As Donald Trump proves increasingly incapable of defending U.S. finance capital’s interests in the next global war, these main-wing bosses are intensifying their efforts to discipline the unreliable president—or, if necessary, to prepare to move him out of office.
January 5 saw the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which painted Trump as ignorant, unfocused, an “idiot,” and a “dope”—in the words of his own senior Republican advisers. The book quoted white supremacist Steven Bannon, Trump’s former top henchman, as accusing Donald Trump Jr. of “treasonous” behavior for meeting with Russians connected to Vladimir Putin during the 2016 campaign. Two days earlier, after Trump boasted that his “nuclear button” was larger than North Korea President Kim Jong Un’s, an NBC news reporter openly questioned Trump’s “mental fitness” (thehill.com, 1/3).
Meanwhile, former FBI chief Robert Mueller was expanding his Justice Department probe of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice. After already indicting four Trump associates, Mueller indicated he was looking to interrogate the president himself (New York Daily News, 1/10). “The end game,” according to the right-wing National Review, “is the removal of Trump, either by impeachment or by publicly discrediting him and making his reelection politically impossible” (12/2/17).
Trump: unstable imperialist
But the bosses’ real concerns about Trump’s “fitness” have little to do with West Wing gossip or Russian operative intrigues. As inter-imperialist rivalries sharpen, the rulers’ fundamental worry is that Trump is unable and willing to prepare the U.S. for an inevitable World War III. As the U.S. sinks into a state of relative decline versus an ascendant China and a belligerent Russia, the bosses fear that the U.S.-dominated liberal order, a fact of life since the end of World War II, may be on its last legs.
A leading mouthpiece for the U.S. ruling class is Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the finance capitalists’ top think tank. In a new afterword for the recently published paperback edition of his cautionary book, A World in Disarray: American Foreign
Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order, Haass sums up the rulers’ anxieties in the Age of Trump:
[T]he United States is no longer taking the lead in maintaining alliances, or in building regional and global institutions that set the rules of how international relations are conducted. It is abdication from what has been a position of leadership in developing the rules and arrangements at the heart of any world order….
Trump is the first post-World War II American president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits. As a result, the United States has changed from the principal preserver of order to a principal disrupter.
Haass proceeds to tick off Trump’s many retreats from world leadership. The president withdrew from the Paris climate pact and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the main-wing Brookings Institute called “not just a trade agreement but also a crucial signal of U.S. commitment to the region in general” (Brookings, 9/16/17). He weakened the U.S. commitment to NATO, which represents the allies the U.S. will need in the next global war. He has threatened to pull out of the North America Free Trade Agreement and the nuclear accord with Iran while gutting of the State Department’s diplomatic corps. As the New York Times (12/28/17) put it,
Mr. Trump has transformed the world’s view of the United States from a reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order into something more inward-looking and unpredictable. That is a seminal change from the role the country has played for 70 years, under presidents from both parties, and it has lasting implications for how other countries chart their futures.
Can the ruling class control Trump?
At the same time, there are signs that Trump is being brought to heel. He has stepped back from his initial attack on NATO and even convinced other NATO members to contribute more to the organization (Washington Post, 6/17/17). For all of Trump’s bluster, he has yet to actually decertify the Iran deal. Longer-term thinkers in the ruling class have successfully inserted their voices into the Trump administration. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was formerly the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, perhaps the company most reliant on U.S. imperialism’s long-term commitment to control over Middle East oil.
Capitalism offers workers war and fascism
At this point, it is hard to say for sure what will happen as the dogfight within the U.S. ruling class plays out. Trump may endure or he may be removed and replaced. The impact on the international working class is less difficult to predict, however. Whether Trump is impeached or finishes his term; whether Democrats win big in the 2018 mid-term elections or Republicans keep their majorities; whether a Democrat wins the 2020 election or Trump gets re-elected—none of these things will change the fundamental shape of the future. None will alter the racist, sexist, imperialist nature of capitalism, or the increasingly fascist conditions that workers face around the world. None will prevent the carnage of world war, where the rulers will be eager to sacrifice millions to preserve their filthy profit system.
For the workers of the world, no capitalist boss can ever be “fit” to lead society. It’s the task of Progressive Labor Party to put all of these warmongering mass murderers out of business—to turn the guns around and turn imperialist war into a war for revolutionary communism.

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This is  part of an extensive series about the Bolshevik Revolution and the triumphs, as well as the defeats, of the world communist movement of the 20th century. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.

There are many anti-communist lies spread by bosses everywhere, including about Ukraine. The far right-wing is strong in Ukraine in part because it is backed by the Ukrainian government, which masquerades as “not far right.” Fascist lies are accepted as the official truth, taught in Ukrainian schools and promoted by Ukrainian academics. The two basic lies involve the “Holodomor” of the 1930s and Ukraine’s “freedom fighters” — really, Nazi collaborators and mass murderers — during World War II.
The facts
The Holodomor, derived from “to kill by starvation,” refers to the phony genocide by famine in the Soviet Ukraine. There never was any “Holodomor” or deliberate starvation of Ukrainians, or of anybody else in the Soviet Union (USSR). It’s a lie disseminated by Ukrainian nationalists and fascists, with no historical evidence. The “Holodomor” myth was politically motivated from the start. It originated in the Ukrainian diaspora (Ukrainians living outside Ukraine), a population led by veterans of Ukrainian Nazi forces.
While the famine of 1932-33 took a terrible toll, it was only one of a long series of catastrophes. Russia and Ukraine had experienced famine every two to four years for a millennium — yes, for a thousand years, at least — and devastating famines every decade or so. There were serious famines in 1920-1923, 1924-5, 1927-8, and again in 1932-33.
The Soviet leadership, Joseph Stalin included, did not understand the extent of these famines for some time. No one did. When they finally realized it, they sent millions of tons of food and grain aid to Ukraine and to other regions of the USSR. They also sent tractors and “political departments” to organize agriculture. The result was a good harvest in 1933, which ended the famine.
About 10 percent of the population of Ukraine died from the 1932-33 famine, roughly the same percentage as in 1920-23. The 90 percent who survived brought home the harvest and stopped the famine — with significant Soviet aid.
Thanks to the collectivization of agriculture, which took place mainly in 1930-31, farming was reorganized on a large-scale and increasingly mechanized basis. Collectivization was the greatest humanitarian triumph of the 20th century. It put an end to the famines that had devastated Ukraine and Russia for a thousand years or more! (There was one more famine in the Soviet Union, in 1946-47. It was caused by the devastation of World War II plus the worst drought in centuries, and affected all of Europe and much of Asia. Even England had to institute bread rationing.)
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were trained by Germany’s Nazis. They entered the USSR with Adolph Hitler’s troops and participated in mass murders of Jewish and Polish workers and communists. As many as 100,000 Polish civilians were slaughtered in 1943-44.
Stepan Bandera led the more hard-core fascist wing of the OUN and eventually consolidated control over Ukraine’s nationalist forces. He was deemed unreliable by the Nazis, who imprisoned him for a time. Then they let him out so he could fight the Red Army again. In 1941, the Banderist leadership declared an “independent” Ukraine state, which was in reality a satellite of Nazi Germany.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was formed in part from the 14th Waffen-SS Division (storm troopers) , an all-Western Ukrainian Nazi SS division.
Lies and damned lies
 In short, both of Ukraine’s foundational historical myths — or, more accurately, lies — have a Nazi origin. And both are taught as “truth” in today’s Ukraine by the Ukrainian government and its institutions!
Russian-speaking workers in eastern Ukraine are affected by these lies as well. But they also question them, and many reject them. As they should do. Now the open fascists are becoming prominent in the new Ukrainian government in Kiev. This isn’t surprising, since fascist lies have been officially propagated and taught in Ukraine for the past 15 to 20 years.
The question of grain exports
Like the pre-revolutionary Czarist regimes, the Soviet government exported grain. While the USSR was exporting it was also allocating much more grain to seed and famine relief. The government accumulated some three million tons in reserves during this period and then allocated two million tons from that to famine relief. Soviet archival sources indicate that the regime returned five million tons of grain from procurements back to villages throughout the USSR in the first half of 1933. This greatly exceeded the amount exported.
However, there was simply not enough food to feed the whole population, even if all exports had been stopped instead of just drastically curtailed, as they were. According to Professor Mark Tauger, the world expert on Russian and Soviet famines:
…[E]ven a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. … The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.
The Soviet government used these procurements to feed 40 million people in the cities and industrial sites who were also starving, further evidence that the harvest was small. About 10 percent of the population of Ukraine died from the famine or associated diseases. But 90 percent survived, the vast majority of whom were peasants, army men of peasant background or workers of peasant origin. The surviving peasants had to work very hard, under conditions of insufficient food, to sow and bring in the 1933 harvest. They did so with significant aid from the Soviet government.
The Soviet government’s large-scale relief campaign which, together with their own hard work under the most difficult conditions, enabled the peasants to produce a large harvest in 1933. In Tauger’s judgment:
[T]he general point [is that] the famine was caused by natural factors and that the government helped the peasants produce a larger harvest the next year and end the famine.
The so-called “Holodomor” or “deliberate” and “man-made” famine interpretation is not simply mistaken on some important points. Its proponents misrepresent history by omitting evidence that would undermine their interpretation. It is not history but political propaganda disguised as history.

NEW YORK CITY—About 500 hundred City University of New York faculty, staff and students rallied by the New York Stock Exchange, joined by faculty from Rutgers, nurses from the New York State Nurses’ Association, and members from community and religious groups.
The demonstration was called by the CUNY faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), against the recent brazenly anti-working class tax bill signed into law by U.S. president Trump over Christmas. The PSC claimed this “emergency demonstration” would send a message in the “heart of corporate profiteering” on the day of Congressional voting for the tax bill.
Progressive Labor Party salutes workers who protested the latest attack from Racist-in-Chief Trump. The tax bill will cut social services for the working class and reflects deep splits in the ruling class. As opposed to the domestic wing of the U.S. ruling class, the imperialist wing needs financial and ideological backing for their coming wars. These tax cuts are a hinderance to that long-term agenda(see more next issue). In this period of relatively low class struggle, more people need to stand up against all the bosses’ attacks.  
Symbolic militancy
Chants like “Kill the Bill” and “7K or Strike” were frequently chanted by the multiracial and young crowd of women and men, with the second chant referring to the demands of adjunct faculty to receive a pay increase from $3500 to $7000 per class taught in the current round of PSC contract negotiations with CUNY. Unfortunately for the energetic hundreds who came looking for leadership, they didn’t get any from the PSC!
As a part of the demonstration, fifteen PSC officers and pre-selected faculty coordinated with the NYPD to be voluntarily arrested (see letter from an arrestee, page 6). The cops allowed them to gather and sit near the Stock Exchange entrance, and then allowed journalists from the bosses’ media to take pictures. In a symbolic effort to demonstrate their supposed militancy — despite not actually blocking the Stock Exchange entrance — the NYPD cheerfully obliged the PSC misleadership’s symbolism by arresting them for blocking the Stock Exchange entrance.
For workers and students present who live in neighborhoods under constant racist police terror, the sight of these “militant” union so-called leaders coordinating and staging an arrest with the full cooperation of the NYPD must have been a strange one.
Following liberal leaders is a dangerous trap that will only hurt the working class.
Rise up or die-in?
Members of the Progressive Labor Party and friends among the students and faculty attended, and at one point, the PSC officers had a section of the march lie down in the middle of Broad Street. They called this a “die-in,” where people passively lie down and pretend that they’re dead, while journalists working for capitalist-owned newspapers step on them and trip over them trying to take their pictures (see letter, page 3).
This level of “emergency” mobilization against the tax bill seems convenient given the Supreme Court is imminently ruling against the agency fee, forcing unions to scramble to keep members loyal and dues paying.
Away from the “die-in” and the artificial bravery of the PSC misleaders, PL’ers and rank-and-file members of the PSC and allied unions led militant chants. While selling CHALLENGE, several conversations were held with friends and demonstrators comparing the media saviness of today’s publicity stunt with the PSC misleaders’ claims to fight for the interests of the adjunct faculty. How can education workers, especially adjuncts, tell when the PSC officers are actually fighting for power, or just “symbolically”? Just look at how the PSC officers relied on the NYPD to stage the demonstration.
Real working class leaders like the Black youth of Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge and elsewhere relied on the working class, because police are exactly the last people workers can ever trust. And as the PSC misleaders’ strange behavior again and again demonstrates, liberals literally lead workers right into the police’s arms.
Unions and capitalism
The behavior of these PSC misleaders is less strange when one considers their role under capitalism. Early on in capitalist history, workers learned that their strength multiplied when they organized trade unions to collectively negotiate for important reforms, like higher pay and better working conditions.
In the U.S., historical twentieth century unions like the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized militant mass strikes led by women, immigrant, Black, and white workers. Radical organizers like Helen Keller, “The Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Mother” Jones, Eugene Debs, “Big Bill” Haywood, William Z. Foster and masses of others led militant, earth-shaking strikes in nearly every major U.S. industry from the mines to the mills prior to World War I. Inspired by revolutionary ideas, these workers didn’t do it with passive “die-ins.” Their massive “sit-down” strikes were organized occupations that mobilized entire industries and cities.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, these same organizers supported the Bolsheviks and formed what became the Communist Party USA. But even after decades of stunning organizing successes, when the old international communist movement decided to put revolutionary politics secondary to union organizing, its defeat was a certainty long before it happened.
Revolution, not reform
Even the relatively few militant unions left today cannot and do not lead the way forward. That’s up to the communists, who must organize within their unions to spread communist ideas. Unions exist within the legal boundaries set by capitalists and do not fundamentally threaten capitalism, but millions of workers who believe in revolutionary communist ideas do!
Today’s unions form an important part of the bosses’ state, colluding with the Democratic Party in exerting political control over the working class. While certain factions of the ruling class clearly want them destroyed, this does not automatically mean that unions and their misleaders are our friends!
The PSC misleaders are trying to convince us to join them on the hamster wheel of liberalism and reform. They are utterly unwilling to confront the cage of capitalism, and meanwhile they build the illusions that capitalism can be reformed and that the NYPD can play nice.
And thus, the PSC misleadership’s behavior is not so strange after all! Their symbolic actions do not represent real working class power, unlike the multiracial rank-and-file mass communist movement of campus faculty, students, and workers that PLP is building on campuses across CUNY. PLP’s growth means the days of this “symbolic” nonsense are numbered. For the masses of workers looking for a way out of capitalism, joining PLP means true resistance to the growing fascist attacks by fighting for communism, and giving the bosses and their capitalist system a new meaning to the term “die-in”!

TEL AVIV—Progressive Labor Party here is working within the Coalition for Direct Employment. This is a reformist mass organization that fights against the horrors of contract labor.
Contract bosses are essentially wage-slave traders. They hire workers, and then lend them to various businesses. Thus, a large business employs the worker in practice, but the legal employer, who pays the wage, is the contract boss hired by that business. This allows all sorts of abuse without holding the actual boss—the one hiring the contractor to provide workers—accountable. Contract bosses often pay very low wages and ignore benefit laws. The actual employer usually treats the contract workers, at best, as second-class workers, and at worst—as slave labor.
The Coalition, an open democratic organization, aims to get rid of contract work and get all workers direct employment. Everyone has a voice, leadership and membership. Even if this is your first day in the Coalition, you can speak up and be heard in it. The leadership team is mostly composed of women; most of the team members are working-class and only a few are “activists.”
The current coordinator (chair-person) is a working-class Black Ethiopian woman. The Coalition replaces its coordinator every five or so years; it has no “Leader for Life” as is common on the Revisionist Left. In short, it is a working-class organization open to everyone.
One coalition member, who is also a PLP communist, is a contract worker at a mall belonging to Azrieli Malls, Israel’s largest mall chain. The super-rich Azrieli family, one of Israel’s 19 richest families, owns this chain. They hire contract workers for housekeeping and security, pay minimum wage and sometimes do not pay for the lunch breaks. They even avoid paying legal benefits.
Sexism in the workplace
The Azrieli Malls employ women to clean toilets, including men’s bathrooms. They often do not allow the workers to lock the bathroom while cleaning. This means that men come and go, and sometimes go to the urinal right in front of them.
When asked to go to the stalls and close the door, some react to the women in a demeaning, sexist manner, sometimes to the level of sexual harassment. The bosses insist that women clean these bathrooms and continue to suffer constant harassment.
Last year, when the boss wanted to fire a worker who protested about this, the coalition bombarded the Azrieli Malls management with e-mails and text messages, and the worker was able to keep her job. The organization is now campaigning for direct employment at the Azrieli Malls.
We organized youth and workers from other work places to form a flash mob in front of the largest Azrieli mall in Tel-Aviv. We produced several videos and shared them on social media. We also leafleted in the malls. Progressive Labor Party will continue this fight with the coalition while exposing the exploitative nature of the capitalist system in the process. Wage labor, in its most basic essence, means being exploited economically and being robbed of our basic human dignity. The conditions are both racist and sexist.
The exploitative, sexist mall and contract bosses will not get away with their crimes!