PL’ers in the mass orgaization Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations are attending the UU General Assembly in Louisville, KY. At last June’s General Assembly, in Phoenix, 3,000 UUs demonstrated outside racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigrant detention center, chanting “Tear it down!”
The progressive aspirations of Unitarian Universalists are codified in seven principles. They are achievable — but not under capitalism. Take these four principles as an example.
The inherent worth and dignity of every person. Despite endless heroic struggles to reform it, capitalism has been destroying the lives of working people for five centuries. Often this takes the form of mass murder, as it did this spring in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In their relentless push for profit, garment factory owners forced employees, mainly women, to work in a dangerous building by threatening to withhold their ($37 a month!) paychecks. The building collapsed, killing 1,127 workers.
Capitalists use both racism and sexism to divide workers and reap even higher profits. The same sexism used to sell women’s fashions abetted the mass murder of women in Bangladesh. For the European and U.S. corporations that were the ultimate employers of these women, racism also played a role in justifying below-poverty wages and deadly working conditions.
To stay competitive, the capitalists impose wage, pension, and health benefit cuts. They resort to layoffs, speedups, unpaid overtime, unsafe working conditions, and outsourcing — whatever it takes to keep them profitable. Democrats are no better than Republicans in this regard. When the Obama administration took over General Motors, it slashed the base pay of new hires in half, from $28 to $14 per hour.
UUs often attribute low wages and unhealthy or unsafe working conditions to the greed of individual bosses. But it’s the laws of capitalist development that undermine the worth and dignity of working people. Companies that maximize profits can expand their operations and gain more access to capital from banks. As a result, they capture market share from less profitable companies, which eventually get taken over or run out of business.
Justice, equity and compassion in human relations. In the 17th Century, John Locke claimed that society was the product of a “social contract” among isolated individuals. This incorrect idea is implicit in the UU principles. In fact, human beings evolved through cooperation in production, beginning with hunting and gathering. In today’s capitalist society, every individual is a member of one of two classes: the small group of people who own and control the means of production (factories, mines, oil fields, transport), and the much larger group who creates value through their work. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans worked together to produce food and shelter for all. No one tried to “get ahead.” This was primitive communism. PLP’s goal is to nurture humans’ nature to work collectively and build communism based on a scientific understanding and practice.
For capitalists, “justice” means the right to exploit workers and profit from their labor. It’s the right to benefit from racist and sexist wage differentials. It’s the right to stay in power by dividing workers with racist, sexist, and nationalist ideas — and through religion. Capitalist justice is enforced by the apparatus of the state: armies, cops, courts, laws, and prisons. Government may take the form of electoral democracy (the U.S. or Bangladesh), or monarchy (Saudi Arabia), or rule by a single party (the state capitalist rulers of China). But the content in each case is the dictatorship of the ruling class.
As for “equity,” capitalists believe it is equitable for the richest 1 percent of the world’s population to own 40 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owns 1 percent. They believe it is equitable for hundreds of millions to suffer from unemployment, despite the desperate need for education, health care, home construction, infrastructure repair, and pollution abatement.   
Do capitalists feel “compassion” for workers? Even as they announce layoffs or pay cuts, they are busy importing cheap products from starvation-wage countries and exporting capital to exploit workers in those countries. Their exploitation forces workers to emigrate to the U.S. and Europe, where they are both criminalized and forced to accept substandard pay and working conditions. “Justice, equity and compassion” are under siege by capitalist social relations.
The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. No matter your age, you have not lived one day of your life in a world without war. Since around 1900, the beginning of the era of monopoly capitalism, the imperialist powers have fought endless wars to seize territory, markets, resources and access to labor. At least 160 million people have been killed in these conflicts. (For death tolls, see www.war-memorial.net.) From the 1860s to 1975, peasants and workers in one small country, Vietnam, fought against imperialist occupiers — first France, then the Japanese, then the French again, then the U.S. and its puppet regimes. In the war against U.S. imperialism alone, three million Vietnamese were killed. A recent book about U.S. military policy in Vietnam takes its title from what many soldiers were ordered to do: Kill Anything That Moves.
The murderous tradition of U.S. imperialism is alive and well today. With the U.S. wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan maintaining smaller numbers of troops, the Obama administration is presiding over a “pivot to Asia,” a move to line up allies and prepare for conflict with their main imperialist rival, China. Cyberwarfare between the two rivals is already underway. If an all-out war erupted between the U.S. and China, it would undoubtedly involve nuclear weapons and result in tens of millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — of fatalities.
War is the ultimate expression of capitalist competition. It’s also the ultimate solution to capitalist crises of overproduction, known as depressions. Through war, capitalist governments destroy excess productive capacity — including “excess” workers — and rebuild.
To achieve “world community with peace,” we must fight to end capitalist rule.
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Most UUs try to some extent to “live green.” Meanwhile, the world’s capitalists pour over a million pounds of carbon per second into the atmosphere, mainly through unnecessarily dirty power plants, factories, cement production, and ships. The stated goal of the 2012 UN Climate Change Conference was not to reverse global warming, but merely to slow it down – and it failed to reach agreement even on that. Why? Because the attendees all represented a capitalist class that places profits over the health of the atmosphere, water, or forests — or of people like us. 
We live in a capitalist world. The only cars, bicycles, or walking shoes we can buy are products of capitalism. So are church pews, and the paper in hymnals. Most of us must work for capitalist institutions. We cannot achieve dignity, justice, or peace on UU islands in a sea of capitalism.
But we have an alternative. We must work together to fight for a world based on production for use, not for profit; on equality, not privilege; on cooperation, not “getting ahead.” In other words, we must fight for communism. “What we fight for” on page 2 of CHALLENGE, outlines the goals of the Progressive Labor Party and the need for mass, armed revolution to achieve them. Road to Revolution IV, available at www.plp.org , explains why the working class has to fight directly for communism rather than socialism, which inevitably leads back to capitalism. Join us to turn the aspirations in the UU Principles into reality.

Part One of this response to the letter, “Can Class Struggle Use the Bosses’ Courts?” (CHALLENGE, 4/26/13), discussed the appearance of the courts as a means to seek justice versus the essence of the courts as a tool of the U.S. ruling class in the previous issue (6/19/13). Part Two discusses why we advocate recruiting lawyers and legal workers to the Party and the use of the courts as one avenue of struggle against the bosses.
First, PL’ers work amongst all sectors of the population to organize communist revolution. The current strike in New York City of attorneys and legal workers, members of Legal Services Staff Association UAW Local 2320 (LSSA), is a clear example of this position. The strike involves a staff that serves the needs of the poorest workers (see CHALLENGE, 6/19/13).
Many well-meaning people become lawyers because they believe the illusion that justice can be served through the bosses’ courts. Yet many become disillusioned. These lawyers feel trapped by the constraints of their job — enormous caseloads, insufficient time and resources to prepare cases, and racist courts. Many welcome our Party’s ideas, relieved to find an ideology that makes sense of the nightmare world in which they work. Of course we want such fighters in PLP.
Second, we use all avenues of class struggle, including lawsuits and criminal defense, when our comrades and friends in the working class are under attack. We must, however, approach the legal work from a revolutionary outlook. We seize the opportunity to expose how the institutions of bourgeois democracy, including its laws, serve to maintain the capitalist system of wage slavery. We want to eliminate the deadly illusions in ourselves and our friends that reforms of any kind, legal or otherwise, can ever lead to revolutionary change.
The Scottsboro case, organized by the U.S. Communist Party, is an inspiring example of how a bold legal strategy in the context of a massive, international political campaign can recruit to the Party. The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. At that time, thousands of unemployed workers seeking work — black, white, male and female — rode illegally on the top of train cars.
The Scottsboro incident grew from a fight between black and white homeless workers who rode the trains. The black workers tossed the white workers off the train. The latter raced to the nearest town, Scottsboro, Alabama, and reported to the local sheriff. The train was stopped and all the workers were pulled off. Two were white girls. Terrified that they would be arrested themselves they promptly claimed they were raped. A random group of nine black teens were arrested and charged with rape.
Communist Party (CP) members happened to be in the area organizing farmworkers when the news broke. They immediately contacted Party headquarters in New York and a campaign was launched. The first defendant was convicted in a day and a half and sentenced to death. The remaining eight were all convicted the following day.
At that point, the CP found a lawyer in New York willing to take on the appeal. The case was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court three times while a mass campaign began involving protests, fund-raising and publicity in all areas where the Party existed. It organized a speaking tour for several mothers of the defendants who spoke across the U.S., and in London, Paris and Moscow. One of the two female accusers even joined the Party and testified at the second trial, admitting that she had lied. It developed into an international movement that put U.S. racism on trial. The struggle lasted throughout the 1930s.
Eventually all nine were released from jail although some spent many years in prison before the state of Alabama finally decided to give up on the case. Out of that and other political/legal battles of the 1930s and 1940s came the enormous experience in the class struggle from which PLP draws many lessons. It is significant that the best book on the philosophy of dialectics, Dialectical Materialism, was written by a communist lawyer active in the fight against the anti-communist attacks of the U.S. government in the 1950s and inspired by the Scottsboro case.
“Standing on the shoulders of giants,”  PLP continues to develop campaigns in many cases where comrades and friends who fought racist and fascist forces have been arrested and prosecuted in the bosses’ courts. PLP has learned from these struggles that a strategy of developing a team of legal fighters who act boldly in the courtroom, combined with political organizing to go on the offensive outside the court; mass actions on the courtroom steps; packing the courtroom with supporters; mass fund-raising for the legal defense, and especially raising the issue in other struggles we are waging; can bring workers and youth closer and into the PLP while fighting attacks by the bosses.
We hope this article stimulates further discussion amongst members and friends that helps to advance our ideological clarity about when and how to fight in the courts.

Chicago, May 23 — Thousands of Chicago teachers, parents, and students petitioned, spoke out, rallied, sat in, marched and disrupted meetings to stop school closings, turnarounds, and consolidations that will attack over 40,000 students at 120 schools. Nevertheless, on May 22, the Chicago Board of Education voted to close 50 schools, turnaround five, and co-locate 11 with charter schools. “Transformation” of schools means a combination of shutdowns, overcrowding multiple schools in one building, firing teachers and redecorating schools based on the racist performance standards of federal and/or private grants.
Students from closing schools will be sent to 54 other schools that will cause overcrowding. The Board made this ruling in the face of clear and well-known evidence of racism — 88 percent of affected students are black, more than twice the percentage of black students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS.) Yet they could not defend their lies that schools needed to close to save money or that students would get a better education in the “welcoming” schools. Their hand-picked “hearing officers” had even recommended taking 13 schools off the list (at the last minute, four closings were removed.)
The move to shut down schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other cities, mostly in black neighborhoods, is part of the racist attack on the living conditions of the working class. The ruling-class-led Broad Foundation is guiding this attack. Its plan is to close schools and divide up school districts in urban areas. This will further advance educational inequities and redistribute more education dollars to the wealthy. Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, with the help of the black CPS CEO, Barbara Byrd Bennett, is implementing the Broad plan despite opposition. Even Chicago’s ruling-class press called for fewer school closings. It’s not that they oppose attacks on working-class education, but that they disagree on how fast or how obvious these attacks should be.
The answer to this is not, as the Chicago Teachers Union promotes, a massive voter registration drive resulting in the election of a new mayor. Under capitalism, the needs of the capitalists dictate the parameters of reform wins. For example, when Richard Nixon was president, he enacted social programs that Barack Obama is now helping to destroy. It has nothing to do with the politicians as individuals or whether they are Democrats or Republicans. It has everything to do with the times.
Nixon was president when U.S. capitalism was dominant in the world — they could afford the social programs that a mass movement was fighting for. Now, in spite of all the billionaires and the growing disparities between rich and poor, U.S. capitalism faces serious competition from China, Europe, India, and other capitalists in the world. Its status as “Number One” is fading fast and it will need to depress working-class wages and conditions and go to war as it attempts to regain its standing. Electing a new mayor will not change that.
What will? The building of a revolutionary communist movement. When PLP was involved in the meetings, marches, and rallies, members pointed out the racism and the anti-student nature of the ruling-class system every day. School closings are an intensification of those attacks, but we also need to fight the daily capitalist status quo of neglect, lies, overcrowding, and under-resourcing schools.
To that end, we have plans to set up a “Freedom School” this summer to implement aspects of communist education on a small level. As our influence and experience grow, more will join PLP in the fight to end capitalism and its self-serving education system once and for all. Under communism, the need to move humanity forward will guarantee that everyone is educated to our fullest potential!

Imperialist rivalry, not religion, lies at the heart of the war in Syria. At stake are the vast energy resources of the Middle East. To maintain control of the region’s oil and gas, the U.S. capitalist ruling class is pointing toward a “decisive” Syria intervention. With the Russian bosses arming in opposition, U.S. rulers need to win U.S. youth to support a new military draft.  They also need the broader working class to support fascist war powers for widening regional conflicts. To date, however, their efforts toward these goals have faltered.
On the ramifications of the Syrian conflict, the New York Times (6/2/13), the top mouthpiece for U.S. capitalism, says:
The Syrian war fuels, and is fueled by, broader antagonisms that are primarily rooted not in sect but in clashing geopolitical and strategic interests: the regional power struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran; Iran’s confrontation with the West over its nuclear program; and the alliance between Hezbollah and the secular Syrian government of Mr. Assad against American-backed Israel.
Why Syria Matters
But that is only part of the truth. Regional bosses aren’t the only ones responsible for the blood of 80,000 Syrians. The Times fails to mention the greater clash between U.S., Russian and Chinese rulers that underlies — and will likely intensify — the slaughter in Syria. Syria stands at the doorstep of the competing imperialists’ geostrategic grand prize, Middle Eastern oil and gas resources. That’s why U.S. planners are seriously pondering the risks of an all-out invasion and occupation of Syria that would kill tens of thousands more workers.
On May 28, the Times published a more candid op-ed piece, headlined: “In Syria, Go Big or Stay Home.” In it, Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the finance capital-dominated Council on Foreign Relations think tank, and who previously served as Barack Obama’s chief advisor on Iran, called for “full-scale, decisive American intervention” in Syria. Takeyh suggests that such an onslaught would set the stage for a U.S. conquest of energy-rich Iran.  By contrast, a limited U.S. campaign — along the lines of the brutal but failed U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — would only embolden Teheran’s pro-Russian and pro-Chinese ayatollahs.
As Takeyh wrote, “Rather than intimidating Iran, a less-than-decisive American intervention in Syria would do the opposite. It would convince Iran’s leaders that America doesn’t have an appetite for fighting a major war in the region.”
Russian bosses, allied to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, are taking lethal steps to counter any U.S. offensive. Moscow is stationing more warships, including an aircraft carrier, at its naval base in Tartus, Syria. It has begun delivery of sophisticated, game-changing S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Damascus, to be followed by MiG-29 fighter jets. Russian ruler Vladimir Putin has defended this escalation as a response to the U.S. threat: “Russia… [is] only providing Assad with weapons intended to protect Syria from a foreign invasion” (Associated Press, 5/31/13).
Enter China
By 2035, China’s vast oil needs from the Middle East will double to seven million barrels per day (Oil Magazine, Dec. 2013). For the moment, China’s capitalist rulers are not equipped to project military power into the region. They are acting diplomatically, using the United Nations to oppose U.S. aid to anti-Assad forces.  But China’s push for a blue-water navy, to forcibly challenge U.S. supremacy in the Persian Gulf, is well under way. And China has already outfoxed the U.S. in Iraq, reaping the oil rewards of the Bush invasion as the U.S.-China rivalry escalates (see box).
Wider wars, like a possible near-term U.S.-Syria-Russia-Iran conflict, loom large for U.S. bosses. They’re also planning for an inevitable World War III with their imperialist rivals. Fresh from their misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, which slaughtered more than a million workers but failed to consolidate U.S. control, they are well aware of their military shortcomings. They know they need more troops and broader support for war — both within the working class and among U.S. capitalists themselves — than George W. Bush or Obama could muster.
True to form, the rulers’ loyal New York Times printed yet another militaristic op-ed piece (5/27/13) to demand restoration of the draft and a new way for Congress to declare war. Written by two Stanford University cheerleaders for the U.S. empire, retired General Karl Eikenberry (formerly Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan) and Professor David Kennedy, the column proposed: “Let’s start with a draft lottery.... [that] could be activated when volunteer recruitments fell short, and weighted to select the best-educated and most highly skilled Americans providing an incentive for the most privileged among us to pay greater heed to military matters.”
The bosses’ idea is to rebuild their depleted officer corps by making top colleges once again a recruiting ground for the U.S. military. The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps is regaining lost ground on the campuses, returning to New York’s City College after a 40-year absence. The rulers’ broader goal is to build patriotism among young people. If they succeed in implementing a new, all-inclusive draft, no one will be able to escape military service — not middle-class students seeking college deferments, not working-class immigrant youth seeking citizenship via Obama’s Dream Act.
The Bosses’ Problems
In an attempt to unite the diverse array of capitalists represented by U.S. politicians, Eikenberry and Kennedy assert, “Congress must also take on a larger role in war-making. Its last formal declarations of war were during World War II. It’s high time to revisit the recommendation, made in 2008 by the bipartisan National War Powers Commission, to replace the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires notification of Congress after the president orders military action, with a mandate that the president consult with Congress before resorting to force.”  
For now, however, involving Congress more directly in U.S. militarization appears to be a pipedream. A significant Congressional contingent fronts for domestically oriented capitalists like the Koch brothers, who have little to gain from oil-driven military action overseas. And divisions will persist between states that profit from weapons contracts and those that need to protect profits with reinvestment in domestic infrastructure.
Meanwhile, a gut opposition to a universal draft has persisted since the Vietnam era among students and workers. Much of it stems from the militant anti-imperialist actions led by the Progressive Labor Party, which made “U.S. Imperialism, Get Out of Vietnam!” into a mass slogan supported by millions.
As U.S. rulers mount an international drive to war, communists in PLP and our allies must intensify our attacks on the ruling class in the score of countries where our Party is growing. We need to link the issue of imperialist war to every class struggle. The capitalists’ murderous drive for maximum profits must be fought in our battles against wage and social service cuts, against hospital cutbacks and strike-busting. It must be tied to our fights against racist, killer cops and against the mass deportations of immigrant workers. Most of all, it must infuse our organizing of rank-and-file soldiers to win them to fight the military brass, not their class brothers and sisters under attack by U.S. imperialism.
Building the Party while immersed in these struggles will ultimately lead to communism, the only system that will end exploitation, racism, sexism, mass unemployment and imperialist war. Workers of the world, unite!  Join PLP!