For workers, the June 23 Brexit referendum—for Great Britain to leave the European Union—was a lose-lose scenario, a fight between two camps of rapacious, racist capitalist bosses. At the same time, the anti-EU vote reflects workers’ disaffection with the decaying profit system, a big setback for U.S. rulers in their inter-imperialist competition with Russia and China—and another step toward global instability and World War III.
Formally established in 1993, the EU grew out of the post-World War II order imposed by U.S. capitalism in its Cold War against the Soviet Union. Alongside institutions like NATO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, the EU allied with U.S. imperialism and helped project U.S. economic power. More recently, U.S. rulers’ efforts to impose their will on the world—and preserve their control over cheaply extracted oil in the Middle East—have led to grossly mismatched wars against small-power regimes in Iraq and Libya.
In wars hot and cold, Great Britain (also known as the United Kingdom, or UK) has been U.S. imperialism’s most faithful ally. For more than two decades, the UK has played a vital role for the U.S. ruling class in convincing other EU members to support wars in the Middle East and beyond. It has sent troops to support NATO missions in Africa and Eastern Europe (Foreign Policy, 6/16), and is a reliable partner in the U.S. bosses’ intelligence and surveillance operations.
Russia Gains at U.S. Expense
While the Brexit vote may not alter the commitment of key British ruling-class forces to continue to play that role (forbes.com 6/24), it removes the most reliable ally of U.S. imperialism from a position of influence inside the European Union. Before the Brexit vote, Great Britain was one of the most persistent voices pushing the EU to lay sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, despite sizable Russian holdings of London real estate and a presence in the London financial sector (openeurope.org).
In short, Brexit weakens the EU and emboldens Russia. According to a Twitter post by Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, “Putin benefits from a weaker Europe. UK vote makes EU weaker. It’s just that simple” (@McFaul, 6/24).
Even if the UK ruling class succeeds in ignoring the referendum or declaring it null and void for constitutional reasons (New York Times, 6/27), Europe may be beginning to fracture. The bailout of Greece and the Syrian refugee crisis have put a number of national ruling classes in survival mode. Border fences go up while Germany tries to hold it all together.
Most of the City, London’s Wall Street, sided with the “Remain” camp—including leading members of the Rothschild family, the British financier equivalent of the Rockefellers. But it appears that a lesser wing of the British ruling class – with Russian backing –has organized a movement around the opposite view. Russia’s English-language media outlets have mocked the EU as chaotic and restrictive for its member states, rhetoric that fed the “Leave” forces. Leaders of the Britain National Party and Britain First, far-right elements of the Leave campaign, have attended neo-Nazi meetings in St. Petersburg (Daily Beast, 6/8/15).
Leave Capitalism!
Over the past two generations, as capitalists have shut down industry after industry while stalking the globe for ever-lower labor costs, the working people of Great Britain have seen their standard of living decline under both Labour and Conservative Party rule (New Yorker 6/16). Over the same period, immigration of Eastern European, Asian, Middle Eastern and African workers into the UK has allowed rulers to super-exploit the newcomers and drive down wages of jobs that remain. The Brexit vote won’t reverse that process.
The Leave campaign, led by Conservative Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage of the gutter-racist, arch-nationalist UK Independent Party, carried the day by scapegoating immigrants for the failures of capitalism in Britain. But the Remain forces—like Hillary Clinton liberals in the U.S.—are an even greater danger. A coalition of mainstream Conservative, Labourites, and Liberal Democrats, these are the same bosses who have thrown millions out of work, eroded workers’ standard of living, and shredded the National Health Service.
On the eve of World War I, leaders of many communist parties were convinced the capitalists were too inter-dependent to go to war. Once war arrived, they forgot the essential Marxist slogan, “Workers of the World Unite,” and led the workers of each imperialist country to side with “their” national bosses. The Russian Bolsheviks’ answer to imperialist war—communist revolution—remains the greatest lesson in the history of the international working class.
The reality is that racism is deadly for all workers, including white workers. The 17 million workers who voted to leave the EU acted against their own interests—not in their rejection of 21st-century capitalism and imperialism, but in their turn toward nationalism and racism. Lacking communist leadership, they are being led down the path to rising fascism by both of the British bosses’ camps. Only communism, a system run by workers in the interests of workers, can solve the unceasing attacks of inequality, poverty, unemployment, and racism that led many workers to vote Leave.
A Class-Conscious Alternative
Amid the furor of Brexit, a few hundred UK rail workers are demonstrating the kind of class consciousness that—if coupled with revolutionary communist politics—represents the only true alternative for the working class. In Scotland, greedy rail bosses want to replace conductors (who safely open and shut train doors) with ticket-takers (who guarantee the bosses’ revenue and profit). These workers are striking not mainly to protect their pay, benefits and jobs but rather to protect their fellow-worker passengers from injury.
Workers of the world need an exit from capitalism. Voting in lose-lose bosses’ elections won’t get us there. We need hundreds and thousands of class struggles like the ScotRail strike, like the Ferguson rebellion, linked by communist politics. The Progressive Labor Party fights for international working-class unity by making anti-racism and anti-sexism primary in all of our local work. In a communist world, workers will be free to live and work wherever our class’s need is greatest. A communist world will put an end to imperialist war. We won’t win that world until we overcome the divisions the bosses work overtime to sow between us. Join us!

SACRAMENTO, CA, June 23—At the State Capitol today, the communist Progressive Labor Party physically whipped the local Nazi scum while bringing red leadership to a mass of anti-racists.
The white-supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) and their arch-racist honcho, Matthew Heimbach (described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “the new face of hate”), made the grave mistake of trying to rally by the Capitol building. In concert with dozens of anti-fascists, a PLP contingent ran toward the fascists to stop them in their tracks. The first clash left three anti-fascists with stab wounds but sent the cowardly racists running.
Based on our Party’s collective experience against similar cockroaches in Anaheim in February and in Charleston, South Carolina last summer, our comrades used wooden poles because we assumed the fascists might have knives. We were correct—and the poles punished the fascist scum. We pursued them down the street, beat them three more times and busted their car windows. The fascist TWP members were bloodied and defeated!
PLP understands that mass, organized revolutionary violence will be necessary for the working class to seize state power from the capitalist bosses. For now, we must treat opportunities to confront racist terrorists as training for the revolutionary period in the future.
Expose Racism, Long March to Communism
Before the planned TWP rally, a multiracial communist contingent of 18 PL comrades—students, workers, and retirees; women and men; Black, Latin, and white—marched onto the Capitol lawn, chanting, “Death, death, death to the Nazis! Power, power, power to the workers!” The presence of PLP was well-received by the many different anti-fascist groups along the sidewalk.
As the PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE and leaflets, an anti-fascist leader approached us and explained their main goal: to stop the fascists from leaving the parking garage and setting foot on the Capitol grounds.
The main goal for PLP was to defeat the fascists and build a movement for communist revolution to smash racism once and for all. We made speeches tying the kkkops, the Nazis, and the California State Legislature together as tools of the capitalist class. The role of the TWP is to win the white working class to attack their working-class sisters and brothers, scapegoating Black, Muslim and Latin workers for the spiraling crisis of capitalism.  The role of the police is to protect the gutter racists on the street, the slick-talking racists in the government, and the suit-and-tie racists in the capitalist business world. The state’s Democratic Party, which has historically controlled California, led the way in racist mass incarceration, increasing the prison population by 572 percent between 1980 and 2010 (Washington Post, 5/18).
Our role as communists is to expose liberal racists like Hillary Clinton as the greater danger to the working class, as proven by her racist, sexist record against the working class as a U.S. senator and Secretary of State. If elected, Clinton will pave the way for inter-imperialist war by accelerating the rise of fascism in the rulers’ embattled profit system.
Red Discipline vs. Anarchy
After a scout reported that the fascists weren’t in the parking garage, we collectively decided to take the Capitol steps and make the scum come to us. They came wielding pepper spray. Anarchist forces successfully counter-attacked one fascist and then got into a skirmish with the police.
Instead of running around the Capitol lawn, the PLP contingent maintained discipline. Our friends played critical roles in the planning and execution of the strategy. Two young women helped lead chants throughout the day, and one young man was a part of the sub-contingent that slammed the racists. Their contribution was crucial to the quality of political leadership the Party was able to provide.
After witnessing our organization in action, a lefty leader told PLP to coordinate the crowd of 200 anti-fascists. A PL member gave a speech calling for a unified, organized march back to the Capitol steps to shut down the fascists. The crowd followed our leadership. Shortly thereafter, we advanced towards the fascists and bloodied them.
Coming after our successful action in Anaheim, this is the second battle the Party has waged against the fascist forces this year. Our comrades’ courage and boldness reflects PLP’s long history of beating, shutting down, and weakening the Ku Klux Klan, other racist organizations like ROAR, and racist bosses at our jobs and schools. Our power comes from our confidence in the working class’s ability to understand our ideas and fight for communist power.
She Joined the Reds
While anarchist fighters can be bold, they lack the revolutionary discipline and organization that comes only from communist leadership. For example, some militant fighters were injured because they thought they could defeat the fascists in isolated hand-to-hand combat.
Our battle in Sacramento showed one friend of the Party the necessity of organized collective action to defeat fascists. It showed another friend that “the Party provides the only clear path towards ending exploitation and building working-class power.” She has now joined PLP. Welcome the newest brave member of our Party, a woman whose leadership to and from the working class has just begun.
The TWP has announced that they will defend supporters Donald Trump, the openly racist U.S. presidential candidate, at the Republican Convention in Cleveland in July. Much as Brexit was promoted with virulent anti-Muslim racism (see page 2), the bosses use extreme racist groups like the TWP to divide and exploit the working class in the U.S. But with a small but rising communist PLP, the working class can oppose these fascist tendencies and unite as one class against capitalism.
PLP is organizing students, workers and soldiers into a red army that is capable of waging revolutionary war against the capitalist class and their state apparatus, from the police and military to the courts and mass media. PLP fights for a world where workers will control all aspects of society.
As communists, we understand that building a revolutionary movement for and by the working class requires organization, commitment to each other, and reliable leadership. We are building a mass party around the world—join the communists!

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I Joined the Party After Battling Fascists

During the planning meeting for the Sacramento Nazi rally, it was hard to comprehend what exactly it would mean to “shut down a fascist rally,” but I felt confident in the capacity and organization of the PL members sitting around the table. The older members showed a level of respect and confidence towards their younger comrades that I have never seen before during my time organizing in the mass movement.
The moment we began marching towards the state building it felt clear to me what we were doing and why it needed to be done. I felt strong knowing I was going into battle with PLP. As we marched on the sidewalk chanting, “death, death, death to the fascists! Power, power, power to the workers!” other anti-fascist groups appeared surprised by our brazen entrance.
My PL team’s role for the day was to lead chants on the megaphone, and to support the PLP team clashing with the Nazis in any way we could. It was an incredible feeling for me to get on the megaphone and scream out, “power to the workers!” and hear it echoed back hundred times louder.
The leadership of my group remained disciplined and focused during the most chaotic moments throughout the day, and they made decisions only after involving other group members in the process. It was this kind of Party discipline that kept us safe that day. No one was arrested.
The level of commitment, trust, and love for the working class that I’ve experienced throughout the last three months of working with PL members has made it clear that the Party is my only path towards fighting for a society free of exploitation and racism. I joined the Party after the rally and look forward to fighting for a communist world.

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I See Red Freedom Poles

This working-class poem, written by a fellow fighter with PLP, depicts the tumult and confusion preceding the clash of communists against the yellow-bellied fascist who were beaten with wooden poles.

The hot peppers
Caught in my throat.
Coughed out spices
Of warning.
Only to be
Mirrored by the reflections
Of my own
To protect.

Voices that came to gather
Soon forced
Bodies to separate,
To be gathered soon,
After  
In different forces.

Black shadows
Against
Other black shadows.
Fist clashed
Against
Flesh.

Hard to depict.
Hard to understand.
Who is who?
What is What?
As confusion comes
I see
the RED freedom poles.

MEXICO CITY, June 28—As murderous capitalist rule in Mexico accelerates its decay into fascism, hundreds of thousands in the capital are protesting in solidarity with the teachers’ rebellion in the majority-indigenous state of Oaxaca. On June 19, at least ten workers were killed and dozens wounded after the cops opened fire on a group of teachers, students and other demonstrators blocking a major highway between Oaxaca and Mexico City.
Masses of rebels have taken the streets to protest racist President Enrique Peña Nieto’s education reforms. They were met by thousands of federal and local cops, as well as military forces equipped with riot gear, high-caliber weapons, planes, helicopters and tanks. The struggle is growing. On June 22, more than 200,000 doctors and nurses joined the teachers’ national strike to protest Pena Nieto’s Universal Health System reform, which they called a “disguised way of privatizing health in Mexico” (telesurtv.net, 6/21).
Progressive Labor Party is fighting with the working class in these battles. We are bringing communist revolutionary politics as an alternative to this capitalist hell that promotes relentless attacks on the working class and inter-imperialist war.
We call on all Party members to mobilize and protest at Mexican consulates in support of our class brothers and sisters in struggle. San Francisco and New York City comrades have responded with solidarity rallies (see more next issue). Workers: Struggles have no borders! Fight for communism!
Fighting the Terrorist State
More and more, the battles against racist cops and education reforms, which hurt indigenous and Black workers most of all, are becoming one fight against the ruling-class state apparatus. The rebels linked the murders of the protesting teachers to the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in the state of Guerrero.
Organized by the National Coordinator of Educational Workers, a militant branch of the national teachers unión, teachers in Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas have been on strike for a month to try to force the rulers to cancel the proposed education reforms. These bosses’ attacks would impose standardized testing and use teacher evaluations to discipline education workers, similar to anti-worker reforms in the United States. They would also severely curtail the influence of the teacher unions and threaten teacher colleges with a history of class-conscious fightback.  
Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero are the poorest states in Mexico; Michoacán is the tenth- poorest. That says a lot in a country where the minimum salary is 73 pesos—less than four U.S. dollars—a day!
The bosses’ immediate objective is to crush the most militant sector of Mexico’s working class: the teachers, and especially the teachers in Oaxaca, long a combative force. Communists understand that an attack on one section of the working class is a forewarning of attacks on the whole working class.
Workers Block Oil Refinery
The massacre of teachers in Oaxaca reflects a mandate for the Mexican capitalists from their big-power imperialist masters in the U.S. and China, who are competing to control natural resources throughout Latin America.
In contrast to the well-publicized teachers strike, the bosses’ media are ignoring a recent insurrection in the Istmo de Tehuantepec, a region in Oaxaca State that includes the second-shortest route between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, after the Panama Canal. In the port of Salina Cruz, forces of resistance have blocked the entrance to the country’s biggest oil refinery run by Pemex, the state-owned petroleum company.
This area is of high economic, strategic and geopolitical importance—and a potential flashpoint of the rivalry between China and the U.S. After decades of trying to establish an industrial and logistics corridor, better known as the Transístmico, Pena Nieto inaugurated a wind farm in the Istmo (Milenio.com, 2/3/16), ignoring fierce opposition from teacher unions and indigenous groups that condemned the project as harmful to their way of life. As a report by the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico noted, the prevailing model of wind energy development in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec “favors developers, limiting the benefits received by local communities and increasing social backlash against the projects” (Problemas del Desarrollos, July-September 2014).
On March 4, the Communication and Transportation secretary inaugurated the Autopista Mitla-Tehuantepec, a 40-kilometer road through the Sierra Madre Mountains (Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, 4/3/16). In addition, a Transístmico train will connect Salinas Cruz, Oaxaca, with Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, creating a regional cluster of industry, including oil refineries. In June 2014, Pemex began building a pipeline to “allow for the transportation of cheap, clean and secure combustibles” (El Financiero, 1/27/15). The goal of Transístmico is to exploit the demand for transporting goods from the East coast of North America to China. Meanwhile, China will be able to further its interests in the petrochemical industry in Veracruz.
Fascist Control Aids Imperialist Aims
As a result of these high-stakes capitalist investments and the super-exploitation of local workers, resistance and repression are both concentrated in this area of Oaxaca state. The local and national authorities defend the criminal capitalist system, where blood, death and jail are the order of the day. They will stop at nothing to try to check the mobilization of rebelling teachers, students and parents. The Istmo is testament to the fact that control of the working class is crucial to the bosses’ imperialist aims.
Fascism is the natural outgrowth of global capitalism. It represents the intensification of the repressive and ideological forces to maintain the domination of the capitalist class. As R. Palme Dutt wrote in Fascism and Social Revolution, “The causes of fascism lie deep-rooted in existing society. Capitalism in its decay breeds fascism.” These rising fascist conditions are what we are witnessing today in Mexico.
This is not a local fight; it is part of a global class war. The teachers’ movement is directly confronting the bosses who are enriching themselves by exploiting and terrorizing the working class. This fight is crucial to the resistance against the capitalist state terrorists who have left hundreds of youth, teachers and farmworkers dead or disappeared. Our class is waging a crucial fight to create a “corridor” of struggle that will take us to the ultimate solution, a communist revolution.

SOUTH INDIA, June 21— A community organizer who shares Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) anti-racist outlook united Hindu and Muslim workers, countering India’s ruling-class arch bent towards fascism.
This struggle ensued when a follower of the Hindu religion placed a stone in the middle of a public street as a symbol of religious devotion. This was seen as provocative and Muslim workers were angered by this and were planning actions against it. This is during the Muslim religious month of Ramadan, where Muslims fast all day every day to commemorate the first revelation of their religious text, the Quran. Some Hindu workers were also beginning to mobilize. Tensions were high.
The community organizer immediately met with both the Hindu and Muslim workers. After some serious debate and struggle, they were able to resolve the conflict. This built more trust among the working class’s ability to solve problems without buying into the divisive bait of religious strife.
This set an example for others in this city to follow and for members and friends of PLP worldwide to follow as we continue to work to oppose racist exploitation and build unity against the different kinds of racism all over the world.
Using Religion to Divide Workers
The serious work of this fighter helped prevent a dangerous situation that could further feed the drive towards fascism. The right wing, nationalist government of prime minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is building fascism (all-class unity during a capitalism system in crisis) by breeding conflict and violence against the Muslim working class.
The capitalist system uses religious conflict, like they use other kinds of racism, as a way to exploit the working class and divide us. As the system moves closer to fascism, this conflict gets more intense. In India, the Modi government is taking this to new extremes, using people’s religious feelings to build fascism. Modi is well known for his anti-Muslim racism. When he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat, his security forces stood by as over a 1,000 Muslims were slaughtered in 2002. The evidence was so strong that he ordered his security forces to allow this massacre, which the United States denied him an entry visa in 2005.
His anti-Muslim racism also didn’t hamper him from becoming prime minister of the country. His racism is no isolated incident. In fact, Modi’s BJP is the political wing of the extreme right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an organization founded in 1925 and openly modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.
No Small Act
The actions of our friend might seem like a small act, but in many parts of India, violent conflict has broken out against Muslims and this is a part of the racist strategy to control not only the Muslim working class, but also the Hindu working class.
Sincere members of the working class can get tricked into fighting against our working-class sisters and brothers. As Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital: “Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” Multiracial unity is fundamental to defeating capitalism.
Real communists today understand that no member of the working class can ever be free as long as there is any exploitation or oppression of workers from any group. That is why we try to win workers to a scientific understanding of the world, rather than a theological one. There are no real differences between Muslim and Hindu workers—our history and earthly fate are tied to each other and our level of class struggle.
Workers in India, and all over the world, must join with the Progressive Labor Party and build a worldwide movement for communism! You can get started by reading and distributing our local CHALLENGE!