The political sideshow of Brexit, Britain’s chaotic divorce from the European Union, reflects the international crisis of capitalism. In Britain, as elsewhere, masses of workers have lost all confidence in the institutions that have sustained the bosses’ profit system since World War II. Prime Minister Theresa May is a dead woman walking. In the latest poll, only 7 percent thought the government had handled the Brexit negotiations well (Guardian, 3/26). Upon resigning last November, the British transport minister called the Brexit mess “a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the [1956] Suez crisis” (Reuters, 11/9/18). That was when the fading British Empire was forced to withdraw its troops from Egypt by a newly dominant U.S. imperialism.
Now the tables have turned. Rising Russian and Chinese capitalists are expanding their influence in Europe at the expense of a U.S. ruling class in decline—a trend that will accelerate if and when Britain, the most reliable U.S. ally, actually leaves the EU. Throughout Europe, ultra-nationalist and outright fascist parties are gaining strength at the expense of mainstream rulers. Post-World War II alliances are breaking down. As capitalism worldwide struggles with a lower rate of growth, sharper competition for markets and resources, and growing social unrest, the collapse of the U.S.-led liberal world order is accelerating.
Leave or stay, workers lose under capitalism
For the working class, the bosses’ split over Brexit is a lose-lose proposition. If the “leave” faction prevails, up to 750,000 workers in Britain will lose their jobs (Forbes, 12/11/18). The British auto and aerospace industries could be decimated as foreign companies pull their factories out of the UK. Diabetics are stocking up on insulin out of fear that pharmaceutical imports from Europe will be disrupted. The UK’s economy is contracting as the British pound loses value against the U.S. dollar, which makes almost everything—including fruits and vegetables—more expensive (New York Times, 4/1).
On the other hand, the “remain” faction, led by the finance capitalists centered in London, has already proven it has nothing to offer workers but a life of misery. These Big Fascists created the anti-working-class austerity program that fueled Brexit:

[T]he protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. … crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness point to a deteriorating quality of life. … By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person in the country (NYT, 5/28/2018).
Meanwhile, a competing group of bosses—the Little Fascists—used racism to shift the blame from themselves to the EU and its relatively open immigration policies: “The number of EU migrants in the UK nearly tripled between 2004 and 2015, from about one million to over three million, almost totally due to an influx of citizens from newer members including Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania” (Council on Foreign Relations, 1/16).

As a result, the UK’s foreign-born population has doubled over the last 15 years, to nearly 15 percent of the population. As British capitalists took full advantage of the cheap labor of white immigrants from Eastern Europe, they promoted the racist myth of African and Middle Eastern “terrorists” immigrating to the UK and taking workers’ jobs. In fact, refugees and asylum seekers represent less than one-quarter of one percent of Britain’s population, and barely 12,000 refugees from war-devastated Syria had been resettled there as of early 2018 (BBC, 4/24/18). These lies were promoted by mainstream liberal and conservative politicians, as well as more open fascist elements like British billionaire Aaron Banks, a close associate of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer, two of President Donald Trump’s most influential supporters. Banks worked with Little Fascist Nigel Farage in a dirty tricks campaign that helped the pro-Brexit campaign win a narrow electoral victory in 2016.
Brexit weakens U.S. in Europe
The post-World War II liberal world order was based on the U.S. funneling cheap Middle East oil to Western Europe while discouraging Soviet expansion with a “nuclear umbrella.” Within the European Union, the UK, a major player in the oil industry and the largest foreign investor in the U.S., could always be counted on to defend the U.S. bosses’ interests. Once the UK exits, German and French capitalist bosses, among others, will be freer to pursue their own interests. The EU will become less an ally and more a competitor for U.S. imperialism.
Today’s EU is split on local economic issues as well as international policy issues. Germany backed the Nordstream-2 gas pipeline from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany, despite opposition by France and Denmark. When the U.S. fought hard against Nordstream-2, the German bosses made it clear they weren’t willing to pay a big premium for natural gas piped in by the U.S. versus cheaper Russian gas.
On the military front, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania want U.S. bases on their soil to deter Russian expansion. But other EU countries, including Greece, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, are less enthusiastic about an expanded U.S. military presence. Turkey, a NATO member outside the EU, recently bought Russia’s S400 anti-missile defense system despite U.S. threats not to sell Turkey its costly (and unproven) F35 fighter jets.
Under Donald Trump, the U.S. is using economic sanctions as a hammer to stop EU companies and countries from trading with Iran and China. This bullying tactic doesn’t seem to be working, however. Italy has agreed to join China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative to facilitate trade with Eurasia, Africa, and South America. At a March 26 meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Germany and France appeared to be less hostile to OBOR than in the past. China just bought 300 jets from the pan-European Airbus, “a huge blow” to U.S. Boeing (abcnews.go.com, 3/26). And the EU continues to resist U.S. demands to ban China’s Huawei equipment from its next-generation, 5G telecommunications network (CNN.com, 3/2).
Assuming Britain does indeed leave the EU, more of these military and economic moves will go against the U.S. According to the “Thucydides Trap,” war often ensues when a dominant power is threatened by a rising one. The probability of global war between a weakening U.S., a rising China, and a resurgent Russia is growing by the day. It is up to Progressive Labor Party to build our international communist movement to smash capitalism and turn imperialist war into a class war for communist revolution.

TEXAS, March 19—Hundreds of workers and students from San Antonio and Austin, Texas protested at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters over the racist denial of a “discretionary extension of time” before deportation for three people, including a child. Recently, these three immigrant workers took so-called sanctuary inside of a church in Austin, militantly sending protestors instead of appearing themselves for their ICE appointments.
ICE officials said that arrest warrants would be issued, highlighting ICE’s increasingly fascist new plan to refuse to grant or extend the discretionary extension of time—meaning to delay deportations—for most people. It means that the Donald Trump administration seeks to arrest and deport nearly all asylum-seekers, escalating anti-immigrant racism from the already-increased Barack Obama-era levels.
Yet a revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party grows deep in the heart of Texas, fighting both to help protect these three workers and to ultimately protect our class with communist revolution!
No “sanctuary” under capitalism
The Sanctuary Movement in Austin and San Antonio, and many other church groups and social justice groups organized the protest at the ICE headquarters. At least one speaker raised the role of anti-immigrant and other forms of racism in keeping both immigrants and citizens increasingly exploited. Among the crowd of students and workers, the need for solidarity and some kind of radical change was clearly felt. Despite the mood of the masses, the politics of the organizers failed to connect increasing ICE terror to the world situation, and they neither offered any critique of capitalism, nor called for any kind of systemic change or revolution.
Some speeches were in Spanish, and approximately 50 immigrant workers facing deportation showed their support for the protest, but were afraid to join for fear of retribution at their hearings. Finally, a member of the Progressive Labor Party moved into the crowd to speak with some of the waiting immigrant workers, and all expressed interest in learning how to participate to build the movement to smash ICE and its racist, fascist terror.
Only PLP called for a revolutionary workers’ movement in the factories, fields and army that could destroy racist ICE terror’s capitalist source, instead of pleading for mercy and electing more Democrats. The Sanctuary organizers have no long term plan to address the needs of all immigrant workers in the area—let alone the needs of the international working class. Their movement is focused only on the exemplary, but short term, action of the three brave workers who took sanctuary in the church and spoke out politically.
The task of communists in PLP is to expose the reality that the storm clouds of World War III are getting closer as the imperialist rivalry between the U.S., Russian, and Chinese bosses sharpen. Wider imperialist wars threaten to murder millions of workers, and there can never be any “sanctuary” for workers under capitalism.
Nonviolence vs fighting back
The bosses’ strategy of using racism, nationalism, and sexism to divide the international working class is enabled by many of these church-based groups like Sanctuary. On the one hand these groups attract many honest and committed antiracist workers and youth who aspire to become fighters and serve their sisters and brothers. It was clear from conversations that the workers and youth at the rally were open to antiracist, internationalist and anti-imperialist ideas.
Sanctuary’s political leadership, on the other hand, is at best misguided, or at worst misled by the bosses’ stooges when they insist that elections and a moral commitment to pacifism and nonviolent civil disobedience will solve our problems. Their insistence on these strategies actually puts the safety of workers like the three taking refuge inside the church at risk. PLP presents another strategy: organizing masses to fight back, and to fight for communism.
From dark night to red morning
The bosses try to divide and confuse our class with ideas like voting or that capitalism can be reformed, while terrorizing us with open racist police and ICE terror. But for all the bosses’ money and cops, and as hopeless as our situation may seem, proof that this dark night will end is everywhere.
Even at this rally, the bosses could not stop the 50 immigrant workers facing possible deportation from being joined, shoulder to shoulder, by their native-born working class sisters and brothers. One of the Sanctuary ministers reminded the gathered workers and students of another dark night when the working class fought through and won- when thousands of immigrants were secretly sheltered from the Nazis by working-class families during World War II.
PLP fights to inherit the legacy of that mass working class anti-fascist resistance, as well as the legacy of the worker-led Red Army that ultimately smashed Nazi fascism and won the war. As workers have proven from the Paris Commune to the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions, what the bosses fear most is a united working class armed with revolutionary communist politics. We will continue to fight alongside our sisters and brothers in groups like Sanctuary, making friends, building for May Day and,soon enough, building our own Red Army to smash this racist, terrorist capitalist system once and for all. This May Day, join us!

The bosses are promoting socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) as the answer to the deepening crisis of capitalism. Challenge, over several issues, will look at how reformist socialist leaders like Sanders and AOC are and have historically betrayed the working class by building nationalism and anti-communism to help the bosses’ move towards growing fascism and war.
Previously we wrote about how the current crop of reformist socialists are building nationalism and laying the basis for liberal led fascism and how the Green New Deal is a blueprint for building militarism and preparing the working class to accept the bosses’ war plans. In this issue, we look at the history of the two trends in the early socialist movement, revolutionary socialism and reformist socialism.

A line can be drawn from the early revolutionary socialists to the communist led revolutions in Russia and China to Progressive Labor Party (PLP)today. Reformist socialism, on the other hand, has been a historic weight trying to hold back the working class from the time of the early socialist movement to the capitalist apologists like Sanders and AOC trying to save the bosses’ system at the expense of the working class.
Two socialist trends
As early as when Marx was writing The Communist Manifesto in 1848 these two trends in socialism existed. Marx saw the leadership of the reform socialists as forces who were scared of the working class coming to power and sought reforms lest the working class rebel:
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish…that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie. (The Communist Manifesto)
Revolutionary socialism, saw the horrible conditions of the working class under capitalism, and understood that only a society led by the working class could create a system that served the interests of the great majority of people.
Marx, the Bolsheviks, and Chinese Communists developed in theory and set out to build revolutionary socialism as a society based on workers seizing power through revolution and a step towards communism. Revolutionary socialists seized the forces of production from the capitalist class and unleashed the power of the working class in leading the building of a society based on production for need instead of profit. In both Russia and China the condition of the working class monumentally improved and hundreds of millions of workers had a chance to play a role in leading society.
Socialism fails workers
However, the early communists were wrong in their belief that socialism could eventually lead to communism. PLP  was formed in 1965 in response to the Soviet Union returning to capitalism and the Communist Party U.S.A. abandoning the fight for workers revolution.
PLP initially fought for a socialist society under the leadership of the working class as part of the road to a communist society. Based on our practice and looking at how Russia and China went back to capitalism, we came to see that socialism, even under the leadership of the working class and a communist party, kept too much of capitalism alive in the form of wages and divisions within the working class. These divisions eventually led society back towards capitalism.
Today PLP fights for communist revolution and the immediate building of a communist society led by the international working class, with distribution of goods based on need instead of wages. This new way forward, first explained in our document Road to Revolution IV, is the legacy of many millions of workers who have fought for workers’ power and an end to capitalism.
 In the U.S., the early socialist movement also reflected both revolutionary and reformist socialism. The Socialist Party of America (SPA) was the major socialist organization in the U.S. It encompassed both reformers and people fighting for workers revolution and an egalitarian society. Under the leadership of its founder, Eugene V. Debs, the capitalist reformers were the dominant force.
A history of reform
Debs rose to national prominence, as the President of the American Railroad Union (ARU) by betraying the workers during the railroad strike of 1894.
The strike shut down the railroad. Debs became terrified of the workers’ anger at the railroad bosses. He urged the union locals to stop the militancy. Debs’ efforts at holding back the workers failed and the U.S. President Grover Cleveland, with Debs’ support, sent Federal troops to end the strike. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
In 1901 Debs founded SPA. The SPA ran in elections to win reforms of capitalism. Debs ran for President in 1904 and got over six percent of the vote. Even while claiming to fight for the interests of the working class the SPA sought a peaceful relationship with the capitalists. The SPA so feared disrupting capitalism that they allowed many blatantly anti-working-class ideas to be prominent within the organization. While Karl Marx fought for unity of Black and white workers as necessary to defeat capitalism, notably the SPA supported official racism.
The following qoutes are  taken from Viewpoint Magazine (3/29/16): “Socialist branches everywhere in the South were “Jim Crowed” and the vast majority accepted only whites.”
The SPA strategy of reforming capitalism was shortly overtaken by the rise of the class struggle.
Beginning in about 1910, the economic and political universes appeared to shatter, offering wider opportunities for socialists. Between 1909 and 1913, mass and sometimes violent strikes swept across the Western world....In New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago, among other centers…workers walked off the job to win higher wages, improved conditions, and union recognition…Simultaneously, the most radical labor organization ever to arise in the United States, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), emerged from relative obscurity to lead two general strikes in the textile industry.
The strikes were “part of a global labor uprising … Germany, France, and Britain required military intervention to quell class conflict…The clash between revolutionary doctrine and reformist practice emerged clearly in 1912 and 1913 when the SPA divided internally over the issue of confrontation and violence. In 1913 the party majority ousted the IWW’s William D. Haywood from the party’s national executive committee. Haywood’s [expulsion] proved that despite its revolutionary rhetoric, the SPA majority in practice followed [reformism].”
Worker-led communist revolution is the only solution
Shortly after Haywood’s expulsion, the 1917 Russian Revolution created the opportunity for revolutionary sections of the working class to form an international communist movement fighting for workers’ power across the globe. In the U.S., workers with a revolutionary outlook left the SPA and shortly formed the Communist Party, which over the next 35 years was a leading force organizing for workers revolution. William Haywood went to the Soviet Union to become a leader of the international communist movement. The SPA became a shadow of its former self, eventually losing the bulk of its reformist base to the Democratic Party and completely abandoning any pretense of fighting for workers’ power.
The working class is the future of society. Every movement that trusts the bosses over the workers to run society will inevitably support the capitalists in time of crisis and when the working class has the opportunity to advance the fight for power. The capitalists will use bourgeois socialists to build movements to keep the ruling class in power. Only communist revolution for workers’ power will lead to a society led by and for the working class.

Newark, NJ—Over two dozen protestors marched outside Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s “State of the City” address today. The goal of the protest was to shed more light on the water crisis occurring in Newark and other cities around the U.S. While the protest did that, it also exposed the liberal politicians for the fascists they really are. Many groups focus strictly on Trump and other open right-wingers as ushering in fascism, but Progressive Labor Party has always maintained that the liberals will be much more successful at getting the working class in line for what the capitalists have in store for us. Some of our friends are starting to realize that as our struggle sharpens.
Class struggle will expose liberals
The protest was organized by the Newark Water Coalition, a group trying to organize students and workers to fight for clean water. The organization began a few months ago with meetings twice a week, but this was the group’s first action—a big step forward.
The action not only energized many who have been coming to the meetings, but it also exposed how the liberal politicians are going to be able to usher in fascism more successfully in the cities than the open white supremacists. As we marched outside the front entrance of the New Jersey Performing Art Center, a few members of the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition came out of the building to heckle the crowd, and called on the police to remove them.
The Newark Anti-Violence Coalition, started by Baraka before he became mayor, has been “fighting” police and gang violence in Newark. The group had a history of shutting down traffic in the street. Many of the members have now been able to work with City Hall and look at cops as their allies. Soon after a confrontation with these liberal fascists, the cops pushed the crowd to the other side of the street behind barricades.
This so-called revolutionary Mayor had a plan to work with the cops to try to shut us down immediately.”
The fact that Baraka had to set up barricades and have the cops push the protestors back outside the event is actually a step backwards for him and the capitalist class he serves. Liberals always try to control the masses through winning them over with ideas. In his speech, Baraka spoke a lot about fighting gentrification and getting people jobs. Whether or not these things will come to fruition is not the point. What is clear is that liberal politicians need to address the issues that Black and Latin workers are concerned about to try to win them to believe that capitalism can be made to work for them. It seems to be working for the moment. The protests for clean water have been relatively small.
However, as the fightback continues, more and more workers and students will recognize that the liberals, through their words and deeds, owe their allegiance to the capitalist class.
City council tries to silence protestors
While the Mayor sends cops and his stooges to try to silence protestors, Council President Mildred Crump is doing it at the Newark City Council meetings. Over the last month, Crump (another one of the professional liberal politicians who has been on the council since 1994) had the police remove three speakers from the podium because they were using “inappropriate language.” One of them used the word “damn” as he was talking about the lead water crisis.
Many people are working alongside legalistic groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (TAPinto 3/25/19), but it really is going to take a mass movement to stop the attacks on workers who are fighting back.
Class struggle will make our ideas shine
Members of PLP have been involved in this struggle and will continue to fight alongside students and workers to expose  liberals as we fight for our class needs. While many of our friends still believe that workers can get power through voting for the “best” candidate, it is up to us communists to show them how this system really works. In this battle over the lead in our water, we have met some great young fighters. Many of them have been open to receiving copies of Challenge and we hope to build a study group to further discuss our political philosophy and to sharpen the struggle. As one friend recently put it, “I know you always like to call Democrats the more sophisticated fascists and I thought you were just paranoid, but this sh*t today showed me.”