Verizon workers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and Communication Workers of America (CWA) have been working without a contract since August 1st.
Verizon is a very profitable company. Last year it earned $9.6 billion in profits, but the ceiling on the exploitative needs of the one percent extends at least to the moon. They still want to cut union workers’ pensions, healthcare benefits, take away workers’ job security and create more repressive working conditions. These conditions are opportunities for PLP to advance revolutionary politics among these strategic telecommunications workers, so one day we can control them!
The IBEW and CWA are no friend of the Verizon workers. The role of unions under capitalism has become to cut backroom deals instead of fight back.
The unions have responded with demands like a sixteen percent wage increase over three years (VZ CEO Lowell McAdam got sixteen percent in one year), substantial pension increases and to regain the health benefits that workers lost in the last contract.
While there is a threat of a strike, most workers currently have mixed feelings about it.  Whenever workers go into a contract battle with bosses, we do so chained in arm and leg restraints.  The laws, the courts, the media and all the power of the corporate state try to keep us from using tactics that could quickly bring the enemy to its knees. This circumstance makes even the most radical of workers contemplate the effectiveness and usefulness of a strike. This is what many Verizon workers are doing right now.
Institutionalized passivity and class collaboration are two of the primary characteristics of the US union movement. Most union leaders “lead” by misdirecting and stifling the anger of the rank and file. By focusing struggles around narrow demands like pensions and healthcare, they surrender the potential to use every contract fight as an opportunity to build a class-conscious working class.
We all need to survive, so raises in pensions, healthcare and wages are certainly important issues. But capitalism is the cause of these cuts, as increasing automation in the industry has dropped the rate of profit, forcing the Verizon bosses to cut pay and benefits, lay off workers, and force one worker to do the job of two or three. In every sector of the U.S. economy, bosses are also cutting back to prepare for bigger imperialist wars on the horizon.  Wage slavery and the global profit system need to be abolished and strikes and contract battles should be seen as opportunities to create conditions that allow the workers living through this experience to understand that the only way to secure a future for ourselves and our families is to fight for all workers everywhere in the world to have the same guarantee.  
While the union bosses treat strikes as a publicity stunt, Verizon workers armed with revolutionary politics could make it a school for communism. While the union strategy is to try to gain sympathetic coverage in the capitalist press, this is an opportunity for PLP to inject itself into the struggle. The capitalist media is as much a part of the bosses’ state as these labor unions, and our struggle is to make CHALLENGE the voice of the Verizon workers.
PLP supports the Verizon workers in their struggle, and calls on them to recognize the incredible power they hold. Here in the northeast are the main switching stations where all calls and internet traffic—both wireless and wireline-- are routed. This includes the vast amount of electronic financial transactions and much of the trading on Wall Street. To occupy and shut these offices down would not only send a message, it would shake bosses all over the world and be an inspiration for workers everywhere. This would be an incredible advance!
PLP argues that we workers produce the economic value and we should make the decisions on how it is used. We fight for a society where the working class is in charge – communism – and invite the Verizon workers to join us in building a mass international party for communist revolution. With telecom workers inside using our skills to shut down the systems that allow the profits to flow through the network and fellow workers outside surrounding the buildings, we no doubt would have the raw material of an insurrection that could rock the foundation of the capitalist economy. We have the power.

This August marks the 70th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history. On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the U.S. ruling class dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering over 300,000 civilian men, women and children. In 2004, a report from Hiroshima set the cumulative death total at 237,062 (CBS News, 8/6/2005), plus another 75,000 from the after-effects in Nagasaki.
The racist U.S. rulers were more than ready to launch these horrific attacks on an Asian population. These atrocities had nothing to do with ending World War II—or “saving lives,”  as the bosses’ media constantly claims. They were actually a political warning from U.S. imperialism to the then-socialist Soviet Union, the first shots of the Cold War. According to A-Bomb scientist Leo Szilard, who met with Secretary of State James Byrnes:
“Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb…in order to win the war….Mr. Byrnes’s….view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe” (A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb, Leo Szilard, 1949).
Japan Was Already Beaten
U.S rulers pushed the falsehood that the A-Bomb attacks were necessary to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion that would have led to one million U.S. casualties. In fact, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before the atomic bombings:
   • The United States Strategic Bombing Survey reported: “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated” (Survey: “Japan’s Struggle to End the War”).
   • In “The Myths of Hiroshima” (8/5/2005), the Los Angeles Times reported: “The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of the air to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper’s Magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry Stimson.”
   • On March 9, 1945, “100,000 to 200,000 men, women and children died when the U.S. Air Force doused Tokyo with jellied gasoline….In the months before Hiroshima [conventional] bombs killed up to 500,000 in Japanese cities and left 13 million homeless” (U.S. News & World Report, 7/13/1995).
   • By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”
   • President Harry Truman’s diary referred to a decoded Japanese cable indicating that Japan was about to surrender unconditionally.
   • On July 17, 1945, three weeks before Hiroshima, Truman’s diary shows that he believed the Soviet Union would “be in the Jap[anese] war by August 15. Fini Jap[anese] when that comes about.” At the Yalta Conference in May 1945, Soviet leader Josef Stalin had promised Truman that the Red Army would enter the war against Japan within three months of the Nazi surrender in Europe. The latter occurred on May 8, 1945; the Soviets swept into Japanese-occupied Manchuria on August 8 and were preparing an invasion of homeland Japan.
   • Dwight Eisenhower, the U.S. general who later became president, said it was his “belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…and no longer mandatory to save American lives” (Mandate for Change, Dwight Eisenhower, 1963).
   • General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, believed the dropping of the bombs was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II, James Clayton).
U.S. War Crimes
So why were the the bombs dropped? With the Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier. The U.S. rulers believed an official Japanese surrender would demonstrate to the Soviets that the U.S. had what War Secretary Stimson referred to as a “master card”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson’s diary).
Secretary of State Byrnes told Stimson, “The atomic bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.” (Year of Decision, Harry Truman).
Earlier, on June 6, 1945, Stimson told Truman he was “fearful” that the U.S. Air Force would have Japan “so bombed out” that the A-Bomb “would not have a fair background to show its strength.” Obviously, U.S. rulers would be “showing that strength” to the Soviets, a “show” that slaughtered more than a quarter-million Japanese civilians.
As the U.S. continues to prosecute a “war on terror” and negotiates to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, Barack Obama’s hypocritical pronouncements about a world “free of nuclear weapons” ignore the fact that only the U.S. rulers he represents stand guilty of this genocidal act.
In what amounted to an indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, atomic scientist Szilard stated: “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremburg and hanged them.”
       It remains for the international working class to mete out this justice to the most murderous war criminals the world has ever known. United beyond the rulers’ borders, workers must turn the guns and bombs around and smash imperialism in the fight for a communist world.

Like all institutions under capitalism, universities and colleges serve the needs of the ruling class. They slant their research to cloud the reality of class conflict and to advance the bosses’ lethal anti-worker ideologies: racism, sexism, nationalism, imperialism, anti-communism. In the U.S., nowhere is their agenda more brazen than in the field of Russian or Soviet studies. Leading departments—at bastions like Harvard and Columbia—were essentially created in the Cold War 1950s by alumni of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. From the start, their mission was to promote anti-communist propaganda masquerading as academic scholarship.
On August 3, Robert Conquest, academia’s most influential anti-communist of the 20th century, died belatedly at the age of 98. Predictably, the capitalists’ liberal media celebrated his work. Citing Conquest’s cynical fictions as fact, the New York Times lauded his “landmark studies of the Stalinist purges and the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s [that] documented the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens.” The Guardian called him “the man who told the truth about the terror [of the ‘30s], and Stalin’s murderous tyranny.”
A Capitalist Secret Agent
In actuality, Conquest was a bought-and-paid-for agent for the ruling class. His career stands second to none for dishonesty and deceit; his shoddy research—and its formidable reputation—speaks volumes about how the capitalist “academy” distorts history. His bibliography is a testament to the work of Nazi propagandists. Here are the facts about one of the bosses’ top hatchet men in their ideological war against the international working class:
1. A dual British-U.S. citizen by birth, Conquest received his doctorate in Soviet history from the University of Oxford, the crème de la crème of capitalist higher education. There he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1937—and then left it two years later after the party denounced World War II as capitalist and imperialist (The Guardian, 8/5/2015).
2. In 1948, after a wartime stint as a British intelligence officer, Conquest joined the newly created Information Research Department (IRD), a secret section of the British Foreign Office. Christopher Mayhew, the Labour minister who invented it, called the IRD a covert “propaganda counter-offensive” against the Russians. Its job was “to collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications” (New York Review of Books, 9/25/2003). This was known as “gray propaganda”—heavily spun and vaguely official material that always concealed its source.
3. Conquest officially left the IRD in 1956, but continued to work closely with his British intelligence connections even as he forged a career as a writer and historian. His first free-lance job, at his handlers’ request, was to edit eight volumes of IRD documents into a “Soviet Studies Series” that was reprinted in the U.S. by the Praeger Press, a publisher subsidized by the CIA (The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Frances Stonor Saunders, The New Press, 2000).
4. In 1968, Conquest published the book that would become the bosses’ basic anti-communist manual: The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. In an analysis that violated every rule of demography and scholarship, he wildly estimated that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people. (He later revised his estimate to “thirteen to fifteen million.”) The Great Terror was finished and published with the help of the IRD; a third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger Press (http://www.fact-index.com/r/ro/robert_conquest.html).
    5. In 1981, Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute asked Conquest to write a book on the so-called “Holomodor” (or “terror-famine”) in the Ukraine in 1932-33. The pot was sweetened by an $80,000 subsidy from the Ukrainian National Association, a New Jersey-based group whose newspaper, Swoboda, was banned by Canada during World War II for its pro-German sympathies (Village Voice, 1/12/88).
    6. The resulting volume, The Harvest of Sorrow, makes the utterly unsubstantiated claim that Stalin deliberately starved millions of men, women, and children to consolidate the collectivization of agriculture. Though the book was favorably reviewed by The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, it was slammed by a number of top Soviet scholars. “This is crap, rubbish,” said Moshe Lewin, a self-described anti-Stalinist at the University of Pennsylvania (Village Voice).
7. Facts never got in Conquest’s way. In The Great Terror, he states: “Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay….On political matters basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor.” This approach gave Conquest free reign to rely on the self-serving memoirs of virulently anti-communist Ukrainian nationalist emigres, many of whom were Nazi collaborators during World War II.
8. In the 1990s, after the Soviet archives began to be opened to historians, Conquest asserted that this primary source material supported his slanders against Stalin. In fact, these claims were based on the big lies put forward by Soviet revisionist misleaders, notably Nikita Krushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. Honest historians like J. Arch Getty (at UCLA) and Grover Furr (at Montclair State University) have found that the Soviet archives contradict Conquest at every turn.
Why the Bosses Hate Stalin
Capitalism relies on racism and sexism to divide the working class and enlist them as fodder for their imperialist wars. The 1917 Russian Revolution revealed that another system was possible. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union went further than any other society in eradicating racism and sexism. Anti-communism smears the great advances made by the Soviet working class and builds the lie that there is no practical alternative to capitalism. By attacking Stalin and the Soviet Union, the bosses seek to distract the working class from the horror house of capitalism. PLP stands by the successes of the Soviet Union, criticizes its mistakes, and fights to teach the working class the truth!
In the bosses’ eyes, the true “crime” of Stalin’s leadership was the Soviet Union’s commitment to the international working class. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin’s leadership was instrumental in creating the heavy industry needed for war materiel. This was a monumental task, since factories had to be dismantled and rebuilt far east of the Ural Mountains while being strafed by Nazi warplanes. The Stalin leadership’s greatest achievement may have been the development of the Red Army, a multiracial, multiethnic force composed of many languages and hundreds of ethnic groups. Not only did the Red Army defy worldwide expectations that they’d collapse within six weeks, but they drove the Nazis all the way back to Berlin and flew the red flag from the roof of the Reichstag. Workers throughout the world were saved from Nazi fascism because of the Red Army.
As in any revolutionary movement, the Stalin leadership made mistakes. They reflected the mistakes of the Soviet working class, the first to wage armed revolution and learn how to run society to serve workers’ needs. In spite of its many serious weaknesses, which PLP has analyzed elsewhere, Stalin’s leadership represented the best of the international working class. It is a legacy that inspires today’s communists and helps us grow..PLP sustains that legacy in our fight for communism, and in our relentless struggle against the horrors of capitalism that vermin like Conquest defend.

It’s easy to spot right-wing capitalist mouthpieces, the politicians who build racism by attacking immigrants, poor people, and what little remains of the social safety net. But the more dangerous enemies are the liberals, whose main job is to deceive and pacify the international working class. Ranging from Pope Francis to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, these fake leftists are falling over one another to bemoan the profit system’s growing economic inequalities.
The latest darling of the lethal ruling-class liberals is Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2016.
Why are these liberal misleaders gaining influence and so much attention from the bosses’ media? Workers around the world are angry. If their anger is directed at the capitalist system and organized around the class-conscious outlook of the Progressive Labor Party, it will be game over for the bosses. PLP fights for the working class to gain power. We’re building a mass party in more than two dozen countries to win workers to build a communist world of true equality, and to smash this racist, imperialist system with communist revolution!
As the U.S., China, Russia, and other imperialist rivals intensify their fight over oil and other resources, they use their politicians to win the loyalty of the workers they oppress. Their first lie is “we’re all in this together,” a promotion of patriotism and all-class unity that divides the international working class. The second lie is that the capitalist system, which cannot exist without the brutal exploitation of our class, can somehow be reformed.
Sanders: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Bernie Sanders is being promoted by the liberal finance capitalists as an alternative for workers and youth disillusioned by Barack Obama’s presidency and by Hillary Clinton—the same role candidate Obama played against Clinton in 2008. But when recently confronted by activists from Black Lives Matter, Sanders—a long-time supporter of the hyper-racist Israeli state—had nothing to say about racism. His bankrupt solution to the system’s problems is to make workers part owners of the companies they work for. This reactionary idea would make workers even more vulnerable to the cyclical crises of capitalism, chaining them more tightly to the big banks for loans.
Every four years, the U.S. working class is fed a new “savior” candidate, yet the result never changes. Workers continue to suffer, with Black and Latin workers hit hardest.
The ruling-class Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank praised Sanders three times in its 2013 paper, “Growing the Wealth: How Government Encourages Broad-Based Inclusive Capitalism.” Who runs CAP? Its top donors include Citigroup and the Rockefeller and Soros foundations. Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state under Bill Clinton who justified the sanction-driven murder of half a million Iraqi children, serves as a director. CAP’s chairman is John Podesta, formerly Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and currently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. This is the same Bill Clinton who promoted the racist mass incarceration of Black youth, the hiring and arming of 100,000 more cops, and the destruction of welfare and educational opportunities for mainly Black and Latin workers.
Sanders has ruled out an independent, third-party candidacy; he is running strictly as a Democrat. Both he and his party’s leaders know he has little or no chance to prevail. His job is to build enthusiasm among workers and youth for the boss-controlled electoral process, and then to throw his support to whatever Democrat wins the nomination. Sanders’ constituency represents many of the people the U.S. ruling class needs to embrace its agenda for wider imperialist wars, and in particular for a military draft. These are the workers and youth PLP must win to our ranks to fight for communist revolution!
A recent piece in Counterpunch (7/21/15) recounts Sanders’ role as a cynical ruling-class tool as early as 1990: “[Sanders] went to the Kennedy School at Harvard for six months and came back with a new relationship with the state’s Democrats…. Bernie has become an ardent imperialist. Sanders endorsed [Bill] Clinton in 1992 and 1996.”
Like every liberal imperialist politician, Sanders and his pro-worker mask present a grave danger to our class. As a U.S. congressman and senator, according to Street (7/21/15), Sanders voted for:

• Economic sanctions that killed more than a million Iraqi civilians;
• Every U.S. bombing of Iraq since 1992;
• Sending U.S. military units to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to threaten Iraq because “we cannot tolerate aggression”;
• Bill Clinton’s overtly racist Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994), which accelerated the mass incarceration of Black and Latin workers and youth;
• U.S. interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Zaire (Congo), Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.

Sellouts Love Sanders
Nineteen of Sanders’ top 20 contributors, according to Open Secrets.org, are among the largest trade unions. These unions have sold out our class by collaborating with the bosses to defeat working-class fightback. Their traitorous leaders haven’t led a significant strike in over three decades.
The other top Sanders contributor is the American Association for Justice, a creation of billionaire imperialist George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Sanders is no friend of the working class. He is deeply intertwined with the highest circles of the U.S. ruling class.
Whether Sanders, Clinton, or some other capitalist shill becomes the Democrats’ choice for the next electoral circus, workers have no stake in any election. Every capitalist democracy is a dictatorship of the bosses. Every capitalist ruling class aims to channel workers’ frustrations into support for some lying capitalist candidate. PLP says, “Don’t vote, revolt!” We fight to organize the international working class to end the capitalists’ dictatorship, build a communist world, and smash racism, sexism, and imperialism once and for all. Join us!

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Sanders-Style “Socialism:” What’s In A Name?

Bernie Sanders has made headlines as a self-proclaimed “socialist,” whatever that means. In the mid-19th century, at the dawn of the modern communist movement, there were many competing political ideas. The movement founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed in a two-stage theory of revolution. They proposed that workers must first fight for socialism, a system that would entail armed revolution and a workers’ dictatorship but also temporarily retain the wage system and certain inequalities. In practice, however, in both the Soviet Union and China, socialism led not to communism but back to capitalism. In Road to Revolution 4 (1982), PLP broke with the two-stage theory and put forward the idea of winning workers directly to communism.
When Marx and Engels labeled their seminal 1848 document the “Communist Manifesto,” it was in part to distinguish themselves from countless socialist groups proclaiming a confusing mix of programs. Politicians like Sanders love to call themselves “socialists” precisely because the term is so vague. It’s no accident that “Nazi” stood for  “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” In the 1920s and ‘30s, the Nazis employed the term “socialism” to mislead frustrated workers away from support for the world’s first socialist republic, the Soviet Union.
We cannot afford to make the same mistake. Workers must not buy the “socialist” label, especially from capitalist fakers like Bernie Sanders.