The remaining U.S. presidential candidates—Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—all aspire to be the next master of U.S. imperialism. The next president will be expected to unify the bosses’ ranks while beating discipline into a disaffected working class—all to prepare for an impending global conflict with imperialist rivals like China or Russia or both. All three candidates reflect the movement of the capitalist ruling class toward fascism, the stage of capitalism in crisis and decay, when the bosses’ sham democracy no longer serves their needs (see box).
The good news: These conditions are also ripe for building a communist movement by Progressive Labor Party.
Imperialism Drives Fascist Path
The latest electoral circus is unfolding amid a sharpening, high-stakes competition that challenges the U.S. in every corner of the globe. China is pushing for control of the South China Sea; Russia is inserting troops into the Ukraine. In Syria, a vital crossroads in the oil-rich Middle East, Russia is quickly becoming the dominant imperialist.
The rulers’ move away from liberal capitalist democracy and toward fascism is compelled by their need to prepare for the coming world war while extracting even more profit from the labor of the working class. It’s the bosses’ last gasp to save monopoly capitalism. For the international working class, this trend translates into increased racist unemployment, lower real wages, dysfunctional schools, mass deportations, more open state terror against working-class women and men, and hyper-nationalist politics backed by a swollen military and militarized police forces.
No Unity Among Thieves
As the U.S. bosses struggle to maintain their status as the world’s most profitable—and lethal—imperialist power, they are hobbled by infighting. The main finance capital wing, represented by giant banks like JPMorgan Chase and oil companies like ExxonMobil, is committed to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and worldwide. The subordinate wing of U.S. capitalists, represented by Koch Industries, its Tea Party allies, and other domestically focused bosses, are less willing to foot the tax bill for an even larger Middle East ground war. Meanwhile, some new-generation, Silicon Valley billionaires seem up for grabs—or coercion. The bosses’ factional fault lines are deep, complex and fluid.
The battle between these capitalist factions is playing out in the U.S. Congress, the military, the presidential election, and the mass movements they’re trying to build to mobilize the working class to their side.
Splits in the ruling class matter. The better we understand the current crisis of capitalism, the better we can turn attacks on the working class into opportunities to smash the bosses and build communism. At the outset, we must smash the illusion of a “lesser evil” in this capitalist election dogfight. Whatever their differences, all bosses are dedicated to the exploitation of the international working class. All of them are ready and willing to intensify their murderous oppression of workers in the U.S. and throughout the world. All of them—and the politicians they use to confuse and mislead us—are our mortal class enemies.
Why Trump Matters
Donald Trump stands to become the first openly racist and sexist major-party presidential nominee of the modern era. In contrast to George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton, who coded their racist appeals as candidates into “acceptable” language, Trump brazenly vilifies and scapegoats Mexican workers, Muslims, and undocumented immigrants. He routinely insults women. He calls for mob violence against anti-racist protesters, a hallmark of rising fascism. Trump has done his best to undermine working-class unity, the main threat to the capitalist bosses.
For the rulers. elections are a critical tool both to keep workers tied to capitalist ideology and to sort out their own differences. While hardly the main wing’s first choice among Republicans, Trump has succeeded in splitting the base of the Tea Party. He has effectively poached masses of workers organized by Koch-funded groups (Bloomberg, 11/20/15).
Trump’s volatility and constantly shifting positions may seem to cloud his ultimate allegiances. But his growing support among mainstream Republicans, along with his appointment of second-generation Wall Streeter Steven Mnuchin as his national finance chairman, suggests that the main capitalist wing will be banking on one of two contingencies. Either Trump will lose the general election (as of now, the likelier eventuality), or he will win and the biggest bosses will find a way to control him.
The Danger of Hillary Clinton
In the meantime, Trump’s public gutter racism has helped embolden President Barack Obama to escalate the sexist, racist deportations of women and children fleeing capitalist violence in Central America. (Over a recent six-month period, as the New York Times reported on May 13, the capture of families at the southwest border was up 131 percent over the same period a year earlier.)  Looking forward, Trump’s extreme racist rhetoric will give Hillary Clinton cover to “more safely embrace the Bill Clinton years,” an administration responsible for the mass incarceration of Black workers and a welfare system overhaul “that cut federal assistance to the poor by nearly $55 billion over six years” (NYT, 5/17).
By scapegoating, brutalizing, and impoverishing the most vulnerable U.S. workers, Bill Clinton advanced the bosses’ move toward fascism in the 1990s. (It’s a long process!) Regardless of who is elected in November, we can expect this trend to accelerate.
Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic candidate, is an established stooge of finance capital. No active U.S. politician is more experienced at attacking the working class domestically or internationally (see CHALLENGE, 3/23). As a U.S. senator, Clinton backed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed more than a million to maintain U.S. control over Middle East oil. As Obama’s secretary of state, she engineered the devastation of millions in Syria, Libya, Haiti and Honduras. The New York Times, the leading mouthpiece of the bosses’ main wing, has applauded Clinton for her decades of service to U.S. imperialism (NYT, 4/21).
From the bosses’ point of view, Clinton’s negatives are her broad unpopularity among young workers and students and her weakness for fat speaking fees (read: bribes) from Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs. Could she sell a military draft, a necessity for a global ground war? Could she mobilize a mass movement for fascism? It seems unlikely but, again, the shift to fascism is a long-term process. A holding pattern under Hillary may be the best the bosses can do for the next four years.
How Workers Get Berned
For left-leaning workers and youth, Bernie Sanders is a deadly choice. More than any other candidate, he has used his “outsider” status to set forth the fascist agenda the U.S. rulers need to remain top-dog imperialists—even if most of them are not yet ready to accept it. Beyond their own disunity and lack of discipline, the bosses must surmount the Vietnam Syndrome, a working class that is weary of “war and remain[s] suspicious of foreign entanglements” (NYT, 4/21).
Much of Sanders’ platform is designed to bring the finance bosses into line. His push to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, eliminate offshore tax havens, increase regulation of Wall Street, and improve infrastructure and military efficiency are essential to the bosses’ preparations for the next world war. Essentially, Sanders is echoing the call of billionaires like Warren Buffett, who see the danger of short-term greed to the long-term interests of their class. While workers are bled dry under fascism, the bosses must also take some of the losses, at least in the short run.
Sanders’ platform is geared to win the working class to global war with phony promises to raise wages. Even as he criticizes Hillary Clinton’s pro-war record, he endorses Obama’s eight years of imperialist war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. As commander-in-chief, Sanders vows on his campaign website, “I will defend this nation, its people, and America’s vital strategic interests, but I will do it responsibly.” As an “independent” U.S. senator, he “always ‘supports the troops’ [and] never opposes any defense spending bill.…Sanders is the darling of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the right-wing Likud government of Israel” (Counterpunch, 9/30/11).
Sanders’ immediate appeal to the ruling class is his demonstrated ability to build a mass movement and bind disaffected workers and young people to the capitalist trap of electoral politics. A big part of “feeling the Bern” is the reform promise of higher wages in a country where median household income fell significantly between 1999 and 2013, even after controlling for an aging population and a smaller average household (fivethirtyeight.com, 9/22/14). Historically, however, full-blown fascism reverses any short-term gains for workers and devastates their standard of living, since the big capitalists are now ruling without constraints.
Capitalist-directed mass movements are critical to rising fascism; that’s why the bosses are fighting to control the leadership of organizations like Black Lives Matter. The rulers use mass movements to pressure (or eliminate) rogue bosses, and also to enforce loyalty to the rulers’ anti-worker agenda, often under a populist or anti-racist facade.
Turn Imperialist War into Class War
Workers in Ferguson and Baltimore have showed the way forward for the international working class: multiracial fightback. Led by Black workers and youth, these rebellions inspired millions worldwide.
World War I brought the Bolshevik Revolution; World War II brought the Chinese Communist Revolution. World War III, when it comes, will lead to international communist revolution—if PLP has organized a mass communist party to seize the day. In periods of impending world war, economic crisis and intensifying fascism, workers, students, and soldiers are wide open to revolutionary ideas.
Our Party is fighting for communist revolution because capitalism can never serve the working class. Only communism will smash the bosses’ dictatorship. Workers built this world; workers know best how to collectively run it. We don’t need politicians—we need communist state power!

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Fascism: Define It to Defeat It

Fascism is not inevitable. Fascism only becomes inevitable if the working class follows the line of reformism, of trust in the capitalist state.
—R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1934

The Progressive Labor Party has characterized the current period as one of rising fascism, a transitional phase between capitalist democracy and mature fascism.
While we believe that capitalist democracy is still primary in the U.S., we can see elements of full-blown fascism in the:
world’s largest prison population and highest incarceration rate, with Black workers imprisoned at more than five times the rate of white workers;
mass deportations and terrorization of undocumented families;
routine police violence against Black, Latin workers and youth;
militarization of police in places like Ferguson, Missouri;
open, racist scapegoating of immigrant and Muslim workers.
Fascism is the true face of capitalism—the state of the profit system in decay, when the bosses can no longer rule in the old, “democratic” way. As rivalries sharpen among imperialist powers, leading inevitably to broader global conflict, the ruling class rips off the mask of liberal capitalist democracy within its own country. In a desperate effort to protect their capital, put down resistance, and raise funds and troops for war, they turn to naked intimidation and open state terror—to unrestricted rule.
The transition from capitalist democracy to fascism is a natural process of capitalist dictatorship. It’s a deadly mistake to view one as contradictory to the other. While liberal democracy is the characteristic form of rising capitalism, fascism is the deepest form of monopoly capitalism, in which a small group of corporations and billionaires control the lion’s share of a society’s wealth.
While the phenomenon is best known for its bestial manifestation in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s, fascists of that era also seized state power in Italy, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Portugal, and found willing collaborators for fascist regimes in France, China, Denmark, Norway, and more than a dozen other countries.
The particularities of fascism may vary, and there is no way to predict the precise form it could take in the U.S. But history points to certain critical elements of capitalist dictatorship in its most transparent form:
Fascism typically begins with ruthless disciplining within the ruling class, to bring unity to its ranks. In Germany, in 1934, the main wing of the Nazis exterminated the rabid SA paramilitary (the Brown Shirts), whose leadership had called for nationalization of major industries and was viewed as a threat by Krupp, IG Farben, and other major German companies and banks. In today’s U.S., the big finance capitalists, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, will eventually either bring the Tea Party wing (including the Koch brothers) to heel, or eliminate it.
Fascism is characterized by intensified racism, sexism, and nationalism, a wholesale attack on workers’ living standards, and ultimately the mass murder of workers both internally and through imperialist war. It uses these tactics to target and destroy sections of the working class—the ultimate exercise of divide-and-conquer.
For the bosses, fascism is a temporary solution to the perpetual crisis of capitalist overproduction—it weeds out the competition. The slaughter of workers and wholesale destruction of industry during World War II paved the way for the “postwar prosperity” of the 1950s and ‘60s, when capitalists in the U.S. and Europe hauled in record profits.
The fascists’ next step is to attack the one force with the potential to defeat them. It’s no accident that communists were the first to be sent to the Nazi death camps. With communists out of the fray, save for a small underground, it was far easier for the Nazi administration to round up Jews, trade unionists, and other targeted groups.
When capitalism has decayed to fascism, there is no turning back to the false refuge of liberal democracy. Misleaders—like the Social Democrats in Nazi Germany, or Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton today—serve only to foster illusions, encourage pacifism, and pave the way for the fascists. They must be seen for who they are: deadly collaborators of the big capitalists. They cannot be part of any anti-fascist force. Only mass, organized violence can stop fascism in its tracks. Communism—the dictatorship of the working class—is the only alternative to fascism. Only a mass, international communist party, PLP, can eliminate fascism for all time by destroying its capitalist roots.

San Francisco, May 6—Fighting back against a series of racist killings and Mayor Ed Lee’s callous indifference to a 17-day hunger strike, a member of Progressive Labor Party helped to lead 200 workers and students in a seven-hour takeover of San Francisco’s City Hall. Banging on the mayor’s door, protesters chanted, “Mayor Lee, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
During the occupation, the protesters—women and men, Asian, Latin, Black and white—took over the area outside the mayor’s door, as well as the main rotunda and eventually the entire first floor of City Hall. We chanted, “If we don’t get it, SHUT IT DOWN!” One young female fighter sang songs of liberation that echoed through the building and inspired us all to keep fighting.
It was on the 12th day of the hunger strike that the PLP member and two students decided to up the ante in pushing Lee to fire racist police chief Greg Suhr. The chief’s termination was the sole demand of the hunger strikers; Suhr’s kkkcops have murdered eight Black and Latin workers since 2014 (http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/murdermap.html). We began organizing other students and workers to stop playing by the rules, which meant being willing to get arrested. Our collective understanding of the importance of militant action was deepened by our week together on the strike line, reading CHALLENGE and having long debates about reform versus revolution.
All agreed that firing Suhr was a reform struggle, but that he had to go—and that this struggle could be used to move people to the left. Revolutionary politics can enter the mass reform movement only if members of PLP are involved in day-to-day struggles and bring the Party’s ideas with them. One difficulty for communists is that reform groups generally place individual identity politics—namely nationalism and feminism—over collective revolutionary politics and working-class unity. In San Francisco, two of these groups proposed shutting down the bridges and BART (public transportation) while individuals locked themselves to various things. The Party member and his base fought against passive, isolated actions and for more collective action, and to organize to bring more people into the movement. Our line won.
Our collective leadership met many times during the occupation to strategize on maintaining the action’s militancy and sharp political tone. We numbered about 50 people. As we occupied City Hall, the police tore down the hunger strikers’ camp in the Mission district. Hundreds of people turned out to try to salvage the camp. Our collective met again and debated whether we should abandon our action and try to help save the camp, or stick to our plan and have the Mission protestors help us. We decided that our action was more important at the time. Within 30 minutes, dozens of supporters were at the doors of City Hall, but the police wouldn’t let anyone in.
We decided to pretend to call off our occupation, to enable us to open the doors and increase our numbers. The police completely fell for it. As we marched downstairs and found no cops around, we sent folks to sprint and open the doors to our comrades. Our numbers suddenly doubled. We now occupied the entire first floor of City Hall, and the doors stayed open. Over the next hour, our numbers continued to grow until we formed a line two-deep and wall-to-wall against the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department riot squad. At the start of the day, only five people had signed up to be arrested; now we had hundreds lined up against the State. The Party member explained that no cops—Asian, Latin, Black or white—can be friends of the working class, since their job is to serve and protect the capitalist system and private property. Some occupiers, who’d previously thought we could appeal to cops’ “humanity,” came around to our position.
The takeover line was a beautiful thing. The youngest person was 15, the oldest 76. There were women and men together in a united, multiracial group. We stood without fear and with love for those next to us, ready for whatever the police would bring. We chanted, “We ready, we ready, we ready for y’all!” When the police finally charged with batons and riot gear, nobody ran or backed down. Everyone held the line—it looked like two football teams locked at the line of scrimmage.
After a two-hour stalemate, the cops arrested 33 protesters, 19 of them women. By then we claimed City Hall for seven hours, and the fear that often paralyzes our class had vanished. While in jail we sang, laughed and discussed revolutionary communist politics. My base jumped from five to 15. Comrades from around the Bay Area distributed PL literature and helped organize jail support.
Lessons from this action will continue to raise the consciousness of young people in leadership roles in these reform groups. The young people’s multiracial unity has given them new political clarity. It has empowered them to challenge anti-communist forces that seek to marginalize them.  
Youth are desperately searching for a Party like ours. Many are tired of the dead-end reform movement that has them chasing from issue to issue—one step forward and two steps back, with no real analysis of the forces driving racism, inequality, and inter-imperialist war. They know capitalism is the problem, but nobody organizes against capitalism like Progressive Labor Party. It is our duty to bring the Party’s line to the masses; otherwise we allow them to be misled by the bosses’ puppets. We can’t let them fall prey to the Democratic Party and their suave preachers, liberal sellouts and revisionists. Put the line on the line! We are now organizing a fundraiser for one young fighter fighting felony charges. Please donate to our legal fund, and fight for communism!

PAKISTAN, May 1—“One world, one fight! Workers of the world unite!” Refusing to be silenced by trade union misleaders, members of Progressive Labor Party brought revolutionary communist ideas to marches and other May Day events across Pakistan.
Workers March For Demands
Various workers’ organizations held seminars, symposia and processions to celebrate International Workers’ Day throughout the country. PL’ers participating through their unions supported demands for a higher minimum wage, equal wage for women workers, and workplace safety.  At the same time, they sharpened the politics at these events by chanting slogans against exploitation, privatization, inequality, injustice, poverty, terrorism and capitalism.
Another major May Day demand was to abolish the contract labor system. The reform struggle, also backed by PL comrades, is for every worker be given an official appointment letter that guarantees regular employment for a fixed period. With these letters, workers cannot be fired at the bosses’ will.
The union misleaders who oppose PLP’s organizing and calls for revolution remain silent about capitalist oppression. Unlike fake revolutionary groups, PL’ers connect the struggles for immediate reforms to the fight for the only true solution for the international working class: communism. The Party’s May Day chants, taken up by many workers, reflected our revolutionary politics: “Long live communist revolution!” “No to capitalism, yes to communism!”  “Down with capitalist bosses!” “All power to the working class!”
PL’ers Fight For Internationalism
In conversations and struggles with coworkers, comrades elaborated on these chants. . They explained the history of communist struggle and attacked the revisionist (fake leftist) ideas that wrecked the old communist movement. To build a world without exploitation, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism, we must fight for an international communist revolution under the red banner of the international revolutionary communist party, PLP
As PLP organizes women workers to play active roles in the Party, on the job and in the trade unions, the Party also organizes against sexist wage inequalities. On May Day, comrades denounced the capitalist bosses who want workers to believe women workers are inferior, to justify lower wages for women and steal more profit. PLP fights to smash sexism by developing women leaders who will be at the forefront of communist revolution.
Local Struggles Build Anti-Imperialist Movement
Leading up to May Day, PLP’s work emphasized the necessity of unity within the working class and improved coordination among the trade unions. PL’ers have been organizing other trade union members to support workers of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) in their struggle against layoffs and privatization—an anti-worker attack by the Pakistani bosses and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an arm of U.S. imperialism. PL’ers and friends have argued that if the bosses’ plans for PIA go through, it would pave the way for privatization of other industries like steel mills, the Sui gas field in Balochistan province in southwest Pakistan, and elsewhere.
The struggle for solidarity with the PIA workers is a powerful anti-imperialist opportunity for PLP and the international working class. The privatization of PIA reflects the sharpening imperialist rivalry between U.S. and Chinese bosses. The U.S. is eager to keep Pakistan as an ally, given its geopolitical importance in South Asia. China is even more eager to draw Pakistan into its own imperialist orbit and consolidate a vital economic corridor for One Belt, One Road, the initiative to expand China’s influence and increase exports throughout Eurasia.
The capitalist rulers of China and the U.S. (through the IMF) are both bribing Pakistan’s bosses with economic incentives to restructure PIA (Express Tribune of Pakistan, 3/13/13). China’s most recent offer was $500 million in aid to PIA, as well as new planes, technical support and construction of a new international airport at Gwadar, a strategic deep-water port developed jointly by Pakistan and China  (Business Recorder, 3/30/15). Gwadar is located near the Iranian border and just outside the Strait of Hormuz, a potential chokepoint for oil shipping routes in and out of the Persian Gulf. Thirty percent of all maritime-traded petroleum—and 20 percent of the world’s oil, overall—passes through the strait (businessinsider.com, 4/1/15). In January, Pakistan’s bosses announced the privatization deals were being finalized (Business Recorder, 1/20).
What the bosses failed to factor in was workers’ resistance. Fightback against PIA’s privatization has been fierce, culminating in a strike on February 2. Workers battled riot police at the gates of Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport, leaving two workers dead and several injured. Flight disruptions and profit losses have set back plans by the Pakistani, U.S., and Chinese bosses (Nikkei Asian Review, 2/19). The struggle continues.
Our local struggles have an impact on workers all over the world. Workers in Pakistan are caught in the accelerating exploitation of inter-imperialist rivalry, an essential feature of the ruthless drive for maximum profit under capitalism. Since the surplus value that derives from workers’ labor is the lifeblood for groups of competing bosses, workers in Pakistan are well-placed to play a lead role in building an anti-imperialist movement. As PLP declared on May Day, only international communist revolution under our international communist party can free the working class from the daily miseries of capitalism. Join us!

BALTIMORE, May 4—The cops have yet again exposed themselves as the dogs of the ruling class. Today was the commemoration of four students getting shot to death by National Guard soldiers during a protest at Kent State University in 1970. Today, following in those fascist footsteps, kkkops at Morgan State University (MSU) arrested a protester for leading chants during the 145th West Wednesday rally demanding justice for Tyrone West and for all victims of police terror.
This rally on the campus and the rally on the sidewalk just outside MSU, a historically Black university, focused on the deadly role of campus cop David Lewis, who participated with City cops in the police murder of Tyrone West on July 18, 2013. The Black campus cops and an MSU boss Floyd Taliaferro, Director of University Center & Student Activities, were apathetic about MSU’s own cop’s participation in the murder of Tyrone.
Before this evening’s arrest, West Wednesday protestors marched across campus and entered the student center, by the display of former MSU students in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Trying to Intimidate Us
The order to aggressively force the protestors out of the student center came without warning. This student is now facing multiple charges. The criminal injustice system sent him to jail and held him overnight at Central Booking. Other MSU students in the group were harassed by the cops and told to report to the campus police station the next morning.
West Wednesday protestors, including PLP members, took turns waiting at Central Booking until our friend was released the next day.
The group of protestors learned yet again that cops, Black or white, carry out the bosses’ orders and do not ”serve and protect” either students or workers. This is a significant lesson, as we are in a city where the majority of cops are Black. As the chant says, “White cop, Black cop, all the same! Racist terror is the name of their game!”
Build Communism
All of this occurred less than a week after some fighters from the West Wednesday travelled to New York City to participate in the revolutionary May Day march led by Progressive Labor Party.
The most important measure of success in the fight against police terror, or in any other reform struggle, is the growth of communist understanding and the growth of Progressive Labor Party.
That’s the development that enables us to be stronger and stronger in future struggles, including the fight to entirely defeat capitalism and build, instead, the egalitarian world of sisterhood and brotherhood that we urgently need!