It’s a hot fightback summer! From hotel workers, grad-student workers, writers, actors, workers are shutting it down!. Earlier this year, college teachers, healthcare workers, education workers, graduate students—all have walked off the job with overwhelming public support. As we go to press 40,000 rail workers from the United Kingdom are on the picket lines leading the largest rail strike in 30 years. We may see strikes by 350,000 UPS workers in August and by auto workers this fall. Clearly, capitalism’s crisis appears to have triggered a period of sharper class struggle.
Workers are fed up with the inequalities—the rising cost of living, exacerbated by the capitalist-bred pandemic’s economic effects, stagnating wages, and more—which disproportionately hit Black and brown working families the hardest.
If you live or work in an area where workers are on strike, support the picket line! Greet workers with the revolutionary ideas of CHALLENGE and the chant, “hey hey ho ho! this capitalist system has got to go!”
Workers deserve nothing less than a communist world. That’s a world run by and for our class.
If the far-right Vox party joins Spain’s ruling coalition after the July 23 general election, it will be the first Spanish government to include open fascists since the death of mass murderer Francisco Franco in 1975. It would also mark the latest failure of liberal democracy to manage the growing global crisis of capitalism. As the U.S. bosses keep weakening in the face of an aggressive challenge by the Chinese imperialists, their junior NATO partners—the centrist parties that have ruled Western Europe since World War II--are losing their grip as well.
Instability is everywhere; everything seems up for grabs. With the war in Ukraine escalating and World War III looming, the old liberal democratic world order is in shambles. Confronted with runaway inflation, a wave of climate catastrophes, and mass unemployment (close to 13 percent in Spain), both the open fascist insurgents and the old guard liberals are scapegoating migrating workers—a hallmark of rising fascism. As millions of workers’ lives are upended in the general turmoil, a segment of the working class has been infected by the disease of anti-immigrant racism. In this dark night of weak class consciousness, the capitalist rulers are pulling out all the stops to mislead, deceive, and divide us. Regardless of which of the bosses’ factions wins the next round of elections, the rulers will ultimately need full-blown fascism to have any chance to destroy their competition and protect their profits.
Only an international mass workers’ movement, led by communists, can beat back the rising tide of fascism. Only communist revolution, spearheaded by the fighting Progressive Labor Party, can end imperialist war and create a society run by and for the working class. The profit system can’t reform its way out of this crisis. History shows us that it can never serve workers’ needs. Capitalism must be destroyed, root and branch. Join us—we have a world to win!
As liberal democracy weakens, open fascists rise
Six years ago in Spain, nostalgic for the Franco years (foreignpolicy.com, 6/29), a splinter group denounced the right-wing Popular Party as too soft and set off on its own. Widely dismissed and underestimated, the Vox party exploited workers’ anxiety over the Catalan separatist movement, which was pushing to break away from the richest region of Spain (centered in Barcelona) and form its own country. Using the classic fascist tools of gutter racism and sexism, and taking a nationalist page from the U.S. Small Fascist forces fronted by Donald Trump (“Make Spain Great Again!”) Vox “opposes abortion rights, denies climate change and rejects the need for the government to combat gender violence” (New Indian Express, 7/18).
Now backed by 15 percent of voters nationwide, Vox is being courted to form a new parliamentary majority by the Popular Party, which is favored to win the upcoming election after shifting to a more openly racist, anti-immigrant platform (El Pais, 7/24/2018). If that alliance comes to pass, Spain would join a growing list of European countries--including the old World War II fascist axis of Germany, Italy, and Vichy France--with openly fascist parties either within the government or as a leading opposition to the government. And with Spain next in line to hold the presidency of the European Union, Spanish fascists could influence the EU’s agenda.
When liberal democracy fails the capitalist class, fascism gives the bosses more direct control over all aspects of society, from the media and universities to industrial policy and war preparations. It’s no accident that fascism is the fastest-growing political movement in Europe today. This reality would have been unthinkable in the decades following World War II, when fascist parties were outlawed In Germany and marginalized in France and Italy. But times are changing, and fast. Millions of workers have lost confidence in the ability of the traditional post-war European parties to solve the glaring problems of capitalism. Europe’s capitalist rulers—the dominant banks and industrialists—are terrified of losing the white working class, a fear compounded by Britain’s departure from the EU and recent mass protests against the French bosses’ pension reforms. At present, these rulers aren’t moving to smash Vox or the likes of open fascist leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. If anything, they appear to be hedging their bets--just as they did in Germany in 1933, when they sanctioned Adolph Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by the liberal-backed president.
In the most recent elections in Germany, the most committed fascist nation during World War II, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) expanded its base, even after AfD members were arrested for helping to plan a fascist coup last December. The party is polling up to 20 percent, “neck-and-neck with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind only the conservative CDU/CSU bloc” (france24.com, 3/7). In France, the National Rally headed by Marine Le Pen is now the highest-polling party in the country. Amid the ongoing rebellion over the French cops’ cold-blooded killing of a 17-year-old son of North African immigrants, it’s calling for harsher treatment of migrating workers, wholesale evictions of public housing residents for minor offenses, and the building of more prisons—the bosses’ modern concentration camps.
In their desperate attempt to hold on to power, the rulers’ mainstream liberal agents, from Joe Biden to Emmanuel Macron, are quickly adopting their own more virulent racist and anti-immigrant policies. From the Texas border to the segregated suburbs of Paris, they’re enabling mad-dog police terror. In France, the kkkops have even prohibited protests against their own racist violence! The result is a political spiral toward fascism. As the big capitalists move to the right, they’re legitimizing and energizing far-right parties that have little or no stake in liberal democracy. Vox, for example, is banning unfriendly news outlets from its events and calling for them to be shut down (Reporters Without Borders). As the bosses’ contradictions continue to sharpen, we can expect the liberals to follow suit in ditching the phony freedoms of capitalist democracy.
Only communists can defeat fascism
The working class cannot afford to sit around and wait for the capitalists to try to fix their unfixable contradictions. Economic and inter-imperialist crises inevitably lead to rising fascism and wider war. In World War II, the force that stopped full-blown fascism in its tracks was a communist-led working class. Although communists and other anti-fascists were defeated in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, they inspired workers throughout the world in the global conflict that followed, culminating in the Soviet Union’s destruction of Nazi Germany. The revolutionary Chinese Communist Party played an important role in beating back fascist Japan.
The Communist Party of Italy led the resistance that smashed the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.
Today there are but two paths before us: fascism or communist revolution. There is no middle ground, no third way. As communist theorist R. Palme Dutt observed in Fascism and Social Revolution (1934), “Capitalism in its decay breeds Fascism. Capitalist democracy in decay breeds Fascism. The only final guarantee against Fascism, the only final wiping out of the causes of Fascism, is the victory of the proletarian dictatorship.”
And so our choice is clear. Build Progressive Labor Party!
The murder of Nahel M. on June 27th by a traffic cop in Nanterre, France set off a nationwide rebellion against racist police murders. Even after the cop who shot Nahel was arrested, people’s anger and cynicism about the system continued to explode. This multiracial rebellion, led by teenage Black and North African workers, spread to more than 200 cities and towns across France. They responded with violence as the police attacked the young rebels in the streets and arrested more than 3000 people over five nights of demonstrations. The rebellion in France is inspiring as it shows the potential power of the working class. At the same time, like so many uprisings before, without an organized communist party and a political vision of fighting for a workers led society it ends as quickly as it began and leaves many people cynical about fighting back.
Nahel was shot by the police at point blank range. Initially the police lied and said he had tried to run them down, but video exposed their lies and showed them murdering Nahel by shooting him through the driver side window as the car started to drive away.
At first French President Emmanuel Macron tried to ignore the rebellion. He was recorded attending a concert on the second night. But the clashes between young people, angered at the ongoing racism of French capitalism and the police, spread beyond the working-class areas and thousands of people marched in the center of Paris. Macron, who visited police barracks to support his racist killers, looked to the police and the more fascist elements in the country to put down the rebellion.
The rebellion exposed, once again the extreme racism of capitalism. Nanterre is a working-class suburb that has a large number of people of North African descent as well as Black workers. Youth unemployment in Nanterre is at 23 percent (CNN, 7/1) and in France more than 20 percent of teenagers live below the poverty line. Many of them live in suburbs like Nanterre. Instead of the French bosses creating jobs for young people, the area is heavily policed. Across France the police have used identity check powers to harass and terrorize the working class. Young men perceived as Black or North African are 20 times as likely to be stopped by the police than the rest of the population (Guardian, 6/30).
As the demonstrations have died down the French ruling class has organized pro-government rallies across the country. These “restore order” rallies have been led by the most openly racist elements in France, including the fascist Marie Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) which is calling for more prisons and to have people that are arrested for any reason to be evicted from public housing. The working class can’t rely on the bosses to fix capitalism. Instead of making things better the bosses respond with more racism.
These rebellions have shown once again that the working class has the power to shut down and overthrow capitalism. It has also shown that this will only happen by the building of a revolutionary communist movement that can fight to take power through communist revolution.
May Day was celebrated with joy and revolutionary passion all over Pakistan. Workers, students and different trade unions organized May Day with banners explaining that we need to change capitalism with a system organized by the working class; from each according to abilities to each according to needs.
Capitalist bosses are greedy so they exploit us to work for their profit system. They want us to die in their imperialist wars while making profit for them. They want us to be exploited every minute of our lives as we work from dawn to dusk. And then they also want us to protect their exploitative system.
But Progressive Labor Party organizes the working class to wage war against the bosses, and one day lead a communist revolution.
Capitalist misleaders
It is ironic that the majority of workers cannot participate in May Day processions because they have to work all day to earn something to feed their families. Daily wagers, contract workers and farm workers cannot leave work to celebrate May Day either because their masters don't allow them or they have to get some wage to meet their needs.
Trade union misleaders are here just to protect the interests of bosses; they are unable to bring something good to the lives of the poor working class. They are getting a monthly fund from every worker by promising that they will bend the bosses down to accept the demands of workers but behind the curtain they are bargaining with the bosses to get more advantages for themselves.
Time after time these misleaders are being used by the bosses to cool down the anger of poor workers by assuring them on behalf of bosses that ‘your demands will be accepted in a few weeks or months’! Workers are still deprived of every facility which is supposed to be provided by the factory owners to the workers according to labor laws.
Communist leadership
In May Day processions and seminars our comrades criticized the prevailing system and its defenders; those are usually union misleaders. Our comrades explained that these so-called union leaders are not essential to leading their struggle against the capitalist system. We pointed out each time workers organized a strike unleashing their class anger through militant sit-ins to close down production, then these misleaders bargained with the bosses to break the strike.
Our comrades also explained the difference between criminals and leaders; they said we need communist leaders who believe in the power of the working class, not the criminal-minded gangsters who are using the name of workers to get benefits for themselves. These criminals are in the guise of leaders, as they torture and abuse the workers even asking the bosses to fire someone if they think that worker is going to challenge their authority.
We are trying to give communist leadership to the working class. We visit factories to start the process of unionizing at the workplace but we are facing hurdles which are being spread by the factory owners, contractors, security personnel and the misleaders.
Our comrades talk about the importance of changing the system and forging the reform struggle. We explain the necessity of an international communist movement against capitalism. The Progressive Labor Party is spreading its communist ideas among the working class and the workers are responding.
PAKISTAN, July 3—Pakistan is in deep trouble! Political instability, economic destruction, religious sectarianism, skyrocketing inflation, poverty, nationalism, racism and chaos are pushing the country on the brink of destruction thanks to capitalism, a system spiraling further into crisis, and escalating inter-imperialist competition. A former ruling party (PTI) was removed from the government through a vote of no confidence which resulted in tightened surveillance, state oppression, police torture and disappearances. Amid this political instability, PLP is trying to organize for communism.
Dangers of compromising with the bosses
Capitalist bosses are using various tactics to continue the exploitation of the working class. They use their puppets to scare the masses from even thinking about making a revolution. In the 1960s when the masses were angry with the capitalist system and trying to organize into a party (Communist Party of Pakistan) to overthrow capitalism, the soil was not ripe for a revolution and the party was very tiny.
So the bosses used their puppets to convince the party leaders that ‘it is good time to overthrow the government and make a revolution,’ which resulted in a failed attempt. Quickly all the leadership and dedicated members were arrested and blamed for conspiracy against the state.
Many of them were sentenced for life time imprisonment, some were killed and some left the country to find a safe place.
Again in the mid-seventies when the masses were fed up with the system, they started to join a newly formed phony Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), to bring change and get rid of exploitation. Progressive student leaders, union leaders, intellectuals and workers joined the PPP with the hope that these so-called progressive leaders will help them out of poverty, illiteracy and exploitation, promising land to the landless.
They were not revolutionaries; they just used the name of the working class and exploited the sentiments of oppressed people to take power but did not take any steps to ease the life of the working class.
The workers’ dreams of a prosperous and poverty-free Pakistan were dashed.
Today, as Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continues to spread communist ideas here, and continues to blossom, we are hopeful that one day we can destroy this rotten system once and for all, and replace it with a system where all workers are safe and can flourish.
Capitalist crisis and chaos
There is ongoing political infighting and crisis in Pakistan. Recently, when the political and economic conditions of Pakistan were calling on the poor working class to build a strong anti-capitalist movement, it was another bosses’ trap. The bosses galvanized Imran Khan and his followers to attack military installations, martyrs’ monuments, military and police vehicles and personnel.
This resulted in a strong retaliation from the state, attacking both the ruling class and the working class. The government banned internet services for several weeks and started to monitor every conversation over the phone or internet. Many innocent people were arrested because they had a telephone conversation with the people involved in attacking the military installations.
Imran Khan (IK) and his goons thought that attacking the military installations they could oust the military leadership, and they would get another chance to rule and bleed the working class dry. Firstly IK blamed the U.S. for “regime change” to get the sympathies of common people, but when he realized that U.S. bosses were angered by his blame game, he changed his tune, and begged them again for help.
A few days ago it was exposed by the defense minister in a TV interview that a rebellion against new military leadership and the newly formed government, was unsuccessful. Many military officers involved in this conspiracy are held by security forces. Now almost all the senior leadership of PTI left the party.
Amid the chaos of the Khan faction versus Pakistan’s military establishment standoff, the PLP is striving for international communist revolution. We are preparing the soil to ripen into an international communist revolution by organizing workers, peasants and students in our rank and file. We believe that only the working class and their party, PLP, can get rid of exploitation, poverty, inequality, slavery and injustice by forging an international struggle against capitalism. Long live international communist revolution!