MEXICO, June 13—Hundreds of teachers and other workers carried on the fight as they beat back the fascist attacks of the Mexican ruling class’s armed thugs in Oaxaca. United, workers blocked road access, burned down a police station and hotels used by snipers. The many years of the country’s militarization along with the rulers’ organized political crimes are used to oppress the working class by all three parts of the government. At the same time the electoral parties show a total submissiveness and collaboration with the police state we face. The mass movement led by the CNTE (the national teachers union) is one of the few with the strength needed to face the bosses’ attacks. It is no coincidence that the capitalist class is trying to annihilate this movement so they can advance their multimillion projects.
The police started the criminal attack against hundreds of teachers who defended themselves with sticks and rocks, putting up barricades, and blocking the road from Nochixtlan to the city of Oaxaca. Police shot at the crowds, killing more than 10 and injuring more than 50. The bosses’ henchmen thought it would be easy, but as soon as nearby workers realized what was happening, they joined the teachers to repel this criminal attack. “The longer they were there, [the] more people came to confront them, the police retreated, some of them beaten by the people,” a journalist said.
The population jumped on them and the hordes of murderous cowards retreated. Everywhere, on the way to Oaxaca, they met with workers’ resistance. That first night, the troops occupied the first square of the city of Oaxaca, but the following morning thousands of teachers and neighbors were out on the streets forcing them to retreat. The ruler’s strategy of exhaustion, discrediting the teachers in the media, and police repression did not scare the CNTE. The CNTE is stronger amongst all the teachers’ throughout Mexico. They are tired of the impunity, the corruption, the government and their genocidal politics.
The popular movement led by the CNTE is reformist—it defends labor and popular rights. While at this moment it is playing a crucial part confronting the police state, reforms of capitalism don’t work for workers. The capitalist system will never meet the basic necessities of the working class, like education, health and housing—but will reduce salaries and labor rights. The capitalists’ government’s rejection of the demands from this popular movement shows once again that capitalism has no interest in solving workers’ problems. The CNTE has a few anti-capitalist positions but it does not organize to destroy the root cause of our misery and suffering: the whole system. This is the job of communists in PLP.
The education reform the teachers are fighting against is racist privatizing of the education system and leads to the firing of thousands of teachers. It also leads to even more oppression of teachers and indigenous communities. The economic background of these reforms is that the ruling class and their imperialist partners need to destroy popular opposition in order to take large extensions of communal land in the south and center of the country. The development of projects and infrastructure will affect thousands of the indigenous population. It might be thought that the expansion of the Lázaro Cárdenas and Chiapas ports and the creation of the oil industrial corridor Coatzacoalcos-Tabasco-Campeche could bring wellbeing and improve the conditions in the region, but because of the capitalist nature of maximizing profits to compete in the imperialist market, we know that these projects will only bring evictions and dispossessions of thousands of farmers and miserable salaries.
Right now, the seven-week strike and mobilizations by the teachers and population in the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Oaxaca, has the rulers on the defensive. What they really want is to protect companies like PEMEX, Walmart, ADO, Moctezuma and others, which have been affected by the strikers’ road blockades. Osorio Chong, Government Secretary responsible for the repression in Nochixtlan, is preparing another attack in the next few hours, or days.
PLP has taken an active part in this movement, discussing and spreading the communist analysis through flyers and CHALLENGE. This mass movement gives us the opportunity to make significant advances, to develop our organizing for the communist revolution. We can win many people tired of the hellhole of capitalism. Let us take the challenge—let’s win more young workers, teachers, farmworkers, and students to the fight for a communist revolution.
PAKISTAN, July 8—From the steel mills to the hospitals and farms, the Progressive Labor Party is fighting shoulder to shoulder with workers and striving to win them closer to communism.
The Pakistani ruling class is
assaulting workers on every front. They are raising the prices of basic necessities of life and imposing heavy taxes on poor workers as they give tax breaks to capitalists. They are increasing unemployment by privatizing the big industries as they use terrorism to keep us passive against all these anti-working class attacks.
PLP is gaining strength by exposing the rulers’ and misleaders’ lies. We are involved in many struggles while the misleadership of the puppet trade unions continually sells out the workers. The anti-privatization protests at
Pakistan International Airlines and the Pakistan Steel Mill were strong: thousands of workers took the streets and morale was high. The union misleaders promised we would succeed if workers sacrifice their time and resources. Some workers fell for these lies. Then as usual, the union collaborated with the bosses and sold out our class.
Yet the working class advanced as PLP struggled with workers to see that only communist revolution can bring systemic change in their lives.
All Sectors of Working Class in Battle
While the bosses try to crush pro-communist ideas, we are struggling to bring the workers closer to communist ideas under the red banner of PLP. We are fighting back in the teachers’ movement against privatization and within the landless farmers’ movement against landowning bosses. Healthcare workers, including young doctors, nurses, and women’s health specialists, held a work stoppage in demand for higher wages and service structure. Domestic workers are protesting against cops at their work places and for better pay and working conditions. Power loom workers and railway workers are organizing struggles against the bosses instead of
following their union’s puppet leadership.
PLP keeps these struggles alive, while being clear that only a communist revolution can foster a world run by the working class to provide the working and living conditions that workers deserve. Society will be run by and for the international working class.
Terror and Diversions
Bosses have divided the world into many so-called nationalities and religious sects. Different bosses’ political parties and sections of the ruling class are at each other’s throats. They try to divert working-class anger to serve their own profit interests and capitalist
political parties, convincing workers to fight along national and religious lines.
While the bosses are always in competition with one another, they are all united in exploiting and attacking the working class.
The working class in Pakistan is passing through an awful phase of history. On the one hand, the bosses’ parties are misleading them. On the other hand, boss-protected terrorists are killing them. Unemployment is rising and workers are also being used by nationalist, fundamentalist, sexist and racist groups to kill each other in the name of nation, religion and race.
Women workers are subject to vicious sexism. They are threatened and harassed at the work places and streets. The so called “Sharia Council” of the parliamentarians is creating more problems for them by introducing new theological laws that say women can be beaten and tortured if they ignore the orders of male family members. The leadership of women workers in the health and domestic industry, in the homes and streets, countering these sexist attacks.
Taking Leadership
Party members and workers worldwide should follow the example of the working class and comrades in Pakistan. Fight the bosses everywhere; in every factory, school or community. Fight racism, sexism and all divisions as we organize for higher wages or against police killings. But in every battle raise the red flag of communist revolution. There really is no other road for the workers of the world. Join the international Progressive Labor Party and fight for communism!
NEW YORK CITY, July 7 —PLP and over 100 other demonstrators marched through soaring heat and hilly terrain, right to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s door to protest his support of Israel, a racist and fascist apartheid state. The whole town saw the march, and several Latin workers we met at the train station even joined the march. PLP members made sure there were chants in Spanish. This march was an important step in smashing borders and bringing all workers together: white, Black, Latin, Muslim, Jewish, men, and women.
Israel: Fertile Ground for Racism
With U.S. backing, Israel has colonized the West Bank and Gaza for 49 years. Palestinians are restricted from travel and suffer scarcities of food, water, and health care. Israelis abuse and humiliate Palestinians on a daily basis. Soldiers and settlers can kill Palestinians with impunity, and every few years the Israeli army rains mass slaughter on Gaza, the last time in 2014. Palestinians in Gaza can’t even flee bombings because they are completely fenced in.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Israeli Jews from Ethiopia, the Middle East, and North Africa, are also subject to intense racism and brutality.
There were two large rebellions, known as Intifadas, against Israeli rule in 1988 and 2002, which both failed
under corrupt misleadership. As a result of these rebellions, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), instead of the Israeli Army, gets to arrest, harass, and kill Palestinians in some parts of
Palestine. Today, there is no leadership for resistance. The main two parties,
Fatah and Hamas, although different, are both corrupt and in it for their own enrichment. These parties can never
liberate workers in Palestine. They fight for a separate, capitalist Palestinian state. Drawing borders will only divide workers and change which capitalist is in control. It will not end oppression and exploitation. Only worldwide communist revolution led by Progressive Labor Party gives a chance for workers to be free.
BDS: Big Fake Solution
About ten years ago a group of activists in the West Bank launched the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement against the Israeli state. This movement aims to force businesses and institutions to stop investing in Israel via sanctions and boycotts. It has become an effective international tool for educating people about the horrific situation within Israel and Palestine and the bad
publicity has gotten under the skin of Zionists everywhere. In the U.S., students who promote BDS have been threatened and intimidated on their campuses.
Several states are considering legislation against BDS, and in NY Governor Cuomo took matters into his own hands. He single-handedly issued a proclamation that all BDS supporters would be banned from doing business with NY State and be listed on the internet.
But let’s be clear: the BDS movement cannot end oppression in Israel, or elsewhere. It is nationalist, focusing on the plight of Palestinians without regard to class. Workers in Palestine have more in common with workers in Israel than with the ruling class of Palestine. Palestine is a capitalist and highly unequal society. The Palestinian bosses cooperates with Israeli and international capitalists to exploit other Palestinian workers. There must be a struggle for a communist world, not just an end to occupation.
Many BDS supporters think a boycott alone can win politicians and achieve a free Palestine. They look to South Africa for inspiration. Fighters forget that years of armed struggle were most important there. More serious yet, the leadership in South Africa settled for an end to apartheid without ending capitalism. This guaranteed that the vast majority of Black workers remained in poverty while some white politicians and businessmen were replaced with Black ones.
Israel, U.S. Tied to Imperialism
So why did Governor Cuomo take action against BDS if it is not a real threat to Israel? Cuomo has interests in higher office and needs to show that he is
pro-Israel. Every president since Israel’s creation has supported Israel, including the present candidates for the office, Trump, and Clinton. Israel serves as a strategic military watchdog for the U.S. in the Middle East, and the U.S. gives Israel $3 billion in aid every year in exchange for protection of oil profits.
Although BDS is not the solution to oppression and brutality in Israel, many militant anti-Zionists, Jewish and Arab, are active in BDS. We must win them to see that only a mass PLP can defeat U.S. imperialism and its worldwide terror.
Comrades in several cities are involved in organizations that promote BDS and we are struggling with workers to see the power of communism. We shall continue to bring our revolutionary perspective to our fellow activists,
promoting the international fight against capitalism.
Pedro Villanueva, Delrawn Small, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile show us again, the increased racist state terror coming our way. The four latest victims of racist police terror show that we have to go beyond the rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore. We have to smash this racist capitalist system with communist revolution.
Revolution, Not Fake “Solutions”
Smashing racist police terror at its capitalist source is the only way to end this racist horror e once and for all. Even a Black President with a Black Attorney General could not indict one of these racist murderers for Civil Rights violations, not the killer of Chantel Davis, Eric Garner, Mike Brown or 12-year old Tamir Rice who was playing in a playground!
Liberal politicians call for hiring more Black, Latin, Asian and Muslim cops, for body cameras, and for “community policing.” Black KKKops didn’t do any more for Freddie Gray in Baltimore than an Asian KKKop did for Akai Gurley in Brooklyn. In Baton Rouge, where Alton Sterling was murdered as the pigs held him down on the ground, the police claim their body cameras “fell off.” None of the reforms proposed by these fakers address the role of the police. Modern U.S. police started out as slave catchers. Many later formed KKK chapters to terrorize Black workers and forcibly divide them from their white and immigrant sisters and brothers.
Individual Terror Only Serves the Bosses
Their real aim is to terrorize and scare the masses of workers, many of them getting active for the first time. No doubt, the police will use these murders to increase their surveillance of groups like Progressive Labor Party. They now have the perfect excuse to spy on and disrupt the “first responders” to the latest siege of police terror.
The revolutionary communist PLP rejects all acts of individual terror or anarchist street theater. We are organizing on our jobs and in our schools, churches, unions, military and many other places where workers are present. We are building a mass movement to combat police terror, imperialist wars and their root cause, capitalism, with strikes, rebellions and walkouts. In the process, we are winning workers and youth to see that racist terror will end only when the working class takes power with communist revolution. Our strategy is to build a Party of millions leading millions more, across all borders. There is no shortcut to organizing the masses and building a mass movement. Terror and individual violence only serve the bosses.
Lone wolfs like Micah Johnson, a Black army veteran who fought in Afghanistan, is a product of this racist system that alienates and traumatizes working-class people. Surely he was battling the contradiction between his task of murdering working-class families in other countries under the order of the same ruling class imperialists that murders and terrorizes Black youth just like him in the U.S. But the bosses’ have turned a case of racism, war trauma and mental illness, caused by capitalism, into a drill for fascism and further capitalist state terror. But we cannot succumb to the deep cynicism that motivated Johnson, and that will effect the working class. There is no substitute for organizing in the masses, with the working class, and fighting in our jobs, schools, military bases, and streets.
Police Protect and Serve Capitalism
The role of police under capitalism is to protect private property and suppress the working class. From the U.S. to Oaxaca to Russia and China, our problem is capitalism and its racism, sexism, and imperialist wars, not white workers. The bosses divide us and subject Black, Latin and immigrant workers to super-exploitation and increasing fascist terror. They divide us internationally with nationalism and imperialist wars with their capitalist rivals over resources, markets, and sources of cheap labor. In order to win, we have to reject nationalism, racism, and “identity politics” and fight back with multiracial unity.
Racist terror will increase as U.S. imperialism sinks deeper into the endless war it started with the invasion of Iraq, 15 years ago. This widening war is leading to world war with Russian and Chinese imperialism. Chinese bosses are challenging U.S. bosses over control of the South China Sea and sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. and Russian imperialists and their proxies, Saudi Arabia and Iran, have turned the Middle East into a killing field and created millions of refugees who will never return to their homes, over who will control the oil-rich region.
Black workers, especially Black women, hold the keys to communist revolution. Millions of workers and youth were inspired by the rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore. But we need much more. Bring the struggle against racist police terror to your unions and churches, to your jobs and schools. Organize your friends and co-workers to join the mass rallies and marches. And most of all, build a mass PLP to smash the racist profit system with communist revolution!
For workers, the June 23 Brexit referendum—for Great Britain to leave the European Union—was a lose-lose scenario, a fight between two camps of rapacious, racist capitalist bosses. At the same time, the anti-EU vote reflects workers’ disaffection with the decaying profit system, a big setback for U.S. rulers in their inter-imperialist competition with Russia and China—and another step toward global instability and World War III.
Formally established in 1993, the EU grew out of the post-World War II order imposed by U.S. capitalism in its Cold War against the Soviet Union. Alongside institutions like NATO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, the EU allied with U.S. imperialism and helped project U.S. economic power. More recently, U.S. rulers’ efforts to impose their will on the world—and preserve their control over cheaply extracted oil in the Middle East—have led to grossly mismatched wars against small-power regimes in Iraq and Libya.
In wars hot and cold, Great Britain (also known as the United Kingdom, or UK) has been U.S. imperialism’s most faithful ally. For more than two decades, the UK has played a vital role for the U.S. ruling class in convincing other EU members to support wars in the Middle East and beyond. It has sent troops to support NATO missions in Africa and Eastern Europe (Foreign Policy, 6/16), and is a reliable partner in the U.S. bosses’ intelligence and surveillance operations.
Russia Gains at U.S. Expense
While the Brexit vote may not alter the commitment of key British ruling-class forces to continue to play that role (forbes.com 6/24), it removes the most reliable ally of U.S. imperialism from a position of influence inside the European Union. Before the Brexit vote, Great Britain was one of the most persistent voices pushing the EU to lay sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, despite sizable Russian holdings of London real estate and a presence in the London financial sector (openeurope.org).
In short, Brexit weakens the EU and emboldens Russia. According to a Twitter post by Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, “Putin benefits from a weaker Europe. UK vote makes EU weaker. It’s just that simple” (@McFaul, 6/24).
Even if the UK ruling class succeeds in ignoring the referendum or declaring it null and void for constitutional reasons (New York Times, 6/27), Europe may be beginning to fracture. The bailout of Greece and the Syrian refugee crisis have put a number of national ruling classes in survival mode. Border fences go up while Germany tries to hold it all together.
Most of the City, London’s Wall Street, sided with the “Remain” camp—including leading members of the Rothschild family, the British financier equivalent of the Rockefellers. But it appears that a lesser wing of the British ruling class – with Russian backing –has organized a movement around the opposite view. Russia’s English-language media outlets have mocked the EU as chaotic and restrictive for its member states, rhetoric that fed the “Leave” forces. Leaders of the Britain National Party and Britain First, far-right elements of the Leave campaign, have attended neo-Nazi meetings in St. Petersburg (Daily Beast, 6/8/15).
Leave Capitalism!
Over the past two generations, as capitalists have shut down industry after industry while stalking the globe for ever-lower labor costs, the working people of Great Britain have seen their standard of living decline under both Labour and Conservative Party rule (New Yorker 6/16). Over the same period, immigration of Eastern European, Asian, Middle Eastern and African workers into the UK has allowed rulers to super-exploit the newcomers and drive down wages of jobs that remain. The Brexit vote won’t reverse that process.
The Leave campaign, led by Conservative Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage of the gutter-racist, arch-nationalist UK Independent Party, carried the day by scapegoating immigrants for the failures of capitalism in Britain. But the Remain forces—like Hillary Clinton liberals in the U.S.—are an even greater danger. A coalition of mainstream Conservative, Labourites, and Liberal Democrats, these are the same bosses who have thrown millions out of work, eroded workers’ standard of living, and shredded the National Health Service.
On the eve of World War I, leaders of many communist parties were convinced the capitalists were too inter-dependent to go to war. Once war arrived, they forgot the essential Marxist slogan, “Workers of the World Unite,” and led the workers of each imperialist country to side with “their” national bosses. The Russian Bolsheviks’ answer to imperialist war—communist revolution—remains the greatest lesson in the history of the international working class.
The reality is that racism is deadly for all workers, including white workers. The 17 million workers who voted to leave the EU acted against their own interests—not in their rejection of 21st-century capitalism and imperialism, but in their turn toward nationalism and racism. Lacking communist leadership, they are being led down the path to rising fascism by both of the British bosses’ camps. Only communism, a system run by workers in the interests of workers, can solve the unceasing attacks of inequality, poverty, unemployment, and racism that led many workers to vote Leave.
A Class-Conscious Alternative
Amid the furor of Brexit, a few hundred UK rail workers are demonstrating the kind of class consciousness that—if coupled with revolutionary communist politics—represents the only true alternative for the working class. In Scotland, greedy rail bosses want to replace conductors (who safely open and shut train doors) with ticket-takers (who guarantee the bosses’ revenue and profit). These workers are striking not mainly to protect their pay, benefits and jobs but rather to protect their fellow-worker passengers from injury.
Workers of the world need an exit from capitalism. Voting in lose-lose bosses’ elections won’t get us there. We need hundreds and thousands of class struggles like the ScotRail strike, like the Ferguson rebellion, linked by communist politics. The Progressive Labor Party fights for international working-class unity by making anti-racism and anti-sexism primary in all of our local work. In a communist world, workers will be free to live and work wherever our class’s need is greatest. A communist world will put an end to imperialist war. We won’t win that world until we overcome the divisions the bosses work overtime to sow between us. Join us!