VIRGINIA, June 8—Forty advocates for changing J.E.B. Stuart High School’s racist name rocked Virginia’s Fairfax County School Board meeting with bold anti-racist speeches amid a cheering throng of supporters.
Students Give Leadership
In this two-year fight, Black students in the high school have given leadership. Two Black Stuart high school students led off tonight’s testimonies, declaring that unless the school board changed the name, it would forever be linked with the racist segregationist school board that named the school in 1958.
“I walk into the weight room [every Tuesday and Thursday] to see a giant mural of J. E. B Stuart painted on a wall in front of me. He’s portrayed like a hero...This sends a message to me that General Stuart and what he fought for is deemed heroic…My ancestors being bought and sold like cattle is OK, because J.E.B. Stuart was a patriot,” said one student.
19th Century Fascist
Stuart was a general and considered the “eyes and ears” of the Confederate Army. He fought to preserve slavery in the 1860s during the Civil War in the United States. Stuart helped capture white anti-racist abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1859. (With the help of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, John Brown organized armed insurrections against slave owners. For his fight against slavery, he was executed.)
Racist Stuart made a name for himself by literally fighting to keep the right to oppress, exploit, and murder Black and indigenous peoples. He served during Bleeding Kansas and in the bloody border wars against indigenous people.
J.E.B. Stuart is the most diverse high school in Fairfax County: only a quarter of the students are white, a little over 60 percent are Latin and Black. This struggle to change the high school’s name is giving the school and county community an opportunity to be on the side of anti-racism. Some adults and students who are in favor of keeping Stuart’s name said they were called white supremacists and felt intimated. But that is no excuse for their racism!
The school board is scheduled to vote on the name change on June 22. More next issue!
Throughout the months of May and June, students across the United States have been taking stands, turning their backs, and loudly protesting the racist commencement speakers their colleges and universities have invited to send them off into the “real world.”
Colleges: Ruling-Class Institutions
Established just less than 400 years ago, the U.S. university system has been a breeding ground for imperialist leaders, think tanks, and providing funding for mass murders around the world.
As a microcosm of the state, college campuses exist to develop the ruling-class thought leaders while also giving liberal-leaning students enough leeway to buy into the façade of activism and first amendment “rights.” College campus sit-ins, peaceful protests, and study groups have often been bolstered by institutions, teachers and administrations until they grew organized, militant, and—most threatening—integrated.
A Contradiction for the Bosses
The bosses, and the institutions they rely on to maintain state power, need racism to keep workers divided. This year, U.S. bosses are in one of their greatest binds in recent years. With the undisciplined, racist, sexist, and fascist Donald Trump at the supposed helm of the country, the main wing of the ruling-class is struggling to maintain order, while also encouraging their biggest resource for ideological control and profit.
College students and workers have historically played a central role in anti-racist movements (see spread above). The Civil Rights movement, protest against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Apartheid in South Africa and Israel were led by integrated student groups.
This year, however, students are under attack for even the most peaceful of protests. Major media outlets, another arm of the capitalist system, ganged up on students for boldly disrupting racist commencement speakers. Meanwhile, new laws in Illinois, Tennessee, Colorado and Arizona are also in consideration in an effort to prevent institutions and students from dis-inviting speakers and force administrations to penalize students who obstruct and protest. (USA Today, 5/10)
Students at Bethune-Cookman Univeristy, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Florida, stood up, turned their backs on, and booed their commencement speaker—Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who was invited to speak after Trump promised funding for HBCUs. Racist DeVos called HBCU’s “pioneers when it comes to school choice,” when in reality, such colleges were the only option for Black workers during de jure segregation. The college’s president publicly chastised this group of all Black students; later on, the bosses’ media attacked them with numerous headlines.
“Some students stood up and turned their back, and the booing was so loud at different points in the speech that the school’s president stood up, interrupted DeVos, took the microphone, and said to the students, “If this behavior continues, your degrees will be mailed to you. Choose which way you want to go.” (The Washington Post, 5/12)
At Yale thousands of graduate students and workers marched toward the commencement ceremony last month to demand the school begin negotiations with a union that was formed by students after the National Labor Relations Board lifted a ban on organizing teachers’ assistants and researchers at private universities. (CHALLENGE, 6/14)
And perhaps the most outrageous attack in recent months was towards the group of integrated students at Middlebury College who shut down a speech by the racist and sexist eugenicist Charles Murray. (CHALLENGE, 4/19) The students have since been charged with serious penalties and been labeled “violent” and “unruly” for protesting the leading voice in eugenics.
Racist teachers and administrators are disguising their racism as pro-free speech. “In this country, threat kind of speech is legal. We have no hate speech exception in the first amendment. Even stopping the most virulent Nazi on campus isn’t free speech; it is civil disobedience,” said James Weinstein, professor of constitutional law at Arizona State University (USA Today, 5/13).
However, students at Notre Dame, a private and predominately white university, have only gotten praise for walking out on Vice President Mike Pence, who was invited to speak at the commencement in lieu of Trump. “School officials knew of the student walkout plans and did not try to stop them. The students – more than 100 out of a few thousand who were earning degrees – walked quietly out, and there were some cheers and boos sounded, through only briefly“ (The Washington Post, 5/21).
Students have historically been given space to explore varying political ideologies and practices at college but within limits controllable by the ruling-class. The bosses play a balancing game between their need for a vibrant movement that keeps the farce of democracy and patriotism alive and their need to control and funnel the movement for their war aims.
Multiracial student movements, a threat to the bosses, are quickly shutdown by any means necessary. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni exposes himself for the ruling-class mouthpiece he is when he instructs working-class and multiracial students to not “bite the hand that feeds them:”
“They ratchet up their language to a degree that weakens its currency for direr circumstances. And they undermine their goals—our goals—by pushing away good-hearted allies and handling ammunition to the very people who itch to dismiss them” (NYT, 6/3).
Pledge to Continue to Fight
CHALLENGE says hats off to all graduates and students who organized against racist speakers! As young and future workers at colleges across the country continue to expose these institutions as racist-for-profit breeding grounds, the need for political leadership and guidance is greater than ever. Commencement speech protests may be the first fightback as students join workforces that are equally as racist, sexist, and segregated.
Graduates, the struggle for a better world continues and the working-class needs you to pledge allegiance to a lifetime of antiracism. Only a multiracial international movement for communism can abolish this segregated society once and for all.
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Review of Yezhov vs. Stalin Dispelling Anti-Communist Myth of Red Hero, Joseph Stalin
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- 15 June 2017 32 hits
The 1930s were a decade of raging worldwide class war. Everywhere, workers were inspired to fight back against capitalism by the example of the world’s first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. From North and South America to Europe, Africa and Asia, communist-led workers led strikes and armed insurrection as the capitalist classes prepared for what became World War II. Within the Soviet Union, the class war raged just as bitterly, but the working class there had one huge advantage over the capitalists and their allies—the workers had won and held state power.
One of the organs of power used by the Soviet Union to hold class rule during this period was the Commission for Internal Affairs (Russian acronym “NKVD”). Soviet workers created the NKVD to manage everything from internal security, to border control and firefighting. For capitalists around the world, lies and partial-truths about the NKVD are key to attacking the example of the Soviet Union.
In particular, anticommunists use a series of executions that occurred from 1936-1939 to slander the entire Soviet workers’ state. Recent scholarship is helping workers around the world understand this period of time. A new book by Grover Furr, Yezhov vs. Stalin, describes the monumental 1930s villainy of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD.
Red Thirties: Building a New World
Black pro-communist poet Langston Hughes once described the Soviet Union of the 1930s in his autobiography as a land with “no Jim Crow,” and also “a land still in flux” in places “where Soviet patterns [of life] were as yet none too firmly fixed.” Hughes marveled at what the diverse, multiethnic Soviet working class was building - without blueprints for their new society - while recognizing it was a state at war with capitalist habits and capitalist allies attempting to mount a comeback.
Despite numerous struggles and an uneven pace of development, masses of workers built an industrial base where there was none before in a matter of a few years. All the while they also built schools, libraries and worked toward abolishing racism, sexist treatment of women, child labor, hunger, illiteracy, and low standards of living. It was not a utopian paradise, but a glimpse of what the working class can do once it holds state power.
As the Soviet Union forged ahead, the rest of the world sank into the Great Depression, fascism, and imperialist war. In 1931, Japanese fascists invaded China; German fascists took power in 1933; Italian fascists invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and both German and Italian fascists invaded Spain in 1936. The Soviet Union’s dizzying progress spurred a sharpening internal class struggle, as pro-capitalist forces inside and around the world recognized the Soviets as a mortal threat.
In a country covering one-sixth of the earth’s surface, even well into the 1930s the Bolsheviks struggled in places to unify their immense state apparatus. Some Bolsheviks, like Nikolai Yezhov, disguised their disagreements and personal ambitions behind the red flag, enough to land him the top job at the NKVD in 1936.
‘The Bad Time of Yezhov’
Furr’s work shows that a significant minority of working-class enemies at first successfully hid their conspiratorial alliances with internal and external working-class enemies, including in the case of some the Nazis and Japanese fascists leading up to World War II.
Scattered widely geographically, Yezhov’s group appeared to the remote Central Committee in Moscow as representatives of the working class. Knowing that the Central Committee was hunting known terrorists after a variety of sabotages and assassinations, Yezhov’s group used their authority to mislabel thousands of dedicated communists, and protect the anticommunists.
Creating chaos and pitting workers against their own state is one of the ways capitalists try to regain power. Through this dual deception they hoped to overthrow the workers’ state and reimpose the capitalist class, certainly in exchange for privileges. Until their plot was discovered and ended, they succeeded in creating their massive mayhem. Yezhov and his anticommunist NKVD associates executed some 700,000 mostly innocent workers, labeling them as enemies of the working class, and the Soviet Union.
Setting The Record Straight
Known in Russian as the “Yezhovshchina,” (meaning: “the bad time of Yezhov”), anticommunist authors like Robert Conquest instead label it the “Great Terror” and blame it on the Soviet leadership and Stalin, a name and blame adopted by most historians ever since.
Historians who endorse the anticommunist version of history blame Stalin for crimes that at first he and his colleagues knew nothing about, and that were halted once he and other Soviet leaders discovered their existence. There are several myths underlying this false version.
Anticommunists claim that Yezhov was only carrying out Stalin’s orders, that there were no conspirators against the state and no collaboration with the Nazis and Japanese fascists, and that confessions at trial by co-conspirators were false and the result of torture.
Furr shows all of these to be false. He examined and quotes from recently released Soviet-era archival documents, among other primary source materials. Furr proves first that the leadership of the Soviet state (Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, Voroshilov, Beria and others) did indeed design its policies in the interests of the working class. Secondly, that class enemies did indeed conspire to commit mass murder and assassination and to overthrow the new working-class state, seize power, and resurrect an exploitative capitalist society.
Lessons from Class Struggle
Running at a little over 200 pages, Furr’s book is accessible to readers with some familiarity with Soviet history and would work well in Progressive Labor Party study groups debating whether or not the working class can seize and hold power, what that might look like, and what we can learn and apply today from the Soviet experience. One takeaway is that the seizure of state power is not the conclusion of a revolution, but the beginning. With the Soviet Union as a guide, we know the capitalist class will do anything to regain power.
With exceptions like Grover Furr, historians under capitalism generally accept the outlook of the capitalist class today in power. Opposition to their accepted outlook from a working class perspective brings retribution, while the rewards include publicity, prizes, promotions, job security, and fame. The anticommunist approach to history is reinforced, and the anti-Stalin outlook is a central feature of most of their writings.
Understanding the actual history of this first pioneering attempt at communist revolution is part of the foundation for the class-consciousness needed for the eventual victory of the world’s working class over the extreme exploitation and oppression of capitalism.
This review cannot begin to answer all the questions that will arise in the minds of thousands of readers. But the book can at least begin to answer them.
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Good Riddance to Zbigniew Brzezinski: Chief Architect of U.S. Imperialism’s Reign of Terror
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- 15 June 2017 28 hits
On May 26, Zbigniew Brzezinski (89), a major architect of U.S. imperialism and servant of the U.S. bosses, finally died. While history is made by the masses and outside the sole influence of just one person, Brzezinski played a disproportionately large individual role in helping shape the capitalist reign of terror we live in today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University in the late 1960s when, during a Progressive Labor Party-led student strike, he called for the arrest, trial and incarceration of the leadership of 1968 campus strikes—and “[i]f that leadership cannot be liquidated at least it can be expelled from the country.” (NY Times 5/26). Brzezinski shared the U.S. capitalist class’s concern for the fate of their empire, and eagerly offered his intellectual services to them.
Many of the student leaders to whom he referred were members of PLP. PLP remains proud to have been the publicly stated enemy of this arch-imperialist butcher!
Vietnam: Blow to U.S. Imperialism
Many readers of CHALLENGE have only known a world in which U.S. imperialism has waged perpetual war in the Middle East. They are too young to remember U.S. imperialism’s vicious assault on—and defeat at the hands of —the working people of Vietnam.
U.S. imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam was a major turning point, and changed the course of world history. Never again would U.S. imperialism adopt all out war, as waged there and in Korea. A “Vietnam syndrome” has forced US imperialism to wage war without exposing ground troops to mass casualties. Brzezinski led the charge into a new era, one where CIA operatives, air power and special operations troops wreak havoc in the furtherance of the interests of U.S. capital.
The U.S. bosses recognized Brzezinski’s usefulness in working out U.S. imperialist policies, despite these constraints, when he joined the powerful Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski was elevated to a top position as National Security Adviser. Brzezinski articulated the strategic imperative that has guided U.S. imperialism in our lifetime—control the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf region, part of a larger worldwide “grand chessboard” that guides U.S. imperialism to this day.
Brzezinski’s boss made this policy plain as day with his “Carter Doctrine” of 1980:
Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
For the capitalists, who see everything in terms of maximizing profit and minimizing costs, oil is by far the cheapest energy source to industrialize and fuel a military. Control of the Middle East means control of the world. He has advised and at times publicly criticized all presidents since Carter, including Barack Obama and most recently Donald Trump, for the absence of any coherent “doctrine” to guide U.S. imperialism (NYT 2/20).
Brezinski, then, has been an active architect of U.S. imperialist slaughter since 1980. This period of time, which includes the complete reversal of the workers’ revolutions in both Russia and China, has seen U.S. capitalism’s lethal grip extend to every corner of the globe.
Godfather of the Mujahideen, al-Qaeda, and ISIS
An outstanding example of imperialist short-sightedness and unintended consequences comes from Carter’s support for the brutal anti-Soviet “mujahideen” forces in Afghanistan.
In 1978, the U.S. bosses, along with the bosses of Pakistan, began secretly funding and recruiting fascist Muslim religious extremists in Afghanistan. They called themselves the “mujahideen,” perverting another religious term for “personal struggle” to justify fascist beliefs. The goal was to overthrow the popular pro-communist government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Brzezinski hoped to “give the Soviet Union its Vietnam” (CHALLENGE, 9/17/08). Secretly supporting the mujahideen with an estimated $40 billion U.S. dollars, Brzezinski himself traveled to Pakistan in 1979, addressing the mujahideen training camps, stating “your cause is right and God is on your side” (The Nation, 2/15/99; BBC documentary “Cold War: Soldiers of God,” 5/8/12).
With Carter, Brzezinski and later U.S. covert support, the Afghan mujahideen recruited from around the world, including rich Saudi playboy Osama bin-Laden, who comes from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families. The PDPA government survived the Soviet collapse until it was overthrown by a new generation of mujahideen fighters taking power: the “Taliban” (Pashto for “students,” short for “students of the mujahideen”). The U.S., Pakistani, and Saudi funding ensured the Taliban “students” came of age in mujahideen training camps, who recruited among thousands of young refugees displaced by war. The networks of Arab mujahideen fighters founded allied groups like “al-Qaeda” (Arabic for “foundation,” referring to their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam).
In the early 1990s, following the first U.S. invasion of Iraq and feeling betrayed by his former U.S. employers for stationing soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda declared war on the United States. This culminated in terrorist attacks around the world, including the two major attacks on New York City, in 1993 and 2001. In 1998, Brzezinski downplayed his terrorist creation as “some stirred-up Muslims” and their global threat as “nonsense” (Counterpunch, 1/15/98). Following the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda took advantage of Iraq’s political vacuum and, in 2011, spread to Syria. In 2013, a faction split, calling itself the “Islamic State,” often called “ISIL” or “ISIS.”
Butcher Brzezinski has left two other deep legacies: anti-Muslim racism and the mass displacement of workers. Much of the vicious anti-Muslim racism spawned by the U.S. state, domestically and globally, is in part thanks to him, as is the refugee crisis born out of imperialist wars.
Brzezinski’s World: Imperialist Slaughterhouse
The period since 1990 has been a trial by fire as U.S. imperialism ravages the Middle East through war and war-induced disease and dislocation. For the entire African continent, the period has been utterly devastating as rival imperialist powers back genocidal regimes to control minerals and resources. The world Brzezinski worked toward, has seen its sole remaining superpower, the U.S., back all sides in resource-rich Congo, where the largest armed conflict since World War II rages. The “free market” that reigns supreme allowed capitalist pharmaceutical corporations to stand idly by while HIV/AIDS ran rampant killing twenty seven million workers to date (aids.org; who.net) with the majority of these deaths being preventable. This same “free” market has starved millions more as arable African farmland is sown with crops for export in pursuit of maximum profit.
Throughout Zbigniew Brezinski’s unfortunately long life, he served U.S. imperialism faithfully, his final act helping Barack Obama craft his murderous policies to try reversing U.S. imperialism’s relative decline. Here was someone dedicated to anti-communism and imperialism, who lived to see Soviet imperialism vanquished and Chinese imperialism take its place as the main rival of the U.S., and who ultimately escaped working class justice. The same will not be true of the capitalist class he worked so hard to protect.
It remains for us to make good on the mortal threat Brzezinski perceived, in embryonic form, at Columbia in 1968 when he confronted the PLP-led student strike: the defeat of U.S. imperialism by powerful new communist movement, one dedicated to learning from the mistakes of past revolutionaries, winning state power and expanding the dictatorship of the proletariat until capitalism is defeated once and for all.
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class has escalated its campaign to check Donald Trump and bring him into line with the bosses’ primary objective: to win mass support among U.S. workers for the next big inter-imperialist war and the fascism the bosses need to wage it.
In the wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the capitalist media scandal around Trump’s possible collusion with Russia is growing by the day. Former FBI chief Robert Mueller was chosen as special counsel to prosecute “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and...any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” (cbsnews.com, 5/17). The bosses are playing hardball. Their intensified effort to discipline their own ranks is a hallmark of rising fascism.
Whether or not Trump and his flunkies actually colluded with Vladimir Putin to help Trump get elected president last fall, the bosses’ open infighting is dangerous for the working class. It distracts from intensifying racist attacks in the U.S. and around the world, such as the U.S.-led airstrikes that have killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria in three years of fighting with the junior capitalists of ISIS (New York Times, 5/25). And it uses Trump’s bizarre and reckless style to build working-class support for the state terrorists who compose the liberal main wing of the ruling class—not to mention the racist, murderous FBI (see box).
Trump, Precarious Servant for U.S. Empire
Trump’s short reign has been a horror for the international working class. He’s launched two raids in Yemen that killed at least 30 civilians (The Guardian, 5/24). He reinstated the racist “global gag rule” that denies family planning funding to organizations that discuss abortion as an option for women. Domestically, Trump has expanded Obama’s racist anti-immigrant policy, creating a climate of fear among all workers, undocumented, documented, and citizen alike. He has appointed overt racists like Betsy DeVos as education secretary and Jeff Sessions as attorney general. He has submitted a draconian, racist budget that slashes billions from what few social welfare programs are left. And his proposed healthcare reform threatens to leave an additional 23 million people without coverage (Congressional Budget Office, 5/24).
The rulers’ master plan is to force U.S. workers to accept fascist conditions in preparation for war with another world power, likely China or Russia. The bosses’ problem is that Trump is too volatile and unreliable to serve as an effective CEO for a U.S. empire in decline.
Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton before him, backed policies similar to Trump’s assaults on workers. But unlike Trump, they were able to hold on to the support of a large section of the working class, including most Black and Latin workers. They were helped by identity politics, which excuse racism and sexism when pushed by Black people. In 2014, for example, Obama signed off on an $8.7 billion cut to food stamps (MSNBC, 2/14). His signature education policy, Race to the Top, was no less destructive and racist than George W. Bush’s much-maligned No Child Left Behind. Obama deported a record 3.2 million immigrants, of whom more than 80 percent had no history of violent crime (Intercept, 5/15). All of this happened with relative quiet from the liberal bosses’ media.
FBI Comey, Not so Disciplined Himself
Unlike Obama or Clinton, however, Trump is unable or unwilling to veil his administration’s flagrant racism and sexism—and he refuses to be reined in, at least up to now. That’s a big problem for the ruling class. Trump’s most brazen act was the unceremonious firing of Comey after the FBI director had launched the Russia collusion investigation.
Comey is somewhat undisciplined himself. Last October, just eleven days before the presidential election, he announced that he had revived the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails of classified information. Though the investigation came to nothing, Comey’s bombshell may have helped torpedo Clinton, the main wing’s candidate of choice. It drew howls of outrage from Democratic Party main-wingers like Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer. Now, however, these same politicians are hailing Comey as a martyr and calling his firing a “Nixonian” coverup (Intercept 5/9). Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, joined a Washington protest to demand appointment of a special counsel (Mother Jones 5/10). Some Democrats and media outlets are even calling for Trump’s impeachment.
This is a message to Trump and the entire political class that their service is always conditional. They can be replaced if they do not serve their ruling-class masters appropriately.
Mueller, the Hammer to Bring Trump into Line
When it came time for the Justice Department to name a special counsel, Robert Mueller was the perfect choice to bridge the partisan divide and help unify the main-wing bosses. Mueller was appointed FBI director days before the September 11 attacks in 2001. He served under both Democrat Obama and Republican George W. Bush, and served them well:
Mueller is as straight an arrow as they come. He is the longest serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover himself and certainly the most influential. He took the FBI from a agency primarily focused on law enforcement and after-the-fact prosecutions and investigations into, really, what is a global intelligence agency deeply focused on counterespionage and counterterrorism cases…(Biographer Garret Graff on NPR, 5/17).
No friend of workers, Mueller can be a credible mediator for disagreements within the ruling class. For as long as they can, the bosses will use the legal system to solve their growing problems. Until they can’t.
Towing the Line of the Grand Chessboard
The first two stops of Trump’s inaugural overseas trip were Saudi Arabia and Israel, both staunch U.S. allies that reflect the deteriorating position of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and the world. The U.S. State Department has known for years that Saudi Arabia has provided “clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region” (Independent, 10/14/16). Israel, meanwhile, is widely hated for its ever-expanding West Bank occupation and apartheid treatment of Palestinians. During the Obama years, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, talked openly of defying U.S. wishes in the region. While Netanyahu has softened his stance since Trump’s victory, Israel remains a questionable ally in a period of intensifying pressure on U.S. imperialist aims.
Different Sides, All Capitalist
Regardless of who comes out on top in this struggle among bosses, workers will lose. While Trump’s open fascism is a threat to the international working class, the gravest mistake we can make is to choose sides in this battle. We cannot support Democratic politicians in their move against Trump, whether they’re mainstream leaders like Schumer and Pelosi or liberal fake “outsiders” like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The Democrats also represent the forces of war and fascism. If anything, they are even more dangerous than Trump and his ilk, because they are better able to deceive and mislead honest, anti-racist workers.
The only path away from these imperialist misleaders is the path to Progressive Labor Party and communist revolution. Our Party and our paper, CHALLENGE, have consistently attacked politicians and media of all strains for what they are: agents of capitalism. A PLP of millions—leading a working class of billions—will sweep them all away.
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FBI: Myth & Reality
The glorification of James Comey and Robert Mueller is a naked attempt to win the working class to support the FBI, a ruling-class institution, as a lesser capitalist evil. But the FBI’s racist history makes it clear that this is a deadly proposition:
Contrary to Hollywood’s image of the heroic FBI rooting out the Ku Klux Klan in the South (as portrayed in the movie, Mississippi Burning), nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the FBI focused on smashing local militant anti-racist groups (such as Deacons for Defense) as well as national organizations, from SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) to the Black Panthers.
The FBI established COINTELPRO, a counter-intelligence program, in an effort to crush both the Communist Party USA and the growing civil rights movement. After the 1963 March on Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover singled out Martin Luther King, Jr. as a primary target. COINTELPRO also targeted Malcom X (Manning Marable, A Life of Reinvention). It has been well documented that the FBI conspired to destroy the Black Panther Party (In These Times, 12/4/13).
The FBI played a crucial role in aiding HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) during the anti-communist crusades of the 1950s. From 1946 to 1952, the FBI doubled its number of agents. In 1951, it launched a secret “Responsibilities Program” that spied on teachers and lawyers, among others. Its most vicious attacks were reserved for Black communists like Paul Robeson.
In short, let us expose the FBI for what it is: a ruthless agent of capitalist dictatorship.