The electoral victory of Donald Trump, a suit-and-tie Klansman, shows the power of racism in today’s United States. The main wing of the U.S. ruling class did its best to swing the presidential race to Hillary Clinton, a more reliable stooge for finance capital and U.S. imperialism. But in spite of overwhelming support from the bosses’ media, political donors, establishment politicians, and celebrity entertainers from Beyonce to LeBron James, Clinton couldn’t close the deal. The vicious racism stoked by Republicans and Democrats in equal measure—including the racist mass incarceration and welfare reform championed by Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s—has come home to roost.

 The election confirmed the deep problems confronting the U.S. rulers. The bosses underestimated the impact of decades of wage-killing exploitation, economic crises, racist and sexist demagoguery, and ever-widening inequity. “It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media” (New York Times, 11/9).

 While the Trump vote was predominantly a phenomenon of white workers’ alienation, Black and Latin and Asian workers have also tired of waiting for their lives to get better. Eight years of Barack Obama have resulted in mass deportations, wage stagnation, a bank bailout, and widespread disillusionment. The bosses’ biggest concern relates to the waning of U.S. patriotism and how it could undermine their plans for the next major ground war. They cannot count on a cynical, disaffected working class to rally around a military draft. In short, the rulers have a lot of work to do.

Progressive Labor Party also has much work to do. Communists have no reason to be depressed by this election. Fundamentally, our goal remains the same: to build multiracial unity and overthrow the bosses’ murderous system. But in a time when open racism has gained a mass base and a public platform at the highest levels, our challenge—and our opportunity—is even greater than before.

Much of the pro-Trump movement consisted of white workers misled by racism to act against their own class interests. It’s our task to wage a principled struggle with all workers against the twin dangers of racism and identity politics. We must redouble our efforts on the job, in the schools, and in the streets. Only a mass movement for communist revolution can smash the racist horror show of capitalism for all time.

Trump Will Serve the Bosses

While the big finance capitalists clearly preferred the more reliable Clinton, they will most likely find a way to work with Trump and guarantee that he serves their interests, in particular their contested control over oil in the Middle East. In March, Trump was briefed by Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main wing’s preeminent, pro-imperialist think tank. “I respect Richard Haass,” Trump said after the meeting. “I like him a lot.” In his victory speech, Trump vowed to invest in rebuilding infrastructure, a top ruling-class priority. On the day after the election, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up more than two hundred points. The profit system did not miss a beat.

By the same token, workers had nothing to gain in this election. Under the rules of capitalist “democracy,” they were forced to choose between two monsters: a gutter racist and sexual predator who demonized Muslims and undocumented immigrants, and a liberal racist and sexist who destroyed millions of lives as a career-long servant of the thieves of finance capital. After decades of destroying working-class families on behalf of their Wall Street patrons, Hillary and Bill Clinton were unable to deceive enough voters into believing their phony promises and lies. Too many workers saw them for who they are: racist opportunists in the pockets of the richest bosses.

If Trump’s election proved anything, it’s the necessity of working outside the electoral box. Don’t vote—revolt! CHALLENGE and the Progressive Labor Party urge you to join the fight for communist revolution. We ask you to work with us in building a united, multiracial working class that will smash racism, sexism, national borders and the entire capitalist system.

Another Step Toward Fascism

As British economist Martin Wolf recently noted, the capitalists are dismantling their façade of liberal democracy, the veil for the  bosses’ dictatorship. As the bosses’ crises intensify and world war grows more likely, Wolf sees “the rise of illiberal democracies or outright plebiscitary dictatorships in which the elected ruler exercises control over both the state and capitalists” (Financial Times, 8/30). What Wolf fails to acknowledge is that the move toward fascism—a phase of capitalism where the bosses rule all aspects of society directly--is inevitable. When their system is threatened, the rulers put any pretense of democracy aside.

This election saw crude efforts by the U.S. bosses to rig the process—and especially the capitalist media coverage—in Clinton’s favor. What they failed to anticipate is that nearly half the voters would support the volatile Trump. The winner’s false “populism” and racist scapegoating found traction with white working-class voters, including women--most notably in the Rust Belt, where Trump seized votes that Obama had won four years earlier.

 The rulers’ problems aren’t confined to the U.S. The Brexit vote in the UK, the Colombian voters’ rejection of the government’s peace deal with guerrilla fighters, far-right racist Marine Le Pen’s strong polling in the upcoming French presidential election—all of these reflect a worldwide crisis of capitalism.

 Fight Back

Heading into election day, both Clinton and Trump were “seen as dishonest and viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters” (NYT, 11/4), a reflection of the decay of U.S. capitalism. But for the working class, voting has never been the path to change the world. Elections are the bosses’ mechanism to hold on to power by giving us the illusion of choice. But just knowing the system is broken isn’t enough. To liberate our class, Black, Latin, Asian and white workers must unite to defeat the bosses’ ideology of racism, sexism, individualism and anti-communism. 

Trump’s open racism is a danger to the working class, but it cannot defeat us. As we go to press, thousands across the country are erupting in protest, shutting down highways and burning the American flag. Let’s bring our communist slogan, “It’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism.” One thing is clear: All sections of the working class are fed up with business as usual. The way out of this capitalist hell? Building Progressive Labor Party and the struggle for communist revolution.

The blood-soaked reports and images coming out of Mosul, Iraq, and Aleppo, Syria, make it clear that the working class needs a worldwide communist movement to escape the clutches of mass-murdering imperialist powers. Never-ending battles among small-time capitalists in Syria and Iraq, stateless would-be bosses in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and large-scale war-makers like the U.S. and Russia are turning these cities into graveyards for thousands of workers and their children. Only a renewed international communist movement offers an escape from these daily horrors. Progressive Labor Party aims to lead such a movement. We invite anyone filled with outrage, sadness or despair over the savagery and decay in the world today to read CHALLENGE—and join the fight to make capitalism a bad memory and no more.
Middle East Conflict a Quest for Oil
The Middle East has long been a battleground for imperialist powers, dating back to World War I. In the war’s aftermath, European powers punished the defeated Ottoman Empire by dividing it into smaller and more easily controlled territories (BBC, 12/14/13): Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. All of these modern nations were artificially created by Western imperialist powers to control the vast amounts of cheaply extracted oil discovered in the early 1900s. While contemporary anti-Muslim racism would have us believe that Shia and Sunni have always been fighting, the reality is very different. Before 1916, there was little of the sectarian violence we see today.
The imperialists of today are no less ruthless than those of a century ago. Middle East oil continues to feed their frenzy. The U.S., the dominant power in the region since the fall of the Soviet Union, finds itself increasingly challenged for control. The result is an accelerating death toll that troubles neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump nor Vladimir Putin nor Bashar al-Assad. Millions of refugees driven from their homes into a terrifying unknown; thousands upon thousands of workers and children slaughtered; the Mediterranean Sea choked with the corpses of workers who’d fled imperialist nightmares – for the ruling class and their political stooges, no price in workers’ lives is too high.
Aleppo: Workers Sacrificed in Proxy War
In Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the siege that began in 2012, Russia’s rulers are openly backing the brutal Assad regime in defiance of the U.S. Their aim is clear: to protect their naval base at Tartus, Russia’s only access to the Mediterranean Sea. On October 14, Russia and Syria ratified a treaty to guarantee Russia permanent access to Khmeimim Air Base, near the Mediterranean port, and to project military force throughout the Middle East and Europe. The sole Russian aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is currently steaming toward the Syrian coast (New York Times, 10/21). When the Kremlin issues a statement that “the entire territory of Syria must be liberated” (10/22) from U.S.-backed Syrian “rebels,” it is delivering a message to its imperialist rivals in the U.S. and Europe.
Meanwhile, U.S.-backed forces are in disarray. So-called “moderate” Syrian fighters are led by jihadist groups like Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra (Reuters, 9/29), even though the U.S. has classified the latter group as a terrorist organization. Both groups have targeted civilians with indiscriminate bombing and torture.  The most effective U.S.-aligned fighting force in Syria is the Kurdish military –which is bombed daily by the military of Turkey, another ostensible U.S. ally. While the U.S. protests Syrian and Russian aggression and war crimes, the European Union has failed to agree on any repercussions against Russia (The Guardian, 10/20).
Mosul: Chickens Home to Roost
Just over 300 miles to the east of Aleppo is Mosul, Iraq, an ongoing example of the willingness of U.S. bosses to create a monster and unleash it on the world. The 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq were designed to create a government friendly to the needs of U.S. oil companies. But the power vacuum created by Hussein’s overthrow, along with the purging of the Iraqi military leadership, opened the field to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which joined with groups in Syria in to become ISIS. By 2014, after splitting from al-Qaeda and declaring an independent caliphate, ISIS had become a powerful fighting force across the Middle East and North Africa. Early on, the U.S. rulers were willing to look the other way or even provide arms and funding. A 2012 intelligence report identifies ISIS as “one of the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” and that “western countries, the Gulf States and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria (The Guardian 6/3/2015).
Soon, however, ISIS turned on its creator and targeted U.S. interests in Iraq. Only when U.S. oil revenues in Kirkuk, Tikrit and Mosul were at stake did the U.S. bosses make ISIS’s brutality an issue. At present, the U.S. has approximately 6,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; it’s busy killing both its enemies and helpless civilians in bombing raids (Foreign Policy, 9/29). With disgusting cynicism, the U.S. plan appears to be to allow ISIS forces to leave Mosul to the west and enter Syria (BBC, 10/4), which would increase the pressure on Assad and his Russian-backed forces. In the process, many more civilians are certain to be sacrificed for the U.S. rulers’ profit system.
Workers in Iraq and Syria—workers anywhere—have absolutely no stake in these fights among imperialist war criminals. ISIS is a brutal small terrorist; the U.S. is a vicious big terrorist. While the Syrian and Russian militaries bomb civilians in Aleppo, the U.S. military and its allies do the same. The international working class is stalked by enemies on all sides. No boss, politician, military or religious leader has our class’s interest at heart. No imperialist will hesitate to spend workers’ lives in pursuit of profit. We have nothing to gain by supporting any ruling class. We have only one way out of this madness: communist revolution.

BRONX, NY, October 20—“Black cop, white cop, all the same; Racist terror is the name of the game” This chant echoed throughout Pugsley Ave. in the Bronx, as a woman comrade led a group of protestors to the 43rd precinct to protest the racist murder of 66-year-old Deborah Danner. As some reformist leaders of the protest called for “better politicians” and “better” laws, members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) called for revolution to replace the “whole damn system” with a world without racism and sexism, and that’s communism!
Danner was murdered in her home on Tuesday, October 18 by a police sergeant who was responding to a call about a woman “acting in an irrational manner” (CNN, 10/21). Danner had suffered from schizophrenia. When the cops arrived, Danner was in her bedroom, holding a pair of scissors. She was convinced to put them down, and in turn, picked up a bat. This is when the sergeant took Danner’s life by shooting her twice in the torso. With such a high-ranking cop being responsible for Danner’s murder the commissioner can’t use the excuse that this is the mistake of a rookie cop; once again, it proves that the cops were just doing their job which is to terrorize and pacify the working class!
Residents Support Antiracism
PLP joined with a group of about 30 protestors on Thursday evening and marched from the apartment where Danner was murdered to the 43rd precinct. As we left the sidewalks and took over the streets, PLP comrades started leading loud, militant chants. “ No justice, no peace, no racist police.” We distributed over 50 Challenges. Residents responded with fists in the air. Some people supported us from their apartment windows. A few onlookers joined the march. Four young Black teenagers accompanied us on their bicycles when we encouraged them to join the march. At the precinct there were about 50 protestors present. Constance Malcolm, mother of Ramarley Graham, (an eighteen-year-old Black teen who was killed by the cops in his home in the Bronx in 2012) was present, along with Juanita Young, mother of Malcolm Ferguson (a 23-year-old Black man shot by a plainclothes cop).
Politicians and Cops Part of Racist System  
At the protest leaders of the Justice League and Black Lives Matter called for some reforms. One leader suggested that since an election for district attorney (DA) is approaching, we could pressure the new DA to indict this sergeant and send him to jail. Constance Malcolm shouted that the next DA would be just as corrupt. Others shouted, “They are all corrupt!” A minister addressed the crowd, shouting, “I would not be a man if I said that all cops are bad! I could never say that I am anti-cop. I am anti-corruption. I have some good friends here.”
To combat the minister’s defense of the cops, two comrades spoke with a young woman, making it clear that when we say that the whole system is guilty as hell, we mean all cops serve this profit hungry capitalist system. They all carry out the ruler’s racist agenda: to terrorize the working class to maintain their power and profits. These ministers, politicians, and various other reformers have been attending these protest rallies for years. They demanded more Black cops; done. They wanted better “relations” with the cops; the working class got the Community Affairs cops. We’ve got Black district attorneys, less stop and frisk, and now body cameras. We even got a Black president. The list is endless, but the capitalist system grinds on. It cannot be reformed, or voted away. It has to go and that takes a lifetime commitment to building a revolutionary movement for communism. After our discussion, the woman took a CHALLENGE, and gave us her contact information.
The working Class Shall Rule the Earth!
The sidelining of women in the leadership was evident in this protest. . Constance Malcolm, certainly, should have been asked to speak. This was juxtaposed by PLP’s multiracial leadership of women, and men. The militant, antiracist and antisexist voices of working class women should not be silenced. It weakens our class. But it was encouraging to see that the working class is not falling for the idea that all we need are “better politicians.” The Ferguson anti-racist rebels were absolutely correct when they said the problem was the “whole damn system.” Join the Progressive Labor Party as we organize a revolutionary movement for communism, an egalitarian system without racism or sexism. Fight for Communism!

Dump electoral politics and support the fight for communism by purchasing this graphic hoodie. click the image to donate.The capitalist class around the world is sliding towards wider war and the various national bosses are moving towards more fascism amid growing volatility.  This is the true nature of capitalism. Liberal democracy is a mask that the bosses remove when it is “inconvenient”. They then use their state apparatus, the politicians, media, police and military to increasingly rule with the iron fist of fascism creating further chaos as bosses fight each other and attack the working class
This election has seen an unprecedented effort by the ruling class to use the state to elect Hillary Clinton.
The building up of the openly racist and sexist Nazi Trump by the liberal press in the primaries was meant to get an opponent that would scare the working class towards Clinton.
 “In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the candidates, but make them [Cruz, Trump and Carson] more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream Republican Party.
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.” (email from Clinton campaign to DNC, dated 4/7/2015. Reprinted in Counterpunch, 10/11/2016)
Trump became the Republican candidate the main wing ruling class ultimately settled on out of fear that Clinton could lose to Cruz and thus strengthen the relatively smaller Koch-led “Tea Party” bosses.
Black, Women Workers refused War
One main reason the rulers want Clinton is to win Black and women workers to fight the bosses wars. The last 15 years of a two front war in the Middle East exposed the limits of the U.S. military. As combat ramped up the military was unable to recruit enough soldiers. A key factor was that the numbers of Black and women workers in the military dropped drastically:
“reflecting a lack of support among African Americans for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan….Since fiscal 2000, when African Americans made up 23.5 percent of Army recruits, their numbers have fallen steadily to less than 14 percent in [2005]… A similar trend has reduced the number of female Army recruits from 22 percent in 2000 to about 17 percent.” (Washington Post 3/9/05)
This predominantly white working class male military was soon worn down, and lost both wars.
“It’s probably accurate to say that in the course of one disappointment or disaster after another from Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia to Iraq, Yemen to Pakistan, the US military never actually lost an encounter on the battlefield. But nowhere was it truly triumphant on the battlefield either, not in a way that turned out to mean anything.” (The Nation, 2/8/2016)
The refusal of so many Black and women soldiers to refuse to kill workers in the Middle East points to the greatest hope for the working class. The only way to get off the spiral of capitalist war and fascism is to build a revolutionary communist movement of workers and students to smash capitalism and build a communist society led by the working class. Workers are right to be scared of the mass racism of Trump - but the seemingly lesser evil of Clinton is a suicidal path for us to follow - a path leading to even bigger imperialist wars.
Clinton Leads the Way to Next War
The next war is on the horizon. While the U.S bosses were busy slaughtering workers in the Middle East, the Chinese bosses were moving into the U.S. stronghold of Latin America, investing in Africa, and building an anti-U.S. alliance with the Philippines bosses and others. At the same time, they are building island military bases in the South China Sea, daring the U.S. to stop their military build-up.
The Russian bosses have also made big gains at the expense of the U.S. bosses, becoming a military player in the Middle East. Today, the U.S. and Russian rulers are in a devastating proxy war in Syria that threatens to escalate into open confrontation. Already 400,000 people have died in that civil war, started by the Obama and then-Secretary of State, Clinton. As the capitalists from Washington to Beijing to Moscow slide towards another world war, Clinton is being charged by U.S. bosses to win the U.S. working class to this death match.
Fascism Attacks Workers, Disciplines Capitalists
 As imperialist rivalries sharpen and the threat of war increases, imposing fascism is central to the bosses’ plan to win the working class to imperialist war. Fascism means the rulers mobilize the entire society for the war effort, bringing their own class into line as relatively smaller capitalists are sacrificed and the big ones use every means available to protect their profits. Second, it means increasing racist and sexist attacks on the working class to terrorize them into submission, all while being downplayed in the bosses’ media.
The U.S. bosses are turning to the fascist state capitalism of their Chinese and Russian competitors.
Compared to the U.S., the direct control by the Chinese bosses’ state over all aspects of society gives them more ability to suppress local capitalists who don’t cooperate.
Headlined “China’s disappearing billionaires,” CNBC (2/1/2016) reported, “Though it has received far less attention, another more ominous sign of trouble is the “disappearance” of senior executives from at least 34 Chinese companies over the last year.”
The Chinese bosses also assert more direct control over news outlets then the U.S. bosses, who are now moving towards their own version of state media. Ruling class politicians that hesitate to fall in line with the main wing of the bosses, like Paul Ryan, are hammered by the bosses’ media into submission until they do. Meanwhile, the mass flooding in Louisiana and days of antiracist rebellions in Milwaukee this summer were mostly ignored, with capitalist media attention fixated on the Olympics.
Rulers Attempts at Total Control Bring Their Own Chaos
From the U.S. to China, when capitalists attempt to assert greater control, the inner contradictions of capitalism create more volatility – and revolutionary opportunities. In spite of the U.S. rulers’ all-out efforts to anoint Clinton, millions of young people refuse to support her or any candidate. The antiracist rebellions of Black workers in Baton Rouge, Raleigh and Milwaukee against racist police terror show us the terrified and weak U.S. bosses are desperate to avoid another Ferguson or Baltimore.
This desperation is both a danger and an opportunity for the working class.
We should have no illusions that anything will dissuade the bosses from pursuing more fascism. The U.S. bosses allowed a passenger ship, the Lusitania, get sunk by German submarines to win U.S. workers to fight World War I, an imperialist bloodbath that ended in the world’s first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. A resurgent German ruling class burnt down their own parliament, the Reichstag, to usher in the Nazis and begin World War II—a war communists led the resistance to and ended in workers seizing power in China in 1949. Capitalists will do anything to keep power and win workers to die for it. As world war becomes more of an imminent possibility, the more they’ll try.
The working class has history on its side, and a choice to make: of following the capitalist death march towards devastation, or joining the Progressive Labor Party, building a revolutionary movement for communism and smashing this capitalist system once and for all.