. The author is proud to have been a member of Progressive Labor Party for 52+ years. The book is dedicated to two collectives from whom I came to my understanding of racism and how to end it: the students I have known at Chicago State University and my comrades in the Progressive Labor Party.
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