CHICAGO, June 11—Bernie Sanders’s second People’s Summit attempted to draw in and mislead 4,000 progressive-minded people. Much like UK’s Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, this faction of the Democratic Party aims to build liberal fascism with the backing of young people.
Rebuilding Democratic Party
While a good part of the working class hates the Trump administration, they also hate the Democrats. A national poll found 62 percent of people felt the Republicans were out of touch with the public, compared to 66 percent for Democrats (ABC, 4/23).
Taking place the day after the Labour Party in London won the second-largest number of seats in Parliament, the People’s Summit sought fresh blood for the murderous anti-worker organization: the Democratic Party. Sanders said, “The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure” (The Nation, 6/15). The Democratic Party faces a “widening breach” within their leadership and ranks, many bitter and trying to recover after its election failure. While some faction of the Democratic Party has reacted by moving to the right, the Sanders faction has continued to build faith in liberalism.
Using a lefty face, the Sanders faction, which includes Elizabeth Warren, is advocating for liberal fascism: mild reforms of wages, healthcare, and education while disciplining both the ruling and working class for a world of war. One of their main concerns is how best to sell a party of imperialism and war to a divided working class of an empire in decline. This faction seeks to assimilate those fed up with business as usual.
Bernie Con
This summit charged people up to $200 to attend and hear Sanders and other misleaders try to persuade workers that “we can vote out racism, sexism, imperialism and capitalism.” Progressive Labor Party was also at the summit to give a different message to workers: only communist revolution can destroy capitalism.
The People’s Summit was mainly a “Comic Con” for Sanders supporters. There were classes with topics such as “Building a Movement that will Win,” “The Rigged Economy” (but hardly talk about capitalism), or “Voices of Resistance & Power.” The Sanders faction has co-opted language of mass fightback but hardly any Black or Latin workers were to be seen, neither on the panels nor in the audience.
They also had a session on “Down-Ballot Revolutionaries” led by Khalid Kamau, a Black Lives Matter activist turned politician, which focused on getting those under 35 into office at all levels of government. This session shows how important it is for the bosses to funnel working-class anger into state-sanctioned politics. It also exposes how desperate the Democratic Party is for younger leadership.
They talked about “building a movement” but the summit failed to invite or even talk about the fightback or the local organizations from Chicago, the very city in which this conference is being held.
Sanders and his group allowed various revisionist groups to have information tables at this summit.
Classic Misleadership
During this summit, the talk going around was about “resistance” but Sanders and his cronies don’t say take to the streets and fight racism and sexism. They preach voting for change. Hardly any of the misleaders at this conference encouraged the attendees to join the local protest against the Neo-Nazi group Act for America and kkkops at a rally that took place on the Saturday of the conference (see CHALLENGE, 6/28). Most of the people there didn’t even know it was going on.
A PL’er talked to some workers at the summit about going to the rally and joining with the party and other anti-racists. One conference attendee said, “I paid a lot of money to be here and I want to get my money’s worth.”
Honest Workers Ready to Fight
But out of the dead-end of Sanders’ ideas, there were workers, young and old that truly wanted to fight back against capitalism and imperialism. One of the only highlights of this summit was the meeting of Black workers at the end of the conference. Again like all capitalist movements, Black workers were marginalized and issues were ‘pushed to the back’ if they were talked about at all.
During the meeting, a Party member gave a speech about how only communism can truly destroy racism and sexism and that Black workers are the key to revolution. Most of the workers in the meeting were interested in the party and took CHALLENGE. Many didn’t know about communism or had disagreements, but they too were interested in Progressive Labor Party’s fight to abolish racism and sexism.

Disarray in the U.S. ruling class is creating more instability worldwide. On June 5, two weeks after President Donald Trump was feted by state terrorist Saudi rulers, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and four other Middle Eastern countries (Libya, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain) cut all ties with the tiny island nation of Qatar.
A flare-up between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both crucial to U.S. imperialism, can only make the region even more volatile. But the brunt of the Saudi coalition’s blockade will fall on the backs of the Qatari working class.
The Saudi rulers have charged that Qatar funds extremist Islamic groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood—and, most damning, because it’s too cozy with Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival, Iran. The hypocrisy of bosses the world over knows no limits. Capitalist-run Qatar attacks workers on a daily basis. So do all of the country’s accusers. And so does the United States, most monstrously of all. Collectively, these capitalist bosses have the blood of our class on their hands.
Isolation of Qatar, Proxy Attack on Iran
Amid its sharpening competition with China and Russia, the relative decline of the U.S. has created instability and anxiety for countries relying on U.S. hegemony to maintain their oil profits and control aggression by warring regional powers.
The Middle East contains two main imperialist camps: Russia, Iran, and Turkey on one side, and the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel on the other. Both sides are ready and willing to slaughter workers to come out on top. The international working class has no dog in this fight.
The bosses of Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran have been at each others’ throats for decades. While they often couch their conflict in religious terms to mislead masses of workers, their real conflict is over political power and control over resources in the Persian Gulf. In moving against Qatar, Saudi Arabia, a virtual slave state and the world’s biggest oil producer, is closely allied with the U.S., aims to check Iranian influence. Qatar and Iran share the offshore North Field, the world’s largest natural gas deposit. The Saudis want to stop Qatar’s funding of regional threats (like Hamas in the Gaza Strip), and to quash Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based media outlet that builds unrest among workers in Saudi Arabia.
A Problematic U.S. Ally
Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base is home to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. It hosts 11,000 military personnel in the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and is “a core part of Washington’s worldwide military infrastructure” (Foreign Affairs, 6/13). CENTCOM uses Qatar as a forward operating base for its mass murders in the Middle East, including bombings of civilians in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, Qatar wields political and economic influence that make it an uncomfortable U.S. ally:

Qatar…is known in Washington political circles less as a reliable partner than as the home of Al Jazeera (which is often critical of U.S. policy), a sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood (which many U.S. observers oppose), and an antagonist of the U.S.-backed government of Egyptian President Abel Fattah el-Sisi….
And Qatar’s liquefied natural gas is critical to states across the world, from the United Kingdom to China, India, Japan, and South Korea: a healthy set of allies should the situation escalate further (Foreign Affairs, 6/13).

By resuming development of North Field after a 12-year moratorium, Qatar’s gas supply is expected to increase by 10 percent, to a capacity of 2 billion cubic feet per day, the equivalent of 400,000 barrels of oil (Reuters, 4/3). This signals a move to compete with Saudi oil, already hit by declining prices.
Meanwhile, the isolation campaign against Qatar puts Chinese imperialists in a bind:

[It] pressures China to take sides, complicates its effort to tiptoe through the minefield of Middle Eastern conflicts and rivalries by maintaining good relations with all parties, and threatens its Belt and Road Initiative with the likely expansion of the Saudi-Iranian proxy war into Balochistan, a key Pakistani node of the plan (South China Morning Post, 6/12).

U.S. Empire in Decay
After Trump recklessly applauded Saudi Arabia’s anti-Qatar campaign, the dominant section of the U.S. ruling class quickly reined him in: “In a phone call with the Qatari Emir, Trump extended an olive branch offering to help the parties resolve their differences by coming to a White House meeting if necessary” (CNN, 6/8).
Mindful of Qatar’s importance to U.S. military interests, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, added, “We certainly would encourage the parties to sit down together and address these differences….[W]e think it is important that the [Gulf Cooperation Council] remain unified” (Vox, 6/6).
Fightback Points to a Communist Future
The working class in the Middle East faces some of the most brutal horrors that capitalism can unleash. Divisive nationalism and religious dogma may be primary at the moment, but their hold on workers’ consciousness is far from eternal. The rich history of communist-led fightback in this region demonstrates how workers throughout the world have been won away from the bosses’ lethal ideology to international revolutionary struggle. Those workers can be won again!
Working people everywhere need to join and build the international Progressive Labor Party. We must develop the Party into the weapon that destroys the bosses’ deadly system—and into the tool that builds a classless, communist world.

An army of “homeless people” is stationed across British cities, armed with Heckler and Koch MP7 rifles.  
The British Army’s Special Air Service troops have been deployed as part of a new strategy against terror attacks.
Over the past three months, the working class of the United Kingdom has suffered three terrorist attacks, two in London and one in Manchester. For the bosses, these events have underscored the bosses’ debate over which brand of fascism will rule Britain. On June 8, when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party made a surprisingly strong election showing against the ruling Conservatives, the disagreement got even sharper.
Building a Police State
The British imperialists have created their own terrorists by funding and fueling religious violence in the Middle East in their pursuit of oil, profit, and power.
Now, after these three vile attacks of individual terrorism, the UK’s capitalist bosses are moving more urgently to impose fascism—a heightened form of state terrorism—on the home front.
Prime Minister Theresa May, after being criticized for her role in overseeing police cuts, called for bolstering of police and security forces, including “changing human-rights laws to restrict the movement of suspects and ease their deportation” (Economist, 6/10).
While general police budget has been cut due to dropping crime rates, the budget for counter-terrorism  “rose from £579m ($750 million) in 2010-11 to £633m in 2017-18. The intelligence agencies were given the go-ahead to recruit almost 2,000 extra officers in 2015, as the threat from Islamic State emerged” (Economist, 6/10).
Despite these increases, Britain’s former counter-terrorism chief Robert Quick charged that cuts to the police budget, and specifically “community policing,” has “hurt their counter-terrorism efforts” (Guardian, 6/6).
Others are advocating the recruitment of working-class people—including young Muslims—to be the eyes and arms of the capitalist state.
Cornwall police commissioner Alison Hernandez entertained the idea of civilian gun owners “helping defend rural areas against terror attack” (Guardian, 6/12). Though a senior officer dismissed the idea, the debate reflects a ruling class in disarray and in a dance with rising fascism.
Things Fall Apart
After its June 8 elections, the UK now has a prime minister who has lost respect, authority, and the Conservative Party’s majority in Parliament.
Next week, May is scheduled to begin negotiations on Britain’s breakup with the European Union. She appears unlikely to last long as prime minister, but whoever has the job will need to grapple with a UK in internal disarray, with declining real wages and a rise in racist nationalism. In other words, Britain looks much like the U.S. in the Donald Trump era.
Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the UK’s Bernie Sanders, successfully misled much of the British youth who bothered to turn out to vote. Corbyn proposed not only to nationalize mail, rail, and energy businesses, but also to “raise corporation tax by more than a third over the next three years and plow the proceeds into schools and universities” (Bloomberg, 5/9). The disciplining of billionaires and nationalizing of companies is a hallmark of a country on the road to fascism and war.
Road to Revolution
Workers in UK, Europe, and worldwide have no real stake in one camp of fascists over another. While it is uncertain how the instability of the UK’s rulers will play out, the working class can be sure to expect more attacks on our class—be it from individual terrorists, state terrorists, or more wars.
Progressive Labor Party calls on workers to build a road to communist revolution. We carry on and advance the fight of communists before us. Join us as we construct an international Party to overthrow this horrifying profit system.

CHICAGO, June 10—The fascist group “ACT for America” attempted to hold a rally in Chicago to spread racist anti-Muslim hate speech today, and to provoke anti-immigrant hatred under the disguise of protesting so-called “Sharia [Muslim] Law.” Unfortunately for these neo-Nazis, they were outnumbered two to one, and directly confronted by a counter-protest led by Progressive Labor Party members and friends who chanted “Death, death, death, to the fascists! Power, power, power to the workers!”
PLP Sets The Tone: Smash Fascism!
At their racist debut in Chicago, despite their absurd costumes, motley signs, and flag waving, there was nothing funny about these white nationalist proto-Nazis and their racist message. Through their rhetoric, they try to demonize Muslims to set the stage for racist attacks.
Police separated the two groups, allowing the ACT fascists to set up on one street corner unrestricted, while surrounding anti-racist protesters across the street with police and barricades. Our PLP contingent and friends immediately made a plan to cross the street and confront the fascists, while selling CHALLENGE and asking other anti-racists to join us.
Although many protesters agreed that we shouldn’t have been pinned down while the racists were not, most were still reluctant to join us. PLP members with their signs crossed the barricades and directly confronted ACT members, pushing them off the sidewalk. The racists ended up with their backs to the Chicago River and surrounded by anti-racist demonstrators. By this time, many more had joined us in confronting the racists. ACT members had nowhere to go and their message was drowned out by chants of “Asian, Latin, Black, and white – workers of the world unite!” and “The only solution is communist revolution!” The police quickly rushed to protect the small band of white supremacists who fled on foot.
PLP members distributed about 100 CHALLENGEs and collected contact information from workers who are interested in coming to meetings. Some expressed support in attending the upcoming trial on Wednesday, June 21 8:30 am at 26th and California, of a protester who was arrested and held in contempt of court during the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the racist cop who murdered Laquan McDonald.
Brigitte Gabriel: Servant of U.S. Capitalist Class
The growth of fascist movements occurs alongside disarray and weakness within the U.S. capitalist class, manifested by the embattled Trump administration.
No matter what happens with Trump, the belief that “all Muslims are terrorists” does not begin or end with him, and it’s an idea that only serves the ruling U.S. capitalist class. On the one hand, the U.S. bosses are trying to win Black, Latin, Muslim and immigrant workers to fight and die for U.S. imperialism. On the other hand, fighting for U.S. imperialism means committing genocidal-scale mass slaughter for control over global oil in the Middle East and Central Asia. And in terms of preparing workers in the U.S. for imperialist war, Gabriel serves an important role.
ACT for America’s founder Brigitte Gabriel (see box) , far from being some fringe element enjoying a few moments of fame, is firmly entrenched within the U.S. ruling class. Through her contacts with U.S. security personnel and the White House, Gabriel has long advocated for the profiling and surveillance of Muslim workers in the U.S.  According to The Atlantic, “former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, served on ACT’s board. CIA Director Mike Pompeo last year won the group’s National Security Eagle Award. Trump counterterrorism advisor Sebastian Gorka has spoken before ACT chapters.”
In October of 2016, her website announced that her racism had earned her membership in one of the bosses’ bizarre private members-only fraternities, the “Knights of Malta.” Now, Gabriel enjoys expensive vacations with fellow former mass murderers for the U.S. capitalist class like Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, and George H.W. Bush.
Anti-Fascists Turn Up
ACT for America held demonstrations in 25 cities and towns around the U.S. Almost everywhere they were greeted by crowds of anti-fascist workers and youth, often outnumbering the fascists who dared to show their faces with the racist, neo-Nazi filth of ACT for America. In Pennsylvania, the KKK-tied “Oath Keepers” provided security for ACT fascists while in Seattle, youth and police engaged in street battles. In California at the site of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, ACT fascists tried smashing car windows of the multiracial anti-fascists, who formed a wall with linked arms before police dispersed the crowd.
Workers and youth in the U.S. are not taking these neo-Nazis lying down! These are good signs for the working class as we steel ourselves for the battles ahead! While many workers and youth are today marching under liberal and pacifist misleadership of capitalist-controlled religious groups and organizations, many are looking for an alternative. An alternative to not just defeating the fascists and neo-Nazis in the streets, but for a whole new world. PLP believes in fighting for communist revolution and uniting as one international working class. The bosses’ cops, the courts, their laws and their pacifist misleaders set the tone for the capitalist ruling class. Our actions as communists in the Progressive Labor Party must set the tone for the working class. Join us and fight back for the communist world our class deserves!