NEW YORK, NY — The Summer Project showed that PLP is all about trying to create a fighting mass party. Participants came from around the world and boosted the confidence of the youth-led Summer Project, which led up to PLP’s 2010 Convention (see page 3). We sold over 7,550 CHALLENGE’s and improved our tactics of talking to workers when distributing the paper to make contacts and asking workers to pay for the paper. We collected over $2,000 and made dozens of contacts.

We sold CHALLENGE at factories, bus barns, hospitals, schools and working-class neighborhoods. One group spent a day at a military base distributing CHALLENGES and GI Notes and making contacts with soldiers.

Study groups were held on how to build a base for communist revolution and how the fall of the old communist movement affects our fight today.

One of the most significant events of the Project was a demonstration in front of the Council on Foreign Relations where U.S. bosses plan how best to attack workers and wage imperialist war. Another was a demonstration in Staten Island where a few black workers who have been temporarily won to the bosses’ racism have brutally attacked immigrant workers (see article above). PLP is fighting for working-class unity of all workers, immigrant and U.S. born, who have more in common with each other than with the bosses.

We also screened several movies like “Cradle Will Rock,“ a movie about the politics of art and “Salt of the Earth,” an anti-sexist movie about a miners’ strike.

Letters from the Summer Project

As a 28-year-old student from Palestine, I was positively surprised by the readiness of U.S. workers to accept our line. Before I came here I thought that anti-communist
attitudes were prevalent here but now I know that the U.S. working class is very open to our ideas.

We sold a very large number of CHALLENGES at the schools, one hospital and a bus barn. We also held two
rallies. Workers passing by were quite supportive of us and many were ready to buy CHALLENGE. I think that U.S. workers are open to our ideas and that Party clubs should sell CHALLENGE on a routine basis and in regular locations for workers to be able to get our paper every two weeks on the street. I was also impressed with the revolutionary determination of the Party members over here and their comradely spirit as our hosts. I think that the Party has the potential to change the world and establish a better world — the worker’s world — once and for all.

A Comrade from Palestine

The future of PLP is bright. The dedication and commitment of young comrades from many areas is very inspiring. Their desire to get up early in the morning, sell CHALLENGE, and study the Party’s ideas is a testament to the Party developing new leadership. One of the most impressive aspects of the project was the collectivity among comrades.

People of all ages worked together to figure out meals, transportation, housing, CHALLENGE sales, and social events. In addition, the willingness of our young comrades to strike up conversations with workers during our paper sales shows tremendous potential in our efforts to build a base in the working class. For the future, we could do a better job in discussing ways in which contacts could be made with some of the workers during these conversations.

Finally, an important lesson for all of us was how CHALLENGE can truly become a mass paper. In one location, we were able to distribute over 400 papers in 45 minutes and 250 in 20 minutes in another location.

Project volunteer

I sold CHALLENGE for the first time, which was amazing because I got money. I got to meet new people in the Party and got to reunite with friends I met at the John Brown march in West Virginia. I got to learn what it means to be a comrade and what it means to be in the Party. I received $20 selling CHALLENGE, which I thought was amazing for one day. I learned how many people are not informed with what is going on and how some people know and agree with us, which is awesome and feels good that you have some support. Overall, I think that this Summer Project was a wonderful experience that I learned a lot from and will always remember.

Project volunteer

When I sold CHALLENGE I learned that the bosses are taking away people’s money because the bosses want more money. When I sold CHALLENGE I made $3.56. I also gave the bus drivers CHALLENGE because the bosses were taking the MTA jobs away from the bus drivers.

10-year-old Project volunteer

Generally, it was incredible and overwhelming to see how the Party operates on a huge scale,
especially for us, comrades from a remote club. I could see the U.S. working class very open to communist politics especially in very oppressed
areas like Bushwick in Brooklyn and at the CHALLENGE sales in front of high schools which were also located in working-class areas such as in Queens and the Bronx. For me it was a unique visit to see New York not as a tourist but as a worker who lives in the city. It was also impressive to see the dedication and devotion to the revolutionary communist cause in the heart of the imperialist beast. It was incredible to meet comrades from all over the world and to get inspired by their sacrifice in order to build the international revolutionary communist party.

In conclusion this visit emphasized the need for proletarian internationalism and the correctness of the line of the workers’ communist revolution and how the old slogan is still relevant.

Workers of the World Unite!

A comrade from the Middle East

PLP has warned for decades that U.S. rulers must conduct ever wider wars to shore up their slipping status as the world’s top imperialists. Now, in addition to their Afghan and Iraqi bloodbaths, the NY Times reports (8/15) that Obama & Co. are running secret and not-so-secret military operations (using Hellfire and cruise missiles, drone attacks and cluster bombs) in Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Algeria,
Morocco, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan.

The Times, a major mouthpiece for U.S. bosses, claims Obama’s objective is “combating terrorists.” But what’s really driving the covert U.S. death squads is intensifying competition with rival imperialists — especially China, Russia and junior partner Iran — for sources of profit. This overriding, inter-imperialist aspect to U.S. war-making also explains why the Obama regime is extending promised deadlines for withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan back into infinity.

China, Russia, Iran Main Foes of U.S. Rulers

The Times “exposé” omits the geo-strategically critical energy wealth and transit routes that lie in or near the 11 targeted countries. Though the words “oil” and “gas” do not appear, it gives the game away by making Saudi Arabia the bulls-eye on an accompanying map of the covert war zone (see map, page 5). The kingdom holds the world’s most important oil reserves. Thus, the Times’ piece deals mainly with clandestine U.S. raids in Yemen, which borders Saudi Arabia and commands strategic
export lanes from it.

For decades after World War II, control of Saudi, Iranian, Iraqi and Kuwaiti (and, of course, North American) oil immensely aided U.S. and allied (mainly British) rulers’ domination of the non-Soviet world. For the benefit of their ruling-class owners, the ancestors of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell dictated the price and terms of supply of capitalism’s lifeblood to three quarters of the planet.

That was then. The U.S. lost Iran to pro-Russian and pro-Chinese ayatollahs in 1979. And today, rising imperialist China, a major buyer of Saudi and Kuwaiti oil, is building a “blue-water” navy to end its need for brokers like Exxon, Chevron, and Shell. That navy includes warships to guard tankers delivering oil to China’s burgeoning manufacturing economy.

China and Russia hold contracts on huge oil fields in Iraq, which seven years of U.S. occupation have failed to pacify sufficiently to get that huge potential reserve out of the ground for exploitation. Moscow and Beijing may be tempted to initiate their own “regime change” in Baghdad by bolstering already significant Iranian influence there.

Gas supplies also motivate Obama’s semi-secret wars. Iran — whose nuclear arms program Russia is assisting — and Algeria, both on the Pentagon/CIA hit list, belong to the Moscow-led Gas Exporting Countries Forum. The Putin gang wants to formalize it into an anti-U.S. OPEC of natural gas.

Iran and Russia might have become competitors as gas exporters. Instead, opposition to the U.S. makes them staunch partners in the gas trade and on potential battlefields. Russia’s “support” of UN sanctions on Iran is a farce. And their military alliance is expanding.

“The Hindu” reports (7/26) that “Russia’s Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said last week that he saw ‘practically no limits’ to cooperation with Iran in the energy field. ‘No sanctions will hinder our cooperation in hydrocarbons’.…Russia is Iran’s main source for arms and technology. In the past 15 years, Russia has supplied Iran with combat aircraft, helicopters, diesel submarines, tanks and air defence systems.”

The Kremlin also backs an Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline to challenge the U.S.-led Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project, now bogged down in Bush-Obama’s botched Afghan war.

Assassinations Can’t Win Oil
Fields for U.S. Bosses

So why did the Times, which speaks for the U.S. imperialist establishment, disclose Obama’s “cloak and dagger” campaign? Because it’s not working. Citing the ultimate authority of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. rulers’ leading foreign policy think-tank, the Times concluded, “Micah Zenko, a fellow at the CFR, examines in a forthcoming book what he has labeled ‘discrete military operations’ from the Balkans to Pakistan since the end of the cold war in 1991. He found that these operations seldom achieve either their military or political objectives.”

The Times has another CFR-Establishment lifer, Edmund Hull, weigh in: “To be successful in the long run, we have to take a far broader approach that emphasizes political, social and economic forces.” This means massive invasions and occupations, which Hull thinks serves the rulers better than assassinations (see box). Hull was Clinton’s deputy coordinator for counter-terrorism.

U.S. Bosses, Like All Imperialists, Need Mass Invasions
and Long-term Occupations

The Times piece sends a message to Obama: “War on the cheap” won’t fulfill U.S. imperialists’ needs. They want him to mobilize society for broader, inevitably, global conflict. They call for “shared sacrifice” to finance a more expensive war. U.S. bosses will intensify attacks on the working class — more budget cuts in social services, teacher layoffs, lowering wages, more healthcare cuts, raising the Social Security retirement age and whatever else they can get away with.

The needs of weakening U.S. rulers means they must go on an even more intensive war footing, forcibly seizing back slices of the world they’ve lost or risk losing their riches. This ups the ante both for Obama’s administration and for our class. We must get on a full war footing ourselves. Our Party’s plan is to build a base in workplaces, campuses, neighborhoods and in the Army to militantly expose and oppose the war-makers. Such actions will ultimately prove schools for communist revolution. J

As our previous editorial indicated (CHALLENGE, 8/18), these varying ruling-class strategies reflect two main options that thus far they are at a loss to decide on:

• Counter-insurgency, which amounts to full-scale, vastly expensive colonial occupation that subjugates the entire population, largely through the deadly seizure of cities; or,

• Counter-terrorism, less costly and perhaps less effective for U.S. invaders, which targets suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and allies for assassination in the hope that the rank and file will see the light.

The historic 2010 Convention of Progressive Labor Party brought to life the slogan ‘one flag, one world, one Party.’ Over 500 members and supporters from at least 17 countries gathered to reaffirm our commitment to communist revolution.

From the first speaker, a young black woman worker explaining in sharp detail the current stage of inter-imperialist rivalry and the irrevocable move towards world capitalist war, to the closing session in which the new International Steering Committee of the
Party was overwhelmingly affirmed by the entire convention, this event marked a significant new stage in the life of the Party.

The opening speech set the tone for the rest of the event:

The phony “leftist” leaders of Latin America, Castro, Chavez, Lula, and Correa, were revealed to be tools of Chinese and Russian imperialism.

 The imperialist powers were called out for the mass racist exploitation of Haitian workers that created the conditions for the 2010 earthquake disaster in which over 200,000 Haitians died.

The destruction of the social safety net in Europe was exposed.

The continuing humanitarian disaster in Africa that has resulted from 200 years of imperialism was linked to intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry.

 The mass racist attacks on immigrant workers all over the world were exposed.

As these facts were laid bare the audience of hundreds roared and stomped their feet shouting, “Smash racist deportation, working people have no nation!” and “Racism means… We got to fight back! Imperialism means… We got to fight back!”

Despite the bosses’ attacks on the working class all over the world the speaker showed that workers are willing to fight back.

Thousands of workers, teachers, students and farm workers took to the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico in the mass rebellion of 2006.

Over 6,000 immigrant workers went on strike for eight months against racist French bosses this year.

Tens of thousands of striking garment workers, led by women workers, in Bangladesh shut down over 700 factories.

Striking Stella D’Oro workers from the Bronx fought for eleven months resisting police attacks and the sexist attacks of Stella bosses who sought to divide the workers.

Workers were overwhelmed with emotion, passion and dedication to the fight for a communist world as we left the opening session and gathered in workshops. There, we engaged in discussion over the line of Progressive Labor Party, and how to carry it out (see Our Fight, page 2). Comradely, but intense, struggle characterized the workshops. We discussed every aspect of our line from the fight against sexism to Democratic Centralism and the need for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

These discussions were anchored in
reports on the current practice of the Party and concluded with concrete plans for how to continue and improve the work as we move forward. Similarly, the Closing Plenary session, where resolutions were presented to affirm many aspects of our line, engendered additional sharp but comradely struggle.

This character of the Convention, in which we recognize that our unity about the need for communist revolution still contains within it differences about particular aspects of our line refutes the anti-communist myth that communists blindly obey their leaders. Only a communist party operating through democratic centralism could achieve this complex interplay of unity and disagreement.

These workshops were enormously enriched by the presence of comrades from around the world. Members from three African countries, throughout the Caribbean, South America, Central America, Mexico, Turkey, Greece, Arab and Jewish workers from Palestine and the U.S. were vocal participants in the workshops.

These comrades’ descriptions of the nightmarish conditions in which our working-class brothers and sisters are driven by the racist,
fascist needs of world imperialism sharpened the understanding of every member about the need to organize and build PLP.

Their descriptions of the struggles in which they are engaged and their progress in recruiting to the Party in all these
areas of the world made it clear that we have made a modest, but significant, leap forward in building a truly international Party.

In addition, leadership was embraced by a
collective of multi-racial young comrades — the next generation of Party leadership developing before our eyes at the convention. They worked for an entire year leading up to this momentous event. Collectively they organized every aspect of the convention from details like food and housing to pressing questions about our line.

Speaking in front of a large banner reading “Workers of the World Unite!” in twelve languages, one young Latino leader, a transit worker, gave a speech describing the history of communist struggle. “How have communists built and developed the communist movement?” he asked. “Through class struggle!” “What did the communists do when faced with the capitalists’ deadly attacks?”, he asked. They “toughened up.”

The lesson was clear, as the imperialist powers impose fascist repression on the working class while pulling each other closer and closer to World War III the Party has only one choice, to toughen up and struggle.

Another significant development was that the Party has achieved unity on the idea of working in mass
organizations. This was clearly reflected in the character of the work reported on and struggled over in the workshops. The convention reaffirmed the rich history of communist struggle by the millions of dedicated
comrades who have helped lead us to this historic point.

The final session ended with overwhelming agreement on the following three immediate plans for the Party:

International leadership for the international
Party of the working class organized into a unified body.

Multi-racial, international young leaders are the future and will continue to be developed, with the aid and experience of veteran comrades, in preparation for the transition of leadership to the next generation.

Conventions will be held every 5 years as the most collective method for assuring the growth of a principled communist Party organized under democratic centralism.

The Party convention reminded us that the dominance of imperialist capitalism means that the working class is in a period of “dark night” (see “Dark Night” at plp.org). The presence of so many people dedicated and ready to fight for communism means that this dark night will have its end. Yes, right now the capitalist class is strong and the Party is still small. But we will “toughen up” and we will advance our communist line in the class struggle and we will destroy this racist, imperialist capitalist system once and for all with communist revolution! Que viva, Que viva, Que viva communismo! 

A report from friends of the Party travelling in Haiti:

About 100 trade unionists and students
listened attentively to a Cuban diplomat speak about the Cuban Revolution. This political
forum was organized by the teachers’ union as part of a campaign to raise the political
consciousness of their constituency as well as the Haitian masses.

After the Cuban diplomat’s talk, members of the audience raised some interesting questions about how the world viewed the Cuban and Haitian revolutions and how the reversal of socialism impacted Cuban society. Then a university student asked the speaker if the Cuban government had publicly criticized Brazil for supplying MINUSTAH with the vast majority of their troops (MINUSTAH is the UN military force which occupies Haiti today). The student pointed out that since Cuba and Brazil have an alliance, Cuba’s criticism would carry a lot of weight in exposing MINUSHTAH’S role in advancing U.S. imperialism’s agenda for Haiti.

The diplomat’s response to the student drew an angry reaction from many in the audience. She said, while making it clear that this was the official position of the Cuban government, that Cuba would not criticize Brazil because this was “not Cuba’s business” and the “Haitian people have to work out their own problems.” Like any other slick liberal politician, she pretended to take the high moral ground, making it seem as though taking a stand in solidarity with Haitians was equivalent to appropriating their struggle.

The 20,000 MlNUSTAH troops that occupy Haiti today replaced the 22,OOO U.S troops that seized the Haitian airport the day after the earthquake. Their convoys ride through the teeming streets of Port-au-Prince in full riot gear with machine guns conspicuously displayed, conveying power and control. They are doing nothing to minimize the wretched misery of the 1.5 million Haitians made homeless by the earthquake.

MINUSTAH has shot into anti-government demonstrations, arrested and threatened radical students with their lives, and aided the Haitian police in murdering prisoners. Without MINUSTAH or other troops terrorizing the masses, the plans of the Haitian bourgeoisie and U.S. capitalists to reshape Haiti would be impossible to implement.

Cuba’s refusal to oppose this repression exposes more than its opportunism. It exposes the true failure of socialism. Since socialist Cuba maintains commodity production and must, therefore, compete in the world capitalist market, it has joined with Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia to form the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). ALBA is an economic regional bloc that will strengthen their hands in competing with U.S. imperialism.

Progressive Labor Party, on the other hand, makes a complete break with this capitalist framework. We are building a new international communist movement that has learned from the reversal of the old one. One of the main lessons is that communists must make the politics of building egalitarianism primary over economic advancement or else we will lose it all, just like the USSR and China did. Cuba is rapidly moving down this same path. For the Cuban government today, economic alliances come before international working-class solidarity. This is an important lesson for all the Haitians, and others, who still look to Cuba as a model for social change.