COLOMBIA, June 13—The Colombian ruling class finds itself in the middle of a historic election campaign between former member of leftwing rebel group and mayor of Bogota Gustavo Petro against Ivan Duque. Duque is “handpicked by ex-President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, a towering figure among the country’s conservatives for his staunch opposition to the peace deal signed between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group” (The Nation, 4/18).
Colombia, the U.S.’s closest strategic ally in Latin America, is dealing with a fractured ruling class that risks upending the peace deal. Volatility in Colombia means uncertainty for imperialist rivals U.S., Russia, and China.
Petro is a liberal nationalist candidate who promises to tax wealthy landowners and stock investors. He also “favor[s] downgrading their country’s economic and military ties with Washington” (Foreign Affairs, 10/3/17). Duque’s patron Uribe, “whose political philosophy is known as “uribismo,” stands for military and paramilitary warfare against the insurgents, close ties with the United States and the ruthless eradication of drugs” (The Washington Post, 5/23).
Don’t fall for the electoral game
They try to deceive the masses with their corrupt electoral circus waving their flags of: lies, anti-communism, fake peace accords and false anti-corruption campaigns. They do this to paper over their state crisis and breathe new life into their discredited institutions of bourgeois dictatorship. They pacify the struggles between local bosses and consolidate their political, economic, and cultural power over the masses who suffer under the warlords that savage them with misery, hunger, and unemployment. They increase the destruction of the environment and invite more droughts, floods, avalanches, and even earthquakes.
The only true advance for the international working class is to unify the struggle to establish a new communist social order that provides for their needs, especially the basics such as: clean water and food, well-built housing, comfortable and flexible transportation, high schools and universities with excellent education and much more. All of this without counting money, profits, or borders.
For 208 years, Colombian capitalism has achieved its liberal-conservative dictatorships over the working class and unemployed. This has deepened the dependence on U.S. imperialism by robbing riches and natural resources. It is clear that it is really the IMF, World Bank, UN, OECD, the mafias, and the corporate monopolies that rule. Who and How?  They threaten workers to vote for Iván Duque (the “right-wing” candidate) or else they will be jobless because if Gustavo Petro (the “left-wing” candidate) wins, businesses will be expropriated and businessmen will flee the country creating another Venezuela, and so we must save our country from the clutches of communism. This fear mongering fabrication hides the fact that both liberals and conservatives are workers’ class enemies. The working class is clearly disillusioned by the electoral system: “All of the surveys, however, feature a high percentage of the population intends to abstain from the vote, cast blank ballots, or are undecided” (Telesur, 6/12).
Lefty ideas at ballot box is a dead end
The working class will never have power by following the electoral path. We can see this clearly.

• FMLN (The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) traitors in El Salvador,
• Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua
• Nelson Mandela in South Africa
• the metal worker Lula Da Silva who ruled Brazil for eight years
• union leader and former Bogota mayor Luis Eduardo Garzon the minister of labor
•  Michelle Bachelet who lived under the fascist dictatorship of Pinochet.

More recently, we see in Colombia how former guerillas and union leaders have become mayors and governors who oppress and jail their electorate. These elected officials have followed their bosses down the path of nationalism and class collaboration, demoralizing the revolutionary struggle and reinforcing the concept of bourgeois democracy.
Capitalists need elections to sell us on the myth that voting will help to reform the profit system and make it more responsive to the needs of workers. However, this is not the only reason. They also hope to find populist (fascist) candidates that can mislead and pacify the millions of workers who are not conforming to their plan. In either case, our class gains nothing by electing either one.
The bosses’ candidates will never liberate the working class. Only the destruction of the bourgeois state and its wage slavery with a communist revolution can liberate the working class from oppression, exploitation, racism, sexism, and imperialist war. We don’t need the bosses or their fake elections. With our newspaper DESAFIO we are present in marches, meetings, and electoral discussions; presenting to workers our ideas about the unity of struggle and organization. Many tell us that this sounds fine, but it is a long struggle, and what do we do in the meantime? We respond with class struggle and recruitment efforts to PLP.

SANTA MONICA, CA— The Santa Monica Police Department (SMPD) is racist to the core.
It was April 21, 2015. Justin Palmer, 36-year-old, tried to use the electric car charging station in Virginia Avenue Park in Santa Monica, California, to have power to drive to work the next day. It was well before 11 PM, the closing time for the park. He waited his turn and when he pulled up to the station, it was slightly after 11 PM. A cop car arrived and told Palmer the park was closed. When he explained he had arrived before 11 PM and had to wait, the cops asked for identification. When he asked what he had done wrong, the father of four was thrown to the ground and handcuffed, and pepper sprayed in the face. Palmer suffered lingering back and shoulder injuries.
While others have been seen using the charging station after closing time, the difference here is that Justin Palmer is Black. This would have been just another racist interaction between white cops and a Black motorist. However, the police assault on Palmer was caught on camera and he was able to successfully sue the SMPD.
SMPD has a history of racist profiling. A few months after the attack on Palmer, a Black woman named Fay Wells was locked out of her apartment in a mostly white neighborhood of Santa Monica. She called a locksmith to get her back inside. A white neighbor reported a burglary and 17 cops swarmed to her building, pointing their guns at her and barging into her apartment without permission.
“21st Century Policing” = putting lipstick on a pig
When these two incidents of racist policing occurred in Santa Monica, the Chief of the SMPD was Jacqueline Seabrooks, who headed the department from 2012 to 2017. In both cases, she defended the cops. While she was the Police Chief in Inglewood from 2007 to 2012, her department was so well known for police killings of Black residents that a U.S. Department of Justice report admonished the Inglewood police and a LA Times investigation found that Inglewood cops “repeatedly resorted to physical or deadly force against unarmed suspects.”
 Seabrooks is a proponent of “21st Century Policing,” a program that came out of a Task Force created by then-President Obama in 2014 in response to the mass protests against the murder of 18-year old Michael Brown by white kkkop Darren Wilson. The goal of the Task Force was to restore people’s trust in and collaboration with law enforcement agencies, while continuing to reduce crime. It recommended the increased use of data gathering, technology and community partnerships to reduce crime.
One of the co-chairs of the Task Force was Charles Ramsey, who had once been the Chief of Police in Washington, DC. He became notorious in 2002 when he directed police to surround more than 400 people protesting against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and without ordering them to leave, arrested them all, including journalists. Ramsey was overhead saying, “We’re going to lock them up and teach them a lesson!” This is the official trying to restore faith in police departments.
Seabrooks and Ramsey are Black, and they are racist just the same. It hasn’t reduced the daily, relentless racism of police in the U.S. Santa Monica uses a form of community policing, an initiative developed by former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton in the 1990’s to encourage community collaboration with police. While community policing was the carrot used to entice people to cooperate with local police, at the same time Bratton developed the stick of “broken windows policing.” People are arrested for minor crimes like riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, or jumping a subway turnstile, or drinking alcohol from an open bottle, which would purportedly help to prevent bigger crimes. Studies have shown that “broken windows” arrests do nothing to prevent larger crimes but do have the effect of saddling mostly Black and Latin young people with criminal records that damage their chances of future employment.
Police and Santa Monica gentrification
Santa Monica now has a new Chief of Police, Cynthia Renaud, formerly the police chief of Folsom, California. She plans to hire more police for the steadily gentrifying Santa Monica, with its rising housing prices and evictions of low-income residents unable to afford the skyrocketing rents. More than 2,000 rent controlled units have been lost in Santa Monica. Meanwhile, the city has become the home of high tech and music companies such as Activision Blizzard, Sony’s Naughty Dog and Universal Music Group.
The role of the police will be to keep a lid on the growing anger of people upset with rising rents, evictions and other social problems. They will be used to harass the homeless in Santa Monica, whose numbers are increasing. And they will target Black and Latin residents for special harassment, as they’ve done in the past.
In a class divided society, the police will always be used to defend the interests of the wealthy while harassing and imprisoning the most oppressed. If we want to change that, we have to fight for a society without classes, without inequality and racism, a society based on sharing and cooperation: communism.

New York City, the wealth capital in the most powerful country, has the worst subway system in the world. Chronic breakdowns and track signal problems have caused the on-time train rate to plummet to 65 percent (NYT 11/18/2017).
Governor Andrew Cuomo said the MTA “estimates it will cost $43 billion and take about 15 years to turn around New York City’s struggling subway and bus systems…That comes in addition to the approximately $50 billion in capital improvements the systems are likely to need over the next 15 years (Wall street Journal, 5/23). As the politicians and capitalists hash out an MTA plan this week, we look at the racist profit motives of the subways.
MTA is an example of how the profit drive destroys even the useful things under capitalism. Infrastructure like the subway system is only built, maintained, and renewed when the bosses need it for profits or to fight their wars. The MTA, which is not profitable to run except to the banks, historically has been minimally maintained leading to succeeding crisis. Only a communist society will build an infrastructure system to serve the needs of the working class worldwide.
Built to profit & segregate
The expansive train network connecting the city was considered a modern wonder in the early 20th century. Today it’s filthy stations and literally rotting track beds stand as a stark example of how capitalism in decay is failing to serve one of the basic needs of society: getting people to work.
The impetus to build the subway was to increase property values in a growing Manhattan by pushing workers out of then-densely populated lower Manhattan. Since then, MTA fell into a cycle of crises. As Black and Latin workers were forced to bear the brunt of segregation, the subways suffered decades of neglect and decay in the second half the 20th century.
With each crisis, the banks lent billions of dollars to a broken system. The interest payments on those loans has continued to bleed the system dry to this day by eating up money that could be going to maintenance but instead goes into the pockets of the ruling class.
The initial system was built by the City by borrowing from the banks and then leased out to private companies. The working class bore the cost as the city cut back on other services to pay the banks back from city tax revenue. Eventually the private companies, unable to raise fares because wages were so low, abandoned their franchises and the city took them over. (From a Nickel to a Token by Andrew J. Sparberg)
Post-World War II segregation
The next subway crisis was triggered by the ruling-class imposed segregation of workers after World War II. Soldiers, returning from defeating fascism in Europe, were demanding equality. The working class, through the international communist movement, was in the leadership of a large part of the world. The capitalists, terrified of a united working class, built racism and decimated the cities.
After World War II, the Federal Housing Administration (a precursor to HUD) and the Veterans Administration hired builders to mass-produce American suburbs…in order to ease the post-war housing shortage. Builders received federal loans on the explicit condition that homes would not be sold to Black homebuyers. (CITYLAB, 9/2/2015)
The loss of population, businesses and jobs devastated the tax base in the cities, leaving Black and Latin workers to live in the decayed shells of cities starved of funds. The MTA rapidly declined.
Recession
As New York City was bled dry, local bosses didn’t pay for even the most basic maintenance of infrastructure and social services. Public schools, hospitals and the transportation system fell into ruin. The ruling class tried to shift the cost further onto workers by raising fares. The working class rebelled and refused as much as it could and still make it to work. By 1976, ridership had fallen to 1.5 billion from a 1946 peak of 2.5 billion (MTA).
As cities were dismantled, the short period of post-war capitalist growth came to a screeching halt. The 1973–75 recession signaled a qualitative change to a period of low economic growth in the U.S. and other post WWII powers (Fortune 2/2/2016).
The 80s
In the 1980s, the NY bosses returned to the banks for more loans. The money to get new subway cars and modernize stations kept the subway system running. But the reprieve was short lived. The underlying problem of low economic growth/low tax environment deprived the system of needed funds.
The interest payments on new loans made things worse and successive Republican and Democratic Mayors and Governors from Rudolph Giuliani and George Pataki to Bill de Blasio and Mario Cuomo have cut spending on the subways and diverted tax money intended for basic maintenance (NY Times 11/18/2017).
Subway improvements for gentrification?
Much of the system’s core, the track and signals, has been neglected for 100 years. Instead of fixing the core, the bosses’ solution has been to spend billions on small expansions in the wealthy Upper East Side and to the formerly industrial area on Manhattan’s far West Side. These few subway stops were built with over $6 billion in new loans. They are designed to increase property values and raise tax dollars by moving white wealthy people into the city and push out the remaining Black and Latin workers in Manhattan.
Even as the NYC bosses would like to improve the subways for the newly gentrified increasingly white city, they are saddled by the lack of taxes and the increasing problems from lack of maintenance over the last 50 years. The short-term nature of pressures on a society that is decaying inhibits the bosses from solving basic problems even when they are willing to spend money on them.
MTA makes workers pay
The MTA is already busy lining the banks’ pockets. “The MTA’s debt is greater than that of at least 30 of the world’s nations…[This] heavy reliance on borrowing to fix transit is crushing riders like a packed subway car at rush hour” (Gothamist, 2/12/2015). To pay off its $38.6 billion in debt, a whole 16 percent ($2.6 billion) of the MTA $16.6 billion budget will go to its annual debt service (NY Daily News, 2/13). This has made it impossible for the MTA to keep up with basic maintenance.
As the subways continue to rot, NYC Mayor de Blasio and NY Governor Andrew Cuomo are in a finger pointing war. This is going on even as under de Blasio “the city’s contribution to M.T.A. operations…dropped by almost 75 percent” (NY Times 11/18/17) and Cuomo continues to feed the banks a steady diet of transit loans and resulting interest payments.
Bosses’ deadly solution to crisis is fascism
The bosses that de Blasio and Cuomo front for will eventually end the infighting. But the ruling class’ way of settling their differences in this period of capitalism in crisis will be brutal for the working class. The Italian fascists claimed Mussolini made the trains run on time. While that’s a pro-fascist myth, fascism is capitalism’s go-to method when faced with crisis. In Italy and Germany, the bosses moved to save their crumbling system by forcing bosses to pay more to the state and forcing the working class to kill and die in the name of the nation.
Fascism is rising and it is the way the bosses will try to deal with their problems like crumbling infrastructure. Our struggle is to fight the stealing and their service cuts and fight for a system that serves the working class. They can’t fix capitalism. It is crisis after crisis, war after war.
Our liberation from this cycle of destruction comes from recognizing that the bosses’ politicians aren’t going to save us and that the working class, organized in the Progressive Labor, can build a communist society that will serve the needs of workers around the world.

As sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry leads to larger wars and fascism, the U.S. capitalist rulers are trying to solve the crisis of their failing profit system by attacking the working class. Over the next several issues of CHALLENGE, we will be writing about how these attacks are affecting workers—and how a communist-led revolutionary movement can fight back.

On May 18, eight students and two teachers were shot and killed at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. Coming on the heels of the February murder of 17 people at a Florida high school, the latest massacre reflects a horrifying trend. Since 2000, more people have been killed or wounded in mass school shootings in the U.S. than in the entire 20th century (Science Daily, 4/18). In 2018, the shooting death toll in U.S. schools is higher than in the U.S. military (Washington Post, 5/18). As families and friends mourn the loss of young lives, it is time to hold accountable the rotting U.S. capitalist system that drives teenagers to become murderers.
Metal detectors and armed school custodians won’t stop this senseless violence. Reformed gun laws and more careful parents won’t stop it. When people have reached the point where they are ready to slaughter their classmates, they won’t be deterred by a locked cabinet or a background check.
Capitalism alienates our youth
The root cause of the recent rash of school shootings is a rotten capitalist culture that is spiraling into even deeper decay. U.S. capitalism in the 21st century is a story of economic dislocation, cuts in mental health services, and a society that lacks concern for the collective good.
The world capitalist order put in place by World War II is coming apart. As old alliances fray and U.S. bosses lose ground to China and Russia, capitalists around the world are racing to find cheap labor as they prepare for the next global war. Advances in technology are used to destroy workers’ living standards. The five largest private U.S. employers—Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Yum! Brands. and Home Depot—overwhelmingly hire people for low-paying service jobs.
U.S. rural areas are disinvested wastelands. The cities are bastions of extreme inequality and segregation, with underpaid immigrants and Black workers serving a mainly white elite class. Seven of ten U.S. workers are falling behind economically: “Most population segments experienced flat or falling incomes in the 2002–12 decade [and] young, less-educated workers were hardest hit” (McKinsey Global Institute, 7/16).
In the U.S. in 1970, according to the Financial Times, a 30-year-old “had a 90 percent chance — almost a guarantee — of earning more than what their parents earned at the same age, adjusted for inflation… This cornerstone of U.S. identity — that if you put in hard work, a better future awaited…is increasingly evading the country’s young people.” By 2016, about half of 30-year-olds were earning less than their parents did at the same age (12/16/16). Trying to start a business is even more hopeless than trying to find a decent job. Within the first 18 months, 80 percent of entrepreneurs crash and burn” (Forbes, 9/12/13).
The hard reality is that the capitalist ruling class views the masses of working people as disposable—a reality deliberately obscured by capitalist schools and the myth-making entertainment industry.
Winners and losers
Capitalist culture pushes the destructive idea that people don’t matter unless they set themselves apart from others in the working class. A society defined by winners and losers is a breeding ground for selfishness, narcissism, and a lack of empathy. Capitalist culture teaches us to care only about ourselves, and perhaps a small group of friends and relatives—and to “get ahead” at all costs.   
Playing alongside this American Dream fantasy are media glorifications of extreme alienation, where the new generation of heroes are sociopathic gangsters, self-justifying drug kingpins, and narcissistic hit men. In hit TV shows like “Breaking Bad,” “Barry,” and “Assassin’s Creed,” angry, frustrated men are made sympathetic as they mow down innocent people.
The end result is that masses of youth feel they are doomed to be society’s losers. Squeezed between the pressure to “make it” and a lack of hope for the future, many will break. As the bosses put the failure of their system onto the backs of children, millions of young people fall into mental illness, drug addiction, and crime. In many parts of the world, frustrated teenagers get blinded by anger into committing acts of terrorism. For a desperate few in the U.S., shooting their schoolmates becomes a demented way to be recognized—to stand out.
What way out?
Ending school shootings will require a revolutionary change of culture. Capitalist schools, media, organized religion, unions, and political parties are too invested in maintaining the profit system to confront the urgent problems faced by workers and their families. That leaves the international working class, led by the Progressive Labor Party, with both a tremendous task and a great opportunity: to build a revolutionary communist culture and a society run for and by the working class.
Most of us try to be good as individuals, but careers and money, fatigue and isolation overwhelm us. Capitalist culture, its selfishness and individualism, poisons the institutions we rely on every day. But it also resides inside us, and will not be undone easily.
Building a new culture doesn’t start when the working class seizes state power. It begins now, today, in the class struggle to fight racism, sexism, and division. The basis for a new and better world lies in the struggle to change the one we live in. As Fredrick Douglas said, “Without struggle there is no progress.”
What we have on our side is our fighting history of class struggle. The fortitude of Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner. The iron will of the Red Army in smashing the Nazis. The fearlessness of the miners in Harlan County, Kentucky. The courage of the young people of Ferguson, Missouri, who stood up against tanks and machine guns to demand justice for Michael Brown.
The movement for a workers-led society is tiny today. But in every issue of CHALLENGE you can see the seeds of its potential. And with every struggle we move forward, we lay the foundation for the communist culture of the future.

*****

The bosses’ deadly racist tool

From the time that the Spanish, French, and British colonial powers committed genocide against indigenous peoples to grab the land and treasures of the New World, guns have been an essential tool for the imperialist U.S. ruling class to terrorize and control the U.S. working class. Guns were used to enslave Black people from Africa and to discourage rebellion on profit-generating plantations. The so-called Founding Fathers denied gun ownership to slaves and free Black people alike (Atlantic, 9/11), a selective gun control policy reaffirmed in the post-Civil War “Black Codes” and later in the Uniform Firearms Act (Arc Digital, 4/4). The Second Amendment “was essentially written to protect the interests of Southerners in the states that formed militias—often known as “slave patrols”—to crush any attempt at what was called … a ‘servile insurrection’” (Daily Beast, 12/6/2015).
The same lethal, racist dynamic persists today, with police using the threat or reality of legalized shootings to preserve wage slavery and the super-exploitation of Black workers. In 2017, U.S. cops killed 1,129 people, with Black workers three times more likely than white workers to be on the wrong side of a bullet (Newsweek 12/29/17).
A system that relies on guns as the primary instrument of oppression has spawned a culture of pervasive gun ownership. There are more than 300 million guns in the U.S.; four of 10 households own at least one (CNN 2/15). While most individuals keep guns for hunting or sport, the National Rifle Association—a historical ally of the Ku Klux Klan—has stoked racist fears to push gun sales, a $13 billion industry, and to lobby for state-level “Stand Your Ground” legislation. According to a study by the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, in states with SYG laws, 34 percent of white-on-Black homicides in states with SYG laws are ruled justified, as compared to just 3 percent of Black-on-white homicides (Arc Digital, 4/4).