MEMPHIS, TN, April 4—Fifty years ago, 1,300 mostly Black sanitation workers fought an important and bold battle here. Today, Memphis is still ravaged by capitalism. All voting has done is promote some Black politicians. More than ever, we need a militat anti-racist, anti-sexist movement with workers’ power, communism, as our goal.
The sanitation workers’ fight was both an economic and antiracist struggle. They began a strike in February 1968 against the city of Memphis after two workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed in the faulty mechanism of the truck they were using to pick up trash, while on the same day, 22 Black workers had been sent home with no pay, while their white supervisors were kept on. Their courageous strike was for economic demands (they earned poverty wages) and also against plantation-like working conditions. The Mayor of Memphis refused to even talk to local 1733, the workers’ union. The workers’ iconic slogan became: I AM A MAN. The Memphis strike occurred as militancy against racism in the U.S. and around the world was increasing and the Vietnam War was raging. Mass movements addressing these issues were shaking the foundations of the U.S. capitalist system.
Today, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) have called for a commemoration of the strike and of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr., which occured the morning after his speech to the strikers and community supporters at the Mason Temple.
Fifty years after the 1968 strike, AFSCME’s local 1733 had finally won a modest pension plan so that sanitation workers might be able to afford to retire. The city of Memphis is the poorest city of its size in the U.S. Racism and poverty still grip the Black population there, who make up 63 percent of the city.
Don’t vote; organize!
In the workshops and remarks by union and church leaders, we were urged to register to vote. Speaker after speaker trotted out that worn-out, failed strategy. Reverend Blake of COGIC made the misleading argument that divisive militants had weakened the civil rights movement. One speaker, however, let the truth get out. He recalled that Dr. King had been rebuffed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 about passing a voting rights bill. It was reported that Johnson said he didn’t have the power to pass such a bill. King said then we’ll give him the power. How was that done? Millions of people marching in the streets. Millions of people questioning the nature of capitalist society and inequality. Millions of people questioning the imperialist war machine.
The real truth, however, is that voting never has and never will give workers real “choice” and never will free us from the war and misery of capitalism. Time and again, these misleaders work to convince masses of workers to rely on the very system that is built on racist lies and designed to exploit. The real truth is that only overthrowing capitalism and building a worker-run communist system can create the conditions that we need and deserve.
Today, what AFSCME and other unions are really concerned with is the Supreme Court ruling on the Janus v. AFSCME case, which would put right-to-work laws into effect for public employee unions in 23 states, in effect making them nationwide. Right-to-work means that workers do not have to pay union dues. This would dramatically weaken the remaining union sectors and disproportionately penalize Black and women workers who hold many public sector jobs.
The lessons of 50 years ago are that masses of workers can make history but without a revolutionary communist outlook, they will remain on a capitalist treadmill fighting for crumbs off the bosses’ table. Join PLP and keep the fight moving forward!

NEW YORK CITY, April 19—Recently, our church justice and peace community met to review our past several months’ work and to plan for our “spring offensive.” Those of us involved in the Sanctuary  movement attended a city-wide meeting to continue planning and organizing movements against racist ICE raids in our neighborhoods.
This month, Fascist-in-Chief Donald Trump Tweeted his opposition to a deal for DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The program shields certain undocumented workers from deportation for two years, allowing them to get work permits.
While DACA itself was essentially a ploy by U.S. bosses for undocumented workers to serve their imperialist needs, even with the “protections” it offered, ICE officials have arrested DACA recipients before. The bosses will always break their own laws to keep workers in line and intimidated.
We are reaching out to houses of faith, community groups, workers, and small businesses (bodegas, barber shops, salons, and others that are part of the community). In order to fight back against ICE and growing fascism we must win workers to understand that all of us have the same needs and interests.
We must organize more and more workers to band together so that when ICE shows up in our neighborhoods, it will be clear that racism and fascism are not welcome! We are also celebrating the victory of one of our church members for whom we mobilized widely in and beyond church membership.
But more importantly, we must bring working-class people to understand that the only way to permanently end this terror is through communist revolution. Nothing less!
The other focus of our study-action group is the scourge of racist police terror-particularly against those who are suffering mental crises. Our main campaign in this regard is for Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old Black worker from the Bronx who coped with chronic schizophrenia most of her life. On October 18, 2016 a neighbor called the local precinct, asking that Danner be brought to a hospital after an acute psychotic episode. The Fire Department EMT’s who responded first were beginning to calm her sufficiently. Then Sergeant Hugh Barry came on the scene, confronted her, and within five minutes, claiming that she was threatening him with a bat, killed her with his service revolver, never even attempting to use the taser he had at hand.
This killing was so incredibly egregious even the mayor and police commissioner had to denounce it and suspended Sgt. Barry immediately.
The Bronx DA dragged his feet for months, but finally got the pig indicted and he stood trial before a judge last month. No surprise that Barry was acquitted! They brought in a judge from Westchester County who would face no political pressure from any Bronx constituents outraged by racist police. The judge also had worked for the same District Attorney’s office that had declined to prosecute the White Plains cop who had killed Kenneth Chamberlain a few years before under similar circumstances as Ms. Danner’s. The fix was obviously in from the start.
Several congregations mobilized to have a presence each day in court - we managed to bring fifteen over the course of the trial. Three of us joined in a militant action with several Black Lives Matter members outside the court house and the chief court cop ripped literature out of our hands. But the most important result is that we are now part of building a city-wide, anti racist movement to fight back against police killings, particularly of the mentally ill.
This ordeal shows that in “liberal” NYC, racist police terror is just as potent as any so-called “conservative” cities out there.
At our Thursday meeting we listed 18 congregations, community groups, professional associations and labor unions where we have ties. Our goal is to help lead hundreds, then thousands against this racist system, and to shut it down!!

A friend from China had an interesting reaction when he saw the 2005 documentary Sir! No Sir! This friend sometimes gets upset when I talk about China as a rising imperialist power. I’m trying to make the point that when imperialists start wars with each other over control of the word’s riches, we “don’t have a dog in that fight.” But my friend is painfully aware of the history of racist humiliation the Chinese experienced from the middle of the 19th century until the communist-led revolution in 1949. This colors his thinking. Clearly, if we are to have Chinese workers and youth as friends and eventually comrades, we must know a little history (see box).
Learning from the Vietnam Rebellion
So what impacted my friend profoundly about that film? Sir! No Sir! presents original footage from the Vietnam war period in the 1960s and 1970s, interspersed with interviews with former soldiers, several of whom are shown in the archival footage as young women and men. As the war went on, they began to see with their own eyes what it was really about— as opposed to the official U.S. propaganda their officers told them.
In the Tet offensive of 1968, the communists of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their South Vietnamese comrades in the National Liberation Front overran most of the country with the support of the civilian population. This made it clear that the Vietnamese people did not view the U.S. as the “liberators”. U.S. soldiers started to publish underground anti-war newspapers—a dangerous undertaking inside the military.
Soldiers began disobeying orders, organized rebellions and even killed their gung-ho officers who wanted to force them into battle against the workers of Vietnam. One Black soldier explained it this way:
I seen Charlie … NVA …, right there laying down as I walked by, I looked at him, he looked at me. Keep on goin’ about my business. This man didn’t do me nothin’, he ain’t hurt me in no type of way, he ain’t hurt none of my Black people, none of my families, so why should I shoot him?
Over 500,000 soldiers, according to the Army’s own statistics, deserted the military. Soldiers were beaten, shot and imprisoned but the rebellions grew. By 1971, according to Marine Colonel Robert Heinl, Jr., the military was no longer under the officers’ control.
By every conceivable indicator, our army that remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.
(Originally published in Armed Forces Journal,6/7/1971)
On an intellectual level, my friend understands that millions of U.S. workers have organized and struggled against U.S. imperialism for decades, including thousands in Progressive Labor Party. But it was not until he saw that documentary did the truth sink in. An imperialist army can have such anti-imperialist soldiers that it turns into something else. Wars are won or lost more by political understanding and commitment than by technological advantage. Smart bombs can be neutralized by thinking soldiers (see Bertolt Brecht poem).
This is a useful film to show friends. It was produced and directed by David Zeiger, who worked at an anti-war coffee house near Fort Hood during the Vietnam war. Find it on Netflix and YouTube. It would be even more useful if it had subtitles in Spanish, Chinese, Russian and other languages so that workers on other lands could have the same insight my friend had.
Win hearts and minds
The rulers of the U.S., China and other imperialist countries recognize the need to “win the hearts and minds” of potential soldiers. Witness the hugely popular series of “Rambo” movies (1982 to 2008) in the U.S. and their Chinese parallel, “Wolf Warrior” and “Wolf Warrior 2” (2015 to 2017). Communists must intensify our work in opposing the poisonous nationalist ideas of the ruling class. The role of revolutionaries is to equip soldiers, workers, and youth— present and future—with understanding that will make it possible for them to do what is in their class interests, as those brave young soldiers did during Vietnam.
The enemy is the generals on both sides, not your brother or sister wearing the other uniform. This understanding must be spread far and wide if we are to turn the coming inter-imperialist war into an international revolutionary war for communism.

BOXX

Century & a half of history, in brief

In 1839 The British attacked China in the first of the “Opium Wars.” They won several concessions from the Chinese, but, 17 years later, pushing for deeper commercial penetration of China, they invaded the country and marched on Beijing, destroying the Summer Palace and forcing the Chinese to sign a degrading treaty. Under that agreement China had to let Europeans and Americans occupy parts of the major seaports, foist their products on the Chinese (including legalizing opium imported from the British colony of India), and extract riches from the country. Westerners were not subject to Chinese law in their “concessions,” large areas in several port cities, so Chinese workers employed there could be beaten or even killed and their Western bosses were not liable to any sanction from a Chinese court. To an American, it sounds a lot like the inhuman, racist treatment of Black people abducted from Africa into North American slavery.
This humiliation was not reversed for over 80 years. During and after World War II, the Chinese Communist Party, at the time under leadership of Mao Zedong and others trying to build socialism in China, mobilized millions of farmers and workers into a Red Army and drove Chiang Kai-shek and his capitalist ruling class off the Chinese mainland, despite Chiang’s strong backing by the United States. Mao Zedong then declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. After a generation of socialist development, the CCP took a
decisive turn toward capitalism. This choice of the “capitalist road” is associated in the thinking of most Chinese today with the death of Mao in 1976. After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping, who had been disgraced during the Cultural Revolution as a capitalist roader, became “paramount leader” and led China’s return to a capitalist market economy.
China’s current rulers are thoroughly capitalist, presiding over huge inequality, massive sweatshops and, since 2001, admitting capitalists into full membership in the CCP. Still, they make a point of presenting themselves as carrying forward the banner of Mao. To the extent that Mao was a Chinese nationalist, there is some truth to that. But around the world workers admire Mao Zedong as a revolutionary and an internationalist. The problem is that the CCP “owns the brand.” In China president Xi Jinping’s main speech to the Party at their October, 2017, congress, he invoked the name of Mao repeatedly and cast himself as modern China’s third great leader, after Mao and Deng. The ruling Chinese capitalists in the CCP recognize the power of Mao’s image over the political feelings of the Chinese people. They cynically build up the nationalist side and negate the communist side of Mao Zedong as a way of winning the people’s loyalty for the coming war.

*****

General Your Tank is A Powerful Vehicle

General, Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

Bertolt Brecht
Published in German, 1939
(“Der Mensch hat einen Fehler:  Er kann denken”)

Facebook is on the hot seat as the main-wing U.S. bosses have launched a multi-front attack to force billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg to contribute more to their war plans. They’re also sending a message to the other technology mega-companies: They must serve the political needs of finance capitalism or suffer the consequences.
Two leading ruling-class mouthpieces, the New York Times and the Observer of London, have led the charge in exposing Cambridge Analytica, an election consulting committee that paid for Facebook user data on 87 million people. The information was used to help elect Donald Trump and earlier to win the Brexit referendum to split Britain from the European Union.
The attack comes now because president Trump has grown increasingly erratic and unreliable. As the U.S. rulers’ main wing, led by investment banks like JPMorgan Chase and multinational oil companies like ExxonMobil, struggles to hold on as the world’s leading imperialist power, it needs to try to push Trump back in line. It needs to stop the tech industry from helping rival capitalists who are backing the loose-cannon president. And as it builds toward war and fascism, it needs to bring U.S. media—including social media—under tighter control.
Facebook’s crime: aiding the opposition
One of Cambridge Analytica’s leading investors is Trump supporter Robert Mercer, whose daughter Rebecca sits on their board. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, the white supremacist and “America First” isolationist who put Breitbart News on the map, was a fellow board member. In the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, Cambridge Analytica funneled data and “psychographic modeling” to a political action committee founded by John Bolton, Trump’s new national security advisor and a longtime opponent of the U.S. bosses’ attempts to build the international alliances they’ll need for World War III (Washington Post, 3/23).
Mercer, one of the wealthiest capitalists in the rulers’ domestically oriented wing, has funded campaigns for tax cuts, ending Obamacare, denying climate change, and shutting down immigration. The Mercers have targeted U.S. Senate leader Mitch McConnell and other mainstream Republican politicians, who are important players in protecting the bosses’ imperialist interests in the Middle East and elsewhere..
The main wing of the ruling class is making a special example out of Zuckerberg, whose crime was to help Mercer keep arch-imperialist and loyal main-wing servant Hillary Clinton out of the Oval Office. One way or the other, Zuckerberg will be compelled to give up some of his billions—just as Bill Gates was disciplined by the federal antitrust suit against Microsoft. In 2000, two years after the suit was brought by Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice, Gates founded the Gates Foundation. Over the last 10 years alone, it has donated $34 billion to education reform and non-governmental organizations operating in foreign countries on issues supported by the main-wing U.S. bosses.
In the face of weakening U.S. dominance and a fast-rising China, the world order established after World War II is falling apart. The U.S. ruling class is locked in a desperate struggle against renegade members of its own class as well as its big international rivals. The U.S. bosses’ weakening situation will continue to drive them toward fascism. They must discipline the Mercers and Kochs—along with Facebook, Google, and Apple—as they intensify their exploitation and terrorization of the working class. They’ll need far more national unity to have a chance to prevail in the next global war.
Facebook attacked
In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) imposed a consent decree on Facebook regarding protection of personal data. This represented the first overt attempt by the big capitalists to bring Zuckerberg to heel. Subsequently, Facebook sought to prove its loyalty in the 2012 presidential election. Carol Davidsen Media Director of Obama for America said, “Facebook…didn’t stop us…[Facebook] [was] candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side” (Daily Mail 3/18).
In fact, Facebook has always collected user data and for years has shared that data with paid advertisers and app developers. Sharing data is the reason Facebook exists. It’s how it became a $500 billion company, and it’s certainly nothing new. But the company’s Mercer-Trump connection has led former FTC officials to suggest that Facebook has violated its consent decree, which could lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in fines (fortune.com, 3/30).
U.S. envious of rival bosses’ fascism
The main trend in the world today is growing fascism. In general, other top imperialist and regional powers have more controlled and unified ruling classes than the U.S. Their media outlets function as a reliable arm of the state. Opposition voices are neutralized, shut down, and often killed. The U.S. main wing must be envious—and taking notes.
In Russia, shortly after assuming the presidency in 2000, Vladimir Putin began consolidating his control: “Oligarch owners were either co-opted, jailed or exiled, and by 2006 most major Russian media were either directly or indirectly under Putin’s administration’s control…. The editors-in-chief of all the major media in Russia attend regular ‘strategy meetings’ with Putin’s staffers” (The Guardian, 3/24/17).
In China, state control over the news media “is achieved through a complex combination of party monitoring of news content, legal restrictions on journalists, and financial incentives for self-censorship” (2006 FreedomHouse Report). China also cracks down on video-streaming websites and requires users to register their real names on online forums. “New rules also require online news websites to be overseen by government-approved editorial staff and for workers to have reporting credentials from the central government” (CNBC, 10/26/17).
In Saudi Arabia, during the recent purge by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, two media tycoons were among those arrested: Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, majority owner of the Rotana media company, and Waleed Al Ibrahim, the owner of MBC and Al Arabiya, a pan-Arab news channel based in Dubai. Controlling “a wide network of Middle Eastern television channels, radio stations, music labels and digital entertainment assets from Morocco to Oman, [they] were reportedly arrested for resisting the crown prince’s repeated attempts over the past year to buy their companies” (Al Jazeera, 11/19/17).
Similar situations can be found in Iran and Turkey, among other countries.
U.S. plays catch up
Beyond extracting money from capitalists reluctant to pay their share, the U.S. rulers are desperate to gain a tighter leash over their media. When the U.S. bosses rose to world preeminence as the dominant capitalist power after World War II, mass media was narrowly held and easily controlled. There were three national news networks and four or five newspapers with national influence.
Today, with the rise of cable, satellites, and the internet, thousands of stations have national reach. Small operators like Breitbart and InfoWars can reach tens of millions of people. The attack on Facebook can be seen as the big U.S. bosses’ attempt to bring undisciplined, rogue media, including social media, under greater control by the state.  
The bosses have no problem collecting our data
While Facebook has been selling whatever “private” information they can, we should not be fooled by the ruling class’s feigned concern over the collection of personal data. In fact, the bosses have long relied on private companies to collect and hold onto personal data. The USA Freedom Act, hypocritically touted as a limit on the power of the National Security Agency (NSA), was signed by Obama in 2015. It requires every phone carrier to collect and hold indefinitely the records of all their customers.
“As a result, the NSA no longer has to worry about keeping up its own database and…the percentage of available records has shot up from 30 percent to virtually 100. Rather than one internal, incomplete database, the NSA can now query any of several complete ones” (ABC News 10/20/16).
No good side in bosses’ dogfights
Between the main wing fascists, the Tea Party klansmen, and the Chinese, Saudi, and Russian butchers, workers have no good choices under capitalism. As these bosses fight out their differences, the international working class will bear the brunt of the attacks.
Capitalism is built on racism, sexism, and the massive exploitation of workers around the globe. The rulers’ wars are killing millions and will kill and devastate millions more. In a period of rising fascism, the data the bosses are collecting will inevitably be used as a surveillance tool to try to stop us from fighting back. A communist revolution won’t be built through the bosses’ social media. It can only be constructed by building a base in the international working class. Join us!