NEW YORK CITY, May 10—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members demonstrated with workers, charged Daniel Penny, a white ex-marine for lynching Jordan Neely, a displaced Black worker-artist, with racist murder. Using a “banned” chokehold on the NYC subway May 1, bigoted Penny killed our class brother when he needed help the most. In an expression of class rage at the system that commits countless murders, we distributed over 200 CHALLENGEs, connecting Neely’s murder to capitalism and providing an alternative with the headline “May Day: Power to the Workers!”

Under communism, all workers would have safe housing and resources, instead of being discarded like trash if they cann’t produce profits. They wouldn’t have to seek shelter in subway cars and fall victim to mental illness and suffer from substance dependency. And they wouldn’t be galvanized to see other workers as their enemies.

Displaced workers not disposable
Neely was having an mental outburst when racist vigilante Penny lynched him. The bosses’ racist ridden system murdered Neely, and Penny dealt the deadly blow. The ruling class’s racist conditions brainwashed Penny into seeing a displaced Black man as disposable.

This crime represents the rise of fascism. U.S Imperialist bosses are going head to head in a desperate competition for the world’s resources. They will stop at no cost to defend their profits on the backs of workers. As more funding goes towards imperialist competition against Russia and China, the bosses are cutting even more critical services for workers-especially Black and Latin ones-and simultaneously increasing direct attacks on them.

Liberal pols response with fascism
Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul predictably released statements either trying to appear “neutral” or giving lip service to helping workers.

From one side of his mouth, racist Adams said, “we cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that” (Hell Gate, 5/4). Later, he said Neely was “Black, like me.”

But actions speak even louder. Adams just last year announced plans for a $2.8 billion spending cut to the Department of Homeless Services while increasing the NYPD budget to $11.1 billion (CItyLimits, 2/18/22). Last November, he issued a directive that emboldens city agencies and kkkops to involuntarily institutionalize anyone who “looks like” they are having a mental crisis.

It’s clear which class Adams serves. And it’s not the working class!

Meanwhile, Hochul played dumb: “I will look at it more closely to find out whether the state has a role.” Liberals love to present themselves as antiracists, but their actions and words always prove otherwise! They’re no better than these republicans spouting openly racist rhetoric about Neely. WIth Adams and Hochul’s plan to flood the trains with more kkkops and force the displaced into unsafe shelters, it’s clear the working class can’t rely on these bosses’ pawns to give us the support we need.

Capitalism attacks
This capitalist system in decay created the conditions for a racist Penny and a distressed Neely. Penny was stationed at Camp Lejeune during his time served. This is no coincidence, as the camp was tied to a Neo-Nazi plot to attack power substations (Fox 8, 4/18).

As capitalism spirals into crisis, low wages and a lack of affordable housing or decent health care are scourges that plague the entire working class. But, they fall hardest on those targeted by capitalist racism and sexism. The capitalist ruling class needs the racism that empowers cops and vigilantee racists to criminalize, dehumanize, and murder Black workers.

Workers rage justified, need PLP
Workers are outraged at Neely’s murder. At the Broadway-Lafayette station, where Neely was murdered, workers had a vigil and occupied the train tracks, chanting, “Justice for Jordan Neely.” The kkkops made arrests, and bruised and bloodied in a pindown.

To understand what’s to come, we just need to look at what happened after mass uprisings in 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Many workers had desperately hoped that capitalism could be reformed to the point where Living While Black would no longer be a crime. But Neely’s murder proves once again that as long as we allow the profit system to exist, the capitalist rulers will keep siccing their racist mad dogs on Black and Latin and immigrant workers. Once the bosses diverted the reform movement to defund the police into the election campaign for Jim Crow Joe Biden, the liberal politicians flipped, as usual, to serve their capitalist masters. Despite the fact that the U.S. murder rate fell last year and remains far below what it was in the 1980s and ‘90s (usatoday, 1/26), the bosses are using a trumped-up “crime wave” to pour more money into police terror and put more cops on the streets. The results? In 2022, at least 1,176 workers and youth—a record high—were slaughtered by the cops.

That’s why we need to channel antiracist fightbacks into the class struggle, and build a movement to direct that anger into destroying capitalism and establishing a workers’ state. Otherwise the bosses will just redirect our fightbacks into more do-nothing reforms. The only way to bring safety for all workers is for us to run a communist society without these bloodsucking scum! Help us make that world a reality.

The following is a speech given by a new PL’er at the conclusion the of the NY/NJ march.

Hi Everyone, today is one of the most exciting days of my life , words cannot express how i feel to be here celebrating May Day with my comrades and be active like I wanted to be a year ago. I want to share with you all my experience, and why I chose to join the fight. I join the fight to defend my convictions and my ideas. From my experience, I know that only the struggle pays off. This is the reason I came here And not staying in my corner to push a rant.

I joined PLP because I know that although the bosses try to fool us with their “Labor Day” in September, we know that May Day is the real holiday for workers because it emphasizes working-class unity and shows the potential of our class to lead society. I experienced this when I flew to Alabama with one of my teachers to support the nine months-long miner’s strike. That's when I discovered more about PLP and saw workers’ power in action. Despite the bosses’ best efforts to distract us, workers around the world and around the U.S. will celebrate May Day with marches and rallies like the one we are having right now. Workers around the world are showing that we must build multi-racial unity and working-class consciousness to raise a new, dynamic political construction: the dictatorship of the workers, where every worker is respected and given the opportunity to contribute and lead in society.

I joined PLP because I am currently a nursing student at Lehman College. My school is made up of working-class Black and Latino students who have been neglected because of the racism of the capitalist system. We know that communists believe that workers need to be truly educated, not just in how to treat patients and prescribe medicines, but also in how capitalism functions, how class struggle is the key to progress, and how workers can run society. I still remember my first experience fighting this racism - joining a march to the CUNY chancellor’s house. We marched against racism and for better pay for our teachers. As a student I couldn’t just sit back and watch what is happening at CUNY without joining the fight. I united with Hostos students to fight for the opening of the cafeteria and their cafeteria is now open. Together we can succeed!  Just like in China in 1949, we know that when the working class, led by communists such as us in PLP, take power again we will bring this education to every worker in the world! 

I joined PLP because I was born in Haiti, and when I look at how the working class there continues to suffer under racist oppression, I know there has to be a better way. We can see how the system forces our brother and sister to run away, how they force us to leave our beautiful community for a better life elsewhere, and what happens to the people who stayed. What happens to people like me that have family that we would like to spend time with? They use our own people to kill us, they use fear to tear us apart, to divide us, to convince workers to turn against workers. We are strong together, we did it before, we can do it again. Nou se premye pep nwa libere, nou konen byen unite se fos nou, we show others the way, we can find our way back and save workers in Haiti and around the world from this mess. Let’s unite, let's find our way back, let's fight together.

I joined PLP because we are fighting for a society where everyone should have the same opportunities to build a life. Where ordinary individuals can become extraordinary.Where another of our brothers will not have a knee on his neck for another 9 minutes 30 seconds. Say his name. George Floyd. In that society we are fighting for, no role will be bigger or smaller because it  will guarantee the idea of human equality. You, you, and you, join us, join me, let’s unite, and fight this system that keeps breeding servants of the ruling class, killer cops, racist unemployment and imperialist war!

Join me and fight together against anti-immigrant policies!

Join me, join us, let’s fight together for the international working class!

Join me, join us, let’s fight for a communist revolution!

MIDDLESBORO, KY, April 7—Members of Progressive Labor Party worked with the Redneck Coalition in organizing an antisexist rally in response to Senate Bill 150 that attacks trans youth. The small but mighty contingent of PL’ers distributed food and CHALLENGE, and spoke of how transgender workers’ struggle is linked to capitalism. A PLP organizer declared that revolution for communism is the only path for liberation. Communism will provide healthcare for all, while eliminating exploitative and sexist gender roles, enabling all working-class people to participate in the labor activities needed for the new society’s progress.

Capitalists need gender roles to turn workers against each other and divide our class into hostile camps. They rake in massive super profits from paying women less in the labor market, while at the same time often keeping them shackled to the home and limited to forms of reproductive labor. Gender divisions help the bosses organize society to reproduce future generations of cheap labor and maintain their political power over us.

Capitalism divides
Capitalism, not “transphobia,” is to blame for the latest attacks against trans youth. These attacks are a further intensification of divisiveness rooted in a deeply sexist and racist system that thrives on super-exploitation of Black and women workers. This is the same system that prematurely kills hundreds of millions of workers around the world through poverty and a horrifically substandard health care system that is depriving trans workers and youth of gender affirming care. Only a communist system run by the working class can grant us the life affirming care we all desperately need.

Today’s rally was specifically in response to the anti-trans legislation (Senate Bill 150) about to pass in Kentucky. Such a law will give teachers the right to misgender students, require doctors to deny gender-affirming care for working-class youth, and prohibit discussions on topics like sexual orientation, sexually transmitted diseases, and more. Attacking the working class based on gender and sexuality divides our natural unity as working people whose labor is exploited. Gutter sexists can only thrive when the society is built on sexism and treating a section of the population as “less than.”

In response, we are determined to build working-class solidarity in the resistance to fascism, where all workers can unite to smash this racist sexist capitalist system once and for all.

Distributing event flyers around town and publicizing on Facebook resulted in a strong attendance at this event, the first of its kind in this area. “When I saw that this was happening, I had to go because I’d never seen anything like this before around here!” said a new attendee.

The Redneck Coalition is made up of anti-capitalist workers from Appalachia who seek to bring the term “Redneck” back to its radical roots, which comes from a history of multiracial struggles of mine workers against company owners in the mountains. The term has been degraded to a negative term for southern white workers, but its original meaning is antiracist militancy against capitalism! (WVpublic.org, 5/18/2015).

PLP and organizers in the Redneck Coalition demonstrated how the fight against racism and sexism must attack their source in capitalist exploitation. Fascism uses lies to get workers to attack each other to keep workers divided. A PLP speaker noted that “trans people . . . make up a disproportionate share of the homeless and unemployed, because capitalism places profit over human decency and human life.”

Big and Small Fascists
The entire U.S. ruling class is floundering—economically, politically, and militarily—as China rises and the U.S. hegemony is under siege. In the U.S., there are two main camps of what we call the Big Fascists—representing the more powerful bosses like Chase and Citibank, multinational oil companies like ExxonMobil — and the Small Fascists — represented by domestically oriented U.S. capitalists like the Kochs, Mercer, DeVos.

The Small Fascists are reluctant to spend money fighting wars to defend the global U.S. empire. Their agenda includes a racist gutting of social services at home and a retreat from U.S. imperialist alliances and commitments internationally. This faction is making inroads into winning millions of workers to see the Big Fascists as their enemy. Workers correctly understand that many of their lives have worsened under the leadership of Democrats, but they are allowing themselves to be led by outright racist, sexist, nationalist ideas spread by the Small Fascists. This cynical scapegoating has the effect of misleading and confusing people about their common interests against capitalism as a whole.

Reject all shades of fascis​​m
Still, the Big Fascists present the biggest danger for the working class in the U.S. because their liberal, “antiracist,” “antisexist” sounding jargon is pacifying millions by building the illusion that they can create a “nicer capitalism.” In reality they are attempting to win us to patriotically fight and die in the name of U.S. imperialism. We need to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal bosses. They are the leaders in attacks on healthcare, from attacking retired workers health insurance to slashing healthcare budgets to refusing to codify Roe vs. Wade.

The rally ended with a call to reject Republican and Democratic politicians because they represent respectively the open gutter racists like Trump and the slippery, dominant, liberal spokespeople for major financial capitalists like Biden. Both are poisonous! The liberal bosses stoke these culture wars for their own cynical purposes. They want to appear as the saviors so they can lead youth into world war.

Instead, building an antiracist, antisexist, internationalist communist movement is the path forward. Such organizing will create a hopeful vision for the future in an isolated area like rural Kentucky often written off by the rest of the U.S. A trans organizer with the Redneck Coalition declared the need for solidarity, saying, “We must build independent political power by and for the working class. If the fascists, like they would prefer, could ban trans people from even getting food at the grocery store, we must be able to feed them.”

The better world we require is communism, where we will take care of all of each other’s needs. Workers of the world, unite!

International Workers’ Day, represents a day of unity for the working class, but not as an end in itself. Despite our diversity as an international class—women and men; young and old; workers and students; rural and urban; Black, Brown and white; immigrant and native-born—we should use May Day as a catalyst in our struggle to thwart the will of all the bosses—the worldwide ruling classes and their flunkeys. Their aggressive attempts to trample on all the needs and aspirations of workers everywhere will, in the end, fail and capitalism/imperialism will come crumbling down and be replaced by an egalitarian society through the means of communist revolution.

And make no mistake about it: ruling classes everywhere are becoming more and more aggressive in the race for power, where imperialist war (or war between the imperialists’ proxies) would be one of the surest strategies to increase not only their capital but also their control of the world’s resources. If we follow the strategies put in place by the bosses, our class will pay the cost: the lives of workers (soldiers and civilians), more racism and sexism, more economic and health misery.

The bosses need to increase social inequality to try to save their crumbling system, while workers need to fight back to stop them. There is no other choice. It’s “them” or “us,” and we want “us” to be the winners—short-term and long-term—in this struggle.

Rebellion needs communist focus
Workers in France are currently fighting back valiantly against the cutbacks in pension benefits that the rulers need to impose to save their system. Students are fighting side by side with them, against the class enemy, because they know that their own future is in the balance. And we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them as well. But we need to fight for more than reforms of the capitalist system. Reforms won can be taken away if the same capitalist system remains. Yes, we can win this battle but lose the war if we don’t fight to rebuild the international communist movement, fight to smash the capitalist tread-mill of reformism once and for all. This is the goal of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP)—one working class, one mass party, all fighting for the same political line!

Our world to win
Solidarity between all comrades, among workers on a planetary scale, is the only way we can win. By building the PLP, we will fight for communism everywhere, following the leadership of the most advanced among us, and fight for the emancipation of our class and transform society on an egalitarian basis.

To our comrades in the PLP and our friends everywhere: Let this May Day be the beginning of a new year of revolutionary struggle on the part of the foes of capitalism and imperialism. To all comrades, current and future: Our struggle against the bosses/ruling class will inevitably lead to a transformation of society on an egalitarian basis.