Victor Hugo, a famous writer-fighter of the Paris Commune, once said: "Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise." At dawn, we must first face the night—and then tear down, brick by brick, the prison walls that block the daylight.
As we enter a new year, we close yet another violent chapter in capitalist history. Workers everywhere remain trapped in a dark night, forced to endure war, famine, poverty, disease, heartbreak, and despair. Across the globe, the imperialist powers’ brutal competition for profit is tearing off their mask of liberal democracy and revealing the naked fascist violence that lies at capitalism’s core. In 2025, they stole even more of our land and labor. They starved us, poisoned us, slaughtered us, perverted science and medicine, and unleashed a new era of mass death and climate disasters. This is capitalism in its truest final form: fascism.
And yet: Workers around the world refuse to give up. We are surviving and then some. Through the tear gas, the bullets and bombs, through hunger and sickness and exhaustion, they are fighting back and rising up..
In these challenging times, the task of Progressive Labor Party is more urgent than ever and clear as day. We must struggle and unite with our working-class sisters and brothers wherever we are. We must strive to be present in every critical class struggle, arming workers with communist ideas and bringing antiracist, antisexist politics within the mass movement to the fore. Win or lose, each reform battle will make us stronger. It will bring us closer to a mass communist party that can smash this nightmare capitalist system and its racist divisions, its brutal state apparatus, its made-up borders and prison walls. Capitalist reforms are inherently temporary and inadequate. Only violent revolution can end the misery of the international working class.
Together, we can build a new world—a communist world where all will share both burdens and bounties, each according to commitment and need. With productive, collective work, we will protect the planet we share and create a sustainable society to benefit all working people and every living thing.
Intensifying Crises
The engine of capitalist atrocities is the ever-sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S., China, and Russia. This competition is driving genocides from Gaza to Sudan, fueling war in Ukraine, and triggering savage state repression and super‑exploitation from the Congo to the Philippines. From Europe to Asia to Latin America, fueled by anti-migrant gutter racism, fascism is on the rise. In September, a far-right rally in London drew more than 100,000 people. Openly racist regimes are sprouting around the world. On December 14,Jose Antonio Kast, the son of a German Nazi officer and a callous admirer of fascist murderer Augusto Pinochet, won the presidency of Chile in a landslide. Kast will be one of nine Latin American presidents to follow the hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant playbook wielded by Donald Trump. These bosses’ strategy is to divide the working class by scapegoating vulnerable groups of workers who’ve been forced by capitalist wars and economic devastation to cross the bosses’ borders.
Amid the Israeli Zionists’ devastation of Gaza, anti-genocide struggles on college campuses in U.S. and Europe led to a crackdown. Picking up where the Joe Biden administration left off, Klansmanin-Chief Trump kicked off his second reign of terror by targeting undocumented workers. Trump’s ICE gestapo, swollen with billions of dollars in new funding, launched sweeps and raids across U.S. cities, invading schools, workplaces, and migrant workers’ homes. With shameless racist profiling, they kidnapped and detained U.S. citizens and legal residents as well as the undocumented. Half a million migrant workers have been deported, and close to 60,000–including 10,000 children–locked up in ICE facilities, many in disgraceful conditions.
Adding insult to injury, grifting tech billionaires, such as Elon Musk (Tesla), Peter Thiel (Palantir), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) jumped on board with the Trump administration to collaborate with law enforcement to spy on and profit from workers.
Within the U.S. ruling class, the bitter feuds over how to manage their crumbling empire dramatically escalated with the election of Donald Trump. The MAGA open fascist faction, fronted by Trump, is dismantling what’s left of the OLD imperialist world order and “democratic” institutions built by the liberal fascist finance capitalists over generations. In the process, they are spurning traditional allies, ceding strategic ground to rivals like Russia, and returning U.S. foreign policy to an early 19th‑century model, the Monroe Doctrine.
In another attack on the working poor, the Trump administration cut trillions in funding for Medicaid and SNAP benefits, while increasing funds for ICE and AI. During an ensuing shutdown, the federal government kicked 42 million people off food stamps, including military workers, disabled people, and low-income families.
The economic crisis, the attacks on education, the rollback of an already frayed safety net, and the continued U.S. backing of Israel’s genocide against workers in Palestine, are all signs of U.S. decline. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. bosses have dominated the world, using oil as their main resource. But with China’s rise and the emergence of the multilateral BRICS coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), rival imperialists are aligning to begin to wrest themselves from U.S. control–and from the dominance of the U.S. dollar.
Workers in Palestine, caught in the crossfire, are still subjected to displacement, slaughter, and starvation. The bogus October “ceasefire” notwithstanding, the U.S.-backed Israeli military continues to starve the residents of Gaza while setting homes ablaze and leaving many to die in the cold. Vital aid continues to be delayed and intercepted. Activists riding the Flotilla were surveilled, held at gunpoint, and kidnapped by Israel, with some held in a high-security prison. In Sudan, workers are facing mass rape and famine has been declared twice this year. Twenty-four million people in Sudan are being deliberately starved (see editorial).
As the U.S. bosses contend with China and Russia threatening to knock them off their perch, rare earth minerals are becoming the new currency of power. China holds a monopoly and also has a more advanced and disciplined military, as demonstrated at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. With the imminent threat of another world war,the U.S. has limited options to maintain its place as the number-one imperialist. It has no choice but to move toward fascism and war, as evidenced by its attacks on Iran in June and the current attacks on Venezuela’s oil tankers.
Workers’ Response
With mass layoffs, rising unemployment, and sweeping attacks on social services workers across the world are more and more enraged and disillusioned. In the U.S., even long-time MAGA supporters have expressed regret for their lock-step support of Trump. Meanwhile, from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka to the latest great liberal hope, New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats continue to rely on bankrupt identity politics and performative gestures to co-opt and pacify grassroot workers’ movements.
Internationally, workers have fought back! In Italy, a general strike paralyzed the country to protest the genocide in Gaza. In Mexico City, masses took to the streets to rise up against rising rents brought on by gentrification. Youth-led uprisings in Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, and Nepal confronted police terror, climate catastrophes, and other capitalist disasters.
But without communist politics, working-class rage can be reduced to reactionary, vigilante violence, from Luigi Mangione’s murder of CEO Brian Thompson to the murder of Charlie Kirk in September.While workers’ rage at the bosses is amply justified, these lone-wolf attacks serve only to deepen bosses’ repression.
What we need instead is communist-led fightback. PLP has been active on the ground across Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Newark, Kentucky, Pakistan, Latin America, and East Africa. PL members have joined anti-ICE struggles in the streets and on campus. From organizing against Trump’s terror to checking gutter racists in the streets, from building people’s pantries to mobilizing flood relief efforts, Progressive Labor Party continues to serve the international working class.
Onward, together!
The past year underscored both the danger of a system in crisis and the possibilities of class struggle. As capitalism grows even more unstable, the ruling class offers only fascism and war. The task for workers and communists is clear: Organize, organize, organize.
Let’s keep building on the gains we made this year and prepare for the battle that lies ahead in 2026. Workers have nothing to lose but their chains—every effort will lead us one step closer to destroying capitalism! Cheers to another year of committing ourselves to building a world run by and for the working class.