Three year-old Aylan Kurdi, lying drowned on a beach in Turkey after his family’s desperate flight from Syria, is one of millions murdered or displaced by capitalist terror. Workers become refugees because their lives are unbearable and their homes unliveable. The root cause is U.S. imperialism, a plague that devastates the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Working-class families are forced to brave suffocating containers, perilous overland crossings, and flimsy rubber rafts. They are compelled to entrust their lives to human traffickers, the callous predators who ape the capitalist bosses in putting profit first and last. Those lucky enough to survive their journey to Europe or the U.S.—mothers, fathers, children—come up against police attacks, razor wire, concentration camps, and racist abuse in places they hope might offer a better life. Women workers face sexist violence and maternal and reproductive health crises. Their children are dying en masse.
The latest refugee crisis is one more indictment of capitalism, a system that treats workers as disposable commodities. The international working class has responded by fighting back and serving the masses. All along the way, workers have greeted refugees with food, clothing, medicine, and housing. Millions have rejected the bosses’ attempts to divide workers with anti-Muslim racism or the capitalist competition for jobs, a by-product of a system that can never meet workers’ needs. The Progressive Labor Party strives to emulate their example in serving our class. We struggle to build class consciousness into the fight for a world with no refugees or imperialist war. PLP fights to win millions to the vision of a communist world, and to smash racist borders once and for all.
Imperialism Attacks Refugees Twice
Under imperialism, workers in places like Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea are assaulted twice. Syria, which alone accounts for 4 million refugees and another 8 million displaced within its borders, is a pawn in the competition between imperialist powers to control the vast oil wealth of the Middle East. In an effort to tilt the balance of regional power and counter the influence of Iran, a Russian proxy, U.S. bosses have financed a brutal rebellion against the state-terrorist, pro-Russian Assad regime This four-year-old conflict has besieged workers with chemical weapons, routine bombings of civilians, torture and mass imprisonment. The resulting destabilization has created an opening for the murderous Islamic State, junior capitalists with their own designs on the region’s oil profits. Critical infrastructure—electrical power, clean water, distribution of food and medicine—has been devastated. Workers have no choice but to leave, by any means possible.
The second attack comes with the racist terror these workers face at every step of their route to whatever destinations will admit them. Hungary, a gateway to the European Union (EU), is busy building a fence along its 110-mile border with Serbia. Anti-immigrant vigilantes are on the march in the Czech Republic; fascist parties are gaining strength in France and Italy. British Prime Minister David Cameron is leading the racist charge among capitalist politicians to warn of the refugee “swarm.” French President Francois Hollande called the port city of Calais a “jungle” and complained that truckloads of dead refugees are hurting insurance companies’ balance sheets.
When thousands of refugees chant “Germany! Germany!” in a Hungarian train station, it reflects Germany’s relatively high standard of living—the fruit of decades of immigrant exploitation and the destruction of weaker Eurozone economies like Greece. With their profits threatened by an aging population, the German bosses hope that an influx of 800,000 refugees will keep their profits humming. Their cynical attempt to save face comes after years of neglect for economic refugees from Africa and the former Yugoslavia, where German imperialism supported the U.S. slaughter in Serbia and turned a blind eye to the refugees the U.S. bombing created.
Workers Have No Borders
Germany is the leading finance capitalist power within the EU, a free-travel zone created by the bosses for more efficient trade and exploitation of workers. But as the numbers of refugees escalate and the costs of social services climb, a number of EU countries have balked and are restoring border controls. The capitalist rulers draw national boundaries to divide the international working class. Meanwhile, capital—the profit derived from workers’ hands and brains—flows freely from one country to the next. The international working class has no need for these artificial lines.
Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, along with his brother and mother, was murdered by racist capitalism while attempting to join relatives in Canada. Thousands of others have died without any headlines. For U.S. and European bosses, the solution is more fascism and war—more air strikes, more mass murders, more refugees.
Workers must respond with class-conscious solidarity. Who are the bosses to draw borders? Who are they to say who should go where? The international working class will erase national boundaries and the racist, imperialist system that created them. We fight to build a mass international PLP. We fight for armed revolution for a communist world. To the workers of the world we say: Our class alone can build a world without nations or refugees. Join us!

Pope Francis, the fake “Peace Pope” and “Pope of the Poor,” kneels in thrall to U.S. finance capital—the world’s leading source of war, suffering, and racist exploitation. With the Catholic church facing steep declines in membership, child-abuse scandals and the loss of critical revenue, Pope Francis has been charged with forging an alliance with U.S finance capital. To deceive Catholics and progressive workers in general, the pope is espousing left-sounding ideas, ranging from an indictment of capitalist inequality to a call to the rich and powerful to take action against climate change.
But don’t be fooled. The Pope is no friend of the poor—and certainly no enemy of the capitalist bosses. In fact, his liberalization campaign reflects the growing influence of U.S. finance capitalists—the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class—within the church. By visiting the U.S., “His Holiness” hopes to steer Catholics and others toward backing the Democratic Party in 2016—the party that, at least for the moment, appears to be the bosses’ most reliable vehicle for expanding war and fascism. Francis’s job is to pacify workers who are disillusioned with capitalism and to restore their faith in reforming this rotten system.
This is nothing new. Going back to feudal times, the Catholic Church has used religion to promote and justify the agenda of the ruling class—along with its own vast business interests. Workers of the world need to see the Pope’s game for what it is: a charade to mislead workers and subvert revolutionary politics. Instead, workers need to channel their anger into support for the Progressive Labor Party, the only organization that can create revolutionary change. PLP fights for the total destruction of capitalism, not the phony cosmetic changes sought by the Pope.
The Catholic Church is in dire need of reform. In 2013, in response to a series of crooked Vatican bank deals and a declining membership base, the church replaced Benedict XVI—a German who’d joined the Hitler Youth—with the more liberal Francis.  But this wasn’t enough to check the church’s downward spiral. Francis has been forced to close schools and churches across the U.S. to pay billions in settlements in child abuse cases. Now he’s turning to U.S. finance capital for help.  
The Pope’s economic dealings reveal his priorities more clearly than his lofty words. In his effort to clean up the money-laundering Vatican Bank, he replaced Ernst von Freyburg, heir to a ship-building fortune from the Hitler era, with Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, a French-born executive at Invesco, a U.S. asset management firm. On June 25, even as he gave lip service to condemn the profit system’s greed, he blessed the heavyweight imperialist leaders of the phony “Inclusive Capitalism” movement, including Bill Clinton, the British Rothschilds, JPMorgan Chase, Prince Charles, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Pope’s lead advisor on the current refugee crisis is ultra-capitalist Peter Sutherland. After granting Francis an audience in June, Sutherland dictated the Pope’s bogus “humanitarian” stance, subsequently adopted by the capitalist rulers in Germany and other European nations as a means to discredit Russian bosses. Sutherland is the chairman of Goldman Sachs International and ex-chairman of British Petroleum. To protect their billions in profits, both Goldman and BP need the U.S. war machine to continue slaughtering workers in the Middle East.
On his U.S. tour, Francis is cheerleading for the Democrats and their campaign to keep hold of the White House. His position on global warming neatly dovetails with theirs, in contrast to the anti-science Republican deniers. Like Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, Francis backs Barack Obama’s Iran deal, which buys time for the U.S. bosses to build up for global war. The Boston Globe (9/13/15) foresees Francis making pro-Democrat inroads against the GOP on several levels:
Conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats have the most to gain, given the pope’s expected focus on issues such as immigration and the fight against climate change. Moreover, given perceptions that the U.S. Church has been moving into a steadily tighter alliance with the Republicans, anything that cuts in a different direction arguably helps the opposition.
So just where do the Pope’s big ideas come from?
In an address during a meeting organized by the Foundation for Sustainable Development, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church reminded key personalities from the fields of science, religion, politics, and economics that finding solutions to global warming is a matter of social justice, since “peoples, communities, men and women, are at risk” (Christian Today, 9/13/15).
The Foundation has cashed fat checks from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 1996.
The pontiff’s other travels reflect similar U.S.-friendly politics. In July, Francis paid a call on Evo Morales, Bolivia’s “socialist” leader. As Britain’s liberal Guardian newspaper reported (10/14/14), Morales has “transformed Bolivia from an ‘economic basket case’ into a country that receives praise from such unlikely contenders as the World Bank and the IMF.” Both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are controlled by U.S. finance capital; they were especially pleased when Morales lowered Bolivia’s legal working age to 10 years. The Pope is no friend of the working class.
As workers worldwide see more clearly that capitalism leads to mass poverty and imperialist war, the Catholic Church and the U.S. finance capitalist class are desperately looking for misleaders to stifle workers’ anger. Like his counterpart, Barack Obama, Pope Francis is the friendly face of this monstrous profit system. Only the destruction of capitalism — and its bosses, wars, racism, sexism, exploitation and permanent mass unemployment — can solve our class’s problems. Only a communist society, led by the working class and its revolutionary party, PLP, can end capitalist atrocities and put cynical salesmen like Pope Francis out of business.

HAITI, August 27—“Why don’t those delinquent politicians like you? The people agree with you and take part in your march,” a worker watching a PLP-led demonstration in the south of Haiti asked a comrade. Our comrade replied, “Our struggle is the struggle of the masses for the masses, not for a single individual who wants power in order to get rich on their backs.” The struggle against capitalism continues in Haiti! More than 650 workers, students and youth, professionals and unemployed workers demonstrated today against hunger, poverty, the high cost of living and mass unemployment.
The Progressive Labor Party is building class-consciousness, organizing and mobilizing the masses around the intrinsic problems of capitalism. Hundreds of people marched for miles with signs, banners and tree branches in hand. Symbolically alluding to hunger, drought and the inaccessibility of water, people came with pots, plates, spoons, glasses and other makeshift instruments to animate the march.
Strike While Iron is Hot!
After the demonstration on July 28 (see CHALLENGE 9/2), marking the 100th anniversary of the first U.S. invasion of Haiti, our comrades and close friends worked for a month to organize a second big action against hunger and poverty, as demanded by our base. After an evaluation of the first march, PLP members and close friends met several times to  discuss how to move forward. Together we planned the next action, which was held today. As communists, we are developing a sense of how to organize class struggle. For a month, posters were put up throughout the area, hundreds of leaflets distributed, banners posted, and statements distributed to media both locally and in the capital. We mobilized door-to-door so everyone knew the plan. Our comrades dug in to discuss the source of the hunger, poverty and unemployment that workers here are facing. Using megaphones and a local radio station, we got our message out in all the neighborhoods.
Workers are developing confidence in the Party’s ideas, and are engaging with us. One close friend lent his motorcycle to a comrade for a full week. Artists and calligraphers are writing banners without charge on materials we provide. One young man lent his family’s generator for sound; a woman donated gas for it. Another friend guaranteed the sound system. Some friends made sure there was water for all the demonstrators in the stultifying heat of a summer day in Haiti. During the demonstration, a former militant mass leader and other community leaders put forward useful ideas and helped guarantee security.
Confidence in the Workers
From the beginning, the police had wanted to stop the march. But all the workers stood firm alongside the comrades of PLP. When the march crossed a major highway, local residents lined the route. Drivers and travelers who received leaflets and CHALLENGEs voiced their solidarity with the struggle. One worker pointed out how this march, disciplined and with a clear political line, was the exact opposite of the free-for-alls organized by politicians during this election season. We then denounced the elections as part of the bosses’ plan to keep power in the hands of those few who have created the misery that faces working people here.
With two demonstrations in the space of one month, some workers were worried about the absence of the capitalist media, whose representatives wanted to be paid to cover our action. That’s capitalism: trying to smother the shouts of the working class. But thanks to some forward thinking by our comrades, the message got out anyway, including some live coverage by a young journalist. The workers are committed to getting our message out ourselves—not relying on the bosses’ media, but on our own initiatives.
Onward to Building a Mass PLP!
Today’s demonstration is part of a long-range plan to develop class consciousness, including conferences on hunger, poverty, documentaries, permanent posters and banners in the streets, and an open letter to the political misleaders. We are organizing study/action groups and freedom schools to understand and act against the sources of workers’ oppression, using local radio stations to agitate. We will also participate in existing mass organizations of  city and farm workers, students and professionals to put forward our politics and win others to join PLP. Our goal is to train masses of new communist leaders.
In this continuing struggle, PLP is proving that we are honest and serious, and can win the masses with our politics instead of material incentives. We are challenging the capitalist politicians. Workers here are being inspired to fight capitalism and build for communist revolution. The PLP, our international communist party, is engaged in class struggle throughout the world. Wherever PLP is fighting back, revolutionary consciousness is growing and the masses will become more and more confident of victory!

ISRAEL-PALESTINE, September 16 — The Zionist government continues its racism against the 20 percent Palestinian minority within the state. According to Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, the new school year in Israel began on September 1 in an orderly fashion. The 33,000 Palestinian-Israeli students on strike since the first day of school disagree! These students attend 47 “community schools” administered by a private Christian church whose existence precedes Israel’s itself. The schools teach students of all religions and employ teachers of all sectors as well.
These schools reject the racist brainwashing curriculum of the Ministry of Education. The Palestinian nationality is preserved in these non-government schools. Students are told the truth about the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, the forcible expulsion in 1947-48 of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of over 500 villages by terrorists who would become the leaders of the future Israeli state. Government schools teach the lie that all Palestinians voluntarily left rather than live with Jews.
Furthermore, the relatively high quality of this education results in 94 percent of the graduates ending up with an academic degree. In fact, out of all Palestinian academics within Israel, 84 percent of those in technology, medicine, and law are alumni of the private Christian schools.
Naturally, the Israeli state is threatened by the idea of educating Palestinian students, whom it treats as second-class citizens, and has been cutting the Christian schools’ budgets year after year. The crisis escalated this year. In addition to cutting the budget, the state is limiting the fees these schools are allowed to charge parents. Private Jewish schools still get 100 percent funding from the state. A Palestinian student in Israel gets 29 percent of what a Jewish student would get.
For the past two weeks, there has been only limited coverage in the Israeli media. The capitalist state has offered two “solutions” — either these schools become official state schools, which would definitely abolish the only places where students get an alternative to the Zionist version of history, or they become schools for rich Arab people only. Considering the majority of Arabs in Israel are below average financially, this option would make the church money. But, it would also force many students to go to state Israeli schools. Lastly, many of these private schools are the only option in places where the State hasn’t even provided official schools for the Arab families.
To support this struggle, here is a link to a statement signed by a large group of Palestinian-Israeli academics on this issue: https://www.facebook.com/hossam.haick/posts/508729419305184.
The racist and savage anti-Palestinian ideas and practices of the Israeli government are used to justify and win Jewish workers to support its existence as a violent state where only Jews enjoy full rights. However, Jewish workers do not profit from this racism. While Palestinian workers suffer more directly and sharply from the occupation and racism, Jewish workers also endure high unemployment, low wages, housing shortages and a militaristic culture. So long as bosses are able to keep workers separated physically or ideologically, all workers will suffer.
Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — or any other boss, politician, Jewish or Arab — is a friend of the working class. All of them maintain their power and profits from the exploitation of workers. And they build and depend on racism, nationalism, sexism and religion to divide us.
For a better world where all children can live in true peace, justice and egalitarianism, all workers in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, whether Jewish, Arab, African, refugee or immigrant, must unite to fight back. As a united working class, we can rid the world of capitalism and the exploitation, racism, wars and other horrors inflicts upon us.

Editor’s note: Let’s fight in solidarity with thesestriking students, and raise communist ideas. These Christian schools are limited by their own religious and Palestinian nationalist ideology. The fight against racist cuts to
education must be coupled with a rejection all religion, nationalism, and borders.