PARIS, October 10 — The French Senate is considering sharpening a new antiterrorist law passed by the National Assembly which, while ostensibly targeting “suspected terrorists” going abroad, can attack any of the nearly five million Muslims — Arab and black Africans — living in France as well as anyone at all who opposes French ruling-class policies. The measure would also re-establish a level of censorship not seen since the fall of Emperor Napoleon III in 1815.
Meanwhile, French troops in four African countries, as well as their widening imperialist interventions in the Middle East and as part of NATO in Eastern Europe, are engaged in far bigger terrorism. If these interventions lead to working-class protests, France’s rulers will assuredly use this antiterrorist law, and others, against any protesters, especially against communists, the deadliest enemies of the capitalist class because we want to eliminate the whole capitalist system. This law mirrors what the Nazis did in their occupation of France during World War II when communist Resistance fighters were branded as terrorists. If necessary, the bosses will act without “legal” excuses, although even fascists prefer a “legal” cover.
The law allows the police to stop a person leaving France if they “suspect” that he or she wants to commit terrorist acts abroad. The government can also summarily block internet sites. Finally, the law creates the new crime of an “individual terrorist undertaking” — which amounts to a one-person conspiracy!
This is fascism, plain and simple. While liberals moan about the erosion of individual liberties and the sapping of bourgeois democracy, they avoid discussing the three basic questions listed below.
Who does the law target?
A September 22 BFM (France’s main news station) television report quotes writer David Thomson saying that “the emirs of the Islamic State are certainly going to order their foreign combatants to return to their countries to conduct terrorist actions.” This could easily mean hunting down “terrorists” among the 4.7 million Muslims living in France (7.5 percent of the population). A Brookings Institute article “Being Muslim in France” reported: “Though France’s Muslims represent 123 different nationalities, nearly three-quarters are from the countries of the Maghreb: Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia.” Many of the others are of black African origin.
So essentially it’s an anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-black law. Its racist nature is concealed by both its advocates and its liberal opponents because racism is integral to their capitalist society. On the one hand, capitalism requires a pool of super-exploited workers both to divide the working class as well as to depress working conditions for everyone (by saying, “if you don’t like your job, there’s a black/Arab/other waiting to take it”). On the other hand, the French Republic motto is “freedom, equality, brotherhood,” meaning it has to pretend to be anti-racist. That’s why the racist nature of the law is concealed by both the reactionary and the liberal wings of the French ruling class — and why communists emphasize its racism.
Why Join ISIS?
According to a March 11 article in the Observatoire des Inégalités, seven percent of the population lives in a “sensitive urban zone” — the official name for a ghetto. This “zone” disproportionately contains immigrants from non-EU countries, young people and unskilled workers.
Poverty and unemployment were always worse there, but the economic crisis triggered by the 2008 financial crisis hit this population the hardest. Between 2006 and 2011, their poverty rate shot up 7.5 times faster than those outside, unemployment five times faster and youth unemployment 1.7 times as fast; 36.5 percent live below the poverty line, almost three times higher than outside these “sensitive urban zones.” The unemployment rate is 24.2 percent, 2.4 times the rate in the surrounding city. Youth unemployment (age 15-24) is 45%, compared to 23.1% outside.
These conditions marginalize and alienate Arab and black youth, opening them to ISIS recruitment. But Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily their main motivation: most of those arrested recently by the French police charged with trying to join jihadist groups cannot speak Arabic, and some of the young women would-be jihadists thought “sura” (the term for a Koran verse) was the name of a fashionable singer! According to an October 5 Le Parisien newspaper article, a website close to the Islamic State says they promise free housing, food, medical care and monthly allowances.
Thus, the Islamic State promises Arab and black youth everything French society cannot. Whether they will deliver is questionable. Without a revolutionary communist party to explain that the Islamic State bosses are just like French bosses — out to maximize profit from the labor of the working class — the youth can be sucked in.  The French ruling class only offers a repressive antiterrorist law, which will only increase the marginalization and alienation of Arab and black youth.
Who does the law ultimately target?
While the law’s immediate targets are Arab and black youth, it can and will attack any dissident group in the ruling class’s sight. Already, the Green Party deputies in the National Assembly are worried that the law can describe popular and civic dissidence as terrorist, asking, “Will the ‘Big Useless Projects’ that threaten the quality of life and the environment now pass for ‘incitement to terrorism’? In Canada, the government is…considering ecological activism as a terrorist threat.”
The French ruling class has learned well from the Nazis how to combat opposition to its racist and fascist policies.

Three trends in the Middle East are accelerating toward a broader global conflict:
A sharpening imperialist rivalry that is driving Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar revitalization of the U.S. nuclear war machine (New York Times, 9/22/14).
A growing disagreement among U.S. rulers as to how to handle the threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) amid a two-front war in Syria, the potential overrunning of a fractured Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s expanding ties with Iran.
The pressing need by the U.S. ruling class for more intense fascism, including profit-driven wage cuts, heightened racism to protect super-profits, and a militarized response to crush working-class rebellions.
But the rulers have a problem. As recent polls on the question of U.S. ground troops in the Middle East have shown, workers have not signed on to the bosses’ war plans. This opens the door for an organized working class, led by the Progressive Labor Party, to wage class war and communist revolution for workers’ power and to destroy the imperialist profit system. Only a society run by and for workers — communism — can end the problems caused by capitalism: depressions and mass unemployment, racism, sexism, poverty, environmental degradation, and unending wars.
Obama’s extended air bombardment of Iraq and now Syria — a close ally of Iran, Russia and China — brings the prospect of global conflict ever nearer. As they blast ISIS from the air, some U.S. strategists are also seeking to arm rebels to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which may or may not prove feasible. Even were they to succeed, the response would be harsh from Tehran, Moscow and Beijing.
Meanwhile, the main, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists is facing the sudden need to prevent ISIS from seizing major oilfields in Iraq and, even more important, Saudi Arabia. These fields are the linchpin of U.S rulers’ status as the world’s leading imperialist power. The U.S. uses 25 percent of the world’s oil (Politifact.com). Its military depends on it. Even as the bosses find alternative domestic energy sources, they still need to control the distribution and pricing of Middle East oil. They need to protect the profits of core ruling-class enterprises like ExxonMobil and Chevron. Equally important, they cannot afford to cede these strategic riches to their imperialist rivals.
Fierce Debate Among U.S. Imperialists
At the same time, the U.S. bosses have long recognized the need to prepare for an inevitable military confrontation with China and/or Russia. The difficulty of managing these two necessities is fueling a fierce debate among U.S. imperialists over Syria-Iraq policy.
One camp calls shelling Syria a mistake that bolsters a U.S. enemy in Assad and does nothing to build public support for greater war goals. Another camp sees the shelling as a needed first step toward the march of U.S. troops into Damascus, the Syrian capital — a probability acknowledged on September 28 by House Speaker John Boehner.
On consecutive days, the New York Times, U.S. finance capital’s leading mouthpiece, published two editorials: “Wrong Turn On Syria: Helping Assad?” (9/24/14) and “Wrong Turn On Syria: No Convincing Plan” (9/25/14). The first said, “In the short term, Mr. Assad stands to benefit most from America’s military incursion” and the suppression of ISIS. It also warned that ISIS leaders view American intervention “as a recruitment tool.”
The second editorial faults Obama’s failure to win the public or Congress to the new militarism that his capitalist handlers require: “In the absence of public understanding or discussion and a coherent plan, the strikes in Syria were a bad decision.”
But Kenneth Pollack, a national security official under President Bill Clinton who later pushed hard for President George W. Bush’s Iraq war, thinks that ISIS could be a useful pretext for Obama to mount a U.S.-backed civil war in Syria and rid itself of Assad. Writing in the journal of the ultra-imperialist Council on Foreign Relations, Pollack proposed that the U.S. could achieve its goals without U.S. ground forces “by building a new Syrian opposition army capable of defeating both President Bashar al-Assad and the more militant Islamists” (Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2014).
Another Foreign Affairs article, “The Retrenchment War,” follows U.S. imperialists’ thinking that there are bigger fish to fry than ISIS — namely, the task of mobilizing the U.S. for a potential World War III.
On September 24, the Times countered that with a skeptical assessment that the build-up of an effective “moderate” Syrian rebel force “could take years, assuming the strategy works.” These differences reflect the disarray and indecision from the White House on down.
Bosses Need to Mobilize U.S. for Potential World War
The advance of ISIS is not altogether a negative development for U.S. rulers. They can point to the group as another “weapon of mass destruction” (a la Iraq), an excuse to bolster a failing NATO and their own war industries at the expense of decent wages and social services for U.S. workers.
Retrenchment was recently promoted by CFR chairman Richard Haass in his brief for militarization, “Foreign Policy Begins at Home.” This ruling-class manifesto spells out the need to rebuild infrastructure to world-war capacity, forge wartime political consensus within a fragmented U.S. capitalist class, and win working-class youth to kill their overseas brothers and sisters.
Forced to defer a highly unpopular military draft, the bosses are pushing patriotism through “national service.” This strategy would use immigrant Latin workers and youth both to fill the gap in military recruitment and to supply the millions of low-paid laborers needed to rebuild domestic infrastructure. In sum, it is a plan to put the country on a war footing.
Rulers’ Dilemma, Communists’ Opportunity
Once again, however, the rulers face a dilemma. The jobless black and Latin youth the bosses need as cannon fodder are the same youth their racist cops are tormenting and killing on the streets of cities large and small, from Chicago and Los Angeles to Ferguson, Missouri. In New York, under liberal Mayor Bill De Blasio and recycled police chief Bill “Broken Windows” Bratton, the NYPD made more than 137,000 misdemeanor arrests in the first seven months of this year. According to an editor at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, “More than 86 percent of those arrested were minorities. Those numbers are nearly identical to arrest data from the same period last year” under the previous mayor, the more openly racist Michael Bloomberg (NYT, 9/26/14).
Oppression inevitably generates rebellion. While the bosses need racism to sustain capitalist profits, it also undermines their promotion of war fever and mass enlistment in the military.
Meanwhile, the U.S. capitalists have to be unnerved by a development involving its main imperialist rival and its leading regional threat. As the Times reports (9/21/14):

Two Chinese warships have docked at Iran’s principal naval port for the first time in history.... The visit to the port of Bandar Abbas is an example of the growing ties between China and Iran. China is already the principal buyer of Iranian oil.... Iran’s main competitor in the Persian Gulf is the United States Navy, which has a base in Bahrain and stations at least one aircraft carrier in the region. On several occasions, Iran has threatened to choke off the strategic Hormuz Strait, a narrow waterway between Iran and the United Arab Emirates that is a gateway for 40 percent of the world’s oil and gas shipments.

U.S. rulers suffer from a depressed economy, decaying industry and infrastructure, a divided capitalist class, and an alienated, war-weary working class. The bosses are expanding their stockpiles of nuclear and conventional weapons and a proven readiness to use them, at the risk of hundreds of millions of workers’ lives. All the more reason to build a revolutionary communist party and to destroy this barbarous system.

Port-au-Prince, September 15 — Several so-called progressive organizations held a sit-in at the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) today to demand justice — reparations — for the victims of cholera. They also demanded the departure of MINUSTAH, the United Nations troops that have been occupying Haiti since 2004. It was these same troops that brought cholera to Haiti in 2010, 10 months after the devastating earthquake. Over 8,500 people have died, and 350,000 have suffered from the illness.
Dozens of cholera victims, the majority women and elderly, gathered at the entrance of MSPP. They travelled hours from the Central Plateau (epicenter of the cholera epidemic) and Carrefour, a suburb of the capital. They waited over an hour in the scorching sun for the “leaders” to arrive.
PLP members participated in this and other numerous anti-cholera, anti-MINUSTAH protests over the years to point out the racist nature of the UN and imperialist onslaught in Haiti. Our position is to demand mass solutions: vaccinations, cholera treatment centers and a total modernization of sanitation and water systems, paid for by UN and the imperialists, rather than individual solutions.
As important as winning those would be, they will not end the struggle of workers in Haiti to build a real future for the working class. We fight to give revolutionary leadership to the struggle, not to rely on the “good will” of the courts or ruling-class imperialists and their local lackeys. We brought signs and led chants, asking the crowd to radicalize the movement by blocking MSPP’s gate and stopping vehicles.
That’s a strong contrast to the young bourgeois opportunist politicians who promised the people benefits and made them believe in the possibility of receiving money from the UN. They didn’t chant and tried to move away from those who did, showing that these participants were motivated not by class consciousness but by the opportunity to gain some personal benefits.
These pseudo-leaders tried to behave like superstars, only talking to the press, and not allowing demonstrators to speak at all. They would never speak, as we did, to the workers of the world, calling for a united fight against the health problems and lack of care faced by oppressed workers worldwide. Despite their claims to be on the left, they have no revolutionary ideas. Cholera is a disease of poverty; bosses like these are seldom among the victims.
This kind of experience shows that only revolutionary communists can lead the fight against capitalism and imperialism. We will continue this fight against not only against the bosses but also against the corrupt opportunists who serve the bosses’ interests. In doing so we will sharpen the class consciousness of workers and students here in Haiti and throughout the world. We have an egalitarian, anti-racist, anti-sexist world to win.

A few days ago, as an active member of a community organization, I was part of a large protest in front of two fast food restaurants, one of which belonged to the giant multinational corporation, McDonalds.
The protest was part of a national campaign conducted by many community organizations and trade unions demanding a $15-an-hour minimum wage for fast food workers and their right to a union, since their current miserable wage barely covers expenses to support their families. These workers, as all workers under capitalism, are exploited.
This protest started very early in the morning, before dawn, because this was a national action where many workers were going on strike and others would participate in civil disobedience.
I was part of the protest in New York that was quite militant and in which 2,000 people participated. Thirty four people were arrested for civil disobedience and it’s possible that the police had a list of those who were to be arrested beforehand.
Slogans were militant, including “Strike, Strike, Strike!” and “Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!” among others.
One detail everyone noticed was the incredible number of cops surrounding the protest. I said loudly, “They thought they were in Ferguson, and were afraid of the power of the working class and of the truth.” That was why they pushed us from the center of the street and forced us to march on the sidewalk.
A woman claimed the cops were there to protect us, and some comrades, me included, argued that cops weren’t protecting us, that they were protecting the bosses’ interests; that the cops were there to repress and arrest workers, the way they did in Ferguson and around the world.
I had the chance to distribute 200 CHALLENGEs during the march, which were well received, although some were thrown down the street, but I picked them up and gave them to other workers who took them and put them away to read later.
I was very moved when I saw workers so early in the morning, chanting our slogans. That’s why I believe it’s good to continue working in community organizations, trade unions, churches, etc. I believe that’s the way to expand our Party to become a massive international party, and to be consciously ready for the time of the revolution, take power for the working class, and build a communist society.
Red Fighter