ALBANY, NY, September 21—Today, about 100 members and supporters of the United Auto Workers (UAW) blocked traffic outside the Federal Building to support the 359 UAW members locked out by Honeywell since May 9. Honeywell is a major war contractor which manufactures brakes for military and commercial aircraft at two plants. UAW Local 9 in South Bend, Indiana, has 317 workers. UAW Local 1508 here in Green Island, New York, has 42 members and services the South Bend plant. Building solidarity with these workers is a key task for the communist Progressive Labor Party.
Honeywell is a crucial part of U.S. imperialism’s industrial complex. PLP fights for better working conditions for the Honeywell workers, while organizing for communist revolution to smash the capitalist system that exploits them as they build the weapons for future imperialist wars.
Today, scabs from the notorious union-busting Strom Engineering are running both the Green Island and South Bend plants. The Green Island plant is working two 12-hour shifts, sometimes six days a week! After picketing the plant early this morning, the workers joined the rally at the Federal Building, demanding — while the lockout continues — that the Obama Administration reverse its decision to extend an $18.3 million contract. From the Federal Building, workers took to the streets and blocked traffic for about 45 minutes before marching to the State Capitol building.
Honeywell: War-maker, Strikebreaker
Honeywell is a company known to most U.S. workers for its thermostat temperature-control devices found in many buildings. Most workers may not know that in addition to thermostats and brake parts for aircraft, Honeywell also manufactures missiles and drones, and is part of a consortium that assembles the nuclear bombs in U.S. imperialism’s arsenal.
Its role as war-maker dovetails with its actions as a strikebreaker. Despite more than $4 billion in government contracts last year, Honeywell locked out the workers after they rejected a contract that would double healthcare premiums for a family of four, and add a $1,400 deductible. After these premiums would be deducted from their paychecks, some workers would be taking home less than $15 an hour.
Honeywell also wants to unilaterally increase healthcare costs in each year of the contract, outsource work to non-union sites and eliminate job classifications and end pensions.  Clearly, this “offer” was intended to force the workers out and break the union.
Honeywell CEO Dave Cote, who has a personal retirement package worth $800,000/month, is no stranger to the Obama Administration. He served on the Deficit Commission and in 2010, he flew on Air Force One on an official trip to India, while 250 Honeywell uranium workers, members of the United Steelworkers, were locked out in Metropolis, Illinois.
This is the fourth time Honeywell has locked out its workers since 2010 — the uranium workers that year and again in 2014, and 840 workers, members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), in Kansas City in 2011. In 2010, Honeywell threatened to use federal troops to break a Steelworkers strike in Florida.
Fight UAW Mis-leadership, Build Solidarity!
PLP supports the rank-and-file workers fighting for their jobs. Rather than using this action to mobilize thousands of workers to surround the plant and stop the scabs, the UAW mis-leadership used it as a platform for a dozen politicians and labor officials to blow hot air at the workers. After four months, the President of the New York State AFL-CIO told the workers, “You are not alone. The 2.2 million members of the AFL-CIO are with you.” Yet he was there by himself! And any talk of mass militant action at the plant, against the scabs, is countered by, “We can’t do anything that will bring an injunction against the local.” But with the plant still working around the clock making profits, what more harm could an injunction do?
The UAW misleaders are also trying to build patriotism to mislead this struggle, saying, “Our military deserves better than scab parts in their fighter jets.” The fighter jets Honeywell is building, along with the nuclear bombs, will be used to slaughter our working-class sisters and brothers internationally. They’re part of the U.S. bosses’ arsenal to remain the top-dog imperialist power versus their growing Russian and Chinese imperialist rivals.
PLP salutes the fight of the Honeywell workers against the war-making, profiteering Honeywell bosses and their servants in the UAW mis-leadership. As the Honeywell workers’ Black and white sisters and brothers in Charlotte, North Carolina, fight back against racist police terror and workers in India fight in the tens of millions for better working conditions, we glimpse the potential for international working-class unity. Our class deserves communism, where factories like Green Island and South Bend assemble machines to build a communist world run by our class, instead of weapons for World War III.
That is PLP’s fight—to organize the working class to smash all borders and this racist, imperialist system whose most recent genocide has cost millions of Arab workers their lives and displaced millions more, turning the Middle East into a killing field. PLP builds the international solidarity of all workers, from Green Island to Syria. Smash war-maker, strikebreaker Honeywell and its imperialist government! Fight for communism!

The conflict of 1914 was the “seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. There is no reason to suppose the [China]-American conflict of a decade hence would not be the seminal catastrophe of the twenty-first.
— The National Interest, 9/7/16.

China’s recent imperialist expansion clashes head-on with the need of U.S. capitalism to maintain its top-dog status, signaling another step toward world war. Despite July’s ruling against them by the international Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Chinese imperialists continue to sail their ships through the Scarborough Shoal (Washington Post, 9/7). According to the Philippines military, these ships were capable of dredging sand—in other words, building more islands. The Shoal is part of a “strategic triangle” near the Philippines “that would allow Beijing to control the South China Sea” (qz.com, 9/11).
The international working class is caught squarely in the middle of this dogfight. Workers are the ones who fight and die in imperialist wars; the bosses will spare no worker in their quest for domination of profit, labor, and resources. Regardless of which capitalist power winds up on top, workers will suffer mass casualties, racist and sexist exploitation, and extreme state terror. The Progressive Labor Party fights for communism, a system that will smash racism, sexism, and imperialist war for all time.
Primer for War
The shift of global power now underway—the relative decline of the U.S. empire, and the surge of China—is a primer for war. Prior to World War I, the Ottoman and Russian empires were falling, and the U.S. was early in its rise. By the end of World War II, U.S. imperialism had established worldwide dominance. But that was then. Today the U.S. faces challenges on many fronts: Russia, ISIS, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and China. This editorial will focus on the clash with China and analyze The National Interest article published two days after the G20 summit conference in Hangzhou, China: “Why America and China Today Are Like Pre-World War I Europe.”
The bosses are now openly admitting what PLP has asserted for years. Disputes over the South China Sea, more assertive regional powers like Japan and the Philippines, the creation of the U.S.-dominated Trans-Pacific Partnership, and China’s One Belt, One Road initiative are moving the world toward a broad global conflict. While these developments are fluid and could go in many directions, ruling-class academic Jared McKinney lays out a blow-by-blow scenario for the next world war:

The creation of new flashpoints in the East and South China Seas is the first stage. This has already happened.

The South China Sea is essential to China’s bid to establish itself as the new top-dog imperialist. China’s economy depends on foreign trade, 90 percent of which travels by sea, which puts the rising superpower in a vulnerable position. In 2013, 82 percent of China’s crude oil imports passed through the Strait of Malacca, a maritime choke point controlled by the United States (Stratfor, 6/24/2015). When China builds islands with military capabilities and flouts international maritime law, it is pushing back aggressively against U.S. imperialism. As all imperialists understand, those who control the movement of oil control the world.
The increased number of Chinese boats in the Scarborough Shoal, a “precursor to possible building of structures on the shoal,” is just the latest example of capitalist China’s ambitions (Reuters, 9/8). In response, the U.S. and its ally, Japan, are increasing their military resources in the South China Sea by arming patrol ships and surveillance aircraft, and by training military forces in Malaysia and the Philippines (Stratfor, 9/7).
It’s only a matter of time until the U.S. sends more troops to these regions. “By positioning sufficient troops forward, including ground forces in Japan and the Philippines, the U.S. could…offset China’s military buildup” (Foreign Affairs, September/October).

Strengthened anti-China groups (both military and economic) are the second stage; this is currently under way.

In addition to challenging the seas, China is making what may be the biggest economic development plan in history, “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR). Funded by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), China’s rival to the U.S.-backed World Bank, this is a plan to develop markets and infrastructure in over 60 countries across Asia, Africa, and Europe. OBOR is luring a number of national bosses traditionally allied with the U.S., from Saudi Arabia (the largest source of U.S. oil profits) to Djibouti (home to a U.S. military base) to Turkey, the no longer reliable corridor from Europe to the Middle East.
 The strategy behind the Belt and Road Initiative is to diversify transit lines, thereby mitigating China’s vulnerability to external economic disruption and reinvigorating China’s slowing economy (Stratfor, 6/24/15).
U.S. bosses have responded by locking down their allies and creating their own economic alliance, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), though it has yet to be passed by Congress. The TPP is a trade agreement among twelve countries in North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania, similar to the Clinton administration’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

An intensified arms race with China and simultaneous constructed crises, typically over “alliance credibility,” are the third stage.

As China advances to realize its global ambitions, it must build a military to protect Chinese capitalists’ investments. China’s military is still weak, as compared to the U.S., but it is strengthening quickly. China just launched the world’s first quantum satellite, which can easily detect stealth planes and is highly resistant to jamming. They are also close to finishing the first Chinese-made aircraft carrier, a big step in extending their military reach.

Peaceful resolution of a few crises is the fourth stage. It’s here that…the statesmen insist on ‘firmly’ defending ‘present-day interests,’ having no fear of the specter of war.

U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden writes, “The next administration will have to steer a relationship with China that encompasses both breakthrough cooperation and, potentially, intensified competition” (Foreign Affairs, September/October). It’s no coincidence that China, Australia and the U.S. recently staged their third annual joint military survival training exercise “to build cooperation and trust”—just one week before Russia and China were to conduct an eight-day naval drill in the South China Sea (People’s Daily, 9/11). Temporary cooperation, a sign of weakness for a constrained U.S., will inevitably give way to wider conflict.

U.S. Says: Mobilize for War, Draft

In light of the upcoming election of the next chief servant of arch-U.S. imperialists, Foreign Affairs (the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, the leading think tank for the main finance wing of U.S. capitalism) dedicates its entire September/October issue to future war strategy. What the U.S. self-admittedly needs but lacks are class unity and ground forces. As conflict with China intensifies, the U.S. ruling class is insecure about many things, among them a disjointed Congress and a “broken military system.”
Co-writing with one of the bosses’ favorite strategists, Michael O’Hanlon, disgraced former general and war criminal David Petraeus (Afghanistan, Iraq) calls the U.S. armed forces “the best military in the world today, by far,” but cautions that it must be ready to handle multiple battles simultaneously. These ruling-class insiders criticize Barack Obama’s plan to cut back the active-duty Army:
Washington might declare its lack of interest in large-scale land operations and stabilization [occupation] missions, but history suggests that eventually it would find itself engaging in them nevertheless…The current and future army must be ready to handle a wide range of possible challenges.
They go on to call the current military budget of $600 billion a “bargain,” and advise against further cuts. If the U.S. is to check China’s imperialist ambitions, the bosses will need more than a TPP. They will need a willing army.  
Making a Draft Palatable
As reflected in Foreign Affairs, the U.S. ruling class is now openly calling for a draft:

“The only way to create a military reserve that looks like the United States [demographically] is to empower the state to require involuntary service. The trick is to make the empowerment politically palatable.” The bosses know they need a military that is “equitable and inclusive: no exemptions for the well-to-do.”  

While racism and divisions within the working class prop up the capitalists’ profit system, these divisions also limit their maneuverability. The bosses lament their lack of an essential aspect of fascism: all-class unity. Presenting a “people’s army,” as the CFR calls it, is contingent upon building a patriotic “America First” mindset. This has been a big struggle for the rulers, as the massive unpopularity of both Democratic and Republican politicians attests.
Who will pay for these coming oil wars? The working class. The main causes of U.S. financial woes “are the government’s rapidly increasing debt and the expanding cost of entitlement programs…It is on the domestic front where the tough choices will have to be made in order to defend the nation’s security and economic well-being.”
Only through fascist control on the domestic front can the imperialists gain an edge on the war front. To mobilize for war, the bosses need intensified nationalism and patriotism to pacify the working class into accepting lower wages and benefits and massive state terror. Tax dollars will be funneled into the buckling U.S. infrastructure. Last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a grade of D+. It estimates an investment of $3.6 trillion will be needed by 2020 if the U.S. economy expects “to be the most competitive in the world” (Wired, 1/23/15).
Turn Imperialist War Into Class War
To paraphrase Marx, every problem contains the elements of its own solution. World War I gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state. World War II gave rise to the Chinese Revolution. The march towards World War III will give rise to the conditions for a worldwide communist revolution. Everywhere in the world—including China and the U.S.—the international working class is fighting back.
Fighting back counts. September 9 marked the 45-year anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion in upstate New York, when 1,300 prisoners revolted against brutal, racist conditions. For four days, before liberal Governor Nelson Rockefeller launched his massacre, they were in charge. This example of Black working-class-led rebellion lives on as a terrible reminder for the bosses—and as an inspiration for our class.

The bosses are using the election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to push sexism and divide the working class. Trump’s sexism is out in the open. Beyond his crude verbal assaults on women journalists and women in general, he created a brutally  poisoned workplace environment in his family’s real estate empire. He poisoned his office with sexist comments and sexual harassment (New York Times, 5/14). Trump has used both racism and sexism to build his racist movement. Among his favorite targets for attack are immigrant women with children born in the U.S. (CBS News, 8/19/2015).
But the most damaging sexist in this election isn’t Donald Trump. While Hillary Clinton’s sexist attacks against working-class women have been less exposed by the ruling-class media, they are even more brutal.
A Sexist Since Arkansas
Contrary to the capitalists’ portrayal of Clinton as deeply caring about women and children, she has been eager to show the bosses she will do whatever it takes to keep them in power. A willingness to attack the working class is ultimately what the bosses need in their politicians. They particularly value the ones who feign compassion while they kill. Here is “democracy” under capitalism: an electoral choice between one racist, sexist mass murderer and another. This reality can’t change until the working class takes power and builds a communist society.
Clinton has been proving her worth to the bosses since her husband, Bill Clinton, was governor of Arkansas. In 1983, the Clintons blamed the problems of the state’s woefully underfunded and racist schools on a low-paid teaching force made up mostly of women. The cornerstone of their education reform was a mandated skills test for already licensed teachers, a sexist device to fail and fire large numbers of women. Many Black women teachers, in particular, were forced to leave Arkansas. The poor women left behind were essentially forced to pay for the state’s public schools. As Counterpunch (11/15/2007) noted:
The plan Mrs. Clinton came up with showcased teacher testing and funding the schools through a sales tax increase, an astoundingly regressive proposal since it imposed new costs on the poor in a very poor state while sparing any levies on big corporations. The plan went through. Arkansas’ educational ranking remained abysmal, but Hillary won national attention as a “realistic Democrat” who could make “hard” choices, like taxing welfare mothers.
Beginning in Arkansas in the 1980s, Clinton worked long and hard to gain the favor of Walmart, arguably the biggest exploiter of women in the U.S. (Today, the company’s U.S. workforce of 1.4 million includes 815,000 women, many of them paid poverty wages.) Rose Law Firm represented Walmart; Clinton spent six years on the company’s board of directors. Her tenure coincided with Walmart’s successful effort to smash a union-organizing drive, an issue where “she was largely silent” in the boardroom (New York Times, 5/20/2007).
In the 1990s, after Bill Clinton was elected president, Hillary Clinton took a lead role in promoting the administration’s sexist, racist policies. Many are familiar with Clinton’s racist fear-mongering about “super-predators” and her enthusiastic promotion of the 1994 crime bill that led directly to mass incarceration. Though the great majority of the 2 million prisoners in the U.S. are men, women have borne much of the Clintons’ attack. Nearly one of two Black women in the U.S. has a family member in prison. Between 1985 and 2007, the incarceration rate for women “increased at nearly double the rate of men”  (The Sentencing Project, 2007).
In 1996, Clinton took her role as lead sexist to a new level by helping to assure passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, also known as welfare reform. “After having supported her husband’s goal of ‘ending welfare as we know it,’ Clinton was instrumental in [building] up support….This bill…effectively ended welfare programs designed to provide real assistance to women and children in desperate need” (Global Research 8/21).
Attacking Women Across the Globe
Clinton’s sexist attacks are not limited to women workers in the U.S. As Secretary of State under Barack Obama, she was instrumental in the plan to trigger the genocidal Syrian civil war: “When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change” (Huffington Post, 2/14).
Clinton’s war in Syria has killed 500,000 people, about the same number of children starved to death in Iraq under her mentor, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Workers trying to escape the carnage of U.S. imperialism are in Clinton’s sights as well. As Obama’s Secretary of State, she engineered the 2009 coup in Honduras to install a pro-U.S. government and then insisted on the deportation of undocumented children fleeing the violence. As she callously explained in February at the Democratic Party presidential debate, “We had to send a message to families and communities in Central America not to send their children.”
Trump or Clinton, Sexism Wins in November
Voting will never end sexism. Whether Clinton or Trump wins in November, the bosses will require the new president to continue to push their sexist, racist agenda to divide the working class. It’s obvious that Trump is mobilizing a mass movement to pit white workers against Black, Latin and Muslim workers, and to demean and dismiss women along the way. Clinton has served the bosses in a less openly fascist but even more deadly fashion. While pretending to be on the workers’ side, she continues to lead the charge in the bosses’ anti-woman attacks. Many women, and younger women workers and students in particular, are rejecting her misleadership. They understand that a boss is a boss—regardless of race, religion, or gender.

BROOKLYN, September 8—Workers, professors, and students unite against the racist and sexist lockout of professors at Brooklyn Long Island University (LIU)! Students are leading the fight: hundreds walked out of their classes and they lead the daily protests with chants and signs. Electricians, carpenters, and custodians from LIU haven’t had a contract for four years and also joined in.
In solidarity, several dozen members of the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York (PSC-CUNY), including members of the Progressive Labor Party, came to the demonstration. This is an important struggle for the working class because students, professors, and workers are seeing that this is everyone’s struggle. When workers unite, we are a force to be reckoned with and we are one step closer to communism!
Students Bear the Burden
The professors are locked out without salaries or health benefits because the administration wants to force already low-paid adjunct professors to accept pay cuts. This is just the latest attack. For the past two years, LIU President Kimberly Cline has made cuts to departments and student services and laid off professors, forcing other to take on higher work loads. All this translates to students getting fewer resources and a worse education. Cline says it is to “balance the budget” while she pockets an annual salary of more than $650,000.
These budget cuts attack students and make it increasingly difficult to get an education. Students at LIU pay over $34,000 in tuition, with tuition increasing every year. That doesn’t even include the cost of food or housing. Many go into crippling debt just to pay for college. What do they get for their money? The LIU administration replaced 400 of the faculty with a couple hundred “scabs with doctorates” who were unprepared or unqualified to teach the first day of class. When professors are attacked, students bear the brunt.
Several speakers at the rally also pointed out that these attacks are racist and sexist. The LIU C.W. Post campus has mostly white students, while the Brooklyn campus is over 50 percent Black, Latin, and Asian students and 70 percent women. Students pay roughly the same tuition, but funds are re-routed to the LIU C.W. Post campus. Professors at the Brooklyn campus make lower salaries and receive fewer benefits. One of the demands of the faculty union, the LIUFF, is for equal salaries for both campuses.
Worker-Student Alliance
All across the country, both public and private universities are using more and more non-tenure track, contingent professors—adjuncts—who are given low salaries and few, if any, benefits. Workers seldom get new contracts to match the insane cost of living. Students are constantly paying more in tuition and getting less for their money. That’s how capitalism works everywhere: bosses maintain profits by making it easier to fire workers and by cutting benefits and resources.
The fight at LIU is for students, workers, and faculty everywhere. The bosses want us to believe that professors, students, and manual workers all have different struggles and that they must fight back separately. That is why it is key that all different workers are coming together in this struggle. The protesters understand that if management is able to lock out union members and force them to accept concessionary terms, it’s a blow to working people everywhere.
As the working class at LIU fight for better living conditions, we must all follow their example. Workers and students everywhere should support the professors and students of LIU. CUNY students are facing tuition hikes and should join the struggle. CUNY professors, and especially adjuncts, are facing similar attacks and must show solidarity. Demand that our unions rally in solidarity. Rank and file members should demand that the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) organize its hundreds of thousands of members to come to LIU, join the picket lines and shut the campus down until we win this struggle!
Let’s not forget that as long as the bosses still run this capitalist system, they can always take back whatever we win in our struggles. We need to build solidarity, fight racism and sexism, and organize for a better world in the future! The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is organizing in over 25 countries against the many abuses workers suffer under capitalism. These abuses will only end with communist revolution where workers run the world. Staff and students at LIU should join this worldwide struggle. Join us in the fight for communism.