At the Democratic National Convention (DNC) the imperialist Big Fascists put on display the political coalition that they hope can defeat Donald Trump and the Small Fascists that he represents. The Big Fascists are going all out, calling on their fake progressives, various military leaders, and anti-Trump Republican Party leaders to fight off the Small Fascists.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) maintains that these liberal politicians, representing the Big Fascists, are the greater threat to the working class. They want to build multiracial support for reforms that will feed their drive towards war against imperialist rivals, China and Russia. PLP says that workers from different countries have no interest in killing each other. The whole damn capitalist system has to go. Workers should run the world–that’s communism.
Big Fascists vs Small Fascists
If it’s not just electoral politics between the Republicans and Democrats, then what’s going on? There’s a split between two capitalist factions: the Big Fascists and the Small Fascists.
The Small Fascists are mostly domestically oriented capitalists like the Koch brothers looking to cut taxes for immediate profit. They are unwilling to spend money fighting wars to defend the worldwide U.S. empire. This means a racist gutting of social services at home and a retreat of U.S. imperialism internationally. Their base is mainly organized through evangelical churches and white nationalist movements. At the Republican National Convention, the Republicans were openly appealing to racist police terror and Klan-type vigilantism. It’s not a party that can lead the U.S. in the  world war that the Big Fascists are preparing for. Reject them all!
The Big Fascists, representing finance capital and the imperialist wing of the capitalist class, are looking to build a multiracial coalition to support U.S. imperialism. They need to win Black, Latin, Asian and white workers to sacrifice for finance capitalists like JP Morgan Chase and Exxon Mobil in a war with China, Russia or both. Reject them!
The party of the international working class is the Progressive Labor Party. Capitalism can never serve the needs of workers. It is a racist, sexist, decaying system. PLP says workers can run all aspects of society. That’s communism.
U.S. imperialist Big Fascists unite behind Biden
The Small Fascists have gained power through the Republican Party, now led by president Donald Trump. He has succeeded in marginalizing Big Fascist Republicans such as the Bush family, Colin Powell, Robert Mueller, etc. We saw this at the DNC.
The Big Fascists trotted out military leaders, many of them Republicans. Republican politicians like former Ohio Governor John Kasich, former NJ Governor Christine Todd Whitman, and 27 former members of Congress came out in support of Biden.
Additionally, military leaders who served U.S. Imperialism overseas also came out for Biden. Colin Powell oversaw the invasion of Panama and Iraq in the 1990s, then helped the U.S. invade Iraq again in the 2000s. He endorsed Biden with over 70 former national security officials. Directors of the FBI and CIA (again many Republicans) are supporting Biden and the Democrats (NYtimes, 8/20).
While unity is essential for the Big Fascists—and deadly for the working class— it may not be enough to defeat the Small Fascists.
Consolidating the phony progressives
Over the last 15  years the Small Fascists have been able to seize upon opportunities that culminated in a Trump presidency. The Big Fascists need to appear anti-racist, anti-sexist, and pro working class while continuing to serve finance capital and build patriotism and pass some possible reforms in order to prepare for world war. So they continue to pander to Black and Latin workers.
In 2016, 12 percent of Sanders supporters ended up voting for Trump (NPR, 8/24/17). The Big Fascists need to win back these workers in 2020. So they enlisted misleaders like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Michelle Obama to endorse Biden.
These Big Fascists know that they need to win Black workers to support Biden whose racist track record has become visible since announcing his candidacy. Biden worked with openly racist segregationists James Eastland and Strom Thurmond to pass racist anti-crime bills that led to the mass incarceration of mainly Black and Latin workers (NYTimes, 6/25/2019).
Racist and sexual predator Biden is not a point of strength for the Big Fascists. They installed a Black and South Asian woman Kamala Harris—a top prosecutor with a history of mass incarceration and a racist “lock em up” mentality—to attract a set of multiracial voters. They are riding on an identity politics ticket.
These Big Fascists view the November election as vital to the future of U.S. imperialism. The working class will lose either way. Our future lies with communism where workers run everything. As protests continue against racist police killings, the Big Fascist Democrats are trying to take protestors from the streets and into electoral politics. We need to organize in the streets against racism and against the entire capitalist system.

I regard the collective as the supremely important form of educational work.
-Anton Semyonovich Makarenko

A pandemic rages. There is no cure. Countless are infected; hundreds of thousands have died. The U.S. accounts for only four percent of the world population but over 25 percent of Covid-19 cases. Clearly the capitalists don’t care about us; their only goal is profit. So, we are being shoved into factories, offices, and stores to die for their profit system. To complete the misery, capital demands that children be returned to schools without guaranteeing safety. Such is the logical conclusion to the capitalist educational system.
But there is an alternative to the absolute failure of this miserable racist, sexist, anti-working-class capitalist system and its so-called “education”.  And that is communist solidarity: production for need, mutual respect, and education for collective and individual development. A communist revolution is needed to transform society. Two great working-class revolutions have occurred within the last 100 years. The Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and the Chinese Revolution (1949). While both have been tragically reversed due to the seeds of capitalist practices, their early practices have yielded valuable lessons to be applied before and after our next successful revolution.
What can we learn from these revolutions now, especially in education? A good starting point is to examine some of the dramatic changes made in every sphere of life after The Russian Revolution.
From 1914 to 1921 Russia, an already impoverished country ruled by a vicious ruling class, was devastated financially and militarily first by its involvement in World War I and then by a civil war created by the U.S., English, French and Polish imperialists. Eighty percent of its industry and transportation system was destroyed and agriculture and food distribution almost ceased. The new Soviet state faced immense problems of hunger, disease, and homelessness. These are the leftovers of the old capitalist society that was dealt with.
All children have role to play in leadership
Yet, despite the vast problems, many in the Soviet Union were eager to create a new society, a new humankind, a new collective spirit and an entirely new type of education. Among them was an educator, Anton Makarenko.
Born into a working class family in 1888, Makarenko became a teacher when he was 17 years old. Already convinced of the need for revolution he began his career in the midst of the first (1905) revolution organizing meeting places for revolutionary workers. Makarenko continued teaching and supporting revolutionary activity. By 1920 he had successfully taught hundreds and supervised thousands of students. In addition, he had begun to formulate a new educational system based upon the Marxist classics, Lenin’s leadership and the Red Army’s experiences.
In 1920 he was asked by the Educational Commissariat to organize the Poltava Colony for Young Offenders. Due to the destruction caused by WWI and the capitalist Civil War, tens of thousands of starving, orphaned children roamed the countryside and the cities in search of food and shelter. Many turned to crime to survive. They were thoroughly demoralized, angry, and divided by ethnic hatreds.
Makarenko began with six adolescents who had a criminal history, a windowless, doorless, broken down building, some poor farmland, no tools, no books, little food, and two teachers. The goal: to create the foundation of a communist educational collective. Completely uninterested in their past records, believing no one is born with “good” or ‘bad” genetic characteristics Makarenko had a positive and optimistic outlook about each child’s development. He found that all children, including those with profound psychological problems, had a role to play in leadership.
This was a time when the U.S. led a Jim Crow segregated education system, spewed racist pseudo-scientific ideas, and promoted
individualism.
Utmost demand & utmost respect
The first months were rough. Untrusting, the children felt that this was just another prison. It took months before Makarenko gained their respect by forcefully demanding that they cut the firewood for the whole colony not just for themselves. It was a beginning. Based on his years of teaching and revolutionary activity Makarenko came to see that one must “place the utmost demands on a person and treat him with the utmost respect” in order to succeed.
He rejected physical punishment, which was a common measure in that period. Makarenko realized that just as the working class and peasantry had overcome great social and personal problems to win a revolution, all children would, given respect and collectivity, become productive comrades.
What the capitalist countries promote only in theory was already done in practice in the Soviet Union: emphasis on treating children with respect, providing a collective for children to learn, importance of adult models, learning as a social process, uniting manual and mental work as one, and more.
Amidst their poverty (and with some help from the central organizations), the children began to learn to raise their own food, repair their clothes, fix their dwelling and cobble together tools.
However, the main tasks Makarenko set before them was to collectively plan their communal needs. Many of the children were functionally illiterate. Yet despite their resistance to being in school, the demand was they learn the trades that kept the commune in repair. They began to work in teams gradually learning to think in wider collective needs not merely individualist needs. The children loved all this freedom and self-respect.
Over many years hundreds of children passed through the renamed “Gorky Colony.” With more teachers and agronomists, engineers and the USSR’s growing prosperity, the colony combined five hours of productive agricultural and industrial work and four hours political and conventional instruction. The intellectual labor and manual labor were united. Even within the first three years, the collective students were encouraged to become a partially self-governing commune. After seven years, Makarenko was asked to duplicate the success by founding a new collective of orphaned children, which became the Dzerzhinsky  Commune.
‘The Road to Life’
Makarenko wrote many books and articles about education which outlined his conclusions distilled from years of experience while educating thousands of children. One of his outstanding works, The Road to Life, is a record of the transformative experience of the Gorky Colony. It is a book to inspire all those teachers (and in fact everyone) who yearn for a free, respectful, socially conscious life: a communist life.

Worcester, MA, August 25—Earlier this month our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) contingent in Worcester joined forces with members from Racism Free Worcester Public Schools, Defund Worcester Police, and Showing Up For Racial Justice to rally for working class students and demand that police be removed from the school system. An integrated and multi-racial group of nearly 75 workers took turns making speeches and leading chants in an effort to advance the battle against systemic racism during the event, which was called by the Massachusetts Human Rights Commission.
The small but mighty demonstration was held in Lincoln Square near the local police station. As leaders from different organizations took turns at the mic, PLP members made our line clear when we demanded this racist capitalist system be shut down.
Our members explained the school-to-jail pipeline and showed the crowd that allowing kkkops in our schools is hurting working class students. We explained that defunding the police isn’t enough, we need to first kick them out of schools and furthermore fight for a world where racist murderers aren’t handed guns and get out of jail free cards.
We also took the opportunity to explain the importance of multi-racial unity and fightback. An integrated, international working class is necessary to end capitalism.
As speeches wrapped up, we then led about 50 people from the original gathering across the street to the entrance of the police station. We led chants ranging from “Black Lives Matter” to “George Floyd” to chants that put the entire system and its lackeys on trial: “Nazi cops, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
We later learned that the local police union equated us to terrorists and made demands that one of our comrades be fired from his current volunteer job. Albeit brief, our militant and organized moment of fightback was met with more pushback from the bosses than the rest of the reform demonstration.
These kkkops know that the bosses’ capitalist system is currently protecting them and they know that when PLP comrades chant “SHUT THIS RACIST SYSTEM DOWN!” we’re not calling for reforms, or reduced funding; we are calling for a workers’ revolution, and nothing scares them more.

 As U.S. and Chinese bosses shut down each other’s consulates and jockey to create the first Covid-19 vaccine, the rivalry between the two capitalist superpowers is quickly accelerating toward armed conflict. The world is changing before our eyes. As U.S. rulers expose their disunity and decay in their chaotic response to Covid-19, Chinese rulers are growing bolder by the day—politically, economically, militarily. As modern history shows, a dramatic power shift among the biggest imperialists can be settled only by global war. It’s as inevitable—and unstoppable—as an earthquake.
 For the international working class, it is more urgent than ever to organize and fight back against all bosses. Workers have no stake in supporting either side of this power struggle. Led by Progressive Labor Party (PLP), we must turn the guns around. We must transform the capitalist parasites’ imperialist wars into a class war for communist revolution!
 On July 21, the Chinese consulate in Houston was closed by the U.S. and accused of medical and scientific espionage. In retaliation, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) shut down the U.S. embassy in Chengdu. These events followed a series of “conflicts over trade, technology, Hong Kong, spying accusations and complaints of abuses against Chinese Muslims” (Time, 7/25). They point to the end of an era of U.S.-China capitalist cooperation and engagement—and a new period of openly adversarial competition.
 The global pandemic, on track to kill millions of workers for the sake of capitalist profits, both raises the stakes and makes war more imminent. Whoever develops the first coronavirus vaccine can use it—or withhold it—to wield enormous geopolitical power (Washington Post, 3/19). At an April World Health Organization conference calling for worldwide cooperation for vaccine development and distribution, both the U.S. and China refused to sign on (Pharmaphorum, 4/27). Under communism—a system built around workers’ needs, not profit and competition—all medical advances would benefit the entire working class.
 As Lenin pointed out, imperialist war is how imperialist powers redivide their control over the globe. But one thing they can’t control is when the shooting breaks out. World War I was not planned. Against a backdrop of competition between Britain and Germany, along with political volatility in the Balkans, a Serbian nationalist lit the fuse by assassinating the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire. No one can be certain what will trigger the next world war between China and the U.S. The flashpoints are many: Hong Kong, Taiwan, the South China Sea, cyberspace, and a sharpening trade war, as well as the pandemic. But no matter how it unfolds, the working class will be expected to fight and die to resolve the bosses’ conflicts.
 Imploding U.S. imperialism must resort to war
 As its global dominance wanes, the U.S. capitalist ruling class is increasingly desperate to hold on to power and profits. Their disastrous mishandling of Covid-19 is an international humiliation. Their economy is in shambles. They’ve been unwilling to sacrifice short-term profits or discipline the likes of Facebook for the imperialist needs of their class. As a result, the U.S. bosses are at a major disadvantage next to China’s extreme discipline, centralized economy, and more full-blown fascism (see back page). The most dangerous superpower is a declining superpower. “The once unthinkable outcome—actual armed conflict between the United States and China—now appears possible for the first time since the end of the Korean War. In other words, we are confronting the prospect of not just a new Cold War, but a hot one as well” (Foreign Affairs, 8/3).
While deranged Donald Trump keeps making things worse by denying the healthcare crisis and pushing for a reckless reopening, the finance capital main wing laid the foundations for where we are today. Democratic Party liberals like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo led the charge to close hundreds of unprofitable hospitals; ex-president Barack Obama slashed billions from Medicaid and Medicare. Besides leading to thousands of preventable deaths, these anti-worker attacks have laid bare the racist inequalities of the profit system.
Rising Chinese imperialism preparing for war
U.S. decline has opened the door for China to escalate its imperialist aggressions: “In the months since the pandemic first engulfed the world, China’s government has engaged in an unprecedented diplomatic offensive on virtually every foreign policy front” (Foreign Affairs, 7/15). President Xi Jinping’s budding alliance with Iran, a proposed $400 billion economic and security deal, would defy U.S. sanctions and  threaten “U.S. security and energy interests in the Middle East and Eurasia” (forbes.com, 7/17).
Proposed port facilities in Iran would give China a strategic advantage over a critical passageway for much of the world’s oil. After a recent military exercise involving China, Iran, and Russia, Iran’s Navy commander, Hossein Khanzadi, declared that “the era of American invasions in the region is over” (New York Times, 7/11).
China has ramped up their activity in the South China Sea, home to a third of the world’s shipping, food supply for millions, and large reserves of oil and gas. In “recent months…China has sharply escalated its coercive activities…. [T]he Department of Defense voiced concern about the Chinese Navy’s decision to seal off an area around the Paracel Islands to conduct naval exercises” (New York Times, 7/27). The U.S. responded by stepping up its own naval exercises in the contested waters. The close proximity of rival ships increases the odds of military confrontation, a combustibile scenario that could spark a wider war.
China is also expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal, with the U.S. expected to respond in kind: “Increased U.S. nuclear force requirements to ensure credible deterrence against China would affect the United States-Russia strategic nuclear balance and threaten to undermine the prospects for further negotiated reductions...China’s nuclear expansion and its refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue will affect stability on multiple levels” (New York Times, 7/29).
Though Beijing’s bosses still use the word “Communist” in their ruling party’s name, the country long ago degenerated into state-run capitalism—a devastating loss for the working class of China and the world. The CCP’s concentration camps for Uighur Muslim workers and their surveillance and repression of  protestors mirrors the U.S. rulers’ fascist internment of migrant workers and brutal attacks on anti-racist demonstrators. Workers have no stake in supporting either imperialist power.
We have a world to win
As their contradictions near a breaking point, imperialist war is the only solution for the world’s capitalist rulers. For the international working class, communism is the only solution to end our conflict with the ruling class—to smash the capitalism that bleeds us dry, once and for all. The first two World Wars were followed by the two great communist-led revolutions, in Russia and then in China. But this didn’t happen spontaneously. Decades of struggle and organizing built a fighting working class that could defeat the bosses’ armies. With the international communist leadership of PLP, the workers of the world can turn imperialist war into class war—“the final conflict.” Whenever we fight back against racist and sexist attacks and the rulers’ criminal exploitation, we take important steps toward that day. Whenever we expose the bosses’ nationalism as a murderous tool of our oppressors, we help workers build the international class unity that is more powerful than any imperialist army. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!