OAK LAWN, ILLINOIS, June 7–The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) once again joined forces with several community organizations tonight to protest at the monthly Oak Lawn Police & Fire Board meeting. We are keeping firm in our demand that the three KKKops who beat Arab teenager Hadi Abuatelah be fired and prosecuted for their vicious assault which resulted in his hospitalization and lingering trauma. One kkkop, Patrick O’Donnell, has been indicted, but we demand all three be fired and prosecuted for this racist attack.  

Under capitalism, racist kkkops are the rule, not the exception. Their role within class society is to harass and intimidate, especially Black and brown workers and youth. They also are tasked with protecting the bosses’ private property. In order to get rid of the police, we must destroy the capitalist system that profits by keeping workers oppressed through unemployment, low wages, and systemic racism and sexism. We need to build a multiracial, revolutionary movement that fights for communism, a worker’s state. And to do all this, we need a mass PLP!

Justice for Hadi, justice for all workers
We are nearing the one-year anniversary of Hadi’s beating (see CHALLENGE, 8/5/22). At the last board meeting, protesters marched out when anti-racist fighters were kicked out by the kkkops. We chanted loudly that we will continue fighting for justice and expose the cozy relationship between the Police Board and the kkkops. Many community members related stories of how the Oak Lawn kkkops have for years targeted Arab workers in the area, particularly workers and families from Palestine.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
At the end of the rally, a comrade grabbed the attention of more than thirty protesters with a rousing speech. He linked the mass antiracist movement sparked by the police murder of George Floyd with the current struggle for justice in Oak Lawn. He said capitalism and racist kkkops go together, and that’s why we need a communist revolution. Everyone was invited to the upcoming PLP summer activities, and several people gave us their contact information to follow-up.

We are pushing to remain consistent in our efforts to fight for justice for Hadi and all other victims of racist police terror and capitalist oppression. We are also working to connect with other plans to protest outside the courthouse where child assaulter O’Donnell is facing charges. With every action that we take part in, we are fighting to win more workers and youth to the need to build the communist movement that connects all these struggles to capitalism and the need to destroy this rotten profit system!

Toxic air plagued much of the U.S. in early June as wildfires raged throughout Canada. On June 6, New York City experienced the worst pollution on record, beyond the “emergency” level set by the Environmental Protection Agency and nearly four times the level considered “unhealthy.”. Hypocritical calls by liberal misleaders like New York Mayor Eric Adams, to “stay home if you can'' were too little too late, as smoke darkened orange-hued skies. Most workers couldn’t heed Adams’ call, since no work means no pay–and the capitalist bosses weren’t about to lose profits to protect workers. Black and Latin workers in the poorest neighborhoods suffered the most as the choking air caused emergency room visits to soar, especially for those with asthma and other respiratory illnesses (Gothamist, 6/12). The dirty air crisis piled on the already poisonous effects of living under capitalism.

While wildfire smoke is unusual for New York, breathing toxic air is the everyday norm for much of the world’s working class. South Asia has nine of the world’s ten cities with the worst air and “persistently hazardous” pollution that causes an estimated two million premature deaths a year” (New York Times,, 6/15). Capitalism wreaks devastation on the working class every day. From non-stop deforestation in the Amazon rainforest to the proposed bulldozing of a forest in Atlanta to build a $90 million facility to train more killer kkkops,  the rulers keep spreading the horrors of their toxic system. We cannot rely on a ruling class that kills us daily. We can’t trust our children’s future to the profit-mad monsters who caused  climate change in the first place. Only communism, a system run to serve workers’’ needs, not the profit of a few, can change the conditions that lead to so much death and disease for the international working class!

Capitalist drive for profits = wildfires
“Wildfires” aren’t  the natural disasters that the term might imply. Although lightning was the primary cause of the recent Canadian conflagrations, many of the burning trees were not in natural forests. Much of the devastated acreage was in industrial tree farms. Timber companies cut down forests that had been there for hundreds of years to “make space for commercial tree varieties and eliminate competition”(Earth Island Journal, 4/8/19). As usual, the drive for maximum profits led to the planting of profitable but “less fire-tolerant tree species, [making] it easier for fires to spread” (BBC, 6/12). Rising temperatures worldwide due to the burning of fossil fuels lead to drier conditions, making wildfires more frequent and intense...which in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause even more global warming.

Protecting the health of the environment and humanity will never be society’s goal until capitalism is destroyed. Under communism, there would be no need to put workers’ lives in such danger. Without money and the drive for profit, all decisions–including environmental decisions–made would be based on the needs of the international working class.

Environmental racism is part of life under capitalism
The smoke that blanketed New York didn't spare wealthy neighborhoods. But like most environmental disasters, the most exploited workers in already neglected neighborhoods are hurt the most. The harm from smoke comes from  tiny solid and liquid particles that are inhaled and trigger respiratory illnesses or worsen existing conditions. With already higher-than-average asthma rates, Black and Latin workers are among the most vulnerable to the hazardous impacts of the smoke. This, too, is not a natural occurrence.

Racist segregation, a criminal abomination created by the capitalist ruling class,  has forced Black and Latin workers to live in neighborhoods cut through by highways and packed with industrial plants. “[B]lack and Hispanic communities in the U.S. are exposed to far more air pollution” and “neighborhoods once shaped by discriminatory housing policies…have more pavement, fewer trees and higher average temperatures — a combination that can lead to deadly heat illness” (Washington Post, June 2020).

During the wildfire crisis, the highest rates of emergency room visits related to asthma were in these areas (Gizmodo, 6/16). Historically Black and Latin neighborhoods–such as New York’s South Bronx, nicknamed “Asthma Alley”– have the highest rates of death and disease from asthma in the country. In New York, 80 percent of the people hospitalized with asthma are Black and Latin workers (Columbia University). Capitalism was already killing these workers! This smoke only made things worse.

Capitalism won’t solve climate change
Liberal misleaders like Adams and President Joe Biden would have us think that climate change denial is a new phenomenon pushed by a conservative fringe. But it was oil giant ExxonMobil, a bulwark of mainstream finance capital, that hired the scientists in the 1970s who found that fossil fuels were dangerous, and then paid them to hide their findings and misinform the public. They “were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks” (Scientific American, 10/26/15).

With Canada in the spotlight, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s hypocrisy stands out. In June 2019, Canada declared a national climate emergency. “The next day, it approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion… to move almost 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to the port of Burnaby” (mronline.org, 6/23). The bosses’ promises at United Nations climate conferences to cut carbon dioxide emissions mean next to nothing.

As oil profits soar, in large part due to the war in Ukraine, trillions of dollars are being invested worldwide in fossil fuel infrastructure (NYT, 4/6). These plans are making a mockery of the UN’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, never mind their members’  “commitment” at the Paris Agreement in 2015. “Temperature rises over 2 degrees could bring catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts, including pushing three billion people into chronic water scarcity” (CNN, 1/30). As the world’s imperialist superpowers ramp up to the next world war, they will keep doing whatever it takes to protect their profits and power.

Under Biden, laughably called the “first climate president,” oil production has increased to record levels. In March,  “the Biden administration approved a massive drilling project in Alaska that could generate the same carbon emissions each year as adding two million gas-powered cars to the roads” (Smithsonian Magazine, 3/22). This Willow Project praised by oil execs is supposed to “secure energy independence” from Russia–the capitalists’ code for sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry.  

The liberal bosses calling for the Green New Deal, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, or other UN climate goals continue to pose them as solutions to the capitalist-created climate crisis. But global bosses have no real plan to “save the planet.””. Their master plan is to prepare for world war. As of 2019, the U.S. military was “the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world” (The Guardian, 11/21). Capitalism can never combat climate change.

Burn down capitalism with communist revolution
Communism is the only system that can! In a system run by and for the working class, the profit-driven causes of climate change will wither away. Unfortunately, the damage caused by capitalism won’t be undone overnight. But we will reorganize the way we work and the way we power our world. We will organize to protect the working class by moving workers away from vulnerable coastlines, increasing green spaces, and converting to clean energy sources. When “natural” disasters strike, our priority will be to save and protect lives. Join Progressive Labor Party and organize for communist revolution to build that world!

Worldwide, the summer months have historically been a time of training for Progressive Labor Party (PLP). As we gear up for summer of learning, fightback, and recommitment to communism, it’s to reflect on one of PLP’s pillars from inception: the fight against racism is key to revolution.

Join our international 2023 Summer Project in the NYC-NJ area from July 6 to July 12, and our Party Convention “Build the Party Under Sharpening War and Fascism” from July 14 to July 16. Contact your local PL’er for more information.

In 1964, the young Progressive Labor Movement played a lead role in the historic Harlem Rebellion, the first Blackled urban uprising of the era against police terror. On July 16, an off-duty cop, Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, shot and murdered James Powell, a 15-yearold, 122-pound ninth-grader, in cold blood. For six consecutive nights, the anger of the Black masses boiled over in open rebellion in central Harlem and then in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.

The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 raised the fight against racist oppression to a new level while exposing the class treason of Black reformist leadership. After Harlem, more than 100 cities in the U.S. felt the torch of rebellion. PL’s leadership in this struggle set the tone for our unceasing fight against racism:


From the 1970s to the current day, PL’ers have organized hundreds of attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis wherever they spread their racist garbage. Rejecting the pacifist mythology that these gutter racists would fade away if ignored, we have attacked them head-on—and confronted the capitalists’ cops who protect them. We have mounted these anti-racist, multiracial actions in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Detroit and St. Louis. We’ve done the same in smaller communities like Tupelo, Mississippi; Scotland, Connecticut; Jamesburg and Morristown, New Jersey; and scores of cities and towns in California. We invaded the Nazis’ headquarters in Chicago. We beat a white supremacist leader in a Boston television interview. These militant anti-KKK/Nazi actions have involved an estimated 100,000 or more workers and youth.


On May Day, 1975, we mobilized 2,500 anti-racists in Boston to march against the segregationist, terrorist organization called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights, accurately nicknamed Racists On A Rampage). When they physically attacked us, we routed them. We subsequently organized a summer project to combat ROAR’s mob violence and its anti-busing racism. We integrated formerly all-white beaches, held anti-racist summer schools for Black children, and rallied to escort Black children into their first day of integrating formerly all-white schools. Our efforts smashed ROAR.

On May Day, 1976, we marched into Chicago’s Marquette Park, where Nazis had barred Black people. We integrated that neighborhood.


Simultaneously, PLP exposed academic charlatans — like E.O. Wilson, Richard Herrnstein, and Arthur Jensen — who spewed racist filth about the “inferiority” of Black workers and the Nazi fantasy that unemployment was inherited in their genes. We mobilized demonstrations wherever these racists appeared, chased them off auditorium stages, and even poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head in the middle of a lecture. (Our member called out, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”) PL’s position was clear and uncompromising: No free speech for racists.


Throughout this period, PLP helped organize the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), a mass anti-racist, multiracial group that led many of these struggles.


In Southern California, our Party has organized against the anti-immigrant Minute Men. We have gone to border towns to fight racist attacks on immigrant workers from Mexico, rallying support from citizen workers around the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”


In 2015, PLP advanced the protest against the cops’ murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. We raised our slogan — “Fight Like Ferguson!” — among thousands across the country. Our Party was building a movement for rebellion against racist police terror, not pacifist appeals to ruling-class officials from then-president Barack Obama’s Justice Department on down. We were doing the same in solidarity with workers and youth in Baltimore who are outraged by the cops’ murder of Freddie Gray.


More recently, PL’ers have taken to the streets—before, during, and after the Covid-19 pandemic—from Brooklyn to Chicago to Los Angeles to protest the police murders of Black women, men, and youth by racist cops.


Antiracism on the Shop Floor
PLP has consistently raised the issue of racism among organized workers to unite them against the bosses’ racist attacks.

In 1973, when a New York City Police Department undercover cop shot a Black 10-year-old in the back in Queens, a PLP club at the Ford auto plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, brought the atrocity onto the factory assembly line. Our Party petitioned the do-nothing union local leadership to take a public stance and demand that the cop be indicted for murder. The workers’ response was electric. They were galvanized into action during a contract struggle that previously had been limited to economic issues. Their heightened political consciousness and militancy led to a weeklong wildcat strike against 100-degree temperatures in the plant, which in turn set the tone for the Chrysler Mack Avenue sit-down strike two months later (see CHALLENGE, May 6).

Beginning in the 1980’s, PLP has provided antiracist leadership to 6,000 Washington, DC Metro transit workers. At one point, the local’s overwhelmingly Black membership elected a white PL’er as their president, defeating a passive Black incumbent. As Metro bosses exclude people convicted of crimes by the rulers’ criminal injustice system, they close one of the few avenues for many Black workers to obtain a decent-paying job. PLP has demanded that the union oppose racist background checks. Many workers have been won to our Party in this antiracist fight.

Fighting Racism Internationally
PLP is still small but mighty and connected across the U.S., Latin America, South Asia, and East Africa.

Ever since the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, with tens of thousands still living in tents, we have spread the struggle against U.S. imperialism and racism, which have enslaved workers there for two centuries.


In Colombia, comrades are putting “Black workers are key to revolution” into practice by organizing among Black workers and fighting against imperialism.  

In Israel-Palestine, PL’ers exposed and fought the intense racism of the Israeli bosses (with U.S. ruling-class support) against workers from Africa and Palestine, who are victims of super-exploitation. We are also organizing workers against the Israeli rulers’ mass evictions of villages inhabited by Palestinians.  


In Pakistan, PL’ers are mobilizing thousands of workers to fight racist super-exploitation and against floods. In the past, the bosses have slaughtered thousands in sweatshops and in Obama’s drone attacks.

These are only a few highlights of PLP’s long fight against racism, the ideological foundation of the profit system. The struggle against racism will prepare our class to overthrow capitalism and obliterate exploitation and divisions among workers. It is the watchword of our Party.

The vicious racketeering and collusion charges, carrying up to a 12-year sentence, leveled by the Joe Biden administration against abortion rights organizers illustrates how the liberal ruling class is the greater danger to the working class. The antisexists’ crime? Spray painting.

The profit system requires maximum profit at all times. Workers are the ultimate source of profit. Every commodity is produced by a producer. Women workers produce the producers of everything. So, the need to produce workers to be bullet sponges is the context wherein we should understand the rising attacks on our working-class siblings and reproductive rights.

Ruling class in crisis
The first context is the 2007 financial crisis where the subprime mortgage collapse was the final straw. The ruling class bailed themselves out. Like in the Great Depression, the lowest birth rates were hit when the crisis of capital was in full tilt in the mid 1930’s. The key difference being that there was an international communist movement that had taken state power in the Soviet Union facilitating a powerful CPUSA (Communist Party USA) who was organizing among the working class. The New Deal was a direct response to the Red ‘30’s. So, this brings up the question of leadership.

Pacifism is a dangerous ideology to the working class. When one is silent, it makes the bully perpetuating the violence feel that they can continue on with it. The liberal ruling class and their state continues to attack working-class women, as well as undocumented and Black workers. They want us to be passive as groups actively attack workers stocking shelves with Pride merchandise.

The ruling class would like for the working class to believe that these parallels to Berlin in 1933 should be handled by them, because history shows us exactly how a liberal government handles growing fascist movements, so we know we need our own Progressive Labor Party (PLP)-led Red Army to smash them once and for all.

Unfortunately, history also shows us that fascism can be decisively defeated by communists with great sacrifice and still not lead to an egalitarian society, so we need to fight for revolution and not reform.

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) postulates that “Policymakers in some advanced economies will need to tackle this trend [of a declining birthrate] and find ways to encourage women to have children. For example, increasing access to affordable and high-quality childcare, family-friendly labor laws, and tax policies” (IMF Blog, 11/13/18) and/or by actively rescinding abortion and reproductive healthcare.

Reproduction and childrearing, a collective responsibility
Under communism, Marx said that “sensuous human discourse” (Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) would be the primary aspect of reproduction. In other words, we would learn how to actively work together to produce what we all need, with children being the responsibility of the whole of society. Instead of any of the identities that are so important to the modern liberal movements, we would struggle to allow for human beings to be who they actually are and love who they choose since there would be plenty of nurturing to go around. The whole human race would be a whole human family.

When the working class takes hold of ideas, they can then turn them into reality. It is the power of the working class being held in the prison of capitalist ideology that allows for the profit system to continue. When the Florida Attorney General points out that she is attacking Antifa and Jane’s Revenge, what she is really worried about is exactly what the Biden big bosses are afraid of, too, and that’s a communist organization being able to actively coordinate and lead attacks on the fascists, and, ultimately, on the bourgeoisie themselves to take hold of the means of production.We need the working class to wake up to the need for communist revolution. This requires patient organizing in mass organizations with the intent of building a mass international Party whose breadth balances being a secret to the bosses while being seen as the bulwark to the working class.