BOSTON—Black, Latin and immigrant students from working class families at a small urban community college in Boston are experiencing sharpening racist attack. The U.S. capitalists’ imperialist war machine is taking money away from workers’ education now, and soon it will try to take their lives in the coming imperialist wars. Community colleges, with their disproportionate percentage of Black, Latin and immigrant workers, are on the front line of these imperialist cuts!
Racist Farce of ‘Workforce Development’
College courses that do not serve the bosses’ agenda to train unskilled, obedient workers are considered “inappropriate” and not in alignment with the curriculum at the community college level.
In the U.S., many students come to community colleges to gain entrance to a four-year university in the hopes of achieving the racist capitalist illusion of the “American Dream.” This is a tool of division the bosses used to strengthen apartheid. Workers blame themselves when they can’t overcome the systematic racist, sexist conditions of capitalism. It pacifies them into studying their way out of the working class, instead of organizing against the bosses.
Today, four-year graduates are no longer in great demand and the trend is against encouraging working class students to actively pursue a four-year degree. Nowadays, the meaning of “workforce development” is code for “close the gateway” to the four year colleges and universities. Degree programs that provide access to four-year schools are being starved as budget cuts continue.  
Working class access to public higher education has been decreasing dramatically.  In this small urban community college in Boston, a course in science research was allowed to run with three to five students for individual instruction on science research projects. The program was a highly successful, and produced student winning national academic awards at undergraduate conferences.  Recently, the course was shut down to save money—mainly because it could not meet the college administration’s cutoff of about ten students per section. Students rallied last spring to save this and other courses cut, gathering over 300 signatures in a petition.  A small victory may be that the course may be allowed to run again in the spring of 2016—but the challenge to prepare at least 10 students for the course and maintain high quality instruction with so many students remains.
Internationalizing the Struggle
Historically, the role of the universities and colleges in the U.S. is to serve the ruling class need to maintain social control and to support their imperialist war agenda.  In the 1970s, the urban community colleges were utilized to quell future urban rebellions. They used community colleges to win Black, Latin and white workers the “American Dream” left behind to support capitalism. Today, in face of the challenges to U.S. imperialism, a new agenda has emerged: train working class youth for low-skill, low level manual labor jobs that have little job security and/or require unreasonable work and obedience to the system. This leaves many urban youth struggling with dead-end dreams, low-income jobs, less control over their lives, and open targets for the U.S. military’s recruitment efforts.
Students at this college gained practical experience in this science course, and a chance to develop critical thinking skills to help them achieve a deeper level of learning in the sciences.
Fighting back in organizing an anti-racist student movement is a science too! This year, no education cuts were announced in South Africa, after massive strikes and demonstrations rocked the liberal misleadership on their heels. In Chicago, high school teachers have overwhelmingly voted to authorize another strike against racism, while in New York City and California, students, professors and staff may declare strikes this spring. Capitalism will never educate the majority of workers. We need to unite workers and students together to fight not just these attacks on the ability to learn, but against capitalism itself!

Members and friends of PLP in the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA) will be doing important political work at the annual MLA convention in Austin, TX on January 6-10,2016. Brutal budget cuts, involuntary “furloughs,” rapidly rising tuition, threats to academic freedom, increasing pauperization of non-tenure track faculty: these are the consequences of cutbacks and escalating Middle East wars.
The annual convention of the MLA, the professional organization of teachers of language and literature, brings together over 8,000 professors, graduate students and adjuncts—most seriously affected by the current crisis. Many tenured professors face stagnant incomes or pay cuts and threatened or actual closings of humanities departments.
The non-tenure track teachers who staff most college-level writing, language and literature courses are hurt more by the attacks. Working for as little as $2,500 per semester course, disproportionately female, these super-exploited academic laborers—often excellent and committed teachers—have little or no chance of ever obtaining adequately-compensated or secure work. These attacks on education workers are also attacks on the students they serve.

For Ph.D. graduate students, the MLA Convention is known as the “meat market.” Many go to great expense to send resumes and travel to the convention to interview for the shrinking number of tenure-track jobs.

The Radical Caucus will protest the current assault on public higher education. Three-quarters of all US academics teach off the tenure track, earning less than a living wage usually with no health care, sick days, unemployment, or retirement benefits.

The context for these drastic cutbacks in Higher Education is the attack on the working class nationally and internationally:

• The US and NATO continue imperialist, murderous wars. The US would like to invade the Middle East but can’t afford to do so right now. Politicians build anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. Thin turn breeds more racism, making it hard for US rulers to field an army depending largely on Black and Latin soldiers.

• The unprecedented attack on women’s reproductive rights – anti-abortion bills in many states and attacks on Planned Parenthood – shows that the Pentagon's decision to allow women in “combat roles” is not a victory for women’s equality but part of the imperialist strategy.

• The “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP) is a declaration of trade war against China and Russia. Can a shooting war be far behind? A recent headline on Russia’s Sputnik News reads: “You Want War? Russia Is Ready for War.”

The American Dream is a pile of dust for some, a nightmare for many. One in 4 American children are on food stamps; 1 in 7 Americans overall.

But mass opposition is growing: demonstrations across the country against rising tuition and racism on campus, including multiracial protests on campuses and in communities against police brutality. The “Boycott-Divest-Sanction” movement against Israeli and US imperialist killing and oppression of Palestinians is growing in professional organizations. PLP has been in the forefront of the protests against police killings across country, including in Ferguson MO and NYC. PLP is also active at the City University of New York (CUNY), where a strike movement is growing.

The voice and aim of the Radical Caucus is a call to action. The RC is considering emergency resolutions: criticizing the governor of Texas for barring Syrian immigrants; opposing attacks on Muslims; against Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s suggestion that Black students are not qualified to attend university; against the “campus carry” laws permitting concealed guns on college campuses; the consequences of all these hurts education.

Everywhere and always, we must support students, especially in anti-racist struggles, the blocking of tuition increases, and the continued super-exploitation of adjunct faculty. We must point out the threat of imperialist and inter-imperialist was. The capitalist system is built on exploitation and can never be reformed to provide a decent life for working people and intellectuals. We stress the need for communist revolution, based in the international working-class.

The MLA Executive Council has made it much harder to get such resolutions approved in recent years. But the ongoing struggle to get the MLA to oppose the imperialist racism of the U.S. government is crucially important. We will continue to struggle with our friends in the Radical Caucus to set forth these or other issues in a principled, forceful, and comradely way.

PLP members in the MLA will be distributing CHALLENGE and participating in the activities of the Radical Caucus, which has emerged as a home for the many leftist humanities professors and graduate students who attend the convention. As the class struggle on college campuses gets more intense, communist teachers and students have an increasingly vital role to play.

Three recent events exposed the current crisis of U.S. capitalism. On December 19, the Chinese capitalist bosses accused the U.S. of a “serious military provocation” a week after a U.S. Sir Force B-52 bomber—capable of carrying long-range nuclear weapons—few within two miles of a disputed artificial island built by China in the South China Sea.
On December 21, in Afghanistan, a geopolitical linchpin for both the U.S. and Russia, six U.S. troops serving with NATO were killed by a suicide bomber in the Bagram district—an area made infamous by the torture and murders committed by U.S. military personnel at the district prison.
In Texas, the same day as the Bagram incident, a grand jury declined to indict any cops or jail guards in connection with the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman found dead in her cell last summer after an arrest for allegedly failing to use her car’s turn signal.
As a high-stakes competition intensifies among the biggest imperialist rivals, the capitalist rulers of the U.S., Russia, and China, the international working class is caught in the middle. In their efforts to terrorize and divide workers in the U.S., the bosses have unleashed their racist killer cops. Meanwhile, the same U.S. bosses are faced with increasingly difficult—and deadly—choices as they struggle to prop up their declining oil empire in the Middle East.
More than ever, the international working class needs unity under the banner of the Progressive Labor Party. PLP is the only party that represents all workers, from the undocumented in New York to those fighting the UN’s imperialist occupation of Haiti to the dozens buried December 20 by a landslide of recklessly dumped construction waste in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers to smash racist police state terror, racist borders and imperialist war with communist revolution.
Oil and Perpetual War
Ten thousand NATO troops are still stationed in Afghanistan. (NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a U.S. imperialist-led international military alliance.) Twelve years after the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq, more than 3,000 U.S. ground troops, backed by civilian-killing air and drone strikes, remain there. As the U.S. rulers escalate their war against the regional imperialist Islamic State (ISIS), growing numbers of U.S. special operations forces are being deployed in northern Syria. It is more and more apparent that more troops will soon be on their way—sent to kill their class sisters and brothers and to be killed, all to protect the bosses’ profits from cheaply extracted oil.
As gutter racist Donald Trump calls for shutting down mosques and banning all Muslim workers from entering the U.S., other presidential candidates are clashing over how to counter the ISIS threat in Syria. Liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton and mainstream Republicans Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie want to escalate U.S. involvement—and help rebels fighting the Iran-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad—by establishing a no-fly zone. Phony “socialist” Democrat Bernie Sanders and right-wing Republican Ted Cruz stand opposed, arguing that regime change in Syria could have unintended consequences that might “worsen U.S. national security interests,” as Cruz put it (Bloomberg.com, 12/20/15).
In reality, the disagreement is strictly tactical. None of these candidates question U.S. imperialism or its role in the global refugee crisis. None of them would dream of advocating that the U.S. abandon the trillions invested in the region by ExxonMobil, a flagship of the main finance capital wing of U.S. capitalism. All of them recognize the strategic imperative recently outlined by Stratfor (12/15/15), a global intelligence firm:
[T]he Middle East is a strategic supplier of oil to the global market, and the critical link connecting Africa, Asia and Europe….To bring about an acceptable level of stability — or instability, from the U.S. point of view — will require the commitment of tens of thousands of personnel on the ground and in the skies above the region, for many years to come.

Liberals Are the Main Danger

Sanders’ role is to divert workers and youth from militant fightback into the passive electoral process—and ultimately to vote for Clinton, a reliable tool of the finance capitalists. Historically, the main dangers to the international working class are the liberal politicians who run as the alternative to the likes of Trump or Cruz. For example:
Liberal Democrat Franklin Roosevelt forcibly deported up to two million workers to Mexico. He forced more than 110,000 workers of Japanese descent into concentration camps during World War II, and supported the apartheid oppression of Black workers in the U.S. South (see page xxx).
Liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson escalated the U.S. imperialist genocide in Vietnam. PLP’s predecessor, the Progressive Labor Movement, organized the first demonstration against Johnson’s war in New York City’s Times Square in 1964.
Liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter declared the imperialist “Carter Doctrine” in 1979, stating that any threat to U.S. oil interests in the Middle East would be met with a military response. A top Carter advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote The Grand Chessboard, a book arguing that that control over Central Asia, including Afghanistan, was essential for U.S. imperialism.
Liberal Democrat Bill Clinton oversaw the racist destruction of welfare, the expansion of racist mass incarceration, and the intensification of police terror against Black workers. Clinton also executed the indiscriminate bombing of the former Yugoslavia in an effort to block Russian imperialist influence.
Liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton supported every one of her husband’s anti-worker atrocities, including the Iraq sanctions that slaughtered half a million children. As a U.S. senator, she voted in favor of the 2003 Iraq genocide.

Trump the Bosses With Communism!
The U.S. rulers need a president who can galvanize the entire U.S. working class to fall in line behind imperialism, or at least to neutralize any resistance against the global conflict to come. The seeming chaos of the current presidential campaign reflects the rulers’ uncertainty over who might serve them best.
For the moment, some white workers are confused about why the U.S. has a real U.S. unemployment rate of 23 percent (shadowstats.com), or why millions have lost their homes, or why wages and social services keep declining. Misled by demagogues like Trump, they fall into the trap of blaming other Black or Latin or immigrant or Muslim workers, who are even more sharply attacked by the racist bosses. What gets overlooked is the root of all workers’ problems: the capitalist profit system.
Instead of surrendering white workers to racist politicians, PLP fights to win them to communist politics and multiracial unity. Our Party fought alongside the Black workers and youth who led the multiracial, anti-racist rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore, giving leadership and lessons to our class worldwide.
As the bosses prepare for bigger imperialist wars, the international working class needs communism—now. We will get there by smashing the mad dog racists and exposing the liberal misleaders as servants of the capitalist class. Millions of women workers, Black workers, refugees, and undocumented workers—now under the capitalists’ sharpest attack—will be our strongest leaders on the road to revolution. Won to communist ideas and to joining PLP, they will be essential in our class’s ultimate victory. Join us!

We are marching in a compact group along a steep and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have…chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh!...[L]et go of our hands…[F]or we too are “free” to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!
— Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done?

In 1901, when Lenin wrote these words, the Bolsheviks were a small communist party struggling to earn the leadership of the Russian working class. Revolution seemed a long way off. But between 1905 and 1914, a massive strike wave in Russia was followed by a ruling-class crackdown and then a global, inter-imperialist conflict: World War I.  By 1917, these upheavals had set the stage for the world’s first successful communist revolution.  The revolution couldn’t happen until conditions matured—but at the same time, the Bolsheviks had to be ready.  
As we assess the developments of 2015 and look forward to 2016 and beyond, the task of Progressive Labor Party is to emulate the Bolsheviks. Even as we participate in reform battles, we must never retreat into “the marsh” of reformism or passivity.  Our historical task is to build a mass working-class party to smash capitalism, seize state power, and establish a communist dictatorship of the working class—a society run by workers to meet workers’ needs.
Worldwide, 2015 saw a sharpening of the kind of Great Power rivalries that sparked World War I and World War II.  Talk of a third world war is in the air. The Russian bosses became more aggressive, projecting military power from the Ukraine to Syria. China expanded its imperialist base in the South China Sea while openly challenging U.S. hegemony in global financial markets with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.   The U.S. ruling class has countered with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a “free trade” agreement designed to constrain China.
In the Middle East, in an effort to consolidate control over the region’s oil, the U.S. has escalated its air strikes and drone attacks, murdering uncounted civilians there. Several Republican candidates for U.S. president are now calling for a new ground invasion, this time aimed against the Islamic State, or ISIS. The U.S. rulers know they cannot protect their oil wealth without a restored military draft and a major ground invasion. They also know they cannot execute a ground war without political support from the U.S. working class—something they don’t have, at least not yet.
The seeds for ISIS were planted by the desperate U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the more recent escalation of the conflict in Syria. While the small-scale terror of ISIS pales against the monumental state terror of U.S. imperialism, the group is an extreme example of “the marsh” of religion.  The ISIS bosses’ “caliphate” is in fact a mini-imperialist state with its own designs on Middle East oil.
The refugee crisis caused by imperialist rivalry, and in particular by ongoing war in Syria and Afghanistan, saw workers in Europe open their doors to their working-class sisters and brothers. As the bosses resorted to open racism to deport the refugees back to misery and death, the international working class responded heroically. Workers have no borders!
Faced with the perpetual crises of capitalism, too many workers in 2015 sought answers from the “marsh” of liberal bosses. In Greece, the working class placed its hope for meaningful resistance in Syriza, a party of the so-called radical left. In reality, however, Syriza’s role was to rally workers to vote before selling them out. Similar sellout, fake-leftist movements in Spain, Brazil, Venezuela and South Africa have pushed workers deeper into the jaws of capitalism.
Danger and Opportunity
In the U.S., the heart of global imperialism, 2015 saw cities rocked by anti-racist rebellion. From Baltimore to Chicago, Black youth led the way and exploded against racist police terror.  Building on the Ferguson rebellion of 2014, these actions grew into a multiracial mass movement that terrified the U.S. ruling class.  Calls from “the marsh” of identity politics by Black Lives Matter and others are working to undermine the revolutionary potential of this movement.  PLP has championed multiracial unity in all fightback struggles, and we are growing in numbers and influence.  Join us in this work in 2016!
Today the bosses are whipping up anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant racism to keep us divided and win support for the bigger wars to come. Gutter rightwing politicians like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen dominate the capitalist media and embolden the fascist right. As the bosses’ push the phony pretext of fighting “terrorism,” immigrant workers suffer the brunt of racist attacks and deportations.
But the main threats to our class are not the Trumps and Le Pens. The biggest dangers are liberal capitalists like Barack Obama and Pope Francis, who deceive honest workers in the name of reform. But capitalism can never be reformed to serve workers. It can only serve profit, first and last.
Out of the Marshes, Into the Class War!
Throughout 2015, the Progressive Labor Party was in the thick of struggles in more than two dozen countries. Our Party continued to fight to organize the international working class into a mass party of millions, and to turn imperialist war into class war for communist revolution.
PLP broke marching bans in New York City after two cops were killed there. We fought the racist expansion of Jewish settlements in Israel-Palestine. We organized teachers and students in East Africa and led mass marches against the United Nations occupation in Haiti. In Pakistan, we built leadership—with an emphasis on leadership by women—and fightback across the most vulnerable sectors of the working class.
In July we confronted the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina while exposing the capitalist-funded Black Lives Matter misleaders. In Haiti and East Africa, we exposed fake leftist politicians with a long track record of corruption. The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party organizes the working class not to vote in some electoral charade, but to revolt. We don’t settle for crumbs off the bosses’ table. We organize and fight to smash this entire racist capitalist system and the imperialism, racism and sexism it relies upon.
The year 2015 also marked PLP’s 50 years of waging fights for communism in schools, on the job, in the streets and the military. Our international convention in August passed the torch to a new generation of communist leaders who are mainly women and immigrant. It’s revolutionizing the concept of leadership — anyone and everyone who fights in the interest of the working can be a leader. This new collective leadership further advances our fight for a mass, international communist movement. The coming year will be one of struggle inside and outside the Party to make the needs of the whole working class our top priority.
For our kids, for the victims of racist police terror, drone strikes, imperialist devastation and the refugee crisis, let’s dedicate 2016 to connecting the struggles of our class worldwide to our fight for communism. Let our New Year’s resolution be to attack every manifestation of capitalism. Let us resolve to join mass organizations wherever workers are fighting, and to share with them our vision for a communist world—a world free from racism, sexism, inequality, and imperialist war.