As the crisis of capitalism leads to sharper splits among the bosses, the working class is going hungry. The 42 million workers and children in the U.S. who rely on the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (also known as food stamps) are collateral damage of this conflict. Malnourished children are the pawns in the capitalist rulers’ vicious combat for supremacy. The government shutdown that began October 1 is just the latest battleground in the war between the  Donald Trump-fronted, Fortress America Small Fascists and the Democrat-fronted, finance capital Big Fascists. On November 1, Trump doubled down and refused to fund SNAP benefits for the people most impoverished by capitalism.

While it appears that the shutdown is ending and recipients will eventually get their paltry assistance, the threat to SNAP shows once again that capitalism is unable to provide for even the most basic needs of the working class.

The U.S. bosses’ cruel attack reflects their desperation amid rising inter-imperialist rivalry and a worldwide crisis of the capitalist system. While Trump is the face of the cuts, the Democrats have also done their share to starve the working class.

Capitalism can’t feed workers

As the bosses’ battle descends into fascism, food is getting ever harder to come by. Trump’s racist cruelty aside, this is not a new phenomenon. 

As inflation shot up under the Joe Biden administration, lines at food pantries swelled with first-time clients (PBS 7/14/22). Since then, with a steady rise in grocery prices, layoffs in major industries and the federal government, and most recently the shutdown, the food bank system has come under even greater strain. Many organizations can barely find enough donations to feed those in line. Even if SNAP continues as before, hunger in the U.S. will keep increasing.  A system that can’t guarantee the most basic benefits is a system fundamentally failing.

Recipients of SNAP live at or close to the poverty level, with typical income of about $2,700 per month for a three-person household. Black workers are hit particularly hard by hunger under capitalism. One of four SNAP recipients are Black, nearly double the percentage of the Black population in the U.S. But millions of white workers and families also live at a subsistence level, including more than a third of those eligible for SNAP.

The food stamp program was established during the 1930’s, when unemployment was so high that workers couldn’t afford to buy all the food produced on U.S. farms. As millions joined a mass communist movement, the U.S. bosses feared rebellion and revolution. Food stamps were part of a package of government reforms known collectively as the New Deal. From the start, they were a Band-Aid; they were never intended to solve the problem of hunger under capitalism. Nearly a century later, capitalism is doing no better at providing workers with a secure or decent life. Currently, one of every eight people in the U.S. depends on SNAP. The richest nation in the world has a perpetual hunger crisis.

Production for need, not profit

Communism puts the needs of the working class first, with food produced to feed people. But under capitalism, everything—food, shelter, health care—is produced for profit. People get adequately fed only insofar as it benefits the bosses—or if the workers fight for it.

Under capitalism, the working class is expendable. Starvation is just part of the territory.  Sometimes it grows out of the chaos of the bosses’ system, as with the reckless speculation that helped trigger the worldwide depression of the ‘30s. At other times, starvation is used by the capitalists to attack workers by withholding food, as the Israeli bosses have been doing in Gaza. In the Congo, South Sudan, Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Afghanistan, the Sahel, Sudan, Somalia, and Northern Ethiopia, over 125 million people are starving. The number-one cause is conflict between capitalist factions for control (World Food Program 6/25/24).

In the U.S., SNAP benefits keep people barely a step above starvation (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities).  Even these crumbs are under threat as the bosses, focused only on staying in power, are willing to let workers starve to death. As the billionaires rake in record profits on the stock market and billions are spent on wars across the globe, the $6 a day to feed workers and their children is deemed too much. Trump has proposed a requirement that able-bodied adults without children must work at least 80 hours per month to keep their SNAP eligibility. [See CHALLENGE on the One Big Beautiful Bill.] [JC1] Though the overwhelming majority of SNAP participants who can work already do (CBPP[JC2] , April 2025), withholding food to workers left jobless by the crisis of capitalism is a particularly brutal form of capitalist oppression.

The Democrats won’t set you free

Thirty years before Trump, President Bill Clinton led a bipartisan effort to destroy the meager safety net for workers already straining to make ends meet. Clinton was the first to add work requirements for welfare recipients. In language eerily reminiscent of the sign declaring, “Work will set you free” at the entrance to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, pundits call the Clinton-Trump reforms “dignity-enhancing work requirements” (Washington Post, 7/18).

Whether it’s fronted by Republicans or Democrats, capitalism always claws at the dignity and subsistence of the working class. Over the past 30 years, the net worth of the top 1 percent in the U.S. has increased sevenfold, according to NASDAQ (10/25), while the net worth of the bottom 40 percent has gone down! Under the Biden administration, inflation shot up and the number of SNAP recipients increased because so many individuals and families needed them for the first time (PBS 7/14/22).

Workers of the world deserve communism

Under communism, access to food would be a basic human right. But human rights don’t exist under capitalism. The rise of food “insecurity”—a nicer-sounding word than hunger-- in the U.S. is even worse for workers around the world. But the causes are rooted in the same desperate drive for profit. The struggle against capitalism and for communist revolution is literally a life-and-death struggle for the working class. Fight for a world without hunger! Join Progressive Labor Party!

Washington, DC, November 2—At the coalition rally led by Progressive Labor Party (PLP) downtown in front of the Convention Center, the chant rang out: “From DC to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime!” The action was organized to protest the growing fascism of the American Public Health Association (APHA) during their annual conference.  

Moments earlier, brave APHA members staged a walkout of the opening session, walking slowly down the main aisle, holding a banner that said, “Oppose Fascism and Genocide.” Another group of those walking out held a banner that said “APHA: Reinstate Amy Hagopian,” a former APHA member and friend to many of us who is also an outspoken leader against the occupation and genocide in Palestine.

If you go by the APHA leadership, the only problem with the world today is Donald Trump, RFK Jr, and the subsequent attacks on public health grant funding and vaccine access. As liberals, they will never acknowledge what us communists point out, which is that capitalism, racism, and wars for profit have been decimating our class worldwide for decades. These liberal leaders of APHA show that they are more dangerous than the outright reactionary wing of the U.S. ruling class because they use identity and respectability politics to keep workers divided, quiet and in line. The liberals believe in nationalism and hate internationalism represented by workers uniting in solidarity across borders.

APHA leadership is doing their best to make sure public health workers are misled. Members of PLP are not confused about the barriers confronting our class. We know that the only way to have a shot at making a lasting difference in workers’ lives and optimizing our collective health is by overthrowing capitalism with a communist revolution. The only way to make a communist revolution is through organizing with the antiracist, antisexist, mass working-class Party that is the PLP, and these are the political ideas we amplified and brought to thousands of healthcare workers!

Building a broad base against genocide and racism

Once outside the convention center, more attendees came to join the rally, until there were 125 people participating in the action. Picketing and chanting were led by a Chicago comrade and then the group gathered to hear from speakers about the issues of racist state violence, genocide, fascism, and repression within APHA. During this spirited rally, many copies of our “APHAs CHALLENGE” were distributed and members were invited to our PLP social and discussion on fascism that same evening. Speakers from local organizations that PLP members have organized within the past two years joined the protest. The opening speaker from DC’s Jewish Voices for Peace was a physician who has also been active in struggles around immigration and health care (See CHALLENGE, 4/23). 

The fight against Israeli military companies in Maryland was highlighted by the leader of the Drop the MIDC! campaign. Our work in PLP to raise money and support ongoing struggles connected with speakers from Doctors Against Genocide, Veterans for Peace, and Health Care Workers for Palestine. One PLP speaker explained inter-imperialist rivalry over oil and shipping routes and the risk of world war with China. A young student PLP member focused on growing racism and fascism and the need to build a mass communist Party to defeat these threats and destroy capitalism. Others spoke about resistance to ICE raids in DC and Chicago, and how teachers in Maryland were punished for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.  

The rally’s final speaker was Dr. Amy Hagopian. She was removed from the organization after participating in an anti-genocide protest inside the APHA at last year’s convention in Minneapolis (See CHALLENGE, 11/22/24). Amy spent this entire convention outside the convention center with a large sign which said, “Ask me why I’m not allowed into the Convention Center.” APHA leadership claimed that the action at last year’s convention was antisemitic—a patently false claim that many of the Jewish members who participated in the action were shocked to hear.  

Liberals are the main danger to our class

APHA leadership has been moving to the right politically for years but has accelerated their fascist turn especially in the last two years. They were appalled that our organizing led to the APHA’s Governing Council voting to pass a policy statement calling for a ceasefire in November 2023 with 90 percent of the vote (see CHALLENGE, 11/29/23). Ever since that meeting, they have ramped up their attempts to silence, censor, and control members who care about workers in Palestine. They have done this through multiple mechanisms including removing power from the Governing Council, changing the more open process for policy statements to a longer, more restrictive process, and having secret “Code of Conduct” trials with punishments up to and including expelling members from the organization.  

These actions mirror the moves the US government is taking in its ramping up of fascism. They clearly demonstrate the saying “scratch a liberal, find a fascist.” APHA is led by liberal careerists who are always in lockstep with the Democratic Party.  Being forced by the membership to disagree with the Democrats on racist police violence in the past (2016-2018) and with the genocide in Gaza so early on (2023) made APHA leadership angry and uncomfortable. And they responded by using every mechanism they possess to control and squash dissent and radical voices.  

We have a world to win

From the walkout and rally we led to the many sessions we presented at and attended, our line was brought to the masses of public health workers and students. We distributed 1000 flyers to announce the rally and 700 APHA CHALLENGE among other PLP literature. We made at least 15 student and worker contacts who loved our fight back and politics.  

We will follow up on this momentum with a new study group in Chicago for folks we met. And we will continue to be bold in the face of repression — who knows how many of us will be barred from next year’s meeting for the actions described here. But, like our friend Amy, we will not let that keep us from fighting against fascism and genocide. We will help build class consciousness in public health so that we can create the communist world that the working class deserves.

The following article is the second installment of Fascism and Revolution, excerpted from a PLP magazine article titled Rise of Fascism 1919–1934, available on our website under the “New Magazines” tab. In Part I, we examined the roots of fascism beginning in 1919, when the betrayal of social democrats and the vacillations of communist leaders led to a crushing defeat by Hungarian right-wing nationalist forces allied with the national army—setting the stage for fascism’s rise. Part I concludes with the Soviet leadership’s response to the growth of fascism and Hitler’s ascent in Nazi Germany.

By 1935, Soviet leaders were deeply alarmed by the spread of fascism in Italy and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. That year, the 7th Congress of the Comintern convened to determine a response to the fascist threat. In his main report, Georgi Dimitrov largely ignored the analysis of fascism’s roots in liberal democracy offered by R. Palme Dutt, instead charting a course for communist parties worldwide to collaborate in united fronts with liberal democrats to prevent further fascist expansion.

Part II explores the rise of fascism in the 1930s, analyzing developments in Spain, China, and North America, and tracing the progression of fascism within capitalism to the present day.

Spain, the first test

In the early 1930s, Spain resembled Italy in 1919. Though its ruling class was too weak to rule effectively, the working class lacked the bold and decisive leadership needed to seize such favorable conditions and fight for workers’ power. The Spanish Communist Party (CP) remained small and relatively isolated. It helped construct a Popular Front with the Socialist Party and liberal Republicans. (In Spain, “Republicans” were defenders of the republic and opponents of the monarchy and fascism.)

The 1936 elections marked a humiliating defeat for the right-wing forces—especially the Falange, which was still marginal at the time—and a major victory for the Popular Front, seemingly validating the communist “united front” strategy advanced by Dimitrov eight months earlier. However, the new Popular Front government refused to arm the workers and did little to alter the fundamental structures of state power.

The Falange, a fascist party, was financed by ruling-class figures and institutions. Its program was a typical mix of radical-sounding, reformist demands, anti-communism, and nationalism. The leading general of the Spanish Army, Francisco Franco, launched a fascist coup, triggering a protracted civil war.

Without a unified, aggressive central leadership, the Republicans, despite their heroism and the revolutionary energy of the working class, went from defeat to defeat. Help came from the Comintern in the form of International Brigades of anti-fascist volunteers from communist parties in 53 countries, along with military equipment and advisors from the Soviet Union.

Franco’s forces would have collapsed early in the war without aid from Germany and Italy. The fascist air force was  German and Italian. Meanwhile, the British government consistently sabotaged the Republican effort. In the U.S., the Roosevelt administration never wavered in its refusal to sell arms to the Republicans.

Among its most serious errors, the Communist Party in Spain failed to engage in the fight against racism. No communist aid ever reached workers in Morocco or other colonial subjects of the Spanish ruling class. The Party was weakest in the areas with national minorities—in the Basque Country, Galicia, and Catalan. But the Party’s biggest weakness was the Popular Front and the weak political line of the Comintern that communists fought as Republicans rather than as revolutionaries. Instead of channeling all efforts toward communist revolution, the Party focused on securing its alliance with the socialists and the liberal Republicans.

The Spanish Civil War was a big defeat for the united front policy, but not for communism. Spain will never forget the help from the world communist movement and the International  Brigades. These heroic volunteers helped to block the fascist advance in Spain for nearly three crucial years. The Spanish resistance, supported by the International Brigades and the Soviet Union, delayed fascist advances in Western Europe and stood as the first major battlefield of the global fight against fascism.. The resistance in Spain trained the leaders of the workers’ armies that would smash the fascist hordes in the world war to come.

China and the price paid for collaboration

The Communist Party of China (CPC) joined a united front—and even a united government—with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), which had come to power as part of a nationalist government. They were supposed to unite to fight the fascist invasion from Japan.

The CPC rebuilt its underground organization despite brutal repression: three successive Party leaders in Shanghai were executed by the KMT, yet a secure network was eventually reestablished in the cities and countryside. By the early 1930s, the Red Army controlled significant rural areas, surviving repeated campaigns by the KMT. These victories were only possible because the CPC learned from its previous errors in cooperating with the KMT.

However, the KMT’s underlying commitment to capitalist and nationalist interests remained intact. After temporary cooperation, the KMT turned decisively against the communists, slaughtering thousands in purges and campaigns like the 1927–1937 anti-communist drives. This betrayal left the door open for capitalist development and nationalist consolidation, demonstrating the limits of united fronts with bourgeois forces.
In China, as elsewhere, only a resolutely independent communist movement could challenge fascism and protect the revolutionary gains of the working class.

North America 

The fascist movements in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada were less significant than those in Europe, Asia, and South America. Nonetheless, the 1930s ushered in significant rightward changes, including increased repression by police organs. Roosevelt’s New Deal concentrated more power in a growing national bureaucracy, strengthening the state’s capacity to stabilize capitalism. While it averted economic collapse, this concentration of authority also created conditions under which fascist-style authoritarianism could theoretically arise. Mexico and Canada saw similar developments.

Why didn’t full-blown fascism develop in North America in that period? First, capitalism was younger, still expanding, and more competitive than in Europe. Second, U.S. imperialism, the chief beneficiary of World War I, was still living off its imperialist loot. A final crucial reason was that the communist and left-led labor movement  went on the offensive in all three countries.

The rise of fascism today

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. imperialists have dominated the world economically and militarily. But as finance capital has become the main form of U.S. capitalism, the closing of factories and the movement of production to other countries has taken a toll on the U.S. ruling class, even as their profits have skyrocketed. A string of lost wars and military debacles, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, have weakened the U.S. politically while draining its treasury. While the U.S. bosses spent billions in a failed attempt to keep control of the Middle East, their Chinese rivals constructed an industrial powerhouse and are now building a military to match.

With capitalism worldwide in a spiraling political, economic, and humanitarian catastrophe, the international working class has fallen under escalating attacks. The current political crisis is driven by inter-imperialist rivalry—by the relative decline of U.S. imperialism and the rise of Chinese state-capitalist power. The world’s deepening crisis reflects the collapse of globalism and free trade, now accentuated by overlapping catastrophes: the COVID-19 pandemic’s aftermath, wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, and severe humanitarian disasters from Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On every continent, capitalists face challenges from both internal fractures and external rivals. The old liberal world order, defined by U.S. economic and military dominance, is under pressure. China is expanding its global influence, investing vast sums to tie smaller ruling classes to its orbit, while its naval and maritime forces, now the largest in number, increasingly challenge U.S. control of the Pacific.

Meanwhile, competition over critical technologies and resources is intensifying. Control of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and rare earth elements—vital for semiconductors, data centers, and advanced electronics—has become a central axis of strategic rivalry. China dominates rare earth mining and processing, giving it leverage over the global AI supply chain, while the U.S. and allied countries scramble to secure alternative sources and production capabilities. This technological and resource struggle amplifies the geopolitical and economic tensions already destabilizing the world.

Within the U.S., an unsustainable federal debt burden, systemic economic fragility, and deepening social polarization threaten to weaken the core of U.S. power. As inter-imperialist conflicts and technological rivalries escalate, the international working class from the most super-exploited nations continue to bear the heaviest costs worldwide.

Domestic bosses exploit liberal bosses’ weaknesses 

Within the U.S., deindustrialization has broken the ties between finance capital and white workers leading to a significant shift of working-class loyalties away from the main wing bosses and the Democratic Party. This alienation has been exploited by the finance capitalists’ domestic rivals, a group of bosses whose fortunes are driven by U.S. oil production and domestic industry, and who are fronted by “America First” isolationists in the Republican Party. In their weakened and internally divided state, the finance capitalists are struggling to act decisively in combatting their challengers. Their control over critical parts of the state apparatus—including the White House, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court—has either been lost or is in jeopardy. This tenuous situation cannot hold.

In periods of capitalism in crisis, war becomes the primary form of capitalist politics. In Europe, inter-imperialist rivalry has degraded into a massively destructive conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and counting. In the Pacific, open warfare between the U.S. and Chinese bosses seems imminent. If and when it erupts, it threatens to draw in a host of other countries.

Dutt’s lessons and U.S. fascism

R. Palme Dutt wrote that the roots of fascism lie in liberalism and that fascism is the inevitable form of government under modern capitalism. Today, we see all of its hallmarks in the United States: the erosion of the “rule of law,” attacks on science and rational thinking, punishment for protest, a crumbling democracy, intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry and the looming threat of world war, declining living standards for workers, the dismantling of healthcare, masked ICE terror against scapegoated immigrants, and racism more virulent than ever.

What must our response be?

Learning from the past, we in PLP know the answer is not to rely on alliances with liberals or democratic socialists. We must work within organizations to win members to our line: that the system cannot be reformed. We must avoid the mistakes of our predecessors by rejecting the strategy of a united front with liberals, social democrats, or nationalists to defeat fascism. To truly destroy fascism, we must uproot it from its source—capitalism itself.

Our ideas must be spread far and wide—through intimate conversations with friends and through CHALLENGE. We must win workers and students to understand that capitalism cannot be reformed. It must be smashed and replaced with communism, a society run by workers for the benefit of all.

Kentucky—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) cadre in Owensboro expanded upon their first food drive last month by hosting a “lunch and learn” on the 25th at a local park in one of our members’ communities. This community is primarily made of Black and Latin workers, and hosts several local homeless shelters. As soon as the first couple comrades arrived on scene to set up,  we were immediately approached by several workers in the area, who heard about the event through the flyers put around locally. They immediately left to go and tell everyone at the local shelter, and anyone else they came across on the way. We began passing out CHALLENGE and engaging with the workers. Many were receptive to the reality: we need communism to free our class from this capitalist hell!

Feeding and educating 

The event’s goal was to host a public educational forum while simultaneously addressing racist local food insecurity in the community. The idea of holding public education came from how receptive the community was to our ideas at the previous food drive. In our goals of agitating the local community we were wildly successful. After about an hour or so the people started coming in waves. This culminated in a small crowd of around 15-20 at about 2 pm. Several, at least half, holding the newest issue of CHALLENGE, listened to a comrade speak about the disparity between the capitalist ruling class and the working class. Words of affirmation came from the crowd while another PLer kept the grill going and ensured that everyone received a helping, and a second helping if they wanted it! 

Fighting for workers…even Trump supporters

One interaction stuck with us: A man came up and began speaking to us. He told us at first that he was a Donald Trump voter, to which we replied, “We don’t care. You’re a working class man. You deserve dignity, a home, healthcare, and education.” To which he replied, “You’re damn right I do!” He then began saying that he strongly agreed with what we were doing but “that word” (communism) made him think twice. We told him that was natural. Then, later on he asked: what do you guys want to achieve? We told him we want working people to own and control the means of production. He said, “I find that hard to believe! That’s what everyone in this country wants!” We then asked, “Well, do you remember when you said that word makes you recoil? That’s the point. They don’t want you to embrace your own liberation!”

Reenergized for the battles ahead!

All in all we fed a maximum of 70 or so people. We made contacts and friends, along with the numerous issues of CHALLENGE distributed. The workers also took extra to hand out to their friends, many of whom said they’d never even considered much of what we were talking about, that we had their heads spinning with all these new perspectives. The comrades in the local club feel vindicated, energized, and excited to continue going out to the community and engaging with the masses. More on our antiracist, antisexist, working class fightback to come!