Washington, DC, 7/23 - Worker’s struggles have no borders! That was the sentiment that led members of NYC’s District Council 37 Retirees’ Association (including a Progressive Labor Party member) to bring a strong resolution of support for immigrants facing “racist, cruel and uncaring” policies to the nationwide retiree council of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The world’s capitalists are ramping up racism and nationalism in preparation for more and bigger wars. Workers all around the world must sharpen our efforts to smash all borders with multiracial unity as we build a revolutionary movement for communism.
At the retiree association meeting, our more immediate and limited goal was to encourage each of the council’s participants to “join efforts, with others in the labor movement as well as with community and religious partners, in support of immigrant rights.” 
We pointed out in our motion that immigrants around the world are forced to migrate “due to a combination of political and religious persecution, government repression and narco terrorist gangs and the lack of jobs and economic opportunity…” We also argued that these problems were based on the history of colonialism and imperialism around the world. That’s why, as we fight to support our immigrant sisters and brothers, we must build the understanding that the entire worldwide imperialist system has to go.
Prior toa the vote most of the voting representatives were spoken to and were supportive of our intent. The motion passed overwhelmingly, reflecting the disgust felt by most at the treatment of immigrants and their children at the southern U.S. border.
  Our actions in Washington grew out of the “Lights for Liberty” rallies held on July 12th. In NYC, there was, at best, modest participation from organized labor.
This raised the issue of trying to bring support for immigrants into our unions. The following week, at a small gathering of retirees of one city union, an immigrant from El Salvador was invited to explain this issue. He told of his forced migration to the U.S. He had been on a death list in the late 1970s. His story personalized the general story of the dangerous but necessary trip many are taking today.
 He galvanized the resolve of several retirees who would be attending the retiree council to take action there. Prior to going to Washington for the AFSCME retiree council meeting, a member of PLP joined with other retirees to craft a resolution to present there. We understood that a resolution wouldn’t by itself change much. Nor would AFSCME likely act on the resolution. We felt that local union chapters, however, could cite this resolution in calling together union and community coalitions.
If actions like ours were replicated in other mass organizations, then demonstrations like those on July 12th would take on a different character. We could raise the ideas of smashing all borders, of fighting racism with multiracial unity, and of building a revolutionary movement for an egalitarian communist world. Today, facing a “dark night” of limited class struggle, a lot of work must be done to win workers to these communist politics of the Progressive Labor Party.

El Paso Dayton. Gilroy. Add these cities to the growing list of mass shootings that have occurred in the U.S. in 2019 alone. Of the 968 victims, 196 people have died. The shooting in El Paso, Texas on August 3 was among the deadliest attacks in the U.S. motivated by gutter racism. It happened as the greatest terrorist of all, U.S. imperialism, is declining around the world and is rotting internally. The answer is multiracial working-class unity and comradeship as we fight against racism and sexism now and for an egalitarian, communist world in the future.
While the “threat of the great replacement,” or the idea that white people will be replaced by Black, Latin or Asian people was cited by the shooter in El Paso, the actions of these “domestic terrorists,” are motivated by racist and/or sexist hatred which is connected to a deeper and often overlooked trend of social and economic alienation. The U.S. working class is disaffected, isolated and living in a constant state of uncertainty and fear—fear of losing their jobs, healthcare, homes and more. Youth are mired in hopelessness, increasingly turning to suicide and/or drugs. Some horrifically turn to mass killing sprees as a way of achieving some form of notoriety. Capitalism and imperialism breed and profit from a culture of drugs and violence.
Racism and violence at the U.S.-Mexico border are nothing new. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, politicians, big businesses and the Texas Rangers often depicted Mexicans and indigenous peoples as criminals to justify the theft of land and resources. At the present, the brutality of racism is intensified, with President Donald Trump calling Mexicans drug dealers, criminals, and rapists. He has appealed to his base to “build a wall” to keep immigrants out of the U.S. His administration has locked up and detained thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers from Latin America, separating families and denying their rights to claim asylum—a legacy continued from former Democratic president Barack Obama.
Capitalism begets violence
Mass shooting trends clearly indicate the intensification of racism, a result of the toxicity that capitalism breeds. Politicians are spinning their wheels, saying these mass shootings are mental health issues, or are the result of violent video games. They squawk about gun control and make calls for universal background checks.
However, the real culprit is the capitalist profit system and its rotten culture of individualism, racism and sexism. In a period of escalating inter-imperialist competition and declining U.S. global dominance, capitalists are seizing every opportunity to use tragedies such as mass shootings for their own purposes. There is an increase of police force presence. Fascism is increasing with calls for more vigilance and surveillance to create and encourage a culture of paranoia and distrust among workers. These deadly mass shootings have only exacerbated fears and anxiety that capitalists have always used to divide workers against each other, especially the fear of being replaced by some other “race.”
Opportunity for bosses to build fascism
Politicians and the bosses’ media use psychology to explain what’s behind U.S.’s “domestic terror problem.” They would rather have people believe that these “lone wolves” are isolated individuals who act on extreme beliefs independently.
Instead, these shootings are an opportunity to build all-class unity. The liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class would love to use these shootings as a way to build allegiance to the system. In the name of safety, the working class will face greater surveillance and repression. Due to racism, this will disproportionately affect Muslim, Black, and immigrant workers. The lesson here is that capitalism begets violence. Capitalists cannot keep the workers “safe.” Only the working class can provide that.
Meanwhile, the U.S. rulers are preparing for the inevitable global land war to defend their dying empire. They need masses of workers ready to fight against China and Russia, thinking they are defending some non-existent democracy and the “American Dream.” This imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class wants workers to have guns only to kill workers in other nations as they defend the bosses’ worldwide empire.
While this single incident may be the deadliest mass shooting in “modern” U.S. history, it pales in comparison to the mostly Black, indigenous and Latin workers murdered by the police every year in the U.S. It pales in comparison to the number of killings that are a result of U.S. military operations around the world in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. A system that engenders violence cannot be part of the solution.
Opportunity for us to build communism
The rulers have no answers for the working class. They are fighting profiteering wars all over the world, and the big imperialist powers are preparing for world war. And it is only the workers that fight and die in these wars and many more in the coming world war, quite possibly with nuclear weapons. So let’s sharpen our struggles against racism and sexism. Let’s promote a better world, run by the working class, for the working class. That’s communism. Let’s plant those revolutionary communist seeds in every struggle that we are in. Join us. Join the international, revolutionary, communist Progressive Labor Party!

The Peterloo Massacre is a snapshot in the history of class struggle around the world that is largely hidden from workers by the rulers. Though this was not a revolutionary struggle but rather one for electoral rights, it does show the determination of workers to fight back against the intolerable conditions that capitalism imposes on our class. And, as always, the lessons learned lead to advances for workers’ struggles.
On Monday, August 16, 1819, a mass demonstration of working women and men and radical reformers in the city of Manchester was attacked by the British Army, leaving 18 dead and 700 wounded (peterloomassacre.org). This brutal and bloody atrocity was soon called “Peterloo” in mockery of the victory over Napoleon Bonaparte’s army at Waterloo in 1815. (The journalist who coined that phrase was sentenced to a year in prison!)
The end of the 20-year long Napoleonic wars caused a depression in the British economy. Manchester was a center of developing capitalist industry, especially in weaving. The powerloom industry was growing, with 20,000 workers, but there were still 40,000 handweavers, working from home. Many thousands of these workers and their families became homeless and starving after the war period. Wages for a 16-hour days had been cut by 50 percent (theguardian.com).One account from a book entitled The Peterloo Massacre by Robert Reid vividly recalls the conditions that triggered the rebellion:
Nothing but ruin and starvation stare one in the face [in the streets of Manchester and the surrounding towns], the state of this district is truly dreadful, and I believe nothing but the greatest exertions can prevent an insurrection [rebellion]


Workers rebel against
bosses crisis
Three years earlier, in November and December, 1816, protest demonstrations at Spa Fields, London had been attacked by the bosses. After that, a few small revolutionary societies, mainly composed of middle-class radicals who supported the now-defeated French Revolution, had conspired to overthrow he British government. Each was infiltrated and betrayed by government spies – the Blanketeers, Manchester, March 1817; the Pentrich Rising (June, 1817); and the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820).
Strikes against the capitalist class had targeted economic issues, such as low wages and lack of food. But Peterloo was different.
Workers go out and
cops target women
Called on a Monday, so that handloom weavers, who didn’t work Mondays because they had already worked throughout the weekend, the Peterloo demonstration was not revolutionary, but a demand for a reform of Parliament—to give more men the vote (women could not vote until the 1920s). Afraid of the might of the organized workers, local politicians demanded that the leaders of the demonstration be arrested. They sent in the army. The Hussars (heavy cavalry) charged the workers on horseback, swinging sabers (heavy swords). Many women were among the demonstrators. Soldiers specifically targeted the women for wanting the same rights as men. They were three times more likely to be killed or wounded than men.  
Shelley commemorates peterloo
Percy Bysshe Shelley commemorated Peterloo in his poem, “The Masque of Anarchy,” which includes this stanza:        
               
   

Karl Marx said that Shelley, who died in 1822, “was a revolutionary through and through and would consistently have stood with the vanguard of socialism.”
Lessons for the working class
Peterloo is recognized as the beginning of mass, organized working-class protest for political and social reform in England. It showed that the working class is capable of organizing for its class interests at many levels, and it showed the intransigence of the ruling class in fighting in its own interests. The experience of Peterloo led to the Chartist Movement (a mass, and often violent, working-class movement for political reform in the first half of the 19th century, which led to the development of the trade unions. (The British imperialists used similar, and even more brutal and bloody tactics to presrve their rule in India in 1919, when they opened fire on a peaceful gathering at Amritsar, killing 400 and injuring 1,000.)
The experiences at Peterloo led to the development of revolutionary communist ideology and the fight to completely overthrow the capitalist system.

After months of mass demonstrations against a military coup and crackdown that killed over 100 protesters in June, Sudan’s governing generals, the Transitional Military Council (TMC), are negotiating a power-sharing agreement with liberal capitalists in the political opposition, the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC). But the main contradiction in Sudan, the tension that generated the current crisis, is the same one shaping events around the world: inter-imperialist rivalry between a rising China and a declining U.S. as they head toward the next world war.
Sudan is a gateway into Africa from the Middle East. The country’s current instability is an opening for the U.S. main-wing finance capitalists to reassert their power in the Horn of Africa and the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial trade route and potential choke point between the Persian Gulf and the open ocean. Only 24 miles wide, the strait is “the only route to the open ocean for over one-sixth of global oil production and one-third of the world’s liquified natural gas” (aljazeera.com, 7/11). For the main wing bosses, control over eastern Africa is critical to their control over Middle East oil, the capitalists’ lifeblood.
But the domestic wing of the U.S. ruling class, represented by the Koch and Mercer families, Sheldon Adelson, and President Donald Trump, is less inclined to commit a big outlay of troops and tax dollars to keep its clamps on the region. Instead, these bosses are giving free rein to the rabid ruling thugs in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel to do their bidding.
As this split deepens, it will accelerate the bosses’ move toward war and fascism. It will only hurt the working class. Only under an international communist movement, led by Progressive Labor Party, can workers end wars for profit and create a society to meet our needs.
An echo of Darfur
In the June massacre in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, “heavily armed troops burned tents, raped women and killed dozens of people, some dumped in the Nile”(New York Times, 6/15). This brutal paramilitary was following the leadership of the TMC’s  General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti. The murderers were carrying on the legacy of Darfur, the Sudan region where a genocidal civil war slaughtered hundreds of thousands and displaced millions between 2003 and 2008 (The Lancet, 1/30/10).
As one protester said, “For years Hemeti killed and burned in Darfur. Now Darfur has come to Khartoum” (NYT, 6/15). The militias had carried out massacres and atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2003.  The U.S. bosses, who looked the other way under both George Bush and Barack Obama, also have Darfur blood on their hands.  
Sudan: a notch in China’s belt
As the U.S. bosses’ infighting under Trump has created a global vacuum of power, the more unified rulers of China have filled the void. Given its location on a vital trade route between Asia, Europe, and Africa, Sudan is critical to the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (formerly One Belt One Road). As the Chinese bosses take on U.S. imperialism and push to become the world’s leading economic power, Port Sudan on the Red Sea will be an important notch on that belt. (Nearby Djibouti, which borders the Strait of Hormuz, houses China’s first foreign military base).
The Chinese rulers’ challenge has been a long time coming. In 1995, they signed an oil deal with Omar al-Bashir, the recently deposed Sudan president. China now controls 75 percent of Sudan’s oil output of 133,000 barrels a day (thediplomat.com, 6/17). The ousting of al-Bashir in April by the TMC was a blow for China—and a potential opening for U.S. imperialists to reassert their influence.
Meanwhile, faced with a weakening U.S. and an aggressive Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are moving to align the Horn states with their axis against rival regional imperialists Iran, Qatar, and Turkey. After funding the ouster of the unreliable al-Bashir (Foreign Affairs, 7/19), they are now backing the ruling TMC with political and military support, as are Egypt and Eritrea. The prize is control over the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Hormuz, which figure to play a prominent role in the coming battles leading up to World War III.  
U.S. bosses’ splits play out in Sudan
While both factions of the U.S. ruling class understand the importance of Sudan, they are split on how to manage that relationship. In 2017, after al-Bashir’s dictatorship committed 7,000 troops to the U.S.-backed Saudi-Emirati coalition’s genocidal war in Yemen, a campaign now opposed by the main wing, the Trump administration lifted economic sanctions and removed Sudan from the Muslim travel ban list (NYT, 7/18). Most recently, the Trump administration is considering “new ways to remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism” (reuters.com, 4/16) and has refrained from open criticism of TMC repression. This hands-off policy squares with the domestic wing’s push to outsource the job of maintaining Middle East stability to its regional thugs-for-hire.
On the other hand, the main-wing finance capitalist coalitions—including the European Union, the United Nations, and the African Union—all support the “pro-democracy” FFC’s “nonviolent civil disobedience” opposition. Their hope is for the U.S. to take the lead in extending the liberal world order’s long-term influence over Sudan. This will be a rebuke to China and Russia, neither of which backed the UN’s condemnation of the TMC junta: “U.S. leadership has been badly lacking…The [African Union] has an important role to play, but it needs an international ecosystem of support” (Council of Foreign Relations, 6/11).
Democracy for the bosses, dictatorship for the workers
The U.S. and EU bosses’ media are hailing Sudan’s power-sharing agreement as a step toward “democracy,” the term they use for a dictatorship of the bosses. But history has shown  that workers can never negotiate the terms of their freedom through our oppressors’ democracy. When workers are duped into compromises with the capitalists, the consequences are always deadly.  Workers in Sudan will be “sharing” power with the very forces responsible for the genocide and displacement of millions of our working-class brothers and sisters in Darfur and Yemen.
Workers in struggle today must rebuild a communist movement that will correct the errors of its predecessors. Otherwise, the brave struggle against Sudan’s junta will be diverted into fighting for the interests of either U.S. or Chinese imperialism. Protesters must pick up the red flag where the old communists of Sudan left it, before making a wrong turn toward national independence. Join the communist movement with PLP!