A small group of CHALLENGE readers traveled to a farming town in California to view The House I Live In, written and directed by Eugene Jarecki. There was a mix of young college students,  teachers, and older workers. The film’s subject was the “War on Drugs.”
The “War on Drugs” has never truly been about drugs. It is a racist war on young black and Latin men and a means of filling up the prisons for profit. This film depicts the horrific and devastating effects of this war on the black and Latin working-class communities. The U.S. incarcerates more of its domestic workers than China or Russia, 2.3 million prisoners behind bars. In large part they are there for non-violent and drug-related offenses.
Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, makes a clear and poignant point when she states, “There are more African Americans in jail or on probation and parole than were enslaved in 1850.” The racist nature of this war on drugs is revealed by these stats: black Americans are 13 percent of the population, 14 percent of the drug users and 56 percent of those incarcerated for drug-related crimes.
During the discussion after the film, one CHALLENGE reader pointed out that capitalism is the culprit and the driving force behind the “War on Drugs.” To end this racist war on our black and Latin youth, we must end capitalism. After the discussion, one youth came forward to say he liked what was said about capitalism and that he had been studying Marxism. He gave his contact information.
The prison guard and other principals in the film, who were portrayed as sympathetic, said the prisons needed to be changed but they had no idea of what to do. Under communism all workers will have useful work to do and will divide the products and wealth of society according to their needs. Prisons will be reserved for ex-capitalists who wish to return to a system of exploitation.

DETROIT, MI June 25 — “There are people who can’t cook, can’t clean, people coming off surgery who can’t wash. This is an affront to human dignity…Every day, we’re shown that black lives, black quality of life, black communities, don’t matter.” That’s how an organizer of the Detroit People’s Water Board described the latest case of mass racist terror as the Detroit Water Department shuts off water to those who owe $150 or are two months behind on their bill. More than 150,000 customers (as many as 300,000 mostly poor and black residents), are late on bills that have increased 119 percent in the last ten years. They are targeting as many as 3,000 homes every week!
Denying water to almost half the population of Detroit in a blistering summer comes after almost 170,000 homes with children and the elderly went without heat during the brutal winter of 2013-14.  To add to the racist terror, state welfare authorities can take children from any home without running water.
Meanwhile, more than half of the city’s factories and office buildings, including the Detroit Lions’ Ford Field, the Redwings hockey arena at Joe Louis Arena, and the Palmer Park Golf Course owe a total of $30 million. No one is shutting their water off.
This is not about unpaid bills. The shutoffs are intended to drive people from their homes so developers can buy up the land dirt cheap, while making the Water Department more attractive to a private investor. Privatizing the Water Department has been on the agenda for the past two decades.  
These attacks are the result of the decline of the U.S. auto bosses, the UAW’s (United Automobile Workers) total submission to their billionaire masters, and a financial crisis that left millions jobless and homeless. The racist character of these attacks is stark and indisputable.
People are parking their cars over water valves to prevent shut-offs and teaching each other how to turn the water back on. Community groups even filed a human rights complaint at the United Nations, demanding an end to the shutoffs. The Detroit Water Brigade, an Occupy-type group, is collecting supplies and trying to serve those in need.
Just weeks ago, the UAW held its national convention here with more than 2,000 delegates. The water shutoffs was even mentioned. Instead of a brief photo op at a nearby hotel organizing drive, the UAW could have led thousands out on strike and seized the Water Department, ending any shutoffs and demanding that the auto billionaires pay the bill. But it didn’t. And it won’t.
As home to millions of industrial workers, Detroit was once a center of communist-led, anti-racist struggle. In 1932, after six workers and youth were killed by company thugs at the Ford Hunger March, 100,000 workers marched behind the red-flag-draped coffins singing the Internationale. Five years later, workers seized the GM factories in Flint, Michigan and established the UAW. And in 1967, the armed uprising against racist police terror shook the bosses and was probably the greatest single act of solidarity with the Vietnamese in defeating U.S. imperialism.
Today, as Detroit workers face winters without heat and summers without water, they are organizing mass militant actions against the water department. What w we win is temporary as long as the bosses hold power. The main lesson of the Detroit water shutoff is that we need to build a mass PLP to destroy wage slavery, with communist revolution. Then, “dark night will have its end!”

India held its general elections in April and May. As the world’s second most populous country, its elections caught the attention of mainstream media outlets, many of which heralded “the largest democracy in the world.” India has a multi-party system, including some phony communist parties that have posted major electoral victories in the states of Kerala and West Bengal in the post-independence era.
In reality, as in the U.S., the elections were fought between the two mainstream parties, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the liberal Indian National Congress, both of which represent the Indian ruling class and have significant links to global capitalist interests. BJP won in a landslide victory — to the delight of the global ruling class, which needs more discipline of the working class during this period of intensified capitalist crisis.
Narendra Modi, the BJP head who became the nation’s prime minister, is accelerating the bosses’ move towards fascism. Modi was formerly chief minister in the state of Gujarat. In 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire and sparked violent riots directed at the Muslim inhabitants in the surrounding areas of the Godhra, leading to the vicious slaughter of over 2,500. The police in the areas reportedly stood by and even facilitated the rampage, and strong evidence suggests that Modi allowed the massacres to go on unabated. (As a result, Modi was denied an entry visa to the U.S. in 2005.)
But Modi’s role in the massacres did not prevent him from being repeatedly elected in a Hindu region where anti-Muslim racism is strong. Nor did it stop investors from funneling billions into the state of Gujarat. Modi, it seems, will wield a heavy hand to crank the profit-making machine for a handful of millionaires, while hundreds of millions in India live in absolute poverty. In the “largest democratic country in the world,” according to a 2010 report by OXFAM, eight Indian states account for more poor people than the 26 poorest African nations combined.
Modi’s BJP is in fact the political wing of the racist extreme right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organization founded in 1925 and openly modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. RSS members regularly participate in ethnic cleansing against Muslims and Sikhs and played a major role in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. As the crisis in global capital spirals out of control, the ruling class aligns itself with fascism to smash working-class resistance to free-market exploitation. This is clearly the case in India, which has seen a widening resistance movement against privatization and a flaring gap between haves and have-nots.
One of the biggest headaches of the Indian ruling class is the Maoist insurrection in the Central and Eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent. With a legacy dating to 1968, the rebels have built a substantial base among the tribal populations and the historically dispossessed “untouchable” castes. Since they staged a rebellion in Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, a revolt brutally crushed by the State in conjunction with the mainstream Communist Party of India (CPI), the Maoists have followed the “Chinese Path” of armed struggle in the countryside while focusing effort on political organizing in the tribal communities. Additionally, there has been a slow-developing but rigorous campaign in the urban centers, led mostly by students and intellectuals, to gain support for the militant struggle in the rural areas.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, despite splits within the Maoist movement, their focus has continued to revolve around issues of food and land, along with caste inequality and sexism. In 2004, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) merged with the Maoist Communist Centre to form the CPI (Maoist), which continues to advocate “seizure of political power by armed struggle” through a People’s War combined with political agitation of tribal communities with the aim of overthrowing the Indian State. While the immediate aim is to establish “compact revolutionary zones” that extend from India’s Southeast to Nepal, the Maoists’ stated goal is to achieve a socialist state by “accomplishing the new democratic revolution and continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Prefacing the most recent military campaign to root out “the greatest threat to India’s security” was the 2005 signing of hundreds of memorandums of understanding between the government and multinational mining corporations. A terror campaign ensued by the ultra-nationalist Salwa Judum against tribal people who refused to give up their lands for multinational development. The vicious campaign only deepened internal resistance to the state and resulted in the formation of grassroots organizations backed by the Maoist insurgency.
Although both the political right and the institutional left in India criticize the Maoists for the use of guerilla violence, the insurgency offers a glimmer of hope for workers’ anger at the system and their willingness to smash it. The mainstream phony communist parties in India, which ran numerous candidates in the recent elections, channel their energy into creating reformist alliances that leave capitalism in place.
With the crisis in capital spiraling out of control, the ruling class needs to turn to movements like the RSS and to racist demagogue like Modi.
We must fight directly for communism through the armed struggle of a mass workers’ party. The struggle of the working class in India is a symbol of continuing resistance as we build stronger ties among the international working class in creating a communist future. The beginning is now.

Workers Still Have Nothing to Lose but Their Chains

When all the mainstream and conservative columnists in the bosses’ press go out of their way to tell you a new book on economics — one that most people won’t even read — is no good and full of lies and all wrong and please pay no attention to the man behind the curtain … well, you know the book must have something going for it. And in this case, it does. The French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century shows that capitalism can never end poverty because capitalism needs poverty. Unfortunately, the author’s idea is to put reins on capitalism, not to end it.
Piketty has angered the ruling class and gotten an astounding amount of space in the business press for a 700-page book dense with statistics. The Wall Street Journal labeled it a “bizarre ideological screed” (4/21). Fox News claimed it was “based on economic lies” (4/15). Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle panned it after admitting, “I have not read it yet” (4/22). Forbes’ Keith Weiner proudly stated, “I didn’t read this book, though you don’t have to in order to understand why it’s mostly wrong” (5/31).
London’s Financial Times has gone the furthest to try to discredit Piketty’s work. In a long feature article (5/23), they claimed to find flaws in the French economist’s assertion that capitalism creates wealth inequality. Soon, however, it was revealed that Financial Times editor Chris Giles had deceptively compared old wealth estimates based on taxes with new estimates based on surveys that understate the wealth of the capitalist class. This data manipulation naturally underestimated the growth of capitalist inequality over time (New York Times, 6/1). Despite this exposure, the business press has continued to cite the Financial Times’ fabrication as if it were true!
 The assertion that has so upset the bosses’ press is that the past 250 years of capitalism in the West has led to a concentration of the world’s wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Only state intervention in the form of progressive taxation and other redistributive policies — a phenomenon that Piketty says starts in 1910, at the beginning of the Progressive Era, and ends with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s — has ever been able to curb this widening inequality, even temporarily. In order to prove his thesis, Piketty marshals an unprecedented mountain of statistical evidence, dating back to the 18th century. His conclusion seems irrefutable.
Capital in the 21st Century exposes the lie promoted by neoliberal market fundamentalists, who have long claimed that deregulation and “free” markets — free for capital while enslaving labor — would lift the living standards of workers everywhere. Of course, most people are aware that the reality of capitalist development has been quite the opposite. Today the poverty rate is growing faster than the population. Millions of workers fall into the ranks of the poor every year.
Piketty’s book has its own problems, however. While many have rushed to call it a replacement for Marx’s Capital, Capital in the 21st Century is anything but Marxist (Economist, 5/3; Time, 5/8; Forbes 5/31). Piketty has actually denied having read Marx’s Capital,  although that has not stopped him from disparaging it and thereby pass as a “responsible” academic (New Republic, 5/5).
It turns out that Piketty is most accurately described as a Keynesian, one who believes in increased spending to stimulate the economy during recessions — much like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and others who have published similar works. At the end of his book he offers ways to fix capitalism, not transcend it. For Piketty, the problem with capitalism is one of inefficiency; its tendency toward wealth inequality creates low growth rates. His solution — which he fairly describes as “utopian”— is for the state to manage capitalism to ensure that workers can buy enough of the product of their own labor to maintain a desirable rate of economic growth, which most economists put at 3 percent per year.
What Piketty misses is the question of politics. Along with pro-capitalist thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx belonged to the 19th-century tradition of political economy, where politics and economics were understood to be intertwined. Piketty considers the period of relatively greater social democracy, roughly 1910 to 1970, as the capitalist ideal. He ignores, or is ignorant of, what brought about reformist policies like progressive taxation and the welfare state in the first place, namely working-class movements.
The early- and mid-20th century had certain particularities. In the U.S. and Europe, in the face of a massive and militant labor movement, highly influential communist parties, and the threat of spreading Soviet communism, the capitalist class was willing to give back some wealth in order to avert what seemed like imminent revolution. But from the beginning, the welfare state was undermined by the capitalist ideologies of racism, sexism and, above all, anti-communism. In the U.S., the New Deal framework was rooted in the maintenance of racial apartheid. The wages of white workers were increased at the expense of black workers. By the 1970s, with the Soviet Union on the capitalist road and communist politics collapsing at home, the U.S. bosses found it easy to pit white and black workers against one another and dismantle the U.S. welfare state. Piketty misses this point because he is interested in reforming capitalism, not destroying it.
Ultimately, Piketty’s work is positive in that it once and for all disproves the myth that capitalism can end poverty. But while Piketty reveals one aspect of capitalism — its intrinsic tendency toward growing inequality — he fails to examine how the system actually works. His book is an interesting piece of the puzzle. But if you want to understand the fundamental dynamics of capitalism as a political-economic process, Marx’s Capital remains required reading. And the struggle Marx called for, a communist-led revolution of the world’s working class, remains what we in Progressive Labor Party are fighting for.