The world’s imperialist powers are debating the best way to prepare for the next potential world war—a conflict that would no doubt exceed the wholesale killing of the working class in World War I (50 million) and World War II (100 million). Will 2014 prove a repeat of 1914, the first eruption of global war? Can the U.S. uphold its military guarantees and forge credible coalitions, or will it forsake its allies as imperialist rivalries sharpen?
These are the big questions coming out of the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where leading capitalists hold their annual convention. U.S. and U.S.-leaning billionaires and their lackey politicians, think tankers, and media stars assemble at the luxurious resort to ponder the future. Their earnest deliberations, of course, are more focused on their profits than the millions of workers’ lives they are all too willing to put at risk. This year’s main sponsors at Davos included imperialist heavyweights JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as British and French oil giants BP and Total. The theme was especially ominous: “Reshaping the World.”
But the bosses’ vision is limited by their class outlook. Their “reshaping” ignores the role to be played by the international working class. In the same way, their analysis of World War I failed to account for the outbreak of the 1917 communist revolution that established workers’ power in what became the Soviet Union. (Caught short, seventeen capitalist countries tried to crush the Soviet revolution with an eight-year invasion. They failed.) Nor, a generation later, did the bosses anticipate the communist seizure of power in China that was sparked by World War II.
Both of these revolutions transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of workers. Both  inspired more billions of workers worldwide. Unfortunately, they were also the first communist-led revolutions and made serious political errors. Under the guise of socialism, the Soviet Union and China eventually reverted to capitalism. Both societies had retained too much of the baggage of capitalism, notably a wage system that created inequalities between different groups of people.
Two World Wars —Two Communist Revolutions
But for the international working class, the positive lessons of history remain clear. Two world wars generated two communist revolutions. As today’s leading imperialists prepare to fight it out for profits, markets, energy and cheap labor to exploit, our class must organize itself for the next imperialist world war. We must prepare for a successful communist revolution that will have learned from previous mistakes.
In particular, we must win workers to see the necessity to abolish capitalism’s wage system. We must rely on the collective wisdom of our class to distribute the fruits of social production according to the communist principle: “From each according to commitment, to each according to need.” No more bosses, no more profits, no more racism, no more sexism. And no more imperialist-driven wars.
For U.S. rulers to uphold their military guarantees, they must deal with U.S. workers who stand in growing resistance to a draft. Workers are disgusted with the decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the millions of casualties there. They are fed up as they see hundreds of thousands of GIs return home without limbs, emotionally broken or suicidal. In addition, economic crises are afflicting tens of millions, driving masses out of their homes and into poverty and raging unemployment. Our youth cannot find their first jobs. Aging workers are suffering permanent joblessness.
These conditions fall mostly on black, Latino and Asian workers and youth because of the racism intrinsic to capitalism. Without racism, and the divisions and super-exploitation that stem from it, the rulers’ profit system could not sustain itself. This is why we’re seeing the bosses train their mad-dog police on these targeted groups.
The Progressive Labor Party has a job to do — to lead workers to the understanding that the bosses’ oppression will end only when its source — the profit system — is destroyed.  Communist revolution can emerge from still another global imperialist war, but it won’t happen spontaneously. We must build PLP into a mass party in the two dozen countries in which we are now organizing.
Meanwhile, the bosses’ think-tankers plod their path towards wider wars. One insightful insider at Davos was leading economist Nouriel Roubini, who had predicted the mortgage bubble and the bosses’ latest economic crisis two years before it happened, in 2006. He has toiled for the bosses’ International Monetary Fund, the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the U.S. government. Roubini tweeted, “Many speakers compare 2014 to 1914, when WWI broke out and no one expected it. A black swan in the form of a war between China and Japan?” Later that day, January 23, he noted, “Echoes of 1914: backlash against globalization, gilded age of inequality, rising geopolitical tensions, ignoring tail risks.”
In economist lingo, “black swan” and “tail risk” mean surprise events with catastrophic consequences.
World War I A Product of Imperialist Rivalry
But while noting the growing opposition to the effects of globalization (the bosses’ code word for imperialism) and inequality, Roubini ignores the fact that World War I was no surprise. Capitalist historians cite the surprise assassination of the Archduke of Austria as the war’s trigger in an effort to hide its underlying causes. In fact, the leading imperialist countries were already fighting for control of colonies in Africa and Asia with naval blockades and military conscription to build up their armies. For a parallel, one need look no further than the current battles for control in Africa. French troops are descending on that country’s former colonies as the U.S. and China vie for control of oil, gas and vital minerals on the same continent. Can global conflict be far behind?
Then there’s the Far East. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, seemingly spoiling for a U.S.-backed military showdown with China, backs Roubini’s grim assessment: “[He] has escalated the war of words, telling ... the Davos conference ...that the increasing tensions between China and Japan were similar to the competition between Germany and Britain before World War I... [Abe] then went on to argue that China’s annual double-digit increase in military expenditures was a major source of instability in the Asia-Pacific region. Mr. Abe previously stoked controversy in December when he visited the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese war dead are commemorated, including 14 Class A war criminals” (New York Times, 1/24/14).
But while Abe hopes to goad the U.S., Japan’s post-World War II protector, into supporting near-term (and possibly nuclear) war with their mutual Chinese foes, ill-prepared U.S. rulers aren’t so quick on the trigger. Preempting Abe, CFR director Joseph Nye thinks the U.S. and its allies have more time to build up for a confrontation with China. “Whereas Germany in 1914 was pressing hard on Britain’s heels (and had surpassed it in terms of industrial strength), the U.S. remains decades ahead of China in overall military, economic, and soft-power resources” (World Affairs, 1/13/14).
Warmakers Desperate to Rally A Reluctant Working Class
Nye’s procrastination meshes with CFR president Richard Haass’s warning that U.S. policy makers need both time and urgency to rally the home front for a potential World War III. The publicity for Haass’s new book Foreign Policy Begins at Home notes:

A rising China, climate change, terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle East, and a reckless North Korea all present serious challenges. But U.S. national security depends even more on the United States addressing its burgeoning deficit and debt, crumbling infrastructure, second class schools, and outdated immigration system.

The problem facing U.S. rulers is that their retrenchment from costly open warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, a calculated measure to help them prepare for wider global war, risks misinterpretation by key allies. Commenting on Davos, London’s influential Financial Times (1/20/14) noted:

The most important emerging theme in world politics is America’s slow retreat from its role as global policeman. Some of America’s closest partners now talk openly of a diminished U.S. global presence. Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, recently gave a speech in which he said: “The United States gives the impression of no longer wanting to get drawn into crises.” As a result, he said, America’s allies are increasingly factoring in their calculations ... the possibility that they will be left to their own devices in managing crises.

U.S. Rulers Direct Worldwide War Machine
Secretary of State John Kerry seized the Davos pulpit to fire back. There he tried to reassure the critical U.S. allies that are now uncertain about U.S. support and continued U.S. control of crucial Mideast oil:
I must say, I’m perplexed by claims I occasionally hear that somehow America is disengaging from the world – this myth that America is pulling back, or giving up or standing down,” Kerry said. “In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. “The most bewildering version of this disengagement myth is about a supposed U.S. retreat from the Middle East. You can’t find another country, not one country, as proactively engaged, or that is partnering with so many Middle Eastern countries as constructively as we are, on so many high-stake fronts.
Kerry said U.S. military engagement across the globe was “as broad and as deep as at any point in our history.” A recent article by whistleblower Nick Turse on the liberal TomDispatch website backs up Kerry’s militarist promises. It reveals low-profile U.S. global war preparation despite the Iraqi and Afghan drawdowns:

[I]n 2012 and 2013, U.S. Special Operations forces were likely deployed to — or training, advising, or operating with the personnel of — more than 100 foreign countries.  And that’s probably an undercount. In 2011, then-Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that Special Operations personnel were annually sent to 120 countries around the world. They were in, that is, about 60% of the nations on the planet.

Build Progressive Labor Party
How many workers are aware that military deployments cover more than 1,000 U.S. bases worldwide, particularly in oil-rich regions? The bosses are warning us that they are ready to send us into the most lethal wars in world history. In the meantime, they heap wage cuts, home foreclosures, racist attacks and permanent joblessness on our backs to pay for those wars. Our only answer must be to build the Progressive Labor Party into an organizing force for the international working class. Our only goal must be to enable communist revolution to emerge out of the ruling class’s hellish war plans.

TEL-AVIV, January 5 — Fifteen thousand African refugees, mostly working class, demonstrated in central Tel-Aviv against their racist treatment by the Israeli government. This climaxed a week-long strike of 30,000 by most African refugees and immigrants in Israel — mostly in restaurants, cleaning and housekeeping — protesting their maltreatment by the capitalist regime. They are also demanding an end to their deportation to the “Open Residential Facility”  — actually imprisoned in barbed wire detention centers with three roll-calls a day in the Negev desert.
However, among Jewish workers in the southern Tel-Aviv slums, this demonstration drew mixed feelings and even hostility. Why? Because the Israeli bosses’ regime, with a hand in the crisis and in genocide in East Africa, has even turned the arrival of a handful of refugees — 60,000 in a country of eight million, less than 0.5 percent of the population — into a humanitarian crisis.  In working-class slums around the country, particularly in Tel-Aviv, the long-time residents and refugees both suffer.
Haaretz newspaper (6/25) reported that Israel is the world’s sixth largest exporter of weapons, and traded $2.4 billion worth of instruments of death in 2012 alone. All this is subsidized by the Jewish and Arab workers’ tax money, as well as that of U.S. workers’ taxes. Meanwhile, a handful of well-connected businessmen enjoy its fruits.
Among the happy customers of this industry of death is Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s tyrant, who buys weapons at discount prices from the Israeli bosses’ government. This dictator has enacted a mandatory “Civil Service” in his country, sometimes even for decades, which is nothing but slavery, all for the profits of the ruling clique surrounding the tyrant. Those who try to escape this “service” to preserve their freedom risk imprisonment, torture or even death. Most Eritrean refugees in Israel have escaped from the claws of this dictator.
Similarly, the Israeli regime, with U.S. backing, sells weapons to the belligerents in the Sudanese civil war, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed, and millions more rendered homeless since 2003.
So the Israeli government has a hand in forcing Africans to flee their homes and risk crossing the Egyptian border (facing death from Egyptian soldiers) to reach Israel. As long as the Eritrean dictator continues to oppress workers there, if refugees return to their home country many will be killed, most likely by Israeli weapons.
Tens of thousands of refugees from East Africa have reached Israel’s southern border. The Israeli government quickly dumped them in the slums of southern Tel-Aviv, without a work permit and without any aid. Adding tens of thousands of unemployed refugees, who don’t know the local language, to already impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods is a recipe
for humanitarian disaster. And, indeed, crime rates have risen sharply, providing city hall with even more excuses to not invest in maintenance in the slums. All of this was perpetrated by the Israeli ruling class and its government.
The rich profit in three ways. First, a group of tens of thousands of workers without work permits, who face hostility from their environment, are a huge reserve army of cheap labor for Israeli bosses. They’re unprotected by Israel’s already flimsy labor regulations and work for very long hours at below the minimum wage with no social benefits — all for the super-profits of their bosses.
Second, the humanitarian disaster in the slum neighborhoods, with additional racist filth spread by the regime, turns the slums’ long-term residents against the refugees, whom they now blame, in many cases, for the situation there. This is divide-and-conquer, pure and simple. It pushes Jewish workers to blame their African sisters and brothers for their own misery rather than blaming the real culprit, the regime and the ruling class.
Third, because slum life is intolerable, the government can now pretend to “solve” this problem by imprisoning people for a year without trial when their only “crime” is their skin color. This makes the government appear as “saviors” to many workers having been brainwashed by racist ideas. Racism like this serves only the rich and ravages the workers.
A solution to the neighborhoods’ crisis would be to allow the refugees to hold legal full-time jobs, such as in agriculture, instead of dumping them in poor neighborhoods with no jobs. Even a tiny fraction of the tycoons’ riches — all stolen from us, the workers — could rebuild the south Tel-Aviv slums in order to provide good housing and jobs for their residents. But this is unprofitable for the tycoons. They want all of us — regardless of skin color — as slaves to hate each other rather than to hate them.
All workers of all creeds must blame the real culprits, the racist capitalists and their servants in the government. Once the working class unites and seizes state power, we could manage the economy collectively in an egalitarian manner, so that everyone — regardless of skin color or their area of origin — will have decent, safe, dignified lives. This is the essence of the communism for which the Progressive Labor Party fights.

MICHOACÁN, January 26 — Progressive Labor Party applauds the angry workers in Michoacán who have had enough of the drug cartels’ violence and have picked up guns and fought back. In an inspiring example of working-class rage, many workers not only took up guns, not only attacked the criminal cartel but also attacked the police and federal agents.
This armed struggle marks the intensification of the conflict between the exploited and the exploiter. It also illustrates another contradiction: the dialectical concept of appearance vs. essence. It appears that this workers’ uprising against the cartels is spontaneous and fully rooted within the working class. But in essence, there may be another cartel arming and directing this movement as well. There also may be opportunist elements within Mexico’s ruling class helping them.
The workers are attacking a symptom of capitalism, not its cancer. Either way, the fact that many workers have turned to armed struggle to challenge the cartel brutally dispossessing them as well as the capitalist state apparatus is a very positive development — workers here are not lulled by pacifism and are willing to pick up arms to fight the bosses.
A major question is, where did these workers get their guns? They appear to be following Mao Tse-Tung’s tenets of guerrilla warfare. A small group began with a few hunting rifles and shotguns. They then raided the police stations and some of the cartels’ arms caches.
This is one way how PLP can arm itself, develop a Red Army and seize state power. However, our primary way is by organizing directly in the bosses’ military, backed by a mass base in the working class.
The armed workers now have automatic weapons and armored vehicles. Needless to say, much of the ruling class is worried about masses of armed workers taking power into their own hands and thereby setting an example to workers worldwide — from Cambodia, to Bangladesh, to France to the U.S. — armed struggle against capitalism!
PLP also recognizes that politics are primary. Though the armed workers have had enough — “Basta Ya!” (Enough is enough!) — they are not fighting to seize the means of production, institute the dictatorship of the proletariat and transform society through communist revolution. We must recognize the contradiction between the positive aspects of workers arming and organizing themselves against a ruthless oppressor and the fact that without destroying the systemic structures of capitalism, they wind up either simply putting a new boss in charge or preserving the social order that allows Mexico’s capitalists to rule. In fact, the cartel they’re deposing actually started as an armed reaction against exploitation!
We applaud the armed struggle, but we’re critical of the lack of a political thrust alongside a populist reaction to the terrible exploitation and brutal violence that the cartels enact upon them. The armed workers also recognize that the Mexican police and agents, despite the millions that they receive in U.S. aid, are ineffectual in stopping the cartels.
The police, the agents, the bosses, the banking system, the Drug Enforcement Agency and a whole line of federal agents all make some money off the very lucrative drug trade. The poisoning of the working class reaps big money flowing into a lot of pockets.
A breaking scandal is exposing how U.S. rulers directly helped the Sinaloa Cartel. Another scandal, “Fast and Furious,” reveals how the U.S. directly supplied weapons to the cartels themselves.
PLP recognizes that the cartels are part of capitalism’s exploitative apparatus because they divide and brutalize the working class and make vast profits for the bosses, either indirectly through money laundering or directly through kickbacks, bribes or outright gun sales that echo the British gun-running in Africa during slavery.
The vast majority of the armed workers appear to be those who were deported from the U.S. and are refusing to passively accept the burden of brutality that the workers in Michoacán have stoically accepted until now. This illustrates a consequence of the U.S. deporting so many workers into Mexico and destabilizing the extortion rackets on which the ruling classes of the U.S. and Mexico have been enriching themselves.
These armed and masked workers are not fighting for some religious ideology, but actually challenging elements of the state apparatus in order to improve conditions of workers in this life, here and now. This struggle will not end the tyranny of the cartels, since too many capitalists are enriching themselves from our class’s addictions. It lacks a communist center, its politics and, most importantly, a Party to organize it and defend the working class’s gains. That communist Party is PLP and it needs to be built in the furnace of the Michoacán uprising. The PLP, both in Mexico and worldwide, will continue to struggle to bring communist politics to this armed struggle.

Seattle area workers have gotten two sharp lessons lately in the limits of reform and why only a revolution that dumps capitalism can make real change for the working class. In one week, a judge condemned SeaTac airport workers to poverty-wage slavery despite a referendum that passed a $15 minimum wage law. And Boeing machinists found their boss and their International union leaders forcing a disastrous 10-year contract down their throats after they had rejected it in a 2-1 vote.
These two sharp attacks came on the heels of a feeling of victory by many workers, as the town of SeaTac, home of the airport, voted for a $15 minimum wage — highest in the U.S., defeating a harsh campaign by some of the country’s biggest corporations, first to keep the issue off the ballot and then to defeat it. When neither worked, they got a judge to declare that the town law didn’t apply to businesses on the airport or Port of Seattle property — which means most of the jobs in SeaTac.
The contract overwhelmingly rejected by the Boeing workers, members of machinists’ Local 751 International Association of Machinists (IAM), followed Boeing’s long-term plan to rid itself of unions and decent wages and benefits. The contract would liquidate their pensions and destroy their wages. No sooner had the machinists voted down the sellout contract than Boeing began plotting with the top leadership of the union to ram the contract down their throats anyway.
Walking away from renewed contract negotiations, Boeing met with top union officials to plot a new vote. On the first day of the Dec. 25-to-Jan. 1 “winter break,” a holiday won in previous contract fights, the IAM International leadership announced a new contract vote for Jan. 3. That was timed to reach as few members as possible and insure low turnout, since many older and more militant workers use vacation time to extend the holiday.
The contract was the same bad deal, but this time the media, local politicians, and the International leadership launched a coordinated full-court press to get a “yes” vote. Radio and TV ads, editorials, and mayoral press conferences all told workers that if they voted no again they would ruin the lives of their children and destroy the economy of the Puget Sound area and Washington state forever.
Even that was not enough: the IAM International leadership rigged the vote. They required special eligibility cards, but many at the 17,000-member Everett plant  never got them and had to wait in long lines in the cold to obtain “good standing” cards. Ballot counting was moved from the central Seattle union hall to various local halls making it more difficult to monitor. Clearly the fix was in. This is what capitalist democracy looks like!
With 25% of the membership absent, as planned, the contract passed by a razor thin margin of only 600 votes. Members sobbed openly in the Seattle union hall while others cried “bull****!” and one demanded the Local leave the International.
A Historic Defeat
The defeat this represents for workers cannot be understated. Local 751 was the largest and most militant local left in the IAM. The precedent set by this sellout contract has probably dealt the Local a fatal blow.
Under this new deal members lose their defined-benefit pension plan, conservatively estimated to reduce Boeing’s retirement costs by 40%. Pay increases change from 2% per year, barely keeping up with inflation, to 1% every two years, a reduction of 75%. The health care plan was gutted. Wage scales were frozen. That means that by 2024 when the contract expires, the three lowest labor grades will be minimum-wage jobs.
And to top it off, workers forfeit their right to strike for ten years! The fact that this rollback is occurring while Boeing rakes in record profits ($4 billion last year) only adds insult to injury. And, while turning relatively good paying jobs into minimum-wage jobs with no benefits, Boeing is getting $8.7 billion in tax breaks from the state of Washington, the largest “corporate welfare” payout by a state ever. No surprise that this sweetheart deal was spawned by Boeing lobbyist David Schumacher who is now director of the Office of Financial Management for Gov. Jay Inslee.
The ripple effect through the state was immediate. Boeing has demanded a 15% price cut from its suppliers who employ thousands in the Seattle area alone. As a result pay freezes, benefit reductions, and speed-up have become normalized for workers already living paycheck to paycheck.
Teachers find themselves under attack as the state legislature has retaken the offensive on tying teacher pay to standardized testing results. At the University of Washington graduate instructors in at least one department began the quarter with a lecture on how meager wage increases in the union contract would cost them Teaching Assistant, Resident Advisor, and teaching positions.
The Limits of Reform
Events in Seattle reveal the limits of reform. Anything that workers win capitalists immediately set about undermining. To win back the gains lost in this new contract, Boeing workers will have to aggressively fight back in the streets and on the shop floor. For workers in SeaTac to gain a living wage they will need to learn to strike and shut their shops down rather than playing within the capitalist’s “democratic” system. To end exploitation once and for all we must drop the mirage of reform altogether and fight for communist revolution!