NEW YORK CITY, November 11—The ability of youth to provide leadership was on display as teachers, students and workers gathered today for PLP’s annual College Conference. Although capitalism bombards us with the message that youth are lazy, irresponsible, violent and selfish, PLP places trust in them and today a multiracial group of young people led a conference with the theme of “Smashing Borders.” More than 50 attendees brainstormed how to combat the borders designed by the bosses to separate and weaken our class.
The opening speech highlighted how capitalists use borders economically and politically. By drawing borders where they want, bosses control resources, markets and workers. Historically, borders were drawn to give the victorious bosses control over the resources of the defeated power. When the Ottoman Empire was defeated at the end of World War I, the Middle East was carved up into countries controlled by European powers. The countries of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan were created by French and British imperialists in order to control the region and to own the newly discovered oil there. Once bosses draw their borders, the workers there are trapped, unable to leave without approval from the state. Meanwhile, their profits, stolen from those workers, move freely and easily across borders, to be invested wherever the rate of profit is highest.
The speaker also pointed out that borders have a political purpose under capitalism—to divide and weaken the working class. Along with racism and sexism, there is nationalism—the notion that workers of a particular country have more in common with, and should have political allegiance to the bosses and politicians of that country. The capitalists want us to believe that workers are different because of their “race,” ethnicity, gender, and nationality, hoping to prevent the unity of workers necessary to take back the value stolen from our labor.
Panel: From Bolshevik Revolution to the Caribbean to Today
After the opening speech, the struggle to smash borders was discussed by a panel of four speakers who described how communists have successfully fought to overcome borders over the years. The first speaker told of how a hundred years ago the Bolsheviks had made a revolution that liberated more than one-sixth of the world’s population and brought equality to the various oppressed nations that had made up the former Russian Empire. The next speaker gave a brief history of the struggles of communists in the Caribbean from the 1930s on, describing how their national fights are often linked to struggles in other countries, such as the campaign to free the “Scottsboro Boys.” The third speaker discussed how working in an immigrants’ rights group exposed the inhumanity of borders while also providing a good lesson in how we must always struggle to blast capitalist ideas wherever they appear.
Finally, the last speaker spoke of borders that became apparent when she began working at a community college as an adjunct professor. In addition to the racism, nationalism and sexism that divide us, she discovered there are also borders between full-time and part-time professors, between professors and staff and between professors and students. All of which weaken our struggle. She swiftly learned no place is free from stratification and exploitation under capitalism. Despite her delicate position as an adjunct, our comrade fearlessly promoted revolutionary politics and fought to improve conditions for students and their teachers. Over the past year, she worked with antiracist students, professors and staff to organize a conference on immigration and mass incarceration that attracted 500 students, and more recently to raise money for relief aid for Puerto Rico.
Learning to Fight
After the panelists spoke, we broke up into workshops, where we discussed how borders affect us on our own campuses and what to do about it. Students from one West Coast university told us how they were organizing mass opposition to an upcoming campus speech by a notorious anti-Islamic bigot, Robert Spencer. Islamophobia constructs borders between Muslim and non-Muslim people and is used to justify brutal U.S. wars of occupation that kill and oppress people in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. The workshops discussed the idea that if we really are to eliminate all the borders imposed on us, we have to reach out not only to other students and faculty but also to other workers on campus and on our jobs.
At the wrap-up, students and teachers feel emboldened to return to campus and sharpen the fight against borders. We left energized to educate, and organize with other workers on campus. More than anything, we left the conference confident that the future is one of a borderless, international working class.

NEW YORK CITY, November 21—One of the Progressive Labor Party’s chants says, “What do we do when under attack? Stand up, fight back!” At a New York City high school where students and teachers are constantly harassed by the administration, a young, untenured teacher did just that. She also struck a blow against sexism.
When the principal observed this teacher, she had a lesson with PowerPoint slides and had to open her lesson plan on her laptop. The principle was upset that she didn’t have a printed copy of her lesson plan, and he put a letter in her file chastising her. This violates the union contract, which states that administrators may only criticize the lesson, not the format of the lesson plan. Even the Chancellor’s weekly newsletter to principals warns them not to use a school handbook to amend the contract. Attacking little things like the format of a lesson plan is one way the administration keeps new teachers intimidated and prevents them from speaking up against bad practices at the school.
Here, as at many NYC schools, students and teachers face many problems. Too many administrators have never taught, almost all the classes are overcrowded, and we have a principal who pick on untenured teachers over nonsense.
Veteran and
New Teachers, Unite
The attacks are constant, but many teachers have fought back. Unfortunately, it’s mostly been the veteran teachers, who have tenure (job protection). Untenured teachers are told they have no rights and can be fired at any time, for any reason. As a result, it’s mainly veteran teachers who stand up to the administration, while those without tenure are advised to keep their heads down and be “team players”.
When this woman teacher began asking co-workers for help, she received conflicting advice. Some men, who historically fought back in the school,  said to do nothing and be a “team player” because that’s what the principal likes. This reflected a degree of sexism – that a woman shouldn’t stand up to mistreatment from a male principal. However, some female teachers and one male teacher, known for being a member of Progressive Labor Party, encouraged her to fight and not quietly accept the disciplinary letter.
Despite being untenured, she wrote a short rebuttal accompanied by evidence about the principal’s wrongdoing. These daily fights over lesson plans and the general harassment by bosses at work are important because they are part of the steeling of the working class that’s necessary for struggles that lay ahead. In particular, this struggle was a small blow against intimidation and sexist ideas at work.  
There are many more struggles occurring in this school that are all geared toward fighting back against an administration that pays lip service to wanting to help the students while attacking teachers and our ability to teach them. The dedication of teachers toward their students has motivated them to attend PTA meetings and build closer ties with parents. This act of defiance is an example of building fightback on the job and forging the unity of men and women necessary to fight capitalism.

In a previous issue (11/8), we described the mass rebellion of soldiers and sailors against the imperialist U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and pointed out that’s one huge omission from the recent Ken Burns PBS series on the Vietnam War, which the bosses’ press has been pushing as a ‘true history’ of the era.

The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played an important role in that rebellion, and many of our members were among the rebellious soldiers. Starting in 1966, a year after our Party was formed, we sent members into the armed forces, sharply rejecting the then-popular pacifist ideology of draft evasion. We correctly understood that was a way out for only a few, while the military was based on a draft of mostly working-class youth.

PLP understood that those working-class soldiers could be—needed to be—won to anti-imperialist, communist ideas—and to turn the guns against the bosses. This was one of the lessons of the Russian Revolution, in which a key aspect was winning the Czar’s army to communist revolution.

Here we present what Ken Burns left out: the struggles of working-class soldiers, with communists among the leadership, against the imperialist war and the military’s officers and ‘lifers.’ While this is the experience of one comrade and his unit in the spring of 1973, it is a good sample of what took place in hundreds of units—and it was enough to scare the military brass. As one counter-intelligence officer testified before the House Internal Security Committee: “Other organizations were being overshadowed by…PLP in the 6th Army.”

We had been distributing literature explaining the class nature of racism and the need for multi-racial unity against the brass for six months, [including] 50 CHALLENGES per issue.

My company had been out in the field for three days. The foxholes we had been ordered to lay down in had been turned into swimming pools by the incessant rain. We were all angry as hell.

Some of us had been trucked back to the barracks. Our Captain ‘All-swine’ Alwine ordered us to get haircuts before returning to camp. Nobody wanted to. Many Black soldiers complained that nobody on base knew how to cut their hair. Following their lead, white soldiers also refused.

The lifers immediately split us into two groups, one Black and one white. They ordered us into trucks. A few of us organizers scurried between them. Then it happened. All the Black soldiers got out of their truck and boarded the truck with their white buddies. Hugs and ‘power’ handshakes were exchanged as well as heartfelt vows to fight the brass together. We commandeered the truck, kicked the lifers off and sped back to camp.

It was night when we arrived. Our comrades had built small fires to dry themselves as they stood watch on the perimeter. We went from blaze to blaze, picking up more soldiers as we went. After circling the camp, we headed for the captain’s headquarters.

He must have seen us because he sent the chaplain out to run interference. The chaplain told us we were violating God’s word. We told him to go to the place where God is reputed not to be… He left in a hurry!

We caught the captain in his tent (he later would run out the back when he saw us coming). More than 50 of us, Black, Latin and white, presented our list of anti-racist demands: no bad discharges, no job discrimination, no riot control 15s (punishment without trial-ed.), no racist slurs from lifers, no genocidal war and, of course, no haircuts. We retired to the heated officers’ tent — no more wet foxholes for us!
The commanding lieutenant of my platoon, a recent ROTC grad, ordered us out to the perimeter. One GI (soldier) asked him where he hailed from. ‘Idaho’ replied the ‘lieuy.’ The GI shot back, ‘Where I come from we eat people from Idaho!’ The ‘lieuy’ left — for good.

I will never forget the camaraderie of those days. The grandeur of these rank-and-file soldiers uniting to fight the racist brass surpasses every Hollywood war epic.

The killing of four U.S. troops in Niger brought to light the escalating role of the U.S. military in West Africa—and the sharpening rivalry between the U.S. and China throughout this strategically vital continent.
In his March 2017 testimony before Congress, the commander of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) spoke bluntly about inter-imperialist competition in the region:  
Just as the U.S. pursues strategic interests in Africa, international competitors, including China and Russia, are doing the same…whether with trade, natural resources exploitation, or weapons sales, …. These competitors weaken our African partners’ ability to govern…and they also undermine and diminish U.S. influence.…
U.S. imperialism is determined to exploit African resources and labor in the service of corporate profits and geopolitical power. Former president Barack Obama greased the path for corporate entrenchment with programs like Doing Business in Africa Campaign, Power Africa, and Trade Africa. In 2014, in another Obama initiative, the U.S.-Africa Business Forum (USABF), public and private deals totaling $62 billion were cemented. Between 2008 and 2015, direct U.S. investment in Africa jumped more than 70 percent, from $37 billion to $64 billion  (Whitehouse Archives, 9/21/16).
China, Imperialist Giant in Africa
But China, which has quietly laid its groundwork in Africa for decades, remains far in the lead. In 2009, it surpassed the U.S. as the continent’s largest trading partner. From 2000 to 2014, trade between China and Africa rose more than 20-fold, from $10 billion to $220 billion, while US-Africa trade faltered (see graph, page 5). In 2015, to increase Chinese influence, President Xi Jinping pledged $60 billion over three years for African infrastructure projects ranging from pipelines, and ports to railways and highways, from manufacturing plants to electric power generation (Financial Times, 6/13, Forbes, 3/14). To protect its expanding role, China is establishing a naval base in Djibouti, in East Africa, the first overseas base for the People’s Liberation Army Navy. In addition, China has deployed a total of 2,500 troops with United Nations peacekeeping missions in South Sudan, Liberia, and Mali. President Xi has pledged up to 8,000 such troops, along with $100 million to the African Union standby force and $1 billion to establish a UN Peace and Development Trust Fund. More than a million Chinese nationals are currently in Africa as workers, contractors, or businesspeople (CNN, 7/13).
To counteract growing Chinese clout in Africa and stake a claim to the continent’s vast resources for its own empire, the U.S. is countering militarily. AFRICOM was established by President George W. Bush in 2007 and greatly expanded under Obama. This year, some 6,000 U.S. troops will conduct 3,500 “operations” out of military bases and U.S. embassies across Africa—a 1,900 percent increase since 2007 (Newsweek, 10/23). At least 800 troops are stationed in Niger, where the U.S. is completing construction of a $100 million drone installation capable of launching advanced attack and surveillance drones, like the MQ9 Reaper and Predator (Newsweek, 9/30/16).
U.S. Build for War
At the same time, the U.S. continues to build up its main base of operation in Djibouti and set up “forward operating” bases throughout Africa, which it describes as “temporary facilities” (Mother Jones, 9/6/2013). The U.S. recently agreed to commit $60 million to a joint anti-terrorist (read: imperialist) force under U.N. auspices. The European Union has likewise pledged $58 million, with France playing a leading role in the Lake Chad region, where it has longstanding colonial interests. The U.N. already has a force of 14,000 personnel in neighboring Mali (New York Times, 10/30).
The official U.S. rationale for expanding its military presence in Africa is to defeat the same radical Islamic insurgencies that U.S. imperialism helped create by devastating Libya and assassinating Muammar Qaddafi (Independent, 9/15/16). In reality, this expansion is a thinly veiled pretext to secure the bosses’ foothold and safeguard U.S. corporate investments and resource transfers. The U.S. imperialists’ best bet is to put U.S. boots on the ground. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, efforts to train local proxy military forces to defend U.S. interests have failed dismally (Foreign Affairs, Nov-Dec 2017). Most recently, in the October 4 ambush in Niger, local troops fled the scene before French special forces arrived.
As the conflict among imperialists escalates in Africa, the Middle East, the South China Sea, and Latin America, a global armed conflict grows more likely. The next world war will require a much larger U.S. army than the current active duty roster of 483,000 soldiers. Restoration of the military draft appears inevitable.
For the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, there can be only one response. We must build a mass, international, anti-racist movement to turn inter-imperialist war into revolutionary war for workers’ power and communism. As the rulers’ latest fight for spoils intensifies, we look to our brothers and sisters throughout Africa to help lead this battle!

*****

The Scramble for Africa in Historical Perspective

Imperialist exploitation of Africa is nothing new. Today’s national borders on the continent began with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, establishing most of the continent’s borders today.  German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck used negotiations to avoid a European war over African territory. True to their racist colonial mindset, the European powers invited no Africans to these discussions.
As imperialists competed for dominance over the continent’s riches, Africans suffered the greatest losses. Leading up to World War I, Germany demanded a broader role in Africa at the expense of the British, French, and Belgian colonial powers. About 1 million people were killed in East Africa in the ensuing conflict. In World War II, over a million Africans were conscripted to fight for their colonial oppressors. After the war, the U.S. deepened its involvement in the continent. It plundered raw materials and tried to blunt the influence of the Soviet Union, which supported national liberation movements combatting colonialism.
These liberation struggles, influenced and often led by communists, seemed to hold great promise. Bold revolutionary actions were taken in Ghana (Kwame Nkrumah), Tanzania (Julius Nyerere), Guinea (Sekou Toure), Mali (Modibo Keita), Angola (Agostinho Neto), and Mozambique (Samora Machel). Because these movements allied with local capitalists, they reverted back to neocolonialism and capitalism. But their brave, anti-colonlialist struggle remains inspirational.
As the imperialist powers continue to exploit workers and resources in Africa as they challenge one another for world hegemony, PLP seeks to build communist revolution and smash capitalist exploitation for all time.