LOS ANGELES, August 23—The teachers’ union UTLA is taking a strike authorization vote to demand smaller class sizes, funding for “community schools,” and salary increases. Class sizes in regular subjects are now 42 students per class. In some subjects, it is as high as 55. Many schools have nurses and psychologists only one or two days a week. Working-class Black and Latin students are hit the hardest. Extremely segregated schools, and decades of racist policies against Black and Latin students and communities, has resulted in large racist disparities in education. As Progressive Labor Party always asserted, the teachers’ working conditions are the students learning conditions.
Additionally, teachers struggle with the cost of living and are desperate to get whatever the bosses give them. On average, teachers in California make $4,000 less per year than the national average for teachers, yet cost of living in Los Angeles is 43 percent higher than the national average. The bosses’ media attacked teachers, claiming they are getting overpaid, and that raising salaries and school funding  would “lead to insolvency and state takeover.”
The best way to have an education system worthy of the working class is to overthrow the ruling class through communist revolution. Only under communism will students achieve a meaningful education that will serve our class. In the meantime PLP will help lead the organizing around this potential strike with our students, their families and other school workers. Through fighting to give schools our students deserve, the LA working class can realize the power we have and our potential to lead society.
Beutner serves the ruling class
The new LA Unified Schools District (LAUSD) Superintendent Austin Beutner is ready to “prevent a strike, which will harm students, families and the communities we serve” (Los Angeles Times, 8/28). This is the typical rhetoric used by the ruling class to divide the working class in order to convince us that it is not in our interest to fight together against the system. Capitalism is the enemy of the whole working class, teachers, parents and students alike.
Beutner is no friend of working-class students and families. He was an investment banker, has no experience managing a school or district, and used to work for then-mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (a well-known enemy of the working class in LA). Beutner was also a board member for Inner City Education Foundation’s Public Schools, a charter group with schools in south LA. Many pro-charter groups lobbied for him to become superintendent, and one of the school board members responsible for hiring him was Ref Rodriguez, a charter school backed ruling-class criminal convicted of laundering at least $25,000 in public education funds.
It is no secret that Beutner’s role is to cut funding for public schools and continue to attack students and working-class families. Charter schools have been used to divide student populations into two groups: those who will serve the ruling class in “management” positions, and those who will remain super-exploited workers. In essence, they increase racist exploitation and divisions in order to serve capitalism.
Working-class anger bubbles up
All this has angered students, parents and teachers, especially in working-class Black and Latin schools. Many are ready to fight back. The teachers union is using this righteous anger to “bargain for a better contract” with the school district. As usual, they are attempting to divert our anger away from our true enemies —the ruling class and the racist, exploitative system of capitalism—and focus it on getting a pay raise and a few concessions. Let’s not be taken for a fools by neither the bosses rhetoric,or by the union misleaders.
Our enemy is capitalism, which serves the interests of the ruling class by suppressing the interests of working class teachers, students and families. The only way to combat it is to fight as a united working class. We must strike, not to “bargain” with the capitalists, but to take the power back from them. The more the working-class struggle refuses to be contained within the bosses’ parameters, the more our class—students, parents, and teachers—will learn class-consciousness. No classroom can provide that experience or lesson.
The Progressive Labor Party and friends here will fight hard in the reform movement and use these struggles as a school for communism. Stay tuned for all the exciting details to come. Fight for communism! Power to the working class!

ROME, August 5—“Italians first! “Immigrants, go home!” The racist movements we see around the world—from Myanmar to Hungary to the U.S.—flourishes in Italy. At the same time, workers are fighting back. At the forefront of this fight are African migrant workers.
Matteo Salvini, the leader of la Lega, Italy’s most overtly anti-immigrant political party, refuses to allow boatloads of African refugees rescued at sea onto Italy’s shores. In the last two months alone, 850 have died in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. “No sooner had Salvini been sworn in than he was proclaiming his eagerness to kick out the 500,000-600,000 immigrants who are reckoned to be living without authorisation in Italy” (The Economist, 6/7).
The need for proletarian internationalism is urgent. The need for revolutionary, proletarian internationalism is urgent. We must fight to welcome refugees and immigrants wherever we are. We must organize to better the working and living conditions of all workers. But really, the whole damn capitalist system has to go!
Sixty percent of Italians elected the coalition of the Lega and the Five Star Movement, founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo and led by Luigi di Maio. Although some cracks are appearing in this coalition—the Five Star Movement pretends to distance itself from the Lega’s blatant racism—together the two parties control the “populista’, or “populist” government.
Since citizenship in Italy is determined by blood rather than soil, the populists want benefits restricted to native Italians only. This political line is blatantly anti-immigrant and racist. But the proposed 15 percent flat tax rate would benefit only the rich, while sharply reducing revenues for working-class education and healthcare.
Rulers scapegoat immigrants
The Lega-Five Star coalition is a ruling-class strategy to control an increasingly alienated working class by scapegoating immigrants as the source of its problems. The pensions of Italian workers have been cut to the bone. Immigrants serve as super-exploited labor and as scapegoats to bolster the racism that divides the working class.
Thus, immigrant workers, many from sub-Saharan Africa, labor in the fields of southern Italy for three euros (about $4) an hour under slave-like conditions, or toil as precarious labor in the northern factories.
In fact the director of Italian Social Security said the system would collapse without the taxes paid by immigrant workers, most of whom will never receive a pension.
Racist murder of organizer,
Soumaila Sacko
Just two days after the installation of the new government, a 29-year-old Malian organizer of agricultural workers, Soumaila Sacko, was murdered. This sparked a strike and large union-led protests throughout the country (The Local It, 6/4).
He had lived in a tent city of San Fernando in Reggio Calabria, an encampment at least 3,000 of migrant workers— primarily from Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and the Ivory Coast—who pick fruits and vegetables for abysmal wages. They are deprived of electricity, running water, and proper toilets.
The protesters correctly pointed out that this is nothing new. “In 2010, migrant workers staged a revolt against the conditions after three labourers were injured in a [racist] street shooting as they returned from the fields. Hundreds of migrants were expelled from an area nearby in what some commentators called ethnic cleansing” (Al Jazeera, 6/27).
Capitalism in global crisis
The bosses’ attacks on workers lays bare the instability of global capitalism. The top owners of European capital want the European Union (EU) to survive.
For six decades, the EU has enabled capital, goods, services, and labor to flow across borders. This created an economic bloc conjoining the interests of the capitalists in different European nations. Yet these bankers and industrialists also benefit from the divisive nationalist movement, enabling them to keep wages low and cut public expenditures. European capitalists need the EU at the same time that they need the nationalist movements opposed to the EU. As Marx pointed out in Das Kapital 150 years ago, capitalism creates contradictions that it cannot resolve.
Fascism or communism?
How will the Italian working class respond to rising fascism? History provides no clear guidelines. Benito Mussolini was first to usher in fascism in 1920s-1930s led by. But the anti-fascist movement was strong throughout World War II; in the late 1940s, Italy had the continent’s largest and most militant Communist Party.
To this day, communist songs—“Bella Ciao,” “Bandiera Rossa,” and the “Internationale”—are sung at protests against the current right-wing trend. But the old Communist movement, led by the PCI (Partita Comunista Italiana) strangled itself with its commitment to work within electoral politics.
The capitalist crisis is global, but workers often think nationally—which means their response can be easily misdirected in the direction of racist, xenophobic “populismo.”
Only revolutionary proletarian internationalism can meet the needs of the workers of Italy—and of the world. There is a desperate need for PLP, in Italy and everywhere, to organize the class struggle and lead the communist transformation of society.

SILVER SPRING, MD—Over 100 Montgomery County residents held a multiracial rally and march protesting the racist police murder of Robert White, a 41 year old mentally ill Black man on June 13. His crime? Walking while Black. Progressive Labor Party (PLP)distributed leaflets and connected the murderous Ku Klux Klan and the killer cops as part of the racist state power that must be overthrown with multiracial communist revolution.
The prosecutor ruled Robert’s murder was justified and released body camera footage of the encounter. The cameras show that the police officer, Anand Badgujar, got out of his car and started following Robert who was walking in his neighborhood as he did daily. Robert became agitated with the cop, and understandably so, because there was no real reason to stop him. The officer persisted, harassing him and even using pepper spray on him.
Kkop Badgujar claimed Robert knocked him down and continuosly hit him, so he responded by shooting him instead of backing off and de-escalating the unjustified confrontation. At one point on the video evidence showed footage of, Badgujar  saying, “This looks like suicide by cop” and called for backup. Despite thisProsecutor Broccolino stated, “We have, unanimously, concluded that [the officer’s] actions were justified under the circumstances,” and closed the case.
Mental illness is not a crime
Speakers from the community who knew Robert White were incensed that he was harassed and then killed simply for “looking suspicious.” A neighbor from the Silver Spring Justice Coalition said that she walks the same routes.
Robert often exchanged pleasantries with him at the store or library. No one had called the police to investigate. He walked the neighborhood daily.
He lived with his mother and father (retired school teacher and minister) and had no history of violence. Mental illness is not a crime. Walking is not a crime. Robert just “wanted to be left alone” as one speaker put it, and their is no crime in that. But don’t tell the bosses’ racist media that!
This rally followed a protest held in June at the time of the murder that highlighted the murder’s systemic, racist nature, even at the hands of a non-White cop. At that protest, Lakshmi Sridaran, Director of National Policy and Advocacy of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) declared, “It is unfortunate that in this case [the cop] is a South Asian American and we will not stand behind that person simply because of their identity.”
After all, it is every cop’s ultimate task—whether they’re Black, white, Latin, or South Asian—to protect this rotten capitalist system at workers’ expense.
Another speaker, mother to Emmanuel Okutuga, who was murdered by cop Christopher Jordan of the same police force in February 2011, spoke passionately about the need to fight for justice and called on the Black community to realize that this can happen to them also.
Her son was about to graduate from college at Bowie State University. Video showed he was not a threat. Somehow, though, the prosecutor’s office “accidently” deleted the video and left the judge free to rule in favor of cop Jordan, calling the death “justifiable homicide.”
Montgomery County borders Washington, D.C. and appears, on the surface, not to have the level of police brutality and murder that has characterized its neighboring Prince George’s County. But the police play the same role everywhere.
Robert’s case echoes the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson—murdered for walking while Black. The struggle against racist police terror will continue under capitalism until all workers unite to create a communist world.

While U.S. imperialism is losing its grip on the Middle East, regional capitalists are at war to fill the vacuum. From Syria to Yemen, millions of workers’ lives are at stake as Israeli, Saudi and Iranian capitalists wage war to control the Middle East and its oil. The U.S. and Russian imperialists are providing military and political support to opposing sides in these wars that could escalate quickly.
The most destructive of these current conflicts are in Syria and Yemen. At least six million Syrians have fled their homes and at least 400,000 have died since 2012. In Yemen, at least six million are on the edge of starvation and over half a million were devastated in the world’s worst-ever cholera epidemic (NYT, 8/22). In both conflicts, U.S. imperialism has been mostly confined to fighting small-time terrorists (ISIS in Syria, Al Qaeda in Yemen).
The U.S. decline has their allies second-guessing U.S. power. This has created an opening for capitalists like Iran and Russia who oppose the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia, have decided to take matters into their own hands, creating more murder and mayhem.
Syria: Iran and Russia Advance Israel Readies for War
With U.S. influence weakening in the Middle East, both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump have done little to oppose Syria’s Russia-backed President Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile, Iran and Russia have moved in, concentrating on propping up Assad’s regime. Russia has deployed significant air power while Iran has recruited 80,000 fighters from across the region.
Assad’s Syrian army only numbers about 20,000, and many desert or go on strike if ordered to deploy outside their own neighborhoods, where they serve as guards.
 When news reports talk about a Syrian advance on rebel positions, the advance is led by Lebanese Hezbollah and units recruited, trained and paid for by Iran.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric and sanctions against Iran, he has not taken on Iran in Syria and pushed to withdraw all 2,000 troops in Syria (NYT, 4/4).  “In his haste to withdraw from Syria, Trump stands alone.
The Pentagon, the State Department and CIA are all deeply concerned about the potential ramifications if the U.S. leaves behind a power vacuum in Syria, as are Israel, Arab leaders, and other nations in the U.S.-led coalition that has fought ISIS in Iraq and Syria since 2014” (Military Times, 4/4).
If U.S. backs off, Israeli and Saudi bosses fear that Russia-backed Iran will become the dominant power across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
Yemen: Saudi Tail Wags U.S. Dog
In Yemen as in Syria, U.S. bosses are not calling the shots as a war unfolds. In 2015, the Saudis and United Arab Emirates invaded after Iran-backed Houthis seized the capital of Sana’a. The latest outrage has been their assault on the main port of Hodeidah. “The U.A.E…wants the port out of Houthi hands as soon as possible, saying it generates up to $40 million a month for the Houthis” (WSJ, 7/8).
It’s important to note that though the UAE is one of the smallest countries in this region, it is one with a growing imperialist appetite. “With an active-duty military of just 63,000, the U.A.E. has rapidly expanded its footprint across the Arabian Peninsula and eastern Africa.
It has a string of bases in Somalia and Eritrea and along the Yemen coast” (WSJ, 7/8)The principal weapon in Syria has been mass starvation created by attacking shipping routes so as to deprive millions of Yemenis of food and clean water.
This murderous campaign has been financed and equipped by the U.S. war machine.The UN estimates this attack will lead to 250,000 deaths from the resulting food shortages.
To stop this slaughter of profit-hungry rulers, we must oppose all capitalist and turn their imperialist wars into class wars against all bosses.
 We must rebuild the international communist movement, overthrow all the war makers, and organize a society run by the working class.