When the leaders speak of peace
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.
-Bertolt Brecht, A German War Primer
Around the planet, the potential for global war among imperialists is escalating—and with it the threat of devastation for the international working class. At the moment, the Russian rulers loom as the U.S. bosses’ sharpest rivals. As Russia pursues an undeclared war with NATO ally Ukraine and moving nuclear-capable weapons near NATO borders, the Pentagon prepares to mobilize heavy weaponry and up to 5,000 troops in the Baltic states and former Eastern Bloc. Tensions between the two imperialist powers are higher than at any time since the Cold War. Seeking both battlefield superiority and game-changing alliances, they seem to be on a collision course.
Imperialist war is essential to capitalism. Rival capitalists must either expand their profit-making empires or fall to one of their rivals, a competition that creates constant instability and periodic crises. Each day, even during “peacetime,” this grow-or-die behavior devastates hundreds of millions of workers. It will end only when millions throughout the world join and help to lead a mass Progressive Labor Party, and to smash this racist, sexist, and imperialist profit system with armed communist revolution.
The Russians Are Coming
When Barack Obama nominated General Joe Dunford to be chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, it reflected the imperialist needs of the biggest U.S. capitalists. According to the Wall Street Journal (7/10/15), Dunford told Congress:
Russia poses the biggest threat to U.S. national security….Amid potential threats that include China, Islamic State, Iranian influence across the Middle East and other challenges...If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, you’d have to point to Russia,” Gen. Dunford said….North Korea, China and Islamic State are what he ranks as the second, third and fourth among potential security challenges.
Dunford’s remarks echoed those made the same day by a leading bank for U.S. imperialism. As Business Insider reported (7/10/15):
The Russia-NATO confrontation is becoming one of the defining aspects of the global strategic landscape. And according to the head of Goldman Sachs’s Office of Global Security, the situation is going to remain tense — or even intensify. Robert Dannenberg, who is also a 24-year CIA veteran, believes that Russia is the top strategic threat from a U.S. perspective. “We are in an extraordinarily dangerous time right now because both Russia and NATO are starting to exercise substantial military activity in close proximity to each other.”
While military buildups by both sides in Europe are heavily publicized, it’s less well known that “U.S. Army Alaska troops…have been taking part in a massive training exercise stretching from Alaska to Australia. Training exercise Talisman Saber involves over 33,000 military personnel from three continents” (Alaska Public Media, 7/10/15). This U.S.-led rehearsal targets both Russia and China with “airborne operations…uncommon…since World War II…The goal is to be able to drop an instant fighting force on the other side of the world within 24 hours” (APM).
Courting India
While U.S. rulers are glad to have Australia as a coalition partner, their bigger wish is to count India and its billion-plus population as an ally. But the bosses of Russia and China may have a better offer for India’s bosses. BRICS, an anti-U.S. economic coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, recently founded its own bank to challenge the U.S.-backed IMF and World Bank. As the imperialists in Russia court allies of their own, BRICS is also developing a military alliance.
India is set to become a full-fledged member of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a Eurasian political and military alliance that includes China and most of Central Asia, Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday.
“Under your (Putin’s) leadership in BRICS, India has become a member of SCO. I am very grateful,” the [Indian] prime minister said (Gulf Times, 7/9/15).
Unite Soldiers, Workers, Students
Another challenge to the U.S. rulers’ global war schemes comes from within, and it is one that PLP members and friends can use to our advantage. While regular U.S. army troops rehearse a European invasion with large-scale tank exercises at Fort Riley, Kansas, U.S. Special Forces are practicing a counterinsurgency Operation “Jade Helm” at bases throughout the U.S. Southwest. Many workers in the Southwest furiously oppose Jade Helm as an attempt to impose Ferguson-style federal martial law. States like Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, and the Carolinas provide U.S. rulers with the bulk of their enlisted cannon fodder. Many of these soldiers are white workers temporarily under the influence of racism and false ideologies like libertarianism. These bad ideas obscure the real source of their suffering: capitalism.
There is more immediate opportunity, however, in the hundreds of thousands of GIs who reject the Obama/Bush/Clinton/Exxon/JP Morgan/Goldman agenda for imperialist war and fascist control at home. By focusing its organizing efforts on students, industrial workers and soldiers, PLP is the one force capable of uniting these GIs with U.S. workers in the South and Southwest who are frustrated by mass unemployment, and with working-class Black, Latin and immigrant class sisters and brothers who face intensifying racist terror.
All the elections in the world cannot settle the imperialists’ disputes. The wars to come will be more devastating than any the world has ever seen. World War I and World War II were both settled by revolutions led by communists. PLP is building an international mass movement of millions to finish the job and smash the capitalist profit system once and for all. Join us!
PORT-AU-PRINCE — The hot-button subject in the Dominican Republican is the racist “hunt for Haitians.” The current attack, reminiscent of the 1937 “Parsley Massacre” of up to 50,000 Haitian sugar cane workers, has led to the deportation of 40,000 people to Haiti in the first quarter of 2015 alone (Guardian, 6/16/15). As workers are expelled or flee in terror, they move from capitalist oppression in the DR to what is often an even worse plight in Haiti. They are the living proof that national borders serve only the capitalist ruling class.
PLP, our international communist party, has joined anti-racist struggles in support of our Haitian sisters and brothers, both here and the U.S. In Brooklyn, PLP connected the racist deportations in DR to the racist deportations and killings of Black and Latin youth in the U.S. In Port-au-Prince, comrades held demonstrations and conferences attacking the racist bosses on both sides of the island of Hispaniola.
KKKourts Ordain Racism
In 2013, the DR bosses’ highest court broke their own constitution to withdraw citizenship from tens of thousands of people born in the Dominican since 1929 to migrant parents. The new law was blatantly aimed at workers of Haitian descent, who represent 80 percent of the so-called foreign population.
While the court ruling was later modified by the national legislature, the Dominican ruling class continues to use the state apparatus to blame workers of Haitian heritage for mounting unemployment—the perpetual crisis of capitalism. Anti-Haitian racism also serves as a smokescreen for corruption charges against present and past DR governments. Most damaging of all, it divides the working class along nationalist lines.
Two Flags, Same Exploitation
In both the DR and Haiti, workers have lined up behind their respective bosses’ flags, a sure disaster. Appeals to nationalism and racism are the bosses’ main weapon to sow disunity within our class. Haitian workers are super-exploited by Dominican bosses on both sides of the island, from agricultural and construction workers in the DR to factory workers in free-trade-zone shops owned by Dominican-Haitian capitalist partnerships. And these same Dominican bosses exploit Dominican workers on “their side” of the island.
Meanwhile, thousands of more recent Haitian immigrants have fled the DR “voluntarily,” not daring to wait for more brutality. In some cases, their documents proving legal residence were torn up in front of them by soldiers and immigration agents. Others, in the DR for decades and with children and grandchildren born there, are anxiously waiting; they have few remaining ties to Haiti and speak only Spanish.
The Haitian government has done nothing about this crisis. Recently, their ministers met at the Royal Oasis, one of five luxury hotels built since the 2010 earthquake in the capital’s suburbs—with money that should have gone to housing for the earthquake’s victims. The ministers’ big plan was to set up a handful of tents in the border areas to receive refugees from the DR crisis. Much like the earthquake victims, these refugees have no jobs, no services, no hope.
Teaching Nationalist Poison
The Dominican and Haitian ruling classes are in competition to profit off the backs of workers. In the DR, the bosses’ education system is riddled with racism. It poisons working-class children with the nationalist myth that people of Haitian descent are to blame for all the ills of their society. For their part, the Haitian bosses and their politicians do their best to keep the working class in the dark with barely functioning schools. Dominican workers are taught to persecute Haitian workers, while Haitian workers are taught that they are hated by Dominicans and should respond in kind. The workers’ natural class hatred toward the bosses is subverted by racism and division.
Whether in the DR or Haiti, the local ruling classes—backed by imperialist powers like the U.S.—could not care less about workers’ deaths and dislocation. Their only concern is to make more profit. For Haitian workers, the attack is doubled. In addition to laboring under subhuman conditions for miserable wages (earning 50 to 60 percent less than Dominicans for the same work), and experiencing racist humiliation on a daily basis, they may be hanged, burned alive, lynched or shot. Historically, these atrocities have broken out whenever tensions rise between the two countries’ rulers. Haitian bosses invest their capital in the DR, while Dominican bosses make their bread and butter in both Haiti and the DR.
Communism Will Smash All Borders
As long as nationalism, individualism, selfishness and capitalist inequality exist, racism will flourish. The capitalists will use it as a weapon to divide and dominate the working class. Racism obstructs the unity of the working class. This is why communists in Progressive Labor Party fight against racism and sexism in thought and deed. We organize to build communist consciousness in anti-racist struggles. We struggle for a world of equality. Smash racism and nationalism! Fight for communism!
PAKISTAN, July 15 — Pakistan is moving along a bloody path established by the capitalist bosses for their long- and short-term interests. The bosses need fear, chaos and unrest in the country to keep the working class silent on their exploitation and poverty. The bosses pit workers against each other by using nationalism, fundamentalism, sexism, racism and the false concept of ethnicity. Women workers are super-exploited, earning little or no pay and often working under subhuman conditions. All of these divisions are an attempt to circumvent our unity. PLP is fighting to unite workers to challenge the bosses.
Racist Massacres
The recent massacre of Pakhtoons (pashtuns) in Baluchistan, where about 40 working-class travellers were killed brutally after being abducted from two public busses, is another attempt by the bosses to generate perpetual violence. Baluchistan has two main ethnic groups, the Baluchs and Pakhtoons, that lived together peacefully for many years. After killing thousands of innocent working-class people in the name of religion, the imperialist bosses and their puppets launched a new strategy in Baluchistan: to divide these two groups. Baluch separatists, funded by imperialist bosses, executed the killings. PLP asserts that nationalism is a tool used by imperialism to further the bosses’ interests throughout the world.
In 2015, 30 Baluchistan coal miners were killed by terrorists while sleeping in tents in Turbat, Baluchistan. These miners work hard to produce profit for bosses without any safety equipment and with outmoded, dangerous techniques. After this heinous attack, it was proved that security personnel aided the terrorists.
In Karachi, more than 250 workers were burned alive in a Bladia town garment factory after the factory owners refused to pay extortion money to a racist political party. Soon after that barbaric act, the culprit was arrested by some brave security officials, but his affiliation with the party was suppressed. Bosses are always protecting each other one way or another.
Capitalist bosses need profit, above all. By avoiding direct clashes with nationalist and religious terrorists that might threaten their investments, the bosses are protecting their money at the cost of workers’ lives. They are also giving funds and support to the nationalist and religious terrorists because they want to keep oppressing and killing workers.
Capitalism breads nationalism, sexism, racism, fundamentalism and ethnic divisions to keep workers from uniting. Elections are used to deepen these divisions.
We cannot get rid of all these capitalist evils without uniting workers worldwide for an international communist revolution. We know that capitalism has to die. Let us struggle hard under the red banner of the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party to make communism a reality.
TEL AVIV, July 10 — Workers here are waging a fight against contract work and demanding direct employment, a boss-worker relationship without an intermediary agency that pay substandard wages. PLP’s involvement in this reform struggle can help win workers to communist politics.
A group of contract workers and fighters of the National Coalition for Direct Employment walked through downtown Tel Aviv, marking the pavement with chalk in front of businesses and government offices that employ contract workers. Several PL’ers, one of whom is active in the Coalition, took part in the activity.
On June 18, we also rode the train from Be’er Sheva to Haifa and back, talking with passengers and showing videos about the contract workers’ plight. The response was enthusiastic. Most passengers were strongly opposed to the capitalist practice of contract employment. Most fighters in the Coalition were social work students and their teachers. Instead of merely discussing the horrors of capitalism inside class, they came out to the streets to challenge this exploitation.
Contract labor is a relatively new form of super-exploitation of workers, first emerging in the late 1980’s after “structural adjustments”—that is, big cutbacks by the racist Israeli bosses. A contractor boss — a wage-slave trader — hires workers, typically for minimum wage or a little more, and rents them out to various businesses and government offices. This outsourcing is designed to cut costs at the workers’ expense. A contract worker rarely gets even those minimal rights prescribed by the bosses’ laws. In addition, contract labor enables bosses to deny responsibility for dangerous and miserable working conditions.
Capitalism Dehumanizes Workers
Contract work, like all wage labor under capitalism, is a way for bosses to dehumanize workers and treat them as commodities. But contract work also is a way to break organized labor and to give the lowest possible pay for the most work they can squeeze out of us. Both the actual employer and the contractor make big profits while we workers pay the contractors to exploit us. That is why the Coalition came to shame these exploiters and mark them in public as the wage-slave owners they are. Of course, the bosses’ state intervened. City Hall enforcement cops fined some of us, but we paid the fine and continued to mark the pavements in front of the businesses.
Fightback is important for building working-class consciousness in Israel-Palestine. The big strength of the Coalition is its inclusive nature. It treats all people as comrades and partners for change. But it does have weaknesses, mainly its reformist focus on changing contract employment to direct employment. It fails to recognize that all work under capitalism is exploitative.
Inside the Coalition, we are building a base and putting forward revolutionary communist politics. Exploitation can be smashed only by a communist revolution. The bosses’ murderous profit system must be replaced by a workers’ state, where we the working class will run society. Friends in the Coalition want our class to work with dignity. For that, we need communism. Through this struggle, we are winning workers to join PLP.
Tokyo, Japan, July 13 — Thousands are rallying here every week to protest ruling-class plans to expand the country’s military.
Led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan’s leading bosses hope to intensify nationalism and its military powers. China and North Korea’s rulers have recently tested the waters long dominated by the U.S. military with island building and military tests. Japan’s bosses are using fear about these growing confrontations to revise Japan’s constitution and long-held position as a “pacifist” country with a tiny military (“defense force”).
Since World War II, Japan has been home to many military bases for the U.S., and provided funding for their imperialist efforts. But workers in Japan are refusing to accept the local bosses’ war plans. Young and old, women and men, rain or shine, they are in the streets saying no to Abe & Co’s plans.
Many of the youth at the rallies connected the growth of war with racism and fascism. Some working-class women took leadership at these marches by giving speeches and distributing fliers.
There needs to be millions of workers in the streets, on strike and refusing orders in the barracks. And even then, capitalism’s relentless drive for profits will lead to war. That’s why from Japan to Iraq, this whole system must be smashed.