Challenge Newspaper - Progressive Labor Party

Information: Print

From de Blasio to Adams: Racist liberal pols cut literacy for kids

Information: 03 August 2023 778 hits

This past June, approximately 200 literacy coaches, supporting hundreds of elementary teachers, and thousands of students, were fired from their positions with little notice. The simple fact that almost all of these positions were filled by women, many of whom were Black and Latino makes this a massively racist and sexist attack (Chalkbeat New York, 7/13). While former Black kkkop, Mayor Eric Adams and his appointed lack NYC Schools Chancellor, David Banks are responsible for this cutback, it is more complicated than blaming one administration over the other.

Big Fascists education plan: racist inequity and mediocrity for our students
From 2014 to 2021, Big Fascist (see Glossary, page 6) misleader and former NYC Mayor, Bill DeBlasio along with a ‘multicultural’ crop of NYC Public School Chancellors (Carmen Fariña, Richard Carranza, and Meisha Ross Porter) orchestrated this massive attack. Under the sham “Equity and Excellence for All'' Initiative, they claimed that “all third graders (would) read proficiently by 2026.” As a result, approximately 500, early childhood literacy coaches were hired by the previous “Universal Literacy'' Initiative (ULit). ULit reading coaches spent the bulk of their time in Kindergarten through 2nd grade classrooms, working closely with teachers and students (NYT, 9/22/22).They learned how to apply the science of reading, developed training sessions and parent workshops, co-planned, modeled and co-taught reading and writing lessons with teachers, and built meaningful relationships with their students and families. One former ULit coach and recent CHALLENGE reader stated:

We put our heart and soul into that job. Most of us were women of color and the first time most of us had been offered a leadership role. I didn’t think that capitalism would or could teach all children to read. However, most of us successfully trained thousands of early childhood teachers to improve their literacy instruction. As a result, students in the classrooms made real improvement in reading and writing. We were the ones that teachers looked to for day-to-day leadership and support. Not their principals or phony school bureaucrats.
Despite the sincere efforts of the ULit coaches, DeBlasio’s liberal misleaders and the bosses’ racist capitalist school system had no intention of teaching “all” (or even most) students to read. Another former ULit coach,

CHALLENGEreader, PLP study group member, and May Day marcher added:
The DOE never provided the necessary resources, interventions, and additional staff needed to support students reading below grade level.” She added, “everyone blamed the pandemic as the reason why children didn’t learn to read, but I learned in a PLP study group that in two years, communists in Cuba taught workers to read with limited paper, books, and other necessary supplies. In 1961, tens of thousands of volunteers, “the brigadistas,” who were mostly young women, went to every corner of Cuba to teach people to read and write.

By the end of DeBlasio’s regime, the 2021 3rd grade New York State English Language Arts test showed that less than 50 percent of students had met a passing benchmark. (NYSED, 2022) In addition, NYC public school enrollment dropped by more than 50,000 children, over 100,000 public school students were suffering from homelessness, and more than 200,000 students with disabilities did NOT receive their support services (NYT, 12/8/21). While these liberal misleaders got an ‘F’ in serving the needs of early childhood students, these 500 coaches continued to serve their class with the work they had spent between three to seven years developing.

Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks dealt a racist and sexist blow to this integrated team of educators. At the same time that Adams and Banks filled various high-paying city office positions with a new ‘crop’ of Black and Latin Bureaucrats, by June 2022, this integrated team of coaches were reduced to 200, leaving 300 of them to find new positions within the Department Of Education (DOE). Dozens of ULit coaches had reached out to their union, The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) for support. While their UFT Representative held a few virtual meetings with over 400 hopeful coach participants, the ULit coaches were told to passively wait for a favorable resolution. Although one coach challenged the union representative, and suggested a petition to keep their jobs, another coach responded, “Fighting will only get the Chancellor angry at us and could ruin our chances of getting a different out of classroom position.” Unfortunately, many of the coaches remained passive and followed the misleadership of the union.

One year later, the DOE slashed the entire coaching program. The rest of these 200 coaches were sent an email that told them to find work elsewhere.

Our PLP study group member added,
De Blasio set up the ULit program to fail, and Adams used it as an excuse to get rid of us entirely. Adams and Banks are now pushing a mandated curriculum reform across school districts, but without real in-class coaching support, teachers will have to do ‘more work with less support.’ I can safely say the quality of instruction for our students has suffered since 300 of our coaches were slashed. Now that everyone is gone, it will get even worse. Although cutting all the coaches was a racist and sexist attack, the greatest attack is on the students we serve.

Communism: the best education for our class
During the past seven years, these 500 literacy coaches were an inspirational group of educators and one could only imagine the impact they could have on our youngest learners if we lived under a communist society. That is why our CHALLENGE reader’s comment about the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign is critical. As a previous CHALLENGE article stated, workers “can't get mired in dead-end reforms'' and must rely on the working class to teach and care for our children. Not these capitalist politicians or union misleaders. Let’s turn all these fightbacks education into a fight for a communist world. Only then can we truly educate our class.” Onward comrades!

Information: Print

Editorial: U.S. lap dog Israel moves toward fascism

Information: 03 August 2023 797 hits

In yet another blow to the crumbling U.S.-led imperialist world order, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s hard-right coalition passed a bill to strip the Supreme Court of much of its power to check the country’s moves toward open fascism. The U.S.—home of genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings to this day by the capitalists’ kkkops—is sounding the alarm that its longtime ally is being “degraded” into “a corrupt and racist dictatorship.” Although workers in Israel erupted in protests, most are drinking the poison of liberal democracy and nationalism.

Israel serves as the latest evidence that the U.S. imperialists’ once ironclad grip is weakening amid an international crisis of capitalism. The dominant U.S. Big Fascists of finance capital are fending off enemies from without and within. After freely bullying the world since World War II, the finance capitalists are struggling to compete with rising superpower China while fending off a challenge from more domestically oriented capitalists, the Small Fascists fronted by Donald Trump. At the same time, smaller capitalist countries are being destabilized by this sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry as it propels the world toward fascism and world war.
The only antidote to this capitalist disaster is communist revolution by an international, multiracial working class. Progressive Labor Party fights for workers everywhere to break the chains of the bosses’ dictatorship.

From the river to the sea, smash capitalist democracy!
No nation, no exploitation—only workers’ liberation!
At the heart of Israel’s current controversy is a reform that eliminates the “reasonableness doctrine,” the Supreme Court’s power to override officials’ decisions as “unreasonable.” After the bill was passed despite a stern warning from U.S. President Joe Biden, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job, called for a general strike, and blocked highways and airports. Thousands of military reservists have resigned. Even active members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), infamous for their partnership with U.S. police and their mutual love of mass surveillance, torture, and racist terror, are threatening to abandon ship.

The spectacle of protesters wrapping themselves in the apartheid Israeli flag is a reminder that these mass protests, no matter how militant, amount to dead-end reformism and toxic nationalism. Since Israel’s birth as a “Jewish state” in 1948, the Supreme Court has never called out the deportation, terrorizing, or murder of Palestineans as “unreasonable.” In 2018, the Israeli parliament passed the gutter racist Jewish Nation-State Law, which declared that only Jewish people had a right to “self-determination” in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. It promoted Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and abolished Arabic as an official language.

And all of this was perfectly “reasonable,” according to the Supreme Court, which sat on its hands.
Liberal democracy is designed to mislead workers into embracing the capitalist rulers’ dictatorship. All forms of nationalism, including the Israeli and Palestinian varieties, lead to capitalist oppression by different sets of bosses. Workers in every historically colonized country can attest to that.

No honor among thieves: Israel plays both sides
In the bad old days of the liberal world order, the U.S. exerted unchecked control over most of the world, with Israel as their bought-and-paid-for watchdog in the Middle East. Even as Israel displaced nearly a million Palestinians (middleeastmonitor.com, 6/21/17) in 1948 and then kept expanding its illegal Zionist settlements across the West Bank, its apartheid regime received more U.S. aid than any other country since World War II (Congressional Research Service, 11/16/20).

But the era of unchecked U.S. supremacy is over. This year alone, China has made trade deals with Russia, strengthened ties with Brazil, and brokered a pact between U.S. nemesis Iran and Saudi Arabia, the lynchpin of the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula. In June, President Xi Jinping issued a thinly veiled threat to impose “countermeasures” to anything perceived as “endanger[ing] China’s sovereignty, security and development interests” (Bloomberg News, 6/28).

U.S. allies are caught in a high-risk balancing act, and Israel is no exception. Netanyahu has described the China-Israel alliance as a “marriage made in heaven” (Kehila News Israel, 3/20/17). Nearly $4 billion per year in U.S. blood money couldn’t stop Netanyahu from tweeting, “...Israel is no longer another star in the American flag” (The Times of Israel, 7/10). The brazenly corrupt prime minister gave China access to Israel’s advanced AI technology while dragging his feet in sending arms to Ukraine in its war with Russia, despite Biden’s repeated requests (New York Times, 1/17).

These acts represent a threat to the U.S. and a net gain for China. They spell war for workers everywhere.

U.S. mouthpieces voice imperialists’ dilemma
The U.S. Big Fascists are agonizing over how best to deal with their racist friend. While New York Times columnists Thomas L. Friedman (7/18) and Nicholas Kristoff (7/22) toyed with proposing that the U.S. cut off military aid to Israel, the Brookings Institute’s Natan Sachs argued that the U.S. should act with “a vision based on promoting regional stability and integration, and shaped by the U.S. competition with China and Russia” (Foreign Affairs, 7/28). The bosses’ mouthpieces have no shame, do they?

In fact, the U.S. has of late expanded its military exercises with Israel. In early 2023, as Sachs notes, an exercise called Juniper Oak, the largest ever, sent a message that “local partners” such as Israel remain “a cornerstone” of the U.S. strategy for “future crises,” even as U.S. resources are stretched thin in Ukraine and East Asia.

The U.S. imperialists are caught in a bind. To allow Israel’s lurch toward open fascism, with no pushback, would be to lose even more credibility as a “rules-based” power (as if!), and drive nation “swing states” closer to China. By giving a green light to even more ruthless oppression of the Palestinians, it could jeopardize U.S. dreams of a Saudi-Israeli normalization, a pact that might limit future China inroads. On the other hand, publicly defunding Israel would risk losing the U.S. bosses’ regional partner in crime and give China more maneuverability in the Middle East. It’s a contradiction they can’t solve without war.

Given the volatility of U.S. imperialism and the bosses’ state of chaos and disunity, it’s hard to say exactly what will happen next. But two things are for certain. First, the capitalists are always driven by profit and power. Second, to secure that profit, they will inevitably go to war. Our class will pay the price with our lives.

What is to be done? We must build a mass working-class movement, calling on all workers—Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Black refugees from Sudan and Eritrea— to reject capitalist oppression and racist divison. PLP fights for one communist world where we rule for the entire working class. That is liberation. Workers must smash capitalism and break away from the clutches of rising fascism.

Democracy soaked in Palestinian workers’ blood
When hypocrites bemoan the erosion of democracy in Israel, they’re talking about the same democracy that expelled and massacred Palestinian families. The same rule that birthed and bred Zionist apartheid in Israel-Palestine. The same system that bars 5.5 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip from voting in their phony elections . Instead, they are murdered by starvation wages, mass unemployment, and bullets.

We cannot be fooled by the bosses’ deceptive framing of “democracy” vs “dictatorship.” What pathetic theater! Liberal democracy and fascism are two sides of the same murderous capitalist coin.
Every Israeli raid, demolition, and killing of Palestinian workers has been enabled by the U.S. bosses. Israel pulls the triggers. The U.S. pays for the guns.

That’s why the greater danger in Israel-Palestine is not Netanyahu’s band of openly vile fascists, but the friendly, liberal “lesser-evil” fascists who will lead our class to slaughter.

Information: Print

Housing crisis: Demolish capitalism, build communism

Information: 03 August 2023 1118 hits

CHICAGO, July 19—Chants rang out from working-class tenants and their supporters: “People’s needs over landlords’ greed!” Seventy-five pro-housing fighters gathered in front of their south side apartment protesting their eviction notice by the new owners, a property management company by the name of LeVav. Copies of CHALLENGE were distributed to arm our class with communist ideas to counter this racist attack against the mostly Black senior residents of the building.

In a communist society, housing will no longer be a commodity, something to be bought and sold, it will be guaranteed for all working-class people. The notion of rent will be abolished completely. When we in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) say, “Fight for communism,” we mean an egalitarian society where housing justice is guaranteed!

Fight alongside workers, reject liberal Big Fascists’ poison
PLP joined with a coalition of tenants’ rights groups to support this struggle against LeVav and other real estate bosses. LeVav has bought several buildings with the goal of evicting workers, so they can charge new workers moving in up to 50 percent more in rent (Chicago Tribune, 7/24). Naturally, this has been pushed through without any say from the current tenants.

In the demonstration and rally, speakers stated that they want a chance to talk with LeVav, to try and negotiate a settlement with these capitalist robbers. The speakers included liberal Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez of the Pilsen neighborhood on the city’s west side. He noted that there are currently sixty thousand unhoused workers in Chicago, and that new legislation is needed to fight these few predatory companies who destabilize entire neighborhoods. He followed up this statement with “leftist sounding” rhetoric: “eviction is a violent process, and 82-year-olds shouldn’t be worried about where they’re going to live.”

This same alderman – quite the progressive celebrity Big Fascist politician (supporter of billionaire finance capitalists) – is also the chairperson of the Chicago City Council Housing Committee. Sigcho-Lopez and the City Council do not oppose the interests of the landlords. They get money for their campaigns to find the best deals for capitalists, no matter what they say. If the City Council wanted to outlaw the predatory and violent reality of evictions, they could pass laws right away to do it. But most workers know on which side the city government is on -- the landlords’ side. It is on us as communists in PLP to give the organizational leadership and political vision to win workers over to the fight for a worker-run society and housing for all.

Sigcho-Lopez failed to point out that these racist and violent displacements and evictions are not a new occurrence. In fact, the district that he represents has been going through gentrification for years. Because of the fundamental racist segregation and inequality of the capitalist profit system, evictions are mainly carried out in Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods.

In every major city, we are witnessing on a mass scale the displacement of workers in favor of higher income individuals and families. This is done under the logic of the capitalist system to maximize profits and increase property tax revenues.

Profit system is a menace, organize communist revolution
Don’t be fooled by slick Big Fascist politicians like Alderman Lopez; they know what side their bread is buttered on. They use progressive language and identity politics to gain the support of the working masses, disarming our class politically and setting us up for the inevitable attacks of racist state violence like evictions or police murder. They pretend to be on our side but stab us right in the back.

There are thousands of families evicted each year in Chicago, because under capitalism, profits always come first. The profit system is deadly for the working class – let’s organize a mass PLP and communist revolution to destroy capitalism forever!

Information: Print

Letter from India: Nationalism incites racist mass slaughter

Information: 03 August 2023 843 hits

Nearly three long months. That’s the duration of an attempted ethnic cleansing in Manipur, a small province of extreme geopolitical importance, bordering Myanmar in North-Eastern India. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological fountain head Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are deeply experimenting with a neo-Nazi model there. Why so?

The seven states in that part of India (often nicknamed as Seven Sisters) are overwhelmingly indigenous in terms of their ethnicity, language, culture, and belief systems. Such thriving diversity doesn’t fit into the fascist ideas of Hindutva brigade there. As a result, this murderous plot was hatched, when Indian prime minister Narenda Modi came to power in 2014, to divide the people across their religious and ethnic identities. In Manipur the majority Hindu Meiteis are living in and around the valley of Imphal, the state capital. In contrast the minority tribes belonging to the three clans Kuki-Zo-Naga are mostly residing in the hilly and forest areas.

To extract the resources from these latter areas, particularly the mineral and hydrocarbon reserves, the rulers (BJP) at the national and regional levels are trying everything to displace and disperse the non-Hindu population. The present mayhem in Manipur, therefore, comes out imperialists and nationalists blueprints of terror.

As of July 21, more than two hundred people, including women and children have died there. Thousands are wounded and a quarter of a million people have either fled the state or live in rescue camps in subhuman conditions. Numerous cases of rape, torture, and large-scale atrocities with active participation from the state police are also coming out in the open as the internet blockade there was partially withdrawn after a directive of Supreme Court of India.

At the height of such large-scale violence, it’s ironic that the fascist Modi was touring the US and the Middle East, meeting the state heads there and was giving lectures on the “great tradition of Indian democracy.”
The experience of Manipur reaffirms the historical necessity of working-class unity, cutting across all other lines at the local, regional, national, and international levels as the imperialist world system plunges into a third world war.

Information: Print

“I’m A Virgo”: captures capitalist crisis and Big Fascists

Information: 03 August 2023 1091 hits

I’m a Virgo is a new TV series that depicts the coming-of-age story of a 13-foot tall 19-year-old Black giant named “Cootie.” Boots Riley, the series director, was raised in the Progressive Labor Party—in interviews, he often recounts how, in his teenage years, the Party took him on a summer project to organize farm workers in California. I’m a Virgo still retains and forwards elements of PLP’s line: the Big Fascists (liberal finance capitalists masquerading as friends of the working class, see Glossary, page 6) are the greatest threat to the working class and Black workers are key to revolution.

Black Workers Against Social Murder
Centered on the perspective of a 19-year-old Black teenager, I’m A Virgo works dialectically to show how workers develop class consciousness through trial and error. We see the failures of Cootie’s parents, Lafrancine and Martisse, who attempt to shelter Cootie to keep him safe from capitalism while raising him to be a revolutionary. The Marxist theme of discipline is displayed through his parents' expectations for Cootie to read for 10 hours a day, exercise for three, dedicate an hour to hygiene, and a lifetime of abstaining from fast food. But being cut off from the world becomes intolerable for Cootie who wants to learn for himself what it means to live as a Black giant despite the dangers.

Venturing out into the world, Cootie first attempts to play into the capitalist system by being a fashion model but finds himself exploited, unfulfilled, and unable to save his newfound friend Scat from ruling-class social murder. Scat gets into an accident and is turned away at the emergency room because of a lack of health insurance. Scat later dies an ignoble death but in a way that sparks fightback from Cootie, his friends, his comrades, and fellow workers.

The shape of the fightback takes on two forms: Cootie’s anarchism and their friend Jones’ communism. Jones, a Black tenant organizer, explains that the capitalist healthcare system requires workers’ deaths to maximize profit. To fight back, Jones organizes workers to picket and strike against the hospital and greedy insurance executives. Meanwhile, Cootie runs across a police line to write graffiti only to be swiftly arrested by a Big Fascist supercop played by Walton Goggins named “The Hero.” The lesson here is key, individualism in acting does not build toward a revolution—it just leads to a month of Cootie’s house arrest. This struggle between Cootie’s anarchism and Jones’ communist politics becomes the focus of the TV series as they grapple with the brutality and misleading nature of the comic book “Hero’s” liberalism.

The Big Fascists are the Main Danger
Against Marvel’s individualistic, righteous superheroes, “The Hero” symbolizes police terror cloaked in liberal slogans of “justice” and order. As a billionaire, he openly uses marketing and comics for children to delude workers into believing that a white-knight, high-tech billionaire is on the side of the working class. His rhetoric of law, order, and the struggle against “crime” is so seductive that it even gets Cootie on “The Hero’s” side.

Cootie has to learn through class struggle that as a Black worker, “The Hero’s” fight against crime is really a fight against Cootie and his entire class. In a Dark Night of lower class consciousness, workers must learn the same lesson and overthrow Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and their ilk. The only way I’m a Virgo could be even stronger in this critique is to have “The Hero” be a non-white person, since the Big Fascists increasingly hide behind multicultural faces like NYC Mayor Eric Adams, NJ Mayor Baraka and Mexico’s President AMLO to inflict capitalist terror.

For all the strengths of I’m a Virgo in showing communist politics in an easily digestible TV series, this season's ending leaves much to be desired. First, there is only ever focus on exceptional, individual characters rather than workers or the working class. Jones, a communist leader, hogs much of the limelight while the workers she organizes remain as a prop in the backdrop. This is in contrast to Soviet films in which the workers that compose the backdrop are essential since it is always about the working class breaking into the frame to make history for themselves. Second, this focus on the exceptionality of Jones leads to an ending in which she uses words and reason to defeat the Big Fascist “Hero.” This is after “The Hero” has tricked Cootie into believing he is on the side of the workers, despite previously brutalizing Cootie and taunting him with advertisements of a 13-foot jail fit for a giant. Rather than showing the power of the workers or that workers need to organize to fight fascism, Jones merely explains Marxist theory to “The Hero” who submits and flies away. This is dangerous wishful thinking! The ruling class will never hand over power peacefully, and fascists do not respond positively to reasoned discussions. We hope workers' power and fightback will play a more significant role in Season 2 of the series.

Young People Need PLP!
Despite its flaws, I’m a Virgo is a sharp depiction of what working-class youth experience and learn through struggle. While the entire premise and style of I’m a Virgo might be off-puttingly absurd and weird for some, it captures the absurdity of the deepening capitalist crises we are living through. After all, it is absurd that young workers are to accept being exploited by capitalists while the climate, housing, healthcare, education, and political crises accelerate. Dealing with capitalist social murder and genocide while business as usual continues every day can can undoubtedly feel absurd without the guidance of a Party. In the face of rising fascism, we need young workers to learn the lessons that Cootie does: we need an organized, internationalist, revolutionary communist Party committed to defeating racism and sexism. In other words, just as teenage Boots Riley on his first summer project: we need PLP!

Astrology, anti-scientific mind trap
Astrology is a device for liberal fascist rule. With there being an exorbitant amount of surplus labor and workers being disillusioned with conditions under capitalism, oftentimes astrology is used as a tool for workers to attempt to learn more information about the world, connect with one another and find solace in decisions that they cannot control. At this stage of capitalism, the use of astrology is a tool to exploit the working class, further drives individualism, false identities and divisions within the working class, and worst of all attaches pitfalls of the ruling class to star, moon, and sun transits.

Page 137 of 842