BROOKLYN, November 9 — In 1968, guitar virtuoso and songwriter Jimi Hendrix wrote the line, “Look at the sky turn hellfire red…” He was referring to the rising flames of black workers’ rebellions in major U.S. cities after nonviolent struggle seemed futile.
In 2013, his words could easily describe the revolutionary excitement felt at the two-day Progressive Labor Party College Conference to Smash Imperialism. Some participants came from the rally against the repression of student fighters [see front page] and greeted communist ideas and practices as a welcome alternative to the fascism we experience daily on campus.
Creeping Fascism and International Fightback
The conference, 60 people strong, boasted a multi-racial crowd from across the U.S., along with others from as far away as Mexico and Switzerland. It was an important step toward building an alliance of students, professors and college workers. It strengthened a new leadership of PL youth while rejuvenating the fighting spirits of more veteran comrades.
The conference took place as attacks on students and faculty have sharpened. From Haiti to Los Angeles to New York City, college campuses are becoming breeding grounds for fascism. This is a period when U.S. bosses, in preparation for war with inter-imperialist rivals like China, can no longer rule in the old way. In their desperate effort to hold on to state power, they must intensify their repression of students and workers. The City University of New York’s reinstallation of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, integrating generals Colin Powell and David Petraeus into the curriculum, is one sign of creeping fascism. Another is the shutdown of student centers, a move that hinders student organizing [see CHALLENGE 11/13].
Many students involved in fightbacks are wondering, Why is this happening now? Another crucial question: Is communism possible? Our conference was a positive move to build confidence in the working class that we can indeed win. Moreover, the workshops used the Marxist method of dialectical materialism to investigate how capitalism is headed not only toward war but also toward its own inevitable decay and death.
Students Passionate About Communism
Many were passionate in opposing racism, sexism, nationalism and other divisions among working people. In workshops and larger gatherings, students demonstrated a serious desire for a renewed movement to change the dark future capitalism has in store for them [see page 6].
A keynote speech by a student leader of the PLP college work reflected the revolutionary optimism mood shared by many. “Capitalism is a system that’s dying and the working class has glimmers of hope. The glimmers are happening in this very room. There are glimmers of hope when we fight back, when we choose the side of communism. We will win! Choose communist revolution and raise that blood-red flag high. Never let it come down!”
In one workshop, a young woman student talked about the role of universities under capitalism.  She said she felt targeted by her right-wing professor for openly challenging his backward ideas in class. By the end of the day, she said the conference gave her confidence she wasn’t alone, and that PLP has her back in the struggle against anti-working-class ideas. This student was a shining example of an engaged, vocal and focused thinker, the opposite of the media caricature of apathetic youth.
Comrades from Haiti drafted a sharp solidarity letter about an incident four days earlier, when students faced “hundreds of tear gas canisters…fired by the State Police, and students were passing out around us as rubber bullets as well as live bullets rained down on us.”
The conference promoted a discussion on the importance and use of CHALLENGE in our fightbacks. We expect more students to write for, read, and distribute our revolutionary paper.
The college conference is one step in a long fight against imperialism. We must bring our revolutionary optimism back to our campuses, be they in Switzerland or Indiana. If we do our jobs, the bosses will have a bigger problem than the threats to their control over their oil resources. They’ll be up against an organized, international working class.

November 7, 2013, was the 96th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. We should all celebrate it. That day the working class seized state power and kept it for decades. The Bolsheviks re-established the Communist International, or Comintern, which led the fight for freedom from imperialism and colonialism all over the world.
Where it did not lead this fight, the Bolshevik Revolution inspired and aided those who did. It became the greatest force for liberation in world history.
Workers throughout the world fought for and won social welfare benefits because their own struggles were inspired by the successes of the Bolsheviks in taking and holding state power. Capitalists worldwide yielded reforms to try to prevent workers from leading revolutions to overthrow the profit system altogether!
The Comintern led the world in fighting racism and sexism. It inspired the greatest works of 20th century art. It opposed religious obscurantism (the deliberate withholding of knowledge). The communist movement led the fight against fascism everywhere. Fascism — the ideology of capitalism in crisis — killed tens, even hundreds of millions, but in the last analysis was no match for the communist movement. The Soviets destroyed Nazism virtually by themselves.
For tens of millions of working people, intellectuals, students and others, the title “communist” became the proudest badge of honor. No movement in world history is so rich with lessons, both positive and negative, for the international working class to study and learn from, in order to do it better next time.
The Comintern and world communist movement ultimately turned into their opposites. They reverted to capitalism. This happened because of internal weaknesses, contradictions and errors. It also happened because the Bolsheviks were the first! Their mistakes occurred because they were “blazing the trail,” trying to build communism when it had never been done before.
Major errors were inevitable. Errors are part of the process of learning how to build a new world. We can, must and will learn from them.
Ever since 1917, the capitalists have promoted a huge flood of lies about the communist movement. They lie particularly about Joseph Stalin, who led the Bolshevik Party from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Leon Trotsky invented many of these falsehoods. Little that Trotsky wrote during the 1930s about the USSR was true. Most of it was conscious falsehoods; Trotsky knew he was lying. This was convenient for him and also for the capitalists.
We need to be “critically critical.” It is a huge error to simply believe horror stories about the communist movement, Stalin, the Comintern and the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks did the main thing RIGHT! They dared to seize power from the capitalists and dared to fight hard and successfully to hold onto it.
We are, and should be, inspired by them. We stand on the shoulders of giants, the Bolsheviks, who led the first successful working-class communist revolution 96 years ago.
“Standing on the shoulders of giants” means that we can — or ought to be able to — see further than they could. That means learning from their errors, as well as from their successes. That’s our task. Let’s get to it!

The U.S. ruling class needs a powerful military to carry out wars for maximum profit and control of resources and cheap labor. To that end it slaughters masses of workers and youth, from the Middle East to Bangladesh to Latin America. In particular, the military is essential to the bosses’ control of energy supplies, shipping routes, and pipelines. At stake is the rulers’ top-dog status over oil-hungry China, among others.
The Pentagon war machine must prepare for broader wars with its imperialist rivals even as it confronts the conflicts now erupting around the world. At the moment, the Middle East and South Asia are in disarray:
   • Civil war and growing Russian influence in Syria;
   • Warlords battling for control of Libya;
   • Military coup in Egypt;
   • Al Qaeda bases in Somalia, Mali, Yemen and Syria;
   • Sectarian warfare in Iraq that threatens civil war and endangers oil supplies;
   • Threat of Taliban control of Afghanistan after billions of dollars and thousands of troops were expended in a 12-year U.S. invasion;
   • Jihadists’ challenge in nuclear Pakistan, where U.S. drone bombings are alienating much of the population.
U.S. military efficiency is undermined by the disunity that paralyzes Congress, hinders Obama’s efforts for U.S. imperialism, and divides the core of its war machine. This is a reflection of the growing division between domestic capitalists like the Koch brothers who do not profit from imperialist spending and the finance capitalists on Wall Street who do. Right-wingers are battling Obama & Co. for the loyalty of rank-and-file troops.
Racism puts U.S. rulers in a bind. On the one hand, the Tea Party forces’ open racism weakens military unity — a big problem for the liberal rulers, who depend on broad and diverse enlistment in their armed forces. On the other hand, the liberals need to infect U.S. troops with racism to motivate them to fight the black and brown populations of the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tea Party vs. the Pentagon
The anti-Obama Fox News indignantly reported,

Soldiers attending a pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood say they were told that evangelical Christians and members of the Tea Party were a threat to the nation and that any soldier donating to those groups would be subjected to punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (10/23/13).

A similar briefing at Mississippi’s Camp Shelby prompted Tea Party caucus member Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican, to pen a protest letter to the Pentagon endorsed by three of his colleagues: “This most recent mislabeling of a Christian organization [the American Family Association] reflects what appears to be a troubling trend of religious intolerance in the military” (Fox, 10/24/13). (An open racist, Lamborn has directed racist slurs against president Obama.)
The liberal forces, wearied by the Republican-led government shutdown, backed off. On October 24, Fox trumpeted, “The Secretary of the Army has ordered military leaders to halt all briefings on extremist organizations that labeled evangelical Christian groups as domestic hate groups.”
Mainstream U.S. imperialists are keeping a wary eye on Lamborn and his conversion from arms industry flunky to tax- and budget-slasher. He once ranked as one of the House’s top two dealmakers for military contracts, serving prominent death merchants like Northrup Grumman. Now, however, Lamborn backs tax cuts that would hobble the arms dealers sorely needed by U.S. imperialism. This may reflect the fight between the imperialist main wing and the domestic-
oriented capitalists.
Lamborn and his allies embolden evangelical preachers like Rick Joyner, who urges white officers and troops to forcibly oust Obama. “Our only hope is military takeover,” Joyner said during the shutdown, the latest standoff between the two major capitalist parties (Huffington Post, 10/2/13).
But for the main wing of U.S. imperialism, the most worrisome threat of the Tea Party and evangelical forces is ideological, representing a more openly racist force. Lamborn’s district, one of the most militarized in the nation, houses the U.S. Northern Command, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Peterson Air Force Base, Schriever Air Force Base, and the Army’s Fort Carson. Right-wing Christian forces reign from top to bottom at the Air Force Academy, also in Lamborn’s district. As the Huffington Post reported two years ago, a hundred Academy cadets “were actually pretending to be fundamentalist Christians” to “maintain good standing among their peers and superiors at the Academy” (10/12/11).
ROTC Won’t Overcome Bosses’ Racism
But the U.S. bosses’ empire requires troops of all colors. Obama is relocating Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs from the historically racist South to the big cities, hoping to attract black and Latino youth in need of jobs. “The Army chose to close ROTC programs at 13 universities, more than half of them in the South. Tennessee alone will lose ROTC offerings at three of its public universities, the most of any state. The Army Cadet Command, which oversees ROTC and its approximately 33,000 aspiring soldiers, said that by shuttering the 13 lagging programs, it will be able to shift resources to 56 other markets, including Los Angeles, New York and Chicago” (New York Times, 10/22/13).
The Times’ piece also hailed Obama’s integration of the high command: “In 2011, about 28 percent of active duty Army officers were minorities, up from 23 percent a decade earlier.” In the same period, however, more and more black and Latino enlisted personnel shunned “combat arms” duty.
In a similar vein, the liberal rulers are seeking to remilitarize blue-state universities on the East Coast, both elite and working-class, the same institutions that once produced an officer corps in ideological lockstep with U.S. imperialism. ROTC now operates at both Harvard and New York’s City University. Not coincidentally, war criminal General David Petraeus has joined both of their faculties. At Harvard he is a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government. At City College he preaches seemingly harmless doctrines of infrastructure development and energy self-sufficiency. In fact, these are core components of the main U.S. rulers’ global war plans.
Streamlining U.S. domestic infrastructure will enable more rapid troop and arms movement across highways and rail lines nationwide, the main reason President Eisenhower developed the interstate highway system of the 1950s. Energy self-sufficiency is the bosses’ hedge against the threat of oil and gas cut-offs from Middle East sources.
Our Party’s militant actions at New York’s City College exposed Petraeus and his war pulpit. They are helping to mobilize masses of students who are outraged at the ex-general’s presence in the classroom.
Workers (both civilian and military) owe no group of bosses their allegiance, neither the racist Tea Party nor the war-bent Obama wing of U.S. capitalism. Our only loyalty is to our own class. Obama and the rulers he serves cannot hide the rampant racism that permeates the U.S. The stop-and-frisk policies of New York City’s cops, attacking innocent largely black and Latino youth, have spread nationwide. Cops are shooting indiscriminately at black and Latino workers and youth, from California to Florida to the shadow of the White House. And Obama’s agents continue to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers while thousands languish in detention jails.
Only Communism Can End Centuries of Racism
For 400 years, racism has been the foundation of U.S. capitalism. It creates the bosses’ super-profits through lower wages and health benefits, slum housing and under-financed, segregated schools. Racism drags down white workers’ conditions as well, threatening them with the mass unemployment that already afflicts their black and Latino working-class sisters and brothers.
The fight against racism is indivisible from the fight against U.S. imperialist war. Building a mass Progressive Labor Party is the key to this fight. Our goal of a communist society — of, by and for the working class — is the only alternative to the profit system’s war, racism, sexism, mass unemployment and poverty. Joining PLP to organize communist revolution is the order of the day!

New York City, October 16 — Over 80 students and professors rallied in front of John Jay College, demanding that both David “Death Squad” Petraeus and ROTC be kicked out of CUNY, the city public university system. These students and professors are determined to not only throw the military off our campus, but to create an anti-imperialist movement within the CUNY system.
ROTC + Petraeus = War Preparations
Wanted posters of racist Petraeus were held up by PL’ers and friends. A PLP flyer was distributed explaining why ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) was being brought to CUNY: the military needs to expand and diversify in preparation for future wars in the Middle East and Asia, where the U.S. plans to challenge the growing power of its Chinese rival (see page 2). CHALLENGE featuring numerous articles about the struggles at CUNY was also distributed. Our literature explained that colleges exist to serve the labor and ideological needs of the bosses to build an imperialist empire — through war research, military recruitment, patriotism, and of course, ROTC, which provides 30 percent of the military’s officers.
The ruling class is seeking tighter control of their educational factories and is intensifying their recruitment tactics at universities. Youth are reluctant of joining the imperialist war machine, given what they’ve seen in the last twelve years:

• The slaughter and displacement of millions of our workers in Iraq and Afghanistan;
• One of every three female soldiers targeted of sexual assault;
• Nearly 8,000 U.S. soldiers killed and tens of thousands seriously wounded;
• Almost 500,000 soldiers — one of four — who served in those wars returning with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental injuries.

General Petraeus is also part of the imperialist chokehold on campus. This mass murderer was the keynote speaker at a gala, where the minimum price for entry was $500. (Some were willing to pay up to $50,000 for a plate.) “Drones” Petraeus is heralded as an example for students to follow. A “warrior-scholar,” he embodies the ideal soldier: ruthless in his commitment to imperialism. As a top-ranking general in the U.S. military, Petraeus installed death squads against Shi’a populations in Afghanistan, dropped white phosphorus in Iraq and unleashed drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and more. Now Petraeus is spreading patriotism at CUNY. The Administration, in cahoots with the bosses’ need to feed its military machine with student bodies, happily supplies him with all the resources he needs to preach the ruling class’s murderous ideology.
But things haven’t worked out quite as planned. Since the semester began, racist Petraeus was driven from location to location by masses of angry students. In September, a video was released of Petraeus surrounded by protesters demanding his resignation, chanting “murderer!” to his face. The following week, six students from CUNY were brutally assaulted and arrested by the
kkkops. They now face trial in the bosses’ courts, prosecuted by the system of capitalism for daring to speak out.
The bosses’ attacks only emboldened the students. Instead of just targeting Petraeus, protesters demanded an end to imperialist war and to the militarization of CUNY. One student declared, “Militarization is when a child grows up idolizing the army and the police. It’s when that same child goes to school to be harassed by the police in their own school, which is a jail. It’s when recruiters come on to their campus and try to make them join the other side.” CUNY intends to increase its tuition yet again while forcing students into the military to cover the costs of their education. This vicious trap is being employed in one of the few colleges that working-class black and Latino students can afford.
Up the Anti-Imperialist Ante
We are building for our college conference on November 8 and 9. We need to organize against ROTC and Petraeus on every campus:

• Forums with anti-war veterans who expose how soldiers are used as cannon fodder in wars;
• Movies like “Dirty Wars” that expose the terror the U.S. military has brought to workers;
• Organize students to demand that ROTC and war criminals like Petraeus be thrown off campus;
• Win students to join the Progressive Labor
• Party and build a movement to end the root cause of war — capitalism.

While the demonstration was overwhelmingly positive, there are missing aspects. Some spoke about revolution but avoided the word communism. PLP believes we need to be open in our struggle for communism.
The struggle for communism represents the hope for the working class to build a world free from exploitation, police terror and war! Communism means an end to the capitalist profit system, to all forms of class exploitation and inequality: racism, sexism, and nationalism.
Communism means giving birth to an egalitarian society, uniting mental and manual labor, where our books and education won’t be stamped with a price, our classroom will be the whole world and every worker a lifelong student, and every student furthers the development of our communist society. Come to the PLP College Conference to find out why we need, and how we can build, a communist revolution!
As communists, we are not pacifists. We do not argue against war. We wage war for our class. Our enemies — David Petraeus, the CUNY Administration, the bosses’ courts and police — are waging war for their class. It’s about time we fight back. We must build for revolution on every campus, workplace and military base. To build for revolution, we must attack our enemies, strengthen our base, and recruit people to PLP. Fight the bosses wherever they are!