I’ve been going to the B.P. Amoco picket line about every third day. I am a member of the United Steelworkers (USW) but not of their local. Other supporters from other locals have also come to the picket line. The striking refinery workers really appreciate this worker solidarity that brings into view the bigger picture of the struggle facing the working class as a whole. Like one picketer pointed out, “It is easy to honk your horn as you pass by, but it’s something very different to stop and picket in bitter cold weather.”
The oil industry in 2014 made over $90 billion in profit. The workers know the history of Rockefeller and Standard Oil and know that they are up against a ruthless set of bosses. For example, the first demand the company made to the union was for it to cease being the bargaining unit of the workforce!
The refinery is loaded with outside contractors who are crossing the USW lines and are minimally qualified. Some of the contractors are union members, but their leaders claim that they have to honor previous contracts to do certain jobs. The USW is playing by the rules laid down by the bosses.
The USW has produced a sign reading “Solidarity is Strength.”  But the most obvious example of solidarity is the strikers themselves. All the strikers meet at the union hall right across from the plant. They are assigned particular gates to picket. Drivers drop off and pick them up as needed. Hot food is always available at the union hall and canned goods are stockpiled there. Rank-and-filers put on a fundraiser of music and raffles to raise funds for the fightback and raised hundreds of dollars. Speakers called for keeping their rights and dignity on the job and won’t go back without it.
The workers speak of the refinery being understaffed and unsafe. Often four workers are assigned to a job, two working 12 hours and the other two working 12 hours as their reliefs. But if someone takes off, the other two-crew members have to work 18 hours to cover for the missing crewmember. Morale and safety go out the window. Twenty-seven refinery workers have been killed and hundreds hurt in the past five years. Close calls are a frequent occurrence. They work with highly explosive gases and chemicals. One fellow said that he has worked 12-hour days for 19 days in a row (see Red Eye, page 7 on bosses’ risking workers’ lives)!
The strikers are open to communist ideas. One worker upon learning that CHALLENGE was a communist paper said that, “I have some communist leanings and I will check this out.”  Many good discussions were held and contacts made. A strike is a good opportunity for workers to see who are their friends and who are their enemies. We will stay involved and make communism clearer to these striking refinery workers.

The devastation and chaos workers face in Ukraine as a result of the ongoing fight between pro-Russian forces and Ukranian troops reveal what the bosses have in store for the international working class. While the fighting is confined for the moment to eastern Ukraine, increasingly hostile rhetoric by both sides and their imperialist financiers, the U.S. and Russia, threatens armed combat throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. As Reuters reported:

More than 45,000 Russian troops as well as war planes and submarines started military exercises across much of the country on Monday [Mar. 16]...President Vladimir Putin called the Navy’s Northern Fleet to full combat readiness in exercises in Russia’s Arctic North apparently aimed at dwarfing military drills in neighboring Norway, a NATO member.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is the pro-U.S. imperialist military bloc in Western Europe. Three days later, Russia announced it had “doubled the number of troops taking part in mass drills…to 80,000” (Agence France-Presse, 3/19/15).
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the U.S. warmakers’ leading think tank. Representing the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, the CFR warned:

Russian armed forces are in the midst of a historic overhaul....Russian interventions in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014–2015...demonstrate that President Vladimir Putin is prepared to use military might to reestablish Russian hegemony….[T]he Russian military budget has more than doubled over the last decade (3/20/15).

World Wars: Crucibles for Revolution
In short, the competition between U.S. and Russian capitalists — for resources, markets, and geopolitical strongholds — is escalating. Current tensions follow Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 analysis, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. As Lenin explained, imperialist countries like the U.S., China and Russia are constantly re-dividing the world through war. (The U.S.  rulers used Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor to enter World War II and fight their Japanese and German imperialist rivals. The bosses may use Ukraine as an excuse to launch wider wars.)
As bosses in both countries strive to both motivate the working class for a wider imperialist confrontation, discipline workers through increased racist unemployment and intensified racist terror. But Lenin also showed that the world capitalist system is temporarily weakened by imperialist war, giving the working class opportunities for revolution. World War I and World War II, history’s two global conflicts, both proved to be crucibles for revolutionary movements. Those great advances were later reversed, as both Russia and then China decayed into profit-based systems with a capitalist elite. But today the Progressive Labor Party is organizing in 27 countries to smash capitalism once and for all with communist revolution!
A Line in the Sand
In The Grand Chessboard (1997), war planner Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined U.S. imperialism’s need to conquer Central Asian countries like Afghanistan. Earlier, as national security advisor, he helped write the Carter Doctrine, which drew a line in the Middle East sand. This policy, backed by every U.S. president over the last 35 years, states that the U.S. will defend its oil interests in the Persian Gulf “by any means necessary, including military force.” On March 9, Brzezinski told the Center for Strategic and International Studies, another ruling-class think tank:

The Russian army today is ... three to four years from being ready for a sustained military campaign against a well-armed professional military, namely [the U.S.] This is strikingly similar to the situation in 1938-1939, when...Hitler decided to go after Czechoslovakia.

But if the bosses who control Russia decide they cannot wait to mass their ground troops, they have a quicker option: nuclear weapons. As ABC News reported (3/19/15):

Russia plans to station state-of-the art missiles ... and deploy nuclear-capable bombers ... amid bitter tensions with the West over Ukraine....The missiles, which are capable of hitting enemy targets up to 310 miles away with high precision, can be equipped with a nuclear or a conventional warhead. From Kaliningrad, they could reach several NATO member states.

It isn’t only Moscow hastening the outbreak of World War III [see box]:  

A planned U.S. military exercise near Russia’s border...set to begin Saturday, will involve a convoy of 120 U.S. Army Strykers. Over ten days, the eight-wheel drive combat vehicles will stop in a different border area community each night to showcase the ability of U.S. forces to transport troops quickly, and to assure Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland of NATO’s commitment (Military.com, 3/20/15).

Turn World War Into Class War
Our class has no stake in this ruthless battle among bosses. Both Putin and Barack Obama fight their wars on behalf of the billionaire capitalists they serve. Both are ready to sacrifice the lives of millions of workers. Meanwhile, China continues to ramp up its military spending to project its power beyond Asia to Africa and Latin America, the “backyard” of U.S. imperialism since the 1820s.
The Progressive Labor Party is organizing a mass movement of millions of workers worldwide to upset the bosses’ plans for slaughter. We are waging anti-racist battles big and small on the job, on the campus and in the bosses’ militaries. Most of all, we are preparing to turn the next big war into class war for communist revolution. Join us!

*******

Imagining the Bosses’ Next War

On March 17, the Atlantic Council, a war-bent U.S. think tank, hosted a symposium called “How the Next Great War Begins.” Financed by such imperialist mainstays as Chevron, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Council focused on fictionalized predictions of how wars break out and play out. It awarded its top prize to “Coffee, Wi-Fi, and the Moon,” an essay that foresees “a combination of weaponized Wi-Fi, hackable body implants, and great power politics sparking the next Great War” after a U.S-engineered assassination of Vladimir Putin.
James Stavridis, the retired NATO supreme commander who led the bloodbath to rid Libya of Chinese and Russian oil firms, urged the assembly not to forget China. He plugged a forthcoming book, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. As described by Amazon:
The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a twenty-first century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace. The fighting involves everything from stealthy robotic–drone strikes to old warships from the navy’s “ghost fleet.”
“Ghost fleet” refers to the hundreds of warships and freighters the U.S. Navy is keeping mothballed for World War III. Ghost Fleet’s authors, August Cole and P.W. Singer, are no harmless dreamers. Cole runs Atlantic Council’s Art of Future War project, while Singer has cashed fat checks from the Pentagon, the FBI, and the Call of Duty video game. Like other gore-soaked games of its genre, Call of Duty features gratuitous, carnage with no connection to real places or the working people who live in those places.
The war novel-and-game industry is explicitly tied to the Pentagon and military contractors. They are designed to build support and help recruit willing killers for the U.S. ruling class.

Cumberland COUNTY, NJ — For a lesson in Racism 101, you don’t need to take a college course. You can just take a trip to Cumberland County in southwestern New Jersey.  In the wake of workers’ outrage to the non-indictments for police who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner, videos went viral of a police murder last December of Jerame Reid in Bridgeton, New Jersey.
Jerame’s family refused to take this murder lying down. In late February, as many as 200 protesters marched to the local Bridgeton courthouse to protest this legalized lynching.  The protest was full of young workers and youth — many from the Bridgeton community and others from nearby cities, including Philadelphia, where family members of other Black youth executed by cops came to show their solidarity.  
County Built on Racism
The political economy of Cumberland County is built around the racist prison industrial complex.  The majority of New Jersey’s prisons are located here.  From across the state, tens of thousands of unemployed Black and Latin youth — from as far away as Newark — are imprisoned in these so-called “correctional” facilities.  Whose job is it to oversee them? The local workers who rely on the prison industry for their livelihood. The main source of employment and business in Cumberland County — where unemployment is rampant—is the prison system.  Most small business owners, many of them Latin, have contracts with the prison industry.
This is not a new story. For over three hundred years, Cumberland County has been home to concentration camps for oppressed workers.  The Lenne Lenape Indians were systematically forced into plantations in Cumberland County after their land was stolen from them elsewhere in New Jersey by Dutch and British colonizers.
The roots of racism are so deep here that even the local Quaker community — defying national Quaker policy — held slaves here into the early 19th century. (New Jersey was the last state in the North to abolish slavery.) The county’s agricultural base led even these supposed humanitarians to stay committed to forced plantation labor for kidnapped Africans.  Cumberland was the perfect New Jersey headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Even today, the Klan remains an open force across Cumberland County. In January, in neighboring Atlantic County, KKK flyers were secretly left on people’s lawns, part of a regional outreach campaign  from Maryland through Pennsylvania to New York.  
Meanwhile, Bridgeton’s cops, local Black elected officials, and the courts are all in bed together to keep the working class divided and repressed.  Indeed, it was a Black cop who killed Jerame Reid.
Workers Ripe for Rebellion
But Bridgeton is not just a site of racist capitalist repression. It’s also a sleeping giant for revolt led by Black workers. Even though police brandished semi-automatics and posted snipers outside the courthouse during the February rally, the youth and elders did not let up.  They testified to the racist system of entrapment, going back their whole lives.  What the cops failed to recognize is that the state’s bullying tactics have created more angry, anti-racist soldiers.
From Newark to Philadelphia, the Progressive Labor Party has been winning youth to the idea that a long-term, multiracial movement must wage class war to obliterate the killer kkkops in communities like Bridgeton, along with their crony officials and judges.  PLP is that movement!
With the leadership of the Reid family, especially Jerame’s wife, PLP will continue to work with others across the region to point out how dead-end reforms will only buy time for the bosses while more youth are slain in yet another city. As workers rise to the occasion to fight back, PLP will be there to take leadership and learn from workers. And as more workers learn about our Party’s vision for a future without capitalism and racist terror, we will accelerate our building of a mass movement for communist revolution!

Washington DC, March 14 — Over 40 public health workers and students attended an anti-racist gathering today. It was led by three Black workers who addressed disparities in mental health and solitary confinement for incarcerated Black and Latin workers, racism and police terror, and the upcoming arbitration hearing in June on the DC transit system’s racist background checks.
During the discussion period, people denounced capitalism and the profits it makes from prison slave labor. Others condemned the arrests in Ferguson, and called for a fight for jobs. One Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member declared that mass incarceration, generated by the war on drugs — a war on Black workers — jailed tens of thousands of young Black men to take potential militant fighters off the street.
PLP members met many new students, workers, and health professionals. Ten signed up to help on the Metro campaign against racist background checks and to join the upcoming conference on mass incarceration, mental health, and homelessness.  
Earlier, on February 28, a PLP leader and a friend of the Party addressed 100 students at the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) convention session on mass incarceration and the history of racist oppression. The students responded with enthusiasm to the presentation and vigorously discussed strategies to organize against racism. Students in Maryland had organized a social justice discussion group while others organized medical student “die-ins” to oppose racist murders by cops.  Local students as well as those from other states gave their contact information for anti-racist campaigns in health care. The Student National Medical Association (SNMA) chapter at George Washington University (GWU) organized a “die-in” and sponsored programs to train student activists.  
For the past two years the Disparities Committee of the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA) has been campaigning against Metro’s background-check policies. The organization has been fighting to get former prisoners hired and not fired. PLP members have been important in this work. The issue has become well-known in DC and now the leaders of MWPHA and the GWU School of Public Health have joined in activities to broaden the struggle.
During the upcoming National Public Health Week in April, the Dean of the School of Public Health at GWU will speak on mass incarceration. In the coming fall, MWPHA’s annual conference will focus on Incarceration, mental health and homelessness.  The Public Health Student Association (PHSA) will also present a session on grass roots organizing. They have invited a PL’er to speak.  
Members of AMSA, SNMA, and PHSA are planning to work together on these issues. This will be an important step towards multi-racial unity and student health activism.
Despite these encouraging developments, a sharper discussion of capitalism and the need for communist revolution must develop with the many antiracist workers and students who have participated in our work. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Communism is the way to abolish the ills of this racist society. These truths must be raised more clearly in our forums, so that we can offer the vision of a communist society to the broad masses.
PLP is launching a study group with many of these new activists to address these points.  We want these new activists to join the Party, participate in May Day on May 2 in New York City, and to come to the national American Public Health Association Meetings this fall to build on these struggles with the Radical Public Health students in Chicago (see CHALLENGE, 3/11).
Fight Racism in Public Health and Medicine
The rebellions stemming from the Ferguson and Staten Island police murders have made an impact on the thinking of medical and public health organizations around the country. Take a look at these two items from the New England Journal of Medicine to get an idea of the opportunities from struggle that PL health workers can embrace:
“#BlackLivesMatter — A Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities”, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1500529
“Bias, Black Lives, and Academic Medicine”, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1500832

PLP comrades should entwine communist politics into this anti-racist movement.