On June 22, I joined my community organization for a forum on sexism. I did not expect the conversation that was to come, in which a fight to understand sexism also became a fight for multi-racial unity.
The forum began with a total of 35 men on one side of the room and the women on the other. Not sure if the men did this on their own or not, but whatever the case, being a communist man, I felt it my responsibility to sit with the women. The leader of the forum began to dissect what is a woman and what is a man. It soon became two long lists of what men and women ought to be by society’s standards. I tried my best to raise the fact that women are paid less than men as well. Not to the benefit of male workers but to the benefit of this profit system, which is run by both women and men.
Right as I was getting the nod of approval from the audience, the woman leading the group read a quote from feminist Audre Lorde. Unfortunately, I don’t have the quote but I remember that it was about how the fight for equality for women, for the LGBTQ community, and the fight against racism are linked and tied together, which is true.
This is when a lawyer from the organization, a Black man, stated, “I am sorry but we cannot worry about the LGBTQ community or white people’s problems because there are more pressing issues in the Black and brown communities.”
A Black woman felt this was the last straw. She said, “Now I don’t wanna be conflicting.”
I said, “please do.”
She said, “I’ve been to countless rallies and marches and you know who I see there most? White people. There are many white people in this fight against racism. When I was at a rally at Riker’s Island, about to get shot and arrested, guess who was there with me, a bunch of white people. I can’t turn my back on anyone who fights for me.”     
The lawyer jumped back in to say, “let me clarify what I was saying, I don’t mean any disrespect, all I’m saying is I can’t see myself fighting for a people with privileges and wealth when Black people are not free.”
A Latin woman countered with, “We’re all oppressed so what’s the difference?” The facilitator wanted to close the discussion with the privilege theory stating that we all have privilege.
I had my hand up for the longest and she let me give the final closing statement. I said, “Everyone is exploited by the system and the rulers use racism to do it. Dr. King knew it well when he gave a speech about white factory workers demanding livable wages. The boss there replied, ‘Take what I give you, or else I’ll hire a N****r, pay him half and get rid of you.’  The rulers of this system need to oppress us at different levels to maintain their profits.” I continued to say, “The concept of privilege is a way to have us bicker about who’s wounded more, when it’s the rulers of this system who have the privilege and have the money and power to do whatever they want. That’s privilege.”
I got the phone numbers of the women who spoke in favor of multiracial unity. I later invited them out to a movie to watch the James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro. Unfortunately, one of them who said she would come had to babysit. She was able, however, to give great feedback on the movie. We’ve stayed in contact, and she is very interested to learn more about our ideas of how we can fight back against racism.

On the fourth of July, the day celebrating the birth of U.S. imperialism, we organized an “Anti-fourth of July” BBQ to educate our base about the dangers of nationalism and to win them to a more international view. The BBQ brought out a significant group of families, friends, and neighbors. It was organized around ideas that came from our base about how to organize events that involve more participation from everyone.
To kick off the BBQ a comrade expressed how nationalism is a threat to all working people because it’s an ideological tool of control. She explained that patriotism gives working people a false sense of identity and belonging to a group that includes their oppressors. U.S. patriotism is always divisive because it promotes racism against the people who are not considered to be “real Americans.” She also mentioned the U.S. is bombing seven different countries, more Americans are incarcerated than anywhere else in the world, and three million immigrants have been deported. Due to the bosses’ propaganda, the working class falsely believes that “their” country is looking out for their best interests, but in fact the bosses’ aims and ambitions drive this system.
What About the Working Class?
We read a short one-page excerpt from historian Howard Zinn that explains how independence from the English meant nothing for slaves, the indigenous, and poor white farmers. It explains how the ruling class uses nationalism to make poor working people fight and die in wars they do not benefit from. The article puts the history in a class perspective and argues that no slave, indigenous or poor person benefited from the victory of the American Revolution—only rich white male property owners did. Slavery continued to exist post-revolution, the indigenous continued to be beaten off their land, and poor white farmers were promised land but got very little or none at all. Today, working people must understand how nationalism is used by the bosses to justify racist attacks and drum up support for imperialist wars.
Need No Borders
In the following small group discussions, we talked about why borders exist, and how only the ruling class benefits from borders. We discussed how nationalism plays into the attacks on immigrants and refugees, who are fleeing countries destroyed by U.S. imperialism. We then talked about the solution to capitalist nationalism—working class internationalism. For their survival, the ruling classes of the world needs the working class divided, so that we are weakened. Organizing the working class on the job and in the factories—breaking the bosses’ racist, sexist, and nationalist divisions—is the only true way to fight the capitalist system and establish power for the working class.
Many in our base added constructive ideas to the discussion. Whenever the working class starts to understand these ideas, it’s one more qualitative step towards a communist future. More participation from our friends and coworkers is key to getting everyone to understand and think about these ideas more critically. Workers can organize to understand this system and smash it.

When the leaders speak of peace,
The common people know that war is coming.    
When the leaders curse war, the mobilization orders are already written out.
—Bertolt Brecht, German communist

On July 4, the celebration of U.S. imperialism, and just three days prior to the G20, the annual gathering of the world’s leading capitalist states and their bankers, North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching Alaska. The launch intensified tensions between the U.S. and China and moved the world closer to the next major war.
While war is inevitable under capitalism, none of the major imperialist powers are presently able to win masses of workers to fight and die for the rulers’ interests. Although the bosses are all planning for war, world events are not fully under their control. Historically, an important task of communists is to warn the working class of coming war and to organize to turn imperialist war into class war for communism, where the working class seizes state power. That task is now more important than ever.
Nuclear Weapons in an Inter-Imperialist Flashpoint
North Korean bosses, led by Kim Jong-un, have learned the fatal danger of giving in to the United States. They witnessed the overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the top Libyan boss for more than 40 years, after Libya surrendered its nuclear weapons program. “That is what Mr. Kim believes his nuclear program will prevent—an American attempt to topple him. He may be right” (New York Times, 7/5).
The Korean Peninsula is a historic buffer and invasion route, a node of vital imperialist interests in East Asia. The U.S. threat of force was aimed to intimidate North Korea and China and reassure its wary allies. But despite talk of a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s missile installations, U.S. maneuverability is limited by its own internal instability and increasing isolation.
Shifting Alliances, Global and Regional
The weakening of U.S. imperialism correlates with a global power shift. The major U.S. imperialist rivals, China and Russia, appear to be drawing closer to each other, at least for the moment. A temporary collaboration between the U.S. and China to subdue North Korea has given way to a joint effort by China and Russia. The two countries’ foreign ministries have proposed a moratorium on North Korea’s testing of nuclear explosive devices and ballistic missiles while asking the U.S. and South Korea to halt their “large-scale joint exercises” (The Duran, 6/5).
Indeed, Russia and China have common interests there. Both share a land border with North Korea and have diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. But, above all, both are desperate to check US ambitions in their backyards. It’s this desire, this fear of being hemmed in by the West and its allies, that is one of the factors pushing Moscow and Beijing together in a seemingly ever-tightening embrace (CNN, 6/7).
Instability Begets Instability
The relative decline of the U.S. as the top imperialist super-power is reflected in the behavior of its longtime regional allies in East Asia, Japan and South Korea. The new president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, claims the country will “learn to say no” to U.S. rulers (Washington Post, 5/9). South Korea has already stopped deployment of the U. S. THAAD anti-missile system, which China considered a threat. Moon Jae-in is well aware that his nation would be North Korea’s first target in a nuclear war.
Japan, the main regional rival to China and main regional ally for the U.S., is also wavering. Japan felt slighted by Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade agreement embraced by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. By entering a new trade deal with the European Union, Japan sent the U.S. a message: “Both [Japan and the EU] want to show that they can fill the vacuum left by America’s withdrawal under…Trump from its role as the world’s trade leader” (The Economist, 7/8).
Diplomacy + Military Buildup =Inevitable War
For a capitalist power in crisis and decay, the solution is sure to be war. Diplomacy—and its inevitable rupture—paves the way. As the bosses’ media noted, North Korea’s actions were “quickly closing off the possibility of a diplomatic solution” and the United States was “prepared to defend itself and its allies with its considerable military forces if need be” (Reuters, 7/6).
Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, the leading think tank in service to U.S. hegemony, recently rejected two U.S. options: accepting North Korea as a nuclear state or an immediate military strike. With diplomatic negotiations having repeatedly failed to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, the best Haass can propose is “more creative diplomacy,” a transitional step toward a war that will slaughter millions of workers:  

“Trump correctly concluded that the greatest threat to U.S. national security is North Korea’s accelerating nuclear and missile programs…
An interim agreement would not solve the…problem…And even if diplomacy failed again, at least the United States would have demonstrated that it tried negotiations before turning to one of the other, more controversial options” (Foreign Affairs, July/August).

For all their hypocritical talk about diplomacy, sanctions, and the horrors of nuclear conflict, the U.S. bosses are just buying time. Preparations for bigger wars are proceeding at full speed. New
submarine-based “super-fuze” devices triple the killing power of the U.S. ballistic missile arsenal, which was already exponentially more threatening than North Korea’s nukes. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes (3/1), the implications for World War III are clear:
“Russian planners will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly feasible US preemptive nuclear strike capability—a capability that would require Russia to undertake countermeasures that would further increase the already dangerously high readiness of Russian nuclear forces. “
Need Nationalism for Warfare
The U.S. bosses know from past experience (such as in Vietnam) that technological superiority is not enough to prevail in war. Unless masses of workers—including working-class soldiers—are won to lethal nationalist ideas, the capitalist rulers will lose. For all of Trump’s weaknesses, his “America First” sloganeering helps the bosses divide the international working class, and mislead U.S. workers into identifying with their murderous rulers. The bosses’ media plays its anti-communist part by attacking North Korea as a repressive dictatorship and painting its workers as unthinking robots. In reality, every government on earth today—with or without the cover of “democratic” elections—is a dictatorship of the capitalist class. And as the history of the Korean Peninsula attests, workers have the potential to fight back (see above article).
Turn Imperialist War Into Class War
In the 21st century alone, imperialist war and the ravages of capitalism have destroyed the lives of tens of millions of workers. An inter-imperialist proxy war has decimated Syria, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions made refugees. Imperialist war remains the bosses’ ultimate weapon in their perpetual battle to dominate resources, markets, and labor, all in pursuit of maximum profit.  
Living on the brink of wider war has become the “new normal.” This is a great danger for the international working class, especially in the absence of a mass anti-imperialist mobilization, as we saw in the communist-led and communist-influenced movements during the Vietnam War.
With unpredictable politicians like Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un, a major war could erupt sooner rather than later. But most workers are not yet won to the bosses’ agenda. The Progressive Labor Party’s task is to rebuild hope and class consciousness among the workers of the world—to show that communism is a future worth fighting for. Let’s turn these imperialist wars for profit into a class war for communist revolution. Let’s redouble our efforts to build PLP. Power to the working class!

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, July 8—Fifteen hundred anti-racists militantly confronted the KKK
today, shouting powerful chants that forced them to shut down their racist rally. PLP and members of the Seven Hills Progressive Society from Lynchburg Virginia joined this multiracial rally of workers and students. As usual, the local ruling class used their state power to protect these racists, deploying around 200 kkkops in riot gear to attempt to hold back the anti-racist counter-protesters. This exercise of state power was a reminder that racism is critical to the life of their capitalist system.
Chased the Klan Away
The group of about 50 Klansmen, some in their traditional white robes, came to Charlottesville to oppose the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, a leading figure of the pro-slavery U.S. Confederacy. They were escorted in by the kkkops, who had been sent to “protect members of the Ku Klux Klan from counterprotesters” (New York Times, 7/8). They were quickly drowned out by the chants of the demonstrators. PL’ers joined antiracist chants, and many demonstrators took CHALLENGE, vowing to continue the struggle against racism and the KKK. In just under an hour the Klan members finally slunk away. The antiracists refused to let the Klan go quietly, and chased after them, fiercely chanting. The riot cops viciously responded by attacking the anti-racist demonstrators with tear gas and 22 arrests.
State Terror Unleased on Antiracist Protesters
It’s no surprise that the bosses used their cops to attack antiracists, but protect the KKK instead. Since the founding of this country racism was used to justify slavery, the system Robert E. Lee fought to defend. Numerous local, state and federal laws passed over centuries were required to
entrench racist divisions inside the working class, and weaken our ability to fight back against our exploitation. The most vicious state terror was used by police on working people who insisted on struggling together against exploitation (see Lerone Bennett’s “Road Not Taken” on the lynch law of colonial era as well as the Hollywood film “Free State of Jones” on the Reconstruction era which followed the Civil War.)
The kkkops brought out against the antiracists today functioned in this capitalist tradition when they attacked us. As the PLP chant goes: “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan: all are part of the bosses’ plan.”
In fact, the mayor of Charlottesville, Mike Signer, called on residents to stay away from the rally, as if nonviolence defeated the Confederacy. He tried to encourage workers to attend alternate events orchestrated by NAACP misleaders. Whenever the KKK or Nazis rear their ugly head, liberal misleaders and churches do their best to keep people from fighting back.
Signer’s pleas to ignore gutter racism clearly didn’t stop these 1,500 fighters that boldly showed up. One anti-Klan protester said that she wanted to come “because I believe that if you just stay
silent, nothing gets done” (npr.org, 7/9). When the Klan is confronted by multiracial fightback, they are terrified. PLP has a long history of beating them back and driving them out of our streets.
When the working class rejects passivity and organizes multiracial fightback against gutter racists like these, and the racism of this system, we are training for when we will need to defeat the capitalists for good.
The militancy of these 1,500 antiracists shows the potential of the working class to win. Turning the fight against racism, sexism, and nationalism into an international fight for a working-class run society—communism—is the only way to once and for all smash the horrors of this racist and sexist capitalist system.