COLOMBIA, September 16 — For the past two weeks, thousands of farmers, truckers, miners and students have been on strike to protest sharp drops in their living conditions due to the “free trade” agreement between the U.S. and Colombia. The agreement, an extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was signed a year ago. It forces small farmers in Colombia to compete with huge U.S. agro-conglomerates.
The government is trying to end the strike, which has blocked 30 roads around the country, by promising negotiations and millions in investments — promises they have repeatedly broken in the past. No one should be surprised by the crisis the trade agreement has caused. For years, both farmers and social organizations predicted the effects it would have on the impoverished rural majority in Colombia. Farm family incomes, already the lowest in the country, are down 70 percent. That amounts to a death penalty for peasants.
When the agreement was signed, former Vice President Francisco Santos acknowledged there would be “losers,” but that didn’t concern him. With visible excitement, he stated there would also be “winners.” He must have been referring to the big agribusiness companies and the local capitalists who work with them! One year later, they have increased subsidized rice imports to Colombia by an astronomical 2,000 percent. The small local farmers cannot compete with the artificially low price of imported rice.
It was no exaggeration when the archbishop of Tunja, Luis Augusto Castro, called the trade agreement a “betrayal.” As Karl Marx said, the state is the office from which the capitalist class runs its business. In Colombia, the state is a transnational office run by people who despise Colombian workers and are closer to New York than to Ciudad Bolivar.
In reaction to workers’ anger, the bosses have committed huge violations of human rights. They have used the Safety Act to criminalize social protest and the military to repress “the internal enemy” — protesting workers and farmers. These arrogant bosses want passive workers who will just vote and support the rulers’ parties.
Arbitrary arrests have led to the imprisonment of more than 300 leaders on charges of “rebellion.” They have also exposed the vaunted Colombian democracy as a class dictatorship, which we in Progressive Labor Party know we must destroy.
Militant friends and readers of CHALLENGE have been at these demonstrations with our literature and slogans. They bring our message of internationalist struggle against nationalism.  While participating in immediate reform struggles, they also make it clear that only communist revolution can fundamentally change the system we live under. Only communism can end imperialism, nationalism, racism, sexism and the lethal profit system.

ROME, September 3 — As the war in Syria spreads, those who have the financial means to leave are escaping. Many have fled to Turkey, while others risk their lives and many die — just as do migrants from Latin America to the U.S. — boarding small boats heading to Italy. Almost 3,000 have drowned or died of dehydration since 2011. On August 31, more than 300 migrants, including many from Syria, landed in three different places in Italy. The Italian government reports that 24,277 migrants have landed in the last twelve months, 8,932 of whom arrived from July 1 to August 10 of this year.
In June, 95 people were rescued, but seven drowned, while clinging to the floats of a tuna net. Their deaths prompted a politician of the racist Northern League to comment that it would have been “better to save the tuna than the foreigners” and “here is one more reason not to eat tuna.”
Not all Italians agree. On August 16, the President of Italy tried to sound noble by praising those in Sicily who swam out to sea to help Syrian refugees reach Sicily safely. “The television broadcasts of dozens of swimmers generously assisting refugees coming from Syria, many of whom were children, to reach the shore and safety, make Italy proud,” adding that, “humanity is stronger than prejudice.”
What the proud President failed to mention, however, is that Italy’s rulers made aiding and abetting undocumented immigrants “illegal,” ever since Italy criminalized undocumented migrants in 2002. He also neglected to mention that the Italian Coast Guard escorted all of these migrants to the detention centers that undercover reporters have denounced as concentration camps staffed by fascist police. Hundreds of migrant men and women from a center in Sardinia, for example, blocked traffic with a sit-down strike in the street in September to protest their conditions. The President’s “humanitarian” language hides the ugly political and economic reality.
 The Pope of the Catholic Church plans to visit a refugee center in Rome. This follows his earlier publicity stunt of visiting a detention center for migrants on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, where he celebrated mass and prayed for the migrants who cross the Mediterranean from North Africa each year. He threw a wreath into the sea for the thousands who have died during those voyages. Such public performances of humanitarian sorrow hide imperialist geopolitical strategies behind prayers and handwringing.
The Catholic Church’s NGOs actively recruit immigrants to fill low-paying jobs in wealthier countries. Monsignor Giancarlo Peregeo, the director of the Church’s Migrants Foundation, has recently called for the creation of “humanitarian channels for those fleeing the situations in North Africa and the Middle East,” but he noted “patrols are needed to help these migrants reach their destination.” What this means is armies and charitable organizations will help to swell the ranks of the reserve army of the unemployed, needed by capitalism to keep wages low and profits high.
This is not new. The Catholic Church has worshiped at the shrine of capitalism since 1891 when Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum (“The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”) condemning Socialism, which continues to be the Catholic Church’s fundamental social doctrine.  Pope Pius XII later reinforced this teaching by excommunicating anyone who so much as read a communist newspaper at the end of the Second World War.
U.S. imperialist war, proclaimed as “humanitarian intervention,” is anything but that. Obama’s hypocritical words about bombing Syrians to save them from poison gas is more imperialist violence to control resources and to guarantee the subservience of North Africa and the Middle East. The “War on Terror” is a war on workers everywhere in the world. Join PLP and fight for communist revolution to free all workers.

The document below is the flyer that members of the Progressive Labor Party distributed at the striking teachers’ encampment in Mexico City and during the protest against energy reform. In total, we distributed 3,000 flyers. Most teachers welcomed them. Many are already familiar with CHALLENGE and some asked for the paper. There was a huge national teachers’ rally to demand the repeal of the approved reforms, including clashes with the police and arrests. A group of comrades once again distributed our literature. There will be more protests in coming weeks, and we will be there to show our support — and, more important, to advance our revolutionary communist perspective.

Global capitalism is in crisis and inter-imperialist rivalry is sharpening, particularly between the U.S. and China. Eventually the bosses’ economic competition will lead to armed confrontation and push the world toward a broader war. The center of this fight is over the control of oil and gas, the raw materials essential to the capitalists’ militaries and industries.
The struggle over energy reform reflects the inter-imperialist rivalry within Mexico. The accord forged by President Enrique Peña Nieto — along with other politicians in the PRI, PAN and PRD parties — is mainly an attempt to benefit the biggest oil companies in the U.S. and Britain: Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron.
Over the last three decades, U.S. Imperialists have massacred millions of workers in the Middle East in the name of oil profits.  In spite of their ruthless brutality, their control of the region grows weaker by the day. As inter-imperialist war looms closer, the U.S. will need more secure and accessible sources of energy. Mexico’s energy resources are a big part of the U.S. bosses’ plan.  They have already placed their reliable servants in key positions. For example, Emilio Lozoya Austin, the CEO of PEMEX (Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company), is closely tied to Condoleezza Rice, former Chevron director and former U.S. Secretary of State.      
The Mexican Secretary of the Treasury, Luis Videgaray Caso, is allied with Pedro Aspe, his predecessor under former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Aspe is now co-chairman of Evercore Partners, a leading U.S. investment bank. Through his ties to Alberto Bailleres, Mexico’s third richest man, he also is connected to the largest bank in the world, JP Morgan Chase. In turn, JP Morgan Chase is closely linked to ExxonMobil and Chevron (Bajo la Lupa, July & August 2013). As inter-imperialist rivalries sharpen, these relationships are critical. Some day the U.S. may be in a position to militarily occupy Mexico’s oil reserves.
Nationalism: A False Option
Energy reform will wreak havoc with the lives of workers, perhaps even more so than labor or educational reform. PEMEX currently contributes 40 percent of the federal budget. If the company is privatized, that number would drop sharply and lead to budget cuts to health, education, and social development.
The bosses are using tax hikes to try to compensate for their falling rate of profits. This affects all workers, but particularly public-sector employees working at the mercy of the Secretary of the Treasury.  Both the budget cuts and tax increases will deepen misery and inequality. Meanwhile, the super-rich keep getting tax breaks that amounted to 132 million pesos in 2008 alone. This year the Treasury forgave millions of pesos owed by Televisa.
Andres Manuel López Obrador and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas have called on workers to oppose oil privatization with the argument that natural resources “belong” to the nation. In reality, they are defending the interests of a competing group of capitalists. Their struggle revolves around the question of which set of bosses should own the oil. Even when oil is state property, it is never used to meet workers’ needs.    
Bosses like Carlos Slim (Carso Group), the Garza Sada family from Monterrey ( the ALFA conglomerate), the Del Valle brothers (Latina Drills and Mexichem), and Carlos Ruíz Sacristán (IEnova), among others, have business deals with PEMEX of about $3 million USD (El Financiero, August 2013). A similar amount will be required to build the gas pipeline Los Ramones, which is licensed to the Spanish company OHL (in alliance with British capital), IEnova. and the financial division of Protego de Aspe (Reporte Indigo, August 2013)
During the last five years, PEMEX had earnings of $550 million USD (Bajo la Lupa, August 2013). In the same period, the number of poor people in Mexico increased by 4.5 million (El Economista, July, 2013). Whether they nationalize or privatize, the bosses prosper as workers get poorer. Nationalism is a false option.
We Need Communism
As long as the capitalist system is in place, it doesn’t matter which group of millionaires controls the oil wealth. Under capitalism workers get only crumbs. Assets are concentrated in the hands of the greedy, predatory minority that holds political and economic power.
Only a communist society can be organized for the benefit of the working class. Only under communism can we use oil wealth to meet the needs of the population.
The struggle for a communist society must be led by the workers themselves, united and organized by the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party. We fight to overthrow the dictatorship of the bosses and establish the dictatorship of the working class. Join us!

Nine members and close friends of PLP participated in the week-long annual summer institute of the Marxist Literary Group/Institute on Culture and Society (MLG-ICS) at Ohio State University. Over many years, a number of us have attended this gathering — which draws together faculty, graduate students and artists in the humanities.  This year’s experience was the best ever.
The worldwide economic crisis has generated profound skepticism about the ability of capitalism to meet the needs of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the planet.  While a decade ago it was difficult to utter the word “communism”— even among self-described Marxists! — the word is now on the lips of many.  Although the “New Communist Philosophers” — most notably Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jodi Dean, and Bruno Bosteels — hardly envision the same path to communism as PLP, the fact that leftist academics are vigorously discussing how to get past capitalism opens up significant possibilities for deeper political work.
Our presentations ranged over a wide array of topics.  We offered critical commentaries on the representations of race, class, gender and nation in popular movies and TV shows.
We argued that widely accepted anticommunist versions of Soviet history are false. We examined the financially-saturated language in which sexual and romantic relations are formulated in the mass media.  We urged a critical reexamination of the unscientific terms in which the connections between capitalism and nuclear power are widely construed.  We proposed friendly but sharp critiques of the shortcomings of various New Communist Philosophers, particularly in connection with the need for antiracism and internationalism.  No one could fault PL members for being focused on a narrow agenda!
In the sessions where papers were given, we engaged in sharp but friendly commentary and critique of the ways in which Marxist theory was being applied to literature, philosophy and history. In conversations with fellow graduate students and faculty members, we discussed matters of common concern, such as turning academic labor into more contingent, temporary, unstable jobs without benefits. We discussed the dismal job market, as well as the need for a mass communist movement in which the fight against racism plays a central role.  Although we could have done a better job of distributing Challenge, we had better discussions this year than in the past about the role that PL is currently playing in the building of that mass communist movement.
The barriers to political work in this group remain formidable. Neo-Marxism and post-Marxism, while less fashionable than they were a decade ago, continue to divert potential radicals into hyper-theoretical discussions having little to do with revolutionary practice.  Anticommunism, while more on the defensive, continues to guide many assumptions about politics and history.
Too many presumably leftist academics remain unbothered by the nearly all-white participation in gatherings like the Summer Institute. We need to wage a continuing struggle for a more objective and dialectical understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the past century’s attempts to move past capitalism and build egalitarian societies.
Most of the PL members and friends who took part in this summer’s MLG-ICS meeting built new friendships, consolidated old ones, and deepened our ties with a number of academics who take seriously the need for communism.  We were also energized to enter the fall semester with a renewed commitment to campus organizing.