New York, November 23–Hope for a communist future was in the air as a multiracial, multigenerational group celebrated the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution with the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). This year we celebrated this annual event with songs, poetry, and dancing to honor the heroic events that led to workers taking state power in Russia. The Bolsheviks freed 1/6 of the world’s surface from the disease known as capitalism.
The events of the night explained the achievements of the Bolsheviks, while also acknowledging the weaknesses and mistakes they made. Progressive Labor Party’s history of learning from both the Bolsheviks’ mistakes and our own was also a theme of the evening. Through decades of struggle against the bosses and inside our party we have advanced our own political understanding.
Communist education
The program began with a PL’er speaking to an audience of over a hundred about joining workers in a call to action, asking everyone to join the fightback against the racist attacks on our brothers and sisters in Colombia (See article below for more details) and the role of the U.S. in this attack on our class. If we are to take ourselves seriously in taking state power, we must take action against all attacks by the bosses.
The program moved forward with a speech from a multiracial duo about the victories and achievements of the Bolshevik revolution. The Bolsheviks established the first worker-run state. They eliminated hunger and illiteracy. They fought racism and elevated women to many positions of leadership. They inspired workers around the world to fight against capitalism, and during World War II they almost single-handedly defeated the Nazis. The Bolsheviks also broke ties with capitalist elections, teaching the working class that the liberals were the same, if not worse, than the conservative parties, and that workers can only trust communists to fight for our interests. Today, as we learn from both their successes and failures, the Progressive Labor Party stands on the shoulders of these giants.
The speech then explained how PLP has advanced our political line. We have moved away from any cult of personality and we have abandoned all forms of nationalism. For over fifty years since our founding, PLP has concluded we must fight directly for communism and not fight for the stage of socialism first, because socialism inevitably leads back to capitalism. In our long history of being embedded in antiracist class struggle with workers, the Party has grown more international and more politically sharp. The speech ended with a call for the audience to join the fight.
Communist art
The tables and walls were decorated with art posters from the Sovet Union. The artwork helped  inspire and remind workers that we can take state power again if we fight for a communist world. We also sold shirts and stickers with “comunist revolution isn’t on the ballot”.
We also had a performance of the Langston Hughes poem “Good Morning Revolution” by a multiracial group of five young students, predominantly female-led. They are leading the fight against racism at their schools. Langston Hughes was a known communist who wrote many poems about how workers needed communism. In “Good Morning Revolution” he writes how the bosses tried to keep workers away from a communist revolution, and how the workers everywhere have a shared interest  and responsiblity in smashing this system and should declare themselves communist organizers in every country.
The program ended with a song/rap about how workers are trained through the bosses’ media that we should be pacifists. The song continued to explain that many workers tried to come in peace but the capitalist rulers have killed and arrested many of our leaders, leaving us with no other choice but to fight back. Then everyone sang the “Internationale” to emphasize that the workers of the world must unite and fight for communism.
The fight continues
This event was a true collective experience. Many different workers took turns in serving food, while others took turns helping with childcare. It’s only at events like these that various capitalist ideologies are left at the door, from sexism to individualism to racism. Through this event we start to envision a world without capitalism, without the profit system, without racism, where workers control all aspects of society; a true egalitarian world, made possible by a communist revolution.

THE BRONX, December 3—Fifty students protested against racist budget cuts at Bronx Community College (BCC). These students, along with education workers, gave notice that we won’t simply accept larger class size, reduced course offerings and fewer custodians, to name just a few of the cuts, that the BCC administration is planning.
Student after student gave testimonies of how the budget cuts directly affect them— delaying graduation, reducing their access to their professors, forcing them to use dirty bathrooms, and more.
A member of Progressive Labor Party brought a message of solidarity and communist analysis. The fight at BCC is part of the global fight against capitalism. Only by fighting for a communist system with workers in power can we ensure that all students get the education we deserve.
Working class under attack
The student population at BCC is 98 percent Black and Latin, largely immigrant, and suffering from rampant food insecurity and racist unemployment. The BCC administration is putting the students under even greater pressure. The racist plans include:

• Developing a “more resilient staffing model” in order to respond to future shifts in enrollment numbers. This means hiring more part-time faculty and staff that can be laid off whenever the administration needs to.

• Increasing class size.
• Reduction of approximately 225 sections. Fewer classes means it will be harder for students to enroll in classes that they need to graduate.
• Decrease in departmental budgets.
• Increase fees that students and faculty pay for services like technology and parking

When the working class is under attack, what do we do?  We must stand up and fight back. In doing so, we expose the limits of what’s possible under capitalism. By the looks of it, capitalism can’t provide the most basic necessities for working-class students.
Taxing the rich is no solution
As PLP members have been involved in this and future demonstrations, we have raised the idea that it’s not enough to just tax billionaires. It’s not enough to increase funding for BCC. Even in the best of times, education under capitalism is about reinforcing racism and individualism.
College under capitalism is about deceiving us into thinking we can escape the working class, that we can “get ahead” (by exploiting other workers) and that we can avoid the misery of this racist, sexist system.
The international working class will never be liberated through capitalist education. The bosses don’t want to educate us all, and even if they did, it wouldn’t end exploitation and racism.
More fightback and Party-building ahead
We have another demonstration planned next week, where we will confront the administration directly over these budget cuts. The boldness of the united students and education workers will be on display, as we take small steps and train ourselves to challenge the rulers on campus. Bringing CHALLENGE to these protests is crucial to building the fightback spirit and class-consciousness of the students and workers.
As we organize more students to get involved and as the ideas of communism and PLP become ideas grasped by masses of students and faculty, these small steps will be transformed into leaps toward a communist future. Onward!

During meetings of a workers’ committee in a community organization, where some Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades do political work, reports are included in the agenda which analyze the world situation, especially everything related to the struggles of workers worldwide.   
During past meetings, we have talked about Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia. This time, we called to show solidarity with workers in Colombia, who organized themselves together with the peasants and young people in an unprecedented challenge in history. The workers are rebelling against the neoliberal policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that have forced “economic adjustments:” fascist measures that greatly affect the lives of working people already caught in poverty and misery.
For many years, the bosses have murdered hundreds of social and union leaders in Colombia. This time it was the turn of the workers, who lost their fear of all the oppression and fascism and threw themselves into the streets in massive protests in several cities and towns.
The protests became violent, due to the brutal response of the army, police and special riot forces trained by United States advisors. They shot at protesters, and used tear gas and water jets with chemicals, which caused many deaths and wounded, even though the government and the bosses’ press say there were only three.
 One of the workers murdered was a young student from the capital Bogotá, which provoked an even greater anger from the protesters. In their fury the workers destroyed numerous shops, large supermarkets, banks, and government offices. Many of the businesses were “looted” by workers who came down from impoverished and marginalized areas after so many years of abandonment under the bosses’ profit system.
For this, they were called vandals, but the true vandals in the country have been the corrupt, liberal, and repressive capitalist governments.
Workers take the streets over bosses’ cuts
These massive protests were convened mainly by trade union leaders and other sectors of the working class, who are tired of their living situation. They are fighting impending fascist reforms that Ivan Duque, an ally of the U.S government, plans to present to the National Congress. These reforms, among other things, would reduce pensions to retired workers and reduce wages to young workers. But this fascist government did not expect that workers, peasants and young people were going to organize and take to the streets!  
With the working class at the forefront, arm in arm with the peasants and youth, a massive wave of protests  was generated throughout the country and continued for several days.
Imperialist war, and
international communist
revolution through PLP
At the end of the discussion our PLP member summed up that these events were taking place within the framework of the power struggle between the imperialists of the United States, China and Russia for the control of  other countries and their wealth, especially oil and minerals like lithium. Lithium can be considered the “white gold” of these times given its widespread use in profitable products like electric cars. The largest reserves of lithium are in Latin American countries, especially in Bolivia which has recently experienced a racist and fascist coup d’etat. Despite the bosses’ violent repression there, many indigenous workers are maintaining a brave fight against the new fascist liberal government.
In the end, everyone present agreed that we must be supportive of the workers in Colombia and worldwide who are facing fascist neoliberalism that is advancing strongly across the planet.
As members of PLP we must raise the consciousness of the working class and prepare for the only way to overcome this capitalist hell: mass violent communist revolution. We have to take initiative during this wave of popular uprisings of workers and young people around the world, to direct the workers to the goals of seizure of state power from the capitalists and the construction of communism.
To work toward this goal, it is important for us in the Party to stress the importance of internationalism and working-class power, wherever we are. Confidence in the international working class, communist politics, and our Party is our only way forward.

Despite the smoke and mirrors over “corruption” in Ukraine, the Donald Trump impeachment proceedings expose the intense fight between two factions within the U.S. capitalist class. The battle between the main wing, Big Fascist liberal bosses and the Small Fascist, more domestically oriented bosses is based on something more fundamental than any “quid pro quo” in Kiev. It reflects a sharp difference over how to manage the U.S. bosses’ decline.
The U.S. rulers’ real conflict is over how to deal with the rise of the Chinese bosses as a global superpower and to preserve their vast investments in Middle East oil and around the world. Workers have no side in this fight. Both capitalist factions will give us fascism, though in different forms. For the international working class, the only choice is communist revolution—to eliminate inter-imperialist war and fascism by smashing capitalism for all time.
Ukraine and the death of the liberal world order
Trump’s impeachment was initiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other politicians controlled by the Big Fascists, the same group that established the liberal world order after World War II. These main wing bosses invested trillions of dollars and decades of effort into dismantling the old Soviet Union, the first workers’ state in the history of the world. Even after the USSR was dissolved in 1991, the U.S. rulers continued to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Russia. Toward that end, they backed anti-Soviet dissenters, corrupt politicians, and open Ukrainian fascists (Nation, 2/22).
By contrast, the domestic bosses’ isolationist playbook calls for ceding geopolitical ground to its other imperialist rival Russia. As the Daily Caller News Foundation, a Small Fascist media outlet, stated: “We need Ukraine like an alcoholic needs a drink… [The State Department has to stop] keeping our assumptions exactly where they were in the fall of 1977, when fighting the Soviet menace consumed a lion’s share of the federal budget” (RealClearPolitics.com, 11/15). However self-serving or uneven Trump may be, he is carrying out the Small Fascists’ Fortress America strategy.
Ukraine’s local bosses are adjusting accordingly. Billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who not long ago financed military attacks against eastern Ukraine’s Russian-speaking Donbas region, is now pursuing closer ties to Russia: “EU and NATO won’t take us, but Russia is ready to welcome us”(New York Times, 11/13). Further, Trump’s military withdrawal from Syria has surrendered a big piece of the Middle East to Russian and Iranian control. This is the real reason for Trump’s impending impeachment: his retreat from the U.S. empire.
A tale of two capitalist factions
Since the 1930s, the Big Fascists have dominated the U.S. capitalist class. Led originally by the Rockefeller family oil and financial monopoly, they have pulled the puppet strings of every U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the exception of Trump. In 1945, by incinerating hundreds of thousands of workers with atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. the Big Fascists established themselves as the leading genocidal butchers of the new world order. Over the 75 years since, they have butchered our class in Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Congo, South Africa, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Mexico—and in dozens of other countries, including the U.S., all to preserve the profits they’ve stolen from our class.
For decades, the Small Fascists have rankled over being taxed to pay for wars to protect the Big Fascists’ multinational investments, which compete with their own domestic-centered businesses. They have consistently opposed U.S. military intervention in the Middle East as an unfair government subsidy to their imperialist competition, like Exxon Mobil.
This domestic faction is currently led by the ultra-rightwing Koch family and Koch Industries, the top supplier of capital equipment for the petroleum industry and the second-largest privately held company in the U.S. The Kochs have financed numerous gutter racist and fascist organizations around the world, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and assorted white nationalist militias.
The unholy Trump-Koch-fundamentalist alliance
The Koch family fortune got a huge boost with the ascendance of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) at domestic oil and gas wells, to the point where the U.S. is now a net energy exporter for the first time in many years. It also gave the Kochs ample funds to consolidate their control over the Republican Party. The Small Fascists replaced traditional Big Fascist Republicans with Tea Party members and other compliant politicians. In 2016, they saw their opportunity to seize control of the presidency. The Koch family alone budgeted $889 million for the campaign.
Trump and the Small Fascists struck a deal. In exchange for choosing Koch protégé Michael Pence as his vice-presidential running mate, Trump received the Kochs’ backing, along with the support of big-money Christian fundamentalists. The ability of this unholy alliance to seize the White House reflects a longterm liberal decline, the result of more than 20 years of failed Middle East wars and the 2008 economic crisis. Though they’ve have had some differences over trade and immigration, Trump has mostly done what the Small Fascists want, especially in foreign policy, taxes, and regulation. For now, at least, he’s kept their support.
Oppose all fascists
It’s not hard to see that the Koch faction is clearly fascist. Open racists have been energized by the Trump presidency. Attacks by white nationalists are on the rise, from Texas and South Carolina to Syracuse, New York. This Nazi scum has penetrated the White House in the form of “senior policy adviser” Stephen Miller (Guardian, 11/16). Anti-racist workers everywhere are understandably appalled.
But many workers fail to see the equally fascist character of the liberal imperialist faction and the Democratic Party it controls. Behind Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the Big Fascists have imposed mass racist imprisonment and intensified racist police terror. They have done—and will do—more to build fascism than the Kochs could dream of. That’s why Progressive Labor Party calls them the greater danger to our class.
To try to survive the deepening contradictions of capitalism, the liberal bosses will use fascism to crush the Kochs and their ilk. Trump’s impeachment marks their first big step in that direction. Then the Big Fascists will intensify their brutal exploitation of the working class, in preparation for leading the U.S. into World War III.
As communists, we must organize our fellow workers to act independently of the leadership of all fascists, Big or Small. We have a long road to travel—and a world to win!