EL SALVADOR — Since 1927, 14 families have “democratically” dominated El Salvador through military dictators. There have been many elections in El Salvador’s history, elections in which the military  candidates always won while the opposition was always killed or exiled.
The capitalist class in El Salvador follows imperialist orders, especially from the U.S. The current ruling class, who in the past posed as revolutionaries, have proven to be traitors to the workers.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) rules for the bosses. Our conditions worsen every day due to unemployment, low wages and murders by the Maras (gangs) and the rulers’ death squads.
For example, in San Sebastian Salitrillo in the state of Santa Ana, five FMLN councilmen have been accused of money laundering. Just like Mayor Francisco Castañeda, all of them have become wealthy with public money. But they authorize budget cuts in health and education. 
The Progressive Labor Party has developed a base here. We are organizing communist schools with the working class to win them to understand that we must destroy these capitalist leeches and their cronies. Our goal is for PLP to spread from east to west. That’s why we recruit new readers of CHALLENGE, which reflects our class struggles worldwide. The bosses’ newspapers only report the lies and crimes that the bosses themselves make. 
Our base continues to grow among workers, peasants and students here. Although it is a small country, it has a great revolutionary tradition. However, without communist leadership, these struggles have always turned reformist. Our goal is to give these schools a real communist character. Only PLP has the alternative of communist politics, which can free us from capitalist oppression — destroyer of workers and peasants. Only working-class unity organized by PLP can smash this fascist system.

BOSTON, MA, January 6 — Members of PLP active in the Modern Language Association (MLA), along with friends in the Radical Caucus, helped to bring communism and class struggle to the 2013 MLA convention here. 
Party members gave papers on various facets of literary radicalism: the role played by communists in the proletarian and post-colonial literary movements; speculation about post-class society in literary works focusing on racism and sexism; debates over the “idea of communism” in current political theory. The current economic crisis, along with the dire job market faced by many humanities scholars and teachers, has many MLA members querying the legitimacy of capitalism. PL members contributed to a sharpening of the discussion and distributed significantly more CHALLENGES than we have in the past.
The activist core of the Party’s work here for years has centered on motions and resolutions raised by the Radical Caucus. One of this year’s initiatives focused on the need for serious data gathering on the wages and working conditions of part-time and adjunct faculty, who teach about 75 percent of college-level humanities courses, for as little as $1,500 per course, with no benefits. The other urged the MLA to condemn the so-called Pathways project at the City University of New York (CUNY). This project overrules faculty governance in an effort to cut costs and exert tighter control over curriculum.
Those in power don’t care that this policy produces inferior education — science courses without labs, writing and language courses with reduced contact hours. Students disadvantaged by the curricular changes are overwhelmingly immigrant, black, Latino, and Asian. Teachers who have opposed Pathways have been threatened with dismissal.
Discussion and debate over the CUNY resolution revealed that Pathways is funded by the Lumina Corporation and the Gates Foundation, both ruling-class efforts to privatize and corporatize public higher education. These efforts are widespread: members of the Delegate Assembly spoke passionately about the capitalist profiteering and authoritarian ideological repression occurring on dozens of campuses around the U.S. and Canada.
Both Radical Caucus initiatives were passed with overwhelming majorities. Several people joined the Radical Caucus, and one delegate, new to the Radical Caucus, helped to fight for passage of the opposing Pathways resolution. While this support was gratifying, our level of success made PL’ers and friends aware that we need to push harder for a stronger anti-capitalist analysis in the measures brought before the Delegate Assembly.
The annual Radical Caucus meeting was large and spirited, with several young new members offering to take leadership in framing the sessions and activities for the 2014 convention. Featured next year will be more discussion of “alternatives to capitalism,” as well as of universities as sites of ruling-class ideology. Onward!

DHAKA, BANGLADESH, January 27 — Seven young women garment workers were murdered and 50 others were injured yesterday when a deadly fire swept through still another textile factory of mostly women.  “When I tried to escape through the emergency exit, I found the gate locked” Raushan Ara told the Prothom Ala newspaper here. Many workers jumped from the second-story windows to try to escape the flames.
The factory lacked the most basic safety standards. “We did not find fire extinguishers. We did not find any safety measures,” a fire department official told the New York Times (1/27).
Several fire victims were teenagers, as young as 15. Bangladesh’s “laws allow teenagers as young as 14 to work” in these factories” (NYT, 1/25).
The Smart Garment Export Company is among the country’s 5,000 clothing factories that manufacture garments for leading Western retailers. This is the 33rd major fire since 2006, which has killed over 700 workers. It follows the November atrocity at Tazreen Fashions that killed 112 workers who manufactured garments for outfits like Wal-mart, the GAP and Sears and are paid as little as $37 a month. That fire led to millions of workers taking to the streets and strikes that shut down much of the industry for days.
 While the government had conducted many high-profile inspections after that fire, they are meaningless given that nothing has changed in this industry for decades. Just since November there have been 18 more fires. Not one factory owner has ever been held responsible for any of the deaths in all 33 major fires.
This country’s $19 billion textile export industry is the world’s second largest, behind China’s. Its profits are reaped over the dead bodies and slave-labor conditions suffered by its four million mostly women workers, another example of the special oppression that women endure under this system. Workers everywhere should rage in protest to show unity with these garment workers’ struggles.
It is this capitalist drive for maximum profits that is at the root of the exploitation and murders of these women workers. It will continue until workers become part of a mass revolutionary communist party that can start a fire that will sweep the world and extinguish this hellish system.

The U.S.-backed French invasion of Mali with its 15 million people is geared to strip this country of its vast natural resources while hiding behind the Bush “war-on-terror” label. They use this label in the hope that it will generate unquestioning support for whatever the imperialists do in its name. This racist attack on innocent workers is occurring in the eighth nation in four years alone in which Western regimes are killing Muslims.
French bosses have a long history of colonization in Mali, having also established military bases in neighboring Niger, Chad and Burkina. So far they have sent in 4,000 troops equipped with armored vehicles, helicopter gunships and 40 airplanes which bombed Northern Mali. They hope for 5,800 more forces from other African capitalist countries.
Initially the air attacks killed 11 civilians, including three children who drowned as they fled into a river trying to escape the bombs, as well as other workers and their families in or near their homes, said the mayor of Konna. He fled the town with his family, reporting “significant infrastructure damage” (News Beacon, Ireland, 1/15). The bombings have displaced an estimated 30,000 people.
This flies in the face of a promise by French Socialist (read capitalist) president François Hollande who said “France would never be in the front line but would only provide logistical aid, without fighting” (le Canard enchainé, 1/23). It also violates the 1995 agreement with Mali on technical military “cooperation” which stipulated that “French soldiers cannot participate in the preparation and execution of war operations” (Canard, 1/23). But, of course, imperialist neo-colonialists regard such “agreements” as mere scraps of paper.
Still Another War for Obama
and U.S. Rulers to Escalate
Obama’s war machine is knee-deep in this French operation. Not only were U.S. rulers “providing intelligence to French forces in Mali” (News Beacon, 1/15) but, “The U.S. military has based a growing number of armed Predator drones as well as F-15 fighter jets at Camp Lemonnier, which has grown into a key installation for secret counterterrorism operations” in the Horn of Africa (Washington Post, 1/14).This is all “part of a more than $500 million…program to train and equip armies across the Sahara….American Special Forces provided Malian infantry troops with training in marksmanship, border patrol, ambush drills and other skills” (NYT, 1/25).
Furthermore, the past “overthrow of the Malian government [which destabilized the country] was enabled by U.S.-trained-and-armed soldiers….Commanders of this nation’s elite army units , the fruits of years of careful American training, defected…taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy” (NYT, 1/14) It was, “An American-trained officer [who] overthrow Mali’s elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists” (NYT).
Meanwhile, NATO countries — Canada, Belgium, Denmark and Germany — “have publicly backed the French incursion, pledging logistical support” (News Beacon). Britain has helped transport French troops to Mali and its Prime Minister David Cameron “has led Britain into Mali’s conflict without even a pretense at consultation” (columnist Owen Jones in the British Independent, 1/14).
This invasion has little to do with “terrorism” but rather is based on the usual reason for imperialist adventures: natural resources. Mali is rich in gold (Africa’s third largest producer); diamonds, iron ore, bauxite, manganese, copper, gypsum, phosphate, lead, zinc and lithium. And “Mali’s petroleum potential [is] already attracting significant interests from investors….Mali has stepped up its promotion and research for oil exploration, production and potential exports” (News Beacon). It “could also provide a strategic transport route for Sub-Saharan oil and gas exports through to the Western world” (News Beacon).
Blood for Uranium
The French bosses’ main interest in Mali revolves around uranium whose exploration is now in full swing. Following the 1973 oil shock, French rulers opted for nuclear energy. Its 59 nuclear reactors lead the world. These reactors generate nearly 80 percent of its electricity, making it the world’s largest net electricity exporter. Although Niger has been France’s primary source of uranium, Mali has an estimated 5,200 tons of untapped uranium sources. Malians have set up community organizations in mining areas, protesting the potential environmental degradation and outflow of resources to imperialist beneficiaries.
Much of the instability in Mali stems directly from NATO’s intervention in Libya. The Tuareg people, “who traditionally hailed from northern Mali, made up a large portion of [Muammar Gaddafi’s] army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned to their homeland, sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under attack in [‘liberated’] Libya” (British Independent, 1/14) Alongside them, “Heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamic fighters returned from combat in Libya...The big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic fighters who came back” played the precipitating role [along with the Mali troop defections] in the collapse of the U.S.-supported central government” (NYT, 1/14, and British Guardian, 1/14). Blowback with a vengeance.
Obama’s second term has begun by joining newly elected French Socialist/capitalist president Hollande in still another racist/imperialist war spreading across northern Africa. In order to extract valuable natural resources for the profits of French, U.S. and other capitalists, they are killing black workers, much as their racist cops kill black and Latino workers on the streets of big U.S. cities and as French bosses super-exploit black African and Arab immigrant workers in France. Such racist wars are used to try to win masses of French workers to accept austerity in the name of restoring French bosses’ power.
It is only a communist revolution that creates a society run by and for the workers that can end this profit-hungry capitalist hell.