(Click here for leaflet on Paris Terorist Attack)

Immediately following the Paris attacks, the mass media has ramped up anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism, using them as an excuse for intensified border control and calls for war.  These racist responses to a horrendous attack on the working class of Paris are exactly what the ruling class wants (whether they are French, U.S. or Saudi bosses). What we really need is working class unity against all these bosses and their warmongering.

The best way to stand in solidarity with our Parisian sisters and brothers against this most recent carnage is to stand against imperialist war on our jobs, schools and universities. These recent attacks in Paris reflect the continued chaos created by the US and French led oil war in Iraq and Syria.   

Same Enemy, Same Fight!

From Paris to Damascus, Baghdad to Brooklyn the workers of the world have no good side in this dogfight for oil profits in the Middle East.  Only under the international communist red flag of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) can we turn these racist wars and fascist anti-immigrant policies into a class war and fight for communism: a world without borders, wars for profit, racism or sexism.

With all their rhetoric about creating an Islamic state, ISIS (which is composed primarily of former military of the old Saddam regime and funded by both oil profits sold on the black market and small-time Saudi bosses), has actual dreams of maintaining control of key oil and gas fields in direct competition to the US and French bosses.

Since September, 2015 the French bosses have deployed their only aircraft carrier, and just this past week have expanded their bombing campaign from Iraq into Syria, carrying out over 1,300 sorties and 271 airstrikes murdering thousands of workers “without mercy.” 

Workers of the World Unite!

Workers need to unite internationally against all imperialists. Communist revolution is the only solution to the problems of capitalism but we need millions of committed workers to make that happen. Communism means no bosses’ borders creating fake divisions for our class. We will share all of the world’s resources for the benefit of our whole class!

Smash Anti-Muslim racism!

Join the international Progressive Labor Party in the fight for Communism!

The capitalist class that runs the United States appears to be tentatively settling on its two presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio. The 2016 U.S. presidential election is more than the media-driven circus it appears to be—for the bosses, the stakes are high. While U.S. imperialism still dominates the world, its relative power is in decline. It faces growing challenges from the capitalist bosses running China and Russia and upstart regional imperialists like ISIS.
Elections in any capitalist country, from the U.S. to Malaysia, are used to discipline the bosses’ ranks, to centralize power in times of crisis, and to deceive the international working class into backing the rulers’ agenda. Above all, the mission is to protect and expand the capitalists’ profits.
Rubio and Clinton: Birds of a Feather
For the dominant wing of U.S. financiers and industrialists, including JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil, the 2016 election is a means to guarantee the future use of military force to maintain control of the energy-rich Middle East—and gear up for a broader conflict with Russia or China or both. For the moment, at least, the bosses are leaning toward Rubio as the Republican nominee: “Marco Rubio will take the mantle of ‘establishment’ or ‘business’ candidate from Jeb Bush” (Fortune, 11/1/15).  On the Democratic side, the warmakers’ current choice is Hillary Clinton. A reliable servant of U.S. imperialism as Barack Obama’s former secretary of state, Clinton engineered the mass slaughter of workers in Libya in 2011. The liberal Democrat “insurgent,” Bernie Sanders, is in fact a pro-imperialist tool of the same establishment that now favors Rubio (see CHALLENGE, 8/12/15). His job is to lure disillusioned young people into the charade of electoral “democracy” before he steps aside for Clinton or some other capitalist shill acceptable to the bosses.
While no one can predict the outcome in 2016 with any certainty, one thing is certain: The next U.S. president will serve the needs of U.S. imperialism, just like Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and those who came before them.
Fascism: Capitalism in Crisis
The main U.S. bosses are also using these elections to reassert their dominance over more domestically oriented capitalists like billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. In contrast to the ExxonMobil wing of the ruling class, with its trillions invested in the oil wealth of the Middle East, the Koch brothers’ assets are concentrated in refineries in Minnesota and Texas. Where the ExxonMobil faction has defended the crude it pumps in Iraq at the cost of three million workers’ lives and counting, the Kochs and their Tea Party allies oppose the corporate tax hikes a major ground invasion would require. The Koch network plans to raise close to $900 million in 2016 to elect Republicans who will “push for deregulation, tax cuts and smaller government” (New York Times, 1/26/15). Koch backer Chris Rufer, a California tomato processor, said the network’s “central goal…is to stop the centralization of power” (The Hill, 10/21/15).
“Centralization of power” is code for fascism, a form of capitalism in crisis, when the bosses can no longer rule in the usual way. The finance capital wing is putting the Koch faction on notice that it needs to fall in line, contribute its share of cash to finance the coming imperialist wars, and help coerce the working class to fight them. For the international working class, fascism means more open racist and sexist terror by the state apparatus—the cops, courts, and prisons. U.S. workers will be forced into a military draft amid mass racist unemployment. Workers outside the U.S. will face a sagging imperialist power that will be only more desperate – and brutal – to stay on top.
U.S. Bosses Prepping for Fascism
Rubio’s break with the Koch faction made the dominant U.S. imperialists happy. On October 30, the big bosses’ New York Times celebrated with a front-page article: “Paul Singer, Influential Billionaire, Throws Support to Marco Rubio for President.” Singer’s pro-Rubio manifesto read in part:
There are enormous power vacuums [worldwide] in one hot spot after another...Senator Rubio grasps this reality in his bones...His instincts are excellent, and he knows the terrain and the risks. He will stand with our allies and stand up to our adversaries.
Just who is Paul Singer? He heads Elliott Management, a Wall Street “vulture” hedge fund known for buying up defaulted loans in countries like Peru and the Republic of Congo, “rejecting any attempts at restructuring, then firing up lawsuits to claim full repayments plus more” (Wall Street Journal, 6/25/14). A significant contributor to both the Koch network and the past Republican presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, Elliott is ideally placed to help unite the ruling class behind a willing servant like Rubio.
As Russia deepens its military involvement in Syria and China colonizes the South China Sea, the U.S. bosses’ problems are deepening by the day. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, an influential pro-imperialist think tank, writes that Syria is “an example of how we might want to send or have to send 10, 20, 30,000 forces to one mission or another …there are security stakes around the world that still could necessitate more than just drones and Special Forces” (NPR, 11/1/15).
The bosses know they cannot win over workers to fight in the next profit-driven bloodbath without getting their own house in order and bringing the Koch brothers to heel.
No War But Class War!
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is against all imperialist war. We stand for revolutionary class war! PLP is organizing in more than two dozen countries to build a mass international Party to fight for communism. We reject the bosses’ election circus. We say: Don’t vote, organize! Organize anti-racist struggles on the job, on the campuses and in the bosses’ militaries. Only PLP represents the working class. Only a mass international PLP can smash imperialism for all time. Join us!

NEW YORK CITY, October 27—Forty students, joined by church and community groups and members of Progressive Labor Party, rallied to protest the exploitation of campus workers at Columbia University, a wealthy ruling-class school with a long history of attacking the working class.
Student Worker Solidarity has been organizing for three years at Columbia, which pays students about $9 an hour while hoarding a $9.6 billion endowment and lavishing its president, Lee Bollinger, with a salary of more than $3 million a year (businessinsider.com, 12/16/14). At today’s demonstration, students told of how they earn so little that they cannot afford both food and books. One student noted that vital positions—like sexual violence hotline counselors—are not paid at all.
Only a system based on wage slavery would force workers to pay for the bare necessities of life. Under communism, work will be organized according to the needs of society and the commitment of the individual. There will be no money or wages. Incentives will be political, not material. We will work to serve our class.
Today’s demonstration culminated in a march into the office of the provost, the university’s number two official, with the group chanting loudly all the way.  After the provost failed to respond to their demonstration on October 13, as one student put it, the protesters had “no choice but to escalate” the class war.                   
Under the profit system, all businesses—from fast-food chains to hospitals to colleges—attack workers on a daily basis. As an elite educational institution, Columbia helps develop next-generation leaders for U.S. capitalism as the rulers move toward broader war and rising fascism. That’s an important job, and Columbia will crush anyone who gets in its way. In recent years, Columbia students have sided with community residents against police sweeps of adjacent, mostly Black and Latin public housing projects. They have exposed the university’s racist designs to displace long-time neighborhood residents in campus expansion schemes.
Reform Struggles, Revolutionary Ideas
Fifty years ago, when PLP was founded, it undertook a strategy to inject revolutionary content into student anti-war and anti-racist movements. A worker-student alliance was born.  PLP’s early growth among students was rooted in the conviction that capitalism was the real enemy, and that only a revolutionary party could lead workers to a communist world that will liberate us all.
During the Vietnam War, anti-imperialist campaigns at Columbia and other campuses, along with PLP summer projects, inspired students to take jobs in factories and transit. This Party-led movement produced committed revolutionaries who dedicated their entire lives to overthrowing the whole rotten capitalist system.
Students in Student Worker Solidarity are becoming accomplished organizers as they recognize the need to unite with workers. The next step is to deepen our understanding of the limits of capitalism, a system than can never provide a decent standard of living for most workers. In fact, as international competition for markets and resources intensify, and inter-imperialist conflicts inevitably follow, cuts in wages and services will only get worse. Ultimately, capitalism has got to go! And that means joining PLP to create a world of work without the exploitation of wage slavery.

THE BRONX, November 11 — Worker-student alliance leads the way across City University of New York campuses. Drawing inspiration from the striking college students in South Africa who shut down universities and roads in response to a tuition fee, hundreds of students here were involved in teach-ins or rallies to challenge capitalist ideas.   
Regular classes were suspended at some campuses, as professors brought their classes to teach-ins. These included panels about the fight against racism, the role of contingent labor, the exploitation of part-time faculty, tuition hikes, the history of CUNY and historic struggles for open admissions and free tuition.
At one teach-in, over 60 students saw a presentation of the video “Professors in Poverty” and discussed why so many are living below the poverty level (see page 5). We discussed the need to fight back and follow the lead the students in South Africa. In the biggest student protest to hit the country since the end of Apartheid in 1994, students fought the cops’ stun grenades and water cannons with working-class violence. The mainly Black students say they cannot afford fee increases and have even rejected a government bribery to restrict increases to 6 percent.
Meanwhile, CUNY bosses have planned to continue to implement tuition hikes at $300 per year, before fees. This is in addition to the five-year hike that’s already in effect! Some student discussed the struggle to survive, balance work, and travel costs along with tuition and book expenses. Like South Africa, these hikes are racist and hit Black students the hardest. CUNY Students are planning a protest against tuition hikes November 12 (see next issue).
At one campus, students and faculty set up tables in the cafeteria to make signs about the CUNY crisis. Many signed up to be part of a fightback committee.
At one community college, an all day teach-in was organized that drew over 200 students. Panels included a discussion of the militant struggles of students in 1989, where protests shut down campuses, forcing then Governor Mario Cuomo to withdraw a $200 tuition hike. Another lesson we can learn from this is that no reform is safe under capitalism.
PLP in the House
We have an important lesson to learn from students in South Africa, whose parents had fought Apartheid and were dished Black capitalism and reconciliation. Not only do we need to fight back, we need to arm ourselves with communist politics as our weapons.
Progressive Labor Party is experiencing some success in bringing communist ideas to our campuses. Our analysis about what the ruling class is up to in its drive towards war and fascism resonates with many students and faculty.
From the Bronx to Brooklyn, PLP is raising the red flag of communism (see Medgar Evers article). In the Bronx, we are continuing last year’s study group with students and faculty. We discuss CHALLENGE, campus issues, and how to fight.
One professor uses CHALLENGE regularly in his class and is meeting more students who want to get involved. Last year, Bronx students were involved in a number of struggles including supporting workers in the neighborhood who were being underpaid, helping to organize a mass teach-in about Ferguson, and leading a walkout against police terror. The attacks on CUNY students are part of the ongoing systematic exploitation of the working class. As the U.S. gears up for more war, the working class must gear up to fight back and fight to win!