The allegations that Russia paid cash bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with no response from the floundering U.S. government, is yet another sign of the decay of U.S. imperialism. Facing an out-of-control pandemic, a full-blown economic depression, and mass fightback against the racist kkkops, the U.S. ruling class is in crisis. Their institutions are in freefall. Their leadership—both Republican and Democrat—is incompetent and divided.
For the international working class and the revolutionary communist party that must lead it, the resulting chaos is both an opportunity and a danger. For the first time in many years, masses of workers are openly seeking alternatives to the bankrupt profit system. But we must also be aware that intensified state terror and inter-imperialist global war are heading our way.
Fascists big and small
After 18 years of fruitless U.S. combat in Central Asia and the Middle East, open racist President Donald Trump has pushed for a pullout from flashpoints like Afghanistan and Syria. Trump fronts for the isolationist Small Fascists, whose profits come mainly from U.S. energy and other domestic sources. Trump’s wing is fundamentally at odds with the imperialist finance capitalists, the liberal Big Fascists, who rely on dominance over cheap Middle Eastern oil. Both sides have become tired of “the forever war” in Afghanistan—a conflict, says the New York Times, the liberal bosses’ top mouthpiece, that “needs to be brought to an end” (7/7).
But we shouldn’t confuse the Big Fascists’ push for “peace” with any aversion to spilling workers’ blood. The liberal rulers want to conserve their military and political collateral for the superpower war to come. They see Trump’s failure to check rival Russia’s rise in the region as a dangerous strategic weakness. As U.S. finance capital fights to regain control in the upcoming elections and beyond, these splits within the ruling class will become only sharper and more violent.
As workers, we can have no illusions that the Big Fascists’ attacks on Trump will serve our class interests. These liberal capitalists represent the greatest danger to our class. They co-opt mass uprisings into voting and dead-end struggles for minor reforms as they build a patriotic boss-run movement for full-blown fascism and World War III.
For workers to escape this nightmare, our goal must be clear: communist revolution and the building of an egalitarian, worker-run society. The international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to organize the world’s masses, from Kabul to Moscow to Minneapolis, into an armed force of millions to crush this racist, sexist capitalist system forever.
Liberals pile on Trump in rush to war
The Big Fascists, represented mainly by Democratic Party stooges and sell-outs, wasted no time jumping on the bounty report to further discredit and discipline the rogue president. They recognize Trump for the deranged, self-serving clown that he is, completely unfit to manage the long-term interests of their U.S. empire.
Numerous past U.S. military leaders have joined the attack. John R. Allen, head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan under ex-President Barack Obama, a reliable Big Fascist front man, blasted Trump and Co. on the recent “peace” deal brokered between the arch-sexist, criminal Taliban and the battered and corrupt Afghan government:
From an administration that has… abandoned the Kurds in Syria and undercut the Palestinians, it’s hard to imagine an American strategic counterattack into Afghanistan when the Taliban inevitably violate the terms of this agreement….(Brookings, 3/5).
The Big Fascists are desperate to win back the presidency to try to “right the ship” of U.S. imperialism and prepare for war against Russia or China or both. Though they’ve yet to find the internal discipline required for the job, they’re seeking to restore some semblance of legitimacy to capitalist legal and economic institutions. Hence the liberals’ calls to address glaring racist and sexist inequalities in wealth, health, housing, jobs, and incarceration. They also realize that they need a more aggressive stance to keep their imperialist rivals from rolling over them.
Within days of the bounty scheme becoming public, prominent liberals like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded to be briefed by national intelligence officials while calling for renewed sanctions against Russia (NYT, 7/1). Joe Biden, the segregationist nitwit the Democrats plan to run against Trump, boasted that if he were elected, Russian President Vladimir Putin “would be confronted and we’ll impose serious costs on Russia” (MSN, 6/28).
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the premier Big Fascist think tank, chimed in on Twitter: “Russia is carrying out covert wars vs US troops in Afghanistan and our democracy here at home. A proportionate response would increase the costs to Russia of its military presence in Ukraine & Syria and, using sanctions & cyber, to challenge Putin at home” (6/27).
With the liberal world order and U.S. supremacy collapsing before their eyes, the Big Fascists will be forced to escalate their imperialist onslaughts—not out of strength, but out of weakness.
Russia’s covert imperialist game
A Russian covert intelligence attack against U.S. and British military forces in Afghanistan fits with Putin’s approach of “hybrid” warfare. With Russia’s military not up to the task of confronting U.S. or NATO forces head-on, its state capitalist bosses have sharpened their destabilization skills with cyberattacks, meddling in foreign elections, and arming proxy armies (RAND Corporation Report, 3/22/17).
As details of the alleged bounties surface, so too does evidence that Russia has been cultivating both the Taliban and the central Afghan government to engineer a quicker U.S. withdrawal (CNN, 7/1). A shrinking U.S. presence will leave a vacuum for the Russian bosses’ own imperialist designs on the region. After being forced out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s by the U.S.-backed mujahideen (the forerunners of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS), Russian imperialists are eager to restore their neighbor and greater Central Asia into their orbit for wider regional security, lucrative military contracts, and access to natural resource wealth (The Interpreter, 5/7).
Fight for communism!
When the contradictions of inter-imperialist rivalry eventually explode, all sets of national capitalist bosses will be eager to send countless workers to fight and die in their wars for profit. As communists, our revolutionary objective is to win millions of workers and students worldwide to join Progressive Labor Party. We must smash capitalism’s genocidal business as usual and fight for international workers’ power. We must link the struggles against racist police terror, devastating unemployment, and imperialist war into a unified revolutionary battle against this entire rotten system. PLP represents the mass working class, the one force that can wipe the profit system and all its misery from the face of the earth. Join us!

CHICAGO—Dozens of Black, white, and Latin women and men of all ages shut down streets on the city’s west side. The bold actions of these anti-racist fighters peaked with a demonstration in front of the District 10 Chicago Police Department (CPD) station. As more people joined in, the killer Klan-in-blue made a hasty retreat into the station. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated and helped lead, promoting communist revolution as the solution to racist killer cops.
The march was led by friends and relatives of Steve Rosenthal. This 15-year-old Black teen was  executed by racist cops in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood in August 2018. The lying kkkops naturally rationalized their violent murder, leading with the standard lie that they “thought he might have a gun.”
After chasing him into a stairwell at his grandmother’s home, they shot him in the back of the head. They claimed it was “suicide.” He was brought to the local hospital, dead on arrival, but the family was not allowed to see his body. We have been fighting for justice for Steve ever since. During the first month after Steve’s murder, demonstrations were held almost daily.
Communists in the international PLP fight injustice alongside our class sisters and brothers wherever and whenever the bosses attack. We promote the idea that the whole racist capitalist system is at the root of our collective misery and must be destroyed. Racist police murder, pandemics, unemployment and deportations will cease to exist when we organize millions of our class into PLP to crush capitalism with communist revolution!
Antiracists take the street, fascist cops retreat
The massive worldwide rebellions set off by the police murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor inspired the renewed energy to fight and march for Steve. Organized mainly through social media, flyers, and personal contacts, a crowd of a few dozen multi-racial workers and youth turned up in front of the local west side high school that served as the rallying point for past marches.
Soon after setting off on our march, we quickly took over a major street in front of the police station where Steve’s murderers operated and found protection. A line of cops soon filtered out and tried to intimidate and disperse the crowd. But the anger of the family, friends, and supporters would not be stopped!
We quickly shouted down the racist hitmen, pointing out that 22 months had passed and the family still had little to no information about getting justice for their loved one. The cops were forced to retreat as we continued to block the street and the station’s front entrance.
Continuing the march through Steve’s home neighborhood, his friends and relatives led the march with chants, songs, and speeches. Some of the marchers were grade school age, like Steve’s younger brother, but still spoke into the bullhorn as boldly as any seasoned fighter.
 The leadership shown by the young Black workers who organized a militant march and stood up to the police was powerful. It bodes well for the future of the struggle to overthrow capitalism.
Workers embrace communist line
PLP comrades, who have been fighting alongside Steve’s family since his 2018 murder, helped give leadership as well. Our speeches called out liberal politicians, such as Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Black woman posing as an anti-racist, who fully supports Chicago’s racist police.
Marchers applauded our message to continue organizing for communism, instead of falling into the bosses’ election traps. They asked PLP to lead the second half of the march with our banner that read CPD: Guilty of Racist Murder. Unite to Overthrow Capitalism. Join PLP.
Participants also loudly repeated PLP-led chants:
“CPD, KKK—How many kids did you kill today?”
“CPD you can’t hide—We charge you with genocide!”
We distributed hundreds of PLP leaflets and CHALLENGE newspapers to marchers and working-class residents. Our long-term efforts to build a base in this particular neighborhood – holding other rallies, marches, May Day dinners, and CHALLENGE sales – have helped to make us a welcome, antiracist fighting force in the area. We intend to continue deepening these relationships and building our base for our mass Party.
No retreats from communism
The movement against racist police murder worldwide is at a crossroads, and we have the potential to play a vital role. Either we boldly advocate for communist revolution as the solution, or we allow the liberals and the misleaders to dilute the struggle as they have done time and time before.
For us, the second option is a definite no-go. The road to justice for Steve Rosenthal, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless others takes the form of building the international PLP. Fight back against racist capitalism – Fight for communist revolution!

Readers of CHALLENGE are aware of Progressive Labor Party’s(PLP) insistence upon the centrality of the struggle against racism to the fight for working-class liberation. The history of this strategic communist emphasis reveals the importance of proletarian (that is, working-class) internationalism in both theory and practice.
Although the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is widely credited (even by anticommunist historians) with leading the fight against racism during the Depression years, during most of the previous decade the CPUSA—following in the tradition of the prewar U.S. Socialist Party—insisted that Black oppression (then called the “Negro Question”) was exclusively an economic matter. Undue emphasis upon the violence, poverty, and harsh conditions of labor disproportionately endured by the Black working class, it was argued, would alienate white workers. Unsurprisingly, Black membership in the CPUSA remained low through the 1920s: by 1929, there were still fewer than 300 Black members in a total membership of over 15,000 (Zumoff).
The contradictory policy of Black liberation
It was the intervention of the Comintern (the worldwide association of Communist parties formed in 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution) that enabled the CPUSA to put the fight against racism front and center. At the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, there was intense debate over race, class, and nation. (1) Should Black workers in the U.S. be viewed as a “people,” a “race,” or a “nation”? (2) Did class divisions in the Black population make it impossible to have commonly shared material interests? (3) Did the call for “self-determination” of oppressed peoples and nations—a proposition key to both Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings on the “national question”—pertain to U.S. Black workers, and if so, how? (4) Were Black workers in the United States, by virtue of their greater degree of oppression and exploitation, particularly positioned to lead the global struggle against capitalism?
Notably, Black communists in the U.S. delegation to the Sixth World Congress were—while actively recruited to play a prominent role in these debates—themselves split on these issues (Haywood). It was largely delegates from other countries—especially Japan, Finland, and the USSR—who pressed for the position that would be endorsed as CPUSA policy during the coming period (Solomon). This policy was complex and contradictory.
On the one hand, it asserted that the Black peasantry (agricultural workers), located mostly in the “Black Belt” of the rural South, constituted an oppressed nation in need of self-determination, comparable to the separate peoples that had joined together to form the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) after the Bolshevik Revolution. On the other hand, particularly in the North, the Comintern policy called for an intensified fight against racism in all spheres of life, expressed in the slogan, “Black and White, Unite and Fight!”
Black nationalism is a failing strategy
It was assumed that the Black Belt—upon attaining self-determination through a “bourgeois-democratic” (capitalist) revolution that would help it overcome its capitalist-engendered uneven development—would then join the multiracial working class in the unified revolutionary movement needed to abolish capitalism.
This strategy was then and is now subject to serious critique. The call for a Black Republic, while intended to benefit working-class people of all races and ethnicities, even at the time smacked of Black nationalist separatism.
The post-World War II history of national liberation movements premised upon self-determination, moreover, has shown that the two-stage theory of revolution (first the bourgeois-democratic revolution, then the socialist revolution) has yielded only disappointment and betrayal, particularly in those parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America where it was most fervently embraced.
Progressive Labor Party asserts that the early twentieth-century theorizations of the “national question,” while plausible in their time, have proven to be impediments rather than spurs to working-class liberation. We see its failure playing out to this day. That is why PLP fights for nothing less than multiracial unity and one international fight against capitalism. We have one common enemy and one world to win.
Communists fight racism
Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the sharp struggles undertaken at the Sixth World Congress, the CPUSA greatly intensified its commitment to the fight against racism. Focusing both upon the special oppression of nonwhite workers and upon the destructive and divisive impact of racism upon the entire working class, the CPUSA took the lead in building a class-conscious multiracial movement, one whose legacy lasts to this day, especially in the ranks of PLP.
There would have been no Scottsboro campaign, no sharecropper organizing, no multiracial unionism, no massive eviction protests throughout the USA without the debates that had taken place in Comintern meetings on the other side of the world (Kelley; Naison). Moreover, where racism (“white chauvinism”) within the Party raised its ugly head, it was combated head-on, as in the so-called Yokinen trial of 1931 (Hudson).
One of the favorite canards of anticommunist historiography is the claim that the Comintern—often equated with a demonized construct designated as “Stalin”—never had at heart the interests of the workers of the world: that it sought only to defend the USSR and its ruling circles. The history of the struggle over the “Negro Question” in the United States shows quite the opposite.
In fact, whatever their nationalist limitations, when seen in retrospect, it was communists from around the world whose intervention helped communists in the U.S. reset their priorities. For this gesture of proletarian internationalism revolutionary antiracists remain indebted to this day.
Black workers key
The international communist PLP is fighting for the idea that liberal bosses and politicians are the main danger and that fascism is being expressed most sharply today in fights within ruling classes over how they will align themselves or respond to the reality of U.S. imperialism in decline.
We also fight for the idea that leadership of Black workers is uniquely key to the global victory of communism. Join the fight.

Further readings:
Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist.
Hudson, Hosea. The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Depression.
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression.
Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936.
Zumoff, Jacob. The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919 – 1929.

The following is an excerpted speech given by a PL high school student at a rally in front of the Chancellor of NYC public schools home to a crowd of hundreds demanding that NYPD (New York Police Department) be removed from all public schools.
I am a junior at a mostly Black and Latin high school. My school has had metal detectors for decades, so I am no stranger to the racist over-policing and criminalization of Black and Latin youth in public schools.
I get to the front of the line with all of my metal items and electronics in a basket and when I have to get hand-wanded, I know that I have to stand with my feet shoulder-width apart and my arms out. I don’t need to hold onto something when I have to lift my feet up so they can scan the bottom of my shoes. This is because I have been doing this every day since the 6th grade.
The DOE (Department of Education)  has perpetuated into my daily life since I was 11 years old, that I am a suspect before I am a student. School safety tells me to remove metal items from my body before a teacher tells me good morning. I have to explain that I am a student at the school and have been for 6 years to reenter for volleyball practice before my coach tells me to run a few laps. I have to put my phone and jewelry in my bag before I can take a pencil out of it.
They claim it is for our safety and protection. They claim my classmates are the dangerous ones. They try to make us scared of each other, but the only people I am scared of are the ones wearing the badges.
Racist incidents at school range from extreme ones like my friend getting tackled, bruised, and arrested for using a safety pin to hold his glasses together to something as seemingly small as not being allowed to bring an iced coffee because of the claim that there could be alcohol in it.
The NYPD and DOE work side by side to help funnel innocent working-class Black and Latin kids into prisons by familiarizing us with the police from a young age. But at my school we fight back!
My volleyball team went to one of the city’s “elite” high schools to play a game and got yelled at by school safety and were forced to walk in a single file like we were at Rikers Island [prison]. The white team we faced got none of that. We were accused of stealing from their gym inventory and racist remarks like “looks like they went on a shopping spree” were murmured between school safety agents as we left.
My school rallied teachers, students, and parents to collectively fight back. We made phone calls, we wrote letters, we threatened a sit in, and in the end, my team got the head of school safety along with the perpetrators to come to our school and have an in-depth conversation that ended in genuine apologies. Now every time our volleyball team walks into that school we are treated with respect.
When the working class unites, changes are inevitable!
However, just because we won that fight does not mean racist policing has stopped in schools. We still have to get the NYPD and its racist, toxic murderous culture out of our schools! And more is needed!  This entire school system under capitalism teaches a toxic ideology; only some kids are meant to make it. This is a school system that teaches us that in every graduating class there are a few winners and many more losers.
Everybody wants to talk about systemic racism without mentioning the system—capitalism, the profit system—that treats most of us like waste. For me the systemic change that is needed has a name—communism.  
In our segregated system, from elementary school, students and parents buy into this idea that going to a Black and Latin school equates to failure. The real failure is being won over to racism, the real failure is pushing your kids into schools that fuel elitism by allowing them to think that they deserve to be there because they are better.
This capitalist government needs to maintain this superiority complex in order to stop the working class from realizing that if we unite as a whole, NOTHING can stop us!
The very multi-racial, multi-generational unity that we see right now to get these kkkops out of our schools is the very unity that is needed to smash this racist, capitalist system.
High schools and colleges have trained us to hate communism, the same ones that tell most of us we have no worth. Do you trust these institutions of oppression to teach you the truth about your own liberation?
We cannot trust the very capitalist system that needs racism to thrive to fix systemic racism. This is not a broken system. It is working exactly how it was built to work.
Removing NYPD from schools will not fix segregation, it will not stop failing the majority of its students, and most importantly, it will not fix the racism that is taught in our schools. My classmates, your students, your children deserve more; so, we have to fight for more!
We have to abolish the NYPD and this racist, capitalist system once and for all! SAME ENEMY,  SAME FIGHT,  WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!