The following is an excerpt from the Keynote speech given at the college conference by a young woman leader (see article, front page).
What are we learning in school today? I see a lot of beautiful and diverse faces, and I know I’ll get a million different answers. For today, let us take stock of what the bosses really want us to learn.
We’re learning about the artifice of race, class, gender, religion, and national borders that divide the international working class. We’re learning that we must climb this elusive social ladder to separate ourselves from the working class. We’re learning that the role of the university is to accept the inevitability of war, and to remain loyal to a system that murders, deports, and exploits our working brothers and sisters abroad, and to accept the fascist conditions at home.
We’re taught that the quickest way out of the hood or to stay out of trouble is to join the military, so the bosses lure us into their death traps with their ROTC [The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps]. We’re learning that being Black, white, gay, straight, lesbian, trans, male, female is primary over working-class unity—they got us hooked into identity politics, or shall I say the latest opiate of the masses.
We’re being taught that we’re criminals by the bosses who’ve turned our schools into juvenile corrections facilities. Last year, Khalif Browder, a student from my campus committed suicide. He was jailed for two years on Rikers Island [New York City’s main prison complex] WITHOUT BEING CHARGED WITH A CRIME, just because he couldn’t afford bail. He was physically beaten and psychologically tortured when he was put in solitary confinement. Ironically CUNY [public university system] invests in the prison industrial complex. For students outside these U.S. borders, our classrooms may be miles apart but the lessons remain the same.
From Haiti, Quebec, to the U.S to Europe, and South Africa, vicious cuts on education have become a worldwide pandemic.
In Quebec University, tuition has more than tripled. In South Africa the tuition hikes are a reminder that the apartheid isn’t over.
Students learn that professors are underpaid and disposable. At CUNY, racist and sexist tuition hikes, budget cuts, are the order of the day. These rapacious attacks are not coincidental: they’re happening against the backdrop of escalating imperialist wars.
But there is one lesson that you won’t learn— that these cuts are the bosses’ way of preparing for the next world war. They won’t teach us the rival arch-capitalists in the U.S., Russia, the E.U, and China vie for who will hold the title of the next world super power; they spend trillions on nuclear weapons, arming “rebels”, and installing brutal fascist regimes to gear up for their carnage campaigns. The working class people are their sacrificial lambs.
The bosses have you believe that their invasion of the Middle East is necessary to spread “democracy”, and rescue women from the oppressive forces, but they won’t teach you that their brutal tactics actually hurt women the most.
When it comes to the refugee crisis, our schools won’t teach you the truth: that ever since capitalists started dividing up the world and drawing borders, there have been refugees.
The U.S. was founded on the creation of millions of indigenous refugees. Today, we’ll remind ourselves that 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees overnight in 1948 and are still kept off their ancestral lands.
13.5 million Syrian workers are in need of humanitarian assistance as the result of a fight between U.S. and Russian imperialists, not just Bashar al-Assad. And 15 million Africans, from places like Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, have been made refugees by the centuries of imperialist fighting over resources.
We’re learning there is no phonier lesson in human responsibility than the boss’s claptrap about climate change. They say we must recycle, go green, or go vegan. Meanwhile, the capitalist bosses’ corporations are free to ravage the planet as they please. Not surprisingly the imperialist war machine is one of the world’s worst polluters.
We’re being lead astray by the bosses who play us into believing that education is a right, but the global attacks on students say otherwise. But today, you’ll learn that while that geographical distance, borders, languages, culture, and race may separate us, we must recognize that our struggle is one, and that we must fight back. Fortunately, today we’ll learn the bosses’ racist borders and the refugees that they create have an expiration date.
What are we learning about elections? I know that’s a really popular subject that many of us students worry about these days.
We are taught that the presidential election is the most important decision facing U.S. workers in decades, that we have a real choice here: the fascist Trump or the socialist Bernie. Today we’ll learn that choosing sides in a capitalist election is a death trap for workers. Bernie, Hillary, Donald, Ted, it doesn’t matter. Whoever is president will become the commander in chief of the largest imperialist army in the world, aiming to maintain its global power, no matter how many workers and students have died for their oil wars.
The best we can do, we’re told, is to work within the system to make small changes. But today we’re going to hear about militant fightbacks going on worldwide!
We have been taught the university is a world of ideas, that the world will become a better place through education. But a look at history will illuminate the truth: the way the world will become a better place is through struggle, fightback, building a worker-student unity, and planting the seeds of communist revolution in everything we do. In 1970s and 80s, PLP led the movement to kick racist theoreticians off campus. During the Vietnam War, masses of college students participated in strikes, sit-ins, and mobilizations against imperialism.
1999 was the year of the longest student strike in Mexican history at the Mexican National Autonomous University. They united workers and peasants against the privatization of electricity. Student strikes against austerity, increasing tuition, and budget cuts raged over London, Quebec, Chile, and South Africa the last few years. In South Africa, the slogan “fees must fall” swept the country. From University of Missouri to Yale, campus protests against racism have made headlines.
In the spirit of fightback, let us go to school today. Not to learn lies about our working-class brothers and sisters around the world; not to be fooled into thinking that elections are the path to liberation for workers.
No. Let us go to school today to learn about the origins of racism and nationalism. We’ll learn today about how our predecessors in the communist movement fought and won advances for the working class. Most importantly, today we’ll learn how we can fight against racism, sexism, nationalism and individualism, and we’ll learn why communism is the only force truly capable of eradicating these social diseases created by capitalism. For a new world, for communism, we must fight back.
As the Russian capitalists scale back their recent bombing campaign in Syria, they’re calling it a “withdrawal.” But the international working class should make no mistake: The Russian bosses are leveraging their military might to consolidate and expand their influence in the oil-rich Middle East. They will use their strengthened position to extort more favorable terms in the upcoming “peace” talks that could wind up partitioning Syria.
Sooner than later, the Russian rulers’ maneuvering will translate into a more intense conflict with the U.S. bosses, whose empire also relies on controlling Middle Eastern oil. In the current period, capitalists around the world are intensifying racism, sexism, nationalism and fascism in attempts to coerce workers to kill and be killed in the bosses’ wars.
The international working class must reject all of these toxic ideologies. Workers can be liberated only by their own class—and by building a mass revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Capitalist bosses will never “withdraw” their violent dictatorship over the working class. That’s why PLP fights back against the entire capitalist system.
Our Party is building toward armed revolution in every country to smash racism, sexism, national borders and imperialism. From Anaheim to Ankara, every anti-immigrant rally is an opportunity to build international solidarity. From Pakistan to Palestine, every racist, sexist budget attack is an opportunity to fight back. These are the sparks of communist revolution. Our organizing will fan the flames.
Syria: Russia’s Imperialist Key
The Syrian port city of Tartus is Russia’s only access point to the Mediterranean Sea. Without Tartus, Russian warships would need to pass through the narrow Bosporus Strait—controlled by the U.S. bosses’ powerful regional ally, Turkey—to return to their Black Sea bases. The Russian bosses can’t afford to lose this port to U.S.-backed Syrian “rebels,” a big factor in their support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. At the same time, they’ve suggested that they’d accept Assad’s removal if their interests were guaranteed (Reuters, 12/18/15).
From newly expanded bases in both Tartus and Latakia, Russia’s rulers have ensured direct access to the Middle East’s energy resources. They’ve also blocked plans by U.S., Turkish and Qatari capitalists plans to overthrow Assad and build their own pipeline through Syria:
The Russians have placed an impenetrable obstacle to the development of the [U.S.-backed] Qatar gas pipeline. Russia has also placed itself at the nexus point of other new offshore gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Israel, Cyprus, and Greece (Oilprice.com, 3/16/16).
Meanwhile, as the Boston Globe (3/16/16) pointed out, the abrupt halt to their heavy bombing of Syria (if only temporarily) helps the Russian bosses on several fronts:
The Russians have a lot at stake in the shattered country. Moscow wants to keep Syria open to Russian goods, particularly arms and machinery, since the Russian economy is so driven by the oil and gas sectors….Putin will now have more time to focus on [the war in Ukraine] as he seeks guarantees that [Ukraine] will not join NATO….In addition, Putin’s decision to cut the campaign short helps to limit the growing anger among [Sunni Muslims] over Russia’s heavy hand in Syria. This, in turn, reduces the terrorist threat to Russia.
U.S.-Russia Rivalry Heating Up
Russia’s troop drawdown marks an growing weakness in the U.S. political, economic, and military position in the Middle East. U.S. bosses were caught off-guard by Russia’s next move, never a good sign. The Economist, the London-based cheerleader for U.S. imperialism, could offer only guesses on Russia’s intentions. The liberal imperialist Guardian Weekly (3/14/16) suggested that Vladimir Putin’s regime had once again out-maneuvered the U.S. and its European allies:
Nobody wanted to deal with Russia after Ukraine, and the goal of the Syria campaign was to force the [W]est to deal with Russia again… [and now they’ve left] with minimal losses…It’s a pretty brilliant tactical move.
Along with an emboldened anti-U.S. Iran, plus a growing Chinese imperialist presence through their “One Belt, One Road” (see CHALLENGE, 3/9/16), Russia’s escalation in Syria is changing the balance of power in the Middle East. Russian and Chinese imperialists, the U.S. bosses’ main rivals, are carefully watching the U.S. 2016 presidential campaign. What they’re seeing can only encourage them: a divided, undisciplined U.S. ruling class, and a cynical, disaffected U.S. working class.
The two presidential candidates drawing the largest crowds of workers—Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—represent increasingly desperate attempts by mainstream U.S. finance capitalists to keep workers voting instead of rebelling. The bosses are straining to mislead workers with KKK-style racism on the one hand, and bogus calls for economic fairness and equality—an impossibility under the profit system—with the other. The divisiveness and racist violence encouraged by Trump, in particular, has exposed the fractured political loyalties of the U.S. working class. This is a huge potential obstacle for the U.S. ruling class and its plan-of-necessity for a military draft and a broader global war.
Meanwhile, Black workers who led and supported rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore aren’t rushing in droves to enlist in the U.S. military to fight for U.S. imperialism. The U.S. Army barely met its recruitment goal in 2015 after lagging for most of the year (USA Today, 10/1/15).
Until the main wing of U.S. bosses succeeds in disciplining their own capitalist class, a central ingredient of fascism, they will be hard-pressed to win the working class to sacrifice for U.S. imperialism. Their options in the Middle East will be limited. The Russians’ recent gains in Syria do not bode well for their near-term future:
It may also help better position Russia for whomever succeeds Obama in the White House: an America that perceives itself humiliated in Syria by Russia and its allies’ military prowess is less likely to participate in any reset, and more likely to do the reverse (Huffington Post, 3/17/16).
Crush Capitalism With Communist Revolution
Under capitalism, no matter which camp of bosses is gaining, the working class loses. During the devastating, ongoing, five-year Syrian civil war, essentially a proxy fight between imperialist super-powers, U.S.-provided weapons are being used in terror attacks in the U.S. and worldwide. The conflict has murdered more than one million workers and displaced millions more, with women and children hit hardest. Displaced people have suffered extreme racism and sexism in refugee camps. Those who manage to reach Europe are confronted with violent anti-immigrant racism.
All politicians—including Trump, Sanders, and Hillary Clinton—serve the capitalist class. They are used to try to veil the essential conflict between two mortally opposed forces: the capitalist class and the working class. Either we crush the bosses, or the bosses keep trampling our class. PLP is open to all workers who want to see a mass, fighting communist movement smash this system once and for all. Join us!
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The Brooklyn Park Five: Capitalism Fails Black Youth and Women
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BROOKLYN, NY, March 7—An innocent student’s arrest on trumped-up charges has intensified anti-racist, anti-sexist fightback inside our school. Communist women in Progressive Labor Party are helping to lead this ongoing struggle.
In January, we learned that kkkops had arrested five teens, including one of our students, in connection with the rape of a young woman in a Brooklyn park. The news spread quickly, and one communist teacher asked the principal for an emergency staff meeting. By that point, even before the teens’ first court appearance, the racist capitalist media had done its worst to convict them. Ranging in age from 14 to 17, these young people’s photos, names and schools had been splashed over newspapers and websites. They were painted as violent, brutal rapists.
Black Students Guilty Before Trial
At the staff meeting, PLP comrades cautioned against jumping to conclusions. We reminded our co-workers of the Central Park Five, the infamous 1989 case where five Black and Latin boys from Harlem were falsely accused and convicted of raping a white woman jogging in Central Park. They spent up to 15 years in jail before being found innocent. In the sexist, dehumanizing profit system, which treats all workers as commodities, rape and sexist violence are rampant. But even as we defend women against these capitalist crimes, we must also defend our children against racist attacks.
The stereotype of the “animalistic” and “hyper-sexualized” Black male dates back to slavery. Used as a tool to oppress and divide the working class, it has destroyed the lives of countless innocent Black youth.
Students Discuss Racism, Sexism
Our next step was to bring this discussion into our classes. Students addressed the racist police tactics in poor, segregated neighborhoods like Brownsville, which is 93 percent Black and Latin. We discussed what students should and shouldn’t do if they are ever arrested. (For example: Never make a statement to the police without a lawyer or parent present.) At the same time, we pointed out that our only real protection against cops is to fight back as a united working class.
Our young students understood how racism and sexism were being used in this case, which was actually about the criminalization of Black youth and the systemic oppression of women. The 18-year-old victim had in fact been abused by her father and utterly failed by “support systems” that care nothing about Black women. Capitalism is designed to fail the working class, particularly Black, Latin,and women workers.
Teachers Defend Student in Court
After a communist in the school got a call from the lawyer representing the accused student, she organized three teachers to come to the arraignment in support. The prosecution’s case was weak, at best. As the defense lawyer noted, our student had “placed himself” at the scene of the crime only after three seasoned detectives had this scared youth alone in a room, without a lawyer or parent, to get the answer they wanted. Although the prosecution asked for $25,000 bail, the judge set it at $2,500. That may seem like a victory, but the amount was still impossible for the family. The lawyer made a plea to raise funds to keep our student out of Rikers Island, the New York City jail notorious for racist violence. Family and teachers got into gear and made phone calls, and the money was raised.
Organizing Inside the Schools
With communist and anti-racist leadership, the following days at school were full of discussions about the racist system and the need to fight it and defend our student. Money was raised within the school and beyond by some staunchly anti-racist teachers. We also discussed how to help our student in his transition back to school, with the weight of his charges still pending.
On February 24, the district attorney announced that charges against all five teens had been officially dropped. Again, this may seem like a great victory until you consider that these young men will forever have to deal with the consequences of this racist system. Their names will forever be connected to rape charges; they have been traumatized in countless ways.
Students, Not Criminals
Like thousands of Black and Latin students across the city, our students are treated like criminals every day. To enter the school, they must line up to file through metal detectors while being shouted at by New York City cops. Their bottled drinks are confiscated on the phony pretext that they might contain alcohol. When they walk through their own neighborhoods, they can never know when the racist cops will decide that they “fit the description” of a criminal suspect. Once they graduate, they face the grim reality of 51 percent unemployment for Black youth.
But that is the nature of capitalism, a system that needs racism to divide and pacify the working class. There is only one world that will smash racism and sexism—a communist world! Under communism, a society organized around meeting workers’ needs, collectivity is essential. The political and economic divisions created by racism and sexism will be destroyed. Only then will we be able to build a world worthy of working-class women and men.
It is our continuing task in our schools and workplaces to show our friends, co-workers, teachers and students that they must join this fight. In that spirit, we are now organizing our second annual anti-racist school assembly. The struggle continues!
NEW YORK CITY, March 19—“Trump, Bernie, Clinton all the same—racist terror is the name of the game!” Over 30 Progressive Labor Party members and friends made a revolutionary uproar at an anti-Donald Trump rally and march. While nearly 2,000 demonstrators called out only Trump for his vicious racism against the working class, a multiracial PLP exposed the endemic racism of the profit system and all of its stooge politicians: conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans and “democratic socialists.”
The rally began with speeches by immigrants’ rights fighters, students and various organizations. As they spoke, we distributed 500 CHALLENGEs. We also contributed chants that changed a reformist political tone to a communist one.
Shut This Racist System Down
Trump is the most open and obvious racist in the current president campaign, and his attack on Muslim, Latin, and immigrant workers and youth must be countered wherever he dares to show his garbage-spewing face. Even if he never gets elected, Trump is helping mobilize the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist fervor needed by the main wing of U.S. capitalism for the next global war to control Middle Eastern oil. But Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are playing their own deadly roles in luring workers away from rebellion and into the voting booth (see CHALLENGE, 3/23). It is the task of communists to expose all of capitalism, not just one particular puppet.
That’s what we did as the crowd marched through Central Park and across 59th Street and passed numerous upscale hotels and restaurants, including some owned by Trump. Our bullhorn finally gave out, but our chants stayed strong. When PLP called out the whole system as racist with the chant, “This whole damn system—shut it down!” a large number of youth and workers joined our contingent. When communists bring forth a sharp line, the working class more often than not responds with enthusiasm. (One Bernie Sanders supporter did try to shut us down—unsuccessfully.)
Tension from the police rose as the march exited the park and entered the streets of Manhattan. They began to form a solid ring around us, hassling us to quicken our pace. We boldly responded with the chant, “NYPD, KKK, How many kids did you kill today?” As the march headed south onto Madison Avenue, passing Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel, we defiantly chanted, “Capitalism means we’ve got to fight back!” All eyes and ears were on us, in the stores and in the streets. But the excitement was short-lived. As the march approached 57th Street, the police forces multiplied. They used their Long Range Acoustic Device, a sonic weapon, to warn us to stay on the sidewalk and not impede foot traffic. The cops arrested three protesters and pepper-sprayed the crowd.
Shut Down Highways, Not Just Shopping
At the same time, another anti-Trump rally blocked traffic on a highway in Arizona in an attempt to stop thousands from attending a pro-Trump event. Disrupting upscale shopping on Madison Avenue was certainly an intense experience, but it was not sufficiently militant to point us toward the actions we’ll need to take to shut down capitalism. The Arizona protest was a bolder step in that direction.
Don’t Vote, Organize for Communism
Fundamentally, the fervent support for Sanders and Trump stems from the same source: The working class is fed up with capitalist politics. Both the racist supporters of Trump and liberal backers of Sanders are deceived in trusting “maverick” politicians to have working-class interests at heart. The working class wants change, but electoral politics can only preserve the capitalist status quo—while giving workers the illusion of having a choice. The big capitalist bosses at ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup will make sure that the next president will continue to protect the interests of U.S. imperialism, as the rulers advance toward a broader global war. As an international working class, we must break out of the jail of electoral politics. We must organize anti-racist, anti-sexist fightbacks in our schools, jobs and streets. By continuing to fight racist tuition hikes, mass deportations and state-terrorist drone strikes, we’ll continue to show the bosses they cannot get away with violence against the working class.
There’s an alternative to the Clinton/Trump/Sanders/Cruz clique of ruling-class misleaders. That’s Progressive Labor Party. We stand for communism, a world system where all workers and youth will work together to meet our class’s collective needs. PLP continues to show that no matter our race, gender or nationality, the working class is united in a common struggle—the struggle for workers’ power. Don’t vote—organize for the long haul, for communist revolution!
Chicago, March 11—Thousands of protestors succeeded in stopping the appearance of gutter racist presidential candidate Donald Trump at the University of Illinois (UIC). The crowd was young, multiracial and international, and receptive to Progressive Labor Party’s communist ideas.
UIC student groups were outraged that the university would allow such a racist, anti-immigrant politician like Trump to speak, exposing the university bosses’ allegiance to the capitalist ruling class. The more conservative student groups, which support Bernie Sanders, called for peace, non-violence, and freedom of speech. Other student groups rejected that liberal program. A young Latin woman took the microphone and said, “The cops don’t understand peace and harmony—we need violence!” The microphone was quickly taken away from her. So much for the bosses’ phony free speech!
“Racists Go Home”
Many protestors gained access to the auditorium where Trump was to speak, and shouted anti-Trump slogans as the police tried to remove them. Trump was forced to cancel when it became clear that anti-racist militancy could not be silenced.
Scuffles and pushing matches broke out between Trump supporters and anti-racists. To clear the auditorium, the cops led Trump supporters into the parking lot. The anti-racists followed them, chanting, “Racists go home!” A protester threw a bottle, hitting a kkkop on the head.
It’s Not Just Trump; It’s the Profit System
PLP members and friends participated in the demonstration of thousands outside the building. We distributed over a thousand leaflets and 150 CHALLENGEs. We explained that unapologetically racist Trump, Wall Street-raised Clinton, and so-called socialist Sanders are all servants of the capitalist ruling class. Like Barack Obama, any president will continue to murder our class sisters and brothers in their wars for maximum profit. No matter which candidate wins, workers will lose. Capitalism is based on racism, war and the exploitation of the working class. Only a revolutionary communist party can destroy capitalism once and for all.
Communists Welcome, Must Give Leadership
Demonstrators were interested in communist ideas and what CHALLENGE had to say. Many gave us donations and contact information. One student gave $20 for a CHALLENGE subscription on the spot. A student from Serbia expressed interest in organizing PLP there.
Self-critically, we could have given more leadership; we had too few papers and no bullhorn. Before the demonstration, we discussed the idea of disrupting Trump’s speech from the inside. We decided we’d go in if our friends wanted to. As it turned out, anti-racists inside the building took the lead and were invigorated to fight against Trump’s racist supporters. Moving forwards, we must give bolder leadership. We will develop more confidence in the working class as we build a mass party.
There will be many more opportunities to lead workers and students on the road to communist revolution. Let’s build for a massive celebration of May Day, the international working class holiday representing fightback and our potential to build a communist world.
