The U.S. ruling class is in chaos. As the presidential election campaign kicks into final gear, the splits among the capitalists are getting sharper by the day.  The debate between Klan hero Donald Trump and mass incarcerator Joe Biden degenerated into an incoherent shouting match between two lifelong racist liars. After Trump and more than a dozen of his closest advisors tested positive for Covid-19, the Superspreader in Chief was left to shamble around a mostly deserted White House, jacked up on steroids and contradicting himself from one minute to the next. In the face of full-blown fascist China’s disciplined, sword-rattling challenge to U.S. dominance, the rupture between the Big Fascists (led by multinational finance capital like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs) and the Small Fascists (organized around domestic energy firms and short-term profits) has reached a breaking point.
Elections are a critical tool for resolving the capitalists’ internal conflicts. The Big Fascists need masses of workers to vote for their side to legitimize their plans for inter-imperialist war and fascism. Equally important, they need the myth of electoral democracy and the “peaceful transition of power” to mask their brutal capitalist dictatorship (see page 5). This time around, however, it’s unclear whether either gang of bosses will accept the results of the November ballot. The stakes are high. The future of the U.S. profit system and its teetering liberal world order hangs in the balance.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls on all workers to see that their power lies not in the voting booth but in class struggle in the streets and workplaces. Among capitalists there is no “lesser evil,” only a choice between blood-sucking mass murderers. Democrats and Republicans alike stand for racism, sexism, exploitation, state terror, and the death of millions from  lack of food, shelter, medical care, and public health infrastructure.  Only by organizing anti-racist fightback and building for communist revolution will we turn the tide against rising fascism and impending global war.
Rise of Small Fascists throws U.S. bosses into disarray
The Small Fascists’ agenda is to cut taxes for the wealthy, remove the U.S. military from costly overseas commitments, withdraw from international alliances, eliminate social services for the working class, and scrap environmental regulations. After years of organizing on the margins, with fringe third parties like the Libertarians, they found their chance to move inside the tent with the rise of the gutter racist Tea Party. But they were unable to challenge the Big Fascists’ stranglehold on state power until Trump. The failed developer and reality TV con man hijacked the Republican Party with a base of alienated white workers, hard-right vigilante racists, and hypocritical evangelicals. Finance capital placed its bet on the despicable Hillary (“Super-Predator”) Clinton and is still paying for its arrogance.
We know through dialectics that the internal is primary. The Big Fascists’ lack of discipline—their corruption, individualism, and short-term outlook—enabled the Small Fascists to grab power. The loss of decent-paying industrial jobs and two failed Middle East wars cracked open the door. The Great Recession of 2008 and Barack Obama’s bank bailout opened it wider. Small Fascists like the Kochs didn’t much like Trump and his anti-immigrant rants, since much of their profits come from immigrant labor. But in an act of mutual opportunism, they came together to seize the executive branch.
Trump’s wildly disruptive presidency reflects a qualitative change in the capitalist bosses’ internal struggle. To many CHALLENGE readers, Trump and his openly racist and sexist backers are repellent, the very essence of capitalist callousness, selfishness, and greed. They aren’t wrong. But for our class, the alternative can’t be Joe Biden and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Because it’s the Big Fascists who have an even more dangerous long-term outlook for the international working class.
Big Fascists in jeopardy
For over a century, and especially since World War II, U.S. finance capital has controlled the military, the intelligence agencies, all three branches of government, and virtually all of the big media. Along with rulers in Western Europe, they established alliances to maintain U.S. supremacy and contain their enemies, like the old Soviet Union and current-day China and Russia. Not so long ago, the bosses could work out their differences before the knives came out. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and named George W. Bush president. A united ruling class rallied behind the fascist Patriot Act and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It formulated the Hart-Rudman plan, a blueprint to sustain its domination through the 21st century. The contradiction between the bosses’ two wings, so glaring today, was still young.
But external pressures have sharpened the contradiction. China’s rise—its Belt and Road Initiative, its global leadership in the pandemic—gives the U.S. bosses less room to patiently work out their disagreements. This reality is driving finance capital to fascism that much faster—first to destroy the Small Fascists, then to build a multicultural, patriotic movement to control the working class and prepare for World War III.
U.S. allies are plainly worried. After the first (and maybe last) Trump-Biden debate, labeled “a shit show” by CNN, a French political analyst said, “European leaders must have woken up this morning thinking, ‘The American leadership is over, and for a while, even if Biden is elected and tries to rebuild what Trump has destroyed.’” The U.S. bosses’ rivals also took notice. According to a state-controlled newspaper in China, “Such a chaos at the top of U.S. politics reflects division, anxiety of U.S. society and the accelerating loss of advantages of the U.S. political system” (NYT, 9/30).  
Although Trump proclaims himself the “law and order” president, the Big Fascists have a much longer and uglier history of promoting state terror against the working class. Biden, who built a career on serving the profit-hungry banks and credit card companies, is the embodiment of finance capital’s decay. From his 1994 mass incarceration crime bill, to the bloody Middle East wars executed by the Bushes and Obama, to his latest refusal to “defund” his beloved police, Biden has been the most loyal of stooges for the Big Fascists’ lethal program. His running mate and former prosecutor Kamala Harris, proudly known as California’s “top cop,” played a significant role in unleashing the Klan in blue to kill Black workers like Oscar Grant (NYT, 8/9).
Don’t vote, revolt!
Fighting for communism means building a mass revolutionary party and a world run by and for the international working class. We can’t get there with the bosses’ sham of democracy, with elections that force us to pick one racist exploiter over another. And we can’t get there without smashing the racist, sexist, and nationalist divisions that keep our class in shackles.
Over the seven months of the worldwide capitalist pandemic, in their fightback on the streets and their courageous labor in hospitals and grocery stores, workers have shown that our class can take the lead in caring for one another and overcoming the most challenging obstacles. These communist impulses within the working class are what keep the bosses up at night. The next step is to sharpen our struggle with comrades and friends to create that better world. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!

BROOKLYN, October 1—“You are Scholars, Not Suspects!” That is the message the mainly Black and Latin students received as they entered their school building for the first day of school from a multiracial group of 40 parents and teachers. We met dozens of students as they lined up to walk through metal detectors on their first day back in a school building after more than six months. Racist metal detectors are the welcome back that thousands of mainly Black and Latin students have been given by the racist NYC Department of Education (DoE),  and City bosses who refuse to make any real antiracist changes even as they spew their empty promises of “equity.” As one chant said, “How do you spell RACIST? D-O-E!”
Members of a Brooklyn high school Parent Teacher Association (PTA) organized and rallied on the first day of the school buildings’ reopening, demanding the racist metal detectors be removed citywide (see box). This multiracial group has a long history of antiracist fightback against the many racist attacks hurled at students.
These past fightbacks include:

• demanding the removal of scanners for years
• demanding more and integrated sports teams
• defending students arrested inside the school for failing to remove a pin holding eyeglasses together
• protesting the disrepair of the school building itself to organizing to defend an anti-communist attack on members of the school.

In the wake of mass antiracist rage
When we can organize antiracist and antisexist actions we can build the confidence within our own class. Our PTA was touched by the explosion of mass anger coming out of the racist murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the start of the summer.  Time and again parents responded to our calls to join demonstrations and fight for communist ideas. Our multiracial and intergenerational leadership changed the tenor of several huge marches.  
In the run-up to Thursday’s picket line against racist metal detectors parents active with us over the summer, and who had seen liberal racism in action over a period of many years before that, rejected the notion that we ought to rely on misleader elected officials like Councilmember Brad Lander or NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to help lead our event.
Thursday’s demonstration also came in the wake of a series of club meetings, crowdcasts and zoom calls where Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members moved friends, student families, and coworkers into a discussion where the need for organizing against the racist attacks on students in the lose-lose scenario of remote vs. live instruction was hammered home.
These locally and nationally organized virtual meetings, along with responsibly distanced socializing, gave us a firm foundation to call for sharp action as the first day of live instruction for students approached.
Metal detectors, tool of terror and division
It is not always clear to students, parents, or school staff why metal detectors in schools are a racist attack. Some believe that they are there to provide safety. This is the lie that is sold to workers by a system that relies on racist divisions and fear mongering to keep the working class divided.
Metal detectors in school means that students are seen and treated as potential criminals. “In 2016, 99 percent of all New York City public school students handcuffed during incidents of emotional distress were Black and Latin. New York City’s Black students had the highest rate of suspension, accounting for 27.1 percent of the population but almost half of all suspensions. Statewide, 1 in 5 Black boys and 1 in 7 Black girls are suspended from school” (Alliance for Quality Education, 6/19).
This year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, scanning will result in even more harm, clogging entrances to schools where the urgent priorities should be maximizing physical distancing and instruction time. Even if it goes against any common sense or costs the city more money amidst  a budget crisis, one thing the bosses’ always give priority to is more racism!
Metal detectors in schools also build suspicion among students. They teach students to be fearful of one another. This ideology builds disunity within the working class, weakening our ability to unite as one working class against capitalism, the racist, sexist, exploitative class system. It builds the illusions that we cannot rely on each other for the solutions to the worlds’ problems. It builds the cynicism that therefore our only option is to put our hope in one politician or another’s empty promises to “fix” the very system they represent.  
Building our class muscles through struggle
This small, but significant action reflects the  kind of organizing that really can make a change. As we near the elections, it is hard to escape the pressure to view voting as the real way to make a change. Elections under capitalism are a lose-lose for workers because they reflect workers’ cynicism that the international working class does not have the potential to run society in our interests and builds the illusion that this system can be reformed in our interests  (see editorial, page 2.) The horrible handling of this pandemic from the beginning and the disorganized reopening of schools (some NYC schools are already reclosing following a rise in infection rates) illustrate how the bosses see our working-class children as completely expendable.
Only when the international working class controls all of society in the interests of our class, and not for the profits of a few, will we be able to truly build an antiracist, antisexist world that ALL of our children can thrive in. We still have a long way to go for the masses to turn these ideas into action and to turn action into a fight for a communist world. This rally was a small but hopeful step in that direction.

South Bronx, October 9–The crisis at the City University of New York (CUNY) is sharpening, as the capitalist trustees and politicians pursue their plans of implementing budget cuts, packing virtual classes with as many as a hundred students and laying off thousands of part-time instructors and college workers. CUNY administrators have increased class sizes, launching a racist attack on students’ education. This is a racist attack because the students at CUNY are disproportionately Black and Latin. But racism divides and hurts all working class students. So several student clubs and some union members from two Bronx CUNY campuses took to the streets and held a militant, multiracial march against racist cutbacks.
We began with a short rally near the courthouse, where students and faculty had an informal “warm up” of speeches. (see letters on page 6). We spoke about the need to fight back against these racist cuts, about why we need to strike, and about the need for unity between workers and students. Many faculty & staff have lost their health insurance in the midst of the pandemic that has disproportionately stricken Black and Latin workers and students.  Colleges throughout CUNY are pressuring staff to risk their lives at unsafe campuses. Our speakers included students from both campuses, who called on us to continue the fight back.  They pointed out how the problem is capitalism. Politicians are part of this capitalist system. An adjunct made the point that voting for the Democrats will not resolve this crisis. In New York City Democrats run everything. They are the problem. The adjunct said, “We are the ones we are waiting for.“ That’s right and the future for us as workers is communism where we run all of society.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are active in our union committees and student clubs. We were happy to be joined by comrades from the Bronx and to see so many workers responding to CHALLENGE newspaper. In these mass groups that we work in, we are trying to bring workers and students closer to our communist ideas through discussion, struggle, and action. Our study group has discussions about how racism and capitalism go hand in hand, and why capitalism cannot provide us with the education we need.  We look forward to more of our co-workers and students joining PLP as we battle on!
The march ended in front of one of the Bronx campuses, where a number of security guards began approaching us and calling for backup until they realized we were “livestreaming” the march and backed off. It was a clear message to the marchers that we must demand COPS ARE REMOVED FROM  CAMPUS as well as the end to austerity. The closing speech was very inspiring as a professor who was laid off explained what it had been like for her to lose her livelihood. She thanked everyone for coming. “I love you all for standing by me” she said and then proceeded to call for us to continue building a movement to shut down CUNY and fight back against capitalism. We ended with a bang and formed a “human chain” extending from one end of the block to the other. With our signs and a huge banner facing traffic we called on drivers to honk in support.
One of the student leaders shared her reflections after the march. “It was amazing to come out to the march and get the message out about striking for a fully funded CUNY. Our voices were loud and clear, which encouraged passersby to join us and strangers to proudly honk their horns in support. I hope to attend more marches and be part of this collective fight.”
This march was powerful. It represented the class anger we feel at what is happening to our students and colleagues.  It was a collective effort with different people volunteering to plan the route, translate the leaflet, post the fliers on the Internet, etc.  It is a glimpse of how powerful the working class can be. Join us in the fight against racism and for communism!

COLOMBIA, Sept 24—After two cops murdered Javier Ordoñez, thousands took to the streets, leading to clashes with the state-sponsored thugs. As crisis in Colombia deepens, the working class needs to reject working within the system and embrace building outside the system: communism.
These demonstrations demand a restructuring of the police, the resignation of the Minister of Defense, Carlos Holmes Trujillo, and the end of political assassinations of social leaders. Demands also include a solution to unemployment, and the annulment of Decree 1174, which is the “most aggressive labor and pension reform in the last 30 years.”
What the spontaneous movement needs is communist leadership to raise the consciousness of workers. Through struggle, our class needs to see how the police are a murderous institution that cannot be reformed. We must understand that it only protects and serves the interests of the ruling class. Only communist revolution can put an end to the present waves of state terrorism against our class and build a new society free from all forms of racist, nationalist, sexist oppression, bosses wars and wage slavery.
Crisis intensifies
This year, we have seen the horrible return of massacres, the racist displacement of communities in fields and cities, the constant threat from paramilitaries, and the increasing murder of social leaders. On top of that, working-class fighters, former FARC guerrillas, peasant, indigenous and Black organizations have experienced this extermination with greater force during the quarantine. Much of this repression is carried out by the military and groups of thugs at the service of the state and local capitalists.
Health, government, and recycling workers and strike committees continue to carry out cacerolazos (demonstrations with the banging of pots and pans) and demonstrations in squares, parks, and public spaces. The protesters call for the dismantling of ESMAD (Colombian anti-riot police), responsible for repression and deaths—like the murder (still unpunished) of Dylan Cruz on November 21, the day of the first national strike. The mass demonstrations are called by community organizations, women’s student organizations and other organizations belonging to the National Unemployment Committee.
The police repression during the demonstrations left at least 14 murdered, more than 250 wounded, and at least 150 shot. The number of live bullet injuries reached 74. Several reports of abuse and rape by the police during the illegal arrests were also recorded. According to the magazine “Noche y Niebla” (Night and Fog), the biggest “human rights” violators in Colombia in 2019 were the paramilitaries and the police. By human rights, they mean violence against the working class.
The repression also had a vigilante character: “sexual abuse, against two detained women, obstruction of information, and even arrests in clandestine centers as evidenced in videos where, in addition, it is proven how the police exchange weapons with thugs in plain clothes, who shoot as a team, and also aim directly at the body of the protesters and beat them while they were defenseless.”
Workers organize against police attacks
Residents of many neighborhoods in the capital and other cities organized to prevent the police from entering their residential complexes, beating, and shooting at people. There are many reports of police infiltration and of having seen plainclothes agents behind the fires of shops and looting. In many videos, the police are seen fleeing attacks from organized neighbors with stones and sticks.
During the protests, more than 30 CAI (Rapid Response Police Centers) were burned or destroyed. Neighbors denounce that these are the “booths” where drugs are traded, and bribes are paid for mafia activities. After the fires, many of these CAIs were transformed into popular libraries and community meeting centers by protesters.
PLP is building a base within the working class as part of our international work. Members of the Party, friends, and readers of our newspaper CHALLENGE are participating in these demonstrations and joining our sisters and brothers who fight for a better society. We discuss and continue to be involved in the class struggle as a way to move forward to communism.