PARIS, September 13 — The Socialist government running France for the bosses since May 2012, is wobblier than ever. The bosses’ other governing party, the right-wing UMP, has been discredited by the 2007-2012 Sarkozy regime’s policies and by current scandals. The National Front fascists are eager to grab power. That’s France today: social fascists versus open fascists. The elections are a mechanism by which French banks and businesses (finance capital) maintain state power. Whether it’s the liberal fascists or the outright fascists, both sides spell disaster for workers.
The Sarkozy gang upped the retirement age and lowered retirement pensions, broke the historic strike of undocumented immigrants by promising them papers (which most strikers never received) and pushed racism. In a 2007 speech, Sarkozy adopted the racist stereotype that black people are child-like, saying, “The African man has not entered history sufficiently.…Africa’s problem is that it lives too much in the present.”
Disgusted, many voters believed François Hollande’s election campaign speech: “My true opponent….will never be elected, and yet he governs. That opponent is the world of finance.”
But since they took power, the Socialists have pursued the same fascist pro-boss austerity policies as Sarkozy. In January, then-Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced, “I am a social-democrat [a right-wing Socialist] and so is the president,” while defending a 10-billion-euros giveaway, supposedly to enable French bosses to compete better with other imperialists.
After the social fascists lost control of 155 cities in the nation-wide municipal elections, president Hollande named a new Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. More window-dressing — Valls pursued the same pro-boss policies as Ayrault.
Meanwhile, unemployment continues to explode — 20.3 percent in July. Deportations of undocumented workers continue — 27,000 in 2013 — which is not surprising, as Valls infamously complained in June, 2009 when he was mayor of Evry, about seeing “too many non-white faces” at the city flea market. By August, Hollande’s approval rating had fallen to 17 percent.
More and more Socialist deputies and ministers became dissidents, fearful that in the 2017 elections, the government’s disastrous policies would deprive them of their comfortable positions. Hollande and Valls responded on August 25 by ousting the dissidents.
Now, the Socialists’ governing majority in the National Assembly is a bare 50.2 percent and is expected to lose control of the Senate in this fall’s elections.
The UMP is broke due largely to shady financial deals during Sarkozy’s 2012 election campaign. Sarkozy himself is under investigation for various crimes. The party is divided into warring factions, with two others, François Fillon and Alain Juppé, vying with Sarkozy for the party’s 2017 presidential nomination.
Anti-Arab Racism Hurts All Workers
But the bosses have a third option: the openly fascist National Front (FN). In August, FN leader Marine Le Pen proclaimed her readiness to govern France. And the fascists are indeed getting ready.
This intensified anti-Arab and immigrant racism will  continue to drive down wages and benefits for all workers. It will be useful should French troops be needed as cannon fodder in Obama’s coalition in the fight for oil profits in the Middle East.
In September at the FN’s summer conference hall, a sign said, “The DPS [its storm trooper organization] is recruiting…everywhere in France.”
A hot theme at that conference was the racist, paranoid belief in the supposed replacement of French people by Arabs. Le Pen’s foreign policy councilor, Aymeric Chauprade, said: “You see it every day, this change in the population…the big replacement is obvious.” The head of the FN youth organization repeated the theme: “If we don’t do anything, our people will be replaced.”
The overt fascists have also circulated a fake ministerial letter on the social networks. It “earnestly advises” city governments to sponsor “a weekly beginner’s course in Arabic” as an extra-curricular activity in primary schools, and is supposedly signed by the Education Minister. This fabrication follows that the Eiffel Tower will become a mosque, that French schools will forbid the “plus” sign because it resembles a Christian cross, that school canteens will stop serving pork, and similar anti-Arab lies.
Large numbers here are apparently swayed by this racist garbage. According to a September 4 opinion poll, if presidential elections were held today, the FN would win up to 32 percent of the vote; UMP between 17 and 25 percent; and the Socialists 17 percent percent in the elections’ first round. In the second round, the FN would win a run-off against the Socialists but would lose in one against the UMP. In all cases, the bosses would win.
All three parties — from social fascists to open fascists — are financed and run by the bosses. For workers, the only solution to racism, fascism, mass unemployment and government austerity is communist revolution, to establish a society run by and for workers. Arab, African, French workers of the world unite!

Comrade Val Woodward, a staunch antiracist and champion of the working class, died on June 6 at age 87. Starting in the early 1970s, Val and his wife Clare organized the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) in Minneapolis-St. Paul. InCAR was founded nationally by the Progressive Labor Party to combat racism on the job, in education and in academic publications.
Val’s antiracist and pro-working-class teaching and actions permeated his life. When serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Val ended up in the brig after pummeling a fellow sailor who was spouting racist epithets, stopping him in his tracks.
Val applied his knowledge and education in the field of genetics to serve the cause of fighting racism. He was a professor of genetics at Kansas State, Wichita State, and Rice University. He then taught for 33 years at the University of Minnesota, where his course on Heredity and Human Society became one of the school’s most popular. He won virtually every teaching and human rights award at the school.
But Val’s outstanding contribution was in leading the fight against academic racism wherever it reared its ugly head, under the principle that racism hurts all sections of the working class. This was especially true in his exposure of the academic racists who stoked white supremacy in the 1970s on campuses across the U.S. — the Schockleys, Jensens, and Herrnsteins. The national media disseminated their unfounded claims about unemployment being caused by genes and not by capitalist inequity, and about “inferior” intelligence being inherited by black, Latin and Native American workers.
Val was among the leaders in unmasking flawed data on “IQ genetics” and participating in campus demonstrations against college-sponsored talks that presented racist conclusions as scientific fact. Helped by Val’s leadership, hundreds joined InCAR to demonstrate at the U. of M., exposing academic racism and opposing the sponsorship of neo-Nazis and KKK’ers. Val taught the history of academic racism in the classroom and in churches, training hundreds and leading them in scores of antiracist protests.
During the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s, Val was often invited to speak at churches, clubs, sororities, fraternities and commencement ceremonies. He would explain how the atrocities of slavery and racism were based on scientific-sounding claims in deeply flawed publications. The realization of InCAR’s core principle — that racism most hurts black, Latin and Native American workers, but also hurts white workers — led to the growth of PLP during this period.
As a widely respected geneticist, Val was invited to join a delegation to North Vietnam toward the end of the Vietnam War. He participated in an international conference exposing the horrors and genetic damage of Agent Orange, the defoliant produced by Dow Chemical and dropped by U.S. bombers on civilian populations. Val was among those who brought this evidence back to the U.S., leading to scores of demonstrations challenging Dow recruiters on campuses.
Val taught students from around the world, introducing them to the Marxist analysis that racism and racist injustice are deeply embedded in the fundamental economic inequality of capitalist society. He was also an excellent athlete well into his 70s. For decades he effectively infused his antiracist outlook into the playing fields and courts where he and numerous students met to enjoy a game.
A true internationalist, Val maintained relations with many international students throughout his life, as they continued to visit him at the U. of M. and after his retirement in 2000. He authored scientific books and papers explaining the sources of racism, including Human Heredity and Society and Biology As A Social Weapon. Val passed on his antiracism to his three children, eight grandchildren and their offspring.
All who knew Val were impressed by his warmth and humor, which never failed to draw you to him as a friend. He is remembered both as a teacher and an active fighter for a world free of racism, a future that is closer because of Val’s lifetime of struggle.

Thousands are gathering in New York and other cities around the world for the September 21 People’s Climate March to attack capitalist complicity in global warming.  Two days later, government leaders will meet yet again at the United Nations in another doomed and hypocritical show of concern over climate change. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has sanctioned a huge expansion of fracking for natural gas. Fracking leaks methane, a greenhouse gas that traps 25 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
Capitalism cannot possibly solve the same climate problem it has caused. It is first and foremost a system of competition driven by profit, while the needs of the world’s workers are ignored.  Indeed, virtually all the problems of the international working class are caused by vicious capitalist exploitation and imperialism, the global rivalry that has led to more than a century of massive world wars and smaller proxy wars.
The Progressive Labor Party stands for communist-led revolution by hundreds of millions of armed and determined workers around the world. Only by eliminating capitalism and organizing a world of cooperation and equality can we meet the needs of all humanity. Only by smashing the capitalist bosses can we hope to stop and reverse the harmful effects of global warming.
The impacts of global warming include the following:

• melting glaciers and rising sea levels that will eventually force 10 percent of the world’s population to abandon coastal cities;
• ever-increasing floods and droughts, as rain and snow shift from one region to another;
• more frequent and violent hurricanes and tornadoes;
• more pest-caused diseases, increasingly without effective treatments;
• destruction of more and more agricultural areas;  
• killer heat waves and home-engulfing wildfires, among other catastrophic effects.  

While workers all over will suffer from these effects, those who will suffer the earliest and the most are the hundreds of millions of workers in Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, and Nigeria, who stand to face more frequent life-threatening conditions  (http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/sep/27/climate-change-poor-countries-ipcc).
Global warming is the inevitable effect of decades of expanded burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.  Greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the oceans and atmosphere, while the mining, drilling, and sale of fossil fuels produce the biggest profits of all. Capitalists, who are driven to maximize profits, will never leave trillions of dollars in the ground.  Nor will they abandon their investment of trillions more in fossil-fuel infrastructures, including millions of oil-burning vehicles, refineries, pipelines, tankers, and power plants. The U.S. military is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet, using over 100 millions barrels of oil per year on ships, vehicles, planes, and ground operations.
Imperialist Rivalry Leads to Endless War
Every capitalist military on the planet consumes oil and control over oil is vital for imperialist rivals to control each other’s ambitions. The rivalry between the U.S., European Union, Russia, China, India, and other rising imperialist nations to control oil and gas (as well as minerals, land, and other resources) will lead to endless war. Millions of civilians are massacred by these national juggernauts in their competition for resources, underpaid labor, and export markets.
We can march by the billions and still never produce any change in this rivalry until we rid ourselves of capitalism, a system that feeds on genocidal wars, racism, sexist oppression, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, sickness and early death.  This means seizing power from the capitalist class, which steals the value of our labor and funnels these profits to fund their wars for supremacy and control.
Cooperation between imperialist rivals is impossible. We are shouting in the dark unless we organize a worldwide communist movement to seize their power through revolution. The September 21 march can help build such a movement, but letting the politicians send us home with more empty promises will only delay the day we can stop the burning of fossil fuels. And further delay means greater and greater difficulty in reversing the accelerating effects of greenhouse gases.  
Only Communism Can Stop Global Warming
The means to end the use of fossil fuels and stop global warming with clean, sustainable energy: wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal already exists. The only thing that stands in the way of achieving non-polluting sustainability is capitalism. For the foreseeable future, the capitalists’ greatest profits will continue to reside in fossil fuels. It is the competitive profit system that continues to kill us and to render the planet more and more unlivable.
The revolutionary elimination of capitalism by a movement of hundreds of millions of workers, led by PLP, is our goal.  Join us in ending this death-dealing and planet-destroying system of capitalism and imperialism, and in building a system run by and for the world’s working class — communism.

When the bosses’ mad-dog cops murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the cause of death was capitalism.
Brown was shot six times by racist cop Darren Wilson for walking while black on a street in Ferguson, Missouri. Garner was killed by a chokehold by racist cop Daniel Pantaleo after trying to break up a fight on Staten Island, New York City. These are just two of many murders of black and Latin workers and youth nationwide. There are at least 400 police killings per year that are reported to the FBI by local police. These racist executions represent the rise of fascism —  capitalism in crisis, capitalism unmasked.  
As the U.S. faces off against rising imperialist rivals like China, and moves inevitably toward a broader war, U.S. rulers need to intimidate U.S. workers. Wages and social services (education, health, housing) must be cut to divert more resources to the bosses’ military machine. The working class has a long history of rising up against capitalist oppression. Our class-conscious anger, when channeled and organized under communist leadership, is the greatest threat to the bosses’ brutal system and their imperialist plans. As we’ve seen in Missouri and New York, they respond with both sticks and carrots, with terror and reforms.
In recent weeks, as multiracial masses of workers fight back in anti-racist rebellions and protests in 90 U.S. cities, the capitalists are doing all they can to divert blame from the profit system. Liberal politicians, editorial writers and academics cloud the issue by calling for police reform. But regardless of any superficial changes they make, the bosses will still hold state power. The cops and the courts will still serve them. A brutal and coercive state apparatus will keep the profits rolling in. With over two million people behind bars, and nearly another five million on probation or parole, the U.S. prison system is “by far the largest in the world” (National Research Council, 2014). The U.S. incarceration rate is 50 percent higher than Russia’s and six times the rate in China (International Centre for Prison Studies, 2013).
Racism is the brick and mortar of U.S. prisons and jails. Black and Latin people collectively make up about 30 percent of the general U.S. population, but close to 70 percent of the U.S. prison population — not because they commit more crimes, but because they are “differentially targeted and processed throughout the U.S. criminal justice system” (Psychology Today, 2/3/14).
Racism Oppresses ALL Workers
Bosses reap hundreds of billions of dollars in super-profits by keeping wages and living conditions for black, Latin and immigrant workers especially low. These racist differentials constitute a “race to the bottom.” Used as a club over white workers’ heads, they effectively drag down standards for all while boosting the capitalists’ bottom lines. In just one example, masses of white autoworkers were laid off after the auto bosses moved plants to lower-wage areas in the U.S. and to Latin America.
Cops help bosses break strikes. Segregation, racist terror, and the deportation of undocumented immigrants help perpetuate low pay, mass unemployment, and rotten schools and housing. The sexist oppression of women workers lowers wages even further. Meanwhile, the capitalists wage one imperialist oil war after the next, killing millions worldwide to protect their profits. The capitalists also need the cops to stifle anti-war dissent to keep the working class docile while they bang the drums of nationalism, a murderous anti-worker ideology.
Communism is the Answer
We need a communist revolution to destroy capitalism and racism once and for all. No ruling class has ever ceded its power peacefully. The bosses’ unceasing violence against the working class must be met with workers’ revolutionary violence. Workers’ power will eliminate the bosses and the profits stolen from the value produced by the working class. A communist society will be run by and for workers. That is the goal of Progressive Labor Party, which is organizing our class in more than twenty countries.
To forestall revolution and their ouster from power, the liberal bosses tell us the solution is to hire more black cops and elect more black officials. But those cops and officials will serve the same rotten ruling class.
Witness South Africa, where liberals ended apartheid in the 1990s. Today, most top government positions are held by black mouthpieces for the big bankers and industrialists. Unemployment is even higher now than under apartheid. Housing and health care are worse. Black bosses are enforcing the profit system to protect their piece of the profit pie. In 2012, a multi-racial police force massacred scores of striking black miners.
Or consider Israel, where the fascist rulers have established apartheid to oppress workers in Palestine. It is no coincidence that the Israeli bosses trained police in South Africa — along with the black police captain put in charge to cool down Ferguson. Racism is an international capitalist phenomenon.
Black Lackeys and Fascist Terror
From Obama on down, the U.S. bosses use a constellation of black lackeys, including FBI informer Al Sharpton, working hand-in-glove with the White House to divert the masses; Jesse Jackson, who was booed in Ferguson, and Attorney General Eric Holder, who allowed racist, murdering cops to roam free as chief of the force in Washington, DC (see Red Eye, page 7). Meanwhile, racist, fascist terror is mounting.
A master of deception, Obama tells us the main lesson of Ferguson is that police should not use Pentagon-supplied wartime weapons in U.S. neighborhoods. “President Obama has ordered a comprehensive review of the government’s decades-old strategy of outfitting local police departments with military-grade body armor, mine-resistant trucks, silencers and automatic rifles” (New York Times, 8/24/14).
In fact, Obama and the finance capitalists he serves aren’t worried about endangered workers. Police SWAT teams invade workers’ homes — sometimes killing innocents — an astounding 45,000 times a year (see “The War Comes Home,” page 8). But as Ferguson demonstrated, the rulers’ savage militarism can turn working-class protests more violent — a potential threat to profits. In any case, cutting back police firepower (for now) won’t change a thing. As servants of the class that holds state power, cops possess a license to kill. Cop Wilson gunned down Michael Brown with his standard service weapon. Cop Pantaleo strangled Eric Garner with his bare hands.
U.S. Racist Atrocities: Fuel for Foes
While U.S. bosses seem to have temporarily pacified angry workers in Missouri and New York, the racist murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner still give them cause for concern. With global conflict intensifying from Ukraine to Iraq and Syria, these outrages hinder the U.S. imperialists’ preparations for global wars. They desperately need support from their overseas allies. But as the rulers’ enemies grow bolder, this backing is proving elusive.
In “Ferguson From Afar” (8/21/14), Foreign Affairs, the leading finance-capital-funded policy journal in the U.S., noted: “Flagrant race discrimination … undermines U.S. efforts to appeal to the hearts and minds of peoples of the world.” The journal recalls how state-sponsored U.S. racism in the 1960s gave imperialist Russian rivals a huge advantage in Africa. Now U.S. foes in Russia, China and Iran — and even supposed friends in Saudi Arabia, Europe and South America — are using their mass media to highlight the latest racist atrocities and expose U.S. moralizing and hypocrisy. To much of the world, ISIS’s beheaders (see Red Eye, page 7) seem no worse than the U.S. rulers’ butcher cops.
Build Progressive Labor Party
Capitalists can occasionally muzzle their killer police in the name of reform. But to be free of racist cop terror, workers must rid the world of the profiteering class that creates it. This will happen only when the Progressive Labor Party is built into a mass working-class revolutionary party. It will happen only when we gather the strength to overthrow capitalism and establish communism: workers’ power. Join and build PLP now!