WASHINGTON, DC, July 15—Two thousand DC Metro transit workers overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike today. Speech after speech, workers called for the end of privatization and the bosses’ strict disciplinary policies. Members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) pointed out the racist nature of the bosses’ attacks. As the transit bosses attack the predominantly Black workers, they are attacking all workers, including the workers who ride the busses and trains. A strike authorization vote is symbolic and sharper fightback is necessary, such as job actions and a strike. We need to flex our working class muscles because eventually we need a revolution, the abolition of capitalism, and a communist world—workers’ power!
The contract expired on June 30, 2016. After nearly a year of negotiations, the union held a series of mass meetings. The overwhelming sentiment from the workers was to continue negotiations, insist that our demands be met, and avoid arbitration which generally works against workers’ interests. PL’ers are fighting to make the union strike ready in order to increase our strength for the coming struggle.
In September 2017, despite the objections of the membership, the union leadership invoked arbitration to resolve the contract dispute. In the arbitration hearing, Metro bosses called for eliminating the defined benefit pension system for new employees, increasing the cost of health insurance and a three-year wage freeze. As of today there has been no outcome of the arbitration process.
Today’s strike vote did not address the stalled arbitration process, but rather centered on violations of the current collective bargaining agreement. The response of the press and the local politicians to the strike vote went from calling for congressional action to dissolving the union to reducing the local governments’ financial contributions to Metro. One politician did express vague support for the workers but not for the strike. As usual, the press and politicians support the bosses.
More fight ahead
There is a lot of work to do before a strike can be successful. There are over 8,000 members of the local and they need to be organized around the demands. Since a strike against the transit authority is illegal, the membership must be prepared for attacks from the courts. An illegal strike is no simple matter!
PLP is working hard to prepare for the fight ahead. A successful strike at Metro could strengthen the entire labor movement. Metro is key to the functioning of the country’s capital. The last time the local went on a wildcat strike in 1978, the federal courts called it a national emergency. (Wildcat strike is when the workers go on strike without the approval of their union bosses.) Its effect this time would be even greater, and would lead to government and management reprisals.
The main task before us is to build the Party club at Metro and also strengthen the emerging rank and file leadership. This is particularly important because of the growing weakness of U.S. imperialism. The bosses do not want any serious challenges from the labor movement as they build racism and prepare for war. Stay tuned for further developments as we seek to grow the revolutionary movement even as we fight  to improve the workers’ day-to-day situation through intensified class struggle.

The year is 2018. There is no red beacon of hope in either Russia or China. Hundreds of millions of workers are not debating and organizing for communism. Yet, capitalists today still fear communism!
They have good reason. Only communist revolution offers freedom from exploitation, oppression, poverty, fascism, and terror for the working class of the world.
Communist parties are illegal in Estonia, Indonesia, Iran, Latvia, Lithuania, Myanmar, Poland, Romania, South Korea, Ukraine, Georgia, Hungary, and in the U.S.
Today communist parties are banned:
In countries traditionally in the American ‘sphere of influence” – that have been dominated politically and economically by U.S. imperialism. In Latin America communists and militant workers are still repressed, arrested, murdered. But, as U.S. influence as weakened somewhat, legal restrictions on communist parties have been lifted.
In Indonesia, after the bloody coup d’etat of 1965-66, during which between 500,000 and two million leaders, activists, and rank-and-file supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party were murdered, along with supporters of the ousted President Sukarno, all with the help of the U.S. CIA. This disaster was caused by the communists trying to exist legally, unprepared for fascist repression and the line of “uniting with the anti-colonial bourgeoisie” (Sukarno). PLP condemned this phony Marxist line and practice then, and we still do!
In Islamist Iran, after the events of 1983, when almost all the leadership and activists in the Tudeh Party (successors to the Communist Party of Iran), plus others, were arrested and killed – as many as 30,000 persons. The Tudeh Party supported the so-called “Islamist revolution” of 1979 – which was really carried out by the “mujaheddin”, left militants—in hope of joining the government and gaining power by the revisionist “peaceful” road. Instead they were murdered. In 1979 PLP issued a pamphlet, translated into Farsi, urging Iranian communists, workers, and activists NOT to trust the Islamists.
In South Korea, a U.S. imperialist creation, dominated by fascists who collaborated with the Japanese imperialists and murdered anyone even suspected of being a protestor.
In countries where all political parties are forbidden: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the Emirates. All of these are in the U.S. economic and political “sphere of influence.”
In Thailand, “communist activity” is forbidden.
In Turkey, all “communist agitation” has been forbidden for decades.
The same was true in South Africa, after the fall of the racist, fascist, apartheid white supremacist government, which the U.S. had always supported.
In Pakistan, communist activity was outlawed during the Cold War, for 40 years, from 1954 to 1994.
The U.S. also officially banned communist organization and action under the Communist Control Act, signed into law by president Dwight Eisenhower in 1954.  
Anti-communism is making a comeback. As the U.S. rulers gear up for war with its rivals Russia and China (former socialist countries), they will use their tool of anti-communism to fool workers and build patriotism.

By all appearances, U.S. President Donald Trump’s undisciplined approach to statecraft makes him seem like an incompetent rogue and possibly a tool of Russian interests. In essence, however, Trump’s wrecking-ball trip to London and Brussels, followed by his bombshell “summit” with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin represents something far more dangerous to the main-wing, imperialist finance capitalists of the U.S. ruling class.
With each passing week, Trump seems to be  lining up more and more closely with the “small America” strategic vision pushed by a subordinate, domestically oriented, overtly racist wing of the U.S. bosses. Represented by billionaires like Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers, who are less reliant on overseas profiteering, these bosses are suspicious of  multilateral entanglements with Western Europe, as embodied by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). With each passing week, Trump seems more and more under the sway of these isolationists—a highly volatile situation for a declining superpower already well on the road to fascism and World War III.  
Trump’s shift to treating Russia as an equal partner rather than a sworn enemy reflects the position of MIT’s Barry Posen in his 2014 book, Restraint:

The United States should focus on a small number of threats, and approach those threats with subtlety and moderation…. It can do that because the United States is economically and militarily strong, well-endowed and well-defended by nature….It is not smart to spend energies transforming a recalcitrant world that we could spend renewing a United States that still needs some work.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the “MIT School” has argued against the strategy of “liberal hegemony,” the “unipolar” dominance presented to U.S. imperialism when its main rival exited the world stage (theamericanconservative.com, 8/26/14). Until recently, this was a mostly ignored minority position inside the foreign policy establishment.
Now a U.S. president has embraced Posner’s go-it-alone nationalism. Trump’s stance implies a smaller, whiter military harboring open racism—like the military that has emerged since 9/11 (Washington Post, 8/17). With backing from the Russian-connected Mercer (mypalmbeachpost.com, 3/18) and Koch interests, Trump has built a loyal and mass racist, sexist, anti-immigrant movement that makes it risky for the big bosses to remove him from power too abruptly.  
Shifting alliances
The split in the U.S. ruling class is leading capitalist rulers in Europe to look elsewhere for more reliable allies. In the days following Trump’s scorched-earth visit to Europe, the European Union sent trade delegations to China and Japan, what may be early steps toward a potential reshuffling of the liberal world order and a diminished U.S. influence.  While EU-Chinese relations continue to be tainted with mutual suspicion (aljazeera.com,  7/22), the Economic Partnership Agreement signed by the EU and Japan on July 17 has created the world’s third largest free-trade community.  The largest is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump pulled out of in January (aljazeera.com, 7/22).
On July 16, Trump doubled down by threatening the newest NATO member, tiny Montenegro, saying the U.S. shouldn’t have to defend it if Montenegro’s “aggressive” people go to war.  As Russian imperialism works overtime to expand its influence in the Balkans, the place where World War I began and where the collapse of the USSR spawned U.S.-led war through the 1990s, Putin can only welcome Trump’s posture.  
US ruling class—splits intensify
Most troubling to main-wing U.S. imperialists, represented by both Democrats and leading Congressional Republicans, is the fact that Trump’s brand of nationalism is gaining followers. An Axios poll found that 79 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance with Putin, while 85 percent think the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian interference is a distraction (New York Times, 7/22). The Times editorial page likened Trump’s base “to the members of a cult.”  
This brand of rhetoric in the leading main-wing mouthpiece could be a prelude to a domestic political conflict that could quickly turn brutal. Rasmussen polls show that  fears of a new civil war are growing (washingtonexaminer.com, 6/18), with the larger group (59 percent) concerned that anti-Trump forces will turn to violence.  
Meanwhile, the mass murderers of the FBI and CIA are presented by the main-wing media as defenders of truth, justice, and peace. This is the essence of nationalism, which misleads and terrifies working people into siding with a nation’s rulers against their sister and brother workers in other countries.   
Ex-CIA chief John Brennan, a willing executioner in Barack Obama’s targeted assassination program (foreignpolicy.com, 9/12), tweeted that Trump’s behavior was impeachable and “treasonous.”  Trump hit back by threatening to revoke Brennan’s security clearance, which former officers retain for both private business reasons and to provide continuity (npr.org, 7/23/18).  Such petty score-settling reveals the growing intensity of the fight between the “Fortress America” nationalists and the main-wing imperialists.
Reject nationalism, fight for communism
There have long been divisions among the bosses over the global reach of U.S. capitalism, from World War II through the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. What’s different now is that the main wing can no longer count on the U.S. president to do its bidding. If pushed too hard, the main-wing rulers will seek to bring Trump to heel—and to deal with his base as brutally as necessary. The U.S. Civil War reminds us that the bosses will kill one another—and many workers in the process—when their interests are threatened sharply enough.
In periods of crisis, the working class must remember that there are no good bosses, no lesser evils. Main-wing liberals—from Franklin Roosevelt through Obama—have the blood of tens of millions of workers on their hands. Though capitalists’ appearances will vary, the antidote to awful capitalist leadership is not reformed capitalist leadership. The antidote is revolutionary working-class leadership—communist leadership.
When we act on this knowledge in the class struggle, we bring us that much closer a communist world. We create the basis for a society that operates on the communist principle: from each according to commitment, to each according to need. We advance a society without racism, sexism, money, or racist borders.
Help the international working class by reading, writing for, and distributing CHALLENGE. Communism is the only society that can deliver what the international working class needs, where the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Chicago, July 14—Screams and chants filled the air—along with bottles and debris—as workers from the South Shore neighborhood rebelled after the Chicago Police Department’s racist killing of Harith “Snoop” Augustus, a 37-year-old barber and father of a five-year-old daughter.
Harith was stopped by police for “exhibiting characteristics of an armed person.”  CPD body cam footage shows Harith talking to a cop on the sidewalk. According to a witness interviewed by the Chicago Sun-Times, they were arguing over whether Harith was selling loose cigarettes. As the dispute escalated, a swarm of cops descended upon Harith. One grabbed his wrist. When Harith pulled away, his holstered weapon was revealed. He began running into the street and stumbled as Chicago’s killer cops opened fire and shot him in the back.
It’s the same old capitalist story: Chicago police murdered Harith Augustus.
This is the second racist murder of a young Black worker and father at the hands of the CPD in as many months. On June 6, in the Bronzeville neighborhood, the cops cut down 24-year-old Maurice Granton, shooting him six times in the back. Both Bronzeville and South Shore are historically Black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. They are being rapidly gentrified amid development in nearby Jackson Park of the Obama Presidential Center, a three-building complex including a library and museum. The Obama Foundation has refused to sign a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) that would bar displacement of longtime community residents because of the development. Barack Obama himself has been silent about these latest racist murders in his adopted hometown.
The South Shore rebellion ignited almost immediately after Harith was murdered. Police swarmed the neighborhood to try to intimidate the working class. But the workers didn’t back down. In the resulting standoff,  the CPD attacked unarmed workers and activists with batons. The cops arrested four activists, primarily from the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), an organization founded shortly after the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. Incubated at the University of Chicago and funded by the Ford Foundation, two elite institutions of the U.S. ruling class, BYP100 began as a research project to examine “the attitudes, resources, and culture of African American youth ages 15 to 25” in regard to civic engagement (blackyouthproject.com). The bosses’ nonprofit reform groups can never be revolutionary organizations dedicated to the liberation of the working class. Progressive Labor Party is the tool of the working class to liberate ourselves from the noose of capitalism.
After the arrests, BYP100 correctly called on everyone to march to the police station where the four people were being held, the same station where the cop who murdered Harith is based. About 70 of us immediately took the street and started to march. At two points along the way, after BYP leadership heard that their members had been freed, they stopped the march and “asked” the other marchers: “Should we keep going (to the station) or turn around?” Each time, workers disagreed with the idea that they stop. On the second occasion, an older Black worker from South Shore came to the front and said, “Y’all asked us to march and we followed you. Ain’t no turning back now, y’all can go back if you want.”
PLP immediately went up to the worker and said he was right and that we would be following his leadership moving forward. We called on the crowd to keep going and most folks came with us, including the BYP100 members. This was another example of why we must have confidence in workers to make the right decisions. In some instances, PLP will have the opportunity to lead our class; in others, we will follow their lead.
In the days following Harith’s murder, there have been more protests and demonstrations. On Sunday, July 15, PLP joined a demonstration, got out copies of CHALLENGE, and made contacts. The following day, more than 500 Black, Latin, white, and Asian workers and youth marched to protest both the murder of Augustus and the cops’ brutal attack on the demonstrators. It was called by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a mass organization that some comrades are working in. The group’s response to the torture and murderous history of the racist CPD is to demand an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). They say their goal is to give the community “control” over the police and their contract—yet another dead-end reform.
Since 1948, Chicago has had a long history of “civilian oversight” and “police accountability” boards that have consistently failed to stop—or even properly investigate—racist police murders. An elected CPAC would mean more politicians—the capitalist bosses’ stooges—overseeing a ruling-class institution whose very purpose is to control and terrorize the working class.
At another rally that ended at the barbershop where Harith worked, a speaker called for the community to put its arms around Harith’s family and to contribute toward funeral expenses. Again, hundreds of CHALLENGE’s were distributed.
At the monthly police board meeting, Black police chief Eddie Johnson was confronted about Harith’s murder. There was also a demonstration at the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has tried to pacify workers by asking them to “lower their voices and listen to other voices” (abc7chicago.com, 7/17).  
But the anger among Black workers in Chicago goes far beyond this latest killing. They are rebelling against the devastation and dismantling of communities that are riddled by racist unemployment and racist school closings. There is only one solution for our class sisters and brothers: communist revolution!
Our Party must grow and become active in our communities as we fight to build a culture of multiracial working-class unity. We must denounce divisions based on nationalism, voting wards, gang lines, or race. We are fighting for an international working class that has yet to imagine its potential. We have a world to win!