When the leaders speak of peace,
The common people know that war is coming.
When the leaders curse war, the mobilization orders are already written out.
—Bertolt Brecht, German communist
On July 4, the celebration of U.S. imperialism, and just three days prior to the G20, the annual gathering of the world’s leading capitalist states and their bankers, North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching Alaska. The launch intensified tensions between the U.S. and China and moved the world closer to the next major war.
While war is inevitable under capitalism, none of the major imperialist powers are presently able to win masses of workers to fight and die for the rulers’ interests. Although the bosses are all planning for war, world events are not fully under their control. Historically, an important task of communists is to warn the working class of coming war and to organize to turn imperialist war into class war for communism, where the working class seizes state power. That task is now more important than ever.
Nuclear Weapons in an Inter-Imperialist Flashpoint
North Korean bosses, led by Kim Jong-un, have learned the fatal danger of giving in to the United States. They witnessed the overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the top Libyan boss for more than 40 years, after Libya surrendered its nuclear weapons program. “That is what Mr. Kim believes his nuclear program will prevent—an American attempt to topple him. He may be right” (New York Times, 7/5).
The Korean Peninsula is a historic buffer and invasion route, a node of vital imperialist interests in East Asia. The U.S. threat of force was aimed to intimidate North Korea and China and reassure its wary allies. But despite talk of a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s missile installations, U.S. maneuverability is limited by its own internal instability and increasing isolation.
Shifting Alliances, Global and Regional
The weakening of U.S. imperialism correlates with a global power shift. The major U.S. imperialist rivals, China and Russia, appear to be drawing closer to each other, at least for the moment. A temporary collaboration between the U.S. and China to subdue North Korea has given way to a joint effort by China and Russia. The two countries’ foreign ministries have proposed a moratorium on North Korea’s testing of nuclear explosive devices and ballistic missiles while asking the U.S. and South Korea to halt their “large-scale joint exercises” (The Duran, 6/5).
Indeed, Russia and China have common interests there. Both share a land border with North Korea and have diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. But, above all, both are desperate to check US ambitions in their backyards. It’s this desire, this fear of being hemmed in by the West and its allies, that is one of the factors pushing Moscow and Beijing together in a seemingly ever-tightening embrace (CNN, 6/7).
Instability Begets Instability
The relative decline of the U.S. as the top imperialist super-power is reflected in the behavior of its longtime regional allies in East Asia, Japan and South Korea. The new president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, claims the country will “learn to say no” to U.S. rulers (Washington Post, 5/9). South Korea has already stopped deployment of the U. S. THAAD anti-missile system, which China considered a threat. Moon Jae-in is well aware that his nation would be North Korea’s first target in a nuclear war.
Japan, the main regional rival to China and main regional ally for the U.S., is also wavering. Japan felt slighted by Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade agreement embraced by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. By entering a new trade deal with the European Union, Japan sent the U.S. a message: “Both [Japan and the EU] want to show that they can fill the vacuum left by America’s withdrawal under…Trump from its role as the world’s trade leader” (The Economist, 7/8).
Diplomacy + Military Buildup =Inevitable War
For a capitalist power in crisis and decay, the solution is sure to be war. Diplomacy—and its inevitable rupture—paves the way. As the bosses’ media noted, North Korea’s actions were “quickly closing off the possibility of a diplomatic solution” and the United States was “prepared to defend itself and its allies with its considerable military forces if need be” (Reuters, 7/6).
Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, the leading think tank in service to U.S. hegemony, recently rejected two U.S. options: accepting North Korea as a nuclear state or an immediate military strike. With diplomatic negotiations having repeatedly failed to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, the best Haass can propose is “more creative diplomacy,” a transitional step toward a war that will slaughter millions of workers:
“Trump correctly concluded that the greatest threat to U.S. national security is North Korea’s accelerating nuclear and missile programs…
An interim agreement would not solve the…problem…And even if diplomacy failed again, at least the United States would have demonstrated that it tried negotiations before turning to one of the other, more controversial options” (Foreign Affairs, July/August).
For all their hypocritical talk about diplomacy, sanctions, and the horrors of nuclear conflict, the U.S. bosses are just buying time. Preparations for bigger wars are proceeding at full speed. New
submarine-based “super-fuze” devices triple the killing power of the U.S. ballistic missile arsenal, which was already exponentially more threatening than North Korea’s nukes. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes (3/1), the implications for World War III are clear:
“Russian planners will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly feasible US preemptive nuclear strike capability—a capability that would require Russia to undertake countermeasures that would further increase the already dangerously high readiness of Russian nuclear forces. “
Need Nationalism for Warfare
The U.S. bosses know from past experience (such as in Vietnam) that technological superiority is not enough to prevail in war. Unless masses of workers—including working-class soldiers—are won to lethal nationalist ideas, the capitalist rulers will lose. For all of Trump’s weaknesses, his “America First” sloganeering helps the bosses divide the international working class, and mislead U.S. workers into identifying with their murderous rulers. The bosses’ media plays its anti-communist part by attacking North Korea as a repressive dictatorship and painting its workers as unthinking robots. In reality, every government on earth today—with or without the cover of “democratic” elections—is a dictatorship of the capitalist class. And as the history of the Korean Peninsula attests, workers have the potential to fight back (see above article).
Turn Imperialist War Into Class War
In the 21st century alone, imperialist war and the ravages of capitalism have destroyed the lives of tens of millions of workers. An inter-imperialist proxy war has decimated Syria, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions made refugees. Imperialist war remains the bosses’ ultimate weapon in their perpetual battle to dominate resources, markets, and labor, all in pursuit of maximum profit.
Living on the brink of wider war has become the “new normal.” This is a great danger for the international working class, especially in the absence of a mass anti-imperialist mobilization, as we saw in the communist-led and communist-influenced movements during the Vietnam War.
With unpredictable politicians like Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un, a major war could erupt sooner rather than later. But most workers are not yet won to the bosses’ agenda. The Progressive Labor Party’s task is to rebuild hope and class consciousness among the workers of the world—to show that communism is a future worth fighting for. Let’s turn these imperialist wars for profit into a class war for communist revolution. Let’s redouble our efforts to build PLP. Power to the working class!
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, July 8—Fifteen hundred anti-racists militantly confronted the KKK
today, shouting powerful chants that forced them to shut down their racist rally. PLP and members of the Seven Hills Progressive Society from Lynchburg Virginia joined this multiracial rally of workers and students. As usual, the local ruling class used their state power to protect these racists, deploying around 200 kkkops in riot gear to attempt to hold back the anti-racist counter-protesters. This exercise of state power was a reminder that racism is critical to the life of their capitalist system.
Chased the Klan Away
The group of about 50 Klansmen, some in their traditional white robes, came to Charlottesville to oppose the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, a leading figure of the pro-slavery U.S. Confederacy. They were escorted in by the kkkops, who had been sent to “protect members of the Ku Klux Klan from counterprotesters” (New York Times, 7/8). They were quickly drowned out by the chants of the demonstrators. PL’ers joined antiracist chants, and many demonstrators took CHALLENGE, vowing to continue the struggle against racism and the KKK. In just under an hour the Klan members finally slunk away. The antiracists refused to let the Klan go quietly, and chased after them, fiercely chanting. The riot cops viciously responded by attacking the anti-racist demonstrators with tear gas and 22 arrests.
State Terror Unleased on Antiracist Protesters
It’s no surprise that the bosses used their cops to attack antiracists, but protect the KKK instead. Since the founding of this country racism was used to justify slavery, the system Robert E. Lee fought to defend. Numerous local, state and federal laws passed over centuries were required to
entrench racist divisions inside the working class, and weaken our ability to fight back against our exploitation. The most vicious state terror was used by police on working people who insisted on struggling together against exploitation (see Lerone Bennett’s “Road Not Taken” on the lynch law of colonial era as well as the Hollywood film “Free State of Jones” on the Reconstruction era which followed the Civil War.)
The kkkops brought out against the antiracists today functioned in this capitalist tradition when they attacked us. As the PLP chant goes: “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan: all are part of the bosses’ plan.”
In fact, the mayor of Charlottesville, Mike Signer, called on residents to stay away from the rally, as if nonviolence defeated the Confederacy. He tried to encourage workers to attend alternate events orchestrated by NAACP misleaders. Whenever the KKK or Nazis rear their ugly head, liberal misleaders and churches do their best to keep people from fighting back.
Signer’s pleas to ignore gutter racism clearly didn’t stop these 1,500 fighters that boldly showed up. One anti-Klan protester said that she wanted to come “because I believe that if you just stay
silent, nothing gets done” (npr.org, 7/9). When the Klan is confronted by multiracial fightback, they are terrified. PLP has a long history of beating them back and driving them out of our streets.
When the working class rejects passivity and organizes multiracial fightback against gutter racists like these, and the racism of this system, we are training for when we will need to defeat the capitalists for good.
The militancy of these 1,500 antiracists shows the potential of the working class to win. Turning the fight against racism, sexism, and nationalism into an international fight for a working-class run society—communism—is the only way to once and for all smash the horrors of this racist and sexist capitalist system.
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Chicago Mayor’s Racism Grad Plan Props Up Wider War & Growing Fascism
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- 13 July 2017 178 hits
Barack Obama’s best buddy Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has once again proven himself equal to his buddy in the task of generating ever-new ways of attacking Black youth in this city. Workers here will never forget his sixteen month cover-up of the police murder of sixteen year old Laquan McDonald. Now Emmanuel is trying to pass off a thinly veiled stratagy to bolster U.S. troop levels in an era of widening war as an act of “compassion” for the mainly Black youth of Chicago.
Racist Rahm has cooked up this insidious operation by intrroducing new high school graduation requirements for Chicago Public Schools. Starting with the class of 2020, students who have completed all academic requirements to graduate will not receive a diploma without a “post graduation plan”: seniors must certify they have a college acceptance, a job, a “gap year” (a year off before starting college), a job training program, or have joined the military in order to finish high school.
The finely tuned gradations for “worthiness” inherent in Emmanuel’s multi-track proposal leave unspoken the fate of the many tens of thousands of students who the schools and overburdened counselors will inevitably fail. As scores of students suffer a widespread unemployment crisis with its attendant gang activity, gun violence, police repression and mass incarceration.
The unemployment rate for Chicago youth between the ages of 20-24 is a staggering 47 percent for Black men and 20 percent for Latin men. Black and Latin students make up 84 percent of CPS (Chicago Tribune, 1/17). Due to the racism inseparable from capitalism students who cannot get into college and cannot find work are more likely to be Black and Latin. Such a requirement is a covert attempt to push many of these youth into the bloody hands of the U.S. military.
A hallmark of fascism is winning workers to viewing some portion of our class as good, worthy and productive members of society, and others as hindrances, and a drag on the potential of the nation, and ultimately as expendable. This dynamic is the essence of Trump’s infamous “Muslim ban” or the debates over the “Dreamer” immigration scheme. In each case the capitalist state is expanding agreement with scrutinizing and terrorizing entire populations and branding entire segments as unworthy and stripping them of any pretense of “rights.”
As the drive towards war intensifies, the rulers need our young people to be “military ready”. The Council on Foreign Relations, a ruling class think tank, made this clear in a 2012 report on military preparedness written by former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor to George W. Bush. That report promoted “Common Core Standards” as a way to academically prepare more young people for today’s military, redoubled expansion of STEM programs to produce the engineers and technically proficient soldiers required in today’s heavily computerized military and even more exposure to foreign languages to facilitate communication with the peoples of far off lands US imperialism seeks to dominate.
The bosses’ military has deep roots in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), with six military high schools: three for the Army and one each specializing in training for the Navy, Marines, and the Air Force. More than 9000 students, predominately Black and Latin, are enrolled in Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp (JROTC), where half of the drill-sergeant/teacher salaries are paid by the Armed Forces. For schools suffering from years of racist budget cuts JROTC is less a choice than a necessity. Emmanuel is leading the charge in preparing Black and Latino youth to die or get wounded fighting for the bosses’ profits. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Army soldiers were almost twice as likely to be injured or killed, compared to other military forces. In CPS, 80% of students in JROTC are in Army programs (Chicago Reporter, 1/14).
PLP’s recently concluded summer project was a glimpse of a readiness program for youth that couldn’t be more different from racist Rahm’s. We are making ourselves ready to organize revolution and lead a worker-run communist society. Over the course of a week our intergenerational, multiracial and gender-diverse collective pushed our limits. We organized demonstrations, reached out to workers in the transit, health care, steel and temp sectors. We examined capitalism’s inherent exploitative nature in study groups and explored our communist alternative in theory and in practice. Peers from other cities joined Chicago youth across the U.S. in playing a leading role in this project (see page 6). As the bosses’ war plans gather momentum, PLP is building internationalist class consciousness among workers and youth. We do that so that in coming wars soldiers will do as they have in the past and turn the guns on their class enemies instead of their working class brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. They will be part of rebuilding a new communist world “from the ashes of the old.”
Healthcare and Congress’ alternative to the (Un)Affordable Care Act is a hot topic. People all over the U.S. have been fighting back on these possible health care cuts. On this date there was a rally held in Indianapolis, Indiana to confront Senator Todd. Todd, and the ruling class are proposing cutting Medicaid, which will have a deadly effect on people with disabilities. The racist cuts will also hit Black workers heavily. Twenty-eight percent of adult Black workers under 65 depend on Medicaid. At the demonstration, cops showed no mercy to workers with disabilities as they stole phones to erase evidence and assaulted others—sending one person to the hospital.
ADAPT, a disability rights organization, asked its members to engage with politicians about the deadly affect this could have.
The ruling class will do anything to promote the idea that workers are just another commodity. When profits are main concern, workers with disabilities are seen as people who can’t carry their weight in society (i.e. pad the bosses pockets) and do not deserve handouts. The bosses will turn right around and give the same vicious treatment to any member of the working class who dare oppose their tyranny.
Too often, not enough comrades are present to build among the people to put their bodies on the line to oppose the bosses’ greed. The working class has to be present, active, and able to organize with lack of accessibility. If we fellow workers do not show up to these struggles, we leave our comrades with disabilities behind with dead-end reformist lines. We as workers can not afford to undervalue the leadership that workers with disabilities can bring to our ranks. Our fight for a communist world is one that seeks the end of the mistreatment of workers with disabilities by developing all of us into leaders of communist revolution.
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Colombia Construction Workers Halt Bosses’ Production
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- 13 July 2017 149 hits
COLOMBIA—In response to the delay in payment of salaries, 60 angry and courageous construction workers went on strike several months ago, demanding to get back stolen pay. Members of Progressive Labor Party have been working with these workers for more than a year, distributing the paper, discussing the situation of the working class, wage slavery and dialectical materialism. One member of PLP even participated in the activities by advising the workers and trying to prevent retaliations from the bosses.
In reaction to the strike, the bosses brought workers from other sites to sabotage the strike. The bosses tried to convince workers that he wasn’t responsible for the scabs and that “other factors” brought them in. Disgusted at his lies, the workers refused to believe him. They intensified their struggle by blocking the entrance to the site, not even letting in supplies. The member of PLP involved tried to protect workers from the bosses’ retaliation. Despite best efforts, the desperate bosses fired ten workers.
Lessons from the Strike
During the evaluation after the strike, we discussed the lessons of this action with the workers. We asked them why they didn’t take into account that the bosses might retaliate and fire workers. They responded that they did not think the bosses would respond so harshly when workers were simply demanding their hard-earned salaries. In reality, the bosses don’t care about stealing from workers. Bosses already steal from workers in order to make profits. The wages any workers receive are nothing compared to the profits that workers create for the bosses. Bosses are crooks by nature, so we can’t trust them to be nice when workers fight back.
We concluded that workers cannot trust capitalist laws, which were made to justify private property, not to defend working-class needs. We also cannot trust in pacifism, because the bosses will use violence whenever they need to in order to keep workers in line. We have to learn from this valuable experience and be more organized next time. Spontaneity cannot replace leadership and organization. We are still debating with six workers and circulating CHALLENGE at this site.
Whole Damn System Has Got to Go
While workers struggle to get paid their meager wages, Colombia’s productive sector is generating multimillions in profits due to the surge in construction and mining. None of those profits go to enrich the working class. They are going straight to the thick bank accounts of the bosses and rulers. Still worse, the bosses’ filthy mines ruin working-class neighborhoods. A UN report found that mining has taken severe tolls on “access to water, health, [and the] development of agricultural activity” and “a high rate of prostitution also occurs among young people, including high school students, and drug addiction, mainly among men” in towns where mines are created.
The Colombian government also doesn’t care about the workers affected by the expanding mining industry, most of whom come from the poorest parts of the country. President Juan Manuel Santos made mining one of the “motors” of his “Prosperity for All” economic policy, code for “Prosperity for All Capitalists.” The government is on the capitalists’ side, not the workers’.
As long as the capitalist system exists, labor accidents, premature deaths, wage theft and mass firings will continue to be an everydayoccurrence. The greedy ruling class has profited off workers’ misery and low salaries. This worksite where there are 160 workers working tirelessly for 60 hours a week is just one example of how the bosses make a profit. It is the job of PLP to organize with workers and raise revolutionary consciousness. Strikes are an important stepping stone in building working class confidence, but we must not stop there. We must abolish the entire capitalist system so that we can win working-class power.
PLP must keep building with workers in all industries and all countries, from construction workers in Colombia to transit workers in Chicago, so that we can build a revolutionary outlook amongst the international working class. We must organize so all of our actions are planned, taking into account our daily experiences, the conscience level and organization of the masses, the strength of the enemy, and our own strength.We can advance with confidence. We must make our revolutionary Party massive, as a necessary step for the communist revolution that will end the vileness of this criminal, racist, capitalist
system.
