With the rupture among rebels against President Bashar Assad, Syria is now engulfed in a three-way civil war. All three forces represent different imperialist camps. All three offer workers nothing but capitalist terror.
Mass butcher Bashar Assad and his Syrian Army are fronting for Russian and Chinese imperialism, along with Iran’s pursuit of regional dominance. The opposition, meanwhile, is a dysfunctional umbrella group of mostly secular nationalists and Islamists. Neither faction has the interests of Syria’s working class at heart. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) stands for the interests of U.S. imperialism, while the Islamists represent regional capitalists and transnational jihadists, who in turn are funded by rival, non-royal segments of the Saudi ruling class. After a jihadist recently killed an FSA commander, the two camps fell out. In cities like Aleppo, Assad’s military is shooting at the FSA while they are shooting at the Islamists.
These sharpening contradictions could help the U.S. ruling class inject itself more directly into the conflict. With the FSA essentially declaring war on the Islamists, Barack Obama can argue that advanced weapons from the U.S. won’t fall into the hands of jihadist terrorists. (The reality on the ground, however, is that rebel brigades swap and sell weapons among themselves, regardless of ideological affinity.) Assad, meanwhile, is seizing the opportunity to reclaim as much territory as possible from the FSA. He is struggling to reclaim the urban production centers while mostly abandoning the undeveloped countryside to the rebels.
Whoever wins will institute fascism of one stripe or another. Assad will butcher the working class in the interests of his imperialist patrons. The FSA will most likely follow the U.S.-led destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan as a blueprint for slaughtering the working class. The transnational jihadists from Pakistan and other countries will keep fighting whatever ruling class gains state power while murdering workers in line with their religious fanaticism.
As the civil war intensifies in Syria, we must keep in mind that there is no possible victory for the working class under any capitalist-backed forces now fighting for state power. Only a communist revolution led by the Progressive Labor Party can win for the working class, in Syria and throughout the world.

A fearless multitude swarms through the streets of New York City. In Washington, they storm the nation’s capital. In Israel, they scale the apartheid walls. This global, multiracial mass of millions grows in strength and number until it confronts the militaries of the world’s imperialist powers.
But this is no revolution — it’s World War Z’s zombie apocalypse.
In other recent apocalyptic films, like “2012” or television’s “Doomsday Prophecy,” the threat to the capitalist order comes from nature. But in World War Z (adapted from the book by Max Brooks), the destruction stems from a nightmare version of the ultimate threat to the bosses: the international working class.
In the opening scene of World War Z, a normal day is turned upside down as Philadelphia is overrun by zombies. Within hours, society has been reduced to a libertarian’s vision of the future: the armed survivalist few gunning down the masses to protect family and private property.
As the film unfolds, Gerry Lane, a United Nations investigator played by Brad Pitt, globetrots in search of a cure to the zombie infection. His family is given safe haven aboard a U.S. Navy vessel in exchange for his service — a recurring theme in what amounts to a two-hour military recruitment ad. As Gerry gears up for a mission to South Korea, he joins a team of Navy Seals for a nighttime attack that recalls Barack Obama’s raid to kill Osama bin Laden. The film’s PG-13 rating will help expose countless youth to this pro-Navy advertising and try to prime them to sacrifice for the next wave of imperialist wars.  
Barely escaping zombification in Korea, Gerry makes his way to Israel. As he travels with an Israeli official, the official gives a stock Zionist account of the Holocaust and Israeli history that justifies Israel’s fascist police state and the 30-foot wall that enforces the segregation of humans and zombies. The film’s message is clear — in times of crisis, fascism is necessary.
Moments later, a faceless horde scales the wall. The scene evokes images of a Palestinian “invasion” into Israel and of the recent Arab Spring revolts. The Israeli military then unleashes devastating firepower upon the multitude. This slaughter is made palatable to the audience because the millions are presented as dehumanized zombies. But the imagery also romanticizes Israel’s real-life apartheid, the legalized system of racist segregation and occupation that separates Palestinians from their land (with real walls) and justifies the ongoing slaughter of Arabs throughout the Middle East by U.S. and Israeli imperialists.
Symbolic of the strong imperialist ties between the U.S. and Israel, an Israeli soldier helps Gerry make his way to a lab and discover a cure. To ward off the zombies and test a potential vaccine, he self-sacrificially injects himself with a deadly virus. Barely alive, he makes his way back to his family. In the final scene, Gerry declares that the war has only just begun.
World War Z is not fundamentally a film about zombies. As author Max Brooks argues, the zombies represent various recent crises — the failed war in Iraq, the 2008 economic collapse, the rise of China — that threaten to paralyze the U.S. capitalist system. The film’s actual message? The U.S. is a power in decline, and workers must sacrifice as the bosses struggle to stay atop the imperialist food chain. Workers must give back wages and benefits for the rulers’ profits and sacrifice their lives in inter-imperialist wars. As billions of people in WWZ perish in military assaults, the film acclimates the audience to the idea that World War III could some day be a reality. It would have us accept that billions will die in the bosses’ ruthless quest for profits.
WWZ’s promotional poster depicts a mass of human silhouettes piling toward a helicopter, much like a famous 1975 photo illustrating the “fall” of Saigon. Just as the image of U.S. personnel fleeing Vietnam marked a crisis for U.S. imperialism, the image of zombies overtaking a helicopter in WWZ symbolizes the growing weakness of the U.S. relative to its imperialist rivals.
It’s no accident Brad Pitt both starred in and produced this film. Pitt and his actress wife, Angelina Jolie, have for years served as a “humanitarian” face for U.S. imperialism’s mass murders around the world. In his role as spokesperson for the Not on Our Watch campaign, Pitt has helped give cover for the U.S. dogfight with China over Sudanese oil. This inter-imperialist conflict is the real crisis behind the scenes of mass slaughter in WWZ.
As a UN special envoy, Jolie has played a major role in promoting “humanitarian” war over pipelines in the Balkans and around the world. In 2007, she became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. imperialism’s premier think tank. Her fortune funds special CFR reports, blueprints for future imperialist interventions.
World War Z reflects a disagreement among key members of the U.S. ruling class over how to deal with the crisis within their empire and the rise of China.  Calling for the “restoration” of U.S. imperialism, CFR President Richard Haass argues for the U.S. to rebuild at home and limit “wars of choice” (Iraq, Syria) to prepare for future wars with rivals. But others in the CFR favor different tactics, including U.S. expansion into Syria.
WWZ author Max Brooks has weighed into this debate with frequent lectures, including one to the U.S. Naval War College. Like Haass, he calls for a smarter form of U.S. imperialism. For Brooks, the zombies’ power reflects internal weaknesses in U.S. capitalism. He leads his audience to see education and healthcare as national security issues.
Far more than a mere horror movie, WWZ is a major work of U.S. imperialist propaganda. The working class must defy these dehumanizing images of itself by joining the Progressive Labor Party and building a communist class-consciousness. One day millions will storm Wall Street and Washington and topple the apartheid walls in Israel. But it won’t be a zombie apocalypse — it will be a communist revolution!

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U.S. racism led to the murder of 17 year old Trayvon Martin; from the police to the courts, the capitalist system continues to protect racist murders. 

In 2012 George Zimmerman gunned down Trayvon Martin because he was a Black youth in Amerikkka.  The capitalist system has protected Zimmerman ever since.  Masses of workers wanting “justice” protested to have Zimmerman tried for the racist murder of Trayvon Martin. 

Neither Trayvon nor any worker will ever get justice through the bosses court system.  Since the beginning of the trial the bosses have made it impossible to talk about the very essence of the case, racism.  At the very beginning the judge ruled that the topic of race would be “severely limited” and discussion of “racial profiling” would not be allowed.  Capitalism can never address the issue of racism.  Racism was created by the capitalist class and is the glue that holds their system together.

Bosses profit from Racism

Since Obama was elected in 2008 he has tried to convince us that Amerikkka has entered a “post racial” society.  The truth is that through Obama’s leadership, the most vicious racist attacks have occurred.  Obama has:

The only solution is Communist Revolution!!!

The working class must take the streets! We cannot allow the murder of another young Black man to go down in silence.  We must fight back against racism and the capitalist system that depends on it.  But “justice” for Trayvon and all the other victims of capitalism will only come with the overthrow of the system that creates these conditions.  Once the bosses’ system is smashed, the need to divide the workings class and super exploit some will no longer exist.  Only then will we be able to smash racism, sexism and all other anti-working class ideas.  This is the fight of the Progressive Labor Party.  Join us!  

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Barack Obama’s visit to South Africa was a fitting tribute by the top figurehead of U.S. capitalism to the man who helped to end apartheid and create a new “rainbow” alliance of brutal, racist capitalist bosses: Nelson Mandela.
Apartheid was the brutal and legalized segregation enforced by South Africa’s white Afrikaner rulers from 1948 to 1994. The system enabled U.S. corporations like General Motors to pay black workers 56 cents an hour to slave away in its auto factories. It netted British and U.S. mining interests billions in profits. It penned workers and their families into townships that were virtual concentration camps.
Apartheid also sparked a mass, militant, worldwide anti-racist movement. In South Africa, workers and students staged massive, often violent protests against the vicious Afrikaner regime. In 1976, in Soweto, tens of thousands of black high school students fought racist cops. Up to 700 of the young protesters were killed.
From Rebellion to Black Bosses
After Mandela became the country’s president, the anti-apartheid movement was ultimately co-opted by U.S.-British imperialism with the active collaboration of Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) party, the new local capitalist rulers. Hundreds of millions of workers, in South Africa and across the globe, were steered away from revolution and down the dead-end path of nationalism and electoral politics. One of Mandela’s first presidential acts was to attempt to break workers’ strikes for higher wages. His argument: the workers’ struggle would “discourage foreign investment.” By misleading the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, Mandela aided U.S.-led imperialism and sustained the racist
super-exploitation of South Africa’s working class. The only real difference was that the local bosses were now black as well as white.
As Barack Obama recently celebrated the ailing Mandela in Johannesburg, workers and students engaged in mass protests against the U.S. president’s visit and his murderous drone bombings. They hoisted signs comparing Obama to Hitler. As one worker said, “Whether Mandela lives or dies, South Africa is worse now than under apartheid.”
Shooting Workers in the Back
Mandela’s ANC successors, including current president Jacob Zuma (who’s been linked to massive corruption and fraud), are responsible for last August’s Marikana Massacre. When platinum workers staged a wildcat strike over low pay at the Marikana mine, owned by London-based Lonmin, the ANC sent in cops, both black and white, and killed 36 miners. Most were shot in the back. Subsequent walkouts of tens of thousands of heroic workers virtually shut down the country’s lucrative mining industry.
Mandela’s billionaire booster, Patrice Motsepe, is a poster child for nationalism and what it means for our class. Shortly after Mandela’s rise to power, billionaire Harry Oppenheimer and his Anglo American mining company began selling mines to black businessmen via favorable loans. Bobby Godsell, chief executive of Anglo’s gold and uranium division, said, “I was seeking to create capitalists out of people who had no capital” (Forbes, 3/6/2008). After buying Anglo’s Orkney gold mine, Motsepe promptly cut wages by 25 percent and instituted “profit-sharing,” which amounts to a pay cut with speed-up.
As Motsepe has prospered to become the fourth-richest man in South Africa, with a net worth of $2.9 billion (Forbes), national unemployment is now estimated at 40 percent, higher than before the ANC took power in 1994. According to the United Nations, one of four South Africans lives on less than $1.25 (U.S.) per day.
That is the real Mandela legacy.
Imperialists Pull Strings, ANC Dances
Obama’s visit to Africa reflects a U.S. attempt to counter growing influence by archrival China throughout the continent. The president is seeking deals with Africa’s local bosses to expand profits for U.S. investors. Obama’s agenda was made plain when he chose to meet Mandela’s family at a shrine built by U.S. imperialists and the local rich to promote their capitalist ideology. According to the New York Times (6/30/13), the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory serves as “ground zero in the effort to maintain and shape the legacy of Nelson Mandela...and to make sure that the narrative of the struggle does not deviate too much from what Mr. Mandela wanted it to be.”
On its website, the Centre boasts former U.S. President Bill Clinton, David Rockefeller (longtime chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, now JP Morgan Chase), and Patrice Motsepe as “Founding Nelson Mandela Legacy Champions.” A place devoted to remembering conveniently forgets Rockefeller’s steadfast lending to the fascist apartheid regime throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. Nor does it recall that benefactor Motsepe and honoree Mandela both owe their success to South Africa’s fabulously wealthy Oppenheimer family, the same clan that has maimed and murdered countless starvation-wage miners.
For more than a century, imperialist rivalry amid class struggle has driven world history. It explains Mandela’s checkered journey from lawyer to prisoner to president to saint. Britain’s empire shrank after World War II, especially in Africa. In 1948, South Africa’s white, openly racist Afrikaans-speaking plantation owners seized control from weakened London-backed rulers and imposed apartheid to control the black working class. Mandela was by then an attorney in the ANC, which was allied with the pro-Soviet South African Communist Party. He pushed the group in a nationalist, capitalist direction rather than toward multiracial, working-class unity. In 1964, Mandela’s anti-government activism landed him in the prison on Robben Island. He spent the next 26 years behind bars.
At the height of the Cold War, when the main imperialist rivalry pit the United States and its NATO allies against the Soviet Union, the U.S. and junior partner Britain tolerated South Africa’s rabidly anti-Soviet Afrikaners. Washington and London accepted the regime’s embarrassing human rights abuses as long as it suppressed pro-Soviet political movements in the region and guarded the crucial shipping route to the Cape of Good Hope. As a result, Mandela and many political prisoners like him rotted in jail.
Black Empowerment Smokescreen
In the 1980s, however, Mandela took on new importance for the U.S. and U.K.  The Soviet imperialists’ fiasco in Afghanistan signaled the U.S.S.R.’s coming eclipse as a first-tier power. Though Mandela and the South African Communist Party still had mass influence within the ANC, their pro-Soviet stance no longer posed a threat to U.S. imperialist interests. With Moscow in retreat and in reaction to a worldwide resistance movement, liberal capitalists proceeded to pacify the working class’s fight against apartheid and racist exploitation. U.S. and British rulers began to exploit the Mandela brand to win back influence in Africa under the smokescreen of black empowerment.
In turn, Mandela and other ANC leaders sold out the heroic struggle of millions of workers. In the 1980s, Helen Suzman, the Oppenheimers’ liberal bought-and-paid-for member of South Africa’s parliament, began visiting Mandela at the Robben prison. Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger, the Rockefeller lieutenant and former Nixon Secretary of State, arranged meetings between patriarch Harry Oppenheimer and embattled Afrikaner rulers. After being promised a cushy post-apartheid existence, the Afrikaners grudgingly agreed to free Mandela. (The imperialist representatives were true to their word. F. W. de Klerk, Mandela’s presidential predecessor, today lives in an all-white neighborhood with five black servants.)
In 1985, acting to impose a deal on the crumbling apartheid regime, the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Bank stopped lending to the South African government. Mandela was released from prison in 1990. Four years later he became South Africa’s first black president.
Roger Phillimore, Harry Oppenheimer’s godson and chairman of the bloodstained Lonmin platinum company, has followed Mandela’s liberal lead. He recently replaced his white CEO with a black one. 
Learning from South Africa
Despite its setbacks, the history of working-class fightback in South Africa — against both the apartheid regime and its ANC successors — has much to teach workers worldwide. Mass anti-racist struggle, whether in South Africa or elsewhere in the world, can squeeze the capitalist ruling class and disrupt its moneymaking machine. But the international working class must not be fooled into thinking it can be freed while capitalism continues to flourish. We cannot follow the Mandela path to exchange one group of exploiters for another. Only through communist revolution, led by the Progressive Labor Party, can workers liberate themselvess and crush the savage profit system for good.
As Mandela nears death and celebrations of his capitalist legacy engulf the world, we must bring our communist message to the workers of the world. The real lesson of the fight against apartheid is: Join and build the PLP!