On September 10, at Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk, the gutter racist and sexist MAGA media personality who divided workers with vicious hate speech, was gunned down at a public debate. This champion of rising fascism and vigilante gun rights was killed in the midst of a back-and-forth about mass shootings in the U.S. Kirk’s murder reflects deep instability within the U.S. capitalist ruling class, and also a growing trend of reactionary, anti-revolutionary political violence.
While Klansman-in-Chief Donald Trump and his flunkies have used Kirk’s assassination to advance their fascist attacks on workers, liberal politicians and pundits are busy whitewashing the dead man’s despicable legacy. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein mourned and celebrated Kirk “for practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California Governor Gavin Newsom called for people to “honor” Kirk’s memory by sustaining his work. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, another potential Democratic presidential candidate, ordered the state’s flags flown at half-staff “as a mark of respect.” All hands rose to defend “freedom of speech,” a dangerous myth under the bosses’ dictatorship. These are the same liberal hypocrites who attacked any workers and students who dared protest the U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians. Many of them pushed for thuggish kkkops to break up peaceful college encampments.
Kirk rose to prominence by building Turning Point USA, an organization funded by right-wing billionaires to combat “left biases” and “wokeness” on college campuses. Despite his self-proclaimed status as a free speech advocate, Kirk set up an online “watchlist” to harass and intimidate antiracist professors. His debating points were a stale rehash of scientifically debunked racist and sexist rhetoric. He railed against “Jewish donors” who were “anti-white” and “quasi-Marxist,” the Islamic “threat to America,” Haitian workers he said were “infested with demonic voodoo,” and prominent Black women who lacked “brain processing power.” He claimed that abortions were “worse than the Holocaust.” Kirk was a Christian nationalist, a nazi through and through.
While we understand workers’ rage and frustration, Progressive Labor Party does not support or condone vigilante violence. As long as capitalism exists, racism and sexism will be peddled by the ruling class to divide and exploit workers. The only way to smash these murderous ideas is with mass revolutionary violence by an organized, communist-led, international working class.
No free speech for racists!
In 1978, in Washington, DC, PLP confronted the infamous Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, proposed that some human behaviors were biological. He warmly supported such open racists as New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, whose book, A Troublesome Inheritance, “argues that Black people may be, on average, more impulsive and less hardworking than white or East Asian people, and that basic differences in human society—why Haiti is poor, for example, and European countries wealthy—are attributable to genetic differences among groups” (Popular Science, 2/21/22). In the early 20th century, similar ideas spurred the U.S.-born eugenics movement, which used them to justify racist inequality and the sterilization of less “desirable” groups. Like Charlie Kirk, the U.S. eugenicists were funded by rich philanthropists, including the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune. “Race science” was embraced by “some of America’s most respected scientists…from Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton” (historynewsnetwork.org, September 2003). In the 1930s, along with Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, these U.S. eugenicists were a major influence on Adolph Hitler.
As Wilson began to speak at the AAAS conference, PLP and our affiliated International Committee Against Racism (InCar) stormed the stage and doused him with water. Protesters chanted, “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” As open racism becomes even more normalized in rotten capitalist society, we must match this boldness in challenging the rulers’ vile mouthpieces. Lone wolf violence will not defeat racism. The only solution is communist revolution. Join us!
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From the Philippines to the U.S.: Strike fascist terror
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- 02 October 2025 859 hits
Washington D.C., September 14 & 21—As the U.S. government continues its crackdown on immigrant workers, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members continue to organize against this racist, fascist terror campaign. Recently in Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC, workers fought back against attacks on seafarers who are mainly from the Philippines.
Members of PLP have been organizing with members of the Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, particularly the University of Maryland chapter (terpCHRP). We were invited to their fundraising gala for “a just and lasting peace in the Philippines” which showcased music, class struggle, political speeches, and dynamic banners. Unfortunately, they fell short of calling for communism, which we in PLP know is the only way for lasting peace for the workers of the world.
Racist deportations bring terror to workers in the Philippines
Earlier on the same day, forty miles away, another PLP member joined a bold protest at the Port of Baltimore. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) kidnapped four workers; three from the Philippines and one Indonesian seafarer from a Carnival cruise ship in Baltimore Harbor on September 7. The seafarers were detained, interrogated, falsely accused of heinous crimes, forced to confess under duress, and deported to the Philippines later that same day. Just since April, over 100 seafarers from the Philippines working for Carnival have been deported, using the same underhanded tactics. As with all of the workers that have been kidnapped by ICE, they were not afforded any due process or recourse.
Approximately 30 percent of seafarers worldwide are from the Philippines. They experience isolation, dangerous work conditions, poor mental health, and exploitation by their employers through legal loopholes. In general, widespread poverty, corruption, and foreign plunder leave tens of millions of Philippine workers unemployed and underemployed, desperate for work. The Philippine bosses’ government does nothing to protect workers who migrated to the U.S., which has led organizers to engage in several sharp struggles in the U.S. to protest the deportations. The formation of Tanggol Migrante is well underway, and it is joining with other anti-ICE groups around the country.
Loyalty to no flag, except the red one!
The rally at the Port of Baltimore was a great start, but it prominently featured the Philippine flag, and participants - giving otherwise excellent speeches - focused on holding the government accountable for protecting overseas workers. However, we in PLP need to bring the perspective that nationalism is a losing strategy. Over and over again, reliance on nationalism and national liberation has led to the downfall of leftist movements. Under capitalism, every country’s government is a dictatorship of the ruling class, the big business owners. Their class uses the government and the state (military, police, courts, and jails) to rule. They profit from exploiting workers. They don’t care about the protection of seafarers or any other workers. Workers’ loyalty should not be to any country, capitalist government, or national flag. Instead, our loyalty should be to all our siblings in the international working class!
Striking back against fascist bosses
Another important struggle has seen a campaign launched in the Philippines against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and other “Nepo-babies” (children of the rich capitalists) who have been stealing money designated for flood control and flaunting it on TikTok. This is a serious problem. It’s criminal that none of the money is being applied toward controlling the devastating flooding. Along with the 52nd anniversary of martial law initiated by Marcos, Sr. the theft of flood-relief funds sparked a militant fight-back at the president’s mansion on September 21. Arrests, injuries and at least one protester’s death show that de facto martial law still rules in the Philippines. However, it now has a nice name – NAP-UPD (National Action Plan for Unity, Peace, and Development) – in an attempt to prettify the ugly reality of ruling class violence. Coinciding with this struggle in the Philippines, a local rally was held at Dupont Circle in DC on September 21, followed by a march to the Philippine embassy.
An excellent video shared by one of the students, entitled “Where Taxes Go “, can help us get up to speed with our friends. PLP, however, advocates that to defeat imperialism we need a widespread fight for communist revolution. We need to be clear that replacing Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte, without forcibly defeating the capitalist system, would simply lead to another round of exploitation, with a different face at the top.
We are staying in contact with our friends, helping with their opposition to U.S. imperialism on campus and beyond, and inviting them to PLP events. The struggle continues.
Washington, D.C., September 23—Thirty angry protesters rallied against racist killer KKKops in front of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS), demanding an end to qualified immunity (QI) for these bosses’ stooges in blue. SCOTUS has ruled that government officials are immune to prosecution from civil lawsuits with certain rare exceptions. QI shields cops and other government flunkies from even fake accountability in their frequent attacks on the working class. We said no more! We chanted loudly against these black-clad fascists, including “No good cops in a racist system!” and “No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police!” While this fight is useful in helping teach workers about what role police play in class society, it is ultimately a reform that will do nothing to smash the state. With President Donald Trump ramping up fascist military and cop invasions in D.C., juxtaposed against declining U.S. hegemony here and across the world, much more work is needed.
That’s why Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined in this action, stressing the need for communist revolution against capitalism and its racist structures to bring liberation of our class from the violence of the ruling class.
Workers speak out against racist cops
Survivors of police murders of their sons and family came from near and far to protest. LaToya Benton, the mother of 18-year-old Xzavier Hill (murdered by state troopers in Virginia in 2021) led the protesters through the case, and the group marched around the building to file the complaint against QI, calling for “justice in this town.” LaToya has a hard-hitting podcast on “Life after the Impact” and can be found on Facebook.
Members of PLP joined with many of our friends who have been fighting for justice for years in Prince George’s County, Maryland (PG), including Dorothy Elliott (32 years) and Marion Hopkins (26 years). More recent PG cases involved the murders of Leonard Shand and William Green (CHALLENGE, 6/26/23 and 1/23/24). Tawanda Jones and several members of the West Wednesday Coalition in Baltimore (CHALLENGE 4/10/24) were there as well, amplifying their calls for justice for Tyrone West. Another grieving mother drove 6 ½ hours from Ohio to stand in front of the Supreme Court.
Building a multiracial party to smash the ruling class
Qualified Immunity – just another tool of the racist capitalists in their quest to terrorize the working class, deepen racist super-exploitation, and thereby maximize profits. All branches of government work for these rapacious capitalists with no accountability to the working class, leaving only the choice of mass revolution to overthrow their system as the solution to these atrocities. From these struggles, let us build a revolutionary party together.
New York, October 4—Uptown Manhattan is mobilizing our forces on Saturday October 4th against the wave of racist terror that is engulfing the US. Not only has Uptown been facing routine Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)raids and heightened fear among workers, but sidewalk vendors too (overwhelmingly immigrant workers) have been enduring increasing attacks from the KKKops and the Sanitation Dept., who routinely confiscate all their wares and saddle them with large fines they cannot afford. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continues to be at the heart of the struggle, offering both ideological, strategic, and logistical support at every level, and putting forward our revolutionary line that workers need to organize to take state power!
We are navigating political divisions inside our coalition between those who, like us, want to broaden and deepen the struggle, and those who want to limit it to “safe” demands. For example, there are coalition members who want us to avoid “left-sounding” terminology like “workers of the world” or “workers take power.” One went so far as to say we can’t compare—in this largely Dominican neighborhood—conditions in the Dominican Republic to Uptown Manhattan because there are forces inside the coalition who don’t support Haitian workers. We cannot support such racist, reactionary positions!
The five-fingered fist of A UNITED WORKING CLASS is our ultimate and only weapon against the bosses’ rising fascism and the racist exploitation of capitalism. History teaches us that anything less is suicide for the working class.
MARCH WITH US—UNITE THE HEIGHTS!
Saturday, October 4: meet at 193rd Street and St. Nicholas, 2 pm. March to 167th Street. (Mitchell Sq).
UNITE, FIGHT BACK! Workers’ struggles have no racist borders!
Avenge the racist detention of Dylan!
BREAKING: Dylan López-Contreras, believed to be the first NYC student detained by ICE in this latest surge of racist terror, was just denied asylum by the kangaroo bosses’ KKKourts. We must continue to mobilize our forces and fight back! Ultimately, only a communist revolution, led by a revolutionary communist party, can put an end to the capitalists’ 500-year-old reign of terror.
(Stay tuned for the follow-up article next issue.)
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Smashing racism is central to communist revolution
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- 02 October 2025 740 hits
The following is an excerpt from PLP’s document, Fighting Racism: A Key Struggle (1982). For the full version, go to https://tinyurl.com/plpfightingracism. Following the Charlie Kirk debacle, the document serves as a good reminder that while race is a made-up concept, racism is very much a real central aspect this profit system. The fight for an antiracist world is inseparable from a communist one.
The fight against racism is one of the major aspects of the fight for an egalitarian society and should be seen as central to the struggle for communism. Racism is not an “accidental” or “incidental” aspect of capitalism, but an essential one. Nowhere has there been, or will there be, a capitalist society which is non-racist. Capitalist relations of production created historically and maintained everywhere to the present day the material basis of racism. At the same time, racism, closely linked with anti-communism, is a major aspect of bourgeois ideology.
This article raises a four general points:
(1) The fight against racism under capitalism is not “just another reform.”
(2) Capitalism cannot and will not ever eliminate racism, so all non-communist antiracist movements are doomed to failure.
(3) To the extent that capitalist production relations are allowed to exist under the dictatorship of the proletariat, racism will continue to exist even if efforts are made to fight it on an ideological and on an economic level.
(4) To the extent that racism continues to form a part of people’s consciousness, it will be difficult or impossible to build a communist society.
Racism: a central aspect of capitalism
Pre-capitalist societies had many ways of dividing the oppressed classes and creating group hostilities, but the notion of “race” was probably not one of them. The idea of “natural” differences among human groups--in the sense of biological differences—was closely linked to the rise of modern science. In particular, the development of taxonomy (classification of living things) was a product of the rapid overseas expansion of European mercantile capitalism in the 16th and 17th centuries, and a prerequisite for the “scientific” classification of human “types.”
Creating racism to justify exploitation
At the same time, the rise of capitalism in Europe depended on the forcible incorporation of Africans, Asians, Native Americans and other “people of color” into the sphere of capitalist production relations. The so-called “primitive accumulation of capital” which fueled the development of industry in Europe was nothing but the expropriation of wealth and labor power from non-European societies. At first, the European bourgeoisie justified this rip-off using religion: the Pope divided the world and told the rulers of Spain and Portugal who could do their ripping-off where. But this was not enough--it was necessary to explain why these people were to be ripped off rather than converted, and besides, after the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the leading national bourgeoisie of England, Sweden, and Holland didn’t care what the Pope said anyway. So, the idea of distinct “racial” groups, some of which were supposedly inferior to others, came to play the key legitimizing role. This aspect of racism has remained important to the present day because the logic of capitalism has continued to require overseas expansion and increasingly complete incorporation of all people of the world into the capitalist sphere.
The particular pattern of racism in North America-- in many respects the pattern for all subsequent development--emerged mainly in relation to the emergence of a multiracial work force in the British colonies. Black and white laborers were forced by law into qualitatively different relations of production: slaves were not simply “zero-wage” earners, but were not allowed even the “privilege” of selling their own labor power on the market as an increasing proportion of white laborers were forced to do. Meanwhile, Native Americans, who were not strong enough to maintain their own system of production in the face of the European invasion, but strong enough to resist enslavement, were subjected to genocide. Anti-Black racism thus became the main form of racism in the United States.
With the destruction of slave-capitalism, and the rapid industrialization of the United States in the late nineteenth century, the working class became multiracial, and the system of racist capitalism took on its present shape. The concept of race was written into law, and strict segregation of the so-called “races” was enforced with the power of the state at the point of production and in every other sphere of life. “Separate” was never “equal”, anytime or anywhere. Differential in wages paid, in employment patterns and job classifications, in “social wages” such as education and health care, and so forth--the super-exploitation of supposedly “inferior races”--provided additional billions of dollars ripped off from the working class by capitalist bosses.
Nothing natural about ‘races’
At the same time, the actual differences in the lives of persons of different “races”–created by the bosses themselves--were explained by the bosses’ ideologues as supposedly the result of so-called “natural biological hereditary differences” among these so-called “races.” Thus, social inequality was defended as an inevitable “fact of nature.” Workers were kept divided, at each other’s throats, and in some cases were used as the shock-troops to keep down the superexploited minorities. The worker-farmer Populist movement was destroyed by this racism, and the U.S. labor movement seriously set back. In addition, this ideology of racism played the key role in preventing the development of communist consciousness on a mass scale. To the extent that the super-exploitation of minority workers seemed “natural” (as in the “social-Darwinist” mythology) any possibity of a society based on full social equality must have seemed remote indeed. Racism necessarily leads to anti-communism!
Because racism is an integral part of capitalism, serious antiracists should become communists. Only by destroying the system on which it rests can racism be eliminated.
The fight against racism under capitalism
Under capitalism, so-called “liberal” antiracism will inevitably be turned into its opposite. Liberalism means relying on the bourgeois state--cops, legislation and especially the courts--to stop the KKK and other racist-fascist groups. This is a real loser! Liberalism pushes pacifism as well as legalism, disarming the anti-racist struggle. Liberalism rejects the view that racism stems from capitalism, blaming it instead on individual prejudice, and singling out the white worker as the villain. Since white workers, too, are hurt by racism, this is a version of “blaming the victim.”
Thus liberalism is also idealist: not recognizing the connection between racist ideas and racist segregation/discrimination, it calls for toleration of racist ideas under the slogan of “free speech.” Liberalism promotes nationalism--”to each his own.” Liberalism and the bourgeois notion of “right” lead to a narrow, economist view of the fight against racist wage differential and so forth, calling for the elimination of overt differential (“equal pay for equal work”), or at best, equal access to different job categories. It cannot deal with the historical fact of segregation and the racist lies pushed to defend it: witness the stampede of liberal ideologues who jumped on the “reverse discrimination” racist bandwagon. Liberalism calls for “toleration” of other “races” in spite of their “differences.” It hides the fact that workers of all so-called “races” have far more in common than they have differences, and the fact that the whole concept of “race” is an invention of the bosses.
Only communist ideas and organization can give the leadership which will ensure that anti-racist organizers avoid these pitfalls. And communists must point out that the logic of real antiracism inevitably leads to an openness to communist ideas.
Because racism is an integral part of capitalism, communists must be antiracist organizers. To take and hold power on a communist program will require masses of workers to the idea of a society organized in the interests of the working class as a class and on the basis of full social (not merely legal) equality. Winning people to these ideas involves convincing them at least of the truth and importance of our analysis of racism. In fact, this may prove to be the largest part of this ideological struggle. Thus, waging serious antiracist struggle on all fronts under capitalism is a prerequisite for the building of communism under the dictatorship of the working class, and is a key political task.
