Many workers, students, and soldiers are interested in fighting racism and building a movement for a better world. In countries like the U.S., violent clashes between antiracist workers and open fascists like the KKK have sharply raised the question: when is it acceptable to break the capitalists’ laws?
The Progressive Labor Party fights for communism, for the abolition of capitalism through armed revolution of masses of workers. Racism and these racist borders, police terror, sexism, and imperialist wars will be smashed and outlawed with an armed working class ruling society, and preventing a capitalist comeback with force. The capitalist class will never allow themselves to be removed from power without a fight. Whether the form of capitalist rule is more democratic or more openly repressive, threatening capitalism is always illegal, and the bosses’ state will always defend itself.
Germany: Reformism’s Road to Disaster
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the workers’ movement in highly developed industrial countries like Germany enjoyed mass support. They had fought for and won legal recognition over decades of bitter struggle, and won the respect of the working class along the way. Many workers at the time believed that, given Germany’s developed industrial economy and powerful, organized trade unions, that revolution for workers’ power must logically begin there.
The politics that workers are won to is always the decisive factor, however. While fighting militantly for reforms became a proud working class tradition in Germany, few workers were won to organizing for revolution. Over time, the workers’ organizations became intimately tied to the German capitalist class, with ultimately disastrous results.
For example, the leadership of the trade unions was tightly controlled by a majority of the capitalist Social-Democratic Party. When workers demanded a general strike against the bosses, the workers’ Trade Union Congress was influenced by Social-Democratic leaders to decide against it. Union leaders regularly collaborated with the bosses on long term agreements on wages, hours, and working conditions, tying the workers hand and foot to the very capitalist system exploiting them and preparing their children to fight and die in World War I. Since the Party there considered themselves 100 pecent legal, a recognition they had proudly fought to win, they organized demonstrations with the permission and compliance of the police (sound familiar?)
At the outbreak of World War I, a war of rival imperialists in which the working class had no stake, the workers’ parties and unions completed their betrayal of the workers by supporting German imperialism. In their insistence at fighting for and remaining within the bosses’ laws, the once-mighty workers’ organizations became little more than imperialist tools.
At the same time, a multiracial party women and men communists organizing across the vast Russian Empire, nicknamed “Bolsheviks,” solved the question of legality a different way: by organizing for illegality. During World War I, the Bolsheviks were able to turn the guns around on the warmakers and create the first workers’ state.
Bolsheviks Find Road to Revolution
They did this by organizing fightback directly within the ranks of workers, and struggling over revolutionary ideas from the beginning.
A Bolshevik named Osip Piatnitsky arrived in the city of Odessa, Russia in 1905 to organize the Party after the Russian bosses slaughtered 1,000 workers at a peaceful march. His accounts are instructive for today’s communists. In response to the massacre, revolutionary Bolshevik organizing occurred on ships, small tailoring shops, and large tobacco factories. Bolshevik workers painstakingly made connected the workers’ day-to-day demands with the need for armed revolution, and organized study groups around communist ideas.
Before strikes, workers in many factories and shops went on strike early. In one general strike, the police tried to beat the striking workers into submission. Workers responded by overturning empty train cars, throwing stones and iron fences.
Following these uprisings, the frightened Russian bosses’ mouthpiece, the Tsar, issued a manifesto proclaiming newer and more liberal freedoms. Almost immediately however, racist attacks against Jewish workers began in nearby Moldavanka. Unlike the misleaders of the German workers’ movement, who coordinated their activities carefully so as not to risk their prized legal status, Bolshevik-organized workers fought back in solidarity with Jewish workers in bitter street combat with the racist police. Despite many workers sustaining injuries, Piatnitsky wrote that after these events, the Odessa Party Committee increased its membership! As the Bolsheviks had confidence in the working class and filled its ranks with the best organizers among them, so did the working class gain confidence in the Bolsheviks and in communist ideas.
By World War I, this confidence grew tremendously and proved decisive. The working class in the Russian Empire responded to the Bolsheviks’ call for the seizure of power in 1917, and ended the imperialist World War I with a new state- what became the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union became a beacon of light to workers around the world, putting capitalism on the defensive for the first time in history.
The international working class today is struggling and fighting back in a dark night of sharpening fascism and imperialist wars. The rise of fascist movements around the world means that workers today cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the workers in Germany one century ago. PLP follows in the footsteps of the Bolsheviks, to learn and emulate the best traditions of the past while learning and correcting inevitable political errors. Fight for a mass international anti-imperialist movement of millions of workers to fight back, and seize power for revolution- for communism. Join us!
  

With Donald Trump has endorsed the return of thousands of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, a sign of the U.S. bosses’ anxiety about leaving a superpower vacuum in Central Asia and the Middle East. This 16-year-old war, the longest in U.S. history, is a product of inter-imperialist rivalries—mainly between the U.S. and China, but also between regional rivals Pakistan and India, and China and India as well.
House of Cards
For three centuries, the bloody British imperialists ravaged what is today Afghanistan. Then the U.S. imperialists followed suit. After 16 years of wreckage for the working class in Afghanistan, with the Taliban resurgent and controlling vast swaths of territory, the U.S. bosses have been forced to admit both their failure to date and their lack of any solution for the future:

American-led efforts, despite some successes, have ended up reinforcing and accelerating the broader cycles of violence and fragmentation that have been growing since the state’s collapse in the early 1990s…Its [Afghanistan’s] location puts it at the mercy of several foreign powers, all of whom would benefit from seeing Afghanistan stabilize but also stand to lose out if another country dominates (New York Times, 8/24).

As the U.S. drew down its military in Afghanistan, from a peak of more than 100,000 troops in 2011 to fewer than 10,000 today, it left an opening for China. The Chinese capitalist bosses are eagerly filling the gap with troops, funds, and training of local forces:

China’s financial interests revolve around Afghanistan’s abundance of natural resources and minerals, and its access to Central Asian markets. Beijing sees Afghanistan as a vital link for its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, an economic policy that seeks to connect Eurasia to China (Military Times, 3/5).

The U.S. rulers can ill afford for China to become the dominant big power in this critically strategic territory. If the U.S. cannot control Afghanistan, it will dig in for a stalemate, which means more chaos, slaughter, and plunder of the working class. In 2016 alone, according to a United Nations report, “3,498 Afghan civilians were killed…and 7,920 were injured, making it the deadliest year for civilian casualties since the U.N. began counting in 2009….[T]he number of children killed in 2016 was 24 percent greater than the previous highest recorded figure” (nbcnews.com, 8/22).
Not for the first time, the U.S. is exploiting the regional rivalry between India and Pakistan to sustain this stalemate. But with India pledging billions to Afghanistan in the wake of its transit and trade agreements with U.S. nemesis Iran, and Pakistan strengthening its economic and military partnership with U.S. archrival China, this strategy may backfire.
No Grand Plan
The war without end in Afghanistan has provoked disagreement within the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, as recently illustrated by two writers associated with the Council of Foreign Relations, the bosses’ leading think tank. While Max Boot favored renewed “nation-building” in Afghanistan (NYT, 8/22), Aaron O’Connell called for a de-escalation and adopting “more realistic, minimal goals” (Foreign Affairs, 6/16).
The rulers’ indecision reflects the relative weakening of U.S imperialism. U.S. bosses have no winning cards to play, which makes them even more dangerous to the international working class.
Workers, the Wild Card
The working class, organized under the revolutionary communist leadership of Progressive Labor Party, holds the trump card. As the imperialists expand their wars, they are forced to recruit into their armies the same workers and students who are targeted by the bosses’ racist attacks.  These young soldiers, won to a worldview of no borders and no capitalism, can turn the next world war into a revolutionary war for communism. The capitalists inevitably will make their wars, but we will finish them!

The spectacle and aftermath of Charlottesville heralds a torch-bearing fascist movement in the U.S., a danger to the main wing of the ruling class. Donald Trump, the first U.S. president since the 1930s to fail to make a categorical condemnation of Nazis, finally yielded to bipartisan condemnation and pressure from leading U.S. capitalists and generals. Even then, however, the Racist-in-Chief proposed that the fighting anti-racists—acting in defense of their working-class brothers and sisters—were equally “bad.”
Homegrown Fascism
On August 12, hundreds of Nazis, KKK, and other white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, many carrying firearms.  Thousands of antiracists, joined by members of Progressive Labor Party, showed up to confront them.  The first Nazis to arrive were physically attacked by many. The police and National Guard were on hand to protect the fascists, but couldn’t save them from the ire of the masses.
As the fascists were leaving, a Nazi used a car to run over a multitude of antifascists, murdering 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19.
As American as a Nazi
Amid the fury of the antiracist masses, Trump was forced to read a statement saying: “Those who spread violence in the name of intolerance strike the heart of America.”  No, they do not!  These cowardly thugs were acting according to the core value on which the U.S. was founded: racist genocide. The White House was built by slaves on land stolen from exterminated indigenous peoples.   
The antifascist masses have shown courage and a willingness to repel the fascists’ violence with their own.   Many still believe that fascism “is un-American,” and that tearing down confederate statues is a patriotic attack against “traitors.” Workers and students in the U.S. and worldwide have marched in solidarity with the antifascists in Charlottesville (see page 4).  This movement has steadily increased in numbers and in its anger, intensified by Trump’s open support of the Nazis.
Danger to the Main Wing
The bosses’ media mouthpieces pulled all the strings to steer the conversation away from organized violence and toward pacifism and liberal patriotism, going so far as to suggest that satire and humor could be used to defeat fascism.  Their desperation reflects the instability within the Trump administration and growing concerns within the ruling class that Trump can competently serve their interests.
An openly fascist movement is perilous for the main wing because it ruptures the illusion of democracy and undermines their need for a strong military and a populace united in fighting the capitalists’ imperialist wars. Notice the bosses’ angst over the increasing disillusionment and alienation of the white working class:
[Trump’s] presidential campaign was built on a foundation of white working-class despair…As a study by the Brookings Institution concludes, “the American Dream of prosperity, equality, opportunity, and stable democracy is being challenged by increasing income inequality, the hollowing out of the middle class, decreasing wages and increased insecurity for low-skilled workers, and rising mortality rates.”
The perceived threat of the other [Black, Latin, Muslim, and immigrant workers] is what drove Trump’s presidential candidacy, and it has become the primary theme of his presidency (Foreign Affairs, 8/21).
While the bosses need racism to exploit and divide the working class, they can’t afford to cede their monopoly over terror to rogue free-lancers.
No Free Speech for Racists
Trump, openly championed by the Ku Klux Klan, has repeatedly blamed “both sides” for the racist violence in Charlottesville. For their part, the liberal politicians, preachers, media, and unions called for “non-violence” in the face of fascism. Keeping the capitalist state’s monopoly on violence is critical to the bosses’ continued repression of the masses and maintainance of their capitalist system.
Progressive Labor Party has a long and proud history of beating back racist and fascist organizers of all kinds.  PL believes in mass, multiracial violence against Nazis and Klansmen. But to eliminate fascism once and for all, antifascists need to join and help build a mass, working-class, anti-racist movement for communist revolution.
Communism: Workers’ Dream, Bosses’ Nightmare
The worst nightmare for the capitalists is that workers, soldiers and youth will see the necessity of working-class unity to destroy the bosses’ racist system and the Nazis thugs.  They want to stop the enraged antiracists before they can mobilize for communism. But that’s exactly what the masses need to do to smash racism and build a system to meet workers’ needs.
Some antifascists already understand that “Trump is the symptom, capitalism is the disease.”  We need to spread the knowledge that racism and sexism is the lifeline of the global capitalism. It uses these murderous ideas to divide us, enabling a few exploiters to rule us.
Communism will abolish the wage system.  We can work collectively to produce what we need, without bosses or borders. Ultimately we’ll need an armed mass revolution to build a communist society.  
Our task is to distribute CHALLENGE, and to build PLP in the factories, schools, and barracks.  We need to prepare ourselves and our friends to fight the racists whenever they show their faces, just like the brave antifascists in Virginia.  In every action and conversation, our goal must be to mobilize for communism.  We need to prepare to lead a new society run by and for the international working class. Join us and build the Progressive Labor Party Only communism can smash fascism.  

BAY AREA , August 27 — A multiracial group of twenty-five members and friends of Progressive Labor Party joined hundreds of antiracists to shut down Nazi demonstrations two days in a row.
Day 1: San Francisco
For three months, the racists had planned to have a rally in Crissy Field. As the date loomed closer, politicians and other officials began warning people to stay away and avoid the rally for fear of violence. They began giving police extra enforcement powers and creating restrictions on the protest to keep it peaceful. If politicians really cared about violence, they would not allow the racists to rally in the first place. Racist speech emboldens people to commit racist violence and normalizes a world where people face racist and violent poverty and state terror. Capitalism allows racists to have free speech because it allows the bosses to keep running society and making profits.
Despite the urging of politicians and other misleaders, hundreds planned to show up to Crissy Field to challenge the racists, a testament to working class bravery and understanding of the need to fight racism. Unsure of what to expect, members of PLP scouted the area of the rally in order to prepare ourselves if any dangerous situation arose.
Flaky Racists
On Friday afternoon, the day before the planned rally, the racists announced they would not rally at Crissy Field anymore and instead go to Alamo Square. Presumably, they were afraid of hundreds confronting them.
After hearing this news, our comrades and friends got together to come up with a new plan. Many were nervous about what would happen the next day. Many had never been in a situation like this, and one person had only been to one protest before. After the planning, we had a good plan and we were confident in each other and our ability to navigate unpredictable situations. This bravery was especially impressive most people were teenagers, and two young women stepped up and gave leadership.
The next day, someone announced that the racists cancelled their rally at Alamo Square too. We decided to go to Alamo Square because the racists could still show up.
When we got there, we saw a crowd of hundreds of antiracists and no Nazis to be found. The rally turned into a victory march for intimidating the Nazis out of San Francisco. At the march, we gave out CHALLENGE and led chants. New people got on the bullhorn and we even made up some new chants on the spot.
People in our group commented that we did a good job of keeping the energy up the whole time, even when the spirit of the march died down. Someone also commented that a spirited group of fifteen could change the whole climate of a large part of the march.
At the end, as we were walking away, a squad of San Francisco Police walked by us, and someone in our group started chanting, “How do you spell racist? SFPD!” This was an inspiring action because it showed the bold antiracism of our young base members.
After the march, we went to debrief. During this discussion, someone reported that a group of racists had assembled at Crissy Field and that they outnumbered the antiracists. We decided it was our duty to confront the Nazis. Nervous, we piled back into our cars and drove to Crissy Field. When we got there, we could see racists and antiracists huddled up and a line of police. There were so many road blockages that it took thirty minutes just to get to the field. By the time we got there, the Nazis had fled.We felt a strange combination of relief and frustration that we couldn’t confront them.
Although there were no Nazis, we saw that we had enough confidence in each other to go into a potentially dangerous situation, and we learned the importance of building a group of people who could fight together in the future.
Day 2: Berkeley
The next day, we assembled to rally against a Nazi demonstration in in Berkeley. One comrade stated that it was normal for racists to play whack-a-mole in San Francisco, but that historically that they show up in Berkeley when they say they will. We prepared ourselves for violence and talked about the importance of staying together and following leadership.
We went to the park where antiracists gathered, a few blocks from where the racists were rallying. We started distributing literature while the organizers of the march gave speeches. Later, we heard the racists had started to show up and we were antsy to go confront them.
Misleaders Try to Silence Militancy
Despite the knowledge that Nazis were gathering at Civic Center, which was the whole reason so many people turned out, the misleaders refused to take the march to Civic Center! We believed this was intentional to keep people subdued and to stop confrontations. Misleaders wanted us to hear their speeches instead of using working-class power to stop the racists. It was absolutely maddening! We started chanting, “Let’s march! Let’s march! Let’s march!” and others joined in with us. The leadership told us we would march soon and tried to silence us.
When we finally started marching, we led chants and pumped up the energy of people around us. Someone was beating a drum at the front of the march, so we led chants to the beat and people got really into it. The crowd especially liked the chant, “Turn up, don’t turn down, let’s run these Nazis out of town!”
By the time we got to Civic Center, the police had blocked off the whole park and there were no racists to be seen. The misleaders stalled everybody until they knew it would be too late to confront the Nazis. After we gave out our literature, we left, for there were no racists to confront, and the crowd was getting agitated.
One person in our group commented that people wanted to confront the racists but couldn’t, and they thought that it could get violent because people had no way to channel their anger. Indeed, as we were leaving, some people were throwing smoke bombs, which can only lead to dangerous situations that hurt other workers. The working class is outraged at the rise of racism and fascism, but misleaders prevent us from using our anger for the good of the working class. It was a good reminder of why we need to build a revolutionary communist PLP that can channel our anger into fighting capitalism and ultimately destroying this system.
Reflections
We discussed our actions over the past two days. Some comrades commented that our actions were inspiring because we were able to turn out almost thirty people to fight with us. If we continue meeting together and host study groups, this can be a basis for fighting more militantly and bringing out more people in the future. It was also inspiring because so many people were young, new, and multiracial. Moreover, younger and newer comrades gave leadership and we strengthened our confidence in ourselves.
This weekend was a reminder of the need to work in mass organizations. Going to rallies is important, but you can’t accomplish as much at a rally as you can in long-term work in mass organizations.
In order to build a fighting Party, it’s not enough to just talk to workers on the streets. We must also entrench ourselves at our workplace or school, and build long-term relationships and lead struggles where we are. That is the only way we will build a party that can destroy capitalism. Overall, this weekend was very energizing to comrades and friends of PLP in the Bay Area and we are excited for upcoming battles.