BALTIMORE, January 16 — As another strong step in the struggle against Maryland Governor O’Malley’s plan to build a new $100-million youth jail, a bold protest rally was organized by Occupy Baltimore, Schools Not Jails and the Baltimore Algebra Project.

While a sizeable group of supporters erected a huge tent, and as volunteers brought supper for everyone, six people defied state and local police by crossing the fenced perimeter of the would-be construction site. A large truck of pre-fabricated construction material was collectively unloaded. Then pieces of a one-room, red wooden school house were passed, hand to hand, up to and over the fence.

As kkkops decided exactly what to do and when, the six people who had entered the site managed — before being arrested — to finish building the schoolhouse, symbolizing the demand being chanted: “Education, not Incarceration!” One of the six, a teacher, also managed to conduct a brief class, repeated in mic-check Occupy-style by everyone at the support rally, just outside the fence. The class cited anti-racist lessons to be learned from the life of Frederick Douglass.

Meanwhile, all 50 CHALLENGES that were brought were eagerly taken by rally participants. In an electrifying moment, a young comrade, recognizing the need for mass advocacy of Progressive Labor Party’s revolutionary ideas, took the initiative to give a dynamic and well-received speech, explaining the necessity for working-class revolution and communism.

It’s now appears that the governor and the local ruling class may back down on this issue, at least for now, and forego construction of the new jail. Even of more profound importance is the emergence of a new PLP study group, led by young comrades, to help create the next generation of revolutionary leaders.

Dare to struggle, dare to win!

BROOKLYN, NY, January 12 — In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, students marked the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake with a march between two campuses of UEH, the State University of Haiti, while simultaneously PLP rallied in a Brooklyn neighborhood where many workers from Haiti live.

Our banner here read, in English, Kreyòl, French and Spanish: “International Solidarity with Haitian Workers: The Struggle Will Go On!” We distributed more than 500 Party flyers, along with CHALLENGE, and gathered over 100 signatures on a solidarity petition to be sent to five union and student groups in Haiti, supporting their efforts to defend themselves against the failed system of Haitian local bosses under imperialist control.

Students spoke in Kreyòl and English about the need to abolish capitalism itself, both in the U.S. and in Haiti, and to build a worker-run society, egalitarian communism. Our bullhorn echoed through the busy intersection as thousands of workers hurrying home heard the communist message.

Just as Bill Clinton’s vaunted “reconstruction” has failed in Haiti (his Interim Haiti Recovery Commission folded last October), capitalism itself is failing everywhere. Consider these racist unemployment figures: 80% in Haiti, 70% in Pakistan, 70% among youth in South Africa, 20% in Spain, 17% in France, 21% in the U.S., (50% among black youth).

Capitalism is a system of production for profit but because of overproduction and a credit crisis, its drive to maintain profits has thrown 250 million workers worldwide onto the streets. Meanwhile, U.S. banks sit on $2 trillion of capital they will not release for investment in real production. So workers’ needs simply go unmet.

As Karl Marx showed, these crises inevitably have recurred throughout capitalism’s entire history. The bosses’ solution to mantain profits during crises is to redivide the pie and destroy workers’ lives through gigantic inter-imperialist wars. Haiti too, as an “ally,” will be caught up in the major war brewing between the U.S. imperialists and their rivals.

The bosses’ proclaimed programs of aid to Haiti have gone mostly right back to the bosses themselves, not to workers there. The vast majority of the $4.59 billion in international aid to Haiti went to the donor governments themselves, to major “vulture capitalists” who swoop in to profit from natural disasters, and to the big NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) with their expensive overhead costs.

For example, $600 million of the $1.6 billion the U.S. Congress eventually released went to the U.S. Department of Defense to reimburse it for deploying 20,000 troops to Haiti to guard against post-quake rebellions. (For details see “Haiti: Seven Places Where Earthquake Money Did and Did Not Go,” at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/03-2.) We can never count on any capitalist, only on ourselves as one international working class.

These January 12 actions are small steps in PLP’s strategic effort to revive the proletarian internationalism so necessary for all workers to defend ourselves, defying the bosses’ borders. We see this urgent need as the big imperialists prepare for world war, most menacingly right now in the flash point of the Hormuz Strait near Iran (see CHALLENGE editorial, 1/18).

The mistakes of the old communist movement, as it collapsed because of the abandonment of its principles, dragged the red flag of internationalism into the mud. In 1943, the Soviet leadership, with the agreement of the Chinese and other communist parties, dissolved the Communist International (the Comintern) and lapsed into a loose collection of national parties. This retreat came directly from the parties’ united front with the capitalist “Allies” in the war against fascism. The Soviets and the others saw abolishing the Comintern as necessary to reassure the Allies that they were safe from communist revolution at home — in essence abandoning workers to their own bosses in the Allied countries. 

We need a new version of the Comintern! PLP is organizing as a single international party, a step beyond the Comintern coalition form. This is a gigantic task, but the principle is clear, as we chanted today: “Same Enemy, Same Fight: Workers of the World Unite!”

Workers have no country and want no country: as workers our “country” is the whole world. Workers in Haiti need both solidarity from the entire international working class as well as to contribute to it. From small actions like these simultaneous rallies a great movement will grow.

NEW YORK CITY, January 23 — A steady winter rain couldn’t dampen the spirit of 75 workers and students as we picketed the federal building in lower Manhattan this evening in support of dockworkers in Longview, Washington. Representing a half-dozen unions and college campuses, the protesters challenged the Obama administration’s support of EGT, a union-busting grain consortium. The U.S. Coast Guard has deployed boats and helicopters to escort tankers making deliveries to EGT’s newly constructed grain terminal, which is being operated by scab labor.

EGT made $2.5 billion last year, but it plans to make a lot more by opening its Longview terminal without hiring workers from the ILWU, the longshoremen’s union whose members have worked this port for 70 years. Instead, it brought in a scab union, Operating Engineers Local 701. This is a crude attempt on the part of a major corporation to break the back of the ILWU. If EGT succeeds, port companies all along the West Coast will smell blood and look to hire non-union workers.

The longshoremen have some formidable enemies. The police have arrested hundreds of protesting workers. The corporate media have attacked their struggle. The national AFL-CIO — led by sellout Richard Trumka — has refused to support their cause, calling the matter a “jurisdictional dispute.” The National Labor Relations Board has filed an injunction against the union to prevent further protests.

Despite these obstacles, the workers are fighting hard, realizing that losing would be devastating. In July, after workers blocked train deliveries to the terminal and one hundred were arrested. In September, 500 dock workers and supporters defied the police and took over the port, stopping deliveries and dumping grain.

Many of us at the picket line this evening — transit workers, teachers, professors — are working without a contract. Others have had concessionary contracts forced down their throats. We were there tonight because we understand that our local struggles are part of a larger class war between between the small ruling class of owners on the one hand (along with the politicians and union sellouts who serve them), and the working class on the other. Progressive Labor Party brings to the struggle the understanding that this war can only be resolved by workers taking state power and running society — not for the obscene profit of a few, but for the benefit of all.

Having spread death and destruction across much of the Middle East, U.S. imperialists now seek to expand their horror show to the Far East. Barack Obama is methodically preparing for eventual war on China. In December he initiated the deployment of 2,500 U.S. Marines in Australia. In January he issued a Pentagon decree entitled, “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.” It states: “While the U.S. military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region [emphasis added].”

Host of Problems = Hard Time for Rulers to Re-elect Obama

But U.S. rulers face two major problems in gearing up for a clash with China. First, they have a growing need to wage wider Middle East oil wars, especially as tensions with Iran heighten. It’s a task made more difficult by a shortage of combat troops, which could necessitate a wildly unpopular military draft.

Second, while the ruling class sorely needs a war president, it may have a hard time retaining their invader-in-chief Obama’s services after November’s election. Millions of voters could be turned off by mass racist unemployment, continuing economic depression, millions of home foreclosures, deportation of nearly two million immigrants, a wage freeze on federal workers, and an administration run by bailed-out bankers who have reaped profit bonanzas during a Depression they helped create.

War Clouds Darken over Iran

Iran threatens more each day to become the next U.S. front for open warfare. Covert action, like CIA-Mossad [Israeli secret police] rubouts of Iranian nuclear scientists, has been raging for years. On January 13, two days after the latest assassination, Iran sentenced an ex-U.S. Marine to death for spying. And while Washington ramps up oil sanctions to discourage the building of nuclear bombs, Iran threatens to attack U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf.

The only question is whether the first air strikes on Iran will come from the U.S. or Israel. Obama is deceitfully trying to deflect blame onto the supposedly more belligerent Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu: “Inside the Israeli security establishment, a sort of good cop, bad cop routine, in which Israeli officials rattle sabers amid a U.S. scramble to restrain them, has assumed its own name: ‘Hold Me Back’” (Wall Street Journal, 1/14/12). The lie is that Israeli bosses, armed to the teeth with U.S. weapons, always act without influence from the White House. Sometimes they do, but there appears to be strategic unity regarding Iran. Says the Journal’s article:

The U.S. military is preparing for a number of possible responses to an Israeli strike, including assaults by pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, according to U.S. officials. In large measure to deter Iran, the U.S. has 15,000 troops in Kuwait, and has moved a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf area. It has also been pre-positioning aircraft and other military equipment, officials say. Arms transfers to key allies in the Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have been fast-tracked.

This context lends added significance to Obama’s recent announcement to send 9,000 troops to Israel in a joint U.S.-Israeli military exercise, a move alleged to be “temporarily withdrawn.”

As for Iraq, al Qaeda bombs killed 73 people there in the second week in January. The country still lacks the stability required to boost oil production to the original U.S. target of six million barrels a day (mbd), much less the Maliki regime’s pie-in-the-sky promise of 12 mbd.  In reality, Exxon Mobil and other oil giants — hoping to cash in on the U.S.-led genocide — are now pumping at a rate below three mbd. This shortfall is enough to prompt U.S. rulers to consider a re-invasion.

Nor will U.S. imperialists be able to stop the shooting in Afghanistan any time soon, not after pictures surfaced of U.S. snipers urinating on their Taliban “kills.” For a time, U.S. bosses had hinted at pointing toward some sort of negotiated settlement with the Taliban. In addition to Afghan mineral wealth and the proposed TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) natural gas pipeline, the U.S. needs Afghanistan for permanent bases in a land that borders Iran, China and a resurgent Russian-dominated bloc.

Taliban cooperation with the U.S. would get them a cut of the mine and pipeline profits. Bill Clinton had worked on a similar pipeline deal between the Taliban and the Unocal oil company in the 1990s, but it fell through when the Taliban switched to a rival Argentine energy firm, Bridas. From that point on, the Taliban became the enemy in U.S. rulers’ eyes. Today, it is the suddenly “viral” release of the year-old corpse desecration video that derails talks.

War Agenda to be Forced on Opportunist Romney and Fragmented Republicans

Obama has succeeded in broadening the U.S war machine’s active theaters of operation from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Bahrain. Looking ahead, Iran, Syria and China are now stated U.S. adversaries. And who better to lead these racist attacks on Asian workers, the rulers figure, than the first black president of the U.S.? But Obama might not be around to lead the charge. Barring unlikely economic improvement or an “October Surprise” (a ruling-class-concocted provocation to whip up popular support for Obama), Republican Mitt Romney has a strong chance to enter the White House next year. An avowed supporter of U.S. imperialism, Romney vows to reverse Obama’s Pentagon cuts and increase Navy shipbuilding by 50 percent.

But as leader of a Republican party deeply divided in both its capitalist donor base and its working-class voter base, Romney caters to a host of contradictory interests. Gary Hart, a major imperialist strategist, laments the GOP’s grab bag of “conservative Protestant evangelicals, neoconservative foreign policy and national security hawks, the Tea Party, much but not all of Wall Street, many of Main Street’s small business owners, libertarians and cultural conservatives, among others” (NY Times, 12/16/11). Some of these factions oppose the war plans of the dominant Rockefeller wing of the ruling class.

Anti-tax, Anti-regulation Forces Hamper Rulers’ War Drive

The liberal imperialists’ New York Times, in its Boston Globe subsidiary, accused Romney of “trying to appease enough constituencies to get himself the nomination” (1/6/12). The Globe was referring to the anti-tax, anti-regulation forces that could hamper the money-raising and centralization needed for the global war foreseen by Obama’s backers. The Globe endorsed the more consistent imperialist Jon Huntsman, who had been Obama’s ambassador to China. The newspaper warned that “the religious right, represented by Rick Santorum, and Tea Party activists represented by Ron Paul, have pushed Romney in unwanted directions.”

Huntsman, the Globe said, would have been “a better president.” But now that he’s out of the race, the Globe believes that Huntsman “could still make Romney a better candidate” by pushing the main Rockefeller’s force’s imperialist aims.

Political events are driven not by candidates’ pandering, but by the sharpening imperialist competition to carve up the world’s resources, labor and markets through war. Elections hold significance for our class and Party only in revealing the tactical fights within the ruling class. This enables us to more accurately expose and attack the various capitalist forces that shape the politicians’ programs and disputes. At the same time, we point out that elections represent only the interests of various sections of the ruling class. Under capitalism, every vote diverts workers away from class war against the bosses.

As revealed in reports on class struggle in CHALLENGE, our task is to win workers and youth in the various ruling-class-led organizations that PLP’ers are active in: unions and shops, schools and colleges, churches and community groups. Our aim is to help them see that the problems faced by our class stem directly from the profit system: racism, sexism, mass unemployment, poverty and war. As long as this system exists, its miseries will continue to enrich the rulers through the labor of the workers, the class that produces all value but gets back only the part of that value necessary to survive.

Capitalism cannot be reformed. It has always been based on exploitation, depressions and wars. We strive to create a society — communism — run by and for our class, without bosses and profits and the nightmares for workers to which they inevitably lead. Only by building a revolutionary communist party, the Progressive Labor Party, composed of tens of millions of workers, can we achieve the ultimate goal of destroying the murderous profit system in communist revolution.