BOSTON, May 28—Today, 70 protestors picketed at the Elks Club in West Roxbury, the site of a panel discussion called by Bostonians Against Sanctuary Cities.  This racist organization formed after Trump’s election with the goal of popularizing his viciously anti-immigrant agenda.
When Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends arrived, an ad hoc group of protesters from all over the Boston area were standing in a line with signs.  We seized the opportunity to provide some leadership and organized a picket line. We began chants “Hitler Rose, Hitler Fell, racist hate groups go to hell” and “Stop racist deportations, working people have no nation.” We distributed a leaflet and carried signs that boldly exclaimed “No Free Speech for Racists”, and “We won’t be divided, we won’t be fooled. Racism is the boss’s tool”.  Almost everyone accepted our leaflet “The main thing to do: Fight Racism.”
 The panel consisted of a mother whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, a Bristol County sheriff who wants to use Massachusetts inmates to build the wall on the Mexican border, and a woman from the openly anti-immigrant Washington DC organization, Center for Immigrant Studies.  It is an ultra-conservative group trying to get a foothold in liberal Massachusetts.
The Trump takeover is fostering more racism as well as more protest. Many protesters are new to fightback and open to rejecting the liberalism of the Democratic Party.  Anti-immigrant racism has always been and is part of capitalist profiteering and exploitation of the working class. Electing a Democrat will not change that. Obama deported 3.2 million immigrants, more than any U. S. president in history. PL’ers need to go to these protests with the outlook of meeting new friends who want to help build a militant, multiracial movement against racism, and we need to bring our friends to help develop them as working class leaders. Join us!

The Manchester atrocity shows how cowardly acts of individual violence are spawned by the biggest terrorists of them all: UK and U.S. imperialists. It also creates an opening for state violence and fascism against the working class.
On May 22 at an Ariana Grande concert, Salman Ramadan Abedi detonated a device packed with metal nuts and bolts and killed 22 people, injured over 60, many of them children, and terrorized the working class. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility, but there is no evidence providing IS was directly involved (Stratfor, 5/27).
The 22-year-old Libyan Briton bomber’s action was a despicable attack on masses of unarmed youth and families. But, the biggest terrorists are the capitalist bosses. When the UK and U.S. bosses aren’t bombing hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re shattering the lives of millions with racist incarceration, deportation, segregated housing and schooling, and unemployment. To divert attention from their own monstrous crimes, the bosses will exploit fears of ISIS to stir anti-Muslim racism as well as to pledge allegiance to this savage system to protect us.
A Century in the Making
The imperialists have created their own terrorists. Much of the religious sectarian violence and rise of Islamic militant groups can be traced to the British, French, and U.S. imperialists.
Not only did the British imperialists, along with the French, carve up what is today the Middle East after World War I as a divide-and-conquer strategy, the bosses have used and bred reactionary and armed Muslim groups to back their imperialist oil interests. (See Brzezinski obituary, page 5). UK Secretary of the War Cabinet Maurice Hankey in 1918 viewed control of oil supplies in the region to be “a first class British war aim.”
For example, the UK funded the Mujaheddin as proxy fighters. “It resulted in the spawning of al-Qa’ida, the spread of international terrorism, and the empowering of ISI, the Pakistani secret police, who became their sponsors. …[T]he lesser known by-products [are] the dispatch of Afghan Islamist veterans, with the connivance of Britain and the US, to the wars in the Balkans and the former Soviet republics in central Asia, and ethnic Muslim areas of China.” (The Independent, 7/29/2010).
In Libya, a joint effort on the British, French, and U.S. imperialists via NATO, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engineered a U.S. invasion in 2011. The massive bombing and missile raids were designed to consolidate oil deals the imperialist powers had made with the unreliable Muammar Qaddafi and each other. The British admit their role “aided the rise of the Islamic State in North Africa” (9/14/16). They also aided in displacing, starving, and terrorizing hundreds of thousands of families.
An Opening for Fascism
The Manchester attack will spur even greater efforts from bosses on all sides to impose fascism on the working class as they prepare for wider imperialist wars.  Increasing racism and capitalist state terror, and foster cross-class collaboration with police forces, are symptoms of rising fascism.
The Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson tweeted, “We need a State of Emergency as France has. We need internment of thousands of terror suspects now to protect our children” (NY Times, 5/23).  Some called for those suspected to be electronically tagged. The Economist called for an “iron-willed application of the law” (5/27).
Working-Class Response
In Manchester, residents opened up their homes to those stranded, taxi drivers gave free rides, and restaurants sent donations to those still searching for loved ones. While the bosses will respond with cynical ploy to build allegiance to its exploitative system, the working class responds with collectivity and antiracism.
The international working class still holds all the cards, including the potential to overthrow the entire murderous capitalist system. No amount of divisions can keep the working class from ultimately taking power. No lesser-evil politician or government can liberate our class. Progressive Labor Party aims to build communism. We will construct a world free of terrorism, racism and sexism.

New Haven, CT, May 22 —It was Yale’s graduation day. Three thousand workers and students—multiracial, young and old, men and women—marched together through the streets of New Haven in support of Yale graduate student teachers who are waging a determined struggle for union recognition and their first contract. Thousands of Yale undergraduates and their parents witnessed a demonstration of class solidarity, as teamsters and steel workers, laborers and communication workers, K-12 teachers and professors, as well as hundreds of graduate students and undergraduates marched toward the commencement proceedings wearing bright orange t-shirts and chanting loudly. I was marching near a contingent of 100 casino and restaurant workers who came all the way from Atlantic City to support the Yale grad students.
Hunger Strike for Unionization
In the weeks leading up to the march, eight grad students conducted a hunger strike in front of the administration building, while another 23 were arrested in civil disobedience sit-ins that shut down busy intersections in New Haven. The union has made this fight a social justice campaign. It is not just for a contract that raises pay and benefits. They want a grievance mechanism for gender discrimination complaints and they have received support from many undergraduates, professors, campus workers and community members.
A local Black minister spoke at the ending rally and recounted the campaign his church led against racist unemployment, demanding that Yale hire 1,000 members of the community, which is more than half Black and Latino, and where a quarter of the population lives in poverty. He stressed how the graduate student union provided strong support for that anti-racist campaign and now he and members of the community are happily returning that solidarity. This is a lesson for faculty unions everywhere; support community struggle against racist conditions such as high unemployment and mass incarceration, and, in return, the community will support your struggle for better pay and benefits.
Yale sits on a $25 billion endowment fund, yet is refusing to negotiate with the grad students’ union, Local 33 of UNITE HERE. They prefer to wait until their billionaire buddy Donald Trump appoints new people to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), who will reverse previous NLRB decisions in favor of graduate assistant unionization.
At the commencement, when the wealthy trustees who run Yale marched by in their black robes, thousands of us sang “We Shall Overcome” to let them know we’ll continue the struggle. But that isn’t enough. The Yale Board of Directors is composed of owners of Wall Street firms and major corporations. They amassed their fortunes from the exploitation of workers in the U.S. and abroad. So it’s not surprising that they show contempt for workers at the university. Yale has trained generations of major figures in the U.S. ruling class, including the CEOs of companies like Boeing, the Blackstone Group, FedEx, and Time Warner, and major political figures (and war criminals) like the two President Bushes, Dick Cheney, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
As these graduate student-teachers fight for their union, they should expose the whole capitalist system that Yale and their millionaire and billionaire Directors represent. Help the Progressive Labor Party destroy this profit system based on class exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialist war, and build a communist movement that takes power away from the Yale trustees and the entire ruling class and puts it in the hands of working people, where it belongs.

The election of ex-investment banker Emmanuel Macron as president of France reflects the global crisis of capitalism. Like all other capitalist powers, the French ruling class has responded with rising fascism and heightened attacks on the working class. Like Donald Trump (and Barack Obama before him), who has surrounded himself with Wall Street bankers, French finance capital is maneuvering to maintain its rule.
Beneath Macron’s liberal, “pro-immigrant” rhetoric, this so-called outsider and his “independent” political party (En Marche!) received the full backing of France’s political elites, with unlimited media and financial support. Simultaneously, he effectively isolated the mainstream capitalist parties that have lost credibility with French workers.
Trending Decline and Disarray
Faced with an unsustainable budget deficit, the French bosses are in a bind. Heading into the April 23 presidential election and the runoff two weeks later, they knew that their next president would need to escalate the rulers’ attacks on the working class. The rulers want to eliminate job protections and to slash spending on pensions, health care, family allowances, and unemployment benefits—which altogether account for more than a third of France’s Gross Domestic Product (www.thelocal.fr, 12/22/16). Since the 1980s, the French government has either partially or fully privatized many national industries, including Air France, France Telecom and Renault.  However, the government still plays a role in certain key national sectors, such as agriculture and healthcare, including labor protection laws that are cutting into the profits and competitiveness of the French bosses (Focus Economics May 2017).
Macron has already promised to pursue the anti-worker labor reforms of his unpopular “Socialist” Party predecessor, Francois Hollande, including attacks on unions and collective bargaining, prohibition of strikes, and cuts to social benefits, while privatizing health care and education.  The French ruling class hopes that Macron can do so while winning mass applause instead of mass upheaval. The more openly fascist National Front’s Marine Le Pen, the losing candidate in the May election runoff, had similar proposals to Macron on the domestic front, but likely would have generated the intense opposition the U.S. ruling class now faces with the anti-Trump movement.  It’s hard to attack the workers and mobilize for war when the workers are on strike and fighting back in the streets!  It’s no surprise that  Obama endorsed Macron three days before the election.  
The French bosses are learning from the experience of the U.S. ruling class. For more than 30 years, the U.S. rulers have attacked wages and pensions and privatized the healthcare and education systems with relatively little fightback. Tens of millions of workers—including super-exploited black workers—have been misled and pacified by the Democratic Party.  In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton signed trade agreements that eliminated decent-paying factory jobs, mostly eliminated welfare, unleashed 100,000 more racist cops on the streets, and created the largest prison population in the world, filled with mostly Black and Latin workers. Then Obama—who, like Macron, campaigned on a “pro-immigrant” platform—deported more immigrant workers than any president in U.S. history.  
In France, Macron plans to add his “shiny new face” of liberal fascism with promises to add 10,000 more cops and 5,000 more border cops, to increase the National Guard to 85,000, and to expand their prison detention centers by 15,000 additional spaces—policies in step with those advocated by Le Pen (French Institute of International Relations, April 2017).
For French finance capital, however, Macron’s victory fails to solve the fundamental problem every ruling power faces as inter-imperialist rivals prepare for the next global war. The bosses must win the allegiance of the working class and unite workers behind their patriotic agenda while at the same time waging vicious racist, sexist attacks.  Even with Macron as an option, 25 percent of all eligible French voters abstained from casting a ballot, the highest proportion since 1969. An additional 25 percent of those voting for Macron did so only as a vote against Le Pen. (CNN, 5/8).
La Lutte
Last summer, when Macron was Hollande’s economy minister, and the country was gripped with violent protests over government attempts to eliminate job security and the 35-hour work week, Macron was pelted with eggs, one landing directly on his shiny, new face.
In the weeks leading up to this spring’s elections, masses of high school and college students, deciding that neither Macron nor Le Pen were acceptable choices for their future, waged a no-voting campaign. Led by the slogan, “No Fatherland, No Boss, No Le Pen, No Macron,” youth hit the streets around the country to protest French imperialism. Two thousand turned out in the western French city of Rennes. In Paris, protests blocked entrances to 20 high schools.
These bold youth faced off against police in riot gear, who attacked them with tear gas. While denouncing Le Pen’s racist nationalism and Macron’s pro-business front is a start, only a communist movement can bring the change these young people seek. Only a communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party, can smash the bosses and their Fatherland and create a new society: “One Party, One World, One Class.”
While workers in the U.S. have seen an uptick in fightback against the Trump administration, it remains to be seen if Macron can effectively mislead and mute workers as effectively as Obama did in the U.S. Nonetheless, the fake left in France has shown its true colors by selling out the working class to the banks and capitalist system.  And while Le Pen lost the election, her openly fascist party received more mass support from our class than ever.  
No electoral capitalist party can defend workers against rising fascism. Only a revolutionary communist party like PLP can fight for the interests and needs of our class. Join us!

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French Imperialist Role

Despite the decline and fall of their colonial empire, the French bosses retain an interest in playing an imperialist role on the world stage. The National Front’s Marine Le Pen took an isolationist stance, calling for French withdrawal from NATO and the European Union, and rejection of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).  Additionally she argued for lifting sanctions and making an alliance with Russia. Her movement stands in contradiction to the French bosses’ pro-U.S. and pro-Europe stance since World War II through the alliances with other European countries and the United States. Macron’s more traditional positions won him the main bosses’ backing and ultimately won him the election.
While calling for cuts in public spending and attacks on workers, Macron is promoting French imperialism by supporting increased spending on the military and its adventures around the world.  The French military, the largest in Europe at 205,000-strong, is actively planning to modernize its nuclear weapons. It has 30,000 troops deployed in Africa and the Middle East, in its support of the U.S.-led imperialist “war on terror.”
Under “Operation Chammal,” the French army has a full battery of Caesar 155mm gun-howitzers, along with French Rafale fighter aircraft, fighting alongside U.S. forces in their oil war in Iraq and Syria.  The French rulers continue their imperialist ravaging of Africa for oil and minerals in Libya and their “Operation Barkhane” in Mali, Mauretania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad (U.S. Department of Defense, Jan 2017).