On June 5, the Black Alliance for Peace hosted a powerful panel discussion on the topic of “Defending Our America: Building Resistance to Imperialism and Militarism.” The event was held at the Harriet Tubman Social Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles. 

The gathering started with a poster and banner making session in preparation for the mobilization against the Ninth Summit of the Americas. A special film screening of a documentary on SouthCom (the U.S. Military Command in Central America and the Caribbean) opened the forum, which was followed by a powerful panel that addressed the expansion of U.S. military bases worldwide, working class struggles, connecting our struggles, and building international solidarity specifically with Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and other nations occupied by SouthCom. 

Carlos Sirah of the Black Alliance for Peace chaired the discussion and Dr. Jemima Pierre, Black Alliance for Peace’s Haiti and Africa Coordinator, introduced the panelists.

In closing, John Parker, Coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center and on the ballot for U.S. Senate on the California Peace and Freedom Party ticket, emphasized that the purpose for running in the primary election is to raise awareness, to address issues that are not talked about by the Democratic or Republican parties, and to give the people an alternative. The increasing numbers of people who choose socialist candidates shows our movement is moving forward and people are developing an understanding of socialism.

Videos of the program may be viewed on Black Alliance for Peace Facebook at tinyurl.com/2p8c4dha 

No compromise! No defeat!

On its first of 3 days, the Peoples Summit for Democracy in Los Angeles opened by surpassing expectations in numbers attending and unity. The significant organizational challenges of the event being held at the LA Trade Tech College went smoothly thanks to a committed group of mostly young volunteers who organized everything from the 9 panels that were presented to a large tented area set up to accommodate many of the over 250 organizations that represented social justice groups, veterans, students, community-based artisans, unions, women’s rights, Latin American solidarity groups and many more.

Organizers reported that of the 1000 people who had registered over 750 showed up on the first day. In the opening plenary entitled, “Democracy for Who” it was obvious that this was a serious crowd who had come to learn and connect with others. The urgency connected to the decline of the US in the eyes of the world and its inability to meet even the most basic of needs of the majority of people was obvious. Manolo De Los Santos, a key organizer of the Peoples Summit, reminded the crowd that, “this cannot be a one-time event. We have to keep in mind that we must forge unity with all those who are oppressed, exploited and victimized by this system whose time is up.”

Cuba who, like Venezuela and Nicaragua was not invited to Biden’s Summit of exclusion was brought up time and again as an example of a collective society that, despite the over 60 years of blockade and a mountain of sanctions that are now Biden’s responsibility, continues to stand up to empire unified and never wavering dignity. In most panels, the dignity of Cuba was intertwined in the discussion regardless of the topic.

In the panel entitled, Let Cuba Live: Young Voices against the Blockade, moderated by Cheryl LaBash, co chair of the National Network on Cuba, 3 young women who had recently returned from Cuba explained not only how heartwarming their experience was but how much they learned. There was a separation of belief from everything that they had been told from the official US narrative against Cuba their entire lives and the rich experience of cooperation in sharing and commitment for the common good that they witnessed on the island. The forming of this critical view will now extend to everything else they have been told about the so-called greatest democracy ever.

Danaka Katovich, national co-director of Code Pink expressed the sentiment of the panel by pointing out, “The US never consults with me about my rights as a woman, I can’t even vote on it, where in Cuba women are involved on every level. The whole point of the US blockade against Cuba is based on cruelty so the US has no right to lecture us about human rights and democracy.”

Perhaps the area where the most discussion and organizing was taking place was on the informational tables outside where people were signing up and getting into lively conversations about activism and strategies. On our Resumen Latinoamericano table, people were signing up eagerly as one woman said, “I just need to get information from new sources.”

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

The most dangerous poison is racism. This toxin filled Payton Gendron’s bloodstream as the gunman went to Buffalo, New York, to kill Black people.

The latest version of this poison is the claim that white people are being “replaced.” Tucker Carlson tells his Fox News audience that they’re being pushed aside by immigrants as well as by all Black, Brown and Asian people.

This lie was emphasized by the murderer Gendron in his 180-page “manifesto.”

It wasn’t immigrants that closed nine of the ten GM plants in Flint, Michigan, destroying more than 70,000 union jobs between 1980 and 2006. Capitalism committed this mega job theft.

Because of the United Auto Workers union, Flint used to have the highest average wages in the United States. Now because of plant closings, 60% of Flint’s children live below the miserably low official poverty level.

To save money, children in the Black-majority city were deliberately lead-poisoned. Heavily polluted water from the Flint river was substituted for the clean drinking water that had come from the Great Lakes.

That’s a real replacement that Tucker Carlson won’t talk about.

It isn’t Black or Latinx people who are responsible for the inflation-adjusted wages of over-the-road truck drivers falling 55% between 1980 and 2021. It was government deregulation and union-busting attacks against the Teamsters union that committed this crime.

The last 50 years has been one long holiday for the rich. Real average wages rose just 3% between 1979 and 2018. Meanwhile productivity has zoomed. While there are 735 billionaires in the U.S., 40% of people can’t afford $400 for an emergency expense. 

It wasn’t Muslims who forced 60 million people in the U.S. to use food banks and pantries in 2020. Transgender people aren’t responsible for folks being forced to buy food at dollar stores because they can’t afford to shop at supermarkets.

Shoplifters didn’t make meat prices skyrocket by as much as 20% in the last year. It was the greedy meat monopolies that committed the crime.

Even the White House admits that “four large meat-packing companies control 85% of the beef market. In poultry, the top four processing firms control 54% of the market. And in pork, the top four processing firms control about 70% of the market.”

Who’s hurt most?

Poor and working people in the United States are suffering. Capitalism destroyed nearly 7 million manufacturing jobs ― many of which were union jobs ― between 1979 and 2019.

White workers were hurt by this job destruction. Black people were devastated.

White families in the Midwest saw their median income drop by 7.1% between 1978 and 1982. That’s a great recession.

But Black families in the region saw their median income fall by five times as much. Their 35.8% income drop amounted to a great depression.

Conditions were so bad that the Black median family income in the Midwest dropped below that of the South. (Census Bureau, historical income figures-families) A “reverse migration” began southwards.

This was a real great replacement. The banksters and billionaires were determined to get rid of their dependence on Black labor in heavy industry.

Back in 1968, a quarter of all auto workers and steel workers in the U.S. were Black. That was double the Black percentage of the population. (“Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981” by Philip S. Foner.) 

Among them were thousands of Black workers employed at Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna works located just outside Buffalo. Almost all of these jobs were destroyed. Buffalo’s Black Community never recovered from the loss.

Using a bankruptcy to make a profit of $300 million, Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross robbed Bethlehem Steel retirees of their medical benefits.

White workers were a majority of those cut off.

Tucker Carlson, who takes home $35 million per year, won’t mention this robbery. 

Capitalism continually replaces workers through automation. The number of railroad workers fell from 1.5 million in 1947 to just 145,000 today. 

Black workers are often the first victims of automation. In New York City alone, installing automatic elevators following World War II threw 20,000 workers out of a job.

Throughout the United States, operating elevators was considered a “menial occupation” and was generally reserved for Black men. A. Phillip Randolph attempted to organize them in New York during the early 1920s.

The 1934 organizing drive of building workers in New York City was sparked by African American elevator operator Thomas Young being fired for not saying “down, please.” The two-million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was born in this struggle. (“Local 32B-32J: Sixty Years of Progress”)

The biggest replacements of all time

Telling poor people that they’re being replaced by other poor people is old and stale. In the 1790s, Federalists in Philadelphia blamed Irish immigrants for their election losses. (“Philadelphia ― The Federalist City,” by Richard G. Miller)

Catholics were accused of wanting to replace a Protestant majority. In the 1920s, bigots claimed that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were replacing “old American stock.”

Italians, Poles, Hungarians and other immigrants were blamed for being union supporters in the strike wave that followed World War I. A special target of the 1924 immigration act were Jewish people. Africans and Asians were entirely excluded.

The Tucker Carlsons of the 1930s weren’t usually attacking Islam. They were instead fighting to keep Jewish refugees out of the United States. Anne Frank died in a Nazi concentration camp because her family was denied a visa to come to the United States.

Never forget that land belonging to Indigenous nations was stolen by one massacre after another, started by the Pilgrims. That’s a real replacement.

Joe Biden needs to replace Leonard Peltier’s jail cell with freedom. The American Indian Movement leader has spent 45 years in jail.

The African Holocaust is a centuries-long replacement that along with the Indigenous Holocaust jump-started the capitalist world market. Wall Street became the financial center of the United States because it was the banking house of the slave masters.

Capitalism is cooking the earth. We need to replace it with socialism.

The first step towards a revolution is to replace the lies of Tucker Carlson and every other racist with working class truth.

[For immediate release]

The People’s Forum in New York City attacked by the far-right, enabled by the police

Since our founding in 2018, our space, The People’s Forum (TPF) has been the target of multiple attacks by the far-right on both social media and in our location. We have managed to defend our space which operates on values and principles of social justice and people power. Most recently a coalition of anti-vaxxers, Cuban and Venezuelan anti-communists, and other far-right reactionaries have increased their attacks on TPF. Today, over a dozen officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) entered TPF, uninvited, and acted as security for the far-right who carried out an illegal attack on our space.

We ground and pride ourselves in organizing our own safety and coordinating with other organizations to defend and protect each other. Today, as many of TPF staff and leadership are in Los Angeles building The People’s Summit for Democracy, this far-right coalition attempted to forcefully occupy our space as part of a larger strategy against TPF’s politics and mission. The NYPD facilitated the attempted occupation by objectively preventing us from ejecting these far-right reactionaries. They allowed for the occupation attempt to continue for over an hour, while our staff and guests were physically assaulted and verbally harassed, and anti-vaxxers vandalized our space.

Today, this far-right coalition was driven out of the space by the strong stance and resistance of TPF staff and fellow comrades who protected the space. Rest assured, we will continue to uplift our socialist values and be a welcoming space for working people and all those who want to transform society for the better.

On May 12, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign officially began with a Mother’s Day march led by Coretta Scott King and welfare mothers.

I was barely 18 years old. Pregnant with my son and filled with the kind of hope that only the young possess — who know little of the hardships ahead — I participated in the Poor People’s Campaign.  

My neighbors were from Appalachia; my mother from the coal mining area of eastern Pennsylvania. As much as I was motivated by empathy for the people I loved who were my family and neighbors, it was the civil rights movement that lit a fire inside of me.  

So when I saw a flier posted by a group of Vista workers soliciting people to go with them to the D.C. Poor People’s Campaign, I called immediately.

I lied to my parents and pretended to stay with a friend, then left for Washington with a small group of older, certainly more sophisticated, participants. Most of them were graduates from the University of Delaware. 

I was the youngest, the only woman at the time. I was awkward; I couldn’t accompany them to bars because of my age, had no money and had never eaten in a restaurant. 

It wasn’t surprising that my new companions found me a burden and deserted me once we arrived in Washington. I never saw them again until we made the trip back to Wilmington, Delaware.

Instead, it was older Black participants, mostly from the South, who took me under their wing. I was taught how to piece together boards, hammer nails and build Resurrection City.  

Much of the mud, rain and even the speeches remain a blur. The only thing that stood out was the kindness and care of those Black residents of Resurrection City who took a rather young white kid under their guidance and shelter.

The aims of the Poor People’s Campaign were never realized. But that is another story.

U.S. poverty today

The United States has the largest economy in the world, yet it is slipping in every indice of quality of life. At last count, 37.2 million people were living in poverty, an increase of 3.3 million from 2020. 

Life span in the U.S. has declined for the first time by over two years. The U.S. has slipped from the 43rd place in the world to 64th in life expectancy.  

Class divisions and racism have widened. In essence, “The rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer.”

Aid to Dependent Children, founded in 1935 through the Social Security Act, which later became Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the country’s main welfare program, was ended in 1997 by the Bill Clinton administration. Notwithstanding the program’s history of racism, this was a terrible blow.

It’s important to recount this history because mothers, particularly Black mothers from the Welfare Rights Organization, played a leading role in the Poor People’s Campaign and in fighting for poor people’s rights.

In January 2001, George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives through a series of executive orders. These orders shifted federal funds to religious organizations to deliver formerly government-mandated social services.

This move also had a secondary impact of taking the teeth out of church- and religious-led protests, since religious institutions were now competing for government funds.

What was taking place, going back to the Reagan administration, was a trend popularly referred to as “neoliberalism.” It included gutting government spending on social programs, eliminating price controls, deregulating and privatizing services in favor of “free market” capitalism.  

The nonprofit sector has grown ever larger, but it has served more to enrich its executive directors and top leaders than to serve the poor. It has attracted young workers who are looking for what they consider “meaningful work,” only to encounter poor compensation, resistance to union drives and high burnout rates. 

This trend toward private charities and nonprofits was meant to replace the government’s responsibility to serve people. The vast amount of wealth produced in this country continued to shift to the war machine, the forces of repression and to fill the pockets of bankers and billionaires.

All of this contrasts with the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese government, which made eradicating poverty one of its major goals.  

China’s anti-poverty program

In 1949, the newly-formed People’s Republic of China was faced with momentous tasks. The majority of the population were desperately poor peasants plagued with famine and death.  There was almost no industrialization or education.

Edgar Snow documents many of the incredible obstacles that faced the CPC in his book, “Red Star Over China.” He gives a firsthand account, and puts human faces to the staggering statistics and suffering of both the peasants and the Red Army.

The commitment to wiping out poverty has its roots in the early period of the People’s Republic of China and remains important.

Decades later, in 2012, China’s President Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, vowed to eradicate the vestiges of extreme poverty by 2020.

Despite the incredible challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government proudly proclaimed the achievement of this herculean effort on November 23, 2020.

The World Bank stated that China has lifted over 850 million people out of poverty. “With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty.”  

When humanity looks back, this will be one of the biggest stories of this century.  

How did China do it?

It would take a much longer article to explain in full. Of course, one factor is China’s economic growth. But that’s just a part of the equation. Without a conscious effort by the Chinese government, economic growth in of itself would not have solved the problem.

This government effort was remarkably systematic from top to bottom, from the central government to rural villages to individual families. Every poor family is tracked and assessed individually. Villagers voted to determine who among them should be declared in poverty and when poverty was alleviated.

There were five components: industry, relocation, ecological compensation, education and social security. Social security includes both pensions and Dibao, China’s minimum living standard guarantee. 

Massive apartment buildings were constructed to relocate people in villages where soil erosion or other conditions made it impossible to sustain a higher standard of life. Contrast this with the continual destruction of public housing and Section 8 programs in the U.S. In addition to deep housing subsidies, China’s poor families are guaranteed furniture and televisions. 

Emphasis is put on providing stipends and funds for education.

Young urban students and workers, many of them professionals, moved from their relatively comfortable lives to rural villages to participate in this campaign. It reminded me of Cuba’s literacy campaign that uplifted young women teachers and tasked them with going into the countryside and the mountains to teach peasants to read and write, making Cuba one of the first Caribbean nations to eradicate illiteracy.

Going in opposite directions

The capitalist West, particularly the U.S., remains cynical and dismisses all that China has accomplished. The media distorts and quibbles about statistics. But this is only possible if you have never experienced how poverty crushes human potential.

What cannot be argued is that socialist China is going in the opposite direction of the capitalist West. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the government is taking on the responsibility of uplifting the population.   

In contrast, the U.S. government has shed itself of responsibility for the welfare of the people.  Instead, its only duty is to the imperialist banks and billionaires and increasing the repressive apparatus from police to prisons to Pentagon. 

Our challenge is to learn from what China has done. 

One million people in the United States have died of COVID-19. Coronavirus was written on their death certificates as the cause.

But they were really killed by poverty, racism and capitalism.

Even compared to other capitalist countries, the U.S. has a much higher death rate from COVID-19. If the United States had the same number of COVID fatalities per thousand people as Australia does, 900,000 people would still be alive.

At the beginning of the pandemic, reactionaries scoffed at the coronavirus. The late, unlamented, bigoted windbag Rush Limbaugh told his 12 million radio listeners on Feb. 24, 2020, that the coronavirus was just the common cold. 

The Wall Street Journal devoted an entire page of its March 25, 2020, issue to pour scorn on the risks. “Is COVID-19 as Deadly as They Say?” was the page’s lead headline.

Two years later, over 84 million people in the U.S. were counted as having gotten the disease. The real number is much higher because of a lack of initial testing and unreported figures from home testing.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, half the U.S. population became infected with COVID-19. That includes 75 percent of children and adolescents.

Viruses don’t discriminate, but capitalism does. In zip code 11369 ― the East Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York, where Malcolm X lived with his family ― one out of every 117 people died of COVID-19. That’s a rate almost three times the U.S. average.

In the Navajo Nation, 1,771 people died of Dikos Ntsaaígíí-19 (COVID-19). Latinx people are 18% of the U.S. population while having 24% of the COVID cases.

Essential workers were deliberately put in harm’s way. Nurses and other workers at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital had to wear Hefty garbage bags as their personal protective equipment. 

Over 150 transit workers in New York City died of the virus. Mass Transit Authority chief safety officer Pat Warren initially forbade workers from wearing masks. 

In the first 11 months of the pandemic, over 59,000 employees at the four biggest meatpacking companies became infected. At least 269 workers died in the industry. 

Most of these workers were Latinx, Black and/or immigrants. John Tyson and other dead animal capitalists got Trump to sign an executive order that drove workers back to the unsafe plants.

Demanding Chinese people die

Another big killer during the pandemic are high rents. Behind the slumlord is the bank or insurance company owning the cockroach capitalist’s mortgage.

Overcrowded housing makes social distancing impossible. Many are forced to double up in homes with their sister’s or brother’s family.

After the declining number of deaths in the last few months, there’s been a new push to downplay wearing masks. Schools and colleges were reopened without adequate protection.

Then came the highly contagious BA.2 Omicron subvariant. U.S. COVID cases soared to 171,000 on May 18. That same day socialist Cuba, despite a cruel U.S. economic blockade, had 61 cases. 

Also on May 18, the White House held its first pandemic briefing in six weeks. 

One million COVID deaths in the U.S. means 30 people died in an average small town with a population of 10,000. Despite that miserable record, the capitalist media are attacking the People’s Republic of China for doing too much to combat the coronavirus.

The Economist claimed in an April 16 editorial that “the zero-COVID policy has become a dead end from which the Communist Party has no quick exit.” To this mouthpiece of the Anglo-American financial aristocracy, profits are always more precious than life, especially the lives of poor people.

Socialist China, with over four times the population of the United States, has suffered 14,583 deaths from COVID-19. This figure includes the capitalist special administrative region of Hong Kong, which had 9,366 deaths.  

Hong Kong lagged behind the rest of China in taking necessary safety measures against COVID. Now it’s catching up. 

Yet Hong Kong’s death rate from the coronavirus is about a quarter of New York City’s rate. Not only is the Big Apple the capital of capitalism. It’s also a center of the $4 trillion U.S. medical-industrial complex. 

Eight medical schools are located in New York City, along with Rockefeller University, a leading research institution. That didn’t help people in East Elmhurst too much.

In the first year of the pandemic, more than 3,600 health-care workers died of COVID in the United States. Despite these workers’ valiant efforts, the capitalist medical system is unable to combat pandemics.

Socialist Cuba has the highest number of doctors per population in the world. But it doesn’t have a single health insurance company.

We need what Cuba has: free, quality health care for all.

Across the U.S., Bans Off Our Bodies student walkouts took place May 12 to protest the Supreme Court’s attack on abortion rights, including in Richmond, Virginia; Brookfield, Connecticut; Austin, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; Urbandale, Iowa; and Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

Students at several New York City public schools participated. Struggle-La Lucha spoke with Dru, a seventh grader at Arts & Letters 305 United in Brooklyn, who joined a walkout by middle-school students and documented the event with videos. She talked about how the students organized the action, and how the school administration worked to sabotage it.

After the draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade leaked May 3, “People I talked to were upset about it,” Dru told SLL. “Some kids in my class were the ones planning the walkout. They gave out small hand-written leaflets announcing it. 

“Before the walkout the co-principal said she was all for it. Most of the teachers said they were in full support. They sent out permission slips to leave the school grounds, but that was about it.”

On May 12, she said, “During second period, the majority of the class got up and went downstairs. We passed the other co-principal, and there was a sign taped to the door next to him that said: ‘By participating in this walkout you are participating in a civil disturbance. Keep in mind that there could be severe consequences for doing this.’ He didn’t say anything, he just watched.

“After a few minutes there was a large crowd of more than 100 people in the schoolyard. People held signs they made. We crowded around a bench where the organizers gave talks with a megaphone.”

Handmade signs held by the multinational crowd read, “Free and safe abortions for all,” “Our bodies, our choice,” “Abortion is a personal decision, not a political debate” and “Access to abortion is a human right.” 

One powerful sign said, “Texas won’t make a 12-year-old wear a mask to school but will force a woman to have a baby?”

Dru continued: “After a few minutes we said we were going to march around the neighborhood so people would hear our message, since standing around in the schoolyard wasn’t really a walkout. Then some school staff members locked the gate. We were like, ‘What?’ So we turned around and went to the entrance to the public park next door, and they locked that too!

“A group of kids rushed to the last open gate and held it open so everyone could flood out. We walked down the sidewalk chanting and carrying our signs. 

“When we got to the next block the assistant principal and another staff member said if we didn’t go back we’d be in trouble. Even people with parental permission were told we had to go back,” she said. “Enough people were scared that we all went back to the schoolyard together. 

“People got back up on the bench and continued to speak out. At no point did the cops appear, but all the gates were locked and school staff were guarding every gate. The person standing by the gate we’d escaped from apparently had the list of people with parental permission, but they never made an announcement or told us anything.

“One of my parents talked to the school office, and was told that they’d let us go after informing us we’d be marked absent. But that never happened. 

“Everyone in the crowd was chanting. One of my friends said we should start circling in the schoolyard. After we’d been outside for about an hour some people started to give up and went back inside. The school staff were advising people to go back inside, and they were also telling people the [citywide students’] protest at Union Square was happening later than it really was. ‘You guys can’t stay out here that long.’ I was determined to stay as long as there were people out there.

“When there was only a small group left in the schoolyard, after they had been trying to discourage us and run out our time, they finally said, ‘’We can’t legally stop those of you with parental permission.’

“They could have let us march in the neighborhood and come with us to make sure we were being safe. The people who went to Union Square went without any adults, even though before they said school staff would accompany the walkout.”

Dru concluded: “The next day during the community meeting the co-principal said: ‘During the walkout yesterday a lot of you were concerned about getting in trouble because of that sign I had. But you won’t be getting in trouble from us. This was an inspiring experience. Protests are meant to be uncomfortable.’

“The kids who organized for the walkout were so excited. And it was kind of a slap in the face to them how the school treated it. They did everything they could to defuse the walkout. And afterward they said all kinds of sweet things about how inspiring it was. I was really angry.”

Dru’s parent Greg told SLL: “I was in constant contact with Dru by text during the walkout. I spoke to the school office. I’ve watched all of Dru’s videos. Everything backs up her version of events, not the spin that school officials put on it.

“It was a rotten way to treat these students who wanted to speak out for their rights that are under attack. In my opinion, this conduct is deeply at odds with the progressive, diverse, community-oriented values this school administration claims to uphold.

“I’m very proud of the students. They did everything they could and left egg on the faces of the school administration and the higher-ups in Mayor Eric Adam’s administration who were calling the shots. Their ‘jailbreak’ from the schoolyard to the street was especially courageous and inspiring. 

“I think next time, student organizers and concerned parents will know better than to trust the school officials’ promises and will plan accordingly.” 

Hundreds of Denver-area middle and high school students took to the streets on May 12 to resist the ongoing warfare against a woman’s right to choose and reproductive rights generally.

“Hey-hey! Ho-ho! These sexist laws have got to go!” and “My body! My choice!” chants rang through the air as Denver youth and their parents marched on the Colorado state capitol as part of a larger national student walkout in defense of reproductive rights and women’s liberation. A recently-leaked draft opinion outlines plans for the Supreme Court to strike down the historic case regarding the right to an abortion.

The march was multinational in nature and led by Black and Brown student leaders. The students marched around the building for hours during an unseasonably warm day.

A 15-year-old woman from East High School in Denver did not mince words: “We’re tired of these old white men deciding the future of our country when they’ll be dead in 10 years.” Another speaker, a Denver native attending Florida A&M University, testified to the horrors she has witnessed while attending college. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed HB5, anti-abortion legislation, as well as the repressive HB1557 “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Student organizers noted that this would not be the last action planned in the city. 

We must defend a woman’s right to choose whether or not she wants to be pregnant. Nor can we forget others who may become pregnant, including trans men, non-binary and gender non-conforming people. That most basic freedom may now be denied, with the U.S. Supreme Court indicating it will overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling upholding a person’s right to control their own body. 

Ruling-class politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties have either pushed this tremendous attack on women, or allowed it to be pushed. They’ve allowed state governments like that in Texas, one of the most racist and reactionary, to continue policies that encourage further reactionary attacks around the country.

Today we the working class face unprecedented, multiple attacks. We have to be aware of those members of our class hit the hardest, like women, who are still paid only 79% on average of what men make. They are being victimized by Texas laws denying their right to an abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. 

Women in Texas face forced pregnancies under penalty of debilitating fines and imprisonment, and their caregivers could face life in prison. This is having a devastating effect on those unable to travel to other states to get the procedure. 

It is Black women who are most severely hit by this form of fascism. Texas has a severe maternal mortality crisis, and Black women are three times more likely than white women to die during pregnancy or as a result of childbirth. And, although abortion is a safe procedure, every week of unnecessary delay increases the risk. 

The goal of these reactionaries has long been to use multiple challenges in states and the complicity of the Supreme Court to abolish Roe v. Wade. The ACLU estimates that this will mean 36 million people across the country forced to carry pregnancies against their will.

As stated in an article in the publication of my party, the Socialist Unity Party’s Struggle-La Lucha, Texas has become ground zero for some of the most reactionary and divisive laws in the United States. The government is also attacking the voting rights of Black people – many of whom died gruesome deaths at the hands of white supremacists fighting for that right. Texas leads in the racist rejection of truth-telling in teaching U.S. history – and now, of persecuting trans children and their families.

The consequences are being felt everywhere. NBC News reported on March 20 that across the U.S., state lawmakers proposed a record 238 bills since the beginning of 2022 that would limit the rights of LGBTQ2S peoples — more than three per day — with about half targeting transgender people specifically.

Isn’t it time that we abolish the appointed-for-life Supreme Court, this most undemocratic institution, and replace it with elected members representing our multinational, multi-gendered, and LGBTQ2S working class?

Thousands participated in a beautiful, multinational May Day commemoration in downtown Los Angeles on May 1. 

Beginning with a rally at the corner of Broadway and Olympic, unionists, immigrant rights fighters, socialists, environmentalists and activists fighting racist police brutality took every lane of one of the busiest thoroughfares on their northbound route to Grand Park. 

The march was initiated by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and numerous L.A. trade unions. The signs and banners, consistent with the tradition of this international holiday, called out the important issues in the global working-class struggle. 

After long decades of suppression, it was a resurgence of the immigrant rights movement that fueled a mega-march on May 1, 2006, and brought May Day to the attention of hundreds of thousands of people once again. Though interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the size and breadth of this year’s march shows that was not an aberration. 

Workers and oppressed people are geared up for a fightback to recoup all that was lost or delayed by the billionaires who have exploited and elongated the deadly pandemic. 

SLL photos: Scott Scheffer