The capitalist profit system’s ongoing and profound failure to provide decent education to working-class youth has triggered mass rebellion in France, an uprising that demonstrates the radical power of the international working class and the necessity of communist revolution. Workers have joined massive and militant high-school-student-led protests that began two weeks ago, and the estimated 450,000 who marched on October 6 make this the largest protest in the recent history of the country. 

Students throughout France are fighting back against proposed budget cuts and worsening learning conditions. Teachers have joined them, parents have formed front lines between their children and police (Reuters, 10/6). Over 6000 have been arrested, the vast majority being minors. The demonstrations began in the suburbs outside of Paris spreading to cities including Dijon, Lyon, Strasbourg, Lille and Marseille. By October 5 half of France’s high schools were shut down.   

Students are standing up against ever-increasing budget cuts and demanding more teachers and resources and lower class sizes amongst other things. The French government under President Macron has plans for a budget “savings” of 54 billion euros while increasing war spending (Outlook India, 9/30). The plan includes freezing public sector wages, most pensions, and cutting healthcare benefits.
France is facing a serious budget squeeze in 2027 because two costs are rising at the same time: military spending and the cost of servicing its debt. “The ministry projected debt interest costs would rise to €74.2 billion in 2027 from €64.8 billion in 2026, while defence spending would increase by €6.4 billion in line with France’s military programming law (Reuters, 07/26).” 

The world’s bosses have only one plan for the future of working-class youth: a demand for more sacrifice – including our very lives – amid ever expanding imperialist war for control of profits, resources, labor and markets. The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) applauds the anger, fightback and working-class unity shown in this fight, and strives to give rebellions like these revolutionary leadership and direction. The capitalists will always choose to pay back the banks and spend money for war instead of providing the working class with basic needs. A system like that does not deserve to exist. Instead, workers around the world deserve and must fight for communism; a system where workers’ needs will always be the priority.

The Spectre of 1968

As workers are moved to join this student uprisings it begins to echo 1968, where students sparked a general strike that ten million industrial and government workers joined and shut down the country. Workers around the world took their leadership and followed suit. They showed the power the working class can have but they didn’t go far enough – the mighty struggle was surrendered to revisionists and liberals and didn’t overthrow capitalism. And so almost 60 years later here we are again, still fighting for crumbs the capitalists throw at us. 

Presently, the repression is ruthless. Pepper spray, thousands of arrests and police violence is the answer the French government has for these young people. In one video shared on social media, a teenager was shot in the face with a tear-gas grenade at almost point-blank range by a policeman (CNN, 10/2). Another had his hand blown off by a grenade (Guardian, 10/7). 

While some teachers have sided with student protesters, others have taken a stand against them with reports of 78 education workers injured while defending school property from angry youth (Le Monde, 10/5). Yet several French teacher unions called on their members to stand with students to hold before-school rallies on October 6th (InfoOccitaine.fr, 10/3) This stark choice for educators - to stand with students against fascist repression - will be presented again and again, as the future capitalism has in store for us all is one of worsening living and working conditions. 

It’s validating to an outlook of mass antiracist and revolutionary class struggles that the current school protests originated in the suburbs to the north and east of the capital Paris. These working-class suburbs, known as the banlieues, historically housed migrant workers and their families from Africa and Asia following World War II. The lower-income banlieues still are home to many migrant workers to this day, a re-settlement for some of the millions displaced globally from capitalist-caused climate disaster, famine, and war each year.

In the summer of 2023, there was another mass rebellion in the Paris suburb of Nanterre over the police murder of a 17-year-old named Nahel from North Africa. What’s crucial to the development and growth of the current student protests is that they unite with the struggles against racist state terror and inequality – the likes of which stole Nahel’s life and so many others – to form a broader multiracial movement under the leadership of Black workers, whom PLP recognizes as a key revolutionary force.

Two roads: Continued capitalist misery or communist revolution

“They want to divide the young people into good and bad protesters,” said Omar Slaouti, a high-school teacher in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris. “If there were no trash cans on fire, the government would not have stepped back and become aware of the issues at stake (Reuters 10/6).”

This teacher’s analysis of government awareness as a sort of victory is misguided, but his embrace of student militancy is the stuff that revolution is made of. The ruling class wants schools to be factories for compliant labor and nationalist ideology, preparing students to accept racist genocide, endless war, and permanent climate crisis as inevitable. We in PLP understand that communists must fight to make schools sites of struggle, clarity, and preparation for a world beyond capitalism.  

Capitalism can never satisfy the aspirations of youth for equality and productive, meaningful lives. The only solution to the problems of the education system is a new system where workers organize society around our needs, not around the profits of the bosses. Only communism can solve the problems of capitalist education.

No matter who gets elected next year, Le Penn’s openly racist party or the budget-cutting-liberals, bosses will choose to increase war spending on the backs of workers and our children.

You cannot vote in fundamental change, change the international working class deserves. We need to organize to smash capitalism and bring forth workers’ real power: communism.

On September 26th, nearly 10,000 students and workers joined a march. They protested the Mexican government’s failure to find the 43 student-teachers from Ayotzinapa. A group shared about 500 copies of a DESAFIO (CHALLENGE) leaflet. Marchers, including many from the teachers’ union CNTE (Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación), received it well. The content is below: 
Under the capitalist system we live in, there is no justice for the working class: the laws serve to guarantee the bosses’ profits, private property, dispossession, and exploitation. The capitalist class in power enjoys impunity and uses the force of the state to stay in power and protect its interests.

Twelve long years have passed since the 43 student-teachers from Ayotzinapa were kidnapped and  vanished. Justice has yet to find them, leaving families and classmates adrift in despair. For more than a decade, these families, alongside their working-class siblings, have fought  a relentless struggle—both legal and political. 

We communists of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) reiterate our solidarity and urge our class broaden the struggle to end this system of capitalist oppression and build a communist society of social equality, where the laws serve the working majority and punish exploitation, racism, sexism, crime, and the disappearance of our young people.

Reform parties work to increase profits for bosses

The petty Mexican political parties, such as AMLO’s MORENA Party (also known by its political platform the  4th Transformation, or Cuarta Transformación in Spanish, abbreviated 4T), the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN), the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Movimiento Ciudadano, and other parasitic splinter groups, uphold capitalism and make sure the government runs efficiently to reproduce and perpetuate the system of profit for the benefit of the capitalist ruling class. To accomplish this, they increasingly rely on their official repressive bodies (the army, the navy, the National Guard, and the police) and on unofficial ones, such as paramilitary groups directed and financed by the CIA, the DEA, and the U.S. embassy, made up mainly of criminal groups. This represents a clear step toward fascism, which is growing worldwide. To confront it, it is vital that we workers organize ourselves into a revolutionary party and fight for communism. Liberals like the 4T open the door to the fascists. We communists will defeat them, as we did in the Second World War. 

The enforced disappearance of the 43 student-teachers of Ayotzinapa in 2014 is a sign of growing fascism. Journalists and researchers have documented links between the case and Guerrero’s mining belt, and argue that mining interests and organized crime sought to control the territory around the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in order to exploit minerals, produce opium poppy, and move drugs, weapons, and mining products (Proceso, 9/26/2020; Proceso, 9/30/2020, Harvard ReVista, 7/26/2023). Mexico’s Truth Commission concluded that the disappearance was a state crime involving the bosses’ state,involving the bosses’ state at the municipal, state, and federal levels, and the army has been implicated in both the disappearance and the cover-up 

Student-teachers targetted by criminal bosses

The presence of the student-teachers and their political influence were getting in the way of the criminal bosses’ profiteering. Fascist repression, such as disappearance and forced  displacement, consists of systematic practices meant to terrorize the working class and weaken resistance and organization.

The recent arrest of the former PRD governor of Guerrero, as well as the development of supposed new lines of investigation by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), look like new smokescreens from the government in power. The bosses will not deliver justice because their criminal system is the root of all this  injustice. Mothers, fathers, and comrades, we know that the only alternative is struggle, ultimately for the end of this system. For Ayotzinapa 43, for our students, and the working class, let’s march non-stop  and keep organizing for the egalitarian communist future we all deserve. Join us!

Corbin, KY, Sep 26, 2026 - Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends, including Chicago PL’ers, attended Corbin PRIDE. Local comrades had deep relationships with the organizers, and, weeks prior, circulated CHALLENGE on the Party’s Klan-smashing history. PL’ers distributed 60 flyers, dozens of CHALLENGE, and made more than 20 new contacts interested in building an antiracist committee.

Why Corbin?

Corbin has a deep history of racist terror. Fighting it is central for PLP. In the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, a white mob drove nearly all of Corbin’s Black population out at gunpoint onto southbound trains. The town became a sundown town whose legacy carries on today. The KKK remained active here, including in local government.

But there’s a growing “progressive” presence, including our comrade who organized Pride. Queer-worker-led groups are popping up across Southeastern Kentucky to fight the reactionary politics gripping the region. But they remain limited, focused only on identity issues and tied to local Democrats.

Our comrade hopes PRIDE can introduce communist ideas to workers. Many queer, women, and trans workers we met work industrial jobs—they can break the alliance between white workers and chauvinist racist culture. They deserve communist ideas!

Why communists showed up

Corbin PRIDE was nearly cancelled after volunteers dropped out over Klan threats. That threat was real: in 2023, two Klan members harassed a Corbin trans rights rally. They flashed cards and shouted slurs. When a demonstrator slapped a card away, the Klansman pulled a gun. KKKops returned the gun, let them walk, and told queer workers they needed a permit. Workers didn’t back down. They showed up armed next time! This year, PLP and community workers made sure PRIDE continued. Chicago comrades came down specifically to fight the threats. In the end, KKKowards never showed up.

We showed up because ALL workers deserve to rally in peace. Racist terror isn’t defeated by waiting on the bosses’ “justice;” It’s smashed by multiracial working-class power. The KKKourts & KKKlan go hand in hand! Communism, abolishing the system that produces the terror, can make that peace permanent!

Chicago comrades make cross-border fightback a success!

One Chicago comrade worked in Beijing and connected our fight against racist lawyer-landlords to the Chinese peasantry’s struggle. “These ruthless slumlords ran their racket with a smirk. They raised rents while tenants lacked savings, lawyers, and a way out. But like peasants in the Chinese countryside, they found their power…the smirk disappeared!” Chicago comrades toured the rail depot where Black workers were sent off, linking Corbin’s history to Chicago’s 1919 Red Summer expulsions.

Racist past and communist future

Our flyer traced Corbin’s 1919 expulsion to today. The same inter-imperialist war, competition, and class struggle that define our moment also shaped 1919. Black workers fled Jim Crow to fill Northern industry’s labor demand, and bosses used racism to divide workers whose victory required fighting side by side. Now those contradictions produce ICE ethnic cleansing, world war, and fascist attacks on LGBT events.

The flyer linked “spontaneous” racial violence to eventual organized Klan fascism, which attacks all workers’ organizations, scapegoating Black workers to achieve this. We contrasted this with Appalachia’s fighting history in Matewan, Blair Mountain, and Harlan County. We explained communism as the only solution: workers of all races, nations, and identities uniting against their exploitation.

One system, many targets

A KY PLer’s speech linked housing, unemployment, food, opiates, and police/Klan/ICE terror as one system attacking different local and international targets. It traced slave catchers who became police to unaccountable raids on Doug Harless and Breonna Taylor. It showed how each crisis lands hardest on Black, queer, trans, and immigrant workers. We named those communists who’ve always led the fightback, and proposed the Corbin Committee Against Racism as the working-class solution for the abolition of the system that produces these crises!

“We need it!”

One moment in the speech: “From Palestine to Mexico, f– their borders, f– their walls!” -met the widest applause of all.
Locals came up wanting to know more about 1919 and how to fight racism in Corbin. A young medic working security thanked us, saying our work globally was making a difference.

We faced no hostility, and met many workers we’ve had in our base. The most common response to our goal of forming the committee: “We need it!”

All in all, over a whole page of contacts not only embraced but shaped it, naming what issues it should fight against: surveillance, wage inequality, bigotry, transportation, and more!

The Party after the party: building ties, deepening the struggle

After Pride, we joined friends and contacts at a local Mexican restaurant and had a deep discussion about communist politics with a factory worker.

The next morning, we met with comrades who couldn’t make Pride and some who did. Some met Chicago PLers for the first time, strengthening Party ties. A comrade from an addiction recovery group, who we’d encouraged to come to Pride, joined us and connected Kentucky conditions to those in Chicago. We spoke with one comrade’s contacts in China over the phone, singing red songs, inspiring Chinese students unsure about American workers’ revolutionary potential. We plan to extend this to workers and revolutionary organizers in India.

As a comrade said, “These Pride rallies give us an opportunity to go all over the state- building the Party and schools for communism across Kentucky, essential for multi-racial working-class unity and revolution!”

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members came out to support a September 24 rally in San Francisco against attacks on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) workers, packing red flags, posters, and communist flyers. Most importantly, we came with a clear message: the racist assault on Haitian, Latino, and TPS workers from 17 countries (see Box) is part of capitalism’s attack on the international working class.  Workers don’t need the empty promises of politicians or more court battles. We need to build a revolutionary movement capable of ending the system that profits from our exploitation and divides us by nationality and immigration status.

At the rally, PLP members distributed flyers connecting the Haitian Revolution of 1791 with workers’ struggles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), deportations, and capitalist wage slavery. The response, especially from younger workers, showed that this history can speak directly to today’s struggles. Workers recognize the injustice of a system that threatens workers with expulsion after they have spent years building lives, raising children, and doing the labor that keeps society running, often in the most dangerous conditions.

Racism and reformism: The bosses old playbook

The fight over TPS is not just an immigration dispute. It is an attack on Black and Latino workers, and an effort to make the whole working class more fearful and easier to exploit. The government grants temporary permission to remain, and then uses the threat of taking it away to keep workers insecure. Workers who organize, demand better conditions, or simply try to live with dignity are forced to contend with the possibility that a change in government policy could separate them from their families or send them back to danger.

The Trump administration’s termination of TPS put an estimated 330,000 Haitians at risk of deportation. Haiti continues to face widespread violence and a humanitarian crisis, yet the U.S. government has moved to send people back. More than 450 people had been deported to Haiti since July, with flights increasing from about once a month to once a week. (Human Rights Watch, September 21).

Without valid work permits, TPS holders lose their jobs, income, and ability to support their families. In August 2026, U.S. Immigration Services admitted that Salvadoran TPS holders still had pending work-permit renewal applications ahead of the September 9 termination date. These workers had followed the renewal process but still faced losing authorization to work because HSS (Dept of Homeland Security) refused to process their work permit renewals. TPS holders have also paid Social Security and Medicare taxes through their wages, without being eligible for benefits. 

The economic consequences extend beyond U.S. borders. Remittances to El Salvador reached approximately $10.1 billion in 2025, equal to 27.5 percent of the country’s GDP, according to World Bank data. Since January 2026, the U.S. government has also imposed a 1 percent tax on many remittance transfers, including those made with cash and money orders. (IRS, January 1). These figures demonstrate how deeply Salvadoran families and their country’s economy depend on workers’ earnings in the United States. 

These attacks disproportionately threaten Black, Haitian, and Latino workers, using immigration status to make them more vulnerable to exploitation and family separation. Racism also encourages workers to blame immigrants for low wages, unaffordable housing, and inadequate health care, rather than unite against the system producing these problems. 

As the Trump administration carries out these attacks, liberal politicians are trying to distract workers with pitiable reforms. Democrat Representative Ayanna Pressley pushed to merely extend Haitian TPS for another three years, leaving their future dependent on another temporary status that politicians can revoke at any time.

Workers need to defend one another against deportations now, but lasting security requires more than temporary protections: it requires building a movement capable of ending the racist exploitation and divisions that make immigrant workers vulnerable in the first place.

Pierre Damas Bel: The human cost of state terror

The death of Pierre Damas Bel shows how devastating these policies can be. Bel was a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant and student in Springfield, Ohio. After the termination of TPS, immigration authorities placed Pierre under electronic monitoring with an ankle device. His father said Bel felt humiliated and was bullied over the monitor. Pierre’s family and immigrant-rights advocates correctly blamed the US immigration policies for his death. (CBS, September 2).

Bel, like all workers being attacked by this capitalist system, should be remembered as a person with a life and a future who was loved and needed by their community. He was made to live under the threat of removal and the humiliation of being made to wear a device used for criminals. His death demands that we confront the human cost of a system that terrorizes immigrant workers and their families in order that all workers live in fear of fighting back.

A speaker at the TPS rally described how these costs were being felt by Salvadoran families. She said that more than 150,000-192,000 U.S. citizen children have at least one Salvadoran relative with TPS, and that roughly 52,000 children came to the United States with TPS parents but lack legal status themselves (Immigrations Policy and Research). Her message was clear: when the government targets immigrant parents, children pay the price. Some risk being separated from their families, left with relatives or in foster care, or being forced to leave the country alongside their parents.

For children, a parent’s immigration status is not a statistic. It can determine whether they sleep in the same home tomorrow, whether their family can pay rent, and whether a parent who has cared for them for years will be there when they come home.

From Haiti’s revolution to communist revolution 

The Haitian Revolution showed the world that enslaved people could overthrow a ruling class that seemed invincible, inspiring rebellions throughout the Caribbean and the Americas. That legacy belongs to workers fighting ICE terror and racist deportations today. Just as enslavers used racism to divide and control people, capitalism uses immigration status to make Haitian, Latino, and other workers more vulnerable to exploitation. 

We cannot rely on politicians, court battles, or temporary protections to end this system. We must turn solidarity at rallies like this one into organized working-class struggle in our workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is fighting to build the revolutionary communist movement needed to overthrow capitalism and end the exploitation and divisions that terrorize and threaten all workers. 

From Haiti’s revolution to today’s fight against deportations, the lesson is that workers can change history when we unite across national borders. Join PLP and fight for a communist world where workers everywhere stand together against racism and exploitation!