Last issue, a Washington DC Metro transit worker, a member of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 representing over 10,000 workers, shared her thoughts about building a revolutionary movement in her workplace as a communist, shop steward, and union executive board member for many years. This section concludes her story about the battle against the bosses and the union misleaders.

Communist organizing at Metro
Since the 1970s, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been militant organizers in Local 689. We led a week-long wildcat strike in 1978 that closed down the entire city. The issue that motivated the strike was the bosses’ refusal to pay cost-of-living raises required by the collective bargaining agreement. But the anger of the mainly Black working-class transit workers was deeper because of the abuse dealt out by management. The strike was partially successful – we got the raise! – and the Party gained respect among the other workers. Still, the effort to build a revolutionary party did not take hold among the workers.

Since then, we have won many reform battles and helped push the conversation within our union towards the left. We led fights against the criminal background check that blocked the hiring of formerly incarcerated workers. We led teach-ins and anti-war contingents in protests in DC. We organized many rallies outside of Metro headquarters around proposed cuts to our benefits, contracting out, and proposed fare increases on our riders. While these struggles have improved lives and raised class consciousness to some degree, we are still facing the same attacks we have confronted for the past 50 years.

Even when these reform efforts are successful, the bosses are always primed to take back any concessions they have made. Right now they are trying to go after our pension--after already  taking back retiree health insurance for workers hired after 2010. The deepening economic crisis of capitalism means that the struggle will intensify in the coming years.

But who will lead and move our fellow workers to arevolutionary solution? Not the ATU 689 union leadership!

Failures of the union leadership and their reformism
In Loudoun County, Virginia, we struck for a better contract for commuter bus operators. We picketed for two months in the middle of winter. The union leadership relied on the County Executive to “find” funding for the transit contractor to meet our demands and end the strike. Such wishful thinking! When this “friend of labor” abandoned us, the union maneuvered to end the strike instead of “upping the ante.” We communists pushed to spread the strike to other transit workers, public-school teachers, and others. But the union leadership said no. The workers on the picket line wanted to keep striking, but the union leadership insisted that a “suspension” of the strike was the best strategy. PLP Metro members were unable to counter that losing strategy and workers went back to work without a contract, losing the strike.

Similarly, our union led a strike in Prince George’s County, Maryland  against a contractor operating the paratransit service. The workers struck for two weeks, at the end of which they got a subpar contract. Many workers wanted to continue the strike, but at the union leadership’s urging, voted to accept the contract. The contract was somewhat better than it would have been without a strike but was still not a real improvement to the quality of life for those workers. As communists on the picket line, we tried but were not able to win the majority of workers to continue the strike in the face of the union leadership’s opposition. This, despite the agreement of most workers that much more was needed in the contract to keep up with inflation and secure enough benefits to be able to retire.

Gaslit by the KKK-Metro management team-up
Workers often look beyond basic bread and butter contract issues. Seven years ago, the KKK planned to hold a demonstration in downtown DC. The Klan members planned to take a special Metro train from Virginia into the city for their rally. We held an emergency meeting at the union hall to decide how to stop these racists. In an electric atmosphere, train operators declared that we should shut down the train in the middle of the tunnel. Others said to have a sick out to prevent any operator from being forced to drive the train. The General Manager (GM) of Metro – the top boss -- said that the Metro system would not provide a train for the racists and the union leadership believed him! Since when do we believe the lying bosses? The KKK boarded a boss-provided Metro train and were safely taken downtown for their rally that was opposed by thousands.

These three examples show how union leaders can undermine the militancy of the working class by channeling them towards limited change and then blunting that if the struggle gets sharper. We need unions to fight collectively against the bosses, but the union is ultimately a reform organization that props up capitalism. Our union leaders spend thousands of dollars of union dues supporting politicians and nothing on building a fighting organization that can beat the bosses.

PLP grows
Based on my 12 years of organizing at Metro, I know that workers can be won to the analysis that a disciplined communist party is necessary to abolish capitalism. As a result of our Party’s engagement in hundreds of struggles large and small, we have been able to swell the ranks of our Party group at Metro. The bosses have much to fear over the long run from our organizing work in the industrial working class!

While the fight for revolution seems improbable in day-to-day struggle, history shows that revolutions can be propelled forward by major crises of the capitalist system and win. Communist revolutions can change the world, abolish capitalism, and create a world of creativity, equality and collectivity that meets the needs of all workers.

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.

Global warming causes intense wildfires and widespread Code Purple health alerts for smoke-based air pollution. The warming of the planet is the result of two centuries of capitalist production. It is caused by a rapid increase in greenhouse gasses (GHGs) in the atmosphere. These gases (mainly carbon dioxide and methane) have increased steadily since the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Global capitalist development has been fueled by burning coal, oil, and natural gas to power production, consumption, and transportation. GHGs allow the sun’s radiation to reach the earth, but trap the heat in the atmosphere that radiates from the ground, creating a hotter planet and disrupting previous weather patterns. It is similar to how cars get hot in the summer when the windows are rolled up.

Wildfires flourish under capitalism
Forest fires have historically been a natural process and often helpful to ecologies. Lightning strikes in forested areas often start beneficial fires. Today, however, global warming has created droughts in many places in the world, leading to some forests becoming tinder boxes rather than resilient stands of trees and brush. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” That now applies forcefully to much of the planet. Now even historically wet areas, such as the Amazon rainforests, permafrost areas, and marshy peat bogs have experienced huge fires. More are expected even in the Arctic by the end of the century. MacArthur Fellow Stephen Pyne has labeled the new era of massive fires the “Pyrocene” in his 2022 book, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.

The United Nations Environment Program projected the risk of these extreme wildfires would rise 14 percent by 2030 and 30 percent by 2050. By the end of the century, that risk would increase by 50 percent.

Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2020 is a harbinger of things to come. Extreme fires raged for many months, fueled by record-shattering temperatures, severe drought and fierce winds. The fires directly killed 33 and another 500 deaths were caused by inhaling smoke. That same year, the world’s largest tropical wetland, the Pantanal in South America (located in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia) burned following severe drought and scorching weather. Nearly a third of this forest was destroyed. The wildfires in wetlands were intensified by capitalists, hungry for profit, plundering rainforests and wetlands through logging, road construction, agriculture and mining activity. Such extractive activities led to the loss of tree canopy, leading in turn to accelerated vegetative undergrowth that was then exposed to the extreme drying of global warming, and hence even more massive wildfires.

Burning forests emit vast amounts of carbon dioxide previously locked in their trunks and branches, creating a vicious feedback loop intensifying global warming. For example, about 55 million tons of carbon dioxide was emitted from Canadian wildfires in May 2023, approximately equal to 10 percent of the country’s total carbon emissions for an average year.

Workers suffer, bosses profit
The direct health impacts on the working class are severe. In the United States alone, between 2006 and 2010, fewer than 500,000 people every year were exposed to a single day of extreme levels of fine-particle pollution, also known as PM2.5. Between 2016 and 2020, that number rose to over 8 million. Such small particulates lodge in the lungs much like the deadly Black Lung disease faced by coal miners, leading to difficulties breathing, lung disease, and early death. These increasingly unnatural emissions also tie in to environmental racism. Asthma ER visits in New York City during the recent Canadian wildfire smoke were the highest in low-income, majority Black and Latin neighborhoods (Gothamist, 6/12).

The multitude of problems caused by global warming including intense wildfires will deepen over time as the world’s capitalists refuse to significantly reduce reliance on coal, gas, and oil to augment their fortunes. They pretend that solar panels and wind turbines can replace fossil fuels in the world economy while knowing full well that substantial fossil fuels are required even with these limited alternative fuel sources. Why such inhumane treatment of the global working class? Why burn us up and make us sick and die from deadly smoke? Because they have sunk trillions of dollars into infrastructure to extract fossil fuels, and they refuse to ever take a hit to their profits!

The whole damn capitalist system has to go!
That’s why nothing short of the destruction of the capitalist system can seriously address the environmental disaster that is more evident by the day. Between war, racism, repression, and devastating climate change, the need for building a revolutionary party is ever more urgent.

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!