Facing the ‘Thucydides Trap’…the military must step up its efforts.
—Xu Qiliang, Vice-chairman of China’s military

[China] stated that war with the United States is inevitable...When you [U.S.] send an armored brigade combat team anywhere in the world...you have made a strategic decision to fight and win
—Major General Richard Coffman of U.S. military

Imperialist rivals China and the U.S. are caught in the “Thucydides Trap,” an inevitable drive towards war when a rising power threatens to displace the established world power. Driven by their need for maximum profit and world supremacy, the capitalists are on the course toward World War III. 

From signing the Iran deal to challenging the world’s currency, top-dog wannabe China marks more territory while the decaying U.S. flounders and loses allies along with its credibility. The U.S. reigned as a superpower since the end of World War II and established what they call the liberal world order, which has been in decline since the 1970s. Their dominance rests on U.S. financial and military power, its strategic control of the Middle East, and the flow of oil to Europe, Asia, and Africa. To sustain this dominance, they need to rebuild for war and foment nationalism against their arch-rival, China. 

War, with working-class lives as cannon fodder, is how rulers resolve their contradictions. Progressive Labor Party calls on all workers to reject both U.S. and Chinese warmakers. Instead, the international working class must embrace their historic role of turning world war into a revolution for communism. 

China’s big flex

ANNAPOLIS, MD—Chants and demands rang out in Maryland’s state capital as over 150 protesters, with support from 90 mass organizations, marched on the Annapolis statehouse. The collective of the Maryland Coalition for Justice and Police Accountability had high hopes that a bill repealing the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBR) would finally pass but as is the case with many reform struggles, these hopes came crashing down as multiple amendments obliterated demands. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined the voices calling out the legislative betrayal of the working class and chanted: “only communist revolution will break our chains.” We can’t reform away racism that’s integral to this profit system’s survival.
PLP has been working with the coalition to end racist police terror and murder for years now. Several PLP members who also work with Community Justice in Prince George’s County and the West Wednesday Coalition in Baltimore attended the march, distributing copies of CHALLENGE.
Our message to workers: ending police terror and murder requires a revolutionary overthrow of the whole damn system—appealing to the legislature will never free the working class. Pandering politicians represent and manage this racist capitalist system.
A history of racism, masked as reforms
Following the passage of the National Fair Housing Act in the 1970s, Black workers moved into Prince George’s County. As the population grew more integrated, the government established the racist LEOBR, providing a free pass for the klan-in-blue. Since its establishment, LEOBR has inspired similar measures in surrounding counties, giving cops extra protection whenever they are charged with excessive force and murder.
LEOBR has been the focal point of  antiracist protests for over 30 years. However, despite growing awareness of racist murders and attacks at the hands of the police, minimal reforms were granted only after the Baltimore uprising against Freddie Gray’s murder.
The insulting reform simply reduced the time that cops can refuse interrogation from 10 to five days. Of course, five days is plenty of time for a racist murderer, emboldened by the system,  to “get stories straight,” tamper with evidence, and evade accountability.
A militant working class can never be defeated
In response to these continued racist measures The Coalition was formed and established a set of demands to protect Black and Latin workers: abolish LEOBR; open records for cops charged with misconduct; remove armed police from schools; establish a state-wide policy to minimize force used by cops; and return the Baltimore City police department to local control.
Demands for these reforms have been largely led by the voices of mothers whose children have been killed by cops. Many participants in the march this month were also fighting for “Anton’s Law” named for a victim of police murder in which the cop’s questionable records were not reviewed when he was hired on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Over 20 bills related to these demands have been introduced by one politician or another, but predictably, virtually all were amended to make them useless, and few were even passed by the State Senate. Liberal politicians, the sneakiest wolves in sheep's clothing, posture as friends of our class. Workers have seen this betrayal repeated in state legislatures throughout the U.S.
Learning from a summer of struggle
About 15 million people, in the U.S. alone, participated in the massive protests and rebellions this past summer against police terror. Workers worldwide joined in solidarity, fighting racism in the name of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many more lost to racist murder.
What we saw was the potential of a united working class to change the system. In the face of an organized, multiracial, multi-generational, and antiracist, antisexist fightback, politicians were forced to take up issues they’ve historically ignored. To the degree that laws or practices were changed to reduce police terror, we’ve experienced the limits of reform.
Communist revolution is the only solution
As the Maryland legislative session draws to a close for 2021, it looks like the only substantive change in law enforcement legislation is that the records of some officers may be made open to the public, but only if it is deemed reasonable to do so by the police department. Cops will remain in schools, police will continue to be shielded and parents will go another year without justice despite a summer of open rebellion against the racist capitalism.
The struggle against racist police terror predates even the Civil Rights movement by decades. These fightbacks are often schools for communism and sharpen the politics of the working class but fall-short as capitalist rulers continue to foster racist police brutality, intimidation, and terror to maintain their power over us.
PLP continues to bullhorn the belief that only communist revolution can put the working class in power. While many workers are still not won away from the racist and capitalist ideas that have been ingrained in us, we struggle every day to counter racist stereotypes and expose racist laws and structures.
We remain encouraged by workers taking to the streets and the extensive mutual aid and support for our neighbors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Those disillusioned with the capitalist system should consider joining PLP and build towards revolution to create a communist system for the working class, run by the working class.

BROOKLYN, March 29—In early March the bosses’ media finally reported a year-old wave of anti-Asian violence in a serious way and the antiracist reflexes of dedicated staff at the mostly-Asian Brooklyn Technical High School sprang into action.
The school's equity team organized a schoolwide response which included devoting time in all classes to solidarity lessons and setting up travel groups from Chinese immigrant neighborhoods to the school.  
Then came the horrific Atlanta shootings targeting young Asian women. Asian students shared stories of families afraid to leave the house. The week’s lessons and a town hall organized by the sophomore class took on increased urgency. In a promising sign of potential class-consciousness most students who spoke up have resisted the twin poisonous ideas of anti-Black racism (since some attacks on Asian workers have been carried out by Black workers or youth) and reliance on the heightened police protection as a source of safety. 

Fighting racism at Brooklyn Tech
A long-festering racist impact of New York City’s worst-in-the-nation system of segregated public schooling is that the student body at the highly selective Brooklyn Technical High School is disproportionately Asian and white, about 85 percent. While 70 percent of the city student body is Black or Latin, the combined presence of Black and Latin students in the student body at Tech hovers around 15 percent.
Across all the city’s magnet high schools The Specialized High Schools Admissions Test has reproduced and worsened these racist results for years (NY Post, 3/19/20), sending the message that Black and Latin students do not belong at the city’s “best” schools. But any school that reproduces such a racist lesson is not a good school.  
Since 2015 Black students at Brooklyn Tech have hit back in a series of public (msnbc, 1/16/16) and in-house campaigns to expose racist bullying that is baked into school life at Tech. This reprehensible behavior, exhibited by some staff along with some students, merely reproduces the constant racist broadcast from ‘liberal’ NYC school bosses that the ‘best’ schools cannot be Black or Latin. An increasing proportion of the staff have responded to the student outcry by dedicating themselves to establishing an antiracist tone in school life.
 Student’s voices, including sharp criticism of faculty complicity in racism, have come to guide school life more and more. In many schools the ‘equity team’ is an empty vessel. The equity team at Tech has managed to carve a space for itself in the face of an ongoing campaign of administrative harassment of vocal Black and Jewish teachers.  It has fought to become the home base of antiracist activity.
Results are incomplete, but in close unity with a long-established and open Proressive Labor Party (PLP)  presence, multiracial unity is being strengthened in the class struggle against the NYC bosses’ segregation and its disgusting racist effects.  When in-person schooling returns after spring break, staff stand ready to organize commuter groups.  
Next stop, May Day!
Anti-Asian violence is nothing new in the U.S. This most recent manifestation has been whipped up in the context of China-bashing trade wars, a Covid-19 blame-game and infrastructure development all designed to plant the seed of support for future war against U.S. imperialism’s chief long-term rival – Chinese imperialism (see editorial, page 2). Beyond Covid-19, the warmongering suggestion that Asians living in the U.S. may be spies for the Chinese ruling class is connected by a bright line back to the fascist internment of the Japanese during World War II.  
The international working class has one interest, communism, and one day to gather our forces to express our determination to get there—May Day.  Show your solidarity against racist attacks and the future imperialist bloodbath the imperialists have in store for us all by joining Progressive Labor Party for May Day 2021. J
March down Flatbush Avenue, 1pm Saturday May 1. Evening zoom celebration at 6pm.

PAKISTAN, March 8—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) spread revolutionary communist politics while participating in the rallies on International Working Women’s Day this past month in Pakistan.
This was partly because of the increasing misleadership of liberal and nongovernmental organization-led groups in the mass movement, who are disconnected from the social, political and economic conditions of working-class women. This year there were fewer women workers compared to last year. The low participation was also because of threats given by fascist religious clerics. These liberal misleaders were not interested in talking about the racism, poverty, exploitation, illiteracy, domestic violence, and special type of religious oppression against working women.
PLP, however, participated in the marches and brought radical communist slogans and speeches, exposing both the liberals and fascists as agents of the same capitalist class. We related the issues women are facing in their everyday life with capitalist greed and exploitation, calling for working class unity to destroy this capitalist system which is designed to divide and rule. PL’ers and friends also struggled to change the liberal chants and slogans into revolutionary slogans to distinguish ourselves from the liberal groups.
Working class women and men both are being pitted against each other through sexism and exploited and deprived of basic human needs. But talking against cultural injustices and sexist practices once a year is pathetic! We have to struggle constantly for a political system which meets the needs of working class women and men because it is run by them — communism.
Build working class antisexist struggle
Masses of workers in Pakistan strive for a society based on equality and justice. Poor workers are always being used by the right-wing political parties in the name of some religious sect, ethnicity and nationalism to prevent the workers from unifying against their exploitation, poverty and illiteracy. But the reality is most workers desperately want to get rid of this and religious extremism and are open to communist ideas. So-called left parties are not capable of influencing masses of workers because of their false social analysis, poor political strategies and other internal weaknesses. These so-called left parties are misleading the working class through their incorrect ideology.
However, PLP is fighting to give communist leadership to the working class of Pakistan by taking part in many different small and big struggles. We organize for better conditions at our workplaces, better transit, health and education facilities, dignity and respect for women. But ultimately real victory can only be achieved by a constant struggle of working-class people under the red flag of the international communist Progressive Labor Party. Working class men and women both are exploited, and both must fight against the bosses to get rid of this barbaric system.
Communism vs. liberal, fascist misleaders
Women cannot achieve liberation from these conditions through feminism, which blames men for their oppression, but only through joining hands as revolutionary communists striving to establish a communist society. Capitalist culture, not men, create these sick customs which oppress women and support and reinforce their super-exploitation.
Feminism and liberal misleaders, as a whole, work hand-in-hand with this sexist capitalist culture to prevent women from uniting with men in the working class struggle against sexism. Struggling to free the working class from sexist ideas and building communist PLP-led fightback has the potential for impact on the entire international working class.
Sharpening sexism and imperialism
It's no coincidence that openly fascist, religious sexist attacks on women are rising at the same time that liberal feminist politics are becoming more visible. Both are poisons pushed by the bosses to intensify working class exploitation as inter-imperialist rivalry sharpens between the U.S., Russia and China. China’s new $400 billion, 25-year trade deal (see editorial, page 2) with neighboring Iran has enormous significance for Pakistan through building the Chinese, imperialist-led “Pakistan-China-Iran Trilateral Cooperation.” (Institute for Strategic Studies Islamabad, 2019)
Bringing the fascist rulers of Iran and Pakistan into closer political, economic and military collaboration with China will pressure Afghanistan’s fascist Taliban rulers to cooperate as the U.S. withdraws, and pull the rest of Central Asia closer into China’s imperialist orbit. Whether they succeed or not, Pakistan’s working class is a key piece of Chinese imperialism’s Belt and Road Initiative as conditions sharpen for workers.
While the U.S. bosses are busy propping up the fascist Indian bosses to contain Chinese imperialism’s accelerating rise, neither imperialist power holds any hope for the workers of Pakistan or for the international working class. Neither do their fascist religious or liberal feminist politics.
The struggles we lead against sexism here to unite women and men workers, on the job and in the streets, are the key to winning communism, and the struggle continues. Happy International Working Women’s Day!