In his first few weeks in office, imperialist-in-chief Donald Trump has shown his willingness to serve the U.S. ruling class’s murderous war machine. From putting Iran “on notice” to openly threatening to block China’s expansion into the South China Sea, Trump is desperate to project the appearance of strength in an ever-weakening U.S. empire. He has escalated Barack Obama’s murderous war in Yemen (see page 2) while continuing to amass troops on Russia’s doorstep, inching the world closer to World War III.
The U.S. ruling class and its massive military, once the world’s leading superpower, now operate in a world where the Russian and Chinese imperialists are challenging U.S. bosses for control over resources and profits. All three imperialist powers understand that Eurasia—the gigantic landmass composed of Europe and Asia—is the key to global supremacy. To control it, they are willing to slaughter the world’s working class.
Russia’s bosses continue to test their U.S. rivals on multiple fronts. In the space of one week in February, Russia secretly deployed an intermediate-range cruise missile in violation of a Cold War-era nuclear forces treaty; stationed a spy ship 30 miles off the coast of Connecticut; and sent four aircraft to buzz a U.S. destroyer in the Black Sea. In the face of disarray in the Trump administration, and the steady weakening of the U.S. empire, the Russian bosses are growing bolder by the day.
These incidents came on the heels of a wave of anti-Russia warmongering. Democrats first fanned the flames of this hysteria after it was alleged that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee to disrupt last fall’s presidential election. Ever since, the bosses’ media has been in a frenzy to intensify it.
Bosses Doubting Trump
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sent out a tangle of mixed signals on both Russia and China, provoking concern within the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class about the new president’s reliability. Trump’s leadership has been openly questioned by two main-wing insiders, General Tony Thomas, head of the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor under President Jimmy Carter. A third ruling-class mainstay, Senator John McCain, told international leaders at the Munich Security Conference that the administration was “in disarray.”
In an Op Ed piece in the February 20 New York Times, Brzezinski attacked “the sometimes irresponsible, uncoordinated and ignorant statements” of Trump’s team. He also gave voice to the bosses’ concern that Trump was slighting China and thereby increasing “the danger that China and Russia could form a strategic alliance.” The U.S. bosses know that China is their most dangerous long-term rival. They also know they aren’t yet ready to go to war with the Chinese rulers. It’s no accident that Trump reaffirmed his support of the “One China” policy on February 9, less than two months after he threatened to abandon it—a stance that was unacceptable to Beijing.
On February 14, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer declared that Trump now expects Russia to “de-escalate violence in Ukraine and return Crimea” to Kiev. But in the next breath, Spicer said: “At the same time, he fully expects to and wants to get along with Russia” (Reuters, 2/14). In the midst of this posturing and confusion, the New York Times revealed that Trump sent two emissaries to broker a backdoor “peace plan” that could enable Crimea to be “leased” to Russia for up to 100 years (2/20). For its part, Russia has shown no signs of backing down. For the Russian ruling class, exerting their influence in Ukraine and waging war in Syria are ways to validate their superpower status and extend their global reach.
The bosses are doing their best to surround Trump with people it trusts, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and weed out the people they don’t. On February 13, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was forced out by a barrage of leaks over his pre-inaugural discussions with the Russian ambassador on possible relief of U.S. sanctions. Trump was apparently persuaded or pressured to replace Flynn with General H.R. McMaster, a ruling class-approved strategist who has long sounded the alarm over Russia’s increasing military capability.
McMaster is “the opposite [of Flynn]—a careful scholar and successful general who’s well-regarded in the Washington foreign policy establishment” (Vox, 2/20). But the bosses still worry about the influence of rogue advisors like Stephen Bannon, the white supremacist and former Goldman Sachs banker who now serves as White House chief strategist, with a seat on the National Security Council:
In practice, it’s far from clear how much influence McMaster will actually have over a president who seems deeply skeptical of people outside his immediate circle and information that troubles his basic worldview (Vox, 2/20).
NATO Instability
At this point, it’s impossible to be certain about Trump’s worldview and where it will lead. His slamming of the European Union and NATO (which he has called “obsolete”) has unsettled U.S.-European relations more than at any time since World War II. Mattis initially told NATO allies that if they didn’t pay their fair share, the U.S. might not come to their defense. He later reassured NATO leaders of U.S. commitment to the alliance, calling it “a fundamental bedrock for the United States and for all the transatlantic community” (reuters.com 2/15). The U.S. ruling class’s wavering commitment to its European alliances reveals a deeper crisis within the center of U.S. imperialism.
To calm U.S. allies in Europe, Mattis has rejected closer military ties with Russia. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, despite his recent ties to Russia as Exxon’s CEO, also reassured foreign leaders that the U.S. will remain firm with Russia. But there is little the U.S. can do to counter Europe’s growing internal instability. Once solid allies like Turkey have threatened to leave NATO and join the Chinese and Russian imperialists in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. A Russian pipeline deal is drawing Germany closer to Moscow’s orbit. These tremors in post-World War II alliances reflect the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries and the greater likelihood of wider wars.
Workers Rising Up
For decades the bosses have worked tirelessly to destroy working class consciousness. Since the reversal of communism in the Soviet Union, this “dark night” has left the working class vulnerable to Trump’s anti-immigrant racism and “America First” nationalism. After decades of low wages and terrible working conditions, many are susceptible to his promise that “America will start winning again.” Trump sells nationalist rhetoric and conspiracy theory to misguide the anger of an alienated working class whose lives have been destroyed by capitalism.
Millions of workers, however, are rising up to oppose the bosses’ murderous agenda. In Belarus, thousands have taken to the streets to stage one of the largest protests there in years against a “parasite law” that imposes a tax on unemployed workers. The wave of anti-Trump and anti-fascist uprisings around the world presents us with opportunity, and also a duty to continue sharpening PL’s anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics. The inability of the U.S. bosses to recruit masses of our Black and Latin youth and students to fight and die in imperialist wars reveals the limits of their ideological hold on the working class. Armed with PL’s politics, these workers can begin to understand that capitalism can never serve their needs, and that we can fight back and win.
But to be successful, struggles must be carried out on the job and in mass organizations. We must organize multiracial committees that can lead on-the-job fights centered around anti-racism and anti-sexism on behalf of all workers. We must connect on-the-job struggles to the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries. We must organize our base around the Party’s line to shut down the bosses’ racist profit system. Through struggle we can win our base to Challenge reader’s groups and ultimately to the Party, to become fighters for communism.
YEMEN
The bosses’ have used the recent wave of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism to ramp up calls for war in the Middle East. Trump’s recent ban of refugees and immigrants from seven majority Muslim countries includes Yemen, a country that has been terrorized by a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing campaign. The proxy war between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the pro-Saudi/U.S. regime has killed thousands of workers. Given Iran’s alliance with Russia and Yemen’s invitation to Russia to use its ports and airbases, tensions are rising between U.S. and Russian imperialists.
Trump’s first major decision as imperialist-in-chief, which was planned under the Obama administration, a botched raid on Al Qaeda in Yemen, killed at least 30 civilians, including nine children and eight women. The White House insists this slaughter was a “success.” Following the U.S. strike, the Yemeni government withdrew permission for U.S. ground raids, showing that even smaller bosses are willing to buck the U.S. ruling class.
For the U.S., maintaining access to oil has made its alliance with Saudi Arabia essential. Since 2009, the U.S has sold the Saudi government over $100 billion in weapons, making them the largest recipient of U.S. arms sales in the world (motherjones.com 9/21/16). Even so, the Saudi ruling class has been building closer ties with U.S. imperialist rival China, which is now the largest buyer of Saudi oil.
Over the past two decades, oil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen have destabilized the region and the world. These wars have created more than 65 million refugees. Ultimately, this is a crisis of capitalist unemployment. The bosses need to destroy the capital and productive capacities of rivals to survive their perpetual crisis of overproduction. With much of the infrastructure in Yemen and Syria leveled by imperialist war, masses of unemployed workers have no choice but to become refugees. The laws of capitalism are driving the desperate posture of U.S. imperialism and intensifying rivalries with China and Russia that will ultimately lead to World War III.
Black and Red: Untold History of Black Communists
History has segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many Black fighters were dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time. Below are quotes from a few of the antiracist Marxist women and men who fought in the interest of the working class.
Lucy Parsons (1853—1942)
Labor Organizer, Communist
Texas
"So many able writers have shown that the unjust institutions which work so much misery and suffering to the masses have their root in governments, and owe their whole existence to the power derived from government we cannot help but believe that were every law, every title deed, every court, and every police officer or soldier abolished tomorrow with one sweep, we would be better off than now."
Chicago Police Department description of Lucy Parsons: "More dangerous than a thousand rioters..."
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868—1963)
Journalist, Educator, Communist
Massachusetts
“In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”
Paul Robeson (1898 - 1976)
Singer, Athlete, Actor, Communist
New Jersey
“In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being…This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the rights of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America.”
Hosea Hudson (1898—1988)
Labor Leader, Communist
Florida
"The Communist Party taught me that the masses of people must be educated politically through struggle -- even the struggle to write a postcard, a letter, sacrificing to buy reading material and struggling to read it. Struggles to achieve people's day-to-day needs are the basis of political education"
A. Phillip Randolph (1889—1979)
Labor Organizer
pro-communist
"Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship."
Harry Haywood (1898—1985)
Political Activist, Communist
Nebraska
"“Throughout this whole struggle, we Black students at the school had been ardent supporters of the position of Stalin and the Central Committee. Most certainly we were Stalinists – whose policies we saw as the continuation of Lenin’s. Those today who use the term “Stalinist” as an epithet evade the real question: that is, were Stalin and the Central Committee correct? I believe history has proven that they were correct.”
Langston Hughes (1902—1967)
Poet, Writer, Communist
Illinois
“Put one more s in the U.S.A. / To make it Soviet. / One more s in the U.S.A. / Oh, we'll live to see it yet. / When the land belongs to the farmers / And the factories to the working men — The U.S.A. when we take control / Will be the U.S.S.A. then.
Now across the water in Russia / They have a big U.S.S.R. / The fatherland of the Soviets — But that is mighty far / From New York, or Texas, or California, too.
So listen, fellow workers, / This is what we have to do. / Put one more S in the U.S.A.” - One More "S" in the U.S.A
Angelo Herndon (1913—1997)
Labor Organizer, Communist
Ohio
"I wish I could remember the exact date when I first attended a meeting of the Unemployment Council, and met up with a couple of members of the Communist Party. That date means a lot more to me than my birthday, or any other day in my life." - You Cannot Kill The Working Class
Claudia Jones (1915—1964)
Organizer, Communist
Trinidad, Harlem
“It was out of my Jim Crow experiences as a young negro woman, experiences likewise born of working-class poverty that led me to join the Young Communist League and to choose the philosophy of my life, the science of Marxism-Leninism – that philosophy not only rejects racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them.”
Ousmane Sembène (1923—2007)
Director, Producer, Writer, Communist
Senegal
“…To act so that no man dares to strike you because he knows you speak the truth, to act so that you can no longer be arrested because you are asking for the right to live, to act so that all of this will end, both here and elsewhere; that is what should be in your thoughts. That is what you must explain to others, so that you will never again be forced to bow down before anyone, but also so that no one shall be forced to bow down before you. It was to tell you this that I asked you to come, because hatred must not dwell with you.” ― God's Bits of Wood
Frantz Fanon (1925—1961)
Psychiatrist, Philosopher, Revolutionary
Martinique
“And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of relative strength.” ― The Wretched of the Earth
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (1930—1965)
Playwright, Director, Communist
Illinois
“…[We] must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non- violent.... They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps--and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.... The acceptance of our condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children…”
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Boston PL’ers Sow Communist Consciousness in Budding Fightback
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- 24 February 2017 183 hits
BOSTON, Feb 12—From the inauguration to the Muslim Ban, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends here have been exposing fascism as an outgrowth of a capitalist system in crisis. The working class is searching for an explanation and ways to fight back.
Inauguration: Day One of Lifelong Fightback
Just hours after the Inauguration 175,000 people came to Boston from the whole New England area—New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and from south Connecticut and Rhode Island—to stand strong against Trump’s racism and sexism. For many it was the first time they had ever demonstrated. There was a fighting spirit in the air. Many shared the sentiment that we can’t continue to conduct business as usual. People understand that there is a crisis in the system and hundreds of people listened to Progressive Labor Party’s bullhorn rally and came up to take pictures of the banner “It’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism.”
PLP talked to people about the need to abolish capitalism because the democrats are not “our friends” either. Multiple times, PL’ers heard, “I agree with you.”
PLP made contacts and distributed 2,000 leaflets, with the help of a lot of friends. It was electrifying to see so many people take a stand against rising fascism. It’s an important opportunity for the members of PLP’s inner and outer circles to deepen and develop politically. A strong base will grow the Party, as that is the only way to defeat fascism and build an egalitarian world.
Liberal Bosses, Still More Dangerous
The following Saturday, PLP held a forum: “Fascism—Then and Now,” which was well attended. People from a study group gave two out of four of the presentations and a lively discussion ensued. One key point was the role of liberals in paving the way for fascism. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whom many people mistakenly pinned their hopes on, will only disarm the working class until it’s too late to fight.
These politicians’, as all politicians, commitment to U.S. capitalism will keep the working class locked within the confines of the electoral system rather than organizing in working-class interests.
Ban Borders
The following weekend PLP members went to another protest against Trump’s racist travel ban. Many thousands poured onto the streets—Muslims, South East Asians, Middle Easterners, people from every region of the world, and Americans took a stalwart stand against the politics of fear and division.
PLP distributed 750 leaflets and CHALLENGEs and talked with many people about anti-capitalist ideas. Communists made speeches and led chants on the bullhorn. One moving moment was when a multi-generational Latin family enthusiastically joined the internationalist chant, “Working people have no nation, smash racist deportations.”
Many thanked PLP for putting forth this political message, and took CHALLENGE, as did so many others.
The capitalist crisis has woken millions up to the need for fundamental change. In times like these, plenty of workers and students are open to a communist alternative, and PLP can provide that leadership.
CHICAGO, IL—“As long as we have each other, we are not alone…When my inside begins to question if this is good or bad, right or wrong, and how the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) and Mayor’s Office will respond, I am made stronger when I envision the City in grid-lock because not one bus or train is moving. If I have that vision, I know the powers that be also share the same vision.” As more than 300 members of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 308 voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike vote, this train operator and many other workers understand that the whole damn capitalist system has to go and the working class has the power to make that happen!
Local 308 is the rail side of public transportation, ATU Local 241 is the bus side. This vote followed both locals conducting a joint “Day of Action” on December 21, to protest a CTA contract offer that includes a 2 percent “raise,” an 18 percent increase in health insurance premiums and unlimited subcontracting of transit work. Nearly 10,000 CTA workers have been without a contract for a year.
Transit workers often face long shifts and more than 40-hour weeks. Accelerated discipline, a system that leads to rapid suspensions and firings, is stacked against workers from the word go, and “accelerates” short staffing and increased workloads.
Another worker attacked the CTA’s “evil 2-tier wage system” as part-timers “operate the same trains, flag at the same sights, do the same platform duties, but make half of what a full time employee makes.” He said that four years ago, CTA bosses thanked Locals 308 and 241 for saving them $60 million dollars a year for the life of the contract!
Prison Labor at CTA
There is another group of union members who pay full union dues, pay into the billion-dollar Retiree Health Care Trust, but have no benefits and are temporary. These are the “2nd Chance” workers, who have criminal records for non-violent offenses and make only $10 an hour. This is how this racist, capitalist system works. Give tax cuts to the rich and find more and more ways to drive workers as close to poverty as possible. The whole damn system has to go!
After the strike vote, there was a vote on the 2nd Chance program. Workers who had just called for a strike vote, voted overwhelmingly that the local union should not agree to renew this poverty-wage program with the CTA. Some members complained that 2nd Chance workers get better days off and are used to take away overtime hours. Others said that by only hiring people with criminal records for entry level maintenance jobs, their children cannot get these jobs. What we really need is union scale jobs for everyone now and revolution to get rid of this racist, capitalist system as soon as possible. No one is really getting a second chance at $10/hour. Not surprisingly both the ATU leadership and the CTA bosses want to keep the 2nd Chance Program.
Even after the defeat of Hillary Clinton in November, the union leaders remain in the hip pocket of the Democratic Party. That’s why there has not been a strike since 1979. While some workers have been won to more racist ideas, more are open to the idea of a strike, and to fighting racism. With the rash of police killings of black youth and gang-related murders due to poverty and mass unemployment among black youth, more workers are also talking about the need for revolution. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is rebuilding our national concentration in mass transit. We need to build a mass base for communist revolution among transit workers from Chicago to New York to Washington, DC. We have our work cut out for us, but this is the work that can ultimately lead millions of workers to power. Join us!
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Transit Workers Under Racist Assault
Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the CTA President Dorval R. Carter are pushing for deeper concessions while granting tax cuts and other subsidies to big business. This is the national trend in mass transit, one of the main concentrations of, and last sources of decent pay and benefits, for black workers in the US.
More than 30,000 New York transit workers in Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 are now voting on a contract that offers a 2 percent raise, but will drastically cut labor costs as thousands retire and new hires start at about two-thirds the pay, while billions are paid to the banks on interest for capital project loans. Bus drivers in Dayton, Ohio, ATU Local 1385, voted to strike only to be derailed by the ATU and TWU leadership. In December, ATU local 589 in Boston offered to negotiate wage concessions even before the contract expired. Detroit bus drivers, in ATU Local 26, signed a new contract in 2015 with starting wage of only $12/hour. And in November, the TWU ended a strike by 5,000 Philadelphia transit workers in order to get-out-the-vote for Hillary Clinton, and then accepted a contract that cut pensions.
National freight railroad workers are also in contract talks, facing similar demands from their bosses. Chicago has the highest concentration of freight railroad workers, from nearly all of the major railroads.
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Facts vs. Fiction of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
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- 24 February 2017 240 hits
Recently I tried to get some Chinese language practice by making small talk with a woman worker sitting next to me on an airplane to China. Somehow, the conversation got around to the Cultural Revolution. Like many workers in China you might meet today, she immediately felt compelled to tell me how that particular ten year period, 1966-1976, was a disaster for China.
This worker’s idea of this period being a “disaster” for China comes from the capitalists who run China today. China’s educational system, like that of the U.S. and every other capitalist country, teaches the lies that the capitalists want workers to believe—and they have the gall to call themselves the “Chinese Communist Party.” China’s capitalist bosses use their state power to attack the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with a ferocity matched only by professional anticommunist academics in the U.S.
The attacks on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution serve to mask the achievements of millions of workers won to communism, who dared to defend the 1949 Chinese Revolution, when the working class seized state power. Today, despite calling themselves “communist,” the bosses hold state power in China. Our class lost power there around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and the entire world we live in is controlled by a tiny capitalist class in each country who live by the labor others do for them: the international working class.
If our class sisters and brothers are to ever smash this capitalist hell with its imperialist wars and sharpening racist and sexist attacks worldwide, the Cultural Revolution is a key piece of history to understand. Fortunately for those fighting for a worker-run, egalitarian world, that is, for real communism, there are scholars like Yiching Wu.
Masses Fought Back With Creativity and Courage
In 238 pages of The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (2014), Wu pulls together information from about 400 sources, most in Chinese and many previously unavailable, to critically examine the political trends “at the margins” of the Cultural Revolution. It is a story of vast upheaval and class war, where ordinary workers fought with courage and creativity in an effort to take China to the road of true equality, communism. This book is of particular interest to members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party, because Yiching Wu reaches many of the same conclusions that PLP published in 1971.
Now is an important moment to reexamine this history. 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and also the 50th anniversary of a exploding class war in China.
In 1967, masses of workers in the city of Shanghai expelled the fake “Communist” Party misleaders and seized control of the city, defiantly declaring it the “Shanghai Commune.” Elsewhere, groups like Shengwulian in Hunan Province, the Bohai Battle Regiment in Shandong Province, and others, organized opposition to evolving systems of exploitation inside the socialist state.
They criticized the “Communist” Party’s decision in the 1950s to set up a system of material incentives for party leaders and mangers. They argued that such a system had created conditions for the development of a new ruling class, as it had in the Soviet Union, where capitalism was fully restored by that time. This system, which ranked cadres (managers, usually Party members) and Party leaders in over 20 grades with different salaries and access to better housing, schools, private cars, medical care and even domestic servants. Groups like Shengwulian criticized what they called the “bureaucratic capitalist” class.
History Written By The Rulers
Most workers in China today, let alone workers around the world, never learn about these mass communist uprisings that shook China’s new so-called “communist” capitalist class to its core.
The standard narrative of the Cultural Revolution is that Mao Zedong and other leaders inside the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) saw that the Soviet Union’s way of building socialism after the workers took power there was leading back to capitalism. So, the top leaders launched the Cultural Revolution to keep the same thing from happening in China. Supposedly, under the ground rules of that CCP-sanctioned campaign, ordinary workers and students were encouraged to criticize those party members and managers who were “taking the capitalist road.”
This narrative paints Mao as its central hero, who, in January of 1967, determined that enough “capitalist roaders” had been removed from power. The story goes that as soon as he died, pro-capitalist elements of the CCP and within a few years, presto! China had become the capitalist country we know today.
This story completely ignores the mass rebellions and uprisings made by the working class against the government in 1967, the year that the capitalists had supposedly been chased out. The tens of millions of workers, students, peasants and former soldiers joined mass organizations like the Shanghai Commune and Shengwulian - in opposition to what they viewed as the return of full-blown capitalism.
More and more scholarship is being published that upends the dominant narrative of the Cultural Revolution.
Today’s world is under the control of competing groups of capitalists, each trying to grow their economic and political dominance (a process called “imperialism”), and world war becomes more likely every day. Creating a peaceful worker-run society without exploitation is the goal of communist revolution. The only way to prevent inter-imperialist war is to eliminate the economic system that produces imperialism, to eliminate capitalism.
Today’s communists must study the great revolutions of the past, including the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was defeated primarily because these millions of workers still held on to the idea of fighting for socialism first, and communism later—a view PLP rejected in 1982, in large part based on the experiences of the Cultural Revolution. Our literature analyzes the success and failures of the old movement elsewhere.
PLP fights on from the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. We will not stop until communist ideas are once again mass ideas, and next time, we will take communist revolution all the way.
