The Star-Spangled Banner and the American flag are symbols of racism, but they also represent the never-ending wars and mass destruction of U.S. imperialism. When Colin Kaepernick first ‘took the knee’ during a National Football League (NFL) game last August, he was specifically protesting the racist police killings of Black people. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color…this is bigger than football and it would be selfish … to look the other way. There are bodies in the street…and people… getting away with murder.”
But Kaepernick went further: “a system that perpetually condones the killing of people, without consequence, doesn’t need to be revised, it needs to be dismantled!”
As the U.S. rulers move ever closer to world war with it’s imperialist rivals, China and Russia, we must once again remember those cries from the young Black rebels from Ferguson. “The whole damn system has to go.” In the Progressive Labor Party, that means organizing millions of workers to build a multiracial, revolutionary movement to not only ‘dismantle’ this capitalist system, but also replace it with communism, an egalitarian society that fights to eliminate racism and sexism forever.
NFL Owners Promote Racist Patriotism and Imperialism
The NFL is a huge, profit making, mega corporation run by billionaire owners. As they lie about free speech, they have conspired to ban Kaepernick from football, hiring many lesser quarterbacks. Yet, when Army and Navy ‘honor guards’ paraded during halftime ‘shows’ the NFL was paid by the Army and Navy. As Air Force jets performed aerial shows during halftimes, the NFL collected their ‘patriotism’ money from the Air Force. Free speech is not free. It’s bought and paid for.
And the NFL is perfectly suited to promote this militaristic patriotism. You start with the Star Spangled Banner, written by a pro slavery racist, and originally attacking and degrading slaves fighting for their freedom (TheRoot, 7/7). As Edward Curtin says, it “is a celebration of war, meant to stir martial emotions.  And football is the war sport par excellence, extremely violent.... In the 1960s, Brazilian television, in an effort to distinguish football (soccer) from American football, aptly termed it “military football.” (Counterpunch, 9/27).
Build a Mass
Anti-Racist Movement
As more athletes start protesting, questions arise. How to fight racism? Trump wants all kneelers fired. LeBron James, Cleveland Cavaliers basketball superstar, called him a bum. Many cheered. But when Cleveland cops killed Tamir Rice and were acquitted, James said nothing. “I don’t have enough knowledge about it.” Some owners are trying to coopt the movement. They are ‘joining’ their players in a show of ‘unity.’ Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, a million dollar Trump supporter, exemplified this phony unity. He linked arms with the players and kneeled for a few seconds before the anthem was played, then they stood up. That’s no protest at all. Shortly after he announced that players who did not stand would not play. In the PLP we fight for a revolution and an egalitarian, communist world. We welcome people who hate Trump, as we encourage them to join us in the fight for communism. We welcome people who hate racism, but want to ‘improve our democracy,’ even though we think this ‘democracy’ is completely phony. We don’t welcome the racist, billionaire NFL owners.
There is a history of athletes fighting back. The communist Paul Robeson was a militant fighter against racism. The bosses blacklisted him and took away his passport, so he could not perform in Europe. Sprinters Tommy Lee and John Carlos raised their fists on the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. They were vilified, sent home, thrown off the U.S. team, received death threats and had their medals taken away. Muhammad Ali famously said that “no Vietnamese ever called me a ni**er” as he refused to go fight in the Vietnam War. The Government tried to jail him. These athletes, like Karpernick, fought back and paid a price. More must take a stand until we are millions and bringing forth an egalitarian, communist world. Join us!

As the Myanmar military continues its genocidal onslaught—murdering children, raping women, torching whole villages—against the Rohingya people, the U.S. rulers’ media have focused on religious differences in this small country in Southeast Asia. In reality, the mass atrocities and displacement in Myanmar are products of capitalist greed and inter-imperialist rivalry. U.S., Chinese, and local bosses are vying for control over rich reserves of oil and natural gas in Rakhine state, the Rohingyas’ home. Even more critically, U.S. bosses are exploiting the plight of Myanmar’s Muslim minority in a desperate effort to check China’s rise as the dominant power in Asia—and beyond.
China’s “Malacca Dilemma”
China’s ambitious One Belt One Road (also known as the New Silk Road) aims to control Eurasia and East Africa through a land- and sea-based trading network. This multi-trillion-dollar project would create roads, ports, and railroads through Central and South Asia, enhancing China’s access to Middle Eastern and European markets (see CHALLENGE, 3/9/16).
One of six OBOR corridors would connect China to India via Myanmar and Bangladesh. Moreover, Myanmar is “a vital cog in China’s strategy…to avoid its Malacca dilemma” (Huffington Post, 9/23).  At present, 25 percent of the world’s oil—and most of China’s energy supply—is transported through the Malacca Strait, a chokepoint between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
To reduce their vulnerability, guarantee that oil imports from Saudi Arabia flow freely, and strengthen their military foothold in the region, the Chinese bosses established the $10 billion Sino-Myanmar pipeline, connecting the Bay of Bengal to China’s landlocked Yunnan province (Stratfor, 9/14). China is also building a deep-water port in Rakhine at Kyaukphyu, which “will give China highly prized access to the Indian Ocean” (New York Times, 7/20) and is “expected to contribute huge profits to Chinese business conglomerates such as Citic Group” (Huffington Post, 9/23).
As U.S. President Donald Trump neglects to follow up Barack Obama’s overtures to the newly “democratic” Myanmar, now led by genocide apologist (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Aung San Suu Kyi, China is exerting more power in its backyard:
Across Southeast Asia, China is energetically bringing nations into its orbit, wooing American friends and allies with military hardware, infrastructure deals and diplomatic attention…Once completed, ‘Kyaukpyu will be a Chinese naval base,’ said Mr. Maung Aung Myoe, the military analyst. ‘China desperately needs access on the eastern side of the Indian Ocean.’ China is already building Indian Ocean ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and it is seeking approval for one in Bangladesh (NYT, 7/20).
Instability in Rakhine is a problem for Chinese imperialists:
China has a particular interest in pressing the Arakan rebels to the peace table.…Keeping Rakhine free of unrest may have also been a factor in China’s blocking the United Nations from issuing a statement on the allegations of atrocities committed by Myanmar’s army there (NYT, 7/20).   
But for U.S. imperialists, ethnic cleansing in Rakhine could be a pretext for potential military intervention in the region.  Under the smokescreen of “human rights,” the U.S. hopes to destabilize Myanmar and thwart China’s looming regional supremacy:
“[T]he generals at the Pentagon see the [Myanmar corridor] as an enemy supply line. With the U.S. flexing its military muscle in the South China Sea….
[p]lacing Rakhine state under US/NATO protection would be an obvious way to sabotage this project” (Global Research, 9/15).
This is why the Rohingya crisis is getting so much media attention in the West.  While the U.S. imperialists ignore the killing of Yemeni workers by their oil-soaked allies in Saudi Arabia, they cry crocodile tears for the Rohingya. The criminal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria should teach us to be wary whenever the mass-murdering U.S. bosses voice their concern.
Myanmar: This is What Capitalism Looks Like
With a poverty rate of 37.5 percent, Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in Asia; in Rakhine, the poverty rate is 78 percent (CFR, 9/13). The country has the lowest life expectancy in Southeast Asia and the second highest rate of infant and child mortality (World Bank, 2014).
To keep workers from organizing to overthrow this failed capitalist system, the bosses drown them in religion and nationalism. In Myanmar, Buddhists represent 87 percent of the population. Buddhist rulers have persecuted the mostly Muslim Rohingya people for centuries. Since the military takeover in 1962, the government has excluded the Rohingyas from citizenship. They need official permission to marry and have limited access to education, jobs, and residency. In some parts of the country they can only have two children (CFR, 9/13). These restrictions resemble the racist laws imposed by the Nazis against Jewish people in Germany.
Attempts by the Rohingya people to fight back have met with little success, due both to their limited numbers and weak political line. The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), funded by bosses in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (International Crisis Group 12/15/16), is driven by nationalist politics. After ARSA’s recent attacks on government buildings, the ruthless Myanmar government responded  by killing thousands and forcing nearly half a million (including 240,000 children) to leave the country. Aung San Suu Kyi defends these atrocities under the guise of “national security.”  
Meanwhile, her administration acknowledged that it will manage the redevelopment of the razed villages, a potential goldmine for local capitalists. The government plan “is likely to raise concern about prospects for the return of the 480,000 refugees, and compound fears of ethnic cleansing” (Reuters, 9/27).
Long Fight Ahead
There are many lessons to be learned from the tragic developments in Myanmar. One in particular is the role played by the big imperialists in a seemingly “internal” affair. Whenever the bosses’ media pay close attention to crimes against workers, a little digging will reveal the rulers’ economic and political interests—which are never to serve the working class. Only a communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party, can smash the murderous profit system and end racist genocide for all time. Join us!

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, September 18—As growing demonstrations against the anti-worker national budget entered their third week, class struggle here is intensifying. A general strike was called by transport workers, followed by two more days of demonstrations. From the capital to the provinces, up to 10,000 people have angrily taken to the streets to protest outrageous attacks on the working class, including a flat tax of US$186 for access to public administration services and an annual renter’s tax of six to 10 percent. For example, an individual in a home worth US$3226 would pay US$326/year. The bosses’ budget includes more money for the functioning of Parliament and the executive branch than for education and health.
According to Radio Kiskeya, the strike was 95 percent successful around the capital. It was also widely respected in St-Marc, Petit Goave, Les Cayes, and Hinche, all large population centers. Union leaders are calling this a warning strike. If the government persists in going forward with the budget, more actions are planned.
Encouraged by the showmanship of one senator who tore up the budget on the floor of the Senate, the protests began with hundreds taking to the streets. But while a dogfight has surfaced among politicians in Parliament, it will not put an end to capitalist exploitation. Only conscious class struggle can lead to communist revolution and crush capitalism. Workers are voting with their feet for a mass demonstration to organize even more people against the government. Many called for more than tearing up or burning the budget, but for revolution as the only way to address the needs of the workers and students of Haiti.
The bosses and their police are trying to suppress these demonstrations because they threaten the stability of what is locally called the “restavek” bourgeoisie. (Restaveks are children of the poorest sectors of the working class, bought by the wealthy as domestic slaves). The police have answered the protestors with live bullets and tear gas. Several people have been wounded, and the gas has permeated workers’ homes.
In Port-au-Prince, the demonstrations snaked through the city, into middle-class neighborhoods like Pétionville, home to store owners whose products are often unobtainable by workers, and up to Pélerin, where President Jovenel Moïse lives. The police have been particularly brutal as they protect the private property of the rich.
Students from the State University and others gathered in front of the Faculty of Ethnology at the Universite d’Etat d’Haiti. They raised money to rent a sound system and buy materials for placards. Claiming the street, artists among the militants sang revolutionary songs denouncing the bourgeoisie and the State in an event called “Concert tear up, burn the budget.” The crowd took up the call and added its own verses, such as “Tear up, burn down the Parliament.” After each verse, different people took the microphone to encourage more people to join the fight. A Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  member set the tone by calling for class struggle to fight the bosses to the end: “We will not be asked to pay for what should be our rights. It is necessary to revolt against the bourgeois system, which dreams only of more exploitation of the masses.” Every time a journalist tried to question the PLPer, he replied by shaking his sign: “This budget is a conspiracy of the State and the bourgeoisie against the masses.”
In one provincial town, up to a thousand people—practically the entire population—blocked the streets as they joined the popular movement, responding to the call of PLP to fight back against the bosses.
PLers are intent on giving a different kind of political leadership to these mobilizations. At the end of a Port-au-Prince concert, the crowd took off shouting, “Where are we going? To Parliament to tear up and burn the criminal, anti-people budget.” The PLers called for “anti-capitalist revolution.” Many in the crowd, which grew in strength as it marched through the streets, took up this chant as well. Arriving at Parliament, the group denounced the bourgeois politicians and their capitalist bosses for several hours, threatening to invade and burn down Parliament. The police assigned to protect the government were ineffective at containing this angry group.
The struggle in Haiti must continue on the basis of class struggle, not by favoring political or parliamentary leaders who seek mass support for the rulers’ elections. Taxi drivers, workers, street merchants—the majority of people we met agreed with this fight. Class struggle grows daily in Haiti. The masses increasingly understand their situation and the exploitation they are facing. The working class here is strengthening by the day.
Our Party must step up to lead and expose the misleaders, be they bourgeois shills, reactionary nationalists, or fake leftists who espouse reform and elections over communist revolution. It is our job to win the hearts and minds of workers, students, and soldiers. It is our responsibility to organize them into a fighting force to destroy the capitalist system and all that it stands for: exploitation, racism, sexism, national borders, imperialist war. It is our imperative to build a new society, communism, based on equality, where workers rule in our own interest.

This is the first in an extensive series of articles about the Bolshevik Revolution and the triumphs, as well as the defeats, of the world communist movement of the 20th century. We welcome your comments and criticisms.

One hundred years ago, November 7, 1917, marked the beginning of the single most important event of the 20th century, the Bolshevik revolution. Russia’s working class, headed by the revolutionary communists of the Bolshevik Party and its leader, Vladimir Lenin, freed one-sixth of the world’s surface from capitalism.
The world was changed forever. The rulers were now ruled. Exploiters the world over were trembling.
The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848) described why workers were oppressed and told them what to do about it. The Manifesto declared that in making a revolution workers “had only their chains to lose.” Seventy years later the Bolshevik Revolution proved that the chains of oppression can be ripped off completely.
The Communist Party was the crucial factor. Its leader, Vladimir Lenin, won it to be totally committed to revolution, not compromise. Under its leadership the workers single-mindedly pursued the goal of state power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The profit system—the dictatorship of the bosses—was destroyed.
Revolution, Not Reform
Some so-called “leftists” advised against revolution. They claimed that the capitalist system could be reformed so that it could better serve the workers.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks would have none of this. They had confidence in the workers! The communists and workers knew from experience that voting and demonstrations wouldn’t result in a real change of the social order.
The world’s bosses launched a counter-offensive. What was left of the Russian ruling class joined hundreds of thousands of foreign troops from 14 countries, including the United States, that poured into Russia to attempt to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in the cradle” (Winston Churchill).
The fight against this counter-revolution took far longer than the seizure of power. Supported by the vast majority of workers and peasants, the fledgling Red Army triumphed. Foreign soldiers, most of them workers too, did not fight well against them. Workers worldwide rose up to support the first communist workers’ revolution.
In a short time, the U.S. troops refused to fight the Red Army and were sent home. Workers all over the U.S acted in many ways to support the Russian revolution.
Why were the Bolsheviks successful?
1. The Russian bourgeois was very weak and poorly organized. The capitalists had only gained power in February 1917. Russian workers saw no essential differences between the Tsar and the capitalists.
2. The Russian working class had been steeled in revolutionary battle. Insurrections had occurred in 1905 and in February 1917, involving many workers in battle, often under Bolshevik leadership. By November 1917 the Bolsheviks were entrenched in key areas in major cities, particularly in communications, the army, and the navy.
3. The Bolsheviks understood they could turn “imperialist war into civil war.” The Russian bosses’ attention was focused on the European battleground, leaving their internal flank wide open to attack
4. The Bolsheviks had built a worker-peasant alliance, telling the peasants to take all the land from the landowners. This drew all peasants and agricultural workers to revolutionary leadership.
5. Significant portions of the working class and peasantry were won to the key concept of revolutionary violence—without which no revolution can succeed.
6. The Russian working class had the revolutionary leadership of the party of Lenin—the Bolsheviks. They were steeled in battle. They had unbreakable ties to many sections of the working class. They were unswerving in their drive for socialism. They had carried out a protracted political education campaign for nearly 20 years—defeating the misleadership of various pseudo-revolutionary groups.
Achievements
The Soviet system of production was for use, not for profit. In the 1930s, when the entire capitalist world sank into depression, the Soviet Union was building a new society without unemployment and hunger. They created some measure of a decent life for workers in an incredibly short time.
The Soviet Union fought against racism and sexism. The battle against racism was particularly significant. As pro-communist Paul Robeson said about his trips to the Soviet Union, he “felt like a human being for the first time since I grew up.”
In 1941, the bosses again tried to destroy the revolution. Hitler, using all of Europe’s resources and the largest military machine ever assembled, invaded the Soviet Union. Hitler’s prediction of capturing Moscow in six weeks went up in smoke.
All this was accomplished under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. No wonder he is reviled to this day by world capitalism! Now, with the very partial opening of the former Soviet archives and the Trotsky archive, we can see that all the allegations of crimes by Stalin related by pro-capitalist and Trotskyist “historians” are false, without exception.
Lessons to Be Learned
The Bolsheviks were pioneers—the first to try to build socialism and communism. It was inevitable that they would make many mistakes and suffer from many political weaknesses. These ultimately led to the return of capitalism to the USSR.
Today, no country is led by revolutionary communists. But this is a temporary historical setback. We know that “every dark night has its end.” Capitalist exploitation and inhumanity inevitably leads workers to fight back.
Progressive Labor Party is a product both of the old International Communist Movement and of the struggle against its revisionism – capitalist ideas dressed up to sound Marxist. Our movement is daily fighting to learn from the Soviet Union’s great battles and achievements as well as its deadly errors that led to its collapse. Reformism, racism, nationalism and all forms of concessions to capitalism only lead workers to defeat. We are committed to organizing workers, students and soldiers to build a mass worldwide working class Party that will turn this era of imperialist wars into a new, international communist revolution.

Next issue, we will look at the pre-revolutionary period and how the Bolshevik Party was forged in the class struggle.