TRENTON, NJ—When members and friends of Progressive Labor Party and Cosecha arrived at the state capitol building, about 100 people on the left side of the courtyard were holding signs in support of driving licenses for undocumented workers.
Two immigrant women workers denounced the fact that Democrats starting with Governor Phil Murphy are manipulating the votes of antiracist workers by promising this reform while campaigning, but refusing to hold an antiracist line while in office. The fight for licenses reveals a division between the oppressors and a danger of growing fascism. However, it also reveals opportunity to expose the bosses and build a movement without borders and pass laws: communism.
Driver license fight between two sets of fascists
In 2005, the federal government passed the Real ID Act, which imposed ironclad requirements for getting a driver’s license (see below). Many undocumented immigrants then did not have the necessary documents to renew or get a new license. This then leads to the threat of deportation over simple traffic infractions by bringing the undocumented immigrants to ICE’s attention. This June a law allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses passed the New York Assembly. In the meantime, workers in a couple of other states like New Jersey are being mobilized around similar reforms throughout the U.S. by mass organizations like Cosecha. The different attitudes towards immigrants by politicians represent fighting within the capitalist class. One set of bosses, represented by Donald Trump and his senior adviser Stephen Miller, are concerned about issues affecting their short-term profits. Their caging of children is exciting their mostly racist white working-class base.
On the other hand there is a set of liberal bosses that still worry about the U.S. being the main superpower in the world (see editorial, page 2). They know in order for that to happen they will need a much larger multiracial army. In order to do that they must convince Black and Latin workers that capitalism and these bosses care about them. The driver’s license is one way of doing that.
The pass laws
Notably, in 2005 when the Bush administration signed into law the $82 billion military fund to slaughtering workers in Iraq and Afghanistan, they also incorporated what is known as the REAL ID Act. By 2020, all state identification cards will need to meet this standard to get on a domestic flight or federal facilities, including military bases. Not only do these identification cards enable a central way to track biodata of workers, it also differentiates which cardholder is a citizen, a “lawful” resident, or a “temporary” person with a corresponding symbol at the on the top right corner of the card. This system then effectively creates two classes of identification systems—one for documented and one undocumented workers. This demonstrates how the liberal bosses are building a wider base for fascism.  
CHALLENGE, a tool for class-consciousness
CHALLENGE continues to make a difference with more than 30 workers taking these revolutionary working-class ideas into their hands.   Communist ideas continue to have a growing impact among workers, as one person at Cosecha acknowledges that reading passages from CHALLENGE helped her realize that the fight of workers extends far beyond this reform organization.
After the speeches, our Cosecha group moved into the statehouse. Once past the checkpoint, we went downstairs and chanted in the hallways through which politicians were walking back and forth to their meetings. Though security pushed us into to a confined area, but we were still able to make our presence known to the politicians when they were in our sights. Chants included, “Licenses Yes, Promises No!” as we gave the politicians pamphlets. Some faked being supportive and others didn’t care and kept moving through the crowd.
Which side are the politicians on?
Then, we moved upstairs into the chamber where the politicians vote. In the hallway leading to the chamber were paintings of rich white capitalist politicians throughout history. Their portraits amplified the oppression we already felt. While in the chambers, two protesters defiantly revealed a banner in support of the driving licenses. Some workers revealed posters, and still other workers began to chant against the politicians. Soon after, the workers were kicked out. This revealed the true colors of the politicians.When asked what lessons she could share with other workers who read CHALLENGE, an immigrant leader on the front lines of the reform shared the following:

Bosses and politicians have a lot in common. Politicians pretend to advocate for our rights, which ultimately they only grant when it serves their interests. Both use similar tactics to dominate us. While we labor without fighting back, okay with the little that they give us, the bosses will keep treating us the same. We must realize bosses need us. If we all refuse to work for them, they will be forced to see they need us. When the working class rises up the politicians lose control. They get upset because they are losing domination over us. This is the same with bosses. Learning that fear is the only thing that prevents us from fighting back is important. I have realized that I have the strength to struggle with other workers to fight back. That is how all struggle starts. With knowing that fear has not allowed us to fight back, and having the courage to take leadership in inspiring other workers to rise up against all of our suffering.

Communists in PLP agree. The suffering we feel from bosses is what we call exploitation. The system that maintains this unequal relationship between bosses and workers is capitalism. Regardless of the reforms promoted by one politician or another under this capitalist system, any reform can and is reversed or turned against workers when the conflicts between bosses intensify.
You don’t need a license to join PLP
Communist politics on the other hand means learning from and giving leadership to workers wherever PLP has a presence. We fight to transform any limited reform for a small section of workers into an international working class revolution. This is done by exposing how the competition and division among bosses constantly undermines any benefits gained through reform, drives bosses to find new ways to divide workers, and creates the conditions for workers to unite internationally against our common exploiters. This is what we call organizing for communist revolution! Join the fight!

The following is a speech given during the Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) Summer Project at the  border.
Capitalism is a system that tries to prevent us, workers and students, from living fulfilling lives. Imperialism is a stage of capitalism, a system under which the capitalists move their money and power all over the world in order to control more of it. Imperialism, and particularly U.S. imperialism, has proven many times over that it cannot and will not provide for decent lives for the international working class. Racism, sexism, wars for profit, theft of the value of our labor, destroying the environment, and national borders—all are the product of capitalism.
I’m from Puerto Rico and I can speak of the many ways capitalism ruins our lives. The island has been a colony of the U.S. since 1898. The colonial economy has produced, among many other terrible things, an overall debt of some $74 billion, approximately $40,000 for every single Puerto Rican: child, retiree, worker and maybe even dead folks.
We are presently confronting a sharpening crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border that has trapped workers escaping imperialist-created misery primarily in Central America. The conditions that are forcing workers and their families to flee right now date back to colonial times, when these countries were colonies of Spain. The current U.S.-Mexico border crisis reflects conditions for the working class throughout the hemisphere, and beyond, as workers from the Middle East and Africa migrate to Europe to escape war and poverty. There are currently an estimated 244 million international migrants (3.3 percent of the world population, iom.int/wmr/2018).
As communists, we do not recognize capitalist-created borders! We say: “Workers of the World, Unite! Smash All Borders!” Communist education teaches us to understand our reality as members of class society. We currently live under the capitalist profit system. And the capitalist rulers have created colonies in many parts of the world, where they extract super-profits.
The workers in all colonies are coerced militarily, they are displaced by war, their traditional means of earning a living are destroyed. When they can no longer tolerate these conditions, they are forced to migrate. This is what is happening now in Central America. But let’s be clear about this. Most of us would overwhelmingly prefer to stay in our countries of origin. But because of imperialism we end up elsewhere.
The ruling class bears all responsibility for these conditions because of its drive for profits. This is capitalism’s reason for existence. It is invasive, oppressive and provides only the absolute minimum for the working class to live on, while the bosses and their lackeys grow rich.
Imperialists penetrate
 borders at will
The imperialists have ignored—or created—national borders when it serves their own class interests. The U.S. has a long and bloody history of penetrating the borders of other countries in the hemisphere to support its claim for hegemony in the region.
Guatemala: The U.S. CIA backed a coup in 1954 against elected president Jacobo Arbenz in order to support the interests of the U.S. owned United Fruit Company. In the ensuing 36-year civil war, thousands of workers and their families were massacred by the U.S. trained and equipped fascist military.
Honduras: The U.S. crossed the border in 1890, to enable U.S. fruit companies as they turned the country into one large banana plantation. By 1914, they had acquired one million acres of the best agricultural land, carrying profits back to U.S. banks, and turning Honduran peasants into landless rural workers. The U.S. later dominated banking and mining sectors. In the 1980s, Honduras became the U.S.’s military base to train and arm the right-wing Contra forces to counter the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
Mexico: The U.S has disputed Mexico’s sovereignty since colonial times. Later, in 1910, it intervened in Mexico’s affairs to prop up dictator Porfirio Diaz for 31 years. It supported the creation of death squads that killed some 3,000 communists and tortured another 7,000 during this period. These interventions resulted in the drastic reduction in wages and impoverishment of the working class in Mexico. Another byproduct of U.S. intervention is the flowering of the maquiladoras factories that produce textiles and electronics while paying Mexican workers starvation wages. Another cross-border activity is the U.S. oil companies’ partnering with Mexican drug cartels to steal tens of millions of dollars in oil from government pipelines.
Clearly, when the interests of the imperialists are at stake, borders mean nothing. It’s only when their actions force workers to try to cross those very same borders to save their own lives that national borders become sacred!
To close, I would like to quote a piece of writing I found in CHALLENGE newspaper. It summarizes what we must do. “To liberate ourselves, an ember of class unity must be fanned into the flame of class consciousness.” 

The recent G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, highlighted the escalating battle between two packs of U.S. bosses. The main wing U.S. finance capitalists were hit by both the domestic U.S. bosses, fronted by President Donald Trump, and by Russian capitalists led by President Vladimir Putin. In response, the big U.S. imperialists are trying to rally what’s left of their alliance in the European ruling class to counter expansionist moves by Russian and Chinese rulers.
The volatile dynamic between these U.S. factions is accelerating a worldwide drive toward fascism. The desperate U.S. main wing (the Big Fascists) sees its empire slipping away. But they won’t give it up without a fight. With the bosses heading toward World War III, Progressive Labor Party calls on the working class to battle for our own class interests. PLP is building an international communist movement to fight for a revolutionary communist society. It’s our only alternative to the bosses’ rising fascism, chaos, and destruction.
Putin attacks liberal world order
In an interview on the first day of the summit, the blood-soaked Putin openly challenged the U.S. main wing. He declared that “the world’s liberal political order had outlived its purpose” (New York Times, 6/28). In attacking the liberal world order led by the U.S. main wing ruling class since World War II, Putin signaled that Europe is up for grabs.
Trump, who is backed by the isolationist, domestically oriented wing of U.S. capitalists, joined the Russian president in jokes at the U.S. liberal bosses’ expense (BBC News, 6/28). Trump also staged a sit-down with Mohammed bin Salman, the ruthless crown prince of Saudi Arabia, despite a United Nations report confirming that bin Salman was responsible for the savage killing of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, a main wing voice at the Washington Post (The Guardian, 6/19).
Finance rulers call for war in Europe
In the face of expanding influence by Russian and Chinese bosses in Europe, the main wing U.S. capitalists are rallying their allies in Europe’s finance capitals. The ruling French and German finance bosses used their tenuous victory in May’s European Parliament elections to install pro-main wing bureaucrats at the head of the European Union.
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, an Angela Merkel protégé who backs a strong European military, was appointed president of the EU’s executive body. Christine Lagarde, chief of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund, was nominated as the next head of the European Central Bank. Though splits inside the bosses’ camp are significant, the finance capitalists are consolidating their power and doing their best to bolster their old NATO alliance. As the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. finance capital’s leading think tank, points out, the stakes are high:

The more internally divided Europe is, the more it will find itself at the mercy of … great powers [Russia and China]. This is a recipe for a Europe once again roiled by nationalism, an EU that is irrelevant, and a transatlantic alliance in which Europe has little influence and the United States lacks a strong partner…The only prudent way to avoid this nightmare scenario is for Europe to … develop the ability to better defend itself … pursue common European interests … [and] do more to secure neighboring regions (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019).

Big Fascists use climate movement to enlist the working class
In 2017, the isolationist U.S. bosses, who have significant holdings in heavy-polluting domestic fossil fuels, pushed Trump to pull out of the Paris climate agreement negotiated by predecessor Barack Obama, a reliable stooge for the main wing. Now finance capital is back on the offensive. Emmanuel Macron, the French president and former Rothschild investment banker, threatened “not to sign any joint statement from the Group of 20 summit … unless it deals with the [climate] issue, which he called a ‘red line’” (New York Times, 6/26).
Liberal environmentalism is on the rise. The Sunrise Movement and its Green New Deal, championed by phony leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was incubated at the Sierra Club (E&E News, 12/3/18), where the agenda is driven by main wing billionaire donors like Michael Bloomberg and finance capital nonprofits like Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (opensecrets.org).
From its start, the environmental movement was designed to force smaller domestic capitalists to fall in line. In 1970, the main wing Ford Foundation began funding the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, and the Southern California Center for Law in the Public Interest. “In the ensuing years, [these groups]…advocated …for environmental protection on virtually every public policy issue at the federal, state, and local level” (Duke Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society). Environmentalism is a partisan issue because “any attempt to regulate pollution is an attempt…to regulate the economy” (medium.com 1/26/17)—and because regulations hit the small capitalists much harder than the big ones.
But the environmental movement isn’t just about the economy. Back in 2002, after the Sierra Club backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq over phantom “weapons of mass destruction,” the organization threatened to dissolve its southern Utah chapter for “speaking out against the Bush administration’s push toward war” (Huffington Post 5/25/2011). To protect their control over Middle East oil, the finance capitalists were willing to sacrifice the lives of more than a million workers and children in Iraq. Now their targets are the Chinese and Russian rulers, plus the “Fortress America” U.S. bosses who are against committing taxes and treasure to an expensive global conflict. If history is a guide, the environmental movement will help sound the main wing’s battle cry.
A fight between monsters
The rulers’ cynicism knows no limits. The misleaders now beating the drum on the environment represent the same profit-mad bosses who built their fortunes by ruining our air, water, and food. They are the same animals who poisoned the children of Flint, Michigan. They are the same monsters who drowned the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to protect their French Quarter investments—and then exploited the tragedy to gentrify other formerly Black working-class neighborhoods.
When (and if) they prevail over their capitalist rivals, the main wing will use fascism to attack the working class. It was finance capital that funded Hitler and gave him the poison gas used in the Nazi death camps. It was finance capital that dropped Agent Orange and napalm on the children of Vietnam. It’s not just misguided to trust the liberal bosses. It is suicidal!
Are Trump and his Koch brother benefactors a gang of racist murderers?  Without a doubt. They are enemies of our class and must be fought to the end. But we cannot allow fear of these Little Fascists to drive us into the deadly embrace of finance capital, into the camp of Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren. The Big Fascists have a long and ugly history of slaughtering masses of workers, all in the name of liberal democracy.Our fight must be for our class. It must be against our oppressors. Most of all, it must be for communism!

TEXAS, July 7—The Progressive Labor Party organized 50 workers and youth against capitalist borders during a summer project here. The focus of our fight was a call to unite against racist borders and anti-immigrant racism. We strengthened our commitment to multiracial unity of the working class and the struggle for communist revolution to destroy capitalism.
Every year, PLP and friends join to fight collectively in an area of focus—to connect struggles, grow our organization, and develop young leaders. Throughout the week, we demonstrated, volunteered, distributed CHALLENGE and leaflets, engaged in workshops and discussions and strengthened our relationships with each other.
Internationalism on July 4
After the protest against the new concentration camp in Carrizo Springs (see front page), we took the fightback to the Texas-Mexico border. July fourth in the United States  is a day of hyper nationalism and morid hypocrisy. PLP comrades countered the bosses fake holiday by staging a militant anti-July fourth demonstration, and distributing communist literature to workers and shop owners around the international pedestrian bridge.
Many stopped to read CHALLENGE right then and there. Several joined in on our march through the streets and at the corners where we stopped to chant and hear speeches prepared by our comrades—a call to unite all workers and smash all borders!
Again, PLP’s commitment to international solidarity was proven by rallying directly at the border—connecting with workers who cross back and forth between the two countries on a daily basis. We urged them to take our message back to their families both here and in Mexico and beyond.
Solidarity with migrant families at the shelter
Throughout the week, PLP volunteered at a local shelter that housed migrant families who made the hellish journey from Mexico, Central America, the Congo, and Haiti. As many as 300 arrived every night. We served meals, played with children, and listened to many migrants share their experiences (see letters, page 3). We helped some make travel arrangements, for their journeys are far from over. Many are going to meet family already here—some are going to cities and states they never heard of.
Still, many are going to cities where they will  face more racism, poverty, and exploitation. We ached for them, as they come to the U.S. with immense hope in having a chance at a new life. Ultimately, we learned from our fellow brothers and sisters, as their very presence once again shows the power workers hold in demonstrating their ability to defend themselves even in the harshest of conditions.
A week of learning
PLP also took to the streets in Texas, distributing CHALLENGE and leaflets to Toyota factory workers, passersby, shoppers, and shelter volunteers. We focused on spreading our sphere of influence and developing young leaders. Throughout the week, we engaged in discussions and workshops to increase and strengthen our understanding of intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry, its dependence on racism and nationalism to divide the working class with borders, and to prove further, the heightening danger of fascist liberalism.
We fortified our understanding with direct experience to take back to our schools, our jobs and our communities. We ended the week with a real Texas barbecue celebration, sharing our impressions and lessons learned from the week.
Rising fascism and liberals are main danger to workers
While liberal politicians may cry “keep families together” to appear concerned with the humanity of migrant workers and families seeking refuge, merely keeping families together in a detention center is a complete sham. They use the suffering of the migrant workers for their own cynical purposes. Just like president Donald Trump and his conservative cronies, U.S. liberal bosses have high stakes in exploiting the working class—they just use smoke and mirrors to do so. They want workers to forget that it was Barack Obama who deported more migrants than any other president. Obama authorized the construction of detention camps for children at the border. Obama created DACA to target Latin youth for military recruitment.
Thus, we cannot ignore that it is Obama’s racist legacy that Trump’s anti-immigrant administration is built upon. While Trump’s administration uses open racism to mobilize its political base and fuel anti-immigrant sentiment, we must acknowledge that intensified racism, nationalism, and use of “law and order” to terrorize workers are strategies employed by a number of Democratic presidents—Obama, Clinton, Carter—and are a hallmark of rising fascism.
Worldwide, bosses are sliding towards wider war and the various national bosses are moving towards more fascism amid growing volatility. But, liberal fascists continue to insidiously mislead workers into believing they have our best interests at heart when they are agents of a violent system. They seek not to alleviate the exploitation of the working class, but to subdue workers with meaningless reforms. They seek not to unite workers in multiracial unity, but instead keep workers divided through identity politics. Time and time again, liberals screw workers over for power, profit and control. The working class shouldn’t be fooled!
Communism means no racist borders
Our work in Texas this week reflected what communism means—workers’ power, no racist borders, and no workers forced from their homes and families to find work. Our work this week reflected our dedication to building and strengthening PLP—and our fight to smash capitalism for good. We must unite and fight the increasing mass arrests of undocumented workers, ICE police raids on homes, jobs, military bases, bus stations and highways, mass detentions and deportations.
Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite! ¡El mismo enemigo, la misma lucha, los trabajadores del mundo se unen!