Los Angeles, CA, March 28– For nearly three years the fightback and solidarity with the Flores family has deepened, which has given life to Progressive Labor Party in Los Angeles. With consistent protests over several years, the family has grown to see that this fight is bigger than any individual KKKop or reform policy. They are now actively organizing with other families to target the liberal fascist and George Soros-funded District Attorney, George Gascon. Gascon has a liberal cover, but he has a long cop career, from going along with racist “stop and frisk” policies to refusing to prosecute killer cops.

This has been controversial because Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other organizations have championed Gascon and given him a platform with impacted families where he’s made promises to prosecute cops.  Some families have illusions that targeting Gascon will hurt their court cases, so it is significant that other families have chosen to continue the fight.  The Rodriguez family, who just won a $12.6 million settlement (read CHALLENGE, 2/15) is re-engaged in the struggle and specifically wants to go after Gascon. They have asked the Party, together with the Flores family and three other impacted families, to organize with them and start up this collective.

Democratic Party liberals support killer cops
We are planning our first action in a couple of weeks and at our first meeting, we talked about the politics surrounding Gascon and the reform struggle in general.  We discussed that despite the election of a so-called progressive D.A. and passage of state legislation like the California Act to Save Lives on the use of deadly force, which took effect in 2020, none of it has led to any prosecutions of any KKKops.  When we drafted up our first flier, we criticized not only the local liberals but also Democratic Party misleaders across the country who continue to expand their already bloated police budgets.  We called out former “Top Cop” VP Kamala Harris, for having the nerve to show her face and let alone speak at the funeral of Tyree Nichols, who was beaten to death by Black Memphis KKKops.  When it was shared among the families, the aunt of a young Latin worker who was also beaten to death in Orange County said, “I wouldn’t change one word!”

Gascon has long been connected to the liberal ruling class in California. First, he spent three decades rising through the ranks of one the most murderous police departments in the world, the Los Angeles Police Department.  He went from LAPD recruiter to Assistant Chief and was once called “the right arm” of racist “stop and frisk” Bill Bratton.   Then under the auspices of then-Mayor Gavin Newson, who has political and family ties with the billionaire Getty family that was built on violent extraction of oil in the Middle East. He was appointed Chief of Police of San Francisco in 2009.   In just two years, without any legal experience, Newsom then appointed him to Los Angeles District Attorney, following the footsteps of now VP “Top Cop” Kamala Harris.

His liberal fascism was exposed when his rhetoric was countered by his practice of refusing to prosecute killer cops in San Francisco which even inspired Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players to take a knee in response.  It also inspired impacted families and activists to protest against him at his home and run him out of the Bay area, only to be championed by BLM-LA and others.

It’s a long haul, but only communism means real justice
While all of these families recognize that the whole system is racist and guilty of murder, we still have a way to go to win them away from reformism and liberal-led organizations. Real justice can only come from the dismantling of capitalism and the capitalist state through communist revolution and joining Progressive Labor Party.  However, many families understand that it has been our Party and our leadership that has always been honest and upfront with our politics and consistent in the protests in the streets. We know this is a lifelong struggle, and they have confidence that we will be with them for the long haul.  One of the Flores siblings is in a Party club and considers herself a communist. She is bold and has pushed families to begin targeting Gascon and has won her younger sister to join our collective!  With her leadership, the future of the working class is bright!

The last issue of CHALLENGE (3/1/23) remembered Langston Hughes as a writer sharply critical of Jim Crow segregation during World War II and as a poet for the working class of the U.S.—particularly Black workers.  Now we’ll flash back to the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became an advocate for multiracial, anti-capitalist revolution.  A tradition of anti-racist activism ran deep in Hughes’ family history. In 1858, his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, married Lewis Leary, an abolitionist who died in John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Howard Langston, was an educator and ardent abolitionist.  
According to his biographer Arnold Rampersad, young Langston Hughes was influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay, along with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the anti-racist, pro-communist writer and historian. In June 1921, Hughes’ poetry was published for the first time in a professional journal. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” came out in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.
In September 1921, Hughes moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. Not yet ready for college, he withdrew before the year was out. He plunged into Black cosmopolitan New York and met Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, both writers at The Crisis, and the poet Countee Collins.  By 1924, after a journey to West Africa and Paris and an extended sojourn in Washington, DC, he’d become a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance.  In March 1925, in the landmark issue of Survey Graphic, “Harlem:  Mecca of the New Negro” (edited by Alain Locke), contained ten poems by Hughes, including: “I, too, sing America./I am the darker brother. . . .”  
In 1926, Hughes published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues, and a famous essay for The Nation (June 23, 1926).   In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes wasn’t yet ready to attack capitalism or embrace the need for militant, collective antiracism. Instead, he argued for the importance of Black identity and called for racial pride: “Why should I want to be white?  I am Negro—and beautiful.”  
    By the late 1920s, when Hughes was enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically Black institution outside Philadelphia, he was meeting communists as well as Harlem’s cultural leaders.  In December 1926, four of his poems were published in the communist monthly New Masses, though they were nowhere near as politically sharp as his work to come.   
    With the Great Depression, beginning in November 1929, communists took leadership positions in major labor unions. They had an explanation for the Depression and a solution for racist inequalities and capitalist exploitation.  They called for multiracial unity and revolution.  Hughes was drawn to these ideas in New Masses, and he put his art at the service of revolution.
    For Hughes and millions of others, a political turning point came on March 25, 1931, when nine young Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white young women in a railroad boxcar in Alabama. The arrest and trial of the Scottsboro Boys galvanized communists and anti-racists throughout the world. Eight of the teenagers were quickly tried by the racists and sentenced to death; a mistrial was declared for the ninth because he was underage.  The Communist Party USA sent in lawyers to challenge the case.  The Supreme Court overturned the convictions; one of the women recanted her accusations and even went on tour to defend the defendants. Yet they languished in jail, many of them for decades.  
    Hughes responded with a terse four-line poem, “Justice,” for New Masses (July 1931), which accompanied a drawing of a lynching by artist Phil Bard.   

  That Justice is a blind goddess
    Is a thing to which we poor are wise:
    Her bandage hides two festering sores
    That once, perhaps, were eyes.

For the November 1931 New Masses, Hughes wrote “Scottsboro, Limited:  A One Act Play.” The cast roster includes “Red Voices,” who counter racist “Mob Voices” and shout out: “We’ll fight! The Communists will fight for you./ not just Black—but Black and white.” At the end of the play, the “Red Voices” declare: “Rise from the dead, workers, and fight!”  For the finale, Hughes directs that “Here the Internationale may be sung and the red flag raised above the heads of the Black and white workers together.”  
To Hughes and others in the communist movement, the trial of the Scottsboro Boys was both the cutting-edge antiracist fight of the day and a huge opportunity to unite Black and white workers.  For the June 1932 issue of New Masses, Hughes wrote the poem “An Open Letter to the South.”

    White workers of the South: . . .
    I am the Black worker.
                Listen:
    That the land might be ours,
    And the mines and the factories and the office towers
    At Harlem, Richmond, Gastonia, Atlanta, New Orleans;
    That the plants and the roads and the tools of power
    Be ours:
    …
    Let us become instead, you and I,
    One single hand
    That can united rise
    To smash the old dead dogmas of the past—To kill the lies of color
    That keep the rich enthroned
. . .
    Let us get together, say:
    “You are my brother, Black or white.
    You my sister—now—today!”
    . . .
    We did not know that we were brothers.
    Now we know!
    Out of that brotherhood
    Let power grow!
    We did not know
    That we were strong.
    Now we see
    In union lies our strength.
    . . .
    White worker,
    Here is my hand.
    Today,
    We’re Man to Man.

As Hughes wrote the poem, in the spring of 1932, he was preparing to join a group of 22 writers, journalists, and actors to travel through the Soviet Union. He mailed back from the USSR to New Masses his rousing poem “Good Morning Revolution,” which was excerpted in the last issue of CHALLENGE. After writing a number of commissioned pieces for Soviet journals and a short book, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, Hughes returned to the U.S. in the summer of 1933.    It was a pivotal period in U.S. politics, when communists played a big role in the fight against rising fascism, both in Europe and inside the U.S.
For the remainder of the 1930s, Hugues continued writing his radical poetry. He also traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War—the topic of our next CHALLENGE article.  

Biographical information is drawn from Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford, 2002; and Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 3 vols.  Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2001.

CHICAGO, February 26 – Around 50 Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends gathered on the city’s south side today to celebrate our fifth annual Black and Red event. The multiracial, multi-generational and international crowd in attendance engaged in an interactive program that highlighted the invaluable leadership and contributions of Black communists in past, present, and future revolutionary struggles.
Our local collective began organizing this event five years ago as a response to the many anti-communist distortions and outright lies by the bosses that falsely claim communism to be a political movement limited to white workers. The truth is that Black workers have always given key leadership to the fight for communist revolution, correctly understanding it as the only force to destroy the racism, sexism, and exploitation inherent in the capitalist profit system.
In contrast to the bosses’ Black History Month celebrations, which emphasize the need for more Black-owned businesses and individual success, PLP emphasizes the importance of Black workers leading the Party with comrades all over the world to put an end to racist capitalism once and for all. To be Black and red is to be an antiracist revolutionary!
Working-class Black history is communist history
We began our day at the DuSable Black History Museum, a south side landmark for over 50 years. The museum was founded by Margaret Taylor-Burroughs and her husband Charles, two Black organizers with well-known communist affiliations. PLP members made a list of scavenger hunt questions for our group to engage with the different exhibits and highlight the more radical history of various freedom movements.
We next headed to the local fieldhouse for lunch, socializing, and an event program. After dining on some delicious West African dishes, a new comrade kicked festivities off with an impassioned reading of “Good Morning, Revolution” by Black communist poet Langston Hughes. Although modern sources prefer to ignore or minimize Hughes’ embrace of communist internationalism, any serious analysis of his works such as this poem demonstrate his commitment to revolution.
Another veteran PLP member then took the mic to give some historical context to the violent mass struggle to end chattel slavery and the influence that struggle had on the theories of the communist Karl Marx. Through his work as a journalist reporting on the Civil War in the United States, Marx was able to better develop his understanding of how racism is essential to the profits of capitalism and how one could not be seriously fought without fighting the other.
We next watched a short video also highlighting the influence of communist theory and practice on countless antiracist mass movements in the 20th century, including the defense of the Scottsboro Nine against legalized lynching during the Great Depression and the struggle against the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa. Far from being confined to the history books, the lessons learned from these brave struggles continue to inform our fight in the present day.
Lastly, to give the keynote speech, another veteran comrade drew on her decades of experience as a Black communist in PLP and how that has guided her fightback against racism and sexism in profound ways:

“The earliest comrades of our Party realized that the people who had this generational commitment to fighting the capitalist power structure had to lead this revolutionary movement for it to ultimately win.
Along with this leadership being mandatory for this Party to win, multiracial working-class unity also had to be a defining factor. Our Party views antiracism as more than just a ‘good feeling.’ It is dedicated fighting action in just about every way imaginable.”

Black workers are key revolutionary force
In the fight to destroy capitalism, the international working class must rely on the leadership of those workers most exploited and oppressed by this rotten racist system to truly win an egalitarian communist world. We salute our Black comrades and fellow workers for their ongoing role as an indispensable revolutionary force.

Millions of workers have been devastated by earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio–and most of all, by capitalism. These tragic events were not “natural” disasters or accidents. Corrupt building practices and neglected infrastructure are part and parcel of  a system that’s based on the ruthless drive for maximum profit.
On February 6,  the mass collapse of flimsy buildings in Turkey and Syria killed 50,000 workers and displaced millions. Three days earlier, an oversized Norfolk Southern train with inadequate brakes burst into flames. Fifty cars derailed, spewing toxic chemicals into the air, killing thousands of fish in nearby waterways and potentially contaminating the area’s drinking water (Newsweek, 2/17).
As imperialist rulers hoard resources to prepare for their next global conflict, more corners will be cut at the expense of workers’ health and safety. To get workers to passively accept these disasters and then agree to fight in World War III, the capitalist bosses will need increasing fascist repression.  ‘Lesser evilism,” the idea that some bosses are less racist, less sexist, or less profit-driven than others, will be a literal “dead end.”.  
Under the leadership of Progressive Labor Party, the international working class must turn the guns around and seize state power. Only then can we guarantee that the construction industry, the railroads,  the chemical plants, and the water treatment facilities serve workers’ needs. The only solution is communist revolution!
Turkey’s bosses: profits over workers
Instead of going all out to save and help workers after the earthquakes, the Turkish ruling class went all out to prepare for their regional oil wars with neighboring bosses in Syria and Iraq. Because of decades of racist displacement by the Turkish rulers, the Kurdish and Syrian populations were hardest hit by the disaster.  Predictably, Turkish President Recep Erdogan dodged all responsibility: “What happens, happens, this is part of fate’s plan” (The Guardian, 2/09). Days later, Turkey resumed its bombing of Kurdish forces in Syria and resumed its pursuit of a $20 billion deal  for F-16 fighter jets from the U.S. (Associated Press, 2/20). As the U.S. bosses square off against Russian imperialism in their proxy war in Ukraine, they’re doing all they can to strengthen NATO and consolidate its relationship with the Turkish ruling class. But Turkey has become an unreliable regional ally, as evidenced by its purchase of $2.5 billion in Russian missiles in 2017.
Like all capitalist rulers, Turkey’s bosses have long placed profits over people. To deflect the masses’ rage after a previous earthquake killed over 18,000 people due to faulty construction,  Erdoğan promised tighter building safety codes. But in 2019, he boasted of granting zoning “amnesties” to contractors,  40,000 of them in the hard-hit city of Gaziantep alone (NPA Syria, 2/23). Warnings from disaster specialists were ignored (Birgun, 2/06). After the most recent earthquakes, Erdoğan’s regime moved quickly to funneling relief efforts into the corrupt Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, which is notorious for rewarding patronage jobs to Erdogan supporters.
U.S. infrastructure strategy a train wreck
President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Plan focused on the U.S. infrastructure crisis over  helping workers survive the bosses’ latest economic crisis. As the U.S. rulers drive toward more full-blown fascism, they are calling for workers’ “sacrifice” and funneling more resources toward war preparations.One big problem for the bosses is the lack of discipline within their own class, including the railroad bosses. A core principle of Precision Scheduled Railroading, the operating standard for major railways in the U.S. is to eliminate “unnecessary” costs. In practice, this translates to fewer workers per train line, fewer safety measures, and less inspection time. Fronting for the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, Biden is squeezed between  the railroad bosses’ push for maximum short-term profits and the rulers’ broader need for reliable transportation infrastructure for the coming global war, most likely with  China. Regardless of how the bosses’ internal struggle plays out, workers stand to lose. Last December, cheered on by union misleaders, Biden signed legislation designed to kill a potential strike of over 100,000 railroad workers (CNBC, 12/12/22). Once again, we saw that workers’ allegiance to liberal capitalist politicians leads only to the betrayal of our own class interestsThe only thing that can save us from the rot of capitalism and the bloodbath of imperialist war is to fight back against all bosses and to build PLP.
A related example: Every two days, the bosses’ chemical companies have accidents.  When workers fail to fight back, it’s more profitable for the capitalists to absorb the cost of these accidents than to pay for rigorous safety measures (CNN, 2/22). The bosses at Norfolk Southern are well aware that their accident rate has increased each of the last four years (NS Corp, 1/25). From 2016 to 2021, there were 13,000 violations relating to hazardous materials, or triple the number in the previous five years–a clear reflection of weak federal oversight (NYT 2/17). With over 12,000 chemical facilities across the country, many nearby residents have reason to live in fear. The predominantly white working class population of East Palestine and the surrounding area have been, systematically segregated from their Black and Latin class sisters and brothers. They are chronically unemployed, under-employed, and underpaid. Capitalism’s racist system hurts the entire working class.
For safety, workers need communist revolution
Over and again, we see workers saving workers. In Pakistan, workers risked their lives by wading through toxic, deadly flood waters to distribute vital donations. In Haiti, workers are funding and running community kitchens, and providing clothing and shelter for striking garment workers.. In Turkey and Syria,  thousands of workers and youth are breaking through the border to help other workers after the earthquakes.All of these efforts are courageous and essential.  But ultimately, they will be futile if we fail to understand that we can save ourselves and our class only by smashing capitalism, the root of all these problems.  
Earthquakes will keep happening under communism. But when the working class gains state power, and enforces strict rules for development and building safety, the human toll of these disasters will be far less. Transportation accidents will also occur under communism, though there will surely be fewer of them when workers are empowered to oversee the production and maintenance of these systems. When the means of production are owned by and for the working class, rather than by private individuals and corporations, a strong and resilient infrastructure will be viewed as a social necessity.  By working together and sharing resources, liberated from the divisions of private property and wage slavery, workers will create a safer, freer world. Join us! Build Progressive Labor Party!