At LA Rally vs. Police Murder PL’ers Expose ‘Good-Cop-Bad-Cop’ Misleaders

LOS ANGELES, CA. –– The working class is no stranger to racist killer cops, especially in the recent multiple murders involving the LAPD and LA County Sheriffs.  PLP members attended a candlelight vigil for Christian Portillo, who was gunned down by the murderous cops in Lennox. Recalling PLP’s response to Sean Bell’s murder in New York, we decided to bring revolutionary politics to these events and received positive responses from the working class there.

As the vigil progressed, there was a call by community leaders for a march toward the Sherriff’s office that was to remain calm and collected.  White flags were passed out along with signs calling for an end to police murder. Similar to the misleaders in New York, leaders of this march called for exposing the “bad” cops and respecting the “good” cops. These misleaders called for peace and increased participation in the system. Once Party members saw reformist politics leading the march, we mobilized to circulate more CHALLENGES and literature.  One comrade began chanting “Policia cochina, racista y asesina!” (Police, pigs, racist and murderous!) that was warmly received and picked up by our working-class brothers and sisters.

The workers’ anger, especially that of Christian Portillo’s brother, grew. The march  became a picket line and eventually PLP pushed to move down the block in front of the Sheriffs’ station.  PL members’ chants got louder and more militant. Then, Portillo’s brother tacked a flier attacking these racist murderers on the station wall. One comrade took a bullhorn and gave a speech linking the murder of Christian Portillo to the capitalist system that would continue to flourish with reformist politics.  This comrade called for workers to fight back and join our fight for communism.  At the end of the march, the misleaders continued their call to work within the system.  Another comrade jumped on the bullhorn and gave another speech in Spanish reminding the crowd of the 1992 rebellions in response to the Rodney King beating.  He called for joining PLP and building for communist revolution on the job, in the schools, and in the streets.

The most important lesson we learned is that we should never underestimate our class.  Our initial hesitation to be militant at a vigil based on the fear of being seen as “opportunist” (taking advantage of the situation) was wrong. The actions of the working class in Lennox and especially some of the Portillo family members reminded PL’ers of the responsibility they have to build the fight for communism.  PLP made contacts here and will continue to build the relationships needed for the long-term fight for revolution!  Only revolution will end these brutal police murders and the terror that is capitalalism! J

Protesters Charge Cops With Racist Killing of Latino Worker

Workers PLP met at the Lennox vigil (above) called and invited us to another rally which we attended in Compton the next week against the police killings. Family members of the several victims of racist police terror actively led chants, as they continue being under police surveillance and intimidation. The rally got support from cars passing by and honking.

PLP members led the chant “Black, Brown, Asian, White — to smash racism we must unite!”  Later, when Christian Portillo’s sister spoke, she echoed these sentiments, saying that we all need to unite against racist cop terror. Portillo’s friends and family all took CHALLENGE and were interested in reading it along with our leaflet linking the racist police murders of Portillo and Kevin Wicks in Inglewood with the rulers’ drive to make the working class pay for their wars and economic crisis. One person we had met at the first rally asked us for the new CHALLENGE. She had read the previous one and liked it. She noted that this was the sort of thing that started the civil war in El Salvador. We agreed and could see why the Summer Project which just ended was so important.

By expanding CHALLENGE networks and organizing workers in the factories, in the military and in schools,  PLP is laying the basis to lead the fight against racist police killings around revolutionary communist politics and to build the fight to end racist terror once and for all, not with dead-end reforms but through the long term fight for communist revolution.

Mississippi Terror Raid:Workers Shouldn’t Be Suckers for Anti-Immigrant Racism

LAUREL, MISSISSIPPI, August 28 — The Gestapo-like raids carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cops struck again, arresting 595 workers employed by Howard Industries, world’s largest manufacturer of electrical transformers employing 3,000 workers in southeastern Mississippi. And the traitorous AFL-CIO applauded the raid! (See below)

In May, ICE carried out a similar raid, arresting hundreds of workers at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. These raids are terrorizing many small towns nation-wide. At the same time the Laurel raid was taking place, a rumor of an ICE raid in Perry, a small Iowa town 100 miles from Postville, was panicking the Latino community, 25% of Perry’s population.

Hundreds of heavily-armed ICE agents raided Howard Industries’ Laurel and nearby Ellisvile facilities. They arrived in unmarked cars and white vans, sealed the plants and rounded up “suspect” workers, questioning them in mobile trailers.

Just as the Nazis used yellow stars to identify Jews, Latino workers were segregated from other workers. U.S. citizens were given blue armbands to divide them from immigrants. Agents wearing flak vests stopped motorists driving near the plant and told them to leave the area.

The raid’s blatant fascist-like racism shocked many. An immigrant rights group in Jackson, the state capital, criticized the raid, saying families with children were involved. “It’s horrific what ICE is doing to these families and these communities,” said Shuya Ohno, a spokesman for the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. “It’s just hard to imagine that this is the United States of America.” (NY Times, 8/27)

A woman entering a local church with four small children said several of the youngsters’ parents had been detained. The woman, a translator for many of the families, said: “I don’t like this at all. I don’t understand it. They have come here to work. It’s very sad.”

But this is exactly the U.S.A. today, a country led by a ruling class which needs more racism, more fascist terror. The raids’ aim is not really to deport all undocumented workers, or even to find those guilty of “identity theft” as ICE claims. The goal is to terrorize immigrant workers, and all workers, so they accept super-exploitation, rotten working conditions, more social service cutbacks and get used to the kind of mass terror that the bosses and their police agencies will use against ALL workers who refuse to swallow these conditions. These attacks will continue no matter who’s elected the next President.

Plants like this one here will become more important for the bosses’ war machine as it gears for wider wars, from Afghanistan to the Caucasus. The ruling class realizes that the U.S. population is changing. According to Census figures, in several decades most U.S. workers will be immigrants, Latinos or blacks. So racist super-exploitation will be needed more than ever to keep the bosses’ super-profits rolling in.

But this also becomes a contradiction for the bosses: they need those workers they’re terrorizing for their war plants and their military. So, while we might hear a lot of empty talk about “the end of racism” — “after all,” they tell us, “look at Obama” — the opposite is happening.

This makes it primary for PLP to organize among these factory workers, and all workers and soldiers, to win them to fight racism, understanding that capitalism cannot live without racist exploitation. All workers must see these ICE raids as an attack against the entire working class. The AFL-CIO did the opposite here. Rather than unite the workers and organize them all, it pitted unionized workers against immigrant workers.

Robert Shaffer, regional AFL-CIO official, applauded the raid, saying he’s complained for a long time about how companies in southern Mississippi hire undocumented immigrants, disgustingly adding the racist comment that the region “looks like a little Mexico.” The same union traitors who, because of their pro-boss sellout politics, have failed to organize millions of workers — citizens or immigrants — nationwide, are now blaming the victims for their own failures.

Workers who fall for this racist trap are cutting their own throat. We must defend our fellow immigrant workers when the bosses attack. Our motto should be, “All for one and one for all; same enemy same fight, workers of the world, unite!”

Bosses Turn Education into Schools for Imperialism

From metal detectors, cameras and police presence to eroding union protections for teachers, trends in education point to a tightening control that is part of a growing fascism in society. Workers and youth organizing in movements to oppose an accelerating cascade of budget-cut assaults will come up against these physical and coercive elements of the police state. Through sharp, vigorous and patient organizing inside such movements, communists can win masses of workers and youth to see growing fascism not only as cause for despair but as cause for revolution.

Capitalist education always serves to teach the big ideas needed so that the ruling class can pursue its aims with minimal resistance from the workers. The Cold War education of the 1950s produced a society that mostly accepted a vicious anti-communist war in Vietnam at considerable cost in lives and absorbed its costs for ten years. As the Cold War heated up again under Reagan in the 1980s, brutal wars in Central America and huge cuts in social spending ensued. A U.S. population won to anti-communism tolerated these attacks. The (unexpected) reward for U.S, imperialism was the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main competitor. During the Cold War U.S. schools taught young-people anti-communism so they would not protest the rulers’ war plans.

Today U.S. imperialism faces a situation that is both similar and different. New competitors are rising, and as CHALLENGE has emphasized, control of Mid-East oil is key to dominance in the coming period. What teachers are asked to teach about the Mid-East matters. The ruling class needs U.S. schools to win over future workers to U.S. imperialism.

In New York State all high school students must take Regents exams in several subjects to graduate. In Global History students have been asked to write about the “positives and negatives” or the “differing viewpoints” on imperialism. These topics do more than force thousands of students to argue for imperialism on test day. Because topics tend to be recycled, these questions also exercise enormous influence over teachers who care deeply about preparing their students for examination and graduation. Teachers frame their treatment of imperialism in similar terms. Teachers are pressured to avoid teaching imperialism as the racist and genocidal system that it is. Like slavery and the Holocaust, imperialism has no positive characteristics. This moral stance is impossible when teaching to the test.

This past June, question #41 reads:
“In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The United Nations response led to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This response is an example of:
Détente
Empire building
Totalitarianism
Collective Security

In classrooms, where the struggle for literacy is desperate, teachers tempted to speak about U.S. imperialism are discouraged by such a question. The “correct” answer was choice #4. The test’s writers want Americans to understand Desert Storm not as an exercise in U.S. imperialism but “collective security.” But even more alarming than the right answer is the wrong one, specifically choice #2. Teachers who focus on actual history are in trouble. The history is clear:

The U.S. developed relations with the Saudis after World War II, calling the oil reserves of the Mid-East “a stupendous source of strategic power and the greatest material prize in the history of the world” Carter proclaimed his doctrine of U.S. dominance in the Mid-East in 1980 and created a “rapid-reaction force” designed to invade the area. Reagan transformed this force into Centcom, which has grown under every president and directed three major wars in fifteen years.

This history points to choice #2, imperialism. Teachers who speak in terms of U.S. imperialism run the risk of “confusing” their students and maybe even costing them the one point they need in order to graduate. The prospect is terrifying enough, especially to new teachers, to dampen a real critique of U.S. imperialism.

Additionally, the teacher-training taboo of never “sharing your view” finishes off many a good lesson about the true role of the U.S. in the world before it ever begins. No doubt the rulers have the good old-fashioned witch-hunt in their arsenal for teachers who refuse to toe the line of U.S. patriotism in class, and they will use it again as they have in the past. Next to these exams, however, the Cold War persecution of teachers was crude and perhaps even less effective in terms of the levels of conformity achieved.

Luckily, working class students can and do respond to real history teaching. Facts, a veteran PLP member used to say, are stubborn things. Several students informally surveyed on this question after the exam knew to stay away from choice number two even though they knew it was correct. In class, the teacher led discussions to ensure they understood the purpose of the test and what the testers were looking for. In fact deconstructing an exam this way actually makes test prep easier: “always pick the choice that makes America look good.”

When the “positives-of-imperialism” question reas its ugly head, we have an opportunity to raise important ideas among teachers and students about growing fascism, the role of education and the needs of U.S. imperialism. This article was discussed with several teachers and students in the base of PLP at a school where we’re active for suggestions prior to publication. We must take every chance the rulers give us to build our movement for communist revolution.

Racist Gentrification Sweeping Workers Out of Harlem

HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY, August 19 — Several weeks ago, the Record Shack, a legendary 35-year-old music store on 125th St in Harlem, was suddenly evicted. The owner was not even allowed inside to get his personal possessions; his goods were brought to a Yonkers storage facility that’s asking $12,000 for their return. The landlord is a local church, The United House of Prayer, that has been selling off its ample property to the highest bidders, including banks and chain stores, that are invading the rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood. Last weekend, as on many past Sundays, local activists rallied outside the shuttered music store, demanding its re-opening and condemning the landlord church.

Harlem, home to many poor and working-class African-Americans and a major cultural center, has already been cut in half. That is, housing affordable at the average Harlem worker’s $20,000 wage and to small black-owned businesses are being displaced by luxury condos and upscale stores. What are being labeled “subsidized units” in the new buildings are pegged at incomes of $40,000-$60,000. Going, going, gone are affordable apartments and small businesses.

Resistance to  gentrification has been constant, from students and residents uniting to oppose Columbia University’s takeover of West Harlem, to a militant Movimiento por Justicia in East Harlem, to several groups in Central Harlem. There have been demonstrations large and small and several actions, uniting all the groups. Unfortunately, severe weaknesses pervade the struggle.

All the groups suffer from a major focus on politicians. They rightly denounce the sellouts like ex-mayor Dinkins and Rep. Charles Rangel, and Harlem’s traitorous City Council representatives, but then hope to elect new politicians who say they will fight in the people’s interest. No few individuals can turn around the basic fact that the government’s role is — first and foremost — to protect the flow of profits, and also to control uprisings by the governed. But this obsession with elections means that debating the merits of individuals, or listening to politicians’ speeches occupy many meetings.

Much activity is focused on a few people attending meetings of political bodies and hoping to influence their outcome. Although protesting at politicians’ offices or events can be good focal points for mass actions, the major effort must be to build mass activity and expose the role of politics in a capitalist society. We need more mass actions such as gathering to stop evictions, or we could occupy renovation projects.

Nationalism is the other major stumbling block to building a mass campaign. At the August 3rd Record Shack demonstration, some people wanted to boycott other businesses owned by the Church, not a bad tactic, but on the basis that they were run by Jews or Koreans; they chanted “Buy Black.” This slogan ignores the fact that the evil landlord is himself black, as are many other Harlem oppressors.

It was possible to have a discussion with a few demonstrators about how racism is used to super-oppress and divide people, but nationalism serves to maintain those divisions and hide the underlying class divisions. When we all mass in large numbers with militant actions, then we’ll really see which side people are on and allow us all — workers and students of all backgrounds — to fight together.

Some anti-gentrification movement fighters do see that capitalism, based on endless greed for profits, and built on racism, is the problem. By distributing CHALLENGE and having continuing discussions, we must try to win them to join the Party for the long struggle ahead and not become defeated by our current inability to turn around gentrification.

Angry Homecare Workers Must Sack Union Hacks, Bosses’ Politicians

NEW YORK, NY, Aug. 7th –– Eleven thousand members of Local 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Workers East attended a rally at Madison Square Garden to support 30,000 homecare worker members in their struggle for upgrading pay and against the growing threat to their medical benefits. Their contract expires December 31. As PL’ers distributed all the CHALLENGES newspapers we had to eager and angry workers, it was clear that the workers were ready to fight.

The reasons for their anger were clear. Many of the agencies that employ them are run for profit. They typically skim off half of their state- and city-funded budgets for “administrative expenses.” The average homecare worker, almost exclusively minority and immigrant women, gets about $8/hour while providing lifesaving services. (As CHALLENGE has pointed out before, these workers receive no extra pay for overtime hours and less than their hourly pay when they stay overnight.)

The system under which tens of thousands of the elderly and infirm are cared for in this city makes it clear why we must smash capitalism. The bosses’ system places little value on the lives of those who no longer produce profits for them and therefore spends as little as possible on their care.

Homecare workers have suffered racist exploitation from their bosses and less than full support from the SEIU 1199 leadership. The union leaders refuse to unify them and prepare for a massive strike. On the contrary, this rally was dominated by speech after speech from politicians like Governor Patterson who is planning a $1 billion cut in the state budget. Also featured were Senator Schumer and Congressman Weiner who are busy urging war on Iran. Each of these politicians promote cutting workers’ living standards to pay for U.S. imperialism’s economic and war needs. SEIU leaders are lulling healthcare workers into believing we have no power other than in our union’s political endorsements. In the face of capitalism’s growing economic crisis and war in the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian regions, this is deadly poison for the working class.

Progressive Labor Party and its paper, CHALLENGE, must organize the working class to make a communist revolution. How do we get there? By stepping up the struggle with bosses every day, not allying with them, by getting involved in the daily problems faced by our friends and co-workers, by reading and circulating CHALLENGE participating in discussion groups, and joining the PLP to make egalitarian communism the main issue of the day!

All Workers Must Oppose Anti-Immigrant Racism

NEWARK, NJ, August 3 — A multi-racial and international group of 32 people met here today to discuss the fight against anti-immigrant racism. The unity of black and white citizens and immigrant workers (from Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador) is the best way to confront this growing form of racism which affects the entire working class.

An immigrant described the police harassment of day laborers waiting for jobs in an area of Orange, NJ, as “muy malo” (very bad). Elsewhere in New Jersey, homes have been raided and immigrants dropping off their children at school have been issued multiple traffic tickets up to $5,000! This summer two town councils proposed that landlords rent only to people with documentation.

One town, Bound Brook, has since dropped the resolution. The other, Middletown, has tabled it. But with hundreds arrested at factories lately and the racist murder of Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, PA, by six white youth, we felt the urgency to meet and decide on action.

We noted that criminal bosses aren’t arrested for paying dirt wages and physically abusing workers. Because capitalism is based on exploitation of workers, this kind of racist super-exploitation is “legal.” The racist media tries to divide us by blaming the victims — undocumented immigrants — for the bosses’ attacks through the subprime crisis, mass wage and service cuts, and endless wars. Immigrants have historically been the targets of this ruling-class strategy. One woman recalled that her Italian father, who had no documents, suffered similar racist attacks.

In the early stage of the bosses’ “War on Terror” in Dec. 2001, when Middletown teachers struck, the media labeled them “the enemy of children and parents” because “educators’ benefits must be sacrificed” for the bosses’ war efforts; 228 strikers were arrested.

A woman speaker asked us to picture a world without borders based on a society without social inequalities: communism. During the discussion, one man reading CHALLENGE commented, “This paper is very important.”

A social worker from a family-help center said we need to reach out to communities. Members from three churches spoke, too. One Unitarian related what she learned at her June General Assembly: that Boston and Connecticut churches have e-mail chains ready to respond to attacks.

If the tabled anti-immigrant proposal isn’t rejected in Middletown, we plan to go door

‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln Was Viciously Pro-Slavery

Lerone Bennett, Jr.’s book, “Forced Into Glory” (1999), convincingly documents how most historical accounts have wrongly described Abraham Lincoln as a fighter against slavery. His work also shows that Lincoln was intensely reactionary, making decisions which, contrary to legend, returned many blacks to slavery.

Bennett insists that Lincoln had a life-long commitment to racism. In 1853, as one of 11 managers of the Illinois State Colonization Society, he advocated colonization of all blacks to Central or South America. In 1857 he urged the Illinois legislature to appropriate money for colonization. Three months after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, he sent 450 blacks to an island off the coast of Haiti where 100 died within a year. In April 1865, Lincoln summoned General Benjamin Butler to the White House about the “possibility of sending the Blacks away.”

Bennett documents consistency, from Lincoln’s 1836 vote against black suffrage to his 1865 support of the Louisiana constitution which gave the vote to Confederate veterans but not to black veterans of the U.S. Army.

In 1847, as an attorney representing a slave-owner, he asked two judges to send a black mother and her four children back into slavery. The white judges rejected Lincoln’s plea and freed the family. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herendon, took cases of slaves, but Lincoln never did.

Bennett challenges those who excuse Lincoln’s attitude, saying the few exceptions in the racist climate of the 19th century are out-spoken abolitionists like Wendell Phillips or the militant John Brown. But men like Lyman Trumbull, a known opponent of the pro-slavery Kansas-Nebraska Act, were elected to the Senate over Lincoln. In 1853, 22 Illinois legislators stood against the Negro Exclusion Law, but not Lincoln. Members of Lincoln’s cabinet spoke out for Negro suffrage. Politicians from Mid-West states led the fight against Negro exclusion and black laws. Other politicians took stands for instant emancipation, confiscation of rebels’ land and for use of black soldiers.

Bennett critiques the Gettysburg Address for avoiding pressing issues of the day. The lynchings and burnings of blacks in NYC that very year weren’t mentioned. Lincoln never uttered the words Confederate, South or slave.

Bennett describes how each of three drafts of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reacted to a more progressive Congress. Congressman Daniel Gott called for a ban on the slave trade in the nation’s capital. Lincoln then wrote his first draft, a bill for gradual and compensated emancipation in D.C., stating that all persons now within said District lawfully held as slaves should remain such.

In September 1861, Lincoln revoked General Fremont’s blanket emancipation of all the slaves in Missouri. Intense criticism caused him to write his second “emancipation” draft, proposing gradual emancipation but total compensation for slave-owners in Delaware, with two timetables for ending slavery: 1893 and 1914!

In 1862, when General Hunter decreed that all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida should be freed, Lincoln revoked it, re-enslaving one million people! Criticism was again levied at Lincoln, so Congress urgently signed the Second Confiscation Act saying that all rebel property, including slaves even 1,000 miles from a battlefield, could be seized. Lincoln countered on July 22, allowing 60 days warning for the South, and only for gradual, compensated confiscation.

That July, Congress also authorized the use of black soldiers. Lincoln told a delegation of Midwesterners in August that he would rather resign than use black soldiers to kill white men.

Ultimately, the Proclamation “enslaved and/or continued to enslave over half a million slaves, more than it ever freed,” because there was no power to effectively free slaves in rebel states. The border states, with an additional 556,540 slaves, were excluded because they weren’t in rebellion. Also excluded were large sections of Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia controlled by federal troops — 396,863 slaves — some already wage workers. In January, 1863, slaves totaled four million. By February 1865, two months before the war ended, 3,800,000 blacks were still enslaved.

What did Lincoln do on race issues? He volunteered three times for the war to ethnically cleanse Illinois of Indians. He maintained the brutal treatment of black soldiers and their unequal pay. When William Walker, a black soldier, protested, Lincoln condemned him to the firing squad. He made sure 38 Indians hung for rebelling against his administration’s genocidal strategy. But when Confederates massacred hundreds of blacks, women and children at Fort Pillow, Lincoln did nothing.

Bennett’s work is well-researched and relentlessly exposes Lincoln’s reactionary policies. He also directs sharp criticism at modern biographers for perpetuating the racist hypocrisy of Lincoln’s heroic image as “the freer of slaves.”

Angry LA Workers Mobilize Against Racist Police Murders

HOLLYWOOD, CA, June 21 — Hundreds of workers –– Asian, black, Latino, and white –– expressed their anger at the memorial for Usman Chaudhry, next to the bushes where racist LAPD officers woke him up, handcuffed him, then assassinated him. Chaudhry was 21 years and had autism. Even though the kkkops had his identification the police didn’t notify Chaudhry’s family about his death for 21 days.

The event was also a protest against over thirty such executions since the beginning of 2008 that include Michael Cho who was killed by La Habra police and Brian Moore, 23, in Compton. Just five days later, all charges were dropped against the cops who killed Cho. The memorial challenged the climate of fear that hangs over this block and many others like it.  “It was a good event,” said a regular CHALLENGE reader who lives in the neighborhood, “because people really came together, at all levels.”

On the one hand, we mourned with Usman’s parents, sister, and brother, all of whom spoke, and with friends and family of Cho, Michael Bayoune, and others murdered.  But the barely-suppressed anger of the crowd broke out during the closing candlelight vigil, with raised fists and chants –– led by PLP’ers –– of “No Justice, No Peace –– No Racist Police!”  CHALLENGE and leaflets were warmly received by nearly everyone.

Workers and youth are up against a racist profit system that purposely uses police terror to force workers to submit to intensified exploitation in preparation for wider wars, and eventually World War III. Workers and soldiers have nothing to gain and lots to lose from these wars, beyond those killed and wounded.  One in three homeless men are vets, and three-quarters of all vets have substance abuse or mental health problems.  They come home to inadequate care and systematic police abuse.

PLP members criticized demands made by leaders of sponsoring organizations for federal investigations or police reform. Voting for Democrats is no solution. In the midst of budget cuts to health and education, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants more money for cops.  Barack Obama has called for building up the U.S. military for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and maybe Iran.

The coalition that sponsored the rally is planning for more such events in neighborhoods across the city this summer.  PLP plans on bringing Summer Project volunteers to fight back against these racist attacks by organizing on the job and in the schools to build class unity.  Imagine if each police murder were met with on-the-job protests as well as thousands marching in the streets. And then imagine the power of such a movement, based in the industrial working class and led by communist ideas, to take on the capitalist system that’s killing us.

PL’s Politics Make Mark at LA Social Forum

LOS ANGELES, June 30 — Last weekend, the Los Angeles Social Forum drew a few hundred attendees. CHALLENGES and PL leaflets were distributed throughout the event. One workshop presented the struggles in building worker-student solidarity on their respective campuses. Discussion in both break-out groups and the workshop in general offered different ways to achieve this. PLP members showed that historically the only effective path is building a base in the working class, bringing out communist ideas in class struggle. We also emphasized that while campus work is important we must spread these ideas throughout the working class, especially among industrial workers. An important avenue this summer is participation in the Los Angeles or Seattle Summer Projects, where we will be doing precisely this — building a worker-student and soldier alliance.

The presidential election came up, and while there was mostly agreement on rejecting Obama, there was certainly disagreement over how to react to his campaign. Some wrote it off and condemned participating in it. We advocated the importance of seeing the contradictions within those who are attracted to his campaign. Many working-class youth and adults are drawn to the prospect of change, especially amid the failing economy, budget cuts and the war. We noted that such people can be won to pro-working-class, communist politics if we dare to join the struggle.

It’s important to talk with Obama supporters and show them an alternative — communist revolution — where, instead of giving away our power to politicians and their system of empty promises, we take power ourselves and attend to our needs through a communist society.

Another workshop portrayed the anti-war movement through the soldier’s perspective. A clip from the Winter Soldier forum depicted what soldiers have been required to do in this war, leading to some soldiers becoming more politically conscious. A veteran described the war as imperialist, saying the working class must and could change the world so that imperialism could not exist. A comrade explained that her experience in the anti-Vietnam War movement had taught her that activists needed to understand the reasons for the war and base their activities on anti-capitalist, communist politics.

The discussion illustrated what soldiers have done to end wars, be it the Vietnam War or the current ones in the Middle-East. Some said mass marches and rallies are important, but organizing soldiers both within and outside the military is much more vital to halting this war and building for a communist revolution. Soldiers are ultimately the ones sent to fight these wars for profit. A comrade concluded that the class consciousness of the soldiers on the panel and their stance against racism demonstrate the great potential the working class has for revolution.

Some high school students participated for the first time in the struggle to defend our ideas. Our emphasis on understanding that capitalism is the political basis of imperialism and that the solution is communism resonated with some newly anti-imperialist forum-goers. As we continue to prepare for our summer actions, the LA Social Forum reinvigorated our confidence in the working class and PLP’s politics. Overall our activity at this Forum revealed the importance of putting forward communist revolution and building a base for it.

Student’s Answer to Testing: ‘Shut the School Down!’

NEW YORK CITY, June 30 — The ruling class has been forcing NYC teachers to give testing so the bosses can intensify fascist practices at home, enabling them to continue their imperialist wars. Some PL teachers met to discuss the new preparatory tests that would presumably “predict” what students would do on the final tests. These would be given three times a year, administered by teachers, then graded by the State. One PL teacher was in a high school that was administering the test, a joint partnership between the State and Houghton-Mifflin Corporation. The PL teachers decided that a written report on the test was needed.

As part of his training, the PL teacher saw the computer program of the standardized test. One screen correlated the teachers, the number of students taking the test and the students’ scores on that test. The rulers will use this test to determine what teachers teach in the classroom. They want to tie a teacher’s tenure to the test scores, which would provide a basis for their merit pay schemes. Communists must lead the working class to struggle against the bosses’ attempt to implement this new weapon against us.

A week later the school discussed the testing. The bosses’ puppet facilitator tried to explain that “data-driven education” would be positive. The PL teacher exposed the test as a “tool of oppression,” to loud applause from the majority of teachers. Every teacher who spoke afterwards condemned the test. Only the school administrators showed even tacit support for it. This did not happen in a vacuum. Over 100 CHALLENGES are distributed in the school, more than 20 among the staff. Years of friendship and political discussion with these teachers encouraged them to express their anger toward the ruling class’s plans.

With PL’ers confident in our ability to extend the struggle among teachers, it was time to involve the students directly. PL’ers have patiently built ties among the students for over four years. More than 80 students read CHALLENGE regularly; 10 have joined the Party.

After carefully estimating the balance of forces, the PL teacher encouraged his freshman classes to boycott the test. He told them his job was to give them the test, but they could decide whether or not to take it. He informed them that over $100 million had already been spent on the test.

The students were already frustrated with standardized testing and asked if the tests would affect their grades. The answer was no, but the State could come down on them hard. One student declared, “Well, let them throw the first punch and we’ll shut the school down.” Another replied, “Just give us the excuse.” (Continued next issue.)