The conflict of 1914 was the “seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. There is no reason to suppose the [China]-American conflict of a decade hence would not be the seminal catastrophe of the twenty-first.
— The National Interest, 9/7/16.
China’s recent imperialist expansion clashes head-on with the need of U.S. capitalism to maintain its top-dog status, signaling another step toward world war. Despite July’s ruling against them by the international Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Chinese imperialists continue to sail their ships through the Scarborough Shoal (Washington Post, 9/7). According to the Philippines military, these ships were capable of dredging sand—in other words, building more islands. The Shoal is part of a “strategic triangle” near the Philippines “that would allow Beijing to control the South China Sea” (qz.com, 9/11).
The international working class is caught squarely in the middle of this dogfight. Workers are the ones who fight and die in imperialist wars; the bosses will spare no worker in their quest for domination of profit, labor, and resources. Regardless of which capitalist power winds up on top, workers will suffer mass casualties, racist and sexist exploitation, and extreme state terror. The Progressive Labor Party fights for communism, a system that will smash racism, sexism, and imperialist war for all time.
Primer for War
The shift of global power now underway—the relative decline of the U.S. empire, and the surge of China—is a primer for war. Prior to World War I, the Ottoman and Russian empires were falling, and the U.S. was early in its rise. By the end of World War II, U.S. imperialism had established worldwide dominance. But that was then. Today the U.S. faces challenges on many fronts: Russia, ISIS, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and China. This editorial will focus on the clash with China and analyze The National Interest article published two days after the G20 summit conference in Hangzhou, China: “Why America and China Today Are Like Pre-World War I Europe.”
The bosses are now openly admitting what PLP has asserted for years. Disputes over the South China Sea, more assertive regional powers like Japan and the Philippines, the creation of the U.S.-dominated Trans-Pacific Partnership, and China’s One Belt, One Road initiative are moving the world toward a broad global conflict. While these developments are fluid and could go in many directions, ruling-class academic Jared McKinney lays out a blow-by-blow scenario for the next world war:
The creation of new flashpoints in the East and South China Seas is the first stage. This has already happened.
The South China Sea is essential to China’s bid to establish itself as the new top-dog imperialist. China’s economy depends on foreign trade, 90 percent of which travels by sea, which puts the rising superpower in a vulnerable position. In 2013, 82 percent of China’s crude oil imports passed through the Strait of Malacca, a maritime choke point controlled by the United States (Stratfor, 6/24/2015). When China builds islands with military capabilities and flouts international maritime law, it is pushing back aggressively against U.S. imperialism. As all imperialists understand, those who control the movement of oil control the world.
The increased number of Chinese boats in the Scarborough Shoal, a “precursor to possible building of structures on the shoal,” is just the latest example of capitalist China’s ambitions (Reuters, 9/8). In response, the U.S. and its ally, Japan, are increasing their military resources in the South China Sea by arming patrol ships and surveillance aircraft, and by training military forces in Malaysia and the Philippines (Stratfor, 9/7).
It’s only a matter of time until the U.S. sends more troops to these regions. “By positioning sufficient troops forward, including ground forces in Japan and the Philippines, the U.S. could…offset China’s military buildup” (Foreign Affairs, September/October).
Strengthened anti-China groups (both military and economic) are the second stage; this is currently under way.
In addition to challenging the seas, China is making what may be the biggest economic development plan in history, “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR). Funded by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), China’s rival to the U.S.-backed World Bank, this is a plan to develop markets and infrastructure in over 60 countries across Asia, Africa, and Europe. OBOR is luring a number of national bosses traditionally allied with the U.S., from Saudi Arabia (the largest source of U.S. oil profits) to Djibouti (home to a U.S. military base) to Turkey, the no longer reliable corridor from Europe to the Middle East.
The strategy behind the Belt and Road Initiative is to diversify transit lines, thereby mitigating China’s vulnerability to external economic disruption and reinvigorating China’s slowing economy (Stratfor, 6/24/15).
U.S. bosses have responded by locking down their allies and creating their own economic alliance, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), though it has yet to be passed by Congress. The TPP is a trade agreement among twelve countries in North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania, similar to the Clinton administration’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
An intensified arms race with China and simultaneous constructed crises, typically over “alliance credibility,” are the third stage.
As China advances to realize its global ambitions, it must build a military to protect Chinese capitalists’ investments. China’s military is still weak, as compared to the U.S., but it is strengthening quickly. China just launched the world’s first quantum satellite, which can easily detect stealth planes and is highly resistant to jamming. They are also close to finishing the first Chinese-made aircraft carrier, a big step in extending their military reach.
Peaceful resolution of a few crises is the fourth stage. It’s here that…the statesmen insist on ‘firmly’ defending ‘present-day interests,’ having no fear of the specter of war.
U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden writes, “The next administration will have to steer a relationship with China that encompasses both breakthrough cooperation and, potentially, intensified competition” (Foreign Affairs, September/October). It’s no coincidence that China, Australia and the U.S. recently staged their third annual joint military survival training exercise “to build cooperation and trust”—just one week before Russia and China were to conduct an eight-day naval drill in the South China Sea (People’s Daily, 9/11). Temporary cooperation, a sign of weakness for a constrained U.S., will inevitably give way to wider conflict.
U.S. Says: Mobilize for War, Draft
In light of the upcoming election of the next chief servant of arch-U.S. imperialists, Foreign Affairs (the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, the leading think tank for the main finance wing of U.S. capitalism) dedicates its entire September/October issue to future war strategy. What the U.S. self-admittedly needs but lacks are class unity and ground forces. As conflict with China intensifies, the U.S. ruling class is insecure about many things, among them a disjointed Congress and a “broken military system.”
Co-writing with one of the bosses’ favorite strategists, Michael O’Hanlon, disgraced former general and war criminal David Petraeus (Afghanistan, Iraq) calls the U.S. armed forces “the best military in the world today, by far,” but cautions that it must be ready to handle multiple battles simultaneously. These ruling-class insiders criticize Barack Obama’s plan to cut back the active-duty Army:
Washington might declare its lack of interest in large-scale land operations and stabilization [occupation] missions, but history suggests that eventually it would find itself engaging in them nevertheless…The current and future army must be ready to handle a wide range of possible challenges.
They go on to call the current military budget of $600 billion a “bargain,” and advise against further cuts. If the U.S. is to check China’s imperialist ambitions, the bosses will need more than a TPP. They will need a willing army.
Making a Draft Palatable
As reflected in Foreign Affairs, the U.S. ruling class is now openly calling for a draft:
“The only way to create a military reserve that looks like the United States [demographically] is to empower the state to require involuntary service. The trick is to make the empowerment politically palatable.” The bosses know they need a military that is “equitable and inclusive: no exemptions for the well-to-do.”
While racism and divisions within the working class prop up the capitalists’ profit system, these divisions also limit their maneuverability. The bosses lament their lack of an essential aspect of fascism: all-class unity. Presenting a “people’s army,” as the CFR calls it, is contingent upon building a patriotic “America First” mindset. This has been a big struggle for the rulers, as the massive unpopularity of both Democratic and Republican politicians attests.
Who will pay for these coming oil wars? The working class. The main causes of U.S. financial woes “are the government’s rapidly increasing debt and the expanding cost of entitlement programs…It is on the domestic front where the tough choices will have to be made in order to defend the nation’s security and economic well-being.”
Only through fascist control on the domestic front can the imperialists gain an edge on the war front. To mobilize for war, the bosses need intensified nationalism and patriotism to pacify the working class into accepting lower wages and benefits and massive state terror. Tax dollars will be funneled into the buckling U.S. infrastructure. Last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a grade of D+. It estimates an investment of $3.6 trillion will be needed by 2020 if the U.S. economy expects “to be the most competitive in the world” (Wired, 1/23/15).
Turn Imperialist War Into Class War
To paraphrase Marx, every problem contains the elements of its own solution. World War I gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state. World War II gave rise to the Chinese Revolution. The march towards World War III will give rise to the conditions for a worldwide communist revolution. Everywhere in the world—including China and the U.S.—the international working class is fighting back.
Fighting back counts. September 9 marked the 45-year anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion in upstate New York, when 1,300 prisoners revolted against brutal, racist conditions. For four days, before liberal Governor Nelson Rockefeller launched his massacre, they were in charge. This example of Black working-class-led rebellion lives on as a terrible reminder for the bosses—and as an inspiration for our class.
The bosses are using the election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to push sexism and divide the working class. Trump’s sexism is out in the open. Beyond his crude verbal assaults on women journalists and women in general, he created a brutally poisoned workplace environment in his family’s real estate empire. He poisoned his office with sexist comments and sexual harassment (New York Times, 5/14). Trump has used both racism and sexism to build his racist movement. Among his favorite targets for attack are immigrant women with children born in the U.S. (CBS News, 8/19/2015).
But the most damaging sexist in this election isn’t Donald Trump. While Hillary Clinton’s sexist attacks against working-class women have been less exposed by the ruling-class media, they are even more brutal.
A Sexist Since Arkansas
Contrary to the capitalists’ portrayal of Clinton as deeply caring about women and children, she has been eager to show the bosses she will do whatever it takes to keep them in power. A willingness to attack the working class is ultimately what the bosses need in their politicians. They particularly value the ones who feign compassion while they kill. Here is “democracy” under capitalism: an electoral choice between one racist, sexist mass murderer and another. This reality can’t change until the working class takes power and builds a communist society.
Clinton has been proving her worth to the bosses since her husband, Bill Clinton, was governor of Arkansas. In 1983, the Clintons blamed the problems of the state’s woefully underfunded and racist schools on a low-paid teaching force made up mostly of women. The cornerstone of their education reform was a mandated skills test for already licensed teachers, a sexist device to fail and fire large numbers of women. Many Black women teachers, in particular, were forced to leave Arkansas. The poor women left behind were essentially forced to pay for the state’s public schools. As Counterpunch (11/15/2007) noted:
The plan Mrs. Clinton came up with showcased teacher testing and funding the schools through a sales tax increase, an astoundingly regressive proposal since it imposed new costs on the poor in a very poor state while sparing any levies on big corporations. The plan went through. Arkansas’ educational ranking remained abysmal, but Hillary won national attention as a “realistic Democrat” who could make “hard” choices, like taxing welfare mothers.
Beginning in Arkansas in the 1980s, Clinton worked long and hard to gain the favor of Walmart, arguably the biggest exploiter of women in the U.S. (Today, the company’s U.S. workforce of 1.4 million includes 815,000 women, many of them paid poverty wages.) Rose Law Firm represented Walmart; Clinton spent six years on the company’s board of directors. Her tenure coincided with Walmart’s successful effort to smash a union-organizing drive, an issue where “she was largely silent” in the boardroom (New York Times, 5/20/2007).
In the 1990s, after Bill Clinton was elected president, Hillary Clinton took a lead role in promoting the administration’s sexist, racist policies. Many are familiar with Clinton’s racist fear-mongering about “super-predators” and her enthusiastic promotion of the 1994 crime bill that led directly to mass incarceration. Though the great majority of the 2 million prisoners in the U.S. are men, women have borne much of the Clintons’ attack. Nearly one of two Black women in the U.S. has a family member in prison. Between 1985 and 2007, the incarceration rate for women “increased at nearly double the rate of men” (The Sentencing Project, 2007).
In 1996, Clinton took her role as lead sexist to a new level by helping to assure passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, also known as welfare reform. “After having supported her husband’s goal of ‘ending welfare as we know it,’ Clinton was instrumental in [building] up support….This bill…effectively ended welfare programs designed to provide real assistance to women and children in desperate need” (Global Research 8/21).
Attacking Women Across the Globe
Clinton’s sexist attacks are not limited to women workers in the U.S. As Secretary of State under Barack Obama, she was instrumental in the plan to trigger the genocidal Syrian civil war: “When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change” (Huffington Post, 2/14).
Clinton’s war in Syria has killed 500,000 people, about the same number of children starved to death in Iraq under her mentor, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Workers trying to escape the carnage of U.S. imperialism are in Clinton’s sights as well. As Obama’s Secretary of State, she engineered the 2009 coup in Honduras to install a pro-U.S. government and then insisted on the deportation of undocumented children fleeing the violence. As she callously explained in February at the Democratic Party presidential debate, “We had to send a message to families and communities in Central America not to send their children.”
Trump or Clinton, Sexism Wins in November
Voting will never end sexism. Whether Clinton or Trump wins in November, the bosses will require the new president to continue to push their sexist, racist agenda to divide the working class. It’s obvious that Trump is mobilizing a mass movement to pit white workers against Black, Latin and Muslim workers, and to demean and dismiss women along the way. Clinton has served the bosses in a less openly fascist but even more deadly fashion. While pretending to be on the workers’ side, she continues to lead the charge in the bosses’ anti-woman attacks. Many women, and younger women workers and students in particular, are rejecting her misleadership. They understand that a boss is a boss—regardless of race, religion, or gender.
BROOKLYN, September 8—Workers, professors, and students unite against the racist and sexist lockout of professors at Brooklyn Long Island University (LIU)! Students are leading the fight: hundreds walked out of their classes and they lead the daily protests with chants and signs. Electricians, carpenters, and custodians from LIU haven’t had a contract for four years and also joined in.
In solidarity, several dozen members of the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York (PSC-CUNY), including members of the Progressive Labor Party, came to the demonstration. This is an important struggle for the working class because students, professors, and workers are seeing that this is everyone’s struggle. When workers unite, we are a force to be reckoned with and we are one step closer to communism!
Students Bear the Burden
The professors are locked out without salaries or health benefits because the administration wants to force already low-paid adjunct professors to accept pay cuts. This is just the latest attack. For the past two years, LIU President Kimberly Cline has made cuts to departments and student services and laid off professors, forcing other to take on higher work loads. All this translates to students getting fewer resources and a worse education. Cline says it is to “balance the budget” while she pockets an annual salary of more than $650,000.
These budget cuts attack students and make it increasingly difficult to get an education. Students at LIU pay over $34,000 in tuition, with tuition increasing every year. That doesn’t even include the cost of food or housing. Many go into crippling debt just to pay for college. What do they get for their money? The LIU administration replaced 400 of the faculty with a couple hundred “scabs with doctorates” who were unprepared or unqualified to teach the first day of class. When professors are attacked, students bear the brunt.
Several speakers at the rally also pointed out that these attacks are racist and sexist. The LIU C.W. Post campus has mostly white students, while the Brooklyn campus is over 50 percent Black, Latin, and Asian students and 70 percent women. Students pay roughly the same tuition, but funds are re-routed to the LIU C.W. Post campus. Professors at the Brooklyn campus make lower salaries and receive fewer benefits. One of the demands of the faculty union, the LIUFF, is for equal salaries for both campuses.
Worker-Student Alliance
All across the country, both public and private universities are using more and more non-tenure track, contingent professors—adjuncts—who are given low salaries and few, if any, benefits. Workers seldom get new contracts to match the insane cost of living. Students are constantly paying more in tuition and getting less for their money. That’s how capitalism works everywhere: bosses maintain profits by making it easier to fire workers and by cutting benefits and resources.
The fight at LIU is for students, workers, and faculty everywhere. The bosses want us to believe that professors, students, and manual workers all have different struggles and that they must fight back separately. That is why it is key that all different workers are coming together in this struggle. The protesters understand that if management is able to lock out union members and force them to accept concessionary terms, it’s a blow to working people everywhere.
As the working class at LIU fight for better living conditions, we must all follow their example. Workers and students everywhere should support the professors and students of LIU. CUNY students are facing tuition hikes and should join the struggle. CUNY professors, and especially adjuncts, are facing similar attacks and must show solidarity. Demand that our unions rally in solidarity. Rank and file members should demand that the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) organize its hundreds of thousands of members to come to LIU, join the picket lines and shut the campus down until we win this struggle!
Let’s not forget that as long as the bosses still run this capitalist system, they can always take back whatever we win in our struggles. We need to build solidarity, fight racism and sexism, and organize for a better world in the future! The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is organizing in over 25 countries against the many abuses workers suffer under capitalism. These abuses will only end with communist revolution where workers run the world. Staff and students at LIU should join this worldwide struggle. Join us in the fight for communism.
PAKISTAN, September 14—Pakistan has become a laboratory for the capitalist bosses to see how much labor they can grind out of the working class while worsening their misery, but the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is growing in the fight to organize workers into our international party. All over Pakistan, workers are organizing small and big fights against the bosses, and coming into conflict with the influence of capitalist politicians and professional fake leftist misleaders, who try to sell out the struggles.
PLP is striving to give the working class true leadership and build a mass party that can end capitalism and build a state run by the working class: communism. To succeed in communist revolution, we have to smash the bosses’ state by freeing the working class from the illusions pushed by these misleaders. PLP in Pakistan has been exposing the misleaders’ role while leading the struggles against the bosses and their system- in industries all across the country!
Roll Call of Workers’ Fightback
Below are a few of the struggles PLP is in the thick of in Pakistan.
-Brick kiln workers, many of whom are women, are the most exploited in Pakistan. They are routinely tortured, harassed, and raped by the kiln owners. They are also among the worst paid. Kiln workers are striking and hunger striking for the implementation of a minimum wage for kiln workers: 1,036 Pakistani rupees per 1,000 bricks made, which is about $9.94 in U.S. dollars.
—Electricity workers have held nationwide rallies, protests and meetings to press the government to accept their demands. Workers raised slogans urging the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) management to ensure safe working conditions to the field staff. There has been a rise in fatal accidents involving the line staff during the past year. Workers and PL’ers said it is capitalism which has no concerns about the lives of the working class, because capitalism needs more and more profit at the cost of ever more working class lives. PL’ers and supporters condemned the so-called leaders of their trade union, and declared only the fight for international communist revolution can improve the lives of the working class.
—Comrades and friends in the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) trade union are protesting against the bosses, shutting down work at different WASA stations and urging the government to implement their charter of demands. The demands include payment of three-month salaries to employees, one-month salaries to the sacked contractual and work-charged workers, reinstatement of laid-off workers, implementation of deceased’s sons quota, payment of provident fund, gratuity and other allowances.
—Hundreds of workers and PL’ers working for MOL (a Hungarian oil and gas company) organized a strike against the firm’s contract system. Workers gathered outside the main gate of the central processing facility where they staged a protest sit-in, restricting the movement of the company vehicles. They chanted slogans against the MOL administration, claiming they had been working in the company for the last eight years on contract at very low wages. The workers said they would not tolerate the cruelty under the contract system anymore, and demanded that they be brought under the direct payroll of the company with all perks and privileges which were being provided to the firm’s other employees. Meanwhile, on the alleged directives of the administration of the company, police raided the protest camp and arrested about 100 workers. The workers were later set free by the police when their fellow workers and comrades, waving red flags, marched and agitated for their release.
—Teachers and nurses are agitating against the bosses’ policy to exploit them vigorously without increasing their wages and securing their lives. Nurses and other health workers are organizing demonstrations in different parts of the country, but their union misleadership routinely compromise with the authorities to break the strikes. Teachers are still waiting for the fulfillment of the bosses’ promises about better service structure and resolving their promotion issues but nothing changed because of their puppet right-wing union leadership. Teachers began boycotting academic activities at government universities across Sindh, Pakistan’s largest and most industrialized province, as academic activities were suspended at eight major public sector universities in the province. The so-called leadership of the Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Association (FAPUASA) is doing nothing for academic staff except to get a good position or posting for them. However, in this fight also, PLP is struggling to expose these misleaders.
‘Politicians and Pushers…’
When Pakistan’s capitalist politicians aren’t busy pushing illusions on the working class with nationalism, sexism and racism, they’re blaming each other for corruption and money laundering. They serve Pakistan’s capitalist class well by hiding the real issues for the working class - exploitation, low wages, long working hours without overtime, no safety at workplaces, poverty, and increasing unemployment.
Unemployment is increasing on a daily basis for many workers. No social service structure exist even for impoverished government employees. The bosses harass and assault women workers with impunity, while workers are caught in the middle of various feuding mafias and terrorist groups. Not a single trade union or employee’s organization organizes actions against any of this. PL’ers are engaged with the working class to expose that the people claiming to be our “leaders” are in the pockets of Pakistan’s top bosses. Pakistan’s capitalists depend on keeping the working class here submissive and beaten down, while they fulfill their expanding regional imperialist ambitions.
Pakistan: Vital to Global Imperialist Chessboard
Pakistan’s capitalists were, for decades, reliable U.S. imperialist allies. Today they are central players in the Chinese capitalist class’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR), otherwise known as the “New Silk Road.” The OBOR project consists of $1.4 trillion in infrastructure projects like railroad and highway networks and deep-water ports, pushing four billion workers in 64 countries into a Chinese capitalist-dominated market ten times the size of the markets dominated by U.S. imperialism. In particular, the
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has the potential to unblock vast swathes of South Asia, with [Pakistan’s deep-water port] Gwadar, operated by China Overseas Port Holdings, slated to become a key naval hub of the New Silk Roads (Sputnik News, 8/31/16).
Pakistan’s involvement with OBOR increased along with its status as a full member of the Russian and Chinese imperialist-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) (Voice of America, 7/7/15). The SCO is an international military alliance designed as a rival to the U.S. imperialist-led NATO. Much as NATO’s military power allied with the European Union allowed U.S. imperialism to project its economic power following World War II,
a lot of the (OBOR) action happens in member-states or observers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The New Silk Roads are about to be totally intertwined with…the SCO as a security-economic cooperation umbrella (Sputnik).
The rise of the Russian/Chinese imperialist OBOR/SCO bloc sharpens the rivalry with the fracturing U.S. imperialist-led NATO/ EU bloc. The U.S. capitalist class, declining but still heavily armed and ready to defend their global empire, will not concede many such vital “pieces” of their imperialist chessboard without all-out war. The threat of World War III looms in this intensifying imperialist rivalry.
PLP is involved in organizing different small and big struggles against the capitalist system to show the working class that they are more than just chess pieces in an imperialist game. The working class can forge its own world, and through international communist revolution we can get rid of these imperialist wars, exploitation, poverty, slavery, illiteracy, racism, nationalism and terrorism- once and for all. Our fight continues. We have a world to win!
SAN JOSE, CA, September 2—“Same enemy same fight, to smash sexism we must unite,” PLP and other anti-sexists at the Santa Clara Hall of Justice where rapist Brock Turner was released.
Turner was convicted of three felonies for sexual assault against an unconscious woman and was sentenced to a mere six months in jail, only serving three. Progressive Labor Party gave leadership across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City to protest the special oppression of women (see LA report on page 3).
Building the Action
We built support for the protest by making posters and selling CHALLENGE at a public university in the Bay Area. We canvassed the day before, too. Eleven people, mainly women, came out to make posters. We also signed up eight students to either come to the protest at the Santa Clara Hall or come to future Party events. Many were angry at the sexist injustice system and one student said, “Revolution is the only way to stop this, I need to be with y’all.” PLP is hosting a “Smash Sexism BBQ & Movie” event to continue our efforts to fight against sexism and build working class unity.
It’s Not Just Persky, It’s Capitalism
Aaron Persky, the judge who served a careless ruling justified his decision by claiming Turner had given up a “hard-earned swimming scholarship” and that prison would be “severe.” Perksy is sending a sexist message: that an elite white man’s future overrides the safety of college women. This sexist judge and the whole injustice system have got to go! To draw this connection, we chanted, “Turner and Persky one and the same, sexist terror is the name of their game.”
Persky is one part of a wide criminal system that serves to protect ruling-class interests and idea, not working-class women. Harassment, intimidation, and abuse from courts and the police are common across the country, which is a large reason why women don’t report rapes and why few perpetrators ever face conviction or jail time.
In the few cases that went to trial, prosecutors could be brutal to the victim and judges extremely lenient to the rapist. In one email exchange, a prosecutor referred to a woman who had reported a sexual assault as a “conniving little whore.” A cop wrote back: “Lmao! I feel the same” (NYT, 8/11). In the Bay Area, 28 police from five districts used a 17-year-old girl as a sex slave (CNN, 7/3).
Sexism’s Twin: Racism
In New York City, we discussed how racism and sexism function together inside the police and the courts. If the judge can admit that prison is harmful for Turner, the millions of working-class Black and Latin working class, who are routinely criminalized? The Turner case is a sharp contrast to the five Black teens from Brownsville, Brooklyn who were wrongly accused of rape. The media instantly demonized and convicted them, while Brock Turner, an actual rapist, got away with a mere three months. In the sexist, dehumanizing profit system, which treats all workers as commodities, rape and sexist violence are rampant.
The San Francisco education club met to discuss the political points prior to publishing the leaflet. A comrade pointed out that state violence against women serves the same purpose as racist state violence against Black workers. These acts of violence create divisions between women, men, Black, and white workers. It breeds the kind of terror aimed to immobilize workers from uniting against oppression and exploitation, guaranteeing billions of super-profits and their rule.
Know Your Enemy
We discussed with friends about naming our enemy: it is capitalism or patriarchy? A patriarchy is a society in which men have systemic power, and women do not. But that analysis leaves out class society, and assumes women in power (i.e., bosses and politicians) will make life better for working women.
In India, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi brutally suppressed striking railway workers and pushed their families out of their homes. In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attacked striking miners, closed unprofitable industries and privatized those that remained. Hillary Clinton destroyed the lives of countless women from the U.S. to the Middle East (see page 8). When the occasional woman attains a position of power, the bosses run a victim-blaming campaign against other poor women.
Sexism’s root cause is capitalism, not men. In fact, sexism hurts men—in very material ways. When women’s wages are depressed, the rest of the working class men go down with them. Ever since 1973, though productivity grew by 72 percent, workers wages rose only by 9 percent (ThinkProgress, 9/2/15).
Buying into the bosses’ ideas and practices benefits only the ruling class and destroys our chances of having a successful working class revolution.
Build an Egalitarian Society
PLP is committed to building a communist society where women and men will work side by side to meet the needs of the working class. We saw the beginning of what’s possible last century. In revolutionary China, prostitution was virtually eliminated. In the Soviet Union, educational facilities at all levels granted equal access to men and women. (At the height of the Soviet era, 60 percent of engineers were women.) Maternity leave with full pay was universal; new mothers had no worry about losing their jobs. There were ample kindergartens, day care centers, nurseries, and playgrounds, as well as communal dining rooms. The concept of housekeeping as “women’s work” was abolished.
We can learn from the successes and mistakes of China and the Soviet Union to build a better world under communism. PLP fights directly for communism, abolishing wages at once—the material basis for racist and sexist division.
We saw the potential for this society during our protest, women and men, Asian, Latin, Black, and white united against the sexist violence of Brock Turner and the capitalist state protection granted by Judge Persky. From Brooklyn to San Francisco to Los Angeles, fight for communism!