BROOKLYN, June 14—Today marked four years since the day that the NYPD brutally shot down Shantel Davis. A multi-racial group of about 30 PLP members and friends and some other community organizers congregated with Shantel’s family on the street corner where she was killed to commemorate her life and our four years of fightback. With heavy faces and tear-stained eyes, our collective stood with a myriad of white balloons. In the wake of four years of fighting back against tragedy, one theme remained present throughout the night: Justice for Shantel and all victims of police brutality means nothing short of communist revolution.
The rally began with bullhorn speeches by PL members, the Davis family, and the families of other members of the working class who have been murdered by the kkkops, such as Ramarley Graham, Mohamed Bah, and Anthony Baez. Speeches were bolstered by chants from the crowd of “Racism means we got to fight back!” and “We will never forget Shantel! We will always fight for Shantel!” in between. We then blocked traffic in all four directions of the intersection as we formed a huge circle in the center. As traffic piled up, drivers were told why we were there and they stood in support. More remarks were made over the bullhorn as members of the neighborhood looked on and recorded the spectacle of a multiracial group of protesters on their phones.  
Shantel’s sister delivered a particularly heartbreaking speech. She thanked PL and all in attendance for their extended support in the fightback against this grave tragedy. Her sister had been callously killed on false pretenses, shot in the chest while begging for her life, and her family hadn’t even been afforded the opportunity to properly grieve. Their first task had been to reverse the smear campaign set out by the bosses’ media, which was set in motion immediately after her death, describing Shantel as a criminal monster. Anything to try to convince the community that it was a necessary and justified killing! The reality is that it is the NYPD acting as the neighborhood thugs, violently instilling fear in the working class. In fact, the detective who killed Shantel is particularly known as a menace in the neighborhood—“Bad Boy” Atkins.
Shantel’s sister ended her speech choking past tears, with the words, “I just don’t know what to do anymore…” This speaks volumes about what capitalist “justice” means—there is none! Over the past four years, she has become an incredible, strong leader in the fightback movement against police brutality, but this is what a fight for reform, for a “fix” to the justice system, does to working class morale. Only communism smashes the racism that built this system, and so only the long-term fight for that world can keep us feeling that we can win. PLP knows what to do—and the families of kkkop victims are being won to that idea.
In the months immediately following Shantel’s murder, a group of misleaders tried to convince Shantel’s family that in order to get justice for their sister, they shouldn’t be too militant, as it would make it harder to win within the legal system. These anticommunists “cautioned” Shantel’s family that we in PLP were there for “our own reasons” and we “didn’t really care about Shantel.” 4 years later, the politicians have disappeared and it has become obvious that winning within the legal system is a myth. While the misleaders preached a “behind-the-scenes” approach, we fought for and won Shantel’s sisters to the strategy of organizing a justice committee, along with some of their close friends, to fight back militantly.
The struggle to move our marches from the sidewalks to the streets came out of a bigger political struggle to see that the biggest wins could only come from showing our strength as a multi-racial group fighting back in the streets, to see the courts and politicians as part of the same system as the cops—and to see their fight as part of a bigger working class fight, even if they never see capitalist “justice” for their family member.
This evening ended on a note of hope. We released our white balloons decorated with notes: ‘Justice for Shantel’, ‘We will always fight for Shantel; ‘Fight for Communist Revolution’. One comrade made this poetic observation as the balloons floated into the sky: “They’ve gone so far, and they’re still sticking together.” Let us take this metaphor as a reminder of how we must fight daily to strengthen our force of multi-racial working class unity, build PLP and work towards revolution, so one day we may all receive justice.

U.S. imperialist terrorist-in-chief Obama’s current Middle East strategy prioritizes military action against ISIS. However, as Russia continues to challenge U.S. imperialist ambitions in oil-rich Syria and the Middle East as a whole, top U.S. State Department officials are calling for more aggressive military strategies to counter Russia’s increasing influence. As this rivalry intensifies the threat of even wider imperialist wars loom on the horizon.
Key U.S. Policy Planners Reject Obama’s Current Course
The State Department officials’ message, entitled “Dissent Channel: Syria Policy,” advocates making regime change in Syria the highest priority. They want to remove Russia’s imperialist-backed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power. The officials call for precision air strikes against Assad’s regime, cynically posing as concern for workers in Syria. The officials state “Assad’s systematic violations against the Syrian people are the root cause of the instability that continues to grip Syria and the broader region.”
 If these policies are implemented, they will dramatically increase the danger of a military confrontation between Russia and U.S.-led NATO forces. Russia has been providing military support against the threat ISIS and anti-Assad fighters pose to Assad, including massive air strikes by Russian warplanes. The Obama administration and the Pentagon also claim defeating ISIS their top priority. Both of these imperialist powers are really after strategic control of global oil supplies, and neither one can afford to concede any part of the Middle East to the other.
Importantly, Russia’s ally Iran, itself a regional imperialist power, is a key supporter of Assad. A more aggressive U.S. imperialist strategy in the Middle East threatens the temporary cooperation Iran’s bosses have offered to the U.S., in exchange for money.
Iranian, Russian Bosses Have Temporary Upper Hand
With such risks to U.S. imperialism, why is there such support among the U.S. policymaking establishment to explicitly provoke their Russian rivals? Part of the answer involves the fascist bosses of two key, but embattled U.S. imperialist allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Both allies are currently fighting Iran-backed militia forces, and U.S. policymakers fear that despite the Iran bosses’ appearances of cooperating with the U.S., they continue to secretly fund militias to further destabilize U.S. control.
In neighboring Lebanon, the Israeli bosses fear the Iran-backed Shiite militias of Hezbollah more than any other immediate threat. The rise of ISIS in Syria has temporarily distracted Hezbollah, which fights on the side of Assad in Syria.  In addition, Yemen, on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, is torn apart by civil war between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the local pro-Saudi regime. In response, Saudi Arabia has conducted indiscriminate air strikes across Yemen, killing thousands of workers.
U.S. Policymakers Want Reality-Based Imperialism
The U.S. bosses knew that the recent agreements allowing Iran access to billions of dollars frozen in U.S. bank accounts was a calculated risk. The current disagreement is an acknowledgment that Iran has not stopped its regional imperialist aspirations. These aspirations only benefit Iran’s bosses and, ultimately Russia’s imperialism. The “Dissent Channel” faction of policymakers acknowledges the reality that the U.S. military isn’t in Syria to fight ISIS, but rather to stop Russia’s influence.
The current Obama policy is a very simple divide-and-conquer strategy. It seeks to prevent any possible contender from achieving Middle East dominance (R. Kaplan, “Warming to Iran”; Foreign Policy, Jan.-Feb. 2015.). In particular, the Iran-led Shiite forces, with support from Russia and Iraq on one side, are pitted on the other side against the extremely wealthy Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council dictatorships more closely allied with the U.S.
The State Department officials’ dissenting strategy, influenced by the critical Israeli and Saudi interests, reorients the strategy directly against Russia. This strategy is based on the knowledge that the U.S. and NATO allies have missiles in position to strike Russia as needed. (See “U.S. activating missiles in Europe despite Russian warning”; PressTV, May 11.) These are the lengths the U.S. imperialists are willing to go to defend their declining, but lethal empire. The Russian bosses, smelling blood, have shown they are equally willing to spill workers’ blood to prevent the U.S. from reestablishing dominance over the Middle East.
PLP Fights To Smash Imperialism With Communism
Workers internationally are not served by a U.S.-ruled or Russia-ruled Middle East. We have nothing to gain by following the lead of any of the imperialists, royalists, theocrats or other reactionaries. Neither do workers in any of the imperialist countries of the U.S., Iran, or Russia. In these countries, workers are facing an onslaught of fascist cuts to living standards in order to finance the bosses’ imperialist adventures. The bosses in all countries have intensified anti-immigrant racism, especially against the millions of refugees forced from the imperialist devastation in Syria.
The bosses cannot fight wars with soldiers who would rather turn the guns around on their officers and fight for communism. The Black worker-led rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore showed that not only are many Black workers and youth more willing to fight the U.S. bosses than enlist in the U.S. Army, but also that millions of white, Asian, Latin, Muslim and Jewish workers were inspired by Black resistance to racist police terror.
PLP is organizing a mass Party to “fight like Ferguson” against the capitalist bosses of all countries for communist revolution. We have a world to win, but it can only be won with communist leadership. Building an international communist movement led by PLP is the solution.

Last month’s impeachment of Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, is a sharp reminder that capitalist reforms and sell-out politicians can never serve the needs of the international working class. The political coup against Rousseff and her fake-left, deceptively named “Workers’ Party” points to an escalation of the fight between two camps of Brazilian finance capitalists (see CHALLENGE, 4/16): the pro-China wing represented by Rousseff, and the pro-U.S. wing that orchestrated her ouster and installed her replacement, Michel Temer.
Regardless of the outcome of Rousseff’s trial in the country’s Senate, the workers of Brazil are sure to be the losers. Like arch-imperialist Hillary Clinton and gutter racist Donald Trump in the U.S., Rousseff and Temer are two sides of the ruling-class coin. Along with phony “socialists” like French President Francois Hollande or failed U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, these liberal reformers are all willing agents of the capitalist bosses. Until they are unmasked, our class will stay bound by the exploiters’ chains.
Brazil: Imperialist Prize
With a population of more than 200 million, Brazil is the largest nation and largest economy in Latin America. It lends critical military support to U.S. imperialism, with a lead role in providing troops for the United Nations MINUSTAH forces occupying Haiti since 2004.
A financial, industrial and agricultural powerhouse, Brazil ranks first in the world for exports of sugar cane, coffee and oranges, second for iron ore and soybeans, third for beef cattle.
The country’s enormous wealth is matched by enormous inequality, racist and sexist oppression, and the staggering poverty of Brazil’s working class—“well above the norm,” as the World Bank notes, “for a middle-income country.” Child labor and human trafficking remain rampant. In the rural North and Northeast regions, one of four children under age five suffers from chronic malnutrition (worldbank.org). In the urban favela shantytowns, where residents are predominantly Black or “mixed-race” (like 51 percent of the country’s population overall), murderous cocaine gangs operate with impunity and police kill children as a matter of routine (New York Times, 5/21/15).  
As the U.S. bosses “pivot” to Asia to confront China in the South China Sea, China’s ruling capitalists are challenging the dominance of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, which dates to the mid-19th century. In Brazil, the biggest prize is offshore oil. In 2014, Brazil pumped 2.95 million barrels of petroleum per day, nearly as much as Iraq, Iran or the United Arab Emirates (U.S. Energy Information Administration). Billions of barrels in potential reserves lay off the Brazilian coast, ready to be tapped by the state-run oil operation, Petrobras, the largest company in Latin America.  
In 2009, in exchange for oil import rights, China invested $10 billion in Petrobras. By 2012, Brazil’s annual trade with China had swelled to $75 billion, as compared to $6.7 billion nine years earlier (BBC, 3/27/13). Along with inroads by the Chinese bosses with other fake-leftist regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia, the rise of their influence in Brazil forced U.S. imperialism into action. (Another unreliable Latin American regime, in Honduras, was eliminated in 2009 in a military coup defended by Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State.)
Lies of the Workers’ Party
The Workers’ Party came to power in Brazil in 2002 under populist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula was adept at bribing workers with crumbs from Brazil’s oil wealth to fund the Bolsa Familia, a conditional cash transfer program that gave poor families an average of $54 (U.S.) per month and temporarily lifted millions out of extreme poverty. Meanwhile, a faction of Brazilian bosses used the Workers’ Party to pacify the country’s militant trade union movement and win allegiance from Black and indigenous workers. They coopted the anti-racist slogan, “Outro mundo e possivel”: “Another world is possible.”
In 2010, these bosses found a seemingly perfect misleader to succeed Lula as president: Dilma Rousseff. A former guerrilla fighter, she represented the many thousands of workers and students who were abused, tortured and executed after a U.S.-backed, anti-communist coup in 1964 ushered in an openly fascist military regime that ruled Brazil for two decades.
Behind the scenes, however, the real winner in Rousseff’s election was the Chinese ruling class, by then Brazil’s top trading partner. In 2013, capitalizing on the instability that followed the financial crisis of 2008, China agreed to swap billions of dollars of its currency as a reserve against future crises–a direct challenge to the U.S. dollar (BBC). Alarmed by this development, U.S.-connected finance capitalists in São Paulo struck back in the 2014 Brazilian presidential elections. Wealthy ruling-class families threw their support behind Marina Silva, the Socialist Party candidate. As Maria Alice Setubal, heiress to the Itaú Unibanco banking fortune, the largest financial conglomerate in the Southern hemisphere, explained, “The market is against Dilma” (Bloomberg, 9/14/14).
Return of the Right
While Rousseff narrowly won re-election, the Workers’ Party was growing hated by many workers. Prior to the 2014 World Cup, working-class neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro suffered wholesale evictions and occupation by Brazil’s military police. Workers and students responded with violent mass rebellions, strikes and demonstrations in more than 100 cities (The Guardian, 6/12/14). Unrest intensified in 2015, when global oil prices collapsed and Brazilian health care and education were slashed in the name of “austerity.”
With the sell-out Rousseff administration on the ropes, China’s investments and loans became crucial lifelines for the contracting Brazilian economy. In May 2015, three Chinese banks invested $10 billion in Petrobras. In February 2016, Petrobras received yet another $10 billion from the China Development Bank (Bloomberg). The pro-U.S. wing of Brazilian finance capital began grumbling in public. Two months later, Rousseff was impeached.
Rousseff chaired the Petrobras board when scores of executives and politicians—including her mentor, Lula da Silva, and several of her most vehement accusers—were apparently using the company as their personal piggy bank. Even so, the massive bribery and kickback scandal at Petrobras, known as Operation Car Wash, has yet to implicate her. The impeachment campaign is based on minor budgetary irregularities.
Still, few observers in Sao Paulo expect Rousseff to win back her office in the Senate trial. The fix is in; the pro-U.S. bosses, many of them active backers of the old military fascist regime, are back in charge. Acting President Michel Temer was an embassy informant for U.S. intelligence (Counterpunch, 5/26/16). He has named an all-white, all-male cabinet. The new finance minister, Henrique Meirelles, once headed BankBoston, a subsidiary of the Rockefeller-controlled Bank of America, which is in turn closely interlocked with the Setúbal-controlled Itaú Unibanco. Another top financial advisor, Paolo Leme, chairs the Brazil division of Goldman Sachs, the source of Hillary Clinton’s six-figure lecture fees.
Yet another Temer ally is Brazil’s richest man, Jorge Paul Lemann, who owns Heinz Ketchup and Burger King and is close to Warren Buffett, a leading figure in the main wing of U.S. finance capital. Lemann’s apparatus organized street protest groups to rally for Rousseff’s impeachment (Counterpunch, 5/4/16).
Last year, Brazil’s economy shrank by 3.7 percent. Evictions and attacks on workers have continued as the bosses there prepare for the 2016 Summer Olympics. The new reform on the table is “pension reform”—a frontal attack on retired workers.
Brazil’s History of Fightback
From the 1500s, the workers and resources of Brazil have been crucial to the rise of capitalism and imperialism. The colonizing Portuguese bosses named the land “Brazil” after their original source of New World profits: exports of brazilwood to Europe. With the genocidal enslavement of Africans, the local rulers amassed wealth from sugar, coffee, mining, and—after gaining independence from Portugal in 1822—industry. All along, slaves, peasants and workers faced down Brazilian capitalism’s barbaric “progress” with mass rebellions and insurrections. Fightback is a proud tradition in Brazil.
Progressive Labor Party fights to earn the leadership of the masses of Brazil’s industrial, agricultural and service workers. We fight to be the successors of the rebelling soldiers, industrial workers, and landless Black and indigenous farmers who built the fledgling Communist Party of Brazil into a fighting mass movement. In the 1930s, Communist-led women and men workers waged revolutionary armed struggle against the pro-Nazi Brazilian bosses, a history whose music has survived the intervening decades of brutal repression. While the old communist movement was defeated, the masses have never stopped fighting capitalism and imperialism.
Make History: Fight for Communism
Today, PLP stands with and supports the hundreds of thousands of workers and students battling police in the streets of Brazil’s cities against the openly racist, anti-working class government of Temer. But embracing Rousseff leads only into the arms of the Chinese imperialists. Like reformist parties everywhere, the Workers’ Party long ago sold out the working class.
Another world is possible—communism, where the working class runs society, not the capitalists. We call on workers to leave the dead-end road of elections and take the other path instead—to communist revolution. We call on workers all over to smash all borders and unite with their international class sisters and brothers. Help lead us and build a mass, fighting Party to defeat capitalism. The struggle continues, fight for communism! A luta continua, luta pelo comunismo!

When Muhammad Ali, arguably the greatest boxer of all time, died on June 3, he was praised as a great “American hero” by the bosses’ media, including many who’d once cheered on the U.S. government as it tried to destroy him. Ali’s great historical moment came in 1966, when he stood up against genocide, inspired the anti-Vietnam War movement, and refused induction into the U.S. military with the immortal words: “I ain’t got nothing against no Viet Cong [the communist guerrillas in South Vietnam). No Viet Cong never called me n-----.”
Later on, after the bosses stripped him of his heavyweight title and for three years blocked him from pursuing his livelihood, Ali clarified his position at a fair housing rally in his hometown of Louisville. Showing a keen grasp of the connection between racism inside the U.S. and U.S. imperialism in Asia, he said:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here.
Substitute “capitalist rulers” for “white slave masters,” and Ali was right on target.
Unfortunately, Ali had already taken a wrong turn by joining the Nation of Islam (NOI), a black separatist, pro-capitalist Muslim organization. In 1963, after his friend Malcolm X left the organization, he stayed with the NOI and its ruthless gangster leader, Elijah Muhammad. Two years later, NOI members killed Malcolm X. To his credit, Ali later acknowledged his mistake: “Turning my back on Malcolm was one of the mistakes that I regret most in my life. I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things. But he was killed before I got the chance. He was a visionary ahead of us all.”
Ali’s Limits
When Ali was part of the worldwide mass movement against U. S. imperialism in Vietnam, he was unbeatable. He gained tremendous strength from the mass heroism displayed by hundreds of millions of workers and youth and, in turn, inspired those millions to deeper resistance. But when the mass movement collapsed, Ali’s celebrity and wealth isolated him from the working class. He drifted into a capitalist outlook.
In his later years, as Ali stopped fighting the rulers and became a defanged “humanitarian” reformer, the capitalist class showered him with endorsements. Wheaties, Pizza Hut, Louis Vuitton, Porsche, Adidas, Under Armour, and Toyota all came on board. Ali made up to $7 million a year and left an estate worth between $60 and $80 million.
He kept up his part of the deal. In 1984, Ali endorsed the racist union-basher Ronald Reagan for president. In 2001, he accepted the Presidential Citizens Medal from Bill Clinton, the arch-racist who engineered the mass incarceration of young Black workers, the racist destruction of welfare, the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, and, according to United Nations statistics, the murder of more than 500,000 children in Iraq by imposing sanctions that blocked food and medicine.
In 2005, four years after President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and two years after invading Iraq, the war criminal awarded Ali with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, By then, Ali had been slowed by the Parkinson’s Disease that ultimately killed him. It was a sad and telling moment when Clinton spoke at his funeral.
Paul Robeson, Unconquerable Communist
Ali’s political rise and fall recalls an earlier world-famous Black celebrity who was also vilified by the capitalist ruling class but stayed true to his anti-imperialist principles to the end: actor and singer Paul Robeson. In the 1930s, Robeson was a proud part of the international communist movement. He supported the advances made by the Soviet Union, at the time a revolutionary working-class state. He was an uncompromising fighter against racism and imperialism, and a lifetime member of the Communist Party-USA.
Called to testify before the anti-communist House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Robeson refused to name names and was blacklisted from working in the United States. To prevent him from performing abroad, the U. S. government also took his passport. Like Ali, he lost the equivalent of millions of dollars in income for standing up for his beliefs.
The big difference is that Paul Robeson was hated by the capitalists to the end. Even today, when they may name a school or a park in his honor, the bosses refuse to tell the truth about what he stood for. Robeson was a militant communist and anti-racist to the day he died. In 1973, sick and in seclusion, he said: “Though I have not been active for several years, I want you to know that I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide cause of humanity for freedom, peace and brotherhood.”
Robeson had two significant advantages over Ali. First, he came of age during the heyday of the old communist movement, when the Soviet Union was a beacon for workers throughout the world. Second, Robeson was exposed to advanced political ideas and developed a class-conscious worldview that sustained him through hard times.
Here is perhaps the biggest lesson of these two courageous men: If you want to fight for a better world, you cannot do it alone. Lifelong working-class fighters must draw their strength from the masses. And as the last few decades of Ali’s life showed, you can’t fight racism and sexism by accommodating the ruling class.
Today, capitalism is alive and well, murdering workers by the millions worldwide in its racist, sexist, and imperialist drive for profit. But with the bosses’ every new attack on our class and every step toward bigger wars for profit, the international working class is forging new fighters. Communists in Progressive Labor Party need to organize millions of workers to follow the lead of the Ferguson rebels and smash “the whole damn system.” Ferguson showed what Robeson knew and Ali may never have fully understood: History is made not by a few isolated “heores,” but by multiracial masses of workers, united in anti-racist struggle.
We cannot reform the racist, sexist, warmongering, profit-seeking system of capitalism.  Fight and organize the international working class for the only solution: communist revolution.  Join PLP!