While the Joe Biden administration has ended the use of Title 42, a public health law that was perverted to stop migrants from claiming asylum in the U.S., the criminal abuse of immigrant workers at the border with Mexico continues unabated. Liberal racist Biden is following in the lethal footsteps of open racist Donald Trump and deporter-in-chief Barack Obama. The crisis of capitalism that displaces workers from their homes is only getting worse. Whoever gets elected as the next capitalist stooge in the White House won’t change that hard reality. Only communism—a new society run by and for the working class—can end this mass misery.

Breaking his campaign promise to create a humane border, liar Biden has instead accelerated deportations by adding a transit ban. His new policy requires proof that a migrant has tried and failed to get asylum from a country they passed through en route to the U.S.—in most cases Mexico, where the bosses refuse to provide safe conditions or a reasonable path to legal residency. Any migrants breaking this bogus rule can be deported summarily and blocked from reentering the U.S. for five years. These workers are forced into lives of utter instability and daily degradation, all for the ‘crime’ of trying to survive. The recent death of an 8 year old Honduran migrant girl, seeking ayslum on the Texas border after being denied medical assistance is just one of the many racist horrors committed by the liberal fascists on a daily basis (NBCnews.com, 5/19)

The cages Obama built are still full of migrant workers and families, with more than four thousand people a day booked into immigration detention centers (Washington Post, 5/19). Undocumented workers are sorted for immediate deportation or bused to inhumane conditions in mass shelters. They sleep on police station floors with no beds in Chicago, or in “respite centers” without showers in New York (Chicago Sun Times, 5/1). Terrorizing migrants coerces them to take jobs with low wages and to accept potential pathways to citizenship that enforce loyalty to the bosses, often by joining their military.

As the bosses’ profit system crumbles all around us, the international working class continues to bear the brunt of its failure. The migrant crisis is part of a broader crisis of global capitalism. Sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry and the war in Ukraine have made the situation even more desperate for the working class.

We, the communists of the Progressive Labor Party, affirm that workers have no borders. We must fight back against racism, nationalism, and the bosses’ brutal attacks against migrant workers. In unity with the international working class, we are building an international communist movement that will smash the bosses’ borders with communist revolution.

Workers uprooted by capitalism
Immigrant workers have been uprooted by the misery generated by capitalism–by unemployment and hunger, by criminal gangs in league with the bosses, by the violence perpetuated by this ruthless system. In countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Honduras, workers have long been struggling under extreme poverty. Over the last three years, with jobs lost to the COVID pandemic and living standards eroded by inflation, conditions have gone from bad to horrific.

The working class in the U.S. has not been spared. In New York City, the world’s greatest center of wealth, half the population lacks adequate income to meet basic needs (Citizens Committee for Children of New York).

To divert workers from the reality of the disaster of the profit system, the bosses are criminalizing poverty and displacement. Their targets are the homeless or those forced to make a dangerous trek across thousands of miles to find work. These are the people that capitalism deems most expendable. The racist rulers have sent the message, and the most racist elements of the working class are following their lead. Jordan Neely was murdered on a New York subway for demanding food. To protect the real estate developers’ profit margins, people without homes are refused shelter in liberal-run cities where hundreds of thousands of apartments sit empty (City Limits, 11/17/22). In fact, there are 28 vacant homes for every homeless person in the U.S. (United Way, 3/28).

Bosses’ economy depends on undocumented labor
Capitalists ignore borders every day. They freely span the globe to fight their wars and to exploit workers and raw materials. They use borders to restrict or expand the numbers of migrant workers allowed into their countries, as their shifting economic needs demand. Meanwhile, workers are held prisoner by these arbitrary dividing lines, and used as cheap labor and cannon fodder in the bosses’ wars.

Even as the bosses attack immigrant workers across the globe, they cynically rely on undocumented labor to extract profits. Whole sectors of the U.S. economy would fall apart without undocumented labor: “The vast majority (96.7%) of Mexican undocumented workers are working and contributing to the economy and are vital to critical American industries including agriculture (11.5 percent of the workforce), construction (6.7 percent), and the tourism and hospitality sector (3.4 percent)” (New American Economy Report, 3/8/2021).

One hallmark of capitalism in crisis is rising fascism, as the bosses seek to scapegoat certain workers for the system’s spiraling failures. Trump and his billionaire backers built a movement on attacking immigrant workers. Now that Biden and his band of liberal Democrats and their own billionaire backers find themselves pathetically unable to alleviate the crisis, they are out-Trumping Trump in their racist anti-migrant attacks. The bosses can’t admit that capitalism cannot possibly serve workers’ needs. As the world spins toward global war, they will become increasingly vicious and organized in their assaults.

One international working class
The capitalist bosses have carved up the world through war and genocide. They build nationalism to enlist the working class to defend the lines that imprison and divide us. Every national border has been drawn with workers’ blood. By keeping workers fighting each other, the ruling class ties us to their thieving, murderous rule.  The time has come to erase the bosses’ borders and to unite the international working class. The time has come to smash racism, sexism, and nationalism–to smash capitalism itself.

PLP knows that migrant workers are a critical element in this fight. They have deep knowledge of the horrors of capitalism from their own experience. They possess unlimited potential to turn their collective power to endure into a force for revolution. We must unite with migrant workers wherever we are.

Workers everywhere, on all sides of all borders, suffer from the exploitation, incompetence, and brutality of capitalism, from its callous indifference to human life. Communism means abolishing all nations. It means serving one world, one Party, one international working class. Join us!

Washington, DC, May 6-8–PLers met with antiracist fighters from across the U.S. at The University of California Washington Center for a 3-day abolitionist conference. Conference organizers brought together theorists, students and organizers working to abolish police, prisons, ICE, racist child “protective” services, and other institutional structures that capitalism has built to attack and repress the working class.

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members led a panel on abolishing capitalism, the undergirding of all repressive institutions of the capitalist state. We do not just want to abolish or outlaw capitalism, we want the system fully smashed and guaranteed to never be introduced back into existence. In order to crush capitalism and its state, we need many of these serious organizers in attendance to join a revolutionary fighting party, the PLP, in order for it to grow and lead class struggle against the ruling class. This strategy is really the only way to achieve the abolitionist goals they so fervently desire.

To abolish cops, we must abolish capitalism
Participants in the conference were extremely open to a revolutionary perspective. Many already had this idea, but were not sure how to develop it further. Even two of the keynote speakers agreed, when questioned from the audience by a PLP member, that a revolutionary party was needed to achieve abolitionist goals. You just cannot abolish capitalist institutions without abolishing capitalism!

PLP maintained a literature table throughout the conference. In addition to CHALLENGE, the table featured flyers and information about many of the mass organizations in which PLP is active. The fight for justice for William Green and other Black workers murdered by the police and numerous public health struggles were featured.

Over 40 participants received CHALLENGE from the table and from other comrades throughout the conference and many connections were made. Many of these fighters are already engaged in various forms of class struggle.We will continue to make ongoing connections with these fighters, and try to win them to our radical abolitionist vision of society– a communist world rid of the capitalist ruler’s racist and sexist kkkops, kkkourts, and prisons.

Here in Colombia the new government of Gustavo Petro has managed to curb the militancy of the workers, who are waiting for the campaign promises that will never be fulfilled. Our class must not fall for the illusions of change and postpone our revolutionary communist fight in favor of parliamentary and electoral illusions.

Meanwhile, the movement behind former president Alvaro Uribe has not resigned itself to losing its power. It tries to channel the phony promises of the new government and the discontent over the measures that affect the workers into backing their faction. They make statements appealing to easing the cost of living, health and education. They even call for mobilization against the new government.

Some from the former Uribe government even speak of coup intentions and audios have been published that would support these rumors. Although they currently do not have the strength to prepare a coup attempt, with their rhetoric of hate and war they are gaining the support of warmongering soldiers. They are also training their drug-trafficking gangs and even pay vulnerable migrant workers to carry out violent provocations during their rallies and demonstrations, attacking those who disagree.

The current government -- seconded by their congress and union misleaders -- have called to the streets to “support the reforms” without even publishing the content of said reforms. This is because they prefer to arrange things with capitalists and other class enemies, negotiating for the approval of capitalist development “with a human face.” In reality, their reforms are not radical at all but this wing has succeeded in blunting the militancy of workers here nevertheless. The ability of these social fascists to deceive our class while attacking us even harder than the gutter fascists is what makes them more dangerous. We are being called to take to the streets to support and defend the government’s reforms which in fact means mobilizing to support capitalism, wage slavery, racism and private property.

We in PLP are convinced of the need to destroy the current capitalist society entirely. We are committed to root changes that really point towards the structural solution of the problems of the workers, the poor and the oppressed. The reforms proposed by the Government will continue to preserve the privileges of the powerful, which are in turn arranged and haggled over and over again in Congress, with the exploitative capitalists along with representatives of US imperialism. No workers’ or youth input is seriously considered regarding the true nature of this society.

While they make us promises and call us to support their projects, the cost of living skyrockets, wages stagnate, and police continue to kill with impunity. More than 300 young people and workers remain in prison for participating in the struggles of the recent years. Figures report that there is 58% “informality,” that is, unemployment, and millions more with racist contracts of super-exploitation.

The demands that we need from below are not going to come from the negotiation with the bosses and imperialists. The demands for health, employment, wages, the destruction of racism and sexism will not be resolved by concerting to preserve bourgeois and political interests. The streets should be ours, but not to defend the government, much less to support fascism. The streets must be reoccupied to fight in revolutionary unity, to resolve the demands and needs demanded in the multiple popular uprisings.

For more than 20 years we have been supporting different types of workers’ struggle, making space for discussion, and building a base of friends and readers for communism. The current struggles of the farm workers, drivers, builders, the unemployed, housing workers, women’s organizations, students, and sports clubs must unite in a great solidarity struggle to achieve revolutionary class consciousness, advancing the revolutionary process. The anger of the workers has a growing understanding that the profit system of destroys the life of the workers all over the world by radicalizing the current struggles from Peru to France to England and beyond.

Our newspaper CHALLENGE gives us the understanding of what these battles are about; our task is to create a mass base for communism by helping new leaders emerge and fighting to destroy capitalism and its racist, sexist wage system! We have no other choice –Join us!

The following piece has been updated from its original publication in volume 48 no.25 dated December 21, 2016.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was an historic uprising of the working class led by the most advanced communist ideas at the time. It was the first time the working class attempted to take state power back from a former communist party that had returned to capitalism.

The leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Mao Tse Tung (now Mao Zedong), initially encouraged the Cultural Revolution to get rid of a few people in the leadership of the Party. But some workers in the Cultural Revolution recognized that the official Communist Party was already in the hands of a capitalist ruling class at the time the GPCR began. They argued that the vast majority (90 percent) of the leading cadres were part of that oppressor class, that the People’s Liberation Army (or PLA, the military) was its tool to smash the real Left and maintain power. They said that the new “red” bourgeoisie had emerged during the 17 years from 1949-66 from the ranks of the revolutionaries themselves and, therefore, that the GPCR was not, as Mao said, a struggle to consolidate proletarian rule, but the first revolution in history to attempt to take power back from the fake “communists,” known as revisionists. This analysis led the left workers and students leading the Cultural Revolution to carry out the following political campaigns.

1) They demanded the ouster of the chief representative of China’s “red” capitalists, Chou En-Lai, along with the high-ranking economic and administrative ministers he was sheltering.

2) They demanded that the GPCR be carried into the Army Officer Corps, which they saw as a part of the new ruling class. They engaged in arms seizures from the PLA, raiding depots and arms trains, on the principle that a revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie had to be an armed struggle of the masses.

3) They opposed China’s foreign policies of alliance with capitalist countries. To carry this through they seized foreign ships in the harbors, burned the British consulate in August of 1967, launched a liberation struggle in Hong Kong, seized Soviet arms going to Vietnam over China’s railroad lines and opposed China’s nuclear development program.

4) They began to discuss and implement the formation of a new communist party, given their assumption that the CPC had become the party of the bourgeois apparatus that was restoring capitalism under the ideological cover of a fake brand of communism.
The left forces presented a view of what was going on in the GPCR which was contradictory to the official views of the CPC under Mao, who claimed “95 percent of the cadres are good” vs. the left-wing forces in the GPCR who said “90 percent of the political cadres must step aside.”

Fake “communists” spread capitalist lies
To amplify how completely the Chinese bosses have now moved to capitalism, they now tell the same lies about the Cultural Revolution as the U.S. bosses. The distorted historical narrative told by the capitalists who currently rule China, and retold and amplified by capitalists around the world, is that the Cultural Revolution was “10 lost years” in which the Chinese economy was on the brink of collapse.

However, when one of the participants in a San Francisco conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution went to China with a group of Western economists in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in 1972, the iconic liberal mainstream economist John Kenneth Galbraith was in the delegation and reviewed economic data made available by the Chinese leadership and calculated that the GDP was growing at about 9 percent per year, similar to the rate touted as the “Chinese miracle” after the restoration of capitalism after the late 1970s.

The participation of millions of workers and farmers in political meetings did not cause production to stop, or even to slow down. The criticism of factory or farm managers to a previously unheard of degree, and active involvement in “non-productive” activities that amounted to having a say in the running of society, in fact energized the masses of workers and farmers.

The Communists accomplished feats that would be called miracles under capitalism, starting with spreading literacy across a country of a billion people, introducing health care and ending starvation in what had been one of the poorest countries in the world prior to the communist revolution. Their efforts in the GPCR showed the importance of continuing the struggle for workers’ power even after a revolution. But to ultimately succeed in building a communist society we have to look at the errors of the CPC as well. While the left forces in the GPCR did so many great things they ultimately were defeated and capitalism was firmly established in China. It is important for us to try to understand why the GPCR failed.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Communist movements will inevitably make many mistakes, big and small. The Progressive Labor Party previously believed in fighting for socialism as an intermediary step towards communism. Now, largely from looking at what happened in the former Soviet Union and China, we are fighting for the building of a communist society directly. It is not the only correction we have made or will have to make going forward. For the working class to take and hold power it is essential that the revolutionary communist movement be able to correct ideological errors and bad practice. Criticism and self-criticism of our ideas and activity is the only way we can deal with problems and mistakes that arise. The leadership of the Party especially has to honestly and soberly evaluate their own ideas and practice and be open to criticism from others.

Perhaps the main weakness that led to the defeat of the GPCR was the belief in the cult of the individual surrounding Mao Tse Tung. A big weakness of the old communist movement was that it built up individual leaders as people who could do no wrong. While the Left forces in China recognized that China had moved back to capitalism, they held on to the wrong idea that Mao, the leader of the country, was not a supporter of the backward changes. He was; and ultimately Mao used his influence and his control of the Army to put down the revolution.

Struggle, Fail, Struggle… WIN
The lessons of the GPCR are one of the driving forces in history that has given PLP the confidence that the working class will fight for a communist future. It has also helped us understand the need to continually struggle against the capitalist ideology of individualism in ourselves and in the communist movement. The effort of the working class in the GPCR has been an invaluable contribution to the fight for communism.

Other lessons learned from the GPCR:
Confidence in the working class and the need for a mass communist party: We are building a party that is open to everyone who wants to fight for a communist future for the working class. People can make contributions in many different ways and the more people who participate in building the Party and ultimately running society the better off we will be.

Breakdown of the separation between “experts” and “followers:” In CHALLENGE, we try to explain what is going on in the world as well as have articles on fighting back in the class struggle. We believe that we can only understand the world by trying to change it and knowledge and understanding comes out of putting communist ideas into practice. We call this “better red than expert!”

The struggle for communism will continue for generations. The working class taking state power is only the beginning of the fight to build a communist society.

Commemorating the 57th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is an opportunity to struggle with our coworkers and friends to renew our efforts to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system of capitalism once and for all. Fighting back also means understanding what previous generations in this fight have done – both right and wrong. As the world lurches toward fascism and inter-imperialist war, we have our work cut out for us. We, heirs to the struggle for a communist world, truly honor the heroic masses who fought in the GPCR by organizing on our jobs and in our mass organizations for armed communist revolution. Dare to struggle, dare to win!