The sexual assault scandal that started with Harvey Weinstein has spread across Hollywood and engulfed the whole of the bosses’ media in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and France. Masses of women workers unleashed their wrath, publicly coming forward to call out their harassers and tormenters, many of them in the bosses’ entertainment industry and the bosses’ governments. Some were shamed into resignation. In France, women shared stories on social media with the hashtag, #Balancetonporc, or “rat out your pig.”
Waves of inspiring anti-sexist stories have even rocked local communities as women workers made the exposure of Weinstein their own.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party salute this mass bravery. Our class will need it to build a communist world without racism and sexism. Fighting for a movement capable of eliminating capitalism also means analyzing reality, and investigating things like the exposure of Harvey Weinstein.
The reality is: these exposures have nothing to do with any justice under capitalism for the vicious sexist attacks against women workers. Harvey Weinstein’s depraved attacks on women in the movie industry were widely known for decades.
The New York City District Attorneys and the NYPD had evidence against Weinstein but never chose to press charges (NYT, 10/11). The editorial staff at major capitalist news outlets including the New York Times, NBC and New York Magazine suppressed stories exposing Weinstein for years. Reporters not only knew about what was going on, many of them had been victims themselves (Weekly Standard, 10/9).
Capitalists and their media don’t care for women workers. The bosses see women workers, at best, as instruments of production of future workers, or as objects. Capitalist media empires rake in staggering profits from sexist marketing and pornography, while their friends in the informal capitalist economy traffic women workers into slavery around the world.
Women and girls comprise the majority of the largest disaster facing the international working class: refugees forced across racist capitalist borders from Central America to South Sudan, DR Congo, Syria and the Middle East. Across these borders, women workers are herded into refugee camps and subject to extreme poverty, abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. In Yemen, the Saudi and U.S. bombings have forced women into even more extreme conditions.
The reason the bosses’ media is focusing on the Harvey Weinstein scandal has to do with shifting allegiances within and among the capitalist class, and their Democratic Party.
U.S. Capitalists: Changing Tactics, Institutions
In the first place, the movie industry, the media and the political gridlock in Washington, D.C. are losing a fair amount of the influence they once had. Animals like Weinstein and others play important roles for the bosses, but that role is changing thanks to political-economic pressures (Weekly Standard, 10/9) as U.S. capitalism becomes more desperate. No longer protected by the capitalist state’s media, old scores are being settled, and victims are stepping forward.
Weinstein’s exposure is also about the direction the capitalists may take the Democratic Party. In the opening months of the Democratic and Republican primaries for the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy revolved around promoting Trump as the Republican contender in the general election. Their thinking was that Trump’s gutter racism and sexism would make him easier to beat than a more mainstream candidate, like Marco Rubio.
The election result came as a shock to Clinton, the capitalist class, and probably even Trump himself. It led to disaster for the Clinton electoral machine and the Democratic Party, and there have been brutal internal fights within their party since. These fights reflect the capitalist class’ deep disagreements on how to win workers in the U.S. to support a more liberal, inclusive brand of U.S. imperialism to fight rival, emboldened imperialist powers like China and Russia.
The fight within the Democratic Party has on the one hand, politicians like Clinton, Obama, and Nancy Pelosi. On the other, there’s Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others who have drawn masses of students and working class youth angry at the effects of capitalism, and looking for leadership.
Harvey Weinstein was not only one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, he was one of the Clintons’ principal donors. Less than one month after Weinstein was exposed, a new book by former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairwoman Donna Brazile, attacking Hillary’s campaign, is a one-two punch to the Clinton-Obama wing. Taking down Weinstein is a blow to an entire wing of the DNC. For some in the capitalist class anxiously watching China and Russia’s imperial rise, the Clinton-Obama wing may have outlived its usefulness.
Hillary Clinton’s racist, sexist career of service to U.S. imperialism is rightfully hated by millions of workers, but her decline is no victory for the working class. On the contrary, the bosses’ media’s extensive coverage of these scandals and ensuing mass anger may indicate, or certainly precipitate, a resurgent Sanders-Warren wing within their party. And this wing, as beholden to capitalism and defending U.S. imperialism as Clinton or Trump, may pose the greatest danger to the working class yet.
Imperialism and Fascism Rising
It’s no coincidence that the bosses are also infighting over tax reform, to squeeze workers and even certain sectors of the ruling class to pay for their imperialist war machine and defend their blood-soaked empire. They’ll sort out their problems soon enough. To defend U.S. imperialism, the bosses will need fascism, which means first imposing discipline among the U.S. capitalist class.
The disagreements over how the DNC runs is a tactical argument about how to fool and mislead the working class into supporting U.S. imperialism the best.
And once the bosses settle their factional disputes, the next step will be to discipline the working class through a combination of increasing terror on one hand, and loyalty on the other. We are already seeing hints of this as the bosses try to imply that somehow young working-class children, particularly Black and Latin children are potential sexual predators who have to be brought into line. In a perverse hypocrisy that we cannot allow to go unopposed, the sick rulers who have been promoting this horribly sexist culture and destroying the lives of Black and Latin children through a racist segregated school system, pushing of drugs and cutting benefits are now seeking to engage young women in joining them in painting young men as the enemy.
At the moment, Black working class youth like those rebelling in St. Louis, and Charlottesville last summer are disillusioned with U.S. capitalism. That means opportunities for communists in PLP to grow our movement.
Smash Sexism, Racism and Imperialism
For communists, the bravery of the mainly women workers raising their voices and demanding justice demands support from the working class.
Support means both fighting back on the job, and building study groups to study capitalism and the science of revolution. Capitalism depends on sexist, racist and nationalist divisions among workers to extract maximum profits from them all. Under capitalism, women workers, especially Black women, suffer the sharpest and most intense form of capitalism’s exploitation and oppression.
The idea that the ruling class could take on sexism is absurd. The industries where these animals reign are the drivers of the sexist culture that glorifies the objectification of women. In fact, not only are women objectified, but men and women are constantly encouraged to objectify not only others but themselves as well.
Capitalism commodifies everything. Sex is used to sell everything from soap to cars. The wage system makes it impossible for workers to own anything, including our bodies. We are entrapped by the need to work for the capitalists, seek loans from the capitalists and make a living in the industries controlled by the capitalists.
What the bosses offer is more women in the halls of power as the best they can do. But the 500,000 children in Iraq starved to death on the orders of Madeleine Albright, or the now millions killed in wars started at the behest of Secretary of State Clinton let us know how that story always ends.
Wherever capitalism can divide workers the deepest, the worse off ALL workers are. One century ago, striking women workers in Russia knew this. When they convinced men workers to join their strike, together they set into motion what became the Bolshevik Revolution—and the world’s first workers’ state. They proved we can seize power and run the world for ourselves. It will be done again. Join PLP, and help make that day come sooner.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31 this fall. This case centers on the ability of public sector unions to collect so-called “fair-share fees.” These fees are the equivalent of dues charged for services unions provide regardless of membership status to those workers who are not members. Fair share fees were have been collected since the Abood case in 1977 found them constitutional. Ending this practice would financially hurt the unions and further weaken them.
Janus is a Racist Attack
According to the Atlantic Black Star (9/27), the Janus is the latest effort of the States Policy Network (SPN) and the American Legislative and Exchange Council (ALEC) to destroy public sector unions. This effort reflects differences within the ruling class about how to keep workers from fighting back. The main wing of the U.S. ruling class is more willing to tolerate union leaders who support the capitalist system and lead workers away from class struggle and deliver them into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party. The Koch brothers, who fund SPN and ALEC, prefer to destroy the unions altogether.
In 2016 7.1 million government workers were members of unions. That is a little more than 34 percent of all government workers. Since the public sector is the largest employer of Black and historically more likely to join unions than any other racial group, says Jackson, such anti-union campaigns have particular implications for Black workers.
According to Dr Steven C Pitts, UC Berkeley, on average, Black union members earn 16.4 percent higher wages than non-union members and are more likely to have employer-provided health insurance (17 percent) and an employer sponsored retirement plan (18 percent).
Janus v. AFSCME also reflects the pressures US imperialism is facing internationally. To improve their economic competitiveness the rate of exploitation of the working class must be increased.  
Unions Decline Fueled by Anti-communism
The Janus case attacks public sector unions which is the main place where workers are unionized today. In the mid 1950s, 35 percent of all U.S. workers were members of unions. Almost all of these worked in the private sector.
Today, only 11.9 percent of U.S. workers are members of unions. Of this number 6.9 percent are private sector workers while 36.2 percent work in the public sector. A main factor in the decline in unionization was the Taft Hartley Law of 1947. This law outlawed militant activities of unions and made it illegal for Communists to hold union office.

Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary communist party cannot be bound by the bosses’ laws. We understand that capitalism and its laws oppress us. After members of the U.S. Communist Party were kicked out (sometimes willingly) from union leadership, adherence to other Taft-Hartley restrictions limited fightback. PL’ers seek to bring communist ideas into the workers struggles. This would mean that court cases like Janus would be unable to defeat us. PL’ers fight like hell in the class struggle but understand that to get rid of the capitalist system of class oppression we must build for communist revolution.

With Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announcing plans to remove Catalonia’s separatist leaders and crush the region’s drive for independence, workers face a no-win proposition, a clash between rising fascism and nationalist identity politics. No matter which side prevails, workers will continue to be divided and exploited by the capitalist profit system.
With the U.S.-centric world order in accelerating decline, capitalism is in disarray throughout the world. On October 1, long-simmering tensions intensified when Catalonia staged an independence referendum. In scenes reminiscent of the fascist Francisco Franco regime that ruled Spain into the mid-1970s, Spanish police responded with clubs and rubber bullets, injuring 750 people. Even so, a reported 2.3 million turned out to vote, with 90 percent choosing to split from Spain (Telegraph, 10/2). In response, Spain has threatened to impose new elections for the region’s presidency (to replace the secessionist Charles Puigdemont), suspend the Catalonian parliament, and send in the police and army. Two prominent separatists were jailed without bail.
Catalonia’s independence movement is misleading millions of workers to unite behind the region’s capitalist bosses. The violent battle to come will place workers in the crossfire. Only a communist revolution led by Progressive Labor Party, can smash national and regional borders. Only a communist society can meet the needs of the international working class.
Nationalism: Bosses’ Tool
Nationalism and identity politics are reactionary responses to capitalism in crisis. Since the 2008 global recession, Spain’s workers have suffered with one of the weakest economies in Europe. Even after a recent “recovery,” the country’s unemployment rates stands at 17 percent—and 39 percent for youth (tradingeconomics.com). To protect their dwindling profits, Spanish capitalists have imposed austerity pay freezes and spending cuts. Catalonia is Spain’s most prosperous region, accounting for 20 percent of the nation’s economy and 25 percent of its exports. In the absence of a mass communist movement and working class consciousness, some workers in Catalonia resent those in poorer regions who may get a few crumbs from Catalonia’s high tax bill (CNN, 9/29). They don’t yet see that their true enemies are the blood-sucking capitalist bosses, whether in Madrid or Barcelona:
The contemporary project of independence offers the hope or illusion of a new nation unencumbered by austerity, corruption, and what Catalan nationalists view as Catalonia’s excessive contribution to the rest of Spain in the form of taxes and transfers to less wealthy regions. This narrative, however, ignores Catalan elites’ implication in corruption scandals, as well as Catalan nationalists’ record in government of applying unpopular austerity policies on behalf of the economic elites of both Spain and Catalonia. In the discourse of Catalan nationalism, that is, the politics of identity has trumped the politics of class. (Foreign Affairs, 10/18).
Catalonian Separatism Bad for EU, U.S.
Catalonia’s Brexit-style movement is bad news for capitalists everywhere, from Spain to the U.S.-aligned European Union to the region itself. If Catalonia became independent, its bosses could lose free trade within the EU. One of Catalonia’s biggest banks has already moved its headquarters to another part of Spain; a second bank, along with many other businesses, is considering doing the same (Vox, 10/10).
The rise of Catalonian nationalism is not unlike the movement for Scottish independence or Britain’s vote last year to leave the European Union. It’s also echoed in the mass support for U.S. Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump’s moves to exclude Muslim and Latin immigrants. Workers are being won to the backward idea that uniting around nationalism and shutting out the world will protect them from unemployment, pay cuts, and deteriorating schools and housing. It is Progressive Labor Party’s job to show workers that out suffering is caused not by our working-class sisters and brothers, but by the bosses who exploit us for maximum profit. Racism and nationalism weaken our class and stop us from fighting back.
Under communism, there will be no capitalist bosses dividing us. There will be no money, no unemployment, no recessions. Nobody will profit off someone else’s back; everyone will have housing, food, and security. Only a world based on working-class unity and collectivity can meet workers’ needs. This is the world that Progressive Labor Party fights for.
Destroy Capitalism with Mass Revolutionary Violence
The brutal police violence in Catalonia reminds us that capitalists don’t play nice when their interests are threatened. When the voters came out, the “democratic” nation of Spain used state terror to smash anti-Spanish dissent. It even shut down the Internet! The bosses won’t let workers vote away the capitalist status quo. Real change will come only with an organized, mass, united working class that is ready to use revolutionary violence. Progressive Labor Party fights to unite the working class under the red flag of communism. Join us!

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Brief History of Spain

The two major nationalist movements in Spain are based in Catalonia and the Basque Country. For nearly a century, local bosses in those two regions have built movements around local nationalism. In the 1920s, after World War I and the Russian Revolution upended the old European power structure, national liberation and separatist movements gained momentum across the globe, from Egypt and India to,Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Spain.
In Spain, a unified country for over 500 years, both the Basque Country and Catalonia saw the formation of independence parties in 1922. This coincided with a period of infighting within the Spanish ruling class. One one side stood the old elite, the monarchists and big land owners; on the other, the new rising liberal capitalists. In 1931, the liberal wing won a temporary victory and established a Spanish Republic. To keep the loyalty of local Catalonian and Basque bosses, the Republican government gave them significant autonomy.
The Spanish Republic was short-lived. In 1936, the monarchists and most of the Spanish military allied under the Spanish fascist party, the Falange. The ensuing Spanish Civil War became the opening battle of the World War II, and the focal point for a mass, international anti-fascist movement led by communists. International Brigades of volunteers were organized by the Communist International and spirited into Spain to take on the fascists. More than a million Spanish workers were killed, as well as many thousands of communists and anti-fascists fighting on the side of the Republic. While the ant-fascist forces lost the battle in Spain, their courageous struggle inspired workers around the world to ultimately defeat the Nazis.
In Spain, which was nominally neutral in World War II, the ruling class united under Franco’s murderous regime. The Basque and Catalonia independence movements were suppressed, though they staged periodic insurrections. But in the post-war period, Spanish fascism became a political problem for the dominant U.S. and German bosses who were fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union and portraying themselves as champions of democracy.  When Franco died in 1975, the Spanish ruling class transitioned to a liberal democracy to gain membership in the European Community, forerunner to the European Union.

NEW YORK CITY, October 10—Over 300 Columbia University students and others held a militant protest against Tommy Robinson, who had been invited by campus Republicans. Robinson, who founded the English Defense League, violently opposes all immigrants, whom he calls criminals. It is Robinson who has been jailed for assault and mortgage fraud. It is ironic that Robinson entered the US from the UK using a stolen passport.
Students from the Muslim Students Association, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Barnard Columbia Socialists, Student-Worker Solidarity (SWS), and Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network united against Robinson. Members of Black Lives Matter, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and several friends of PLP members, who take night classes and teach students by day, also came to protest, despite busy schedules.
Thirty students got inside the poorly attended event and interrupted the speech, holding up signs that read “hate speech = violence” and “Muslims are welcome here.”  Outside, other protestors chanted, made speeches, and marched. The following night a group of about 50 students met to plan actions against upcoming fascist speakers and to defend protestors who entered the hall and have been informed by the Columbia administration that they may be disciplined for their actions.
Liberal Institution Welcomes Racists
Robinson is one of a string of fascists and extreme racists who have been invited to speak at Columbia, including Charles Murray last year. They have been invited under the banner of free speech, which only gives them a platform from which to spread their lies about the working class. The hypocritical Columbia administrators oppose racism in words but in deeds facilitate racist organizing while threatening anti-racist protestors.
No surprise. Columbia is run by a board, 75 percent of which are bankers and corporate executives. They represent a capitalist ruling class whose profit-making requires keeping workers divided, weak, and fighting each other, through various forms of racism and sexism. For example, they need the University community to accept the displacement of mostly poor Black workers from Harlem in order to expand their campus.
Capitalism would have severe difficulty surviving in the U.S., or anywhere, unless the rulers keep wages and living/working conditions as low as possible. They succeed by creating inequalities that divide workers against each other—in particular by forcing non-white and women workers to accept roughly 75percent of the wages of white men on average, whether through lower pay for similar work or because they are forced into less valued jobs. Also the lower levels of health, education, housing and sanitation in Black, Latin, and immigrant neighborhoods save the bosses a bundle. But often unrecognized, these divisions, by severely hindering working class unity, also force down the wages and conditions for white workers, along with their non-white and immigrant sisters and brothers.
PLP members from the community and a nearby activist church in Harlem have been attending Columbia SWS meetings for five years. SWS organizes for better pay and conditions for campus workers, including student workers, and supports the unionization campaigns of adjuncts and graduate student teaching assistants. Almost all of these efforts have been successful because of the students’ militancy and persistence. All the members receive CHALLENGE, and several have attended and spoken at PLP-sponsored May Day marches in recent years. Although these students are very dedicated and pro-worker, we have yet to win them to see the possibility of, and need for, communist revolution. This is a long march, but we will continue to advance.