Tunis, Tunisia, the springboard of the Arab Spring in January, 2011, recently witnessed the eruption of mass demonstrations and a general strike to protest the assassination of a leader of the opposition party challenging the Islamist government. However, two of the key factors that led to the 2011 uprising, mass unemployment and poverty, are as prevalent as ever, essentially because their cause, capitalism, still rules. These conditions have sparked violent protests, which is why the government’s state of emergency remains in force.
All this exposes the hollowness of liberals in the U.S. and elsewhere labeling the Arab Spring a “revolution.” Revolutions occur when an oppressed class overthrows the oppressor class.
The General Union of Tunisian Workers called a one-day general strike on February 8, although the country’s universities were shut down until the 11th. However, the ruling class was taking no chances. Soldiers were deployed outside the main government buildings in Zarsis, Gafsa and Sidi Bouzid where masses of workers and youth marched, chanting “Assassins,” accusing the Islamist governing party of being behind the assassination.
Following the funeral at which tens of thousands assembled, taking “on the air of a demonstration against” the government (El Wonton newspaper, 2/9), army helicopters began overflying Tunis and military trucks were deployed on the city’s main avenue. But all of this did not prevent young demonstrators from occupying the street, clashing with police using riot clubs and tear gas.
CHALLENGE pointed out in 2011 when uprisings spread across the Middle East that they were limited to challenging the region’s dictatorships by calling for “free elections.” They weren’t aimed at overthrowing capitalism so the system’s exploitation of the working class would continue. No elections will change this, as workers and youth are discovering in  Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere.
Capitalism’s ruling classes still hold state power and use it to clamp down on mass rebellions in Tunisia. Only the leadership of communist ideas aimed at completely destroying the profit system and its bosses can free the working class of the hell wrought by that system.

Fascism is the response of a ruling class in crisis. U.S. bosses are preparing for such a crisis, composed of a critically unstable financial system along with increased competition from imperialist rivals such as China. A dominant section of the ruling class recognizes that the future includes wider and deadlier wars, perhaps a world war. Their response is increased militarism and internal discipline necessary for the bosses to wage and win wars.
In addition to intensifying racist attacks, the rulers are remaking criminal law and processes on the grounds that the “war on terror” requires special laws, and then applying the new procedures to all workers.
During the recent U.S. presidential campaign, Obama and Romney competed with each other to see who could be tougher on terror. This posturing occurred even though the main threats to U. S. capitalism come from rising powers like China, not from small terrorists.
Most recent acts of “terrorism in the U.S” — which Obama claims is the main threat facing America — are usually orchestrated by the FBI or the New York Police Department using informants to entrap a person or group to launch an attack, something they would have been incapable or unwilling to do without the informant.
These traps have been set against the Arab/Muslim community to build fear of, and racism against, this group among other workers. The “war on terror” remains central to the plans of the U.S. ruling class. This lie is part of the plan to lull workers into accepting a future of wider war and increased racist attacks.
Secret Courts Maintain Bosses’ Dictatorship
The laws about “terror” have been written so broadly that 92 percent of those charged are convicted. For example, the “Material Support” Law, which existed before 9/11 but was significantly broadened when the USA Patriot Act was passed in 2001, makes it a crime to provide anything, including humanitarian aid, to any group that the State Department has designated as “terrorist.” The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of lawyers providing advice about why to give up violence, as well as groups trying to provide aid to tsunami victims in Sri Lanka and human rights monitoring in Turkey. The government has turned this law into a tool against any group not supporting the overall plans of U.S. imperialism.
Although this law sounds like it’s aimed at groups outside the U.S., it’s also been used to convict people and groups inside the country. This includes the defense attorney Lynne Stewart as well as Sami Omar Al Huassayn, an Idaho student accused of running a website where radical Islamists posted materials. This trend will continue. All the Feds have to do is classify dissidents and communists as “terrorists” — who advocate violence — and it becomes a crime to give support of any kind.
The main fear of the ruling class is that workers will follow the communist ideas of workers overthrowing capitalism and running society in their own class interests. That’s the only thing the ruling class can’t survive. And that’s why workers must be won to understand that attacks on communists are attacks on their own class interests.
The “material support”  law has been the cutting edge for expanding the use of laws once used primarily in criminal cases: “conspiracy” laws which allow conviction for the “crime” of cooperating with people who talked about doing bad things, and “false statement” laws which make it a crime to tell cops anything which is not completely true. This is particularly vicious when the cops ask, “Is that all you know?” If you say “yes” then they can arrest you if you forgot the slightest detail.
After the 1970s’ scandals about warrantless snooping in the name of “national security,” Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), allegedly to prevent illegal spying on U.S. citizens. However the Act created a secret court that could issue warrants for covert spying against foreign enemies including activities within the U.S. The law was also expanded by the Patriot Act in 2001.
The “war on terror” has been used to justify issuance of FISA secret warrants against anybody accused of “terrorism.” This is a very broad category, enabling thousands of warrants to be issued each year.
Not satisfied with having to go to court — even a secret one which approves more than 99 percent of all requested search warrants — the USA Patriot Act gave the FBI authority to issue “national security letters.” They ordered banks, phone companies and other institutions to hand over records without telling the person whose records were being seized. When five small phone companies refused to comply with such letters, the Justice Department pounced, suing them for interfering with national security.
By 2011, there were 16,511 national security letters, plus tens of thousands of more informal requests from the Feds for information from phone companies and banks.
These “anti-terror” rules have defined the new norm. Judges have long been able to “seal” (keep secret) search warrants, but that used to be very unusual. However, one outraged judge revealed that in 2008 in Houston, 99.8 percent of all electronic surveillance orders were sealed. He estimated that 30,000 sealed surveillance orders are issued each year nationwide by Federal courts alone (state and local courts issue more).
The cops increasingly dispense with court orders, just writing phone companies. Cell phone carriers report that in 2011 they received requests for information about 1.3 million subscribers. What started out as a special authority to be used in special circumstances (first against “spies,” then against “terrorists”) has now become a normal practice by every police department.
Return of the Red Squads
In the 1960s and ‘70s, special police units called Red Squads were used to harass and attack communists. After 1970s scandals in which the FBI had been openly investigating protestors (strikers, opponents of U.S. imperialism, anti-Vietnam war demonstrators, anti-racists), the ruling class switched course and instructed the FBI to concentrate on crimes rather than protests. Meanwhile, it created FISA to quietly proceed with domestic spying.
This two-pronged approach has been scrapped given the “war on terror.” Now the 2011 FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide explicitly allows the FBI to use all its intelligence-gathering techniques against people not suspected of any crime. Agents are allowed to open an “assessment” “proactively” (without any indication a crime is being planned), and, as part of that assessment, to follow people, search their trash, send in informants, and troll the internet — all in the name of capturing terrorists. The Feds have had to admit using “community outreach” meetings with the Muslim community to recruit informants and identify those whom they will prosecute.
(Conclusion next issue: New technology made exempt from privacy rules.)

Thousands of multiracial moviegoers across the U.S. lined up for hours to see Quentin Tarantino’s Christmas blockbuster Django Unchained. Django is a slave-narrative revenge flick done in a style that combines spaghetti westerns and 1970s Blaxploitation. With so few Hollywood films about slavery and fighting back, how this story is told matters to the working class.
Some have called Django a “liberation” narrative. But to what extent is the capitalist Hollywood industry able to tell a story of true anti-racist liberation? Hollywood has historically been the main manufacturer of racist and sexist ideas. Films that are truly anti-racist or anti-sexist rarely make it to the silver screen. So is Django an exception to the rule? And what are the consequences to the working class of Tarantino’s take on racism and slavery?
The reviews for the film have been overwhelmingly positive, and in the film there is much to root for. In the opening scene a white, German bounty hunter, Dr. Shultz kills the slavers who own Django and offers Django and his wife freedom in exchange for helping him hunt slave masters. They set off, leaving dozens of dead slave masters in their wake! This multi-racial duo echoes the legacy of John Brown, the white preacher who fought slavery with violence.
In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, the head slave master, Calvin Candie, insists that Dr. Shultz shake his hand to complete the buying back of Django’s wife. In a true show of uncompromising multi-racial unity, Shultz extends his hand but pulls a gun and blows Candie away. Shultz is killed and Django battles the slave masters’ minions for his and his wife’s freedom. He blows them away one by one. As Django rides away with his wife into the sunset it is hard not to applaud this anti-racist hero.
But the question remains, what is the image that the audience will take away from this film: is it of Django as an anti-racist fighter or of a gangster who must prove his manhood with his gat?
Tarantino’s use of the Blaxploitation genre is problematic and does more to promote racist stereotypes rather than undermine them. Following the civil rights movement, Blaxploitation films replaced images of black unity with racial stereotypes. In the same vein, Django’s character is “chained” to racial stereotypes that cast black men as hyper masculine, prone to violence and out to “get theirs.”
Aside from the excessive violence, Tarantino attempts to shock the audience with his excessive use of the N-word (110 times in the film!). Tarantino claimed he wanted to present an accurate portrayal of the racism in the South. But the problem was with how the word was used. It was used not to evoke the horror and inhumanity of slavery, but to evoke cheap laughs. By keeping the N-word alive through comedy, it makes everyday racism more palatable to people because they can perceive it as “just a joke.” Racial slurs produce racial stereotypes and allow workers to dehumanize one another rather than organize together.
Throughout the film, Django is described as unique and by the head slave master as “one in ten-thousand” because of the way he stands up for himself. The phrase suggests that those who stood up to white supremacy and slavery were the exception and not the rule. From the Haitian slave rebellion to the hundreds of slave rebellions that shook the U.S. South and the Caribbean  before 1860, slave rebellion was an everyday fact of life. It involved masses of slaves, men and women, not an elite few. To present Django as exceptional and rebellion as individualistic, undermines the true history of anti-slavery fight-back.
None of the female characters in the movie, including his wife, are portrayed as fighters. Women instead, are shown to be victims that must rely on men to liberate them from slavery. Throughout history women, such as “Nanny” of the Jamaican Maroons and Harriet Tubman, have been paramount in the struggle for freedom from oppression.
Django lured audiences with the promise of racist “liberation,” but in the end sold them individualism, racism and sexism in a new package. The audience roots for Django because he is fighting slavery. But his battle with slavery is driven not by anti-racist solidarity, but by hypermasculine individualism that plays on the stereotypes of Blaxploitation films and gangster rap. These racist stereotypes served the bosses following the civil rights era as they sought to rob the gains won by a militant black working class. And these stereotypes continue to serve their needs today as they seek to justify racist unemployment, racist mass incarceration, and racist police killings.
The mass appeal of Django shows that working-class people possess anti-racist ideas and want to fight back. In fact, the true heroes are not Django and Shultz, but the multiracial groups of workers and students who saw the film hoping to be inspired by a story of anti-racist fight back. Ultimately Django does not deliver on its promise of “liberation” just like the bosses and Obama do not and cannot deliver on their promises for “change.” The working class cannot rely on the capitalist Hollywood industry to tell our stories. We must tell our own stories about fight-back, learning from past struggles as an inspiration toward building a truly anti-racist communist future.

Liberals are celebrating President Barack Obama’s lifting of the ban on women in combat as a “triumph for equality” (New York Times editorial, 1/25/13). But the reality is just the opposite. Obama’s move is actually aimed at strengthening U.S. imperialism, which depends for its existence on racist and sexist exploitation and Pentagon-planned mass murder. Putting women on the front lines expands the war-makers’ supply of working-class cannon fodder. And it builds nationalistic support for a war machine that now pretends — as the Times deceitfully claims — to honor “fairness and equal opportunity.”
The U.S. ruling class wants people to buy the illusion that capitalism can defeat sexism. In fact, capitalism is the root cause of sexism. The interconnection between the two can be seen on several levels:
Given the fact that 75 percent of the victims of U.S. imperialist wars are civilians, women in combat — soon to be full-fledged members of the war machine — will take a lead role in the mass killing and brutalization of other women. Exhibit A is ex-General Janis Karpinski, the first woman to lead U.S. troops in a combat zone. She was the commander of 17 Iraqi prisons, including the infamous Abu Ghraib, where both female and male prisoners were routinely tortured and abused by male and female soldiers.
The rulers are using Obama’s initiative to mask the historical truth that women are victimized by the special oppression of capitalism. Women are disproportionately among the most poverty-stricken workers. They generally get paid lower wages — or none at all in raising children as the next generation of future workers for the bosses to exploit. Bill Clinton’s vicious welfare reform threw hundreds of thousands of women and their children into poverty and homelessness.
Black, Latino and Asian women suffer from triple oppression: as workers, as women and as victims of racist discrimination. These workers are mercilessly exploited and even burnt alive in the garment factories of Bangladesh (see pag 8).
Capitalist culture degrades women as sexual objects and leads to violent physical attacks and sexual harassment in the streets, on the job and in the home. Masses of women in India are taking to the streets to fight capitalist culture and its justification of rape in what the U.S. media refers to as “the world’s largest democracy.”
But the U.S. military is no slouch itself when it comes to rape. Obama’s War Secretary, Leon Panetta, admitted that one in three women “will experience sexual assault” during their stint in the armed forces (British Guardian, 1/24). Given that 200,000 women are on active duty, the number of victims would exceed sixty thousand.
These attacks on women would be no isolated incidents. They are a symptom of the intrinstic sexism in the military, which stems from the sexist nature of capitalism — a system breeding the oppression of women and the gendered division of workers. Workers, women and men, must fight these assults with a vision to win all workers to communism. 
Equal Opportunity Genocide
Obama’s ploy supports the capitalist myth that integrating the power structure is progressive. Again, the opposite is true. Ending the combat exclusion will enable Annapolis- and West Point-trained female officers to rise higher in missions for mass killing. In the future, women will command more than fighter jets. They will run entire genocidal invasions on behalf of U.S. imperialism.
Obama’s apologists assert that putting more women in charge will somehow curb rampant sexual assaults within the ranks: “Allowing women to get the benefits of serving in combat positions…might make things better because it will mean more women at the top of the military, and that, inevitably, will mean more attention to women’s issues” (NYT, 1/24/13). But at its core, the military’s rape scandal stems from its own glorification of violence and the profit system’s exploitation and degradation of women in general.
Contrast Obama’s “triumph for equality” for women with his military surge in Afghanistan and his use of remote-control drone warfare, together responsible for the deaths of hundreds — if not thousands — of women and their children. Weigh it against Obama’s mass detention and record deportation of undocumented women, ripping them away from their children. This is fascism in action, and women are among its most vulnerable targets.
Pentagon Troop Shortage? Enter Women
The continuing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals that U.S. forces, however lethal, are not yet large enough to control even mid-sized countries. U.S. rulers hope that widening women’s combat roles will open the door to bringing back the draft — this time for both sexes. “The Pentagon’s decision…is expected to reopen a legal debate: Should women have to register with the government so it knows where to find them in the event of a new draft?” (Washington Post, 1/27/13).
Liberal Congressman Charles Rangel of Harlem is once again touting his Universal National Service Act, “known as the ‘draft’ bill, which requires all men and women between ages 18 and 25 to give two years of service in any capacity that promotes our national defense” (CNN, 1/ 26/13).
With respect to current and future foes, U.S. rulers have technologically superior arms but numerically insufficient armies. The administrations of Clinton, Obama and the two Bushes killed millions of Iraqis and Afghans with invasions and sanctions. But in the absence of a full-blown U.S. occupation, Iraq’s Iran-leaning Maliki regime is hindering what Exxon Mobil views as its right to dominate the country’s oil production. And as Taliban attacks mount in Afghanistan amid a dwindling U.S. presence, the U.S.-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas super-pipeline remains a pipedream.
Economic Draft Won’t Cut It
Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population — mostly unemployed youth unable to find jobs — now “volunteers”  for service. U.S. rulers know that confronting Iran and planning for a potential world war with China will require vastly greater numbers of recruits. Obama & Co. are not counting on legions of newly empowered GI Janes to willingly rush to imperialism’s rescue. What they’re really planning is a doubling of the draft pool, an item long on the bosses’ agenda.  General Willard Paul, the Army’s World War II manpower czar, foresaw a global postwar clash between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In 1947 he asked Congress to create a permanent women’s military corps in all service branches: “We must have the full use of the total personnel of the nation.”
Yes, working-class women do belong in combat — when the fight is against capitalism. Millions of heroic women, both communist-inspired Soviet soldiers and underground partisans across Europe, helped crush Hitler’s Nazis. Millions more women were essential to the Chinese communists’ fight against the Japanese fascists and the Vietnamese defeat of the U.S. invasion. Though the communist parties of these periods had weaknesses in both theory and practice that eventually led them to restore capitalism, these women’s titanic achievements still stand as a beacon for workers throughout the world.
A Mass Party for Working-Class Emancipation
Our struggle today is not against our class sisters and brothers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or China, whom Obama and the bosses behind him want us to slaughter. Instead, our fight must be waged against the profiteers and politicians who would lead us into killing and dying. Their goal is to maintain their profit system and dominate the world’s resources. The principal means to their end is the exploitation of the world’s workers, women and men both.
In working toward the inevitably violent overthrow of the war-for-profit ruling class, the Progressive Labor Party strives for the absolute equality of women and men. Once capitalism is destroyed and replaced by a communist society, run by and for the working class, we will be able to eliminate the sexism and racism that stem from the profit system. Production and distribution according to need — without bosses and their exploitation — will achieve a true “triumph of equality.”