Superficially, McFarland USA is another movie in a long line of “feel good” stories of sports teams (typically made up of Black, Latin or Asian students) up against impossible odds, who somehow overcome them and emerge victorious (frequently with the help of a tough but caring white coach). The film details the story of the McFarland (California) High School cross-country team. The team did not even exist until 1987, when a seemingly washed-up, volatile coach who had been fired from a job in Boise, Idaho, arrives in McFarland with his family to take a job as a health and physical education teacher at the high school.
The coach, Jim White (played by Kevin Costner and sarcastically called “blanco” by his amused working-class Mexican students), soon realizes that the difficult working lives of his students require them to run everywhere. They run after class from the school to the fields to help their families pick cabbages and oranges. To get to work on time, they run on weekend mornings to reach the trucks that would otherwise take off without them. Smelling success, he organizes a cross-country squad of seven young men from his PE class.
The team is the victim of racist and anti-working class jibes ( which White never takes on) from all-white teams from rich suburbs like Palo Alto. They place last in their first big meet because the other schools sports’ budgets give them the ability to practice in the mountainous areas that are frequently the meet sites, and the McFarland runners have run only on level tracks. So White has them practice running up and down mounds of almond shells near the fields. After months of hard practicing, an inspirational speech by White telling them why their working-class lives make their team tougher than anyone else around, and a tremendous team effort, they win the state championship and silence the smart-mouth sons of the petty bourgeoisie.
Great, right? But things aren’t always what they seem to be. First, White and his family have a racist outlook when they arrive in McFarland, his daughter asking “We’re going to live in this dump?” White and his family stereotype the working-class youth as gangbangers who drive their noisy, low-riding cars through town at night for fun. When his oldest daughter (who later falls in love with one of the team members) is injured while with the team during a late-night run-in with other youth who attack them, White immediately assumes his team members are at fault. In fact, they risked their own safety to protect his daughter. But these reactions from the movie’s hero are made to seem innocent and natural.  
Perhaps the emotional center of the movie is the singing of the U.S. national anthem by the players of all the teams just before the championship run. The camera pans White and all the McFarland players, their families and supporters proudly joining in. The message is clear: immigrant workers have just as much to feel loyal to as their suburban counterparts. This is also the message of the DREAM Act, the law that encourages immigrant youth to enlist in the U.S. military to obtain legal status.
Movie Ignores Local Fightback
The movie shows nothing about the fightback of farmworkers against the horrendous working conditions they face. This reviewer participated in two Progressive Labor Party Summer Projects in McFarland, Delano and other California towns around the time of the events described in the movie. There was a sharp struggle in the fields over low wages, long working hours, and the criminal use of dangerous pesticides by the growers, all of which grew out of a capitalist system which must produce food and other commodities for profit, not human need. McFarland and other towns in the San Joaquin Valley saw openly communist-led union organizing of farmworkers for the first time since the 1930s and ‘40s.
Starting in 1984, McFarland also became the center of a cluster of child leukemia cases. Rank-and-file farmworkers, with help from local researchers, were able to show that the most likely cause for these cancers was the gradual downward seepage of pesticides into the soil and then into the water supply. PLP and InCAR organized a campaign to put the growers’ profit motives on trial for the death of our young brothers and sisters. We pointed out the role of U.S. imperialism in forcing immigrant workers to choose between crossing the border and working under these dangerous conditions, and facing mass unemployment and starvation in their countries of birth.
The lesson of McFarland, USA is that, under capitalism, the media can never honestly address issues like exploitation, racism and sexism. That is because mass culture is run by money (for corporations like Disney, which made this movie), and inevitably reflects the dominant bourgeois ideology. So what we get instead is feel-good pap meant to mislead honest, anti-racist workers into supporting dangerous pro-boss ideas like patriotism. After a communist revolution, artistic creation will serve the working class by promoting communist values of class love and solidarity in the struggle for a world without borders, profits and exploitation.

A cockroach named Dylann Roof pulled the trigger at Emanuel AME Church. But capitalism aimed the gun. Capitalism murdered nine people in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17—nine more victims to add to the millions of workers killed each year by callous starvation, preventable disease, environmental toxins, a profit-crazed pharmaceutical industry, missing medical care, mad-dog police, and imperialist war.
And, in particular, by racism.
The foundation of U.S. capital consists of two centuries of Black enslavement and another century and a half of super-exploitation of Black and Latin and immigrant workers. To justify these super-profits of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and protect their organized crime, the capitalist bosses rely on racist ideology. This ranges from the pseudo-science of “intelligence” testing—and the bogus concept of “race” itself—to Barack Obama calling the Baltimore rebels “thugs,” the contemporary n-word. To beat back revolt against their oppressive profit system, the rulers resort to state terror: the mass incarceration and legalized lynching of young Black men and women by the bosses’ cops. (See CHALLENGE, page 4.)
Following Racist Leaders
Dylann Roof was both a product and an instrument of this racist, ruling-class agenda. In his online manifesto, Roof said he was “radicalized” by the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a wannabe cop.
He was influenced by the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, an offshoot of the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950s and ‘60s that harassed and assaulted  civil rights workers in the South. (Essentially an open version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Citizens Councils’ membership included Congressmen, state legislators, newspaper publishers and editors, and the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.)
Given Roof’s gutter leanings, he was no doubt inspired by the recent onslaught of murders-by-cop, the cold-blooded killings of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Shantel Davis and too many others to mention. When the bosses’ police and courts declare open season on Black workers and youth, vigilante scum follow their lead.
Sometimes these atrocities are useful to the ruling class. By distorting the events through their corporate media, the capitalists use them to intimidate workers and feed racist stereotypes. They can try to turn us against one another. They know the one force that can destroy them is a unified, multiracial working class with revolutionary communist leadership. Without racism to divide the world’s workers, there aren’t enough bombs in the world to keep the bosses afloat—or alive.
Terrorists, Big and Small
But sometimes the little terrorists go too far. Sometimes they threaten the rulers’ overriding strategy to recruit enough reliable soldiers for the next big war over Middle Eastern oil, against Russia or China or both. Then the big terrorists slap the little ones down, in a desperate attempt to retain workers’ allegiance and hold open rebellion at bay.
That’s what happened in Ferguson, when the U.S. Attorney General rushed to the scene and launched a civil rights investigation. It happened in Baltimore, when the injustice system was compelled to indict six cops after the brutal in-custody execution of Freddie Gray. It just happened again in Charleston, when politicians of both parties and all stripes joined the liberal national media in condemning Roof and declaring that the Confederate battle flag must go.
In a time of intense partisanship and ruling-class dysfunction, the dominant finance capital wing has used the Charleston massacre to unite and discipline its ranks. News of campaign donations from the Council of Conservative Citizens discredited three Republicans presidential candidates: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum. All are close allies of Charles and David Koch, the Kansas billionaires with huge investments in the domestic U.S. oil industry—and little interest in going to a war to defend ExxonMobil’s profits in Iraq or Saudi Arabia. The three candidates were exposed because the biggest U.S. bosses—represented by Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Jeb Bush, among others—don’t trust their leadership in the next global conflict.
Workers Have But One Flag
The Confederate flag is an abomination. It stands for slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the most brutal, unspeakable oppression of men, women, and children. It should be shredded and burned wherever it is found. But the Confederacy had nothing to do with the genocidal slaughter of millions of people in the Vietnam War, or the half a million children killed by U.S. sanctions against Iraq, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians incinerated by atomic bombs in World War II. These genocidal crimes were committed by the side that won the Civil War, by finance capital, under the most feared and despicable banner in the world today: the U.S. flag.
Workers have no nation. National flags can lead them only in the wrong direction. Flags fuel conflict among workers wherever capitalists are at odds: in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in Israel and Palestine. The international working class has only one flag—the red flag of communist revolution. The Progressive Labor Party has carried that flag for fifty years in our fight against racist terror and for a society run by workers to meet workers’ needs. We hold the red flag high in two dozen countries. Join us!

WASHINGTON, DC, June 19 — Today is Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates the abolition of slavery throughout the South. On June 19, 1865, hundreds of thousands of slaves in Texas were the last ones to be emancipated, more than two and half years after slavery was legally abolished. One hundred and fifty years later, workers are still fighting against racist oppression.
In a somber gathering, hundreds used Juneteenth to honor the nine victims of the racist shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The murderer, Dylann Roof, is a racist militant determined to provoke a race war in the United States. While racist Roof is charged with murder, this racist system is stays free to kill and terrorize Black youth! The working class will propel itself forward in the struggle against this racist capitalist system, just like Denmark Vesey attempted to do in 1822 by launching a rebellion against slavery in 1822, organized in this very same church!
Best Response to Racism? Fight Back!
Several members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party called for multiracial unity against racism and distributed CHALLENGE and leaflets. The leaflet listed several ongoing anti-racist struggles where local PL’ers are engaged. We fight against increased repression and the racist background checks policy at Metro, the bus and rail system for the DC area. The background checks have led to the unjust firing of several workers in recent months. They also block anyone with any criminal record from ever getting a job at Metro. We also work and fight for better public health. We lead struggles against HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C—diseases that have become epidemics especially among Black workers due to systemic racism.
Recently, PLP sparked courageous walkouts around the racist Freddie Gray murder in Baltimore. And we continue the decades-long struggle in Prince George’s County against racist police terror.
Through conversations and our literature, PL’ers called on participants to join these ongoing struggles as the best response to the racist murders in Charleston.
Several people discussed PLP’s broader vision for communism. One person made a financial contribution after a discussion about Karl Marx and how we would abolish the wage system with a communist revolution. A public works employee enthusiastically provided his contact information after learning of the PLP’s work in the industrial working class.
Multiracial Unity Leads to Victory
About half of the participants at the rally were Black. This strong multiracial presence at this event is a warning sign for capitalists. But there is much work to be done to solidify such unity.
One speaker demanded to know how Al Sharpton could call for “calm” after these racist murders. He shouted, “They are telling us to be calm?!”
He noted that Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching crusader, had called on Black workers to arm themselves against racists rather than calmly submit. Another speaker cited the Deacons for Defense, an armed Black group in the 1960s that defended civil rights marchers and the Black community from racist attacks in the 1960s in the South. Non-violence, he said, was not always the best strategy to beat racism!
On the other hand, a speaker from the Nation of Islam mocked the white workers at the rally. Other speakers stressed the need to build Black institutions instead of multiracial and militant fighting organizations, undermining the rally’s unity. However, a Black veteran from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of the 1960s called for multiracial unity with special outreach to poor white workers who, she declared, were exploited by the system and often had their heads filled by the racist scapegoating myths about Black people. She’s right. Separatist Black institutions will inevitably end up in the bosses’ camp because they build Black capitalists and capitalist ideology.
The rally ended with the release of nine balloons representing the victims in Charleston, and with the bold marching order, “Don’t mourn, Organize!”

MEXICO, June 29 — The teachers’ struggle here is intensifying as they have been forced to confront fascist terror from the capitalist class. In the fight against educational reforms, teachers are exposing capitalist democracy for what it is: a criminal apparatus to control the working class.
Worker-Student Unity
In spite of the huge advantages enjoyed by the repressive forces of the capitalist state, teachers, students and rural workers responded with bravery and dignity. In defiance of the bosses’ government, they burned the headquarters of the four dominant parties in Mexico. They also took over the headquarters of the electoral district to attempt to block the elections.
On June 7, the day of the federal elections, in spite of a military state of siege, teachers in struggle organized a huge demonstration and burned thousands of electoral ballots. One hundred forty-two people were arrested and sent to high security prisons in Nayarit, Veracruz and Mexico State. Most have been released, but 17 members of a solidarity organization are still incarcerated, accused of electoral crimes, terrorism, sedition, and carrying Molotov cock-tails.
The education reform introduced teacher evaluation tests. The tests are a way to terrorize and control education workers, who, according to the World Bank, are 54 percent women. They also disregard Mexico’s rural, indigenous, and Black students. Teachers in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas, Michoacán and Veracruz are the strongest contingents of the National Coordinating Committee of Educational Workers (CNTE). On June 1, these groups began local strikes to promote a national political strike that had the following goals: the repeal of the criminal structural reforms, the overthrow of President Enrique Peña Nieto, and the establishment of a popular government. This plan failed.
CNTE limited itself to fighting for its own demands: the repeal of the Education Reform; keeping public education free; job security; revocation of punitive evaluations; saving previous labor gains; acceptance of its educational proposal and freedom for political prisoners. To achieve these goals, they carried out a number of highly bold actions, including the boycott of deputies and governors elections, and blockades of gas stations, airports and international stores.
As of today, Section 22 of the CNTE in Oaxaca agreed to resume negotiating demands with the Interior Minister. But, education workers need a communist revolution, not a popular government or negotiations with the capitalists.
The State Terrorizes Workers
The bosses’ government led by Nieto in an effort to save the most expensive elections in history and the profits of his capitalist lords, sent his fascist apparatus to attack the teachers and weaken the struggle. Thousands of federal and local cops, soldiers and marines equipped with riot gear, high-caliber weapons, planes, helicopters and tanks, invaded Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca and Chiapas. Oaxaca alone was occupied by 20,000 troops.
Fascism is the outgrowth of global capitalism. It is the intensification of the repressive and ideological forces in order to keep the existing capitalist class in power. As R. Palme Dutt wrote in Fascism and Social Revolution, “The causes of fascism lie deep-rooted in existing society. Capitalism in its decay breeds fascism” These fascistic conditions are what we are witnessing in Mexico.    
In the face of the capitalist government’s terror against the working class, and to respond to the parents’ and community support, the CNTE agreed on a tactical retreat to allow the completion of the school cycle. In spite of the bosses’ attacks through the media and in the streets and workplaces, the struggle will continue. During the summer vacation in July and August, there will be massive demonstrations in the Federal District.   
The Progressive Labor Party and CHALLENGE have played active roles in this trade union movement. We distributed thousands of flyers to infuse struggle with our communist analysis of how capitalist politics hurt the working class. PLP in Mexico presents a revolutionary strategy to destroy capitalism and to establish communism as the only solution to the problems faced by the working class. We will continue use this opportunity to strengthen the Party and advance towards a communist revolution.