On July 14, 1789, poor workers took over the Bastille, a medieval prison in Paris and symbol of feudal, aristocratic power. The great French Revolution had began! The capitalist class (bourgeosie) would replace the monarchy (king and nobles). But some advanced revolutionaries were advocating an egalitarian, communist society. This was the birth of the modern working-class communist movement!
France was then an agricultural society ruled by noble landowners and a powerful Catholic church, with the king at the top. The urban bourgeoisie wanted a constitutional monarchy giving them more political power. They needed the urban workers, called “sans-culottes,” to fight for them against the monarchy. But for a few years the sans-culottes fought for their own interests.
The sudden, violent overthrow of the French monarchy and landed aristocracy proved that the status quo was not “God-given,” not inevitable, not the product of “human nature.” It proved that the political structure could be changed for the better. Not only was a society with more equality and less exploitation possible, but the French Revolution also gave birth to future revolutionary communist movements.
The French Revolution was inspired by the Enlightenment, a bourgeois movement that attacked monarchies and feudalism. The Enlightenment popularized talk of human rights—anti-racism, political rule by the people, the rights of women, and equality for all. It argued that the power of kings and aristocrats was illegitimate.
In 1789 the French King had called a nationwide meeting (Estates-General) of nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie, to vote him new taxes. When the bourgeoisie refused the King tried to shut them down. But the sans-culottes rebelled and stormed the Bastille. The revolution began. Here are some lessons, especially from the most radical and democratic period of 1789 to 1795.
* The sans-culottes of the cities—workers, journeymen, apprentices, working women—always pushed the Revolution ahead, towards more equality, more rights and power for working people.
* The sans-culottes had no political party. The party of petty-bourgeois revolutionaries and sincere idealists who worked most closely with them was called the Jacobins. But the working class needs its own party. It is the job of the Progressive Labor Party to fulfill that historic task today.
* It was the mass actions of the sans-culottes, sometimes supported by the most radical Jacobins, who pushed the Revolution to adopt the most democratic reforms.
The bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and sans-culottes all united to get rid of the king and aristocracy and to take land from the Church. After that, their interests no longer coincided. The radical bourgeoisie needed the sans-culottes only as long as foreign armies threatened to destroy the Revolution.
Seizing the lands of aristocrats and the Church gave peasants their own land. They wanted higher prices for the food they grew. But the urban sans-culottes needed low prices. So the peasants’ economic interests were more aligned with the bourgeois merchants, traders, and landlords than with those of the sans-culottes.
Once foreign armies were driven back, the bourgeois representatives—some of whom had been executed as counter revolutionaries—turned against the Jacobins and the sans-culottes and established a more repressive state. After 1795 the propertied bourgeoisie was in firm control. They organized a bourgeois dictatorship, and then an authoritarian empire under Napoleon Bonaparte.
Gracchus Babeuf, a poor, self-taught worker, headed the last and most radical, movement of the Revolution. His “Conspiracy for Equality” was crushed and Babeuf executed. But one of his followers, Buonarroti, survived to influence the working-class and student militants of the 1840s, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And the working class of Europe learned from the experience of the sans-culottes of France. The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, were the first revolutions by the industrial working class, the proletariat. They grew from the lessons of the great French Revolution.

NYC mayor de Blasio and his schools chancellor have announced a forced integration plan, to increase the enrollment of Black and Latin students at the specialized high schools in what could become the most prominent forced integration plan since the battles of the Civil Rights Movement fifty years ago.
Anti-racist alumni, current students, teachers and parents, some of whom are members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party, have an opportunity to win masses of people disgusted by gutter racism to multiracial unity in the fight for school integration. We say that good schools are integrated schools, that good schools take the learning of each student seriously, and that it is impossible for a segregated school to be a good school, including the ones we call elite.
#Blackinbrooklyntech
At Brooklyn Tech, one of the specialized high schools, students and alumni who blasted racism with #blackinbrooklyntech taught us this lesson. Students have started a campaign against racist and humiliating treatment in the school by teachers and officials (see CHALLENGE, 2/10/2016). Since that time other student struggles against sexism and gun violence have maintained strong anti-racist politics. Teachers have formed ad-hoc committees to build up a more anti-racist school tone.
When the mayor’s integration plan was announced, several teachers were prepared to make a public statement welcoming the change. Many teachers, students, and parents who support school integration but have no platform to make their voices heard.
Specialized high schools are only 10 percent Black and Latin; “regular” schools are 68 percent Black and Latin. The stark racism of claiming the best schools are the ones that exclude Black and Latin youth most effectively undermines the kind of national unity required to confront imperialist rivals. The United Federation of Teachers, after sixty years of silence and cooperation as segregation grew in New York City, has taken a position that high school ‘diversity’ ought to be a goal (NY Daily News 5/31).
Racist backlash
The racist backlash to the proposed change has been swift and nasty. Asian workers, Chinese families in particular, are being misled in droves to defend segregated schools (see letters, page 6). The news media played up the disgusting spectacle of working-class Asian folks insulting other working-class families, made desperate to hold on to what meager gains they perceive themselves to have secured.
The entire city is being misled by the false notion that test scores capture a child’s potential to learn. The notion that a substantial increase in the number of the ‘best’ Black and Latin students in the city will ‘drag down’ the level of thinking at the specialized high schools is a gutter racist assumption and is driving much of popular opinion.
 Integration part of war plans
Why now? The rulers have their own reasons for appearing to tackle the problem of school segregation now. Mayor de Blasio is burnishing “progressive” credentials for his next campaign. As always, they are preparing for major war. War plans are always on the back burner for the imperialists, and they need a more robust multiracial armed force to take on their biggest rivals, China and Russia. Parent, students, and teachers have united to form something of a mass movement for school integration in New York City, and this movement has forced the question to the forefront in NYC now.
Our job is to take this fight further than the rulers are willing to go. They want a showpiece adjustment to school segregation. We want the kind of fully integrated and meaningful lives that capitalism makes impossible. Schools are used to preserve the structures of racism that are needed bycapitalism. They need to have winners and losers. The capitalists need to preserve the number of elite higher-income workers that directly serve the ruling class as intellectuals, engineers, and financial managers. They need to maintain the façade of upward mobility in order to preserve the myth of the American Dream.
Defeat the bosses and their ideas
Capitalism causes the working class to fight for the scraps from their table. Instead of fighting for a system that meets the needs of the whole working class. Under communism, every school will be a place that meets the needs of its students. Education would be class conscious, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist. Communism needs the workers to be educated to help to remake the world.  The fight for school integration now is an opportunity to root this education in the struggle against the bosses whom we will have to defeat to win the world we deserve.

June 19, or “Juneteenth,” commemorates the end of chattel slavery. Juneteenth has been pushed on the working class with the sponsorship of major banks like Wells Fargo. Juneteenth perpetuates many racist myths about the U.S., including the myth that the images we’re given of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama supposedly represent the ‘real’ U.S., and Donald Trump is something different.  
While the bosses push their bank-sponsored holiday of Juneteenth on Black workers, the bosses obscure the many anti-racist battles that have been fought by Black and white workers together. These same bosses keep racism alive and well in the 21st century, to divide Black and white workers from eacher and to prepare the U.S. working class for bigger and deadlier wars on the horizon.
Origins of Juneteenth
Two years before June 19, 1865 came Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which excluded slave states that were not in rebellion against the Union – Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri – and Texas, which was not a battleground. Many planters and other slaveholders moved to Texas with over 150,000 slaves in order to escape the raging Civil War. In June, 1865, after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and the Union victory in New Orleans, word finally came to Galveston, Texas that the slaves were free. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending slavery throughout the country, was not passed until December, 1865.
Abraham Lincoln, the so-called “Great Emancipator” of slaves, was no believer in the equality of Black workers. His main motive for fighting the Civil War was preservation of the unity of the United States, not abolishing slavery. In 1858, Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…”
Lincoln favored setting up colonies for Black former slaves in Africa and Central America, and requested funds from Congress to deport freed slaves.
Another history we do not learn about or celebrate is that of the multitude of rebellions against slavery, many of them multiracial, from the 1600s to the 1800s.  In their book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker document many of these. Among them are:

• The Barbados rebellions in 1649, which united Irish and African slaves;
• Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1676, which united slaves and white indentured servants;
• The ‘New York City Conspiracy’ of 1741, which united African workers, white indentured servants, sailors, and Irish immigrants;
• Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831;
• John Brown’s multiracial antislavery campaign culminating at Harper’s Ferry.  
• The most successful was the Haitian rebellion, which abolished slavery and colonization on that island by 1804.

Racism never ended
At the end of the Civil War, freed slaves became wage laborers on former plantations, sharecroppers, or domestic workers. For a short time, their well-being was protected by federal troops during Reconstruction from 1865-77. Once this protection was withdrawn, white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan flourished, often made up of local law enforcement. This Jim Crow era was characterized by the open murder of thousands of Black workers, rampant imprisonment, impoverishment and indebtedness of former slaves and total segregation.
Although many of these abuses were gradually mitigated through mass migrations of Black workers to the North through the end of World War II, court decisions, and then the Civil Rights Movement, racism has continued to flourish in the all parts of the U.S. Today, wage differentials between white men and Black and Latin workers add up to almost $800 billion dollars a year, nearly half of annual corporate profits. Differences in social spending on such services as education, health care and housing add up to hundreds of billions more dollars. U.S. capitalism could not survive without racism.
Black workers continue to be incarcerated at five times the rate of whites and be murdered disproportionately by police, accounting for 63 percent of those killed (223 deaths in 2017) while comprising 13 percent of the population. No cop has ever been convicted for murder of a Black worker in the U.S. Schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods are just as segregated today as they were 50 years ago.
All workers are hurt by racism
Other ideas pushed on workers today include “white privilege”, as if white workers created racism, benefit from it, or should be paralyzed or separate themselves because of guilt. While many white workers may temporarily hold racist views, anti-Black racism was purposely and methodically created by the U.S. bosses of the 1600-1700s to justify slavery and separate white indentured servants and poor farmers from Black slaves. Before that, there had been social mixing and intermarriage between whites and non-whites.
What the ruling class fears is us recognizing is that the lowered standards and super-exploitation for one sector of the working class brings down the standards for all sectors.
Racism serves capitalism well- to maximize profits and minimize rebellion. Separation into different schools, neighborhoods, job titles, unions, and neighborhoods keeps us divided when only multiracial mass action would enable us to fight back effectively. U.S. rulers also rely on racism to win workers, white, Black and immigrant, to fight imperialist wars for markets and resources by painting Muslim, Arab, Asian and other workers as enemies.
It is heartening to witness the mass uprising against the separation and incarceration of immigrant children, which has actually forced a minimal change in Trump’s policies. We must use this power of the unity of millions of workers to destroy this racist system once and for all and build an egalitarian worker-run society: communism.

President Donald Trump’s Group of 7 blunder in Quebec illustrates the disarray and decay plaguing U.S. imperialism. By refusing to sign the summit’s closing communiqué, and then blasting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “weak” and “dishonest” three days before he embraced North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump further alienated the closest U.S. allies. The week before, he’d assaulted the European Union, Canada, and Mexico with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
According to the New York Times, the mouthpiece for the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, Trump “all but blew up the Group of 7 nations that the United States has led for more than four decades and essentially declared open political war on America’s closest neighbor” (6/10).
Pre-Trump, the U.S. and its most important allies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Japan) would collaborate on how to check their common imperialist foes, China and Russia. Trump has torpedoed this tradition and with it the “rules-based international order,” aka the “liberal world order”—the capitalist bosses’ code for the structure for U.S. imperialist dominance post-World War II. Tellingly, Trump asked for Russia to be let back in the G7, four years after they were kicked out for annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine.
“America First”: a losing proposition
For the dominant finance capital wing, the likes of JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil, Trump’s undisciplined opportunism threatens their position atop the imperialist pecking order. Trump’s foreign policy and trade decisions are under attack by both Republican and Democratic politicians, the stooges who serve these bosses’ agenda. Pulling out of the Paris Climate accord, scuttling the Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, instigating a tariff war--each provocation, they complain, leaves the U.S. more isolated and less able to project its power. Meanwhile, U.S. bosses worry that Trump’s moves toward open racism and fascism will rip the mask of “democracy” from the murderous profit system—and undermine the bosses’ efforts to reinvigorate U.S. patriotism and enlist U.S. workers in the next global war.
Meanwhile, unhappy U.S. allies are left trying to prop up what’s left of the liberal world order, hoping for “a president who shares their values” after the 2020 elections (The Atlantic, 6/10). Or as Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main wing’s leading think tank, put it: “The United States has knocked itself off the pedestal” (Economist, 6/7).
Trump’s reckoning
In recent months, Trump has more openly defied the biggest bosses’ attempts to constrain him. He ousted former ExxonMobil CEO and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Hoover Institute member and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, both reliable main-wing operatives. In their place, Trump appointed Mike Pompeo, once the favorite congressman of the Koch Brothers, and John Bolton, the loose cannon who has made a career out of sabotaging multilateral agreements like the Iran nuclear deal.
The U.S. domestic-oriented wing (led by the Kochs, the Mercers, and Sheldon Adelson, among others) has no interest in investing in the massive military ground forces required to maintain a U.S.-dominated world order. As a result, they place less value on the international alliances that Trump is subverting.
But the main-wing bosses aren’t taking this lying down. The escalating Mueller investigation represents their effort to bring Trump to heel. In May 2016, Trump’s foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos told the Australian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Downer, that Russia had “derogatory information” about Hillary Clinton (Observer, 6/5). Papadopoulos turned out to be one of many incompetents in Trump’s camp who have opened the president to scrutiny, giving Mueller’s team an opening. Whether this opening leads to anything in the near future will hinge in part on whether the main-wing bosses are willing to risk a civil war with the president’s racist base.
Sooner or later, though, the main wing will seek to smash the domestic wing., Before they can impose fascism and a global war effort upon the working class, the main-wing bosses will need much greater discipline in their own ranks.
High stakes for all
The stakes for the U.S. ruling class are high. Their position as the world’s dominant imperialist is challenged more each day. In Africa, Chinese investment has exceeded the U.S. since 2009 (FT, 6/13/17). In South America, China is already the largest trading partner with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru (Atlantic, 2/3). The Chinese military buildup in the South China Sea continues unabated. Meanwhile, the ongoing nightmare for workers in Syria illustrates how Russia is outmaneuvering the U.S. in the Middle East.
As Foreign Affairs (4/30) noted:
The era of Pax Americana is over, but the next chapter of America’s role in the world is still being written. We are headed toward a new world order, and the United States should take a leadership role in shaping what that order will be. If it doesn’t, the outcome will be decided without it, its interests, and its values.
The stakes for the international working class are equally high. Whatever the outcome of this investigation, impeachment or the next election will hurt the working class. U.S. rulers will have conflicts internal and external, but they will always be in agreement about exploiting the working class and using their bodies to fight the next oil war. Working-class brothers and sisters must continue to look under the mask of capitalist “democracy.”
The deadliest mistake we can make would be to take sides in a fight among capitalist bosses. Robert Mueller and the FBI are the bosses’ professional contract killers, among the most lethal and racist enemies of the working class. Cheering for the impeachment of Trump equates to siding with a segment of the ruling class that is even more ready, willing, and able to unleash war and fascism on the world. We are told that Trump is destroying “democracy.” But for workers, capitalist electoral democracy has always been a dangerous myth, a cloak thrown over the capitalists’ brutal class dictatorship. It’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism! No president can ever serve workers’ interests. Only a communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party, can create the world we need.