Hurricane Ida ripped through the U.S. and exposed once again the utter failure of capitalism to provide even the most basic necessities for millions of workers. The latest in a long and rapidly growing list of capitalist-created disasters, the system’s breakdown in the wake of Ida has killed nearly 100 people, many drowned in their homes, left over a million without power for more than a week, and hundreds of thousands more without drinking water. While the wealthy centers of New Orleans and New York were left relatively unscathed, the working-class areas where many Black, immigrant and poor white workers live took the brunt of the damage.
As the bosses fight in their tug of war for control, no outcome will serve the interests of our class. Only a communist society based on workers' power can put the needs of the masses front and center. The urgency in mobilizing our class to fight for communist revolution grows with each capitalist-created disaster, pandemic, war or financial crisis.
Hurricane Ida hit the U.S.in Louisiana and took out the majority of the state’s power system. In the Northeast, workers were left unwarned as flash floods hit. The ruling class has crowed that the levees built over the last 15 years kept New Orleans from completely flooding, but many workers were again left stranded. This time without electricity or drinking water. Over a week later, over a million are without electricity indefinitely (NY Times, 9/7).
New Orleans: bosses sacrifice the working class
As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the ruling class  is more openly sacrificing the working class. First, they leave millions to die from Covid-19. Now, with capitalist climate disasters and crumbling infrastructure, they allow workers to die from thirst, heat, and drowning.
In Louisiana the massive damage to the power grid and water system from Ida was preventable. The ruling class spent $14 billion dollars to insufficiently fortify the levee system around New Orleans and did nothing to strengthen the power grid or protect the drinking water system. The new levee system around New Orleans represents only part of what engineers determined was needed, is already eroding, and was breached at least once (Curbed, 9/2). The advice to New Orleans residents from “their” Mayor was “don’t come back” (NYT, 8/31).
Just outside of New Orleans in working-class areas, people were left at the mercy of the hurricane without upgraded levees. LaPlace, a mainly Black town adjacent to New Orleans, flooded more than ever. People there blamed the new system protecting New Orleans for the flooding that destroyed their homes (NPR, 8/31).
NYC: capitalism thrives on poverty housing
The New York City area was inundated with flash floods: thousands caught in their cars, subway system, and basement apartments (NYT, 9/3). Many of the 60, so far, people who have died in the New York City area drowned after being trapped in their apartments. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands live in basement apartments due to exorbitant housing costs (NYT, 9/7).
New York’s economy depends on extremely high housing costs and low wage service workers. Instead of ensuring affordable, safe housing for the working class, the city’s bosses and officials look the other way as workers live in unofficial basement apartments that became death traps when flash floods hit the area and the city and state’s emergency notification system failed to warn people (NYT, 9/7).
Workers’ power replaces profit motive with working-class needs
The driving force behind the extreme weather, broken infrastructure and lack of emergency planning is the profit system. Capitalism is to blame. The world has the technology and knowledge to prepare for hurricanes and protect people from death. But capitalism, driven by the profit motive, ensnares people in a system that will always, at the end of the day, put the bosses’ profits first.
We need a society that prioritizes the needs of the working class, which is possible only when we eliminate profits and run society. Our class will be abandoned and sacrificed on a larger and larger scale as the capitalists navigate infrastructure disasters while preparing for world war. We can respond to their crisis by building a movement for communist revolution and a society based on workers’ power. You need to join PLP.

BROOKLYN, September 4—“Same enemy, same fight! Workers of the world, unite!” rang through the streets of Flatbush neighborhood. As the bosses’ racist attacks on workers in Haiti continue unabated, more than 30 members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) unfurled banners in solidarity with our working-class sisters and brothers in Haiti today. We expressed anti-imperialist and internationalist politics and brought a message of revolutionary hope. Not false hope through elections or fake leftist misleaders, but through confidence in the international working class to one day overthrow this vicious racist imperialist system. And build a communist world–without nations, borders, the ever-present threat of war, and profit-driven disasters.
Learning to fight collectively
A PLP club at the  City University of New York (CUNY), with little collective experience, planned a successful rally and  learned rich lessons. We began reaching out to students and staff from several CUNY campuses and friends made in the #SOSColombia movement (see CHALLENGE, 9/8). We also had several study groups that drew connections between U.S. imperialism and racism in Israel-Palestine, Colombia and Haiti, using CHALLENGE articles to anchor each discussion.
The use of a Colombian death squad to assassinate Haiti’s president illustrated yet another blatant example of the relationship between U.S. imperialism and fascism in Colombia and Haiti. Building international working-class solidarity has been a focal point of our discussions and actions, especially following the devastating earthquake and hurricane.
Days before the rally, two comrades posted 200 flyers along Flatbush Avenue and Church Avenue. Passersby gave enthusiastic support. We made new contacts, saw old friends, and sold CHALLENGE along the way.
Internationalism and food fuel our movement
Before the rally, we held a covid-safe  banner making party. We shared a delicious spread of pizza and home-cooked food including Haitian-style pasta and pikliz. This nourished a debate over elections, reform versus communist revolution, and the connections between workers in Colombia and Haiti.
While many disagreements remain, we were in agreement on the urgent need for smashing racism, and fighting for internationalism. This helped decide the slogans for our banners and we began painting to the music of Colombia’s Joe Arroyo and Haiti’s Emeline Michel. The banners read, “Smash Imperialism from: U.S. to China to Russia” and “Solidarity with Workers in Haiti—Smash Racism!”
Haiti means FIGHT BACK!
When we unfurled our banners in this working-class Caribbean neighborhood, some cars honked and workers raised their fists in support. We carried posters demanding COVID-19 vaccines and immediate aid sent to Haiti. Others carried signs connecting workers in Haiti’s fight with the striking Alabama miners, and with miners in Colombia and Haiti.
We distributed 500 CHALLENGEs. To conclude our rally, we marched on the sidewalks and finally took over a street lane with chants of “Asian, Latin, Black and white! Workers of the world unite!” and “Koupe tèt, boule kay!” (cut off their [bosses’] heads, burn down their houses in Kreyol).
Lessons learned
We are learning how to fight for solidarity and working class internationalism, while exposing our common enemy, imperialism. We’re learning how to build toward revolution through regular study groups, social events, and protests.
Most of all we learned that as U.S. imperialism declines and marches our class toward World War III, we need to be bolder in bringing our politics to the international working class. Workers are looking for answers. We are building communist revolution through practice, making mistakes, and growing.

NEW YORK CITY, September 8—As a new school year begins, working-class students and families are again faced with dangerous lose-lose conditions created by capitalism in crisis. Rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, crumbling school buildings, and a demand to return to business as usual threaten the lives of students, their families, and education workers. This is unfolding as the shortcomings of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan, next door to their main rival China, are on full display to the world (See Editorial, page 2). This school year, let’s continue to build student-worker-parent solidarity and turn crises into opportunities to build a culture of fightback for communist ideas and culture.
A divided U.S. ruling class united in contempt for workers’ lives
Led by President Joe Biden, the finance capitalist Big Fascists are trying to create a more unified approach to schooling. The Small-Fascist Republicans are more domestically oriented and isolationist. In states like Florida and Tennessee the governors attacked smaller city governments that pushed for more vaccinations and use of masks in schools. In response the U.S. Department of Education launched civil rights investigations and lawsuits to block the attacks.
It’s a deadly mistake to think that Biden, the federal courts, or local Democratic politicians in cities like New York and Los Angeles, are motivated to protect the safety of the working class. As the dominant grouping since World War II, these Big Fascists were the architects of the liberal world order with the U.S. bosses on top. Their dominance rests on U.S. financial and military power and its strategic control of the Middle East and the flow of oil to Europe, Asia, and Africa. To maintain this dominance against their rivals, the Big Fascists need a future generation of workers, soldiers, and managers that are willing to fight and die for this unequal system.  
A “lost generation” disillusioned and unfit for this task will hinder their ability to wage such a war. Liberals’ phony, silver-tongued appeals to workers that “we are all in this together” and empty assurances that “we are ready” show that the liberal wing is the main danger to the working class.They are just as ready as ever to have workers die from both Covid-19 and World War III for their long-term profits.
The blatant disregard for workers’ lives shown by both wings of the U.S. ruling class is a hallmark of rising fascism. Capitalists of any stripe are workers’ enemies.
Fight to learn, learn to fight
Capitalist schooling trains us to treat the working class as expendable. We are taught to accept that some workers and youth will be homeless, unemployed, homeless, incarcerated, or killed. Education workers are habituated to accept some dropouts, suspensions, and failure as unavoidable. Capitalist schools also teach patriotism and build loyalty to U.S. imperialism. If millions of youth question capitalism, while the façade of stability crumbles, imperialists will have a harder time winning workers to fight a war against China. Thus as students and education workers fight to learn, they must also learn to fight a capitalist system that fails our class daily.
Even before the pandemic, capitalist schools were unsafe: suspensions, crumbling toxic-filled walls, unhealthy cafeteria food, racist police criminalizing Black and Latin students. The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked additional havoc on student learning. Students have learned even less under these conditions and the bosses plans to catch students up will be plagued with cracks and holes for working-class students to fall through.
Communists and many antiracist education workers refuse to accept this fate. We know the working class is full of fighters, and that whether remote or in-person, education workers and students must use the sharp study of math, science, history and language to understand the racist poison of capitalism and the need for a new, communist society.
Education workers must fight back alongside their students and parents against the bosses’ system, which has set our class up to fail in what will certainly be a tough school year. Every rotten aspect of capitalist schools reinforces the same lesson for us: a system that can’t educate and care for its youth does not deserve to exist, and we must learn together what it will take to smash it.Join the fight with PLP!

NEW YORK CITY, September 5—A Progressive Labor Party (PLP) struggle in the MTA's NYCT division (Metropolitan Transportation Agency/New York City Transit) to help a fellow train operator with a wrongful termination lawsuit has resulted in the agency rehiring her with full back pay. A year and a half after the racist transit bosses allowed its mostly Black and Latin workers to die from Covid-19 (The Guardian,  4/21/20), this is a critical development. While a win in the bosses' legal system is far from real working-class justice, it puts our fightback in public transit on the right track to organize workers for communist revolution.
Sick system disregards the sick
When the PLP member first received word that the MTA bosses had fired Maria, he contacted fellow transit comrades for advice. A woman worker connected us with a civil service lawyer experienced in fighting the MTA. She and the PL’er helped launch a Go Fund Me to raise legal funds, after Maria said she wanted to fight for her job. They promoted it on social media and a local news station did a story on the firing.
The heartless bosses had let Maria go because of “excessive '' sick time usage and absences while on probation (she began training in 2019 with fellow PL’er), but that doesn't tell the whole story. In February 2020, officials ordered her to stay home for four days when she mentioned having a fever. That June, when a senior train operator training her had an incident where he was drug tested, so was Maria, and the bosses held her out for additional days. These days also unfairly counted against her.
The bosses used those total missing days as justification for extending her probation by six months. When she had to take an additional four days to care for her mother, who had suffered a stroke, Transit fired her this past January.
Racist bosses, do-nothing union
Maria's case perfectly displayed the MTA bosses' racist, sexist callousness towards its workforce. This young Latin worker came to work daily, had a flawless operational record, and risked her life during the pandemic to transport essential workers while the bosses cowered in their homes. Termination was how they repaid her efforts! The MTA is especially ruthless against probationary hires, who virtually cannot call out sick for an entire year or face similar penalties.
Per usual, the union proved useless. Her union rep didn’t even return her phone calls. The PL’er later went to a union meeting and blasted Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 representatives for their racist negligence. They repeatedly told him that since Maria was on probation, there was nothing they could do for her. The TWU’s inaction should come as no surprise, given how little they have fought to keep workers safe during Covid. Unions have become a shell of their former selves, and the union misleaders are all in bed with the bosses.
Pushing through anti-communism
The PL’er had initial doubts this would work. His anti-communist fears had him wondering how many would donate to the fundraiser. But support poured in, from co-workers to supervisors and also fellow comrades outside work. Workers have one another's backs!
Getting Maria her job back is a win, but our fight is far from over. The PL’er continues to meet with Maria regularly, gives her CHALLENGE, and struggles with her to see that it’s not just the union or the transit bosses, this whole damn system has to go! We look forward to continuing this fight with our co-workers in the MTA, laying down the tracks that will lead our class to the communist world we deserve.