On November 15, China signed the world’s largest “free” trade agreement with 14 other Asia-Pacific nations. Beyond reducing tariffs and easing barriers to capitalist investments, the trade deal represents a giant step toward fascism and global war between China and its imperialist arch-rival, the U.S.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) “covers almost one-third of the world’s population and about one-third of its gross domestic product” (South China Morning Post, 12/1). The new alliance includes all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China’s top trading partner. It also draws four traditionally U.S.-leaning countries more deeply into China’s orbit: Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. By strengthening ties with its neighbors, China will be less vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. Along with the Belt and Road Initiative, the gigantic Chinese infrastructure project of trains, roads, and gas and oil pipelines, the RCEP gives China tremendous leverage over poorer debtor capitalist bosses.
According to a commentary published by Renmin University’s school of international studies, the deal is China’s biggest win in economic diplomacy since the formation of the Beijing-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2016:
[It] displays that China’s economic cooperation with Asia-Pacific countries will be substantially strengthened, and significantly counter the numerous pressures from the China-US economic decoupling and changes in supply chains…” (SCMP, 11/20).
China’s rise has been relentless. In 2009, it surpassed Germany as the world’s largest exporting nation. This October, the International Monetary Fund acknowledged that China had overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest economy (EurAsian Times, 10/18). Despite mostly empty threats from President Donald Trump, China’s annual trade surplus with the U.S. still tops $450 billion (focus-economics.com, 10/13). It’s the only major economy that has kept growing through the pandemic.
The RCEP may herald a tipping point, the moment when China supplants the U.S. as the world’s most powerful imperialist. Unlike the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Trump withdrew from in 2017, the RCEP plays to China’s strengths and will go by China’s rules. The pact has minimal labor standards, no environmental regulations, and no constraints on state-subsidized industries—all of which would have favored the U.S. rulers at the Chinese bosses’ expense.
What does this mean for the international working class? First of all, “free” trade is a cynical misnomer. As we saw with NAFTA in North America, it’s designed to give the bosses flexibility to move their companies, technologies, and merchandise freely across borders. Meanwhile, workers are free to be used as cheap labor—or, when the winds of profit blow the wrong way, free to starve.
Second, the looming change in the imperialists’ pecking order will make the world an even more volatile place. As the RCEP sharpens the contradictions between China and the U.S., it brings both countries that much closer to World War III. In the face of this development, workers of the world must reject the bosses’ calls to nationalism. Our task is to build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party and smash capitalism and its enslaving economic system for all time.
U.S. bosses’ split: another win for China
Trump has represented the isolationist bosses who make most of their profits within the U.S. They have more to lose than to gain from multilateral trade deals that bring in added competition to the U.S. market. But for the top-dog finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, which makes much of its money internationally, Trump’s high-tariff, go-it-alone trade policy is a disaster, both for short-term profits and long-term geopolitical control.
The task of future Stooge in Chief Joe Biden is to revive the old order and put the liberal bosses back in charge. He’s probably doomed. For one thing, China’s unified ruling class and full-blown fascism gives them a huge strategic advantage. For another, the domestic U.S. bosses have hijacked the Republican Party and are likely to keep running the U.S. Senate, which must ratify any trade agreements.  
At bottom, the division in the U.S. ruling class is over the best way to handle China and its threat to U.S. profits. Trump’s Fortress America wing would rely on a defensive, scaled-down, predominantly white military that could wage genocide on the cheap. Biden’s interventionist wing is targeting Black and Latin youth to build a massive, multicultural, patriotic fighting force ready to lay down their lives by the millions.
Turn the guns around!
On November 24, a high-ranking Chinese official was published in the Op Ed section of the New York Times, finance capital’s daily mouthpiece. Fu Ying, an ex-vice foreign minister, called for a new era of “co-opetition” between China and the U.S., a “mutually beneficial” mix of cooperation and competition. But when you read the fine print, it didn’t sound so friendly: “On the political front, it is high time that the United States drop its habit of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs….and avoid challenging China on the issue of Taiwan or by meddling in the territorial disputes of the South China Sea.” In other words, China will be happy to work with the U.S.—as long as the U.S. surrenders Asia.
While imperialists may cooperate in narrow and short-lived ways when it serves their interests, competition is always primary. The bosses live by the law of maximum profit.
The U.S. finance capitalists will never voluntarily accept China’s ascent to become the world’s new number-one power—there are too many trillions in multinational profits at stake. They may lose, but they won’t go gently.
For the same reason, the Chinese bosses will stop at nothing to reign supreme. China’s true intentions were revealed in a recent message from President Xi Jinping to the People’s Liberation Army Marine Corps: “Put all your minds and energy on preparing for war” (cnn.com, 10/14).
The instability of this period is a great danger to the working class, but also an opportunity.  Though we cannot say when, where, or how the bosses will take up arms, it is our historic responsibility to transform imperialist war into war for communist revolution. We have no side in this fight between exploiters. Workers of the world, we cannot forget that our class seized state power in Russia during World War I, and did the same in China after World War II. Though these revolutions were a great advance for the working class, they ultimately failed to make a lasting break with capitalism. But history tells us we will have another chance—if we build for it today. Fight for communism! Join PLP!

LOS ANGELES, November 30—"We all want justice for these families. That's why we are here. But if we are honest, and this is a hard conversation to have especially with the families who lost loved ones, real justice can only come when we overthrow capitalism!"
This speech was also the overwhelming sentiment of the 75 people, including five other families who lost loved ones to racist killer cops, who came to Newton police station tonight. We commemorated the life of Alex Flores, who was murdered by the racist LAPD November 19, 2019.  
This militancy was echoed in the speeches of two different sisters whose loved ones were murdered by police. Both of these working-class women have been leaders and organizers in this campaign and respect the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and our ideas. Through the last year of fight back, we have fought for everyone involved in this intense struggle to see the need for a party and a communist world.   
Women lead militant fightback
The sister of Cesar Rodriguez, who has been fighting for over three years since her brother was murdered by Long Beach kkkops, referenced the comrade's speech and acknowledged that this is a lifelong battle for her and won't end until we have a new system. The sister of Alex Flores also gave a militant speech on the need to overthrow capitalism. She thanked PLP and said, although her family has painfully lost their family member, her family has also gained many new members, referring to PLP and she then asked the crowd to join us.
As Los Angeles is entering its third Covid-19 surge, there are countless ways that capitalism brutalizes our class. While the focus of the last straight 52 Friday nights has been how the police enforce the oppression of our class, we have fought for all involved to take a broader look at the roots of our oppression.
Saluting one year of antiracist, antisexist fightback
This struggle has had militant, antisexist women leadership since Alex’s racist murder became a mass issue one year ago. Anti-racist marches with family, other antiracists and PL’ers have blocked streets and intersections and chanted while shutting down the entrance of the kkkops’ “Shootin’ Newton” station.
Women political leaders from Alex’s family have been a key force not only in leading chants and marches, but also in being receptive to expanding the antiracist fightback.
 With fellow Black working class sisters and brothers gunned down by racist killer kkkops in this racist capitalist system; a system that only offers our class fascism through racist police terror, racist unemployment, and deadlier imperialist wars and genocide.
BLM misleaders collaborate with kkkops
Just over a week prior, the local Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapter organized a "victory" meeting with newly elected LA County District Attorney Gascon to "manage family expectations."  The sister of Cesar Rodriguez found out about it and let us know, as well as a half dozen other families who have been ardent supporters of BLM and yet weren't invited to this meeting. The families were pissed. In this meeting the true colors of both BLM and DA Gascon were shown as many families left furious knowing that their cases would not even be reviewed.  
La lucha continua!
At rallies like this one now, when asked "Can there be a good DA [District Attorney] in a racist system?  Can there be a good politician in a racist system?" the crowd emphatically responds "NO!" This is a potential sign of the times— masses of workers are open to communist ideas, to militant antiracist fightback, to a solution to this capitalist system that murders our working class sisters and brothers and crushes whole countries into hellscapes through sharpening imperialist rivalry.
We are building a fighting PLP by continuing to expose the reformists and their scams like voting. We have made local political connections to the racism and sexism of capitalism as it manifests in surging Covid-19 rates, hospital closings, underfunded schools, unemployment, and the exploding rates of houselessness.
We still have a long way to go to develop the necessary class consciousness and confidence in our class to turn all these workers into revolutionary communists.
But waging these anti-racist struggles, making these bigger connections, and a deepening commitment to basebuilding is positioning us for longer-term struggle connecting over a dozen families, our on-the-job work, and our mass organization work. Our night may seem dark for now, but our future couldn’t be brighter. The struggle continues, and there’s no better time to join the fight with PLP than now.

The United States president exercises government power on a day-to-day basis to keep the blood-sucking, war-making U.S. profit system running. This job requires a committee of people, a Cabinet, that assists the president with the constant oversight and adjustment of executive government activity: imperialist war, law enforcement, government finances, diplomacy, preserving capitalism, and more.
In analyzing the role of presidents and prime ministers of their day, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In 1848 when capitalist classes in Europe were on the rise, they were relatively unified and focused on completing their drives to push monarchs from power and suppress early efforts of workers to organize fightback and revolution.
In 2020, Marx’s description fits the Chinese executive power under Xi Jinping, as rising Chinese capitalism prepares for world war to challenge declining U.S. imperialism (see editorial, page 2).
The U.S. ruling class, on the other hand, is fractured, contributing to the decline of U.S. capitalism’s world power in relation to a rising China. The Donald Trump presidency marked an acceleration of that decline as the “modern executive” was seized by a gang of open bandits with no loyalty to “the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”  
Compared to Trump’s team of outsiders, Biden’s crew is the ultimate collection of insiders and his choices in personnel point to an attempt to return to the smoothly-delivered imperialist and anti-worker policies of the Barack Obama era. Biden’s cynical and manipulative move to install the “most diverse cabinet ever” is a thin veil that seeks to cover the house of horrors the main imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class has in store for workers everywhere.
The managers of an empire in free fall
Joe Biden, President: He announced that military spending will expand, especially in the areas of cyberwarfare and AI (artificial intelligence) for a more mechanized and efficient surveillance and slaughter of our class overseas, combat roles for transgender workers, and updated equipment for the National Guard who is called in to suppress serious domestic rebellion (Stars and Stripes, 9/10). In 1988, Biden co-authored the infamous “100-to-1” law that targeted Black and Latin workers with mandatory 10-year sentences for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine.  For nearly half a century, Biden has played a lead role in building racism, sexism, and war while serving the interests of finance capital. In 1994, he decried “predators on our streets” and led the charge for Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill, which doubled the U.S. prison population and caged generations of Black and Latin workers. Biden’s slogan sounded a lot like Trump: “Lock the SOB’s up!” (NYT, 6/25/19).
Kamala Harris, first woman Vice
President: In this period of growing fascism and approaching war Harris will continue the long and sordid tradition of Black-led racist assaults on Black workers and sexist assaults on women that are the hallmarks of liberalism. As district attorney in San Francisco and later as California’s state attorney general, Top Cop Kamala “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions” (theguardian.com, 1/31/19). The cops’ racial profiling of Black workers flourished on her watch. As an attorney general, she criminalized parents of truant children, rather than giving them support..
Tony Blinken, Secretary of State: “...A job in which he will try to coalesce skeptical international partners into a new competition with China, according to people close to the process” (NYT, 11/24). Blinken was Biden’s chief advisor when he cast his 2002 ballot in support of imperialist assault on Iraq as well as a vocal proponent in the Obama administration to launch war in Libya.
Janet Yellen, first woman Treasury Secretary: As Chair of the Federal Reserve under Obama, she crafted the 2008 bailouts and subsequent ‘quantitative easing’ that showered billionaires with cash and left millions to languish in a ‘jobless recovery.’ Expect her to continue Trump-style stimulus bribes to pacify workers while the pandemic rages and to attack Social Security and Medicare, as she has advocated since 2012 (HuffPost, 9/13; NYT, 12/1).
Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser: This Obama-Era top aide to Hillary Clinton has recently dedicated himself to formulating “U.S. Foreign Policy for the Middle Class: A Perspective from Nebraska” a Carnegie Endowment study which seeks to solve the problem of re-energizing mass support for the U.S. military (NYT, 11/22).
Avril Haines, first woman Director of National Intelligence: Architect of Obama-era drone bombing program that has killed untold numbers of non-combatants across the Middle East and Africa.
Alejandro Mayorkas, first Latin Director of Homeland Security: Author of the  Obama-era DACA program whose false promises drew millions of undocumented youth into providing personal information in the hopes of legal residency. Oversaw the construction of an archipelago of detention centers as Obama’s deputy and innovator in implementation of family separation (vox.com, 6/14). Right-hand man to Deporter-in-Chief Obama as deputy-secretary of Department of Homeland security.
Pocket-Lining warmakers line up to join Jim Crow Joe
Biden’s repeated promises to restore U.S. leadership are backed up by a phalanx of money-grubbing Democratic Party operatives who alternate between government jobs and lucrative positions at defense-industry investment and lobbying firms like WestExec and Pine Island Capital. Past Democratic power brokers like Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt rub elbows with up-and-coming Biden picks like Anthony Blinken and Avril Haines and enrich themselves at the heart of the U.S. imperialist war machine (NYT, 11/28). Michele Flournoy, front-runner to become the first-ever woman Secretary of Defense, earned compensation of $440,000 in 2018 and 2019 from Booz Allen Hamilton, engineering consultants to U.S. imperialism.
This kind of brazen double-dealing at the heart of the empire is an outrage to workers and Trump was able to mobilize his base to propel him to the White House because Hillary Clinton represented more of the same.
Identity politics: different faces, same crime
Racist attacks were embodied by Obama himself, who commanded his Black-manager-led Justice Department to do nothing to punish the kkkops who strangled Eric Garner and shot Michael Brown. If the wave of Black and Latin mayors who were put in charge during the racist decay and gentrification of U.S. cities since the 1970s were not enough to convince you, Obama himself is the best lesson of what “Black faces in high places” gets us under capitalism  - Black-led racism.
The same goes for sexism. The rulers use women as the faces to deliver on sexist policies. Now-disgraced Bill Clinton picked the first ever woman Secretary of State in Madeleine Albright, who famously declared that the deaths of 500,000 children (half of whom were girls) in U.S. imperialism’s 1990s-era bombing and sanctions campaign against Iraq was “worth the price.”  In the same role under Obama, Hillary Clinton was the face of a crumbling US-led world order, which sowed chaos across the Middle East. The ensuing refugee crisis is the largest since World War II—70 million by 2018 and has exposed untold millions of women to increased chances of physical and sexual assault (World Health Organization, 2018).
Workers and youth, looking for an example of multiracial and antisexist leadership, should not look to the rogues’ gallery of Biden’s cabinet. We must instead spark and join struggles against capitalism’s attacks on our class, from racist police murder to school budget cuts, layoffs and more. Class struggle means that we build new leadership from the ground up. We can guarantee victory of our anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles by keeping our eye on the prize: growth of the Progressive Labor Party today to lead communist revolution tomorrow.

CHICAGO, November 24—Over 35 multiracial workers and community members braved the wind and the rain today to protest the bosses’ racist proposal to close Mercy Hospital. Members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) spread revolutionary politics to help build the struggle against this racist attack. While distributing CHALLENGE and making conversation with workers, PLP asserted that a health industry under capitalism will always sacrifice workers’ lives for profit.
Workers around the world are facing another deadly surge in coronavirus cases, with thousands dying daily. Despite this, the billion-dollar Trinity Health system is looking to shut down this safety-net hospital whose patients are 72 percent Black and Latin.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the racist and sexist bosses want to close a hospital during a pandemic; they choose their profits over workers’ lives every day. That’s the logic of capitalism. But we should be angry over these attacks and organize a mass, militant fightback.
The international PLP is committed not just to keeping Mercy Hospital open, but building a communist revolution to destroy this racist capitalist system that has no regard for our lives. We fight for a world where workers run society collectively in our own interests, and where pandemics, racist police terror, unemployment and evictions are relics of the past.
We are who we need!
What had been promoted as a rally and car caravan by various unions was little more than a press conference. Religious leaders and politicians blew a lot of hot air for the media under a protected canopy while workers huddled in the rain.
Lifelong misleader Jesse Jackson Sr never one to refuse a photo opportunity – gave his standard hollow speech, then jumped in his truck to drive away. Likely he didn’t want to be called out on his opportunism, like when antiracist rebels in Ferguson, Missouri ran him out of town after he tried to quash the fightback there! As workers we must not be blinded by the bosses’ manipulation of identity politics and race. A Black manager of oppression is still a manager of oppression.
While the misleaders babbled on, PLP members talked with other workers about keeping Mercy open. We distributed copies of CHALLENGE newspaper, along with a Party flyer specifically about Mercy and the pandemic.
Workers agreed that the fight needed to grow, not just to include more healthcare workers, but also other workers and students. Many agreed that an attack on any worker is an attack on all workers.
Those of us in PLP here have been organizing to make this a bigger campaign in our other mass organizations and workplaces. We have given speeches, gotten signatures for petitions, and testified at the state review board that ultimately will decide whether the hospital can close.
We build this fight because ultimately it’s the masses of workers and students that move society forward, not politicians. Throughout this pandemic, it’s been the workers in hospitals, transport, and other industries who have saved workers’ lives and kept society from collapsing. Why do we need to accept living under these capitalist bosses’ awful system when we clearly have the interest and ability to run a far better society on our own?
Capitalist “healthcare” will never meet workers’ needs
Right on Trinity Health website’s main page, there’s a link to a video where CEO Mike Slubowski states, “eliminating racism is essential to our Mission.” Meanwhile, his company threatens to close a hospital in a city where the majority of Covid-19 deaths have been Black and Latin workers.
In fact, the bosses have treated hospitals and clinics as places of profit for decades. This has led to a major reduction in overall hospital beds and staff (Truthout, 3/31). In mostly Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods and rural areas, hospitals were closing at a rate of almost 30 per year prior to the pandemic (Bloomberg, 8/21/18). The bosses’ racist cost-cutting guaranteed that when disaster eventually struck, the system was overwhelmed and workers died unnecessarily.
Under capitalism, racist and sexist inequalities in workers’ health prevail . Racist and sexist unemployment and toxic pollution lead to average life expectancies that are at least four years less for Black workers than white workers in the U.S. (The Balance, 3/8/19).
These racist inequalities serve as the tip of the spear to then attack and drag down the standard of health for all workers. They can only be fought by mass, multiracial, working-class unity, ultimately with the goal of crushing capitalism and replacing it with a communist society that’s organized to put our needs first.
A revolutionary shot in the arm
As the pandemic rages on, the struggle over Mercy Hospital is critical. If we workers can keep it open, it’ll be a shot in the arm to lead more class struggle to improve all workers’ lives. And as communists in PLP, we can win more workers to understanding that this system will never serve our needs, and that it will take a revolution to create one that will. Save Mercy Hospital! Join PLP!