NEW YORK, October 24—“We’ve got to change the top, the middle and the bottom. We’ve got to get rid of the whole thing.” This was the sentiment expressed by friends and members at the sixth annual Progressive Labor Party (PLP) College Conference, entitled “Communism, Covid-19 and The Fight Against Racism.” The October 24  conference drew international and national participation from nearly 90 students and education workers. From the Bronx to New Jersey from Brooklyn to Puerto Rico, speakers strategized about fightback struggles on the City University of New York (CUNY) campuses and uniting student and worker struggles.
The opening speaker laid out the state of the world: increasing rivalry between the U.S. and its imperialist foes such as China and Russia is creating more volatility and a need for greater fascist control. The cutbacks on campuses are part of this trend, as local bosses prepare workers and students to accept worsening conditions. The speech ended on a positive note, as the many fightbacks that workers and students have engaged in were highlighted, and linked to the need for communist leadership to turn these fights into schools for communism.
Bosses’ dictatorship exposed
One participant suggested that by getting rid of the top New York racists, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, things would be better for workers here. But regardless of who occupies city hall, the governor’s office or the Presidency, cutbacks on college campuses, the continued needless deaths from Covid-19 and racist attacks on the homeless will continue(see article below). Instead, the nearly 90 attendees spent four hours discussing another approach: organizing the students and workers to join  the revolutionary PLP to destroy the system entirely. During the break-out sessions, participants discussed Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s theory of the state in relation to elections—that no matter which capitalist party is in charge, it’s always a bosses’ dictatorship under capitalism.
We also debunked the capitalists' use of bogus “white privilege” ideology as a means of co-opting and commodifying multiracial, antiracist workers' struggles. It is in the interest of all workers to abolish racism, a tool of capitalist division.

Finally, Da Homeless Hero, a leader of the struggle against de Blasio’s racist attacks on homeless workers, closed the conference with a rousing call for all workers to unite and fight the capitalist attack on workers in the coronavirus era.  
Students: to arms and revolution!
With college students facing rising homelessness—more than 25 percent of students at community colleges deal with homelessness and a full third face food shortages—it is all the more important that friends and members of PLP are in the streets and hallways of college campuses, uniting students, faculty, and workers to fight for communism. This is the only way we will get what we want and need as an international working class.
A central aspect of PLP’s outlook is to make  practice primary over theory, and so our final appeal was for every attendee to increase their engagement in fightbacks on campus or on the job. We invited everyone to participate in election day demonstrations and CHALLENGE sales to bring the ideas of the conference out to the masses of students and workers.

SAN FRANCISCO, October 17—Hundreds of antiracist fighters assembled on short notice today to stop a fascist rally dead in its tracks. When word went out that the racist, sexist Proud Boys planned a rally here, it was Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) revolutionary communist duty to be present, ready to fight back with our anti-fascist class sisters and brothers.
Yet the Proud Boys are small fry compared to the Big Fascists who control Wall Street and wage wars over Mideast oil. So to eradicate all  fascists, we must kill the profit system that birthed them all, possible only when readers like you help build a mass Party of millions.  
Break a fascist’s face
The city of San Francisco is a target because it is what is termed by the bosses as a “sanctuary city” that supposedly shelters immigrant workers. It also draws the gutter racists’ wrath because many residents of the city are antiracist, and it has a Black mayor. The initial rally permit was for Dolores Park in the Mission District (until recently home to many immigrant workers) but the night before the venue was changed to the UN Plaza.
The day of, the racist scum from “Team Save America” totaled six people and were defended by a force of approximately 300 kkkops. They were met by close to 400 anti-fascists.When the fascists arrived they were escorted behind a barricade by the police and they tried to speak.  We shouted them down and threw plastic bottles of water to shut them down. Someone beat up one fascist, another fighter punched their leader, Philip Anderson, breaking his two front teeth. The fascists spoke for less than 10  minutes before being whisked away under police escort.
A few PL’ers organized a small contingent to attend the counter-demonstration.  As a student newer to the Party said, “We are here for two reasons: One is to clear the streets of fascists and defend the right of protest for the working class, and secondly to recruit anti-fascists to the PLP.” We distributed over 300 leaflets and dozens of copies of CHALLENGE to the anti-fascist fighters, and made contacts.
PLP says, No free speech for fascists! Fascist words and movements have led to genocidal state terror and the slaughter of tens of millions of workers in the past 90 years. Fascist terror in the U.S. more recently took the lives of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and two antiracists protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We have learned the lesson—fascist words kill, and we must stop fascists from promoting racist violence when necessary.
Organizing to protect ourselves in the present as a united working class is necessary, but it is not our only goal as a Party. Our goal, as the international PLP, is to win millions of workers and students to the reality that fascism directly results from capitalism in crisis and decay, and that both will only be destroyed with communist revolution!
Liberal politicians & kkkops attack the working class
The city’s Black liberal mayor, London Breed, spent at least $96,000 on overtime police pay to send the force of 300 to defend the fascists. This is the same mayor who promised, this past June, to reallocate funds from the police and into reforms to supposedly benefit Black workers. But like all liberal politicians,  when push came to shove, Breed sent  out the kkkops to defend the capitalists and their private property.
The racist cops’ defense of fascist groups while attacking anti-racists is nothing new, and we should never expect them to be “neutral” in these struggles. Throughout this past summer we watched the bosses’ attack dogs beat and arrest countless anti-racists in the streets, only to allow murdering teen Kyle Rittenhouse stroll past them with a smoking assault rifle. They all protect this racist capitalist state!
Only communism crushes fascism
Some 100 counter-protesters wearing black clothing and flak vests identified with “Antifa,” short for anti-fascist. Antifa is a coalition of various groups including some who agree that violence against the far right is sometimes called for. The Antifa flag (“The Iron Front”) echoes the bosses’ lie that communism is like fascism, when in reality communists have been the greatest antiracist and anti-fascist force in history.
It was the communists who opposed fascism in Europe before and during World War II.  It was the communists in the Soviet Union and the European partisans trained and organized by the Soviets who defeated Hitler.  The Soviet Union lost millions of citizens in that conflict and the Nazis suffered 75 percent  of their losses fighting the Soviets (Washington Post, 5/8/15).  The U.S. and Great Britain held back and didn’t enter the war in Europe until it was clear that the Soviets were winning and that other workers of Europe might follow their lead and throw out capitalism elsewhere.
As the drums of imperialist war become clearer on the horizon, PLP is fighting to build our anti-fascist movement of millions. When the international working class takes power again, we’ll make sure that no seed of capitalism is ever allowed to grow—only communism. Fight fascism, join PLP!

The police department has a really bad habit of killing Black people and then telling them how to react to it. Which is why we need to keep coming out here, because we can’t let them make an example out of me. They want Black people scared… [But] they’re (the cops) scared of people who aren’t afraid of them.”
 — Mohawk Johnson

CHICAGO, October 30—Another spirited crowd of antiracist fighters packed the sidewalk yet again in front the Leighton courthouse at 26 and California. “Free Mohawk! Free Them All!” chants rang through the air as we continued to demand that these racist courts drop the eight felony charges against Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson, an artist, organizer, and all-around great member of our class. This struggle so far has exposed how the rulers’ cops and courts are the bosses’ tools.
Mohawk was arrested during an anti-kkkop protest on August 15 and has been battling the bosses’ __racist legal system ever since (See CHALLENGE, 11/4). A number of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been consistently helping to build the mass campaign in order to fight the bosses’ racist attacks against Mohawk and all workers, and organize for international communist revolution.
Instead of receiving updates on progress within the case, our multiracial crew was given disappointing news: Mohawk had been given another court date and it would be two months from now, on December 29.
The judges would not hear Mohawk’s attorney’s argument for the removal of his electronic house monitor, which he has had to wear since being released from jail in August. Nor did they consider any of the over 200 character letters written on behalf of Mohawk from the community. The hearing was brief and rushed: Mohawk went in with his attorney, and all the judge did was give him  a new court date. Mohawk is still facing the trumped-up charges for aggravated assault on a cop.
The judge's refusal to not take Mohawk off of house arrest as we approach the holidays is petty and abusive, but fits the style of the bosses’ racist institutions. They want to try to break his spirit and the spirits of those supporting him, but they’re bound to fail. For every attempt so far that they’ve used to undermine our support—from changing court locations to delaying hearings—we’ve come back bigger and louder. This is what antiracist fighters do, and we PL’ers are ready to give more fighting communist leadership to this struggle.
So if you are in Chicago, get your snow boots and coats because we will see you all on December 29 at 26 and California! Support Mohawk here https://linktr.ee/FreeMohawk

With one of the most divisive elections in U.S. history fast approaching, workers need to be clear on one point above all: Regardless of who gets elected, our class loses. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have built their careers on racist attacks on the working class. We know they have tactical and strategic differences; they front for different wings of the blood-sucking capitalist bosses. But no matter which candidate wriggles out on top of the rulers’ manure pile on November 3, workers will face a life-and-death struggle ahead. Rising fascism and racist terror by kkkops and other vigilantes will continue to be the order of the day. Imperialist slaughter will still be around the corner. Democrat or Republican, there are no good bosses. Voting for a “lesser” evil can’t bring us the future we need. Just as capitalism and racism were grown together, in the atrocities of the slave trade in Africa, only with communist revolution will they die together!  
Vile, racist Trump: Fascist #45
Trump is vile and despicable, a racist, sexist monster. The roll call of U.S. presidents is a rogue’s gallery, from slave-trading rapists (aka the Founding Fathers) to “progressive” racists (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson) to mass-murdering war criminals (FDR, JFK, LBJ, the Bushes, and Obama, to name a few). Even so, Trump stands out as the ugly face of U.S. capitalist decline and decay. Without a doubt, millions of our working-class sisters and brothers are terrified of another four years of Fascist #45 and are flocking to vote him out. But they’re also cynical about electoral politics, as Thomas Edsall noted in the New York Times: “Neither party has been able to command enduring trust from American voters since 1980. In that sense, both parties are fundamentally minority parties” (10/21).
Make no mistake. As foul as he is, Trump and the small-time, Fortress America bosses he serves are not the biggest danger to our class!
Voting has never protected workers’ “rights”
Elections are a tool the capitalists use to settle their differences while diverting workers’ rage from the source of all our problems—the profit system. Voting has never resulted in substantial or long-lasting change. The Democratic Party misleaders are working overtime to scare workers into turning out for Jim Crow Joe and Top Cop Kamala Harris to preserve the Affordable Care Act (which leaves tens of millions uninsured) and women’s abortion rights (already dismantled in much of the country). In reality, the health care of our class has been gutted over decades by the likes of cutbacks king Andrew Cuomo as well as by Republicans. Last year, just before the pandemic, cities run mostly by Democrats were closing hospitals at a rate of nearly 30 per month! The impact was especially lethal for poor Black and Latin communities (US News, July 10, 2019).
The debate around a woman’s right to “choose” is inextricably tied to racism.  While abortion rates have broadly declined over the last 15 years, it’s the racist inequalities of capitalism that lead Black women to choose abortions at higher rates.  Indeed, “from mass incarceration to maternal and infant mortality...The best way to reduce abortions is to address the difficult circumstances that lead so many black women to end their pregnancies” (New York Times, 7/6/2019). We know that racism and sexism are inherent to capitalism and class society. No capitalist sell-out or stooge will ever care about our wellbeing or our children’s future!  
The liberals’ panic over Black workers’ loss of the “right” to vote obscures more racist history. In 1865, the 13th Amendment ended chattel slavery while sanctioning the enslavement of Black workers in prisons and jails and ignoring the racist terror of the Black Codes and Jim Crow. Exactly 100  years later, the U.S. Congress passed both the Voting Rights Act and Lyndon Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Act, the first giant step toward militarized local police and mass incarceration. In the upcoming election, more than 5 million workers will be prohibited from voting because of a felony conviction in the criminal injustice system. Black workers are four times more likely to be barred from choosing their next exploiter (sentencingproject.org).
Joe Biden—class enemy #1
For nearly half a century, Biden has played a lead role in building racism, sexism, and war while serving the interests of finance capital. Jim Crow Joe’s career took off in the 1970s in the U.S. Senate, where he opposed busing for school integration.  By the early 1980s, Biden was busy legislating racist police terror and mass incarceration, partnering with gutter segregationist Strom Thurmond to legalize the seizure of property from poor workers and use it to buy military-style weapons for cops.
In 1988, Biden co-authored the infamous “100-to-1” law that targeted Black and Latin workers with mandatory 10-year sentences for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine.  In 1994, he decried “predators on our streets” and led the charge for Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill, which doubled the U.S. prison population and caged generations of Black and Latin workers. Biden’s slogan sounded a lot like Trump: “Lock the SOB’s up!” (NYT, 6/25/19). To this day, after another year of mostly unpunished lynchings by the Klan-in-Blue, the Democratic candidate supports even more funding for mad dog cops (The Hill, 8/5).
A loyal imperialist front man, Biden cheered on NATO’s bombing of Kosovo, the better to secure an oil pipeline for U.S. refineries. He supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. As vice president, he backed the Barack Obama drone wars that murdered uncounted helpless families and children.
Kamala Harris—class enemy #2
As district attorney in San Francisco and later as California’s state attorney general, Top Cop Harris  “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions” (theguardian.com, 1/31/19). The cops’ racial profiling of Black workers flourished on her watch. At a time when murders-by-cop were at historic highs, Harris’s office backed useless reforms like body cameras and police force “diversity” while refusing to prosecute even the most notorious cases (New York Times, 8/9).  
In her inaugural as attorney general, Harris threatened parents of truant children with “the full force and consequences of the law”—and then laughed at the backlash (theguardian.com, 1/30/19). Instead of creating programs to support working parents, she criminalized them.
 When and if she becomes the first Black and Asian woman to be vice president,Harris’s shameful history as a servant of the racist, sexist ruling class exposes the dead end of identity politics.
Biden and Harris say they’ll restore “progressive” income and corporate tax hikes to squeeze the wealthy to finance the next inter-imperialist conflict, most likely with China. But while the finance capital bosses know they need to discipline their own degenerate class, it is ultimately our class who will pay the ultimate sacrifice for U.S. imperialism. These Big Fascist rulers know they need a committed, patriotic military composed of working-class Black, white, Latin and Asian workers, all united behind the bosses’ bloody wars for profit. That’s a big reason why the liberals are so desperate to get the isolationist, white nationalist Trump out of office. For ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, Trump’s worst offense is his refusal to invest blood and treasure in the defense of their failing empire.
We need revolution for workers’ power
Even as much of the summer’s militant antiracist fightback has been diverted into futile voting, Progressive Labor Party must continue to lead our coworkers and friends into the class struggle. We must immerse ourselves in mass movements and reform battles while turning them into schools for communism. No matter who occupies the White House in January, the bosses will keep moving toward fascism and war; the crisis of their system demands it. Now is the time to plant the seeds for communist revolution. Now is the time to overcome workers’ fear and cynicism—to prepare our class to move from the ballot box to the streets . Join Progressive Labor Party! Fight for communism!