U.S. President Trump’s recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was a holiday gift to the Israeli ruling class, a big-power blessing of the country’s anti-Arab racism and apartheid. It is also a reflection of the embattled U.S. bosses’ growing isolation in the region and the world. This would lead to even more instability in the Middle East, collateral damage to U.S. allies, and a rise in mass anger and fight-back against the U.S.
In reversing decades of U.S. foreign policy against the advice of his Secretaries of State and Defense, the imperialist-in-chief was transparently playing to his evangelical and Zionist bases, including megabucks campaign donor Sheldon Adelson and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has invested heavily in Israeli settlements (New York Times, 12/6). Trump showed yet again that he has spun out of the control of the main wing, finance capital bosses, who have tried to preserve a charade of evenhandedness in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
With the other 14 members of the United Nations Security Council voting in favor, the U.S. was forced to veto an Egyptian-drafted resolution expressing “deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem.” Trump threatened to cut off aid to any country that crossed him. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley vowed to “take names” of any countries backing the resolution at a December 21 emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly. According to a Reuters report, “Several senior diplomats said Haley’s warning was unlikely to change many votes in the General Assembly, where such direct, public threats are rare” (12/10). With the U.S. in relative decline against its imperialist rivalry with China and Russia, Trump’s bluster has less and less impact.
Imperialism Creates Israeli Killing Machine
All national borders are drawn to protect ruling-class interests. In 1947, the UN adopted a partition plan to succeed the British colonial mandate over Palestine. This was the original “two-state solution,” which led to the violent ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Arab workers from Israel, the new “Jewish state”; an adjacent “Arab state” that united with neighboring Jordan; and placement of the city of Jerusalem under UN trusteeship.
Although Jewish settlers had owned less than seven percent of Palestine’s territory, the partition gave them 56 percent of Palestine’s land. As Itzhak Galnoor noted in The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement, much of the Jewish state was in the Negev desert, a “vital land bridge protecting British interests from the Suez Canal to Iraq.”
The UN plan enabled British and U.S. imperialists to divide and control workers in the region. Pitting Arab and Jewish workers against one another has served the capitalist bosses by preventing workers from uniting and fighting their common oppressors. Ever since its creation, Israel’s racist Zionist regime has been of strategic significance for U.S. imperialism. It has waged several murderous wars to conquer more and more of Palestine.
As a holy city for three religions, Jerusalem has long been fought over by various murderous empires. Though the Israelis took full control of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967, the city remains a point of intense contention between the ruling classes of Israel and Palestine.  All of this plunder and murder has been funded by the U.S. to the tune of $80 billion in military aid. In 2016, another $39 billion was guaranteed to the Israeli killing machine by President Barack Obama.
A few examples of Israeli state terrorism:

• The forced displacement of more than a million Palestinians and the seizure of workers’ homes and land;
• 70 percent of Palestinian families have had one or more family members sentenced to jail in Israeli prisons for resisting the occupation;
• Torture has been institutionalized in Israeli prisons, and has victimized Arab children as well as adults.

Since Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, thousands of Arab workers have taken to the streets in protest, from Amman to Istanbul.  With the Israelis emboldened to expand their racist occupation into Palestine, more death for Arab and Muslim workers is in store. On December 15, the day after Trump’s announcement, the Israeli military fired on protesters in Gaza and the West Bank,  killing four workers and wounding hundreds more (NYT, 12/15).  
One Workers’ State
The Progressive Labor Party rejects the bosses’ narrative that Muslims and Jews have always existed in antagonism. We also reject their phony two-state “solution,” which Israeli settler land grabs have made unattainable. Multiple major uprisings, including two Intifadas have shown the bravery and willingness of Palestinian workers to rise up, but all have ended in defeat. The local, nationalist ruling classes offer no hope for workers. The cynical Hamas resorts to terror tactics, while Fatah has sold out.
Only building a mass, international working-class army and smashing religious and nationalist borders will end the suffering of the working class. PLP is organizing to create a world free of borders and racist and sexist exploitation. Join PLP!
U.S. Bosses’ Loss is Russian Bosses’ Gain
The need for the U.S. ruling class to regain lost ground is tied to the successes in the past year of the Russian ruling class in projecting their imperialist influence. The Russian bosses militarily backed Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad in the seven-year proxy war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more.
With the U.S. missing in action, Russia has demonstrated its growing influence in the region by recruiting Turkey and Iran to begin peace negotiations. With U.S. credibility at an all-time low, exacerbated by Trump’s unstable decision-making over the Paris Accord, North Korea, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is likely that this signals a trend for the U.S. to be shut out of more and more negotiations as rival bosses seek new allies and cut new deals.
Russian President Vladimir Putin  has also been successful in drawing traditional U.S. allies Turkey and Egypt into their orbit. Turkey is expected to sign a $2 billion dollar deal this week to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems, in addition to the country’s announcement to create an embassy in East Jerusalem in support of a Palestinian state (Los Angeles Times, 12/14). Russia has negotiated a nuclear deal with Egypt to use its airspace and bases, and has also collaborated on various military training exercises (NYT, 11/30).

Workers Must Reject Nationalism and Religion
 We take inspiration from thousands of workers around the world outraged by Trump’s decision. But much of it has a nationalist character. The bosses use nationalism and their construction of borders to convince us that other workers cause their suffering. The root of suffering is capitalism, which is reinforced by both the Jewish and Arab bosses.  
The racist, Zionist bosses and the racist, Palestinian bosses will never build a world that serve the needs of the working class.  Under capitalism, the only future workers in the Middle East can expect is low wages, checkpoints, collapsing education and healthcare systems, and violent crackdowns to control them from rebelling against those conditions.
Smash Borders with Communist Revolution
Workers on either side of the Israeli/Palestinian walls have more in common with each other than they do with the respective bosses. Worker on both sides face labor exploitation and budget cuts of social programs that are needed for their very existence. Palestinian and Black African workers are attacked most of all because of capitalism’s need for racist super-exploitation.
Palestinian and Black workers in the region have always risen up against racist terrorism, and Israeli workers must follow their lead to smash this profit system. The only hope for eventual peace is for workers to build one world without borders through a communist revolution.

BROOKLYN—More than 500 workers rallied on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall to demand that federal immigration storm troopers be banned from state courthouses. The demonstrators represented dozens of unions and immigrant rights and community groups, including the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys-UAW Local 2325. Members of Progressive Labor Party are active in a number of these organizations, where they have sharpened the political struggle against the capitalist injustice system and its escalating persecution of undocumented workers.
Nine days earlier, hundreds of Legal Aid and Brooklyn Defender attorneys walked out after a client at a scheduled court appearance was seized and detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. They marched to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and demanded that the Office of Court Administration and Chief Judge Janet DiFiore prohibit ICE from entering court property.  As one speaker at today’s protest said, “We have seen first-hand the effects of ICE’s presence in and around the courts, and we refuse to see the lives of the people that we love continue to be destroyed by it.”
Beyond terrorizing immigrant defendants, ICE’s presence discourages immigrant victims and witnesses from appearing in court. This exposes the sham of the rulers’  “due process” and adds to the devastating effects of Trump’s racist policies.
Bipartisan Racism
Under capitalism, the so-called legal system functions like every other part of the capitalist state apparatus—as the bosses’ weapon to attack, intimidate, and control the working class. While racist-in-chief Donald Trump has intensified anti-immigrant rhetoric and unleashed the mad dogs of ICE to escalate worksite raids, Democrats and Republicans alike share a despicable history for scapegoating immigrants for the failings of the profit system.
In the 1990s, the Bill Clinton administration deported a record 12.3 million immigrants, most of them “voluntary” returns. It also pushed for laws that established “new grounds for deportation, penalties for the crimes of illegal entry and re-entry, mandates for detention of deportable noncitizens, and a framework for cooperative arrangements on immigration enforcement between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies” (Migration Policy Institute, 1/26/17).
Returns decreased significantly under Barack Obama, due primarily to a drop in net migration from Mexico into negative numbers. But Obama also systematically implemented a George W. Bush-era deterrent strategy to remove a record 3.1 million undocumented immigrants through formal deportation proceedings. As a result, a much higher percentage was subjected to criminal charges; re-entry became a felony offense. By 2013, the Obama administration had weaponized another Bush program, “Secure Communities,” to allow the fingerprints of all those arrested by local cops to be matched against FBI and Department of Homeland Security databases (MPI, 1/26/17). The recent courthouse, workplace, and neighborhood sweeps under Trump are a direct extension of the racist, anti-immigrant policies of the Clinton-Bush-Obama era.
End Anti-Immigrant Terror by Smashing Capitalism
The rulers need to demonize immigrants to make super-profits through super-exploitation—and to keep documented and undocumented workers from uniting to fight for communism and smash the capitalist system. The job of the liberal bosses, and the Democratic Party in particular, is to keep a lid on any struggle and steer it back into electoral politics. Our job as communists is to help workers see through the Democrats’ misleadership. When New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito spoke at today’s rally, a number of demonstrators heckled her.
Anti-immigrant racism and terror are hallmarks of periods of accelerating inter-imperialist rivalry. Attacks on immigrants and refugees are growing as the bosses inch closer to yet another world war. PLP is organizing to smash all borders by building an international revolutionary communist movement. One way we advance is to be active in struggles like this one, and by showing our coworkers that the only way to end racist terror is by ending the system that created it.

On the one hand 2017 was another year of rising imperialist rivalry between the Chinese, U.S., and Russian capitalist bosses, leading to more and more devastating attacks on the world’s workers. It was also the year Donald Trump was inaugurated and carried on many Barack Obama policies, while adding his more openly vicious brand of racism, nationalism, sexism and warmongering.
As the imperialist powers prepare for more wars and eventually world war, the rulers are trying to get their houses in order. While Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia lead somewhat disciplined ruling classes, Trump presides over a U.S. ruling class in disarray. Moreover, Trump’s chaotic “America First” foreign policy has alienated many of the U.S.’s allies.
At the same time, the world’s workers are fighting the attacks of capitalism, but they need communist leadership more than ever. The fightbacks are often based on nationalism, religion or identity politics.
It is the job of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to build working-class unity. PLP has participated in many of these struggles and we have been able to raise revolutionary communist ideas, helping to unite the working class and bring us a little closer to a society run by the working class of the world.
Masses Rebel vs. Rising Fascism
The year started with a bang of mass protests following the inauguration of racist Trump. PLP members and friends energized those around them in a passive crowd of 60,000 at the National Women’s March in Oakland, with militant anti-capitalist chants and speeches. Just hours after the inauguration, 175,000 people gathered in Boston to stand against Trump’s racism and sexism. The following weekend, thousands across the U.S. poured into the streets and airports to protest Trump’s racist travel ban against Muslims. One of many moving moments came when a multi-generational Latin family enthusiastically joined the internationalist chant, “Working people have no nation, smash racist deportation.”
Clap Back vs. Racism on Campus
In addition to the mass organizing against racist segregation and redbaiting in the Brooklyn high school Park Slope Collegiate, the working class shut down fascist, racist speakers throughout the year.  

• At the University of California at Davis several hundred students and workers shut down fascist Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News.
• The fascist, anti-Muslim hate group Act for America was confronted in 25 cities and towns across the U.S. PL’ers joined hundreds of anti-racists in the Bay Area to shut down Nazi demonstrations two days in a row.
• Yiannopoulos was again shut down at the University of California at Berkeley.
• Students at Bethune-Cookman University, a Historically Black College and University, turned their backs and booed their graduation speaker, Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
• Over 300 Columbia University students militantly protested against Tommy Robinson who violently opposes all immigrants and calls them criminals.
• At Stanford another 300 protested anti-Muslim racist Robert Spencer.
• And racist and sexist eugenicist Charles Murray was shut down by an integrated group of students at Middlebury College. The list goes on.

Building International Workers’ Movement
Meanwhile in Mexico, 2017 started with occupations, demonstrations, marches, and road blockades throughout the entire country. This was the working class response to the government’s 20 percent price increase on gas and diesel fuel. PLP has been involved in the reform fightback while organizing for communist revolution.
In Colombia, PLP is organizing with construction workers who went on strike demanding back pay that was stolen from them. During the summer, 350,000 public school teachers went on a 37-day strike demanding better health care, higher pay and more school funding. Many teachers discussed revolutionary ideas and helped distribute PLP literature.
At airports in Chicago and Indiana militant protests tried to stop the deportations of our immigrant brothers and sisters. In Chicago, protesters almost got onto the tarmac to stop the planes, but were misguided by liberal misleaders. In Indiana they were confronted by fascist cops in military gear. In both places PL’ers raised revolutionary communist ideas in the heat of these battles.
The summer also saw thousands of multiracial anti-racists confronting and attacking hundreds of Nazis, KKK, and white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA. PL’ers were there to confront these racist scum and call for revolution.
The call for communist revolution also went out in Haiti as several thousand workers and students demonstrated for three straight days for an increase in the minimum wage. Later in the year there were more demonstrations and a call for a general strike as up to 10,000 angrily took to the streets against the government’s anti-working class budget. The Party in Haiti pledged to fight to build “a new society, communism, based on equality, where workers rule in our own interest.”
All these fightbacks and the Party’s struggle to make revolution primary are important. But the imperialists’ drive toward world war is relentless and the devastation on the world’s working class is beyond horrendous. These imperialist butchers only expose these atrocities when they can attack their competitors.
he U.S. bosses say little about Yemen that would reveal that their Saudi ally is bombing Yemen into oblivion. They want Saudi oil. But they criticize the Venezuela bosses who are allying with China and Russia. China doesn’t criticize the North Korean butchers because they are “allies.” Russia loves butcher Assad because Syria houses Russian military bases and the U.S. attacks him for the very same reason. Neither set of bosses gives a damn about the working class in Syria.
Year of Capitalist Disasters
With hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters, the bosses have a similar spin. But instead of blaming another imperialist rival, they blame nature. Whether it is famines and droughts in Africa, massive flooding in South Asia, earthquakes in Mexico, or hurricanes in the Caribbean and U.S., it is never the fault of their capitalist, profiteering system. They ignore the fact that the capitalists survive these ‘natural disasters’ quite easily, while workers suffer greatly.
And now added to this worldwide, capitalist disaster, we have Trump. The capitalist propaganda says that world war with nuclear weapons is unthinkable. They tell us they can control themselves, compete gracefully, and divide the world among themselves peacefully. That was always bull, and with Trump, the world is more volatile than ever.
Another Year of Workers’ Unity
Our job as communists is more vital than ever. Let’s rise to the task and build our revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party so we can lead the world’s working class to turn the bosses’ imperialist war into a war for workers power—communism!

When Democrat Doug Jones upset accused child molester and open white supremacist Roy Moore in the December 12 special U.S. Senate election in Alabama, the vote exposed deepening divisions within the U.S. capitalist ruling class. It also pointed to the challenges facing the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
News of the race monopolized the bosses’ media for days. The rulers’ dominant finance capital wing, representing the interests of ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, went all out to stop Roy Moore. The Democrats poured in more than $4 million to the Jones campaign through a “mysterious super PAC” called Highway 31, “a joint project of two of the largest national super PACs—Senate Majority PAC and Priorities USA Action” (Politico, 12/11). The party brought in its biggest guns—Barack Obama and Joe Biden—to campaign for Jones. Meanwhile, top Republican leaders publicly slammed rogue Republican Moore as a serial sexual predator who was unfit for office.
The rulers understood that stakes were high, though not for the reasons broadcast on CNN. Here are some lessons we might draw from what happened in Alabama:
Gutter Klan-type candidates get slapped down because they are bad for business. Moore threatened the main wing bosses’ con game by peeling back the curtain and revealing the rotten essence of capitalism. While the finance capitalists depend on racism and sexism to divide and exploit workers, they also rely on the false unity of U.S. patriotism as they ramp up toward World War III. They need a multiracial army of men and women willing to fight and die for the bosses’ profits.
Moore’s defeat was a setback for Donald Trump, who played to his arch-racist base by endorsing his fellow predator. While Trump’s political loyalties remain unclear, he is too unreliable to represent the mainstream bosses in a time of intensifying inter-imperialist rivalries. Like Moore, he exposes the hellish profit system—with its racism, sexism, and grotesque and widening inequalities—for what it is. Now that Trump is showing weakness, the main wing may decide to show him the door, sooner than later.
The domestic-leaning wing of the ruling class—represented by Steve Bannon and the Mercer and Koch billionaire families—is determined to spend less on a worldwide military and to cut U.S. support for NATO and other expensive alliances. To gain white workers’ support, they are aiming to build more open racism. Though these bosses lost the battle in Alabama, they’re not about to surrender. With the help of Fox News, they managed to mobilize 48 percent of the electorate, 68 percent of the white vote, and 91 percent of registered Republicans to choose a monster over the big bosses’ Democratic and Republican machines. With rumblings of a threatened “deep-state” coup against Trump, the prospect of civil war no longer seems so farfetched.
Black workers made the difference, with 95 percent—including 98 percent of black women—voting for Jones. They represented 30 percent of the turnout, significantly more than their share of the Alabama voting-age population, and even more than the Black share of the electorate in Obama’s presidential runs (Mother Jones, 12/13/17).  Despite the ever-deepening crisis and intensifying racism of U.S. capitalism, masses of Black workers—the essential vanguard for a communist movement—remain trapped by the rulers’ false promise that voting can lead to real change. The victory of Doug Jones, another politician pledged to keep this racist system going, highlights the need for our Party to recruit many more Black women and men as revolutionary communist leaders.
In short, what transpired in Alabama was a victory for bosses of all stripes. Barely a year after the widespread cynicism that surrounded the presidential race between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the special Senate contest renewed millions of people’s enthusiasm for elections. Younger voters, in particular, were galvanized by Jones, a “former crusading civil rights lawyer” (DailyMail.com, 12/13) who won 60 percent of the 18-to-29-year-old vote in a heavily Republican state (huffingtonpost.com, 12/13).
These young workers are the future soldiers the bosses will need to enlist for the next global conflict. They’re also the ones our Party needs to win to shed this racist system and fight back for the international working class.
Democrats Use Sexism Instead of Fighting It
The sexual assault scandals that have torpedoed liberal Senator Al Franken, among many others, may thin the field for the 2020 presidential nomination and help unify the Democrats. For now, the main wing bosses seem to be rallying behind the tack taken by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who led the charge against Franken and is using the pain of sexual assault as a prop to advance her own career.
This superficial solidarity, however, is limited by the deeply embedded racism of capitalist society. In Alabama, the Democrats’ sudden show of zero tolerance for sexual assault may have gotten more younger and educated white women to tilt their way than in the past. But 66 percent of white women in Alabama still voted for the naked racism of Moore (Newsweek 12/13).
Meanwhile, with the influence of older Black politicians on the wane, the rulers are cultivating new misleaders to keep Black workers and the entire working class tied to capitalism. A number of electorally focused organizations, like BlackPAC and Movement for Black Lives Electoral Project, are led by Black women. The bosses’ media are pushing them as the people to follow (New York Times, 12/16).
There Are No Good Bosses
“‘The elections in Virginia and Alabama have proven that it is possible for Democrats to focus on white and minority voters without alienating either,’ said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster based in Alabama. ‘Technology, for one, makes it possible to target specific populations with particular messages through email, text messages and phone calls’”(NY Times 12/13). In other words, the new Democratic playbook is to quietly tell Black voters the party is against racism, but not to say it so loud that racist white voters will jump ship.
Capitalism can never end racism or sexism. Without a divided working class and segments of super-exploited workers, the profit system would collapse. At the same time, the capitalists need to build unity around the myth that capitalist “democracy” is still the best option for workers. When workers stop voting and abandon the bosses’ misleader politicians for working-class leadership in the class struggle, the whole capitalist system will be in jeopardy. That’s the greatest fear of the ruling class.
And that’s when our class will be free.