NEW YORK CITY—Twenty-five PLP members and friends in the community from eight different countries  held a forum connecting Yemen, Venezuela and the rebellion in Charlottesville. For the first time, seven immigrants from Yemen participated. Together we read a leaflet about the theme. The discussion took place in English, Spanish, and Arabic.
We made the connections between these three places in different parts of the world. Forums like these are the basis of international working-class unity.
Yemen
Yemen has been destroyed by non-stop bombing by Saudi Arabia, backed up by U.S. bombing drones and billions of U.S. dollars in armaments to Saudi Arabia. Yemen has untapped oil and natural gas reserves, is located on an important oil shipping waterway and is directly across from Djubouti, where the U.S. has a new military base overlooking oil riches and oil routes from West Africa to the Middle East and beyond. As our Yemeni friends said, “It’s about power and oil.”
This genocidal war by the Saudis, backed by the U.S., against the Houthi rebels, backed by Iran, has killed more than 10,000 civilians and wounded over 40,000. By UN estimates seven million Yemenis out of a population of 25 million are facing starvation. According to the World Health Organization there are 777,229 cases of cholera, soon to surpass Haiti which reached 815,000 cases seven years after the outbreak there. It has taken only six months to reach those numbers in Yemen. More than half of the cholera victims in Yemen are below 18 years of age and 26 percent of those are under 5. The utter destruction of infrastructure and sewer systems has led to a near total absence of pure drinking water. In addition there is a near total blockade on the entry of any kind of aid. The Yemeni refugee crisis equals Syria’s resulting in many deaths; Yemeni refugees are among those targeted by the U.S. government’s anti-Muslim travel ban. We are learning more every day from our Yemeni friends.
Venezuela
    Like Yemen in Venuezuela it’s all about imperialist competition for control of oil. We talked about the growing tension between the U.S. and Venezuela, focusing on the rivalry between U.S. and Chinese imperialists over control of oil reserves. In Venuezuela the working class is facing shortages of food, medicine and basic services. The children and infant mortality rate has risen drastically. All this is due to the fall of oil prices, in great part designed by the U.S. and its Saudi partners. Furthermore the U.S. government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund opposition groups to Maduro, leading to hundreds of deaths.
Charlottesville
    On August 11 and 12 300 Nazi terrorist and white supremacists invaded the small university town of Charlottesville to «defend» the Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee. Given the green light by the election of arch racist, fascist Donald Trump, they marched with no police interference attacking protesters, who fought back valiently, killing one and wounding 19.
    Everyone at the forum agreed that the deadly situation is Yemen and Venezuela are the consequence of inter-imperialist rivalry for power and control of oil that puts us closer to world war 3. In the U.S. the intensification of racism and nationalism is what the ruling class pushes to divide and win the working class to support racist terror and poverty as they force young people to be cannon fodder in wider wars.
Only the unity of the international working class and the building of a mass revolutionary communist PLP can make us stronger to confront the horrors of imperialist war and enable us to convert those wars into revolution for communism and workers power. We concluded our event with distribution of CHALLENGE and vowed to continue the fight for the working class of Yemen. All enjoyed a delicious lunch with food from Ecuador and Yemen. Power to the international working class!

TEXAS—Two months after the devastation from Hurricane Harvey, the world series has put Houston in the spotlight again. For much of the city life seems to have returned to normal.
Nationalist Slogan Masks Capitalism’s Role
The “Houston Strong” slogan that was pushed in the aftermath of the storm has now reached a fever pitch with the Astros win. This slogan masks the capitalist causes of the disaster and hides the ongoing crisis faced by the workers hardest hit by the hurricane.
Despite being a natural disaster, the laws of capitalism are at the heart of what made Hurricane Harvey a catastrophe.
Houston’s population has grown exponentially in the past few decades and developers seeking to maximize profit have taken full advantage of Houston’s lax building laws. Houston’s lack of zoning laws doesn’t require builders to use flood prevention like green zones or retention ponds to offset their development. And with the explosion of urban dense housing near the inner city and unregulated sprawl outside the city, there is very little land left to absorb floodwater in a rain event like Harvey.
Added to this is the city’s aging flood protection infrastructure. The bayou system in Houston is not capable of handling the large storms that have hit the city in the past several years and development around them has left little room to widen the bayou system.  
The Addicks and Barker reservoirs, the only two reservoirs in the city to hold storm water, are 70 years old and in desperate need of updating. In the late 2000s the Army Corps of Engineers rated Houston’s reservoirs and spillways as “extremely high-risk” infrastructure. Like much of the U.S., infrastructure is rotting away as the bosses divert billions to their imperialist wars in the Middle East, Africa and around the world.
In the midst of the storm, it wasn’t the government that saved people but instead it was a multi-racial army of workers that organized to save themselves and their fellow workers. Images of white workers in particular with access to fishing boats and large trucks rescuing fellow Asian, Latin, Black and white workers demonstrated the potential for multi-racial unity among workers.
Despite this display of working-class multi-racial unity, the narrative the media ran with was a nationalist “Houston Strong” account that promoted an all-class patriotic version of the rescues.
Racist Attack on Black Youth
On top of the “Houston Strong” narrative, the media injected its usual dose of racist “looting” coverage. At the height of the storm, Reuters ran a story claiming, “Storm-hit Houston reels from influx of evacuees, crime outbreak” citing an “outbreak of looting and armed robberies”. The “looters” in these stories are almost always assumed to be Black youth. Despite appearing in an international newsfeed, there was no evidence of a “crime outbreak” to back up this claim. In fact, the crime rate actually went down during the hurricane compared to the previous year (kut.org).
While a slew of fake tweets and news reports labeled Black youth as “looters,” the reality was that Black and Latin youth were among the most devastated by the hurricane. The more time we spent volunteering in the evacuation shelters, the more obvious it became that despite the widespread nature of the disaster, it was mainly poor Black and Latin workers who lacked funds and a safety net that caused them to end up in the evacuation shelters.
FEMA
The structural racism of this capitalist system means that mainly poor Black and Latin workers who live in the most impoverished, segregated neighborhoods in the city and whose school are the most underfunded will bear the brunt of these capitalist disasters. The pennies FEMA is offering families who have the time and energy to navigate through FEMA’s bureaucratic hula-hoops is barely enough to cover a few bills much less restart your life. For undocumented workers, the fear of deportation has prevented many from seeking government assistance, further deepening their already desperate situation. Disasters like Harvey only deepen the structural racism that already exists under capitalism.
Volunteering in the evacuation shelter and working with the teacher’s union to help teachers and their families clean out their homes, Progressive Labor Party had the opportunity to build ties with fellow workers and to discuss the ways in which capitalism turned a natural disaster into a man-made catastrophe. Now that school is in session, we are looking to work with students and their families in more long-term ways to both expose this racist capitalist system and to build a movement to fight back against it.

The sexual assault scandal that started with Harvey Weinstein has spread across Hollywood and engulfed the whole of the bosses’ media in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and France. Masses of women workers unleashed their wrath, publicly coming forward to call out their harassers and tormenters, many of them in the bosses’ entertainment industry and the bosses’ governments. Some were shamed into resignation. In France, women shared stories on social media with the hashtag, #Balancetonporc, or “rat out your pig.”
Waves of inspiring anti-sexist stories have even rocked local communities as women workers made the exposure of Weinstein their own.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party salute this mass bravery. Our class will need it to build a communist world without racism and sexism. Fighting for a movement capable of eliminating capitalism also means analyzing reality, and investigating things like the exposure of Harvey Weinstein.
The reality is: these exposures have nothing to do with any justice under capitalism for the vicious sexist attacks against women workers. Harvey Weinstein’s depraved attacks on women in the movie industry were widely known for decades.
The New York City District Attorneys and the NYPD had evidence against Weinstein but never chose to press charges (NYT, 10/11). The editorial staff at major capitalist news outlets including the New York Times, NBC and New York Magazine suppressed stories exposing Weinstein for years. Reporters not only knew about what was going on, many of them had been victims themselves (Weekly Standard, 10/9).
Capitalists and their media don’t care for women workers. The bosses see women workers, at best, as instruments of production of future workers, or as objects. Capitalist media empires rake in staggering profits from sexist marketing and pornography, while their friends in the informal capitalist economy traffic women workers into slavery around the world.
Women and girls comprise the majority of the largest disaster facing the international working class: refugees forced across racist capitalist borders from Central America to South Sudan, DR Congo, Syria and the Middle East. Across these borders, women workers are herded into refugee camps and subject to extreme poverty, abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. In Yemen, the Saudi and U.S. bombings have forced women into even more extreme conditions.
The reason the bosses’ media is focusing on the Harvey Weinstein scandal has to do with shifting allegiances within and among the capitalist class, and their Democratic Party.
U.S. Capitalists: Changing Tactics, Institutions
In the first place, the movie industry, the media and the political gridlock in Washington, D.C. are losing a fair amount of the influence they once had. Animals like Weinstein and others play important roles for the bosses, but that role is changing thanks to political-economic pressures (Weekly Standard, 10/9) as U.S. capitalism becomes more desperate. No longer protected by the capitalist state’s media, old scores are being settled, and victims are stepping forward.
Weinstein’s exposure is also about the direction the capitalists may take the Democratic Party. In the opening months of the Democratic and Republican primaries for the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy revolved around promoting Trump as the Republican contender in the general election. Their thinking was that Trump’s gutter racism and sexism would make him easier to beat than a more mainstream candidate, like Marco Rubio.
The election result came as a shock to Clinton, the capitalist class, and probably even Trump himself. It led to disaster for the Clinton electoral machine and the Democratic Party, and there have been brutal internal fights within their party since. These fights reflect the capitalist class’ deep disagreements on how to win workers in the U.S. to support a more liberal, inclusive brand of U.S. imperialism to fight rival, emboldened imperialist powers like China and Russia.
The fight within the Democratic Party has on the one hand, politicians like Clinton, Obama, and Nancy Pelosi. On the other, there’s Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others who have drawn masses of students and working class youth angry at the effects of capitalism, and looking for leadership.
Harvey Weinstein was not only one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, he was one of the Clintons’ principal donors. Less than one month after Weinstein was exposed, a new book by former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairwoman Donna Brazile, attacking Hillary’s campaign, is a one-two punch to the Clinton-Obama wing. Taking down Weinstein is a blow to an entire wing of the DNC. For some in the capitalist class anxiously watching China and Russia’s imperial rise, the Clinton-Obama wing may have outlived its usefulness.
Hillary Clinton’s racist, sexist career of service to U.S. imperialism is rightfully hated by millions of workers, but her decline is no victory for the working class. On the contrary, the bosses’ media’s extensive coverage of these scandals and ensuing mass anger may indicate, or certainly precipitate, a resurgent Sanders-Warren wing within their party. And this wing, as beholden to capitalism and defending U.S. imperialism as Clinton or Trump, may pose the greatest danger to the working class yet.
Imperialism and Fascism Rising
It’s no coincidence that the bosses are also infighting over tax reform, to squeeze workers and even certain sectors of the ruling class to pay for their imperialist war machine and defend their blood-soaked empire. They’ll sort out their problems soon enough. To defend U.S. imperialism, the bosses will need fascism, which means first imposing discipline among the U.S. capitalist class.
The disagreements over how the DNC runs is a tactical argument about how to fool and mislead the working class into supporting U.S. imperialism the best.
And once the bosses settle their factional disputes, the next step will be to discipline the working class through a combination of increasing terror on one hand, and loyalty on the other. We are already seeing hints of this as the bosses try to imply that somehow young working-class children, particularly Black and Latin children are potential sexual predators who have to be brought into line. In a perverse hypocrisy that we cannot allow to go unopposed, the sick rulers who have been promoting this horribly sexist culture and destroying the lives of Black and Latin children through a racist segregated school system, pushing of drugs and cutting benefits are now seeking to engage young women in joining them in painting young men as the enemy.
At the moment, Black working class youth like those rebelling in St. Louis, and Charlottesville last summer are disillusioned with U.S. capitalism. That means opportunities for communists in PLP to grow our movement.
Smash Sexism, Racism and Imperialism
For communists, the bravery of the mainly women workers raising their voices and demanding justice demands support from the working class.
Support means both fighting back on the job, and building study groups to study capitalism and the science of revolution. Capitalism depends on sexist, racist and nationalist divisions among workers to extract maximum profits from them all. Under capitalism, women workers, especially Black women, suffer the sharpest and most intense form of capitalism’s exploitation and oppression.
The idea that the ruling class could take on sexism is absurd. The industries where these animals reign are the drivers of the sexist culture that glorifies the objectification of women. In fact, not only are women objectified, but men and women are constantly encouraged to objectify not only others but themselves as well.
Capitalism commodifies everything. Sex is used to sell everything from soap to cars. The wage system makes it impossible for workers to own anything, including our bodies. We are entrapped by the need to work for the capitalists, seek loans from the capitalists and make a living in the industries controlled by the capitalists.
What the bosses offer is more women in the halls of power as the best they can do. But the 500,000 children in Iraq starved to death on the orders of Madeleine Albright, or the now millions killed in wars started at the behest of Secretary of State Clinton let us know how that story always ends.
Wherever capitalism can divide workers the deepest, the worse off ALL workers are. One century ago, striking women workers in Russia knew this. When they convinced men workers to join their strike, together they set into motion what became the Bolshevik Revolution—and the world’s first workers’ state. They proved we can seize power and run the world for ourselves. It will be done again. Join PLP, and help make that day come sooner.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31 this fall. This case centers on the ability of public sector unions to collect so-called “fair-share fees.” These fees are the equivalent of dues charged for services unions provide regardless of membership status to those workers who are not members. Fair share fees were have been collected since the Abood case in 1977 found them constitutional. Ending this practice would financially hurt the unions and further weaken them.
Janus is a Racist Attack
According to the Atlantic Black Star (9/27), the Janus is the latest effort of the States Policy Network (SPN) and the American Legislative and Exchange Council (ALEC) to destroy public sector unions. This effort reflects differences within the ruling class about how to keep workers from fighting back. The main wing of the U.S. ruling class is more willing to tolerate union leaders who support the capitalist system and lead workers away from class struggle and deliver them into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party. The Koch brothers, who fund SPN and ALEC, prefer to destroy the unions altogether.
In 2016 7.1 million government workers were members of unions. That is a little more than 34 percent of all government workers. Since the public sector is the largest employer of Black and historically more likely to join unions than any other racial group, says Jackson, such anti-union campaigns have particular implications for Black workers.
According to Dr Steven C Pitts, UC Berkeley, on average, Black union members earn 16.4 percent higher wages than non-union members and are more likely to have employer-provided health insurance (17 percent) and an employer sponsored retirement plan (18 percent).
Janus v. AFSCME also reflects the pressures US imperialism is facing internationally. To improve their economic competitiveness the rate of exploitation of the working class must be increased.  
Unions Decline Fueled by Anti-communism
The Janus case attacks public sector unions which is the main place where workers are unionized today. In the mid 1950s, 35 percent of all U.S. workers were members of unions. Almost all of these worked in the private sector.
Today, only 11.9 percent of U.S. workers are members of unions. Of this number 6.9 percent are private sector workers while 36.2 percent work in the public sector. A main factor in the decline in unionization was the Taft Hartley Law of 1947. This law outlawed militant activities of unions and made it illegal for Communists to hold union office.

Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary communist party cannot be bound by the bosses’ laws. We understand that capitalism and its laws oppress us. After members of the U.S. Communist Party were kicked out (sometimes willingly) from union leadership, adherence to other Taft-Hartley restrictions limited fightback. PL’ers seek to bring communist ideas into the workers struggles. This would mean that court cases like Janus would be unable to defeat us. PL’ers fight like hell in the class struggle but understand that to get rid of the capitalist system of class oppression we must build for communist revolution.