Pakistan, September 2—In August 2025, vast stretches of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Kashmir were swallowed by raging floods. Nature provided the rainfall, but it is capitalism—with its ruthless exploitation of land, reckless construction, and refusal to invest in protective infrastructure—that turns rain into mass destruction. The working class in these areas needs help and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is organizing relief efforts. But we know only a communist revolution will bring the change the working class needs.

Heavy monsoon rains, intensified by global warming, combined with decades of reckless capitalist development has unleashed destruction on an enormous scale. By the end of August, more than 1,000 people had been killed nationwide. In Punjab alone, over 1,600 villages were submerged, more than 2 million people were caught in the floodwaters, and nearly half a million were driven from their homes. Crops across thousands of acres were ruined; bridges, schools, and hospitals collapsed; and waterborne diseases spread rapidly through crowded camps and submerged neighborhoods.

Capitalists use and overuse fossil fuels to increase profits

The ruling class insists on labeling this a “natural calamity.” But nothing about this catastrophe is natural. PLP emphasizes that disasters of this kind are the direct product of capitalism. 

Imperialism makes the chain of capitalist misery even tighter. The bosses in the big imperialist countries have burned fossil fuels for centuries, heating the atmosphere and intensifying monsoon cycles while the working class around the world suffers the consequences.

In these conditions, relief efforts were not charity but solidarity—workers protecting one another when the capitalist state refused to act. PLP coordinated with local unions, student organizations, shopkeepers, professionals, charitable groups, and even some international NGOs to provide tents, food parcels, and hygiene kits. It was ordinary people who stepped forward. PLP members and supporters mobilized rapidly across Pakistan. With limited resources but coordinated efforts, PLP managed to reach people in difficult situations. These contributions saved lives. Yet even the best relief work is constrained under capitalism. Aid eases suffering temporarily but cannot prevent the next flood.

As PLP comrades explained while meeting people in flood-hit areas, under capitalism disasters are class war. The rich retreat to their safe homes and demand bailouts. The poor drown in their fields, their schools, and their villages. When the waters came, the capitalist state proved useless. Paltry compensation, token suspensions of officials, and staged visits by politicians could not hide the reality that the rulers had abandoned the masses. In flooded areas, families spent days without food or clean water. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan, entire districts were cut off as cholera and hepatitis spread unchecked.

While fighting for international communist revolution, PLP also demands urgent survival measures. Displaced families need shelter and compensation now. Empty luxury properties must be used to house the homeless, rent collection must be suspended, and direct cash aid delivered. Workers must be protected—no layoffs in flood zones. Instead, public works jobs should employ locals to rebuild their communities. 

Farmers need immediate relief: debts canceled, fresh seeds and livestock supplied, and communal grazing lands restored.

Keeping the fight for communism central to the struggle

Fighting for reforms isn’t enough. Profit must give way to planning. A communist economy would meet human needs: flood-safe collective housing, restored forests and rivers, modern flood-control systems accountable to communities, renewable energy to replace fossil fuels, and universal, people-run warning and evacuation networks.

The drowned villages of Punjab and the collapsed bridges of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are not signs of “mismanagement.” Only a revolutionary transformation led by the working class under the red banners of PLP can protect the masses and heal the environment. The existing state is built to defend property, not people—it cannot be reformed. Workers and peasants must organize in the international revolutionary communist PLP to overthrow it and build a state of their own under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which expropriates the exploiters and puts production under collective control.

The floods of 2025 are both a tragedy and a warning. PLP calls on the working class to organize in their workplaces, campuses, and villages to build an international communist party — PLP and to link the struggle in Pakistan with the global fight for communism.

This coming October 17 marks the 166th anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry. It was a revolutionary revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle! The fight against racist terror worldwide rages on today as the ruling class relies on it to keep workers in line, especially among brewing interimperialist rivalry with Russia and China.

As workers recognize the power of unity, the cops crack down harder on protests

The southern enslaving class was terrified by the Harpers Ferry raiders’ militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. 

One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:

“I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-Slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter.”

From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery

This trust among white and Black fighters did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Ohio.

At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever.
 He believed Black and white workers were completely equal. He put 
this knowledge into action daily.

As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, N.Y. near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).

Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, reaching out to Black abolitionists and former enslaved workers.

Tubman single-handedly freed 300 enslaved workers

Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown allies. Born around 1820 to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her “owner” tried selling her as “damaged goods.” Instead she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.

Over the following 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made approximately 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. This resolute, daring revolutionary declared, “I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger.”Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as “General Tubman.” Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.

Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harpers Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.

Black rebels petrified slave-owners

To those today who say workers won’t fight oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal. The slave-owners, although talking of “docile” Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of “outside agitators.” They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep Yankees and abolitionist literature away from them.

Today the “outside agitators” are Progressive Labor Party (PLP) communists, fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us that the impoverished working class is too ground down, too alienated to fight back collectively, saying workers hate communism. Yet they organize cops, plant security, the Minutemen, Black nationalists and sellout union “leaders” to try to keep communists out, and instantly fire them when they’re discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if the working class is supposed to be so passive?

Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds are able to overcome the “natural” segregation capitalist society promotes. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.

Today, U.S. capitalism has created its own contradiction. Workers still often live in neighborhoods separated by “race”, but many are integrated within their workplaces and schools. The bosses try to divide us there as well, with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture to keep workers apart (e.g., soul “versus” country music). Nevertheless, workers rub shoulders every day. Class-conscious workers in PLP must develop these acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.
Class struggle strikes out racism

As in Tubman and Brown’s time, today racism permeates society. But rebellions and strikes reveal multiracial unity and struggle against the bosses. At the Smithfield Ham Factory in Tarheel, NC, for example, a 15-year unionization fight witnessed intense intimidation from the bosses to scare workers from signing union cards. But by organizing support from grocery workers from far and wide, Smithfield workers felt part of a larger community. When the bosses got immigration agents to raid the plant, targeting Latin workers for deportation, the workers saw through this divisive trick, and, in November 2006, 500 marched out in a two-day strike protesting this raid, forcing the company to rehire all the fired immigrant workers!

In 2008 in the Bronx, NY, the Stella D’Oro workers went on strike for 11 months. These immigrant workers from across the world, men and women, overcame differences and stuck together. Not one worker crossed the picket line! PLP had organized friends, comrades, teachers and students onto the picket lines, bringing solidarity and communist leadership. PLP members steadfastly stood in solidarity with the strikers via donations, rallies and marches, and supported their fight against plant closure. 

The fight against police brutality is a protracted class war still being waged today. It is the same war left unfinished by Tubman and Brown.  PLP joins the militant antiracist fightback against the kkkops, who in less than a year’s time, stole the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor,  Jacob Blake, and countless others. The multiracial character of these protests are glimmers of the revolutionary potential of the working class.

John Brown’s raid and Harriet Tubman’s courage in freeing 300 slaves along the Underground Railroad teach antiracists many valuable lessons . First, militancy was foremost in their thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to being a slave, that she would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Bloody Kansas, realized that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed with them, especially after the 1857 Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery nationwide.

The second lesson is that multiracial unity is essential in any fight. Black workers escaping from enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists to reach the North. Thousands of workers, Black and white, helped escaping slaves along their journeys and defended them when attacked by slave-catchers. These workers attended public meetings, donated money, passed the word to their friends, and helped harbor fugitive slaves.

PLP does similar things today. We discuss political struggles and the vital need for multiracial unity against the racist system with friends, coworkers and neighbors. We urge them to join in militant antiracist demonstrations, build a multiracial base with fellow workers or donate to CHALLENGE. Every time someone we know does one of these simple acts, they’re making a political commitment in the fight against racism, capitalism and imperialism, just as thousands of anti-slavery workers did against slavery — taking small steps to serve and defend those who had escaped slavery as well as those who fought it directly.

Join PLP 

We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in these struggles to join Progressive Labor Party.

Today’s supporters of antiracist struggle understand — just as did the thousands backing Brown and Tubman 165 years ago — that revolutionaries like the raiders then and PLP now are the honest, reliable leaders in struggle. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. CHALLENGE constantly reports workers being won to militancy and multiracial unity in struggles against the racist bosses, hailing those joining our ranks. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other’s needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.

Canada: strikers welcome red solidarity 

On a recent trip to Prince Edward Island, Canada, I came across a picket line of municipal workers. There are only 35 members in their union. They can boast nearly 100 percent  participation by my count. The strike has lasted so far 43 days. Management of the city of Charlottetown is refusing to negotiate even though the contract improvements they see would cost only $150,000 Canadian dollars.

I spoke to two union brothers extensively. Both spoke of their impressions that the U.S. was sliding into authoritarianism and fascism, and both worried about threats made against Canadian sovereignty.

They were very upset about ICE and the attacks on immigrants here, while confessing that Canada has had a very mixed history of interactions with the First Nations (indigenous people). What they worry about is the level of support Trump appears to have from their perception of the media among people living in the U.S. I pointed out the recent demonstrations in Chicago, D.C. and L.A. and the growing resistance to rising fascism. I described the United Federation of Teachers - Retired Teacher’s chapter Labor Solidarity Committee’s efforts to increase working class solidarity and our working group on rising fascism. They applauded our efforts.

Of course, only a mass movement that liberates the workers from the stranglehold of capitalist relations of production and creates a communist society led by the workers will end our dependence on capital.
*****

Punda Amechoka: Workers in Kenya tired of capitalism

Before the summer of 2024, when Kenyan police’s deadly crackdown on youth protests garnered international media attention, workers here had staged a series of demonstrations to fight against crushing taxes and high inflation. The one I witnessed started on July 7, 2023, and spread across at least twenty counties. Thousands of workers flooded the streets, banging pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils, and chanting “Punda Amechoka,” a Swahili phrase meaning “donkey is tired.” This slogan compares humans to working animals to indicate taxation-induced starvation. 

Kenya ranks 100th out of 127 countries in the 2024 Global Hunger Index with a score of 24.0, implying a serious level of hunger. The cause of hunger is not a shortage on the supply side, but that people can’t afford food. When the price of unga, maize flour for most Kenyans’ daily meal, goes up, the poor do not switch to cake. People cease to buy essentials when purchasing necessities at inflated prices. During the three months I lived in a migrant labor community in Central Kenya, I noticed even the few “fortunate” industrial laborers hired in adjacent factories, skipped meals and cut back on other nutrients.

In Capital, Volume 1, Marx reckons with wage as a fund for individual consumption that provides laborers “the means of subsistence, or the labor-fund, which the worker requires for his own maintenance and reproduction, and which, in all systems of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce.” (Penguin, p.713) This has been translated into the demand for “living wage” in labor struggles. However, for most Africans, wage-labor-based livelihoods no longer have any real prospects for the urban majority, and they are more like a fading dream. 

The staples of life, such as food, water, sanitation, and shelter, are generated from diverse forms of the informal economy. The “rural-urban” migrant laborers I study in my fieldwork take on a range of low-paying, temporary jobs, including work in factories, garages, street vending, domestic service, waste collection, home tailoring, and crafting. “Hustling” has become the vernacular way to describe the ordinary laboring experience, the shared struggles that William Ruto took advantage of in his successful 2022 presidential campaign. The then-presidential candidate leveraged the deep frustrations caused by unemployment and social stagnation, claiming he represented the “hustler” class and framing his campaign as “hustlers vs. dynasties.” 

It was clear which side Ruto stood with almost immediately. He ordered police to fire live ammunition at protesters whose demand was for the government to withdraw tax bills that would directly push up already soaring living costs. In my neighborhood, police drove fully armed vehicles and deployed tear gas to disperse my neighbors. I was rescued by a neighbor who grabbed my arm and pulled me to a labor dorm shelter amidst the chaos. Though on the margin of capitalist labor relations, the Kenyan people are nonetheless at the forefront of capitalist accumulation. Along with Zambia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Pakistan, Ghana, and other lower-middle-income countries, Kenya teeters on the edge of default on its public debt. In 2023, Kenya spent 59 percent of the nation’s revenue on debt repayment. The rhythm of public debt to repayment significantly affects Kenyan people due to the daunting level of taxes and massive cuts in public services. The pains of price spikes in staple foods, electricity, matatu [minibus] transportation fares, and other essentials dominate daily conversation. Austerity policies, in fact, make every rhythm of time in society and every productive action subject to the central time of sovereign debt repayment.

Public debt, therefore, conjures into being a national economy to which supposedly all Kenyans have obligations. As Marx notes, “the public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation.” (Capital Volume 1, Penguin, p.919) The real “hustlers” have given William Ruto a nickname that he truly earns, “Zakayo,” which is Swahili for Zacchaeus, the biblical figure notorious for being a greedy tax collector. 
What options do ordinary Kenyans have left but to fight back? Contrary to the linear assumption of historical progress, people’s experiences with capitalism are nonlinear, as Black Africans who have rarely experienced Fordism (except for some rare cases in South Africa) but now find themselves fighting against full-blown financial capitalism. Kenya not only shows how public debt can cause violence in daily life, but also how people are forced to turn to loans just to get by. With the ubiquity of mobile phones even in Africa, digital loans – financed by the global surplus capital – are an irresistible allure for borrowing to put food on the table. 

“Punda Amechoka”, the slogan “donkey is tired”, from this angle, I interpret as people are tired of being enslaved by public and private debts. 
*****

To fight climate change, drown capitalism

The continuing failure of the international ruling class to respond in the interests of workers to rapidly changing conditions of the planet due to climate change is no secret. Lately the capitalist owned media has been paying less and less attention to the root causes of the problem.

Some of that can be traced to the enormous profits being made by the oil industry and the continued use of technology to extract oil from older oil fields in the United States. These technological changes have helped make the U.S.  one of the leading oil producers again after undergoing shrinkage 15 years ago before the extensive use of hydro fraction (fracking).

The capitalist-owned news outlets know which side their bread is buttered on. They report individual catastrophes from time to time with virtually no connection between the dots. When you connect the dots of the individual disasters, it paints a picture of profits before people.

Communists know that science and politics must lead the response. The science of climate change is fairly well understood. Symptoms of climate change reported in the international press regularly through articles about raging floods killing thousands of people in Pakistan, India or China are just snapshots of the coming crisis. Just since June over 400 people have died in Pakistan from flooding caused by the increased intensity of monsoon rains. Flooding as glaciers in the Himalayas melt overrun flood plains in which greedy construction companies build housing.
New Scientist magazine states “Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen an extra 15 parts per million since 1960 due to the declining ability of the land and sea to soak up excess CO2.” 

Deforestation, drought, and warming seas reduce the ability of the land and water to absorb the CO2 that is driving increasing global temperatures. Future articles will provide insights into the need for better climate modeling and planning. A key to a communist working-class run society envisioned by the international Progressive Labor Party is scientific planning and thorough discussion throughout society. Capitalism alienates (separates) the working classes from planning.  In a capitalist society, what drives our scientific research is money and the interests of capitalists to reap ever higher profits. The government (state) is controlled essentially by the rich and wealthy. They will never voluntarily give up their money, profits or power. We want to change that. Help build the egalitarian world that is possible. Help build the revolutionary communist PLP. Join us now while there is time.
*****

Reject individual terror, build with masses instead

The assassination of the fascist Charlie Kirk is a reactionary act. It’s not just Kirk! It’s the whole damn capitalist system!  The only way forward away from the Republican Party’s (Trump) creeping fascism is through organizing workers and others to overthrow capitalism.

Here is what Vladimir Lenin wrote about “terror” -- political assassination -- in 1894:

“The Narodnaya Volya was headed by an Executive Committee ... [names omitted] The immediate object of the Narodnaya Volya was the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy, while their programme provided for the organisation of a “permanent popular representative body” elected on the basis of universal suffrage, the proclamation of democratic liberties, the land to be given to the people; and the elaboration of measures for factories to pass into the hands of the workers. 

The Narodovoltsi were unable, however, to find the road to the masses of the people and took to political conspiracy and individual terror. The terroristic struggle of the Narodovoltsi was not supported by a mass revolutionary movement, and enabled the government to crush the organisation by resorting to fierce persecution, death sentences and provocation.

After 1881, the Narodnaya Volya fell to pieces. Repeated attempts to revive it during the 1880s ended in failure -- for example, the terrorist group organised in 1886, headed by A. I. Ulyanov [V. I. Lenin’s brother] and P. Y. Shevyryov shared these traditions. After an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III, the group was exposed, and its active members executed.”
*****

University officials giving names of dissenters to federal fascists

SFGate, 9/12–Officials at UC Berkeley have sent over a hundred names of students and staff to federal officials, who are looking into allegations of antisemitism as part of an ongoing federal investigation. The names of 160 students, faculty and staff were sent to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after the office demanded documents related to complaints of antisemitism and discrimination at the university. “The UC systemwide Office of the General Counsel (OGC), in compliance with its legal obligations to cooperate with the agency, directed UC Berkeley to provide those documents to the federal agency”...

Israeli military continues bombardment of Palestinian homes

Al Jazeera, 9/14–Israeli forces have intensified their bombardment of Gaza City, leveling three residential blocks and killing at least 53 Palestinians, including 35 in Gaza City, as families continue to flee under the threat of new forced evacuation orders. The Israeli army marked the al-Kawthar tower in Gaza’s southern Remal neighbourhood as a target before destroying the building on Sunday with a series of missile strikes less than two hours later…“It was another sleepless night for those in Gaza City, with the sounds of drones, the constant hum of machines of war, and the explosive remotely detonated robots across the city”...

U.S. bosses crack down of workers critical of Kirk

France24, 9/14–For some Americans on the far right, Charlie Kirk died a “martyr” and any criticism of the hugely popular conservative activist must be punished…Middle Tennessee State University’s president announced…an employee’s firing for a “callous” comment about Kirk…Some Kirk supporters have turned into online sleuths, searching out accounts that praised or celebrated Kirk’s murder…These efforts have targeted teachers, firefighters and even military personnel, some of whom have lost their jobs. MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd lost his job shortly after on-air comments about Kirk, one of the first of many figures to experience similar fallout. Office Depot said Friday that it fired a worker at a Michigan store who was seen on video refusing to print flyers for a Kirk vigil…

Small fascists expanding influence in news outlets

The Guardian, 9/14–The US right has appeared to increase its influence on mainstream media in America in recent weeks, especially in television news which has been a major target of the Donald Trump administration. CBS News…installed a Trump ally as its ombudsman, weeks after the family of Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men, and a friend of the US president, sealed control over Paramount, the owner of CBS. Now Paramount is reportedly looking to buy Warner Bros Discovery, the media behemoth behind CNN, which would potentially bring the influential news network under the roof of an increasingly Trump-friendly conglomerate. At CBS News, parent company Paramount placed Kenneth Weinstein, the former head of the conservative Hudson Institute thinktank, to oversee public complaints. 

U.S. borrowing leading to another bubble

Foreign Affairs, September/October–For much of the past quarter century, the rest of the world has looked in wonder at the United States’ ability to borrow its way out of trouble…bond markets have become far less submissive, and long-term interest rates have risen sharply on ten- and 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds… As of May 2025, all the major credit-rating agencies had downgraded U.S. debt, and there is a growing perception among banks and foreign governments that hold trillions of dollars in U.S. debt that the country’s fiscal policy may be going off the rails.

IDF snipers used to target civilians

Der Spiegel, 9/10–”Sergeant D.”...is a sniper in the Israeli army…suspected of having committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip…One accusation that has been made repeatedly is that the army has been intentionally killing civilians. Numerous reports and anonymous statements from soldiers seem to indicate that such accusations are rooted in fact…Videos, photos and digital analyses in addition to interviews with dozens of experts, former soldiers and international law experts indicate that members of the unit have likely shot unarmed people to death and thus may have committed war crimes.