ICE abducts, union stalls, workers organize

It is important that we sharpen and push the political work in our unions. Last November, education workers in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) introduced a resolution encouraging chapters in schools across NYC to create immigrant defense committees. It took three months and the help of Progressive Labor Party comrades for UFT leadership to even include the resolution as a discussion item in their agendas. Another four months passed before the UFT leadership put it to a vote, and it finally passed in June, right before most of us had summer break. This was after ICE had already kidnapped Bronx high school student Dylan Lopez Contreras and Queens high school student Derlis Toaquiza. There was no official notice from the union about either of these abductions. Meanwhile, the UFT was blowing up my phone with reminders to vote in the primary election in June and general election in November. The unions serve as yet another tool to funnel workers into dead-end electoralism instead of seeing ourselves and our class as the answer for the end to fascist attacks against our students.

Many comrades have refused to wait around for union leadership and have already been building anti-ICE collectives for some time. Self-critically, I have been a little more slow-moving, but momentum has been picking up! I used the resolution as an opportunity to build on anti-deportation work from last year, when some coworkers and I organized Know-Your-Rights training for each grade. I handed out copies of the resolution at the first chapter meeting of this school year and invited anyone who wanted to join to do so. Since then, we have had around four or five meetings with around eight members, and more are interested in joining! We have a lot of ideas and are currently working on making a bulletin board to communicate to students who are on the committee, share legal resources, and help build an antiracist school culture. In the committee, we have also had discussions about the racist legacy of the Democrats, the genocide in Gaza, anti-Haitian racism in the Dominican Republic, and Zohran Mamdani. Several of the coworkers involved have received CHALLENGE, three recently marched with the PLP contingent at an anti-ICE protest, and one has attended PLP study groups. The fight continues!
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Communist response: turn ‘personal’ crisis into collective care

Recently, our Party club has been helping a base member navigate a difficult domestic situation. This worker and their three children have been living under constant stress from the abuse of another family member who is seeking to evict them from their home. But we’re committed to not let that happen.

To help support them, we’ve helped our base member contact lawyers who are knowledgeable and willing to take on her case. We’ve initiated some fundraising efforts to help raise money to retain the lawyer, which rarely comes cheap. We’ve accompanied them to the court hearings to make sure they feel supported in that intimidating atmosphere. And we’ve made house visits to help prepare dinner, play games with the children, and try to help them take their minds off the situation for a while.

Admittedly, these aren’t the flashiest actions but are nevertheless crucial to the movement and type of world that we want to build. As communists, we push to understand and explain how the countless daily attacks confronting the working class are rooted in a class society that lives off exploitation, while dehumanizing workers and treating us all as expendable. None of this abuse, whether it comes from an intimate partner or the bosses, can be fully understood without considering how capitalism functions.

To this end, the personal is political, and vice versa. These smaller actions are connected to the class struggle, and we seek to model how the working class in a communist society would handle problems differently. There are no actions we can take that are too small to win ourselves and others into the lifelong fight for a communist world. 
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Enough! March vs. State violence

In the October 29th issue of CHALLENGE, we shared the news of the disappearance of Abril, a worker beloved in her community of Álvaro Obregon, Michoacán. Her car was burned. The evidence suggests kidnap and sexism. There was a sit-in in the capital. Now, the violence in the community has increased to a new level. The municipal president of the community of Uruapan (very close to Álvaro) was shot to death. He was an independent candidate (previously MORENA the new reformist and capitalist party) and he demanded more resources from the national government for local security many times. President Claudia Scheinbaum, MORENA, and the national government were ineffective. They provided few resources for the search for Abril in spite of making propaganda that they care about disappearances and femicides. Scheinbaum is a capitalist first, and gender doesn’t matter. They live to protect the profits;. They cannot mobilize the masses as a class to fight sexism. This would be a profound threat to the profit system. We cannot depend on the capitalist state to defend workers like Abril. They don’t even protect officials. It is the same bosses and their profits that are the root of the violence, and the state protects them. It is protection from the power of the workers.

Early this month, workers all over Mexico marched for:  a

1. the assassination of Uruapan Michoacán Municipal President Carlos Manzo
2.  the lemon farmer from Apasingan Michoacán Bernardo Bravo 
3. Homero Gomez Gonzalez guardian of the butterfly monarch sanctuary 🦋 in Uruapan Michoacán. 
4.  Abril
5.  the 43 Students of Ayotzinapa Normal.
6. all the disappearances in General. 
7.  all the mothers searching.
8.  the youth.
9.  the women. 
10. the Children.
10. the murders.
11. The extorted. 
12. education.
13. medical care.
14. Above all for a free México that is already tired of all the impunity.

To say enough! We are tired of this rotten government. We combine various social issues in our demands because they are all related to violence, which originates in the same capitalist system. We also remember that the working class has to seize state power. No government serving the capitalist class can protect the lives of the masses. 
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‘Nuremberg’ exposes U.S. fascism’

The movie Nuremberg with Rami Malek was based on historical events concerning Nazi fascist Herman Goring, one of the architects of WWII and the Holocaust. U.S. Army military psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Kelley, was assigned to interview Goring in preparation for the Nuremberg Trial. The events up to and during the trial exposed the internal political contradictions of capitalism and imperialism. Dr.Kelley said to Goring “There are rules in war about bombing factories and civilians, but you just can’t slaughter an entire race in death camps!” (But it’s ‘ok’ to do it with military  bombers?) Goring counter argued “And you Americans dropped an atom bomb on a Japanese city vaporizing people!” The then communist led USSR under Stalin’s leadership had a policy  of not bombing enemy civilians  because it was considered anti-working class. When Goring  was put on trial, on the witness stand, he said nationalist  garbage was no ‘different’ than Trump’s  ‘Make America Great Again’  trash. Toward the end of the movie, Dr.Kelley tried to warn America that what Hitler and Nazis did could happen in the U.S., and on that note, he was right! As long as capitalism exists, when it’s in crisis, the bosses will turn to strong arm fascism to attack workers, like America’s gestapo, ICE. Only a  communist revolution, to destroy global capitalism by workers led by the Progressive Labor Party (LP), can eliminate fascist terror.
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