Inter-imperialist rivalry is shaping events in Venezuela. The capitalists’ main fight is over oil. Venezuela is the United States’ third largest oil supplier and the leading exporter to Latin America. It has the world’s second biggest oil reserves. This is a huge bonanza for the imperialists.
The fight within the country pits president Nicolás Maduro (following Cesar Chaves’ pseudo-leftist politics) on one side, backed by the Chinese and Russian imperialists. Gustaro Cisneros, one of the richest men on the planet, supports Maduro’s regime.
On the right-wing side are Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo Lopez. The latter was one of the leaders of the 2002 coup against Chavez, which was supported by the United States. These two represent U.S. imperialism.
Neither gang represents workers’ interests. Workers in Venezuela are victims of capitalism’s world crisis, suffering high unemployment, mass poverty, slum housing and miserable health care. The capitalists are taking advantage of workers’ discontent, similar to what’s happening in Ukraine or Africa: to divert workers’ anger the bosses are pushing workers to fight each other by siding with one or another bosses’ camp.
The working class in Venezuela has a rich history of struggle against the capitalists but unfortunately they’ve never had a party fighting for a communist society. Progressive Labor Party is appealing to workers to join our revolutionary communist party and fight shoulder to shoulder, internationally, to break the chains of the imperialists’ puppet governments. Let’s build a world free of misery and oppression, a world where the riches of nature are enjoyed according to workers’ needs and commitment, not controlled by a profit-hungry bunch of capitalists.

The Progressive Labor Party has always said that racism is an essential aspect of worldwide capitalism. A case in point is the murder of poor black young people in Brazil, which is such a common occurrence that it rarely gets reported. Last fall, however, there was sharp struggle in Sao Paulo after the “accidental” killing of 17-year-old Douglas Rodrigues by a cop responding to a noise complaint. Douglas was simply walking on the street with his 12-year-old brother.
Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, admitted that the same violence that killed Douglas is suffered by “thousands of other black youth.” Human rights organizations, including the National Council for Equality, demanded urgent measures against “the genocide of Brazil’s black youth.”
There are more than 60,000 violent deaths each year in Brazil. According to the Institute of Applied Economic Investigations (IPEA), black or biracial victims account for two-thirds of them. The homicide rate in the black community is 36.5 per 100,000 residents, more than double the white homicide rate. According to the IPEA, this murder epidemic reduces the life expectancy for black youth and workers by more than 20 months.  
Moreover, these victims keep getting younger. In the 1980s, the average homicide victim was 26; today, the average victim is 20. In 2010 alone, according to an investigator from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, 35,000 black people in Brazil died from violent acts. He wrote, “These numbers should be worrisome for a country that appears to not have ethnic, religious, border, social or political conflict. The number of violent deaths represents a much higher volume than those of many of the regions of the world that go through armed struggle.”
Criminalizing Black Youth
Raquel Villadino, coordinator for the Program for the Reduction of Lethal Violence among Teen and Youth in Rio de Janeiro, criticized the fact that only eight percent of the country’s violence prevention programs include racial data. “Racism is a structural element of the fatality of black youth,” Valladino said. “We are not only facing a process of criminalization of poverty, but, particularly of black youth.”
Over the last few years, violence against working-class youth there has intensified. Millions of black youth are out of school and unemployed. Since their lives are of little value to the exploitative capitalists, they are more vulnerable to becoming victims of violence.  But racism towards black youth and workers in Brazil is not limited to physical violence. They are also victimized by structural poverty. According to federal government data, 68 percent of the 81 million Brazilians in poverty are black or biracial.
Racism also affects healthcare. According to Psychologist Crisfanny Souza, a member of the National Network of Social Health Control of the Black Population, “All the rates of health of black women are worse than those of whites. Black women are given fewer breast exams and receive less anesthesia during childbirth.”
A black child is 60 percent more likely than a white child to die before the age of 18 of infectious or parasitic disease, and 90 percent more likely to die of malnutrition. The public healthcare system is not prepared to deal with diseases faced by the black population, including hypertension, sickle cell anemia or type 2 diabetes.
While slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, racism continues to oppress black workers and youth. Despite a 2012 affirmative action law to increase the number of poor and black students in public universities, the top universities are still monopolized by middle- and upper-class students from the prestigious private school system. Public primary and secondary schools continue to deteriorate.
Death and Inequality
Brazil’s indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to racist violence. According to the Missionary Indigenous Counsel, a group linked to the Catholic Church, violence against indigenous communities increased by 237 percent in 2012. These incidents include homicides, death threats, assassination attempts, assaults and sexual violence. In many cases, these attacks were instigated by landowners seeking control of land. In the last decade, 563 indigenous people reportedly have been assassinated — all of this in a society that glorifies itself as racially mixed.
In May 2013, the television network Globo commemorated the 125th anniversary of slavery’s abolition with a satirical skit poking fun at the abolitionist movement. Douglas Belchior, a history professor, attacked Globo TV’s racism, pointing out that more than seven million Africans and their descendants were kidnapped and killed during the 388 years of Brazil’s slavery.
The history of slavery in Brazil is one in a long list of crimes against humanity by the capitalist system worldwide:
The killings of hundreds of innocent men, women and children in Pakistan and Afghanistan by the U.S. imperialists’ drone attacks;
Wage and benefit cuts of up to 50 percent for workers in Detroit, while President Barack Obama gave millions to the auto bosses;
More deportations of U.S. immigrant workers than under any previous administration in U.S. history;
The most intense segregation in U.S. public schools since 1968, with Obama leading the charge for hyper-segregated charter schools;
Police killings of black youth, including Ramarley Graham, Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, and Rekia Boyd — to name only a few.
Workers of the world must fight racism and the capitalist system that creates it. Justice for this system’s victims will only come with capitalism’s destruction. And capitalism will only be destroyed when the international working class join the revolutionary PLP. Only then will we smash racism and sexism, and the division and exploitation of the working class. Only then can we end inequality. This is PLP’s fight. Join us!

The specter of economic doomsday makes war between China and the United States... unthinkable..... Or does it? In fact, Chinese and U.S. military planners are thinking in exquisite detail..., about how to win such a conflict. — David Gompert, former Acting Director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama, Los Angeles Times, 8/26/13.

Imperialist war is inevitable under capitalism. Only war can resolve the imperialist powers’ competition for resources and exploitable labor, the lifeblood of their brutal profit system. History shows that the capitalists will sacrifice millions of workers to defend those profits.
But history also shows that the greatest danger to capitalism — the international working class — can transform world war into communist revolution. It happened in the Soviet Union after World War I. It happened in China after World War II. And it can happen again if a mass communist movement is organized under the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party. With communist leadership, we can turn a quantitative capitalist crisis into qualitative change — into a society run by workers to meet workers’ needs.  
In his description of the tensions between the United States and China, David Gompert, a ruling-class insider, challenges the myth that financial ties between capitalist nations ensure everlasting peace. He recognizes what Vladimir Lenin, the great Soviet leader and thinker, concluded a century ago: Imperialist competition is inescapably violent. But while capitalist policy analysts are in general accord over the looming conflict with China, they have deep divisions when it comes to strategies and tactics.
Bosses’ Strategic Split
At the moment, the bosses are split between two diametrically opposed concepts: “AirSea Battle” and “Offshore Control.” This strategic dispute involves inter-service rivalry and likely explains the recent test-cheating scandals in the Air Force and Navy. These scandals that disgrace Air Force and Navy brass probably aim at cutting the influence of these services back to size amid tortuous strategizing for war on China. It also exposes the spending constraints imposed by the Great Recession on even the biggest, most globally engaged U.S. capitalists.
AirSea Battle envisions a quick, cheap U.S. first strike — conducted largely by the Air Force — at command and control sites deep in China’s mainland. Offshore Control stands for a longer-term U.S. naval blockade that would choke off the overseas commerce that China’s rulers depend upon.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, created in 2000, has a Congressional mandate to “monitor the national security implications of the economic relationship.” Last month it heard conflicting testimony from a number of conflicted testifiers — notably Roger Cliff, an East Asian security expert newly appointed to the Atlantic Council, an imperialist think tank with a long range outlook. (Before Chuck Hagel gave up the Council’s chairmanship last year to become Obama’s Secretary of Defense, he proposed forging a U.S.-led coalition — including India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey — for the next world war.)
To counter a Chinese buildup for the seizure of Taiwan, Cliff proposed a limited, near-term U.S. strike on China’s command center. This attack would need to be executed before 2020, he noted, when China will have “significant numbers of medium-range ballistic missiles and land-attack cruise missiles capable of reaching any of the U.S. facilities in Japan, which are the closest to Taiwan.”
Cliff told the Council that an AirSea Battle could be effective in defense of Taiwan and “would probably entail large-scale force commitments and high, but not unlimited, levels of escalation.” But he also acknowledged that Chinese bosses, thus provoked, might unleash an army in the hundreds of millions, along with their formidable nuclear arsenal: “Conflict over issues that threatened China’s national survival could potentially entail the commitment of all of China’s military forces and unlimited levels of escalation.”
Contradictions and Constraints
The contradictions in Cliff’s testimony reflect his personal career path but also the state of indecision within the dominant, finance capital faction of the U.S. ruling class. Before joining the Atlantic Council, Cliff worked for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a war-on-the-cheap think tank. (The Center is bankrolled by Pete DuPont IV, the former Congressman and Delaware governor who has championed the fight for income tax cuts.) But the Atlantic Council, backed by ExxonMobil, Rockefeller Financial and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, sits squarely in the finance capital camp. These forces normally bang the drum for an expensive, long-term war with China. Cliff’s remarks suggest that the finance capital wing, currently strapped for cash, may be entertaining a cheaper and quicker way to defend Taiwan as well.
But five days before Cliff’s startling speech, David Gompert — a trusted Obama advisor — spoke to the same China war planning board. He warned against sole reliance on AirSea Battle, which “implies a U.S. threat of early strikes on Chinese territory” and “would be perceived as – indeed, would be — escalatory.” As an alternative, Gompert urged an Offshore Control blockade option and “multilateral maritime-security cooperation in the Western Pacific.”
None of these capitalist experts are acknowledging the elephant in the room. Neither AirSea Battle nor Offshore Control take into account the potential for the costly and lethal repercussions of a clash between two imperialist empires: massive territorial invasion and/or multiple nuclear holocausts. Both strategies ignore the real prospect of a land war in China, a country that could mobilize over one hundred million fighting men and women. (The U.S. mustered a tenth of its population in World War II.) And neither strategy outlines a role for the Army, the U.S. military’s largest branch.
In reality, these doctrines commit the Air Force and Navy far beyond their capabilities in all-out warfare. In the current issue of Air Force Magazine, the CSBA’s Benjamin Lambeth boasted:

Airpower has eclipsed land power as the primary means of destroying enemy forces. Since the Cold War’s end, the classic roles of airpower and land power have changed places in major combat against modern
mechanized opponents. In this role reversal, ground forces have come to do most of the shaping and fixing of enemy forces, while airpower now does most of the actual killing.

But killing from 40,000 feet or dominating the seas is not the same as occupying or controlling a country, let alone conquering one. The futile U.S. adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, nations with a tiny fraction of China’s military resources, make that much clear.
War and Revolution
Most of all, the capitalists continue to overlook the most important repercussion of a broader inter-imperialist conflict: the rise of an international, revolutionary working class. As the rulers resort to more naked fascism — racism, sexism, mass unemployment and wage cuts — workers will inevitably fight back. Once armed with the bosses’ weapons and with communist ideas, they will turn the guns around — as they did in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1949.
The Progressive Labor Party cannot prevent World War III. We can’t control how or when the bosses start their next conflict. But if we build a mass revolutionary movement, we can determine how that war ends and what comes out of it. We can finish the bosses and their profit system and create a communist world in their place. Join us!

BROOKLYN, February 12 — “I am happy: they fired my boss!” That’s what you hear all over Downstate Hospital in Central Brooklyn. A bunch of bosses were fired as part of N.Y. Governor Cuomo’s design to downsize, privatize, and/or close our hospital. But don’t forget: A handful of administrators have been fired, but hundreds of workers have been laid off in the past year and a half, with more to come.
That’s why workers have been fighting back, with numerous demonstrations but much more needs to be done. What’s holding workers back is that many of them believe our hospital won’t be closed and that the system can work for them.
The workers’ anger was apparent in the celebrations of the firing of their bosses, some who have offered women positions for sexual acts, stolen money, and
given lush contracts to private companies with no results. Some of the petty bosses have been bull-rushed out the door, but some have been able to use favoritism to save their skins; one that the workers would have liked to see fired got a top academic job based on a resumé packed with lies. One department held a victory party, only to find the next day their boss was being kept.
PLP is having many discussions with workers. We’ve been warning that there is no honor among thieves, and that the new administration, the private company Pitts, hired by Cuomo, is even more anti-worker than the old one. The company is known as a hospital closer, with a track record from Washington D.C. to St. Vincent’s in Manhattan.
We are working to build momentum to call the bosses out on their lies, and to point out how this system works, and that no politician will help unless large numbers of workers stand physically in their way.
That is what happened at Interfaith Hospital a few weeks ago. When the CEO said that ambulances would no longer be allowed to bring emergency patients to Interfaith, dozens of workers marched to his office to protest. The order was rescinded and the CEO left through the back door under guard. The money was found, and the hospital is still open — for now.
When Cuomo blames the Federal budget for lack of health care money, we point out that his administration has slashed support to Downstate by 25 percent, and funds Medicaid in Brooklyn hospitals at half the rate it pays in Manhattan. But they’ve given hundreds of millions to their favored buddies in the form of assuming their debts.
This favoritism was exposed recently when the new mayor, Di Blasio appointed Stanley Brezenoff to a top spot in his administration. Di Blasio’s 70% of the vote came in part because he took a stand against New York State’s threatened closing of Long Island College Hospital (LICH). He even orchestrated his own publicity arrest. But it was Brezenoff, with his health management company Continuum, who bankrupted LICH and whose company continues to receive millions in bailout money from the State of New York (see box).
We will continue to point out that under communism, the working class would run the hospitals to provide health care to our brothers and sisters, not to pile up profits. We will continue to expose how their system destroys our jobs and health care, and that the money for health care is being funneled into the U.S. imperialist war machine, killing workers across the globe to protect the bosses’ profit system.