Readers of CHALLENGE are aware of Progressive Labor Party’s(PLP) insistence upon the centrality of the struggle against racism to the fight for working-class liberation. The history of this strategic communist emphasis reveals the importance of proletarian (that is, working-class) internationalism in both theory and practice.
Although the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is widely credited (even by anticommunist historians) with leading the fight against racism during the Depression years, during most of the previous decade the CPUSA—following in the tradition of the prewar U.S. Socialist Party—insisted that Black oppression (then called the “Negro Question”) was exclusively an economic matter. Undue emphasis upon the violence, poverty, and harsh conditions of labor disproportionately endured by the Black working class, it was argued, would alienate white workers. Unsurprisingly, Black membership in the CPUSA remained low through the 1920s: by 1929, there were still fewer than 300 Black members in a total membership of over 15,000 (Zumoff).
The contradictory policy of Black liberation
It was the intervention of the Comintern (the worldwide association of Communist parties formed in 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution) that enabled the CPUSA to put the fight against racism front and center. At the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, there was intense debate over race, class, and nation. (1) Should Black workers in the U.S. be viewed as a “people,” a “race,” or a “nation”? (2) Did class divisions in the Black population make it impossible to have commonly shared material interests? (3) Did the call for “self-determination” of oppressed peoples and nations—a proposition key to both Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings on the “national question”—pertain to U.S. Black workers, and if so, how? (4) Were Black workers in the United States, by virtue of their greater degree of oppression and exploitation, particularly positioned to lead the global struggle against capitalism?
Notably, Black communists in the U.S. delegation to the Sixth World Congress were—while actively recruited to play a prominent role in these debates—themselves split on these issues (Haywood). It was largely delegates from other countries—especially Japan, Finland, and the USSR—who pressed for the position that would be endorsed as CPUSA policy during the coming period (Solomon). This policy was complex and contradictory.
On the one hand, it asserted that the Black peasantry (agricultural workers), located mostly in the “Black Belt” of the rural South, constituted an oppressed nation in need of self-determination, comparable to the separate peoples that had joined together to form the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) after the Bolshevik Revolution. On the other hand, particularly in the North, the Comintern policy called for an intensified fight against racism in all spheres of life, expressed in the slogan, “Black and White, Unite and Fight!”
Black nationalism is a failing strategy
It was assumed that the Black Belt—upon attaining self-determination through a “bourgeois-democratic” (capitalist) revolution that would help it overcome its capitalist-engendered uneven development—would then join the multiracial working class in the unified revolutionary movement needed to abolish capitalism.
This strategy was then and is now subject to serious critique. The call for a Black Republic, while intended to benefit working-class people of all races and ethnicities, even at the time smacked of Black nationalist separatism.
The post-World War II history of national liberation movements premised upon self-determination, moreover, has shown that the two-stage theory of revolution (first the bourgeois-democratic revolution, then the socialist revolution) has yielded only disappointment and betrayal, particularly in those parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America where it was most fervently embraced.
Progressive Labor Party asserts that the early twentieth-century theorizations of the “national question,” while plausible in their time, have proven to be impediments rather than spurs to working-class liberation. We see its failure playing out to this day. That is why PLP fights for nothing less than multiracial unity and one international fight against capitalism. We have one common enemy and one world to win.
Communists fight racism
Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the sharp struggles undertaken at the Sixth World Congress, the CPUSA greatly intensified its commitment to the fight against racism. Focusing both upon the special oppression of nonwhite workers and upon the destructive and divisive impact of racism upon the entire working class, the CPUSA took the lead in building a class-conscious multiracial movement, one whose legacy lasts to this day, especially in the ranks of PLP.
There would have been no Scottsboro campaign, no sharecropper organizing, no multiracial unionism, no massive eviction protests throughout the USA without the debates that had taken place in Comintern meetings on the other side of the world (Kelley; Naison). Moreover, where racism (“white chauvinism”) within the Party raised its ugly head, it was combated head-on, as in the so-called Yokinen trial of 1931 (Hudson).
One of the favorite canards of anticommunist historiography is the claim that the Comintern—often equated with a demonized construct designated as “Stalin”—never had at heart the interests of the workers of the world: that it sought only to defend the USSR and its ruling circles. The history of the struggle over the “Negro Question” in the United States shows quite the opposite.
In fact, whatever their nationalist limitations, when seen in retrospect, it was communists from around the world whose intervention helped communists in the U.S. reset their priorities. For this gesture of proletarian internationalism revolutionary antiracists remain indebted to this day.
Black workers key
The international communist PLP is fighting for the idea that liberal bosses and politicians are the main danger and that fascism is being expressed most sharply today in fights within ruling classes over how they will align themselves or respond to the reality of U.S. imperialism in decline.
We also fight for the idea that leadership of Black workers is uniquely key to the global victory of communism. Join the fight.

Further readings:
Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist.
Hudson, Hosea. The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Depression.
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression.
Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936.
Zumoff, Jacob. The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919 – 1929.

The following is an excerpted speech given by a PL high school student at a rally in front of the Chancellor of NYC public schools home to a crowd of hundreds demanding that NYPD (New York Police Department) be removed from all public schools.
I am a junior at a mostly Black and Latin high school. My school has had metal detectors for decades, so I am no stranger to the racist over-policing and criminalization of Black and Latin youth in public schools.
I get to the front of the line with all of my metal items and electronics in a basket and when I have to get hand-wanded, I know that I have to stand with my feet shoulder-width apart and my arms out. I don’t need to hold onto something when I have to lift my feet up so they can scan the bottom of my shoes. This is because I have been doing this every day since the 6th grade.
The DOE (Department of Education)  has perpetuated into my daily life since I was 11 years old, that I am a suspect before I am a student. School safety tells me to remove metal items from my body before a teacher tells me good morning. I have to explain that I am a student at the school and have been for 6 years to reenter for volleyball practice before my coach tells me to run a few laps. I have to put my phone and jewelry in my bag before I can take a pencil out of it.
They claim it is for our safety and protection. They claim my classmates are the dangerous ones. They try to make us scared of each other, but the only people I am scared of are the ones wearing the badges.
Racist incidents at school range from extreme ones like my friend getting tackled, bruised, and arrested for using a safety pin to hold his glasses together to something as seemingly small as not being allowed to bring an iced coffee because of the claim that there could be alcohol in it.
The NYPD and DOE work side by side to help funnel innocent working-class Black and Latin kids into prisons by familiarizing us with the police from a young age. But at my school we fight back!
My volleyball team went to one of the city’s “elite” high schools to play a game and got yelled at by school safety and were forced to walk in a single file like we were at Rikers Island [prison]. The white team we faced got none of that. We were accused of stealing from their gym inventory and racist remarks like “looks like they went on a shopping spree” were murmured between school safety agents as we left.
My school rallied teachers, students, and parents to collectively fight back. We made phone calls, we wrote letters, we threatened a sit in, and in the end, my team got the head of school safety along with the perpetrators to come to our school and have an in-depth conversation that ended in genuine apologies. Now every time our volleyball team walks into that school we are treated with respect.
When the working class unites, changes are inevitable!
However, just because we won that fight does not mean racist policing has stopped in schools. We still have to get the NYPD and its racist, toxic murderous culture out of our schools! And more is needed!  This entire school system under capitalism teaches a toxic ideology; only some kids are meant to make it. This is a school system that teaches us that in every graduating class there are a few winners and many more losers.
Everybody wants to talk about systemic racism without mentioning the system—capitalism, the profit system—that treats most of us like waste. For me the systemic change that is needed has a name—communism.  
In our segregated system, from elementary school, students and parents buy into this idea that going to a Black and Latin school equates to failure. The real failure is being won over to racism, the real failure is pushing your kids into schools that fuel elitism by allowing them to think that they deserve to be there because they are better.
This capitalist government needs to maintain this superiority complex in order to stop the working class from realizing that if we unite as a whole, NOTHING can stop us!
The very multi-racial, multi-generational unity that we see right now to get these kkkops out of our schools is the very unity that is needed to smash this racist, capitalist system.
High schools and colleges have trained us to hate communism, the same ones that tell most of us we have no worth. Do you trust these institutions of oppression to teach you the truth about your own liberation?
We cannot trust the very capitalist system that needs racism to thrive to fix systemic racism. This is not a broken system. It is working exactly how it was built to work.
Removing NYPD from schools will not fix segregation, it will not stop failing the majority of its students, and most importantly, it will not fix the racism that is taught in our schools. My classmates, your students, your children deserve more; so, we have to fight for more!
We have to abolish the NYPD and this racist, capitalist system once and for all! SAME ENEMY,  SAME FIGHT,  WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

PAKISTAN—Here, as in any place generally, unemployment and the high cost of living make workers desperate to find jobs.  During the Covid-19 pandemic especially, however, the Pakistani bosses have been playing even deadlier games with the lives of working class people. The bosses here are using the pandemic crisis to boost their regional political power by intensifying working class exploitation and increasing profits.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here have been organizing the working class to fight back and for a world where we produce everything that is essential and vital for life. Only communist revolution can defeat the coronavirus pandemic and the virus of capitalism, as capitalism proves itself again incapable and uninterested in protecting working class life.
Capitalism creates exponential coronavirus growth
Today, Pakistan records  more than 170,000 new Covid-19 patients daily . According to official numbers, every day 2,000 new patients are hospitalized and about 110 people die. The estimates, according to some non-governmental organizations, present an even more dangerous situation, with between two and four million people infected and 800,000 of these in Lahore alone, the second largest city of Pakistan.
The government is not allowing enough people to get tested , showing their careless attitude towards  the working class and leaving them to infect their families and coworkers. But even the testing kits that are available do not give  accurate results; test results on the  same patient taken in private and government labs yield different results. Since the bosses are only interested in increasing production for profit without ensuring test kit quality, they do not ensure that the testing kits produced are accurate. Furthermore, big landlords and factory owners out to make money force workers to come to work even if they will get infected. Bosses know there is no scarcity of workers if some get infected because there are millions of others looking to get a job.
Religion: virus’ vector, bosses’ tool
Capitalist bosses use many different techniques to make money. The best way to make money in Pakistan is to create a disaster-like situation to justify increased racist and sexist exploitation and oppression, and then promote religion. Some of the bosses’ religious propaganda says “there is no coronavirus, it’s just a conspiracy...”. This propaganda affects some among the working-class who believe this, when in reality the capitalist bosses are eager to distract with conspiracy theories rather than providing basic necessities. The medical system is utterly unable to handle more Covid-19 cases, with no hospital beds available even in Islamabad, the capital.
Shia religious ministers were allowed to travel to Pakistan from Iran without staying in quarantine at the Pakistani-Iranian border.  People who came back from Saudi Arabia were also allowed to go home without any testing or isolation. Sunni religious ministers and ruling party leaders influenced the authorities to grant permission to hold “tablighi Ijtimah” (an Islamic congregation organized by Islamic organizations every year) at Raiwind Lahore where people from all over the world participated, spent days together  and then traveled freely  around Pakistan.  
According to the reports about 70-80,000 people participated in this congregation from various parts of Pakistan and 3,000 attendees from 40 countries. 60 percent of the coronavirus cases in Pakistan have been linked to the people who attended this Islamic congregation, and pilgrims returning from the Middle East. Twenty percent out of the remaining 40 percent of cases are linked to  people from Italy, Spain, the UK and other European countries. They were not tested at the airport because they bribed the officers while screening at the airports. The remaining 20 percent were infected by local transmission.
Workers living in abject poverty are more susceptible to Covid-19 because of worse sanitation conditions and higher population density in some places, increasing risk of exposure at the workplace or on the street. Public transport is filled with workers who cannot afford masks or gloves because masks, gloves and hand sanitizers sell for astronomical prices.
Bosses exploit crisis, workers organize and fight
A Pakistani minister told the bosses’ media that he is expecting two million official cases by the middle of July 2020, and that the daily death rate will also be increased to 8-10,000 per day. Despite this prediction, the prime minister is against taking any steps to slow down the spread of disease. Their thinking is that Pakistan needs millions of cases to postpone paying loan installments taken from the IMF, World Bank and other monetary institutions or governments, and to petition for aid from the main imperialist countries.
Meanwhile, the government is rapidly privatizing different government-owned factories and laying off workers in the face of dropping exports and dropping demand for factory production. In Lahore, Karachi, Multan, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi and Peshawar bosses have fired thousands of workers for this reason. In one steel mill factory alone, 9,350 workers lost their jobs all at once. Demonstrations have erupted at textile factories for Qasim textiles and U.S. Apparel, but so far have been broken by the factory bosses’ private security and private police. PLP is working to organize more demonstrations against the bosses.
Communism is the cure for capitalist virus
Capitalism is spreading death everywhere in this world. The bosses  have no intention of saving working class lives and do not care about us. We communists in the PLP know  that communism can fight against pandemics and disasters, as we communists in Pakistan have taken care of working class people who were in danger during past disasters, and now during this pandemic despite our limited resources. Only with a communist revolution for state power can we organize society and our resources to take care of each other. PLP continues to fight!

LOS ANGELES, June 13—Over 300 healthcare workers marched on two LA County jails, and then on to the ICE detention center. The LA County jails are the largest jail system in the country, which is the largest jailer on the planet! As we marched with a pickup truck and sound system Progressive Labor Party chants led all along the way. Chants such as, “Racism means… Alex Flores means… Our healthcare means… WE GOT TO FIGHT BACK” rang out through downtown Los Angeles! We were also joined by three families who had their loved ones murdered by LA Sheriff’s including the family of Alex Flores, killed by the LAPD in November 2019.
A reform group that gets money directly from George Soros (liberal, capitalist billionaire) and is connected to the Movement4BlackLives (M4BL) organized this march.  The Progressive Labor Party has been involved in this group over the last two years.
Multiracial unity against racism confronts identity politics
During the march the identity politics of ONLY talking about “Black lives” fell flat on many workers, as hundreds of multiracial health care workers joined forces with the families and friends fighting against racist police murders.  Meanwhile a PLP comrade gave a rousing speech describing the horrors of racism created by the capitalist system, the creation of the police from slave patrols, and the impact of racism on our health, particularly with the role of mass incarceration on the HIV epidemic.
Our comrade was followed by an even more powerful and passionate speech by the sister of Alex Flores.  She talked openly about her brother’s struggles with a racist education system, difficulties he had landing a job, and connected this racism to her job as a dental hygienist.  She described the inferior care the mostly Black and Latin patients get.  She openly called for multiracial unity and fightback against this racist, capitalist system. She got a great reception by the hundreds in attendance. It was inspiring!
 This group was formed to organize healthcare workers to join the “abolitionist” fight around reforms surrounding LA County Jails.  Our work has consisted of ending money bail, ending pre-trial assessments that lead to increased incarceration for Black and Latin workers, and more recently around the “Alternatives to Incarceration” plan to move County money from the Sheriff’s to the various health agencies within the County.
Let’s march on the jails, not send emails to politicians
We have been meeting mostly to discuss campaign-specific issues, with little political discussion.  So it’s been difficult to really get to know the members in a deep way (they’re all over LA). We’ve mainly brought friends into this group and also politicized our on-the-job work at an HIV clinic. In this crisis period of racist Covid-19 pandemic and police terror, this work has provided an opportunity to mobilize some medical workers and students to participate in the Flores fight, especially our protest at the DA’s house.
More recently we pushed for this march which had us leading over 300 healthcare workers. The leader of this group is also part of the national leadership of M4BL. He has a reformist outlook, while espousing words like “abolition” and exposing “capitalism” to some degree.  For the last two years, he has been calling on members to attend meetings with politicians and send them “angry” emails, like the “digital action” he had us do toward the end of the march. He has been reluctant to build for any concrete actions against the LA County ruling class.  
However, in this post-George Floyd and Breonna Taylor moment, the multiracial uprisings of workers all around the country, made it difficult for him to oppose a march on the jails.  Our comrade, with some support, made the call for the march that he was forced to support.
On the day prior to the march, he wanted to “clarify” messaging on “defunding the sheriff’s” and to call for closing the Men’s Central Jail, only one of seven jails in LA County.  Our comrade asked him why he was singling out only one jail and not all seven given the many calls to “defund.”  This leader then exposed himself when he basically said that the Board of Supervisors, who run the entire LA County system, wants to close the jail anyway because it is completely rundown.  It was pathetic.  He was forced to take the position of closing all the jails, though of course we know that under capitalism that will never happen.
Nevertheless, this period of heightened racist attacks on our class and the uprisings following have created opportunities in a struggle that was seemingly non-moving for the last couple of years. It proves the absolute necessity of working in mass organizations for the long term. That slow work has provided an opportunity to move our base into action, expand our base, and grow our Party for the long-term fight for a communist world.