KHARTOUM, SUDAN—“The regime is panicking! I have never seen them panicking like this.” That’s what an activist with Justice Africa said as massive protests erupted here in response to the government’s attempt to triple the price of bread and fuel. The protests started in the eastern city of Atbara, the former home of the Sudanese Communist Party, which was one of the most powerful communist parties in Africa or the Middle East.  The demonstrations quickly spread to six other cities, including the capital.
Like all workers’ struggles today, this fight in Sudan unfolds in a world where the rivalry between imperialists is the main factor shaping events.  For decades now, Sudan has been a crucial outpost for Chinese capitalists in their drive to challenge U.S. imperialism and establish themselves as a new center of gravity in the world economy. In 1995 President al-Bashir signed an important oil deal with the China, supporting their bid to establish energy access outside the military footprint of US imperialism’s Mid-East presence.  China now controls 75% of Sudanese oil output of 133,000 barrels a day (thediplomat.com, 6/17/18).
Over this same period of time U.S. imperialism has sought to answer growing Chinese influence in the region by backing a series of separatist/nationalist/fascist movements in Sudan fomenting instability and civil war at the expense of the lives of millions.  Following Sudan’s first oil discovery in 1978 civil war raged from 1983 to 2005. US imperialist running-dog politician John Garang, trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, received $20 million of military equipment in 1996 (Federation of American Scientists) helping to prolong a war which has displaced four million and killed two million of our working class brothers and sisters in the Sudan .  
Despite the false promises by the Darfur separatist movement, and the later secession of oil-rich South Sudan in 2011 to create the world’s most recent capitalist state,the workers of Sudan continue to pay the price for U.S. imperialism’s ongoing efforts to deny Chinese imperialist access to a stable outpost in Africa.  
Most recently the Trump administration has reversed course by lifting sanctions imposed on the al-Bashir regime as he has committed thousands of troops to the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition’s genocidal war in Yemen. This “integration” of Sudan’s economy into world trade has pried it open for IMF and World Bank “structural adjustment” policies, which always amount to an attack on workers.  In this case Wall Street demanded an end to subsidies that kept fuel and wheat more affordable, triggering the protests. Such subsidies, like all pro-worker policies capitalist governments implement, are relics of class struggle of prior generations.  Sudanese workers carry forward this tradition of class struggle today.  Similar protests over rising fuel and bread prices took place earlier in 2018 and in 2013 and were put down by security forces.
Police and army snipers opened fire on protesting workers and students, killing about 30, according to local journalists. The government arrested 14 leaders of the opposition National Consensus Forces, and shut down internet service and social media sites. Universities and schools in the capital were also closed as many demonstrators across the country demanded an end to the 30-year dictatorship.
Inflation reached an annual rate of 70 percent last November, leaving many Sudanese workers unable to buy food. Many have been standing in long lines and spending up to 40 percent of their income just on bread or sleeping in their cars for two days waiting to buy gas.
Workers in Sudan in struggle today against the al-Bashir regime must rebuild a communist movement that will correct the errors of its predecessors or their brave struggle against al-Bashir ‘s fascist state will be diverted into fighting for the interests of forces loyal either to U.S. or to Chinese imperialism.  Sudanese communists formed the Sudanese Movement for National Liberation in 1946 with a program of fighting for self-determination, national consciousness, and uniting all classes under the leadership of Sudanese workers and peasants in the fight for independence from British imperialism. With the abandonment of world revolution being pronounced from a USSR exhausted by its recent defeat  in World War II, Sudanese communists viewed socialist revolution as too distant a prospect to be presented to the masses, and all organizing was dedicated to the fight for independence (el-Amin, 1996 Middle Eastern Studies).  These nationalist errors by communists worldwide are analyzed more fully in Progressive Labor Party’s Road to Revolution III (1976).
More and more, Africa finds itself in the crosshairs of the growing rivalry between U.S. and Chinese imperialism. The result is more poverty, more terror and more war. Taking lessons from history, a new communist movement will rise up from the struggles of Sudan’s working class and this time finish the job that was started in Atbara more than 50 years ago.

BALTIMORE, January 5—A nearly unanimous “No way!” was the powerful answer to the confirmation of Mayor Catherine Pugh’s nominee, Joel Fitzgerald, as Baltimore’s next police commissioner. He would have been the City’s fifth top cop in less than four years since the Freddie Gray rebellion in 2015, which put fear in the hearts, and instability in the decision-making, of the local ruling class.
Several days before the City Council hearing, 11 West Wednesday protesters participated in the third monthly CHALLENGE Readers’ Discussion Group. (West Wednesdays are the continuing protests in response to the murder of Tyrone West in July 18, 2013.) One of the topics was about organizing speakers at the hearing, which we succeeded in doing!
Tawanda Jones, main organizer of the weekly West Wednesday rallies that demand accountability for her brother’s death and for all victims of police terror, declared to members of the City Council, about Fitzgerald, “Get him out, or we’ll push you out!”
Fitzgerald’s defining moment
The defining moment, in Fitzgerald’s career, was not the exaggeration and dishonesty in the resume he submitted for this job. Nor was it his racist response to a question about police-community relations: sometimes the best thing is to call an emergency pro-police “back the blue” rally, as he has done in Ft. Worth Texas, where he is currently police commissioner.
No, the defining moment was probably when Ft. Worth cop William Martin responded to a 911 call by Black woman Jacqueline Craig, who accused a white male neighbor of grabbing and choking her 7-year-old son. Shortly after arriving on the scene, Cop Martin forcefully shoved his taser into Ms. Craig’s back, and brutally arrested, not the neighbor, but Jacqueline and her two daughters. Even the Ft. Worth police internal investigation found Martin guilty of excessive force.
Commissioner Fitzgerald de facto let Cop Martin get away. Martin was docked two weeks pay. Fitzgerald instead demoted who commanders for releasing the video revealing the violence against Jacqueline and her family. This led to outrage and protests. In other words, Fitzgerald was far more upset about the truth getting out, than he was about racist police terror. His handling of that crisis was his defining moment.
Speak out at City Council hearing
If he became Baltimore’s police chief, killer cops here would be even more emboldened. That’s why it’s reasonable to argue that shutting down the Fitzgerald confirmation will probably result in prevenient murder of working-class lives in Baltimore. And we did shut it down! Two days after the City Council hearing, Fitzgerald withdrew himself from consideration.
Among the 70 speakers, many focused on advocating for various reforms: calling for a home-grown police commissioner, more community policing with foot patrols, no reinstitution of the deadly “jump out boys,” and no “Back the Blue” rallies.
No use in reforming wage slavery
The limiting the goal to an effort for reforming capitalism is equivalent to folks during slavery trying only to limit the length of whips. Clearly, the bigger goal—complete abolition of slavery—was the necessary focus.
The same is true today. We need to abolish this system of wage slavery. Progressive Labor Party upholds the communist view that as long as capitalism is the framework, vicious policing of the masses is essential to the survival of this system. Trying to control and repress the working class, by way of violence and terror, is the sword of this vastly unequal system. Only a relentless marathon towards a communist society can cut off racist police at its knees.
Over time, we plan to back up sharp words with unified mass action against politricksters, the Klan in blue, and all the other treacherous attacks of capitalism.

I recently returned from a week in Tijuana, Mexico, responding to a call by the New Sanctuary Caravan to lend moral and other support to our brothers and sisters fleeing from Central America. Their bold call was a pro-internationalist to president Donald Trump and the U.S. ruling class’s racist divisiveness.
Tijuana is one of the largest ports of entry in the world, and even though the vast majority of migrants/refugees are from Central America, they are also from many other countries, like Haiti, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico itself, fleeing the poverty and instability that the system of imperialism produces.  And the U.S. embassies refuse to grant them visas to the U.S. (So much for the argument that “They should come ‘the right way’”). 
Sexism and racism are also at play here.  Many of the Central American refugees are young women fleeing sexual violence and persecution. A brave 14-year-old Central American girl walked away from home one night without informing her family where she was going. Fleeing the sexual abuse of a family member, she carried nothing with her except a little money in her pocket. She told the lawyer who found her at the border crossing that she found her way to the border by following the lights from the cars and buses.  Many refugees are indigenous workers being victimized by racist abuse and oppression in their countries of origin.
As bad as then-president Barack Obama was “Deporter in Chief”, Trump’s policies are carrying on, and advancing, that legacy. He’s raising the level of state sponsored cruelty to new heights by separating families, effectively shutting the border, and torturing workers and children in Customs and Border Patrol facilities (nicknamed “The Icebox” by refugees).  I watched the face of a little girl sitting on the curb at the border crossing listening intently as a lawyer advised her mother to write her own name and date of birth with a sharpie pen on the girl’s shoulder in the event they are separated. The trauma that children and their parents are experiencing is reminiscent of Southern slavery and the boarding schools for U.S. indigenous children. 
Thousands of refugees have been living for months in Tijuana in tents and unheated shelters (the temperature is in the 40’s at night) waiting for their numbers to be called to begin the asylum process. Working hand-in-glove, the U.S. and Mexican governments have manufactured this crisis to force people to self-deport or accept the one-year Mexican work visas offered. Every day, the Mexican government shuttles refugees and migrants to a job fair, channeling them into the low wage jobs that will boost the Mexican economy.
The refugee crisis is more than an immigration issue. It’s part of the racist division of labor across borders that capitalism needs to maximize profits.  It’s part of the legacy of sexism that began with class society when women became the property of men.  It’s a reflection of capitalism’s view of workers as tools for profit with disposable lives.  It’s a reflection of workers’ mass impulse to resist exploitation and claim their full humanity. It’s an issue that lay bare capitalism’s failures, and the neccesity for a new social system: communism.
Now, a new caravan is leaving Honduras, continuing to challenge the existence of the capitalist borders that keep the poor countries poor and the rich countries rich.  We need to bring the communist line to the struggle “Working People have no Nation, Smash the Borders” and do all we can to build solidarity.
The hundreds of volunteers coming to the border also need to hear our class analysis, the only answer to a movement, that is heavily influenced by the liberal establishment.  Karl Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, “All history is the history of class struggle”.  Here it is.  The refugee movement is overwhelming the status quo and pushing history forward. Volunteers mostly see themselves as providing service and moral support to the immigrants but not as organizers of struggle to change this system. The Party’s involvement could help transform it into a fighting movement of the international working class. 
I worked with Al Otro Lado that has a Pro Se Clinic that prepares refugees to advocate for themselves in the asylum process. Spanish speakers, and speakers of Arabic, French, Haitian Creole, and other languages, lawyers, law students, or medical professionals are most useful, but everyone can play a role.  There are others organizing support too—World Central Kitchen, Food not Bombs, Border Angels, Deported Veterans, DACA moms, Pueblo sin Fronteras.
 I raised the Party’s ideas in conversation with some of the volunteers and distributed a party flier to them, but was unable to get very far with the little time we had together. I plan to continue this solidarity work in my home city with the community college students I work with. Tijuana and other border communities where migrants confront a militarized border, present a great opportunity for the Party to bring its ideas.

WASHINGTON D.C, January 20–There is one thing the now 29 day old government shutdown shows for sure; neither Donald Trump nor his Democratic opponents have any concern for workers, the main victims of this power game between the main imperialist wing of the ruling class and the domestically oriented, Republican Trump supporters.
 78 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (CNBC, 1/9).Now 800,000 federal employees and hundreds of thousands of contractors, who are 40 percent of government personnel, are without one, whether or not they are being forced to work. To understand the devastation, we must know that 21.2 percent of U.S. families have no savings, including over 32 percent of Latin and 37 percent of Black families. 40 percent of all families have less than $400 in available cash for emergencies, according to the Federal Reserve. What more proof need there be that workers cannot afford to live under this capitalist system?
Indigenous workers living on federally funded land have been hardest hit. Snow covered roads are not being cleared, ambulances are not running and a 60 percent unpaid healthcare workforce devastates medical care. Some of the other concrete effects of the shutdown, which disproportionately affects Black and Latin workers, are: food stamps, used by 38 million people, were given out early for February and will no longer be available; federal cash welfare for $34 million is gone and being temporarily replaced by states; USDA loans and federal rent subsidies for low income rural dwellers will end by 2/1; food inspections have markedly decreased; approvals for opioid drug antagonists (drugs that counteract narcotic overdoses) cannot be had. If workers have not already died from these measures, some soon will, and it is certain that widespread effects of the stress and deprivation will continue long after the shutdown ends.
Why make a crisis out of immigration?
Trump pretends that there is an “immigration crisis,” but illegal border crossings have dropped from 851,000 in 2006 to approximately 62,000 in 2016, and both documented and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than the native born and have a lower unemployment rate (NYT 1/11). Most illegally imported drugs are smuggled through legal ports of entry. Given the falling fertility rates of native-born Americans, the U.S. would need to admit more than a million immigrants a year until 2050, more than double the current number, just to maintain current levels of production (NYT, 1/15).
What the maintenance of legal barriers to immigration does accomplish is to keep this large body of workers in a state of constant fear, drastically limiting their ability to demand higher wages or organize. By branding immigrant workers as dangerous and criminal, racist and nationalistic divisions are also sown between them and other workers, including Black workers and legal immigrants or their descendants.
Why is this happening now?
There may be no better explanation than that Trump is a bumbling politician, without any stable advisors representing the usual ruling class forces. He sees himself as beholden to his most racist and reactionary base to fulfill a campaign promise to “build the wall” and earn his racist and nationalist stripes. However, there should be no illusions that the Democrats or liberals who oppose him have any interest in treating immigrants with humanity. Since a century ago, Presidents Wilson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, both Bush’s and Obama have set up draconian barriers to immigration and increased deportations. Obama deported more immigrants than any president ever (about 3 million), and Democrats have built more of the existing wall than Republicans. Workers should not only fight against this racist border wall and this racist government shutdown; we should fight for a world without borders – communism.
The Democrats today, representing the main finance wing of the ruling class, are anxious to weaken Trump, who is destroying years of policies that strengthened the U.S. ruler’s international military, political and financial alliances. They are horrified by his general undisciplined behavior. They fear that his withdrawing from Syria and Afghanistan, and threatening to withdraw from NATO threatens their worldwide, imperialist empire. They also oppose his total destruction of environmental regulations, overt racism, and destruction of “free trade,” all damaging to the reputation and sway of America’s large corporations and their international imperialist alliances.
Ultimately, workers must rise up collectively to defend ourselves from both parties. Mass sickouts among airport workers are already happening and may spread. Although federal workers are legally banned from striking, job actions are needed to fight for survival as all the bosses ignore their needs. Once again it is clear that capitalism cares naught for workers’ lives and that we need, in the end, to be fighting for a society we control–communism.