OAKLAND—The owners of the Oakland A’s (Major ­­­­­­­­­League Baseball team) had set their eyes on the Laney College site for a new stadium. To many, this was impending doom for the neighborhood and Laney Community College.
Many seemed resigned to hopelessness or dreamed about what they could gain from a stadium deal. A fiery group of staff & students from Laney Community College and community groups organized against the capitalists and their administrative stooges. After over six months of fightback, the college bosses were forced to halt plans with Oakland A’s.
Institutional Racism
Crooked chancellor, Jowel C. Laguerre, and a native of Haiti, has a history of shifting moneys into his own pockets at Solano and Peralta Community Colleges with Measure B funds (tax money that was supposed to be used to hire more part-time teachers). He met with the A’s­ president, Dave Kaval, several times to try and spur deals. The Chancellor tried to sell the bitter pill of a Coliseum takeover of Laney property with the sugar coating that this would bring more revenue to the “starving” Community College budgets.
The A’s owner is John Fisher from the Fisher family, founders of the GAP clothing company. They are also the owners of the Mendocino Redwood Company, the lumber company in Northern California. The Fishers are players in the third most unaffordable housing market on the planet, San Francisco. They will be responsible for tenant evictions and displacement of mainly Black, Latin, and Asian working-class people.  
The new Stadium will drive up the cost of living and housing for its current residents. It will spur the development of residential and commercial properties catered toward non-working-class people. This is an ongoing trend of racist displacement throughout Oakland.
Worker-Student Alliance Fight Back
An alliance of students, staff, and community members fought back. Because of collective organizing, hundreds attended the past four Board of Trustees meetings to give personal testimony to why the A’s deal was nothing more than a land grab and a push to gentrify the Oakland land next to Laney College. The organizing efforts included: emails, phone calls, classroom meetings and articles circulated about how stadiums damage working-class neighborhoods.
While the Board sat perched like faux royalty, many antiracists spoke passionately about why Laney College and the surrounding community are a remaining oasis for the multiracial, immigrant working class in Oakland.
Speakers denounced the institutional racism of a Board decision or the Chancellor’s support for a deal that could lead the way to privatization of Laney College, which now serves a population that is mainly Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant and low-income students.
The A’s management wined and dined fans before the Board meeting and brought them to testify about how important the A’s were to Oakland. They also tried to sway people with stories of exceptionalism (rags to riches from Haiti) or stories of money for shrinking budgets.
But ultimately, these misleaders serve the ruling class and use identity politics to confuse and conquer. We need to see those pretending to speak for the community, like the Chancellor tried to, as predatory servants of big money-capitalists.
After many months of struggle, the teachers union, PFT (Peralta Federation of Teachers), finally endorsed the fightback collective and said “NO” to the stadium deal. This was powerful. The PFT leadership only acted after members pushed for it, after the anti-stadium collective pressured the union.
This working-class pressure from below forced the Board of Trustees to instruct Chancellor Laguerre to stop deal-making conversations with the A’s. Yet, even after the Board of Trustees officially voted, the Chancellor made sure to mention to the San Francisco Chronicle “the door is never closed” on such deals.
Within a week of this victory, the Oakland Unified School District elected Board (k-12) voted to cut $9 million from the mid-year school budget over the protest of hundreds of teachers, students, parents and community. The racist dismantling of public education continues.
PLP members and others responded from the knowledge that deal or no deal, the current trend is one of dismantling public education for the multiracial working-class students at Laney.
Mobilization and Lessons
It was everyday workers (especially a multiracial group of women), students, and staff that had the most to lose who showed up and spurred each other on to fight. Through the struggle, individuals gained confidence in their ability to contribute.
During the fight back, there were efforts made to formalize the organizing coalition, but those who continued to fight, refused to let a hierarchy of leadership form. People in the coalition stressed the need for collective responsibility and to instead allow for informal parings and groupings to fuel the fire.
This was a positive environment to bring up how a communist collective society could function, a place where the motivation was “serve the people” not “what’s in it for me.”
The Oakland A’s team colors of green and yellow do not represent the working class. Instead, let us cheer for everyday workers, ourselves, to have a healthy, educated, meaningful, collective life. That color is revolutionary red.
PLP members aim to build a movement and a Party for a communist society. We have confidence that the working class will destroy capitalism and create and rule a society with no borders. Join us.

On February 9, when North and South Korea march side by side at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, the two countries’ symbolic unity will signify the erosion of U.S. imperialist dominance on the Korean Peninsula. The capitalist rulers of the U.S. are increasingly desperate to hold onto their deteriorating global top-dog status, a crisis complicated by an unreliable President Donald Trump and the bosses’ own disarray. With China growing in economic and military might, longtime U.S. allies like South Korea and Japan are now hedging their bets and looking to fend for themselves.
As the U.S. bosses debate how best to prepare for the next Korean War, the Progressive Labor Party and the international working class must organize to bury these war-makers once and for all.
All events point to war
As the United States and China beat the drums of war and prepare for an inevitable global conflict, the 680-mile-long Korean Peninsula may be at the center of it. A historic buffer and invasion route in East Asia, the peninsula lies at the intersection of imperialist interests for the U.S., China, Russia, and regional power Japan.
War Secretary James Mattis has announced that U.S. war strategy will be shifting its primary focus from “counter-terrorism” to “great power competition” with China and Russia. In his rollout of Trump’s National Defense Strategy, he said, “‘[O]ur competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare—air, land, sea, space and cyberspace—and it is continuing to erode’” (Bloomberg, 1/19). While the U.S. rulers are soberly admitting their decline as the dominant world power, they won’t accept second-tier status without a fight. At the moment, all events point to war:
More than 1,000 reserve U.S. soldiers will rehearse quick-reaction mobilizations and air-assault exercises in February. The U.S. is also sending Special Operations forces to South Korea and deploying additional bombers, including B-2s, to Guam. Gen. Tony Thomas, commander of the Special Operations Command based in Tampa, Florida, said troops now occupying Iraq and Syria “might have to shift to the Korea theater from the Middle East in May or June, if tensions escalate on the peninsula” (New York Times, 1/14). Meanwhile, plans to modernize and maintain “the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years will cost more than $1.2 trillion” (NYT, 1/13).
China is ramping up security along its border with North Korea, deploying more soldiers and radiation detectors. “China must be ready for a war on the Korean peninsula, with the risk of conflict higher than ever before, Chinese government advisers and a retired senior military officer warned on Saturday. ‘Conditions on the peninsula now make for the biggest risk of a war in decades,’ said Renmin University international relations professor Shi Yinhong, who also advises the State Council, China’s cabinet” (South China Morning Post, 12/18/17).
Japan, in concert with the U.S., is making plans for the evacuation of 60,000 Japanese citizens and 200,000 U.S. nationals in South Korea in the event of a crisis (The Daily Yomiuri, 1/16).  
Trump’s version of the Nuclear Posture Review, begun under then-Imperialist-in-Chief Barack Obama, expands the range of pretexts for a future nuclear attack. This normalization of nuclear warfare, including responses to cyber-attacks, exposes the bosses’ utter disregard for the world’s working class. A single modern nuclear warhead, far more lethal than the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on civilian populations in Japan in 1945, could murder millions and damage the working class for generations. The U.S. is the first imperialist to develop nuclear weapons and the only imperialist to have used them in war.
Ready or not
As the top think tank for U.S. finance capital has warned, any U.S. nuclear attack on North Korea will ignite “a full-blown war on the Korean Peninsula that would endanger millions of lives and ultimately diminish U.S. power and influence in the Asia-Pacific” (Foreign Affairs, 1/9). The bosses’ long-range thinkers recognize that a new war with North Korea “would likely be more devastating than any conflict the United States has experienced since World War II, if ever.” Yet given the peninsula’s strategic importance, the U.S. rulers may have no choice.
As of today, the bosses are unprepared to win such a war. It would require a U.S. patriotic revival and a military draft to generate masses of committed ground troops. The capitalists’ internal instability and the deep divisions among ruling-class factions (see page 7) limits their maneuverability. Moreover, as Foreign Affairs warns, even a “limited” nuclear first strike would entail huge political risks for the U.S.:
If Washington initiates a conflict and Pyongyang escalates, Seoul and Tokyo may consider significantly curtailing (or even ending) their alliances with the United States, ejecting U.S. armed forces from their territory, and developing their own nuclear weapons. This would effectively end U.S. geopolitical dominance in the Asia-Pacific, creating a region riven with division and instability, with diminished U.S. power and influence and China poised to fill the void (1/9).
Buying more time
In the January/Februrary issue of Foreign Affairs, Oriana Skylar Mastro points out that neither the U.S. nor China is ready for “a full-blown war” against the other. In the event that hostilities were to break out on the peninsula, she speculates on the possibility of a short-term, shared occupation of North Korea, with the U.S. ceding control over nuclear missile sites within 60 miles of the Chinese border. Mastro underlines how much the Chinese military has evolved over the last 20 years, thanks to modernization and structural reform: “Washington must recognize that China will intervene extensively and military…Beijing would…ensure its interest [was] taken into account during and after the war.”
For the U.S. ruling class, the Korean Peninsula is only one significant area of interest out of many. As Foreign Affairs points out,  “More than anything, U.S. policymakers must shift their mindset to view China’s involvement as an opportunity instead of a constraint…With North Korea out of the way, the United States would have more resources at its disposal to address other threats”—involving Middle East oil, for example.
But given the dog-eat-dog nature of imperialism, in which competition is primary, any temporary cooperation with China would be a delaying tactic, at best. At the end, it would only pave the way for larger wars.
World War is looming
A lack of nationalist unity and fervor in the working class is the biggest obstacle to the U.S. bosses’ war plans. We cannot predict the timing or scope of the next war in the Korean Peninsula. But it is clear that world war with China is looming.  The bosses’ open debate on “best practices” for war reveals their blatant disregard for working-class lives. Workers must refuse to sacrifice ourselves for wars for profit.
The working class remains a wild card, a factor none of the imperialists are adequately taking into account. World Wars I and II birthed revolutions in Russia and China, respectively. Against this period of weak class struggle, we must build an international, communist mass movement and a Progressive Labor Party capable of seizing state power when the time comes. Today we warn of coming war and fascism; tomorrow we turn the guns around!

CHICAGO, January 21—For the second annual Women’s March, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) again rallied with workers from the region against the sexism perpetuated by the U.S. ruling class. Hundreds of thousands of anti-sexists showed up today to voice their anger against the sexist ideology, violence, and oppression.
Despite many of the marchers’ anger towards Trump and the system, the overall tone of the march was reformist and passive in nature. More voting was the call many marchers were yelling. Also, the overall the majority white crowd is reflective of the racism and sexism of the Democrats that organized it.
These wealthy liberal capitalists and their politicians have historically exploited and left out Black, Latin, Arab, Asian, and indigenous women workers from their “movement,” co-opting many genuine working-class struggles against sexism for their own imperialist and profit-based ends.
Our small but mighty contingent of comrades provoked a different conversation, one that encouraged anti-sexists to “march away from the polls.” We distributed hundreds of CHALLENGEs and close to 1,000 fliers, calling out the entire capitalist system and to the need to completely overthrow it. A comrade got on the bullhorn and gave a revolutionary speech calling out the threat liberals pose to women because they offer them the same future that conservatives do: lower wages, sexual violence, and poor access to resources.
Workers were very receptive to our message, taking CHALLENGE and giving their contact information. This was a good indicator that people are looking for other alternatives, not just ballot boxes and “feel-good” slogans.  
 Phony solutions to a deadly problem
The recent anti-sexist movements in Hollywood and corporate U.S. have inspired many to speak out and take action against sexist oppression, violence, and inequality. But if the end result is just to get someone like Oprah Winfrey to run for president, the first Black woman billionaire—who made money off of an unequal and sexist media industry to begin with— then the efforts of many courageous anti-sexists will be largely wasted. Rich women, Black or otherwise, are no friends of working-class women and men.
To advance a truly anti-sexist mass movement, we need to go beyond liberalism, feminism, and identity politics as usual. Pushing for more women executives and politicians won’t liberate women. We need to stand shoulder to shoulder in struggle with billions of workers from all over the world to understand capitalism’s role in spreading sexism, and build for communist revolution as the true source of justice and liberation for our class.
Capitalism = Sexism
The basis for sexism is class society. Although sexist inequality preceded capitalism by many centuries, it is the global capitalist economic and political system that is responsible for breeding the sexist divisions and wholesale violence against women that we see today. In the U.S. alone, we see that sexist wage differentials against women persist, with Latin women receiving 58 cents on the dollar for white men performing the same work, with Black women at 65 cents for every dollar, and white women at 82 cents for every dollar (Pew Research 7/1/16).
In order to continue paying women less, the capitalist bosses need to constantly push all kinds of sexist ideology and attacks. Women are objectified and degraded in advertisements and “entertainment” media, preteen girls are kidnapped and sold into sex slavery, and people of non-conforming gender identities are vilified and murdered at obscene rates. Women and men are taught to consider each other as rivals and inherently different, with millions of men buying into the false and destructive lie that sexist social relations are for their benefit. All these toxic dehumanizing divisions and more effectively prop up the capitalist system by weakening workers’ collective efforts to unite and fight back.
Communist revolution will crush sexism
For generations, communists and countless working-class leaders using history, theory, and practice have known that none of these sexist divisions are “natural” or “inevitable.” Far beyond just fighting for economic justice, these revolutionaries understood that the most direct and permanent path to political and social equality for all working people has been women and men rejecting sexist divisions and organizing against their common exploiters in the fight for a classless society of communism.
PLP fights to carry on this revolutionary communist tradition. We are organizing women and men workers into a mass international movement and a Red Army to destroy sexism, racism, and inequality at their root: the capitalist system. Don’t vote, revolt! Join PLP!

NEW YORK CITY, January 21—At the second annual Women’s March, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) marched to demonstrate our determination to see sexism defeated once and for all. Yet capitalism needs sexism like we need air to breathe.
The mass bravery of the #MeToo trend points the way forward. But powerful elements of the U.S. ruling class are engaged in a comprehensive effort to re-direct the anger of this moment into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party.
The same capitalist class that has mounted attacks on women of breathtaking scope and violence now wants to own/control the movement against “systemic” sexism.
Many signs pointed to voting and the 2018 election as the next step in the anti-sexist upsurge. Our leaflet with the headline “It’s not just Trump, It’s Capitalism” was met with an enthusiastic reception from many, and a handful of PL’ers were even able to turn that slogan into a chant that was taken up by marchers nearby as we made our way through midtown Manhattan.
As the march turned the corner from 59 Street to Sixth Avenue and passed the Trump International Hotel,  liberal chants, “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here” resounded; our slogan “stop racist deportations, working people have no nation” did not strike as much of a chord with the mainly white middle-class elements that formed the bulk of the participants. Anger is high but consciousness is relatively low.
In other portions of the demonstration where more Black, Latin, and Asian and youth formed the body of the crowd, when the crowd chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go,” we chanted “Capitalism has got to go” and people switched and joined us.
As we chanted, people grabbed up leaflets and challenges from us. Hundreds of papers and over 1,500 leaflets were distributed. We made short speeches and some people thanked us for calling out more than just Trump as the problem.
Liberalism: the main danger
The Trump agenda—from the tax bill to the proposed attacks on Medicare/Medicaid, a re-imposition of a global gag rule on abortion and more—is a huge attack on working-class women. Yet we delude ourselves in believing that power in the hands of Democrats means progress.
Capitalists and their media don’t care for women workers. The bosses see women workers as instruments of production of future workers, or as objects. The capitalist media empires rake in staggering profits from sexist marketing and pornography, while their friends in the informal capitalist economy traffic women into slavery.
Women and girls comprise the majority of refugees forced across racist capitalist borders from Central America to East and Central Africa, and the Middle East to the Bay of Bengal. Tens of million of our working class sisters are herded into refugee camps and subject to extreme poverty, abuse, exploitation and trafficking by the forces of imperialism that remain the same from Obama to Trump.
We cannot cheer the fact that record breaking numbers of women ran for public office under Democratic banners in 2017, a trend looking to continue into 2018. Supplying racist and sexist U.S. capitalism with more women and nonwhite politicians to front for rising war and fascism is the core mission of the Democratic Party.
Advances against sexism
The women’s movement in the U.S. struggled for seventy years before the ruling class granted women the right to vote in 1920.
In the Soviet Union women won this right three weeks after the seizure of power in 1917. In then-revolutionary China, communists banished foot-binding forever. Prostitution was abolished in Cuba after the 1959 revolution.
The list of massive advances for women goes on. Even the women’s strike of March 2017 took place on International Women’s Day, a communist-inspired holiday.
As capitalism has returned to Russia and China, sex trafficking and oppression of women have returned. Women have paid perhaps the highest price for the reversal of communist revolutions.
Feminism will not defeat sexism
Learning from the errors of the old movement and rebuilding the movement for communism is priority number one for the Progressive Labor Party.
Feminism aims to bring about a capitalism that “works” for women, too. It relies on the fatal strategy of “all-class unity:” erasing the difference between the experiences and interests of working class women and ruling class women.
The special oppression of Black women is a matter of cardinal importance, and the heightened dangers of capitalism across the board for Black women, from adverse health outcomes to racist police murder, cry out for abolition of this entire social order, not the minor rearrangements of oppressive relations that feminism entails.
Feminism, in tagging men as the source of sexism and not capitalism, serves to further divide the working class. In demanding “equality” within a system built on exploitation and war, feminism leaves us advocating for arch-imperialist demands such as putting women in combat in imperialist wars.
Oppurtunity for fightback
The #MeToo struggle is an opportunity for communists to raise anti-sexist fightback at their place of work, and dig deep with their friends about the roots of sexism. Until the international working class—multiracial, multi-gender, multigenerational—abolishes capitalism, no one is liberated. Build a communist movement with Progressive Labor Party.