On the anniversary of the end of World War II, the Chinese capitalist ruling class flaunted a barrage of new high-tech weapons—hypersonic missiles and underwater drones, robot dogs and lasers (BBCm 9/3).  Leading the nationalist spectacle was China’s Gangster-in-Chief, Xi Jinping, along with Russia’s own top imperialist thug, Vladimir Putin. Their aim was to project unity and military might as the global crisis of capitalism heads closer to world war.

The Chinese Revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that followed were the greatest advances in human history. They taught the international working class what it means to smash fascism, to seize state power, and to fight against the return of rotten capitalist ideas. But the state capitalists who run China today are spurred by nothing but profit. They build their wealth by brutally exploiting workers throughout the world, from Uighur and other Muslim agricultural workers in Xinjiang to auto workers in “slavery-like conditions” in Brazil (aljazeera.com, 2/11/22; BBC.com, 12/24/24).  

Two days before the “Victory Day Parade,” China hosted a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Xi and aligned capitalists from Russia, Iran, India, and Pakistan promised to prioritize the “Global South.” But make no mistake: Not a single policy was proposed to benefit the workers of the world. These vile misleaders see workers as nothing more than disposable labor and cannon fodder. One contradiction of capitalism is that workers create everything of value—and that only the working class has the power to end the rulers and their imperialist wars for all time.

Unstable U.S. bosses lose ground

The intensifying struggle between the two factions of U.S. bosses, the Big Fascists of finance capital and the isolationist, “Fortress America” Small Fascists behind President Donald Trump, has left U.S. imperialism increasingly unstable. At stake are trillions in foreign investments, in particular in Middle East oil. Meanwhile, unconstrained by the liberal myths of a “free press” or “fair” elections, China’s bosses have gained an advantage by moving toward open fascism more swiftly than their U.S. rivals. The Chinese ruling class imposes rigid discipline on both workers and its own ranks. It is ready and willing to arrest any billionaire who threatens the interests of Chinese capital as a whole (bbc.com, 8/19/22).

Trump’s erratic behavior and the general unreliability of U.S. imperialism has led a number of national capitalists to move toward China’s bloc, a dynamic on full display at the SCO summit. Case in point: The U.S. slammed India with a 50 percent tariff for buying discounted Russian oil (Reuters 8/26).  (For more on Trump’s tariff crusade, see the 9/3 editorial in CHALLENGE.) 

In his ham-fisted efforts to isolate Russia, Trump acknowledged that he’s pushed both India and Russia away “to deepest, darkest China” (New York Times, 9/5). The Chinese bosses couldn't be more delighted. Despite their recent history of bloody border clashes with India, both China’s Xi and India Prime Minister Narendra Modi signaled closer economic coordination  at the summit (BBC, 8/31).

India is not unique. Bosses in Brazil and South Africa view the SCO/BRICS alliance as a chance to get out from under the thumb of the U.S., which for decades has squeezed them ruthlessly under threat of military intervention. Others, like Saudi Arabia (Reuters, 5/13) and Israel (Haaretz, 7/7), have used China’s outstretched hand to extract concessions from their U.S. masters, whether in the form of arms sales or support for the Zionist genocide in Gaza. Workers have nothing to gain by backing either of these imperialist death machines.

Atrocities of Chinese imperialism

Since 2013, China has used their Belt and Road Initiative to broaden their global influence by undercutting the U.S.-controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Regional powers in India or Brazil are handsomely rewarded for jumping the sinking U.S. ship, in no small part through bribes and graft. In exchange, they enforce Beijing’s bottom line by breaking unions, violently putting down strikes, cutting social benefits for workers, and handing over natural resources to China. 

Racism has guided much of Chinese imperialism, with workers in Africa being targeted for especially fierce exploitation. Angola borrowed $45 billion and became the top exporter of African oil to China (Eurasia Review, 3/1) as well as a Chinese customer for arms (Further Africa, 3/5).

When global oil prices dipped, Angola could no longer make its loan payments, sending the economy into austerity and chaos. After workers rebelled against Chinese-owned companies (adf-magazine.com, 9/9) , the Angolan bosses responded with violent attacks against protestors, arbitrary detention, and extrajudicial executions (Human Rights Watch).

The Democratic Republic of Congo produces 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, a mineral in high demand for the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries. Chinese billionaires control 80 percent of cobalt mining operations in the DRC, paying poverty wages to millions of miners, including tens of thousands of children (Think Global Health, 2/10). And in Zambia, Chinese loans have led directly to default and mass unemployment (Wilson Center, 1/16/24).

When China’s rulers talk about their “focus” on the Global South, this is what they have in mind. In so doing, they are creating a powder keg of working class fightback. 

Turn the guns around!

As the British Empire declined, many workers welcomed U.S. imperialism with open arms. They believed its lies about spreading prosperity and “democracy.” But it wasn’t long before the U.S. capitalist rulers showed their true colors as the world’s leading exporters of state terror, mass murder, and working class suffering. 

Now China’s vicious ruling class is trying to deceive workers with promises of "multilateralism" and "modernization." The horrific reality of Chinese imperialism will only get worse as the global economic crisis deepens. China is staring at a major housing market bubble, slowing growth, and rising unemployment, (Reuters 9/15). These crises are opening the door for working class fightback in China.

On September 6, just days after the SCO Summit, Canadian and Australian warships sailed through the Strait of Taiwan (Reuters, 9/6)— a desperate attempt by U.S. proxies to signal strength in an era of U.S. imperial decline. It is only a matter of time before such provocations trigger a full-blown conflict. We know the imperialist bosses are planning to force the international working class to do the fighting, suffering, and dying.

That is why workers must start organizing now, under the banner of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, to build the mass movement we need to turn the guns around. We must replace capitalism with a society run by and for the international working class: communism.

Washington, D.C., September 6—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined thousands of Black, Latin and white workers who gathered to protest the fascist federal government’s occupation of the District of Columbia. We marched to Freedom Plaza outside the Wilson Building, where Mayor Muriel Bowser collaborated with President Donald Trump to terrorize city residents. Worldwide capitalism is decaying by the minute. We’re witnessing genocides, worsening conditions, inflation, record displacement, violent kidnappings of migrant workers, climate change, and sharpening competition between the U.S. China, and Russia. The smaller domestic capitalists, those fronted by Trump, plan to use the D.C. occupation as a model for targeting Black, immigrant, and antiracist workers nationwide.The emerging U.S. federal police force—a hallmark of fascism, as evidenced by the Nazi regime in Germany—is a bipartisan creation, decades in the making.

This march demanded removal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, aka the 21st century gestapo, and Park Police, an end to their racist profiling, and support for unhoused workers whose tents and possessions have been destroyed. Chanting “Down, Down with Occupation, Up Up with Liberation,”  D.C. residents, CASA, Free D.C., and anti-genocide protestors controlled the streets for a couple of hours. PLP further called for communism while managing a literature table and distributing over 200 CHALLENGES along with many more PLP flyers about ICE, public health and transit.   

ICE out of our trains!

In our conversations we highlighted our campaigns around the transit system, which is one of the forces that has the power to shut down the city. Many local struggles against ICE show the multiracial unity of the city but need the power of the workers in the subway, buses, electricity, water and communications to advance. We attacked WMATA (Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority) for running ads for the Border Patrol and using their transit police to help ICE at subway stations. When people asked what we could do, we urged them to contact WMATA customer service and plan to join us to testify and protest at the board meeting at the end of the month. Engaging with station managers, operators and other riders is necessary to build this campaign. We called for safety measures like workers on automated trains and free fares to stop attacks on drivers. Take funding from the deep pockets of the large businesses and entertainment centers that benefit from the transit system. Some local bus systems have eliminated fares already. Protestors were enthusiastic about our focus on transit and signed up to help out. 

Making connections

Some of us also went to a program at the University of the District of Columbia to meet “rising organizers” and explain about PLP and the need for revolution against capitalism. A lot of young people want to build a revolutionary movement to destroy fascism and change the world. We went home with over 45 contacts from the two events.

Fighting dead end revisionism

There are a number of fake left organizations that are fighting the occupation. They include open revisionists and social democrats. Most of the non-hardcore revisionists can be won to revolutionary politics. How do we do this?  Our strategy in D.C. is to strengthen our base among transit workers and win them to provide leadership to the rest of the working class. We say make them strike-ready because they have the leverage to shut down the city. Only a massive disruption can defeat fascism and win working class power!

To mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of Progressive Labor Party, CHALLENGE is publishing a series of articles on our Party’s history, from its origins as the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) to its presence today in more than two dozen countries worldwide. This is the second part of an article on PLP’s historic fights against racism. The previous part discussed the Harlem Rebellion and PLP’s leadership in fomenting it.
The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 raised the fight against racist oppression to a new level while exposing the class treason of Black reformist leadership. After Harlem, more than 100 cities in the U.S. felt the torch of rebellion. PLP’s leadership in this struggle set the tone for our unceasing fight against racism:

Beating down racists in the streets

From the 1970s to the current day, PL’ers have organized hundreds of attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis wherever they spread their racist garbage. Rejecting the pacifist mythology that these gutter racists would fade away if ignored, we have attacked them head-on—and confronted the capitalists’ cops who protect them. We have mounted these anti-racist, multiracial actions in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Detroit and St. Louis. We’ve done the same in smaller communities like Tupelo, Mississippi, Scotland, Connecticut, Jamesburg and Morristown, New Jersey, and scores of cities and towns in California. We invaded the Nazis’ headquarters in Chicago. We beat a white supremacist leader in a Boston television interview. These militant anti-KKK/Nazi actions have involved an estimated 100,000 or more workers and youth.

On May Day, 1975, we mobilized 2,500 anti-racists in Boston to march against the segregationist, terrorist organization called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights, accurately nicknamed Racists On A Rampage). When they physically attacked us, we routed them. We subsequently organized a summer project to combat ROAR’s mob violence and its anti-busing racism. We integrated formerly all-white beaches, held antiracist summer schools for Black children, and rallied to escort Black children into their first day of integrating formerly all-white schools. Our efforts smashed ROAR. 

On May Day, 1976, we marched into Chicago’s Marquette Park, where Nazis had barred Black people. Black workers cheered and welcomed us like we were a victorious army. The next weekend white neighborhood workers routed a Nazi rally. We integrated that neighborhood and the Nazis were finished.

No nazis in academia!

Simultaneously, PLP exposed academic charlatans — like E.O. Wilson, Richard Herrnstein, and Arthur Jensen — who spewed racist filth about the “inferiority” of Black workers and the Nazi fantasy that unemployment was inherited in their genes. We mobilized demonstrations wherever these racists appeared, chased them off auditorium stages, and even poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head in the middle of a lecture. (Our member called out, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”) PLP’s position was clear and uncompromising: No free speech for racists.

Throughout this period, PLP helped organize the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), a mass antiracist, multiracial group that led many of these struggles.

In Southern California, our Party has organized against the anti-immigrant Minute Men. We have gone to border towns to fight racist attacks on immigrant workers from Mexico, rallying support from citizen workers around the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”
More recently, PL’ers have taken to the streets in Brooklyn and Los Angeles to protest the police murders of Black women, men, and youth by racist cops.

PLP also advanced the protest against the cops’ murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, raising our slogan — “Fight Like Ferguson!” — among thousands across the country. Our Party is building a movement for rebellion against racist police and ICE terror, not pacifist appeals to ruling-class officials.

Antiracism on the shop floor

PLP has consistently raised the issue of racism among organized workers to unite them against the bosses’ racist attacks. In 1973, when a New York City Police Department undercover cop shot a Black 10-year-old in the back in Queens, a PLP club at the Ford auto plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, brought the atrocity onto the factory assembly line. Our Party petitioned the do-nothing union local leadership to take a public stance and demand that the cop be indicted for murder. The workers’ response was electric. They were galvanized into action during a contract struggle that previously had been limited to economic issues. Their heightened political consciousness and militancy led to a weeklong wildcat strike against 100-degree temperatures in the plant, which in turn set the tone for the Chrysler Mack Avenue sit-down strike two months later (see CHALLENGE, May 6).

Beginning in the 1980’s, PLP has provided antiracist leadership to 6,000 Washington, DC Metro transit workers. At one point, the local’s overwhelmingly Black membership elected a white PL’er as their president, defeating a passive Black incumbent. As Metro bosses exclude people convicted of crimes by the rulers’ criminal injustice system, they close one of the few avenues for many Black workers to obtain a decent-paying job. PLP has demanded that the union oppose racist background checks. 

Many workers were won to our Party as a result of our generational commitment and leadership to antiracist fightbacks! 

Fighting racism internationally

PLP is now actively organizing on five continents.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, political assassinations, and fights between gangs and U.N. soldiers, we spread the struggle against U.S. imperialism and racism, which have enslaved workers there for two centuries.

In Israel-Palestine, PL’ers are exposing and fighting the intense racism of the Israeli bosses (with U.S. ruling-class support) against workers from Africa and Palestine, who are victims of super-exploitation. We are also organizing workers against the Israeli rulers’ genocide of Palestinian workers..  

In Pakistan, PL’ers are mobilizing thousands of workers to fight racist super-exploitation by Pakistani bosses in alliance with U.S. imperialism. The bosses have slaughtered thousands in sweatshops, drone attacks, and through their corruption and mismanagement of disastrous flooding.

These are only a few highlights of PLP’s long fight against racism, the ideological foundation of the profit system. The struggle against racism will prepare our class to overthrow capitalism and obliterate exploitation and divisions among workers. It is the watchword of the Progressive Labor Party.

CHICAGO, September 14—Members from the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) connected with thousands of other workers at the Mexican Independence Day parade today on the city’s southwest side. Distributing hundreds of flyers and copies of CHALLENGE newspaper in a short time, we stood in solidarity with countless immigrant workers and families facing a surge of racist state terror while we offered a fighting, internationalist and anti-capitalist alternative.

The frenzy of attacks by Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unleashed on the greater Chicago area recently, under the orders of U.S. Klansman-In-Chief Donald Trump, is spreading fear as they destroy lives. At the same time, however, the state terror is provoking a militant response from many workers committed to repel the rotten attacks on us and our class.

We communists in PLP have a unique role to play in the growing fightback. Instead of relying on nationalism, “lesser evil” politicians, weak reforms or the bosses’ laws and courts, we must be building a mass militant working-class movement under communist leadership. As we fight like hell to protect our class from the current attacks, we must be bold in putting forward communist revolution as the only real solution to the chaos of capitalism and recruit more antiracist fighters to the Party!

Seizing the moment to fight back

Our attendance at the parade today was in line with efforts from the Party in our area to grow our connections with ongoing anti-ICE struggles. Just one day prior, a PLP member joined close to a dozen other workers in an “ICE Watch Bike Ride” through the same neighborhood where the parade was held. Riders monitored for any ICE activity along our route while we spread messages of support and solidarity to workers we passed. Plans were made to continue the rides on a weekly basis at least.

In another nearby neighborhood that has a majority population of Latin workers, another PLP member has been forming walking groups to promote safety among undocumented parents. The prospect of heading out solo for many undocumented workers for work, appointments, or shopping is an intimidating task in the current climate. Many are forced to forgo earning wages for the sake of security, or vice versa. By organizing to head out in groups, we are helping to reduce our risk in a collective way while having an opportunity to spread the politics of PLP among other workers regularly.

Liberal bosses lie, workers die

Deepening our roots and connections with our fellow workers is essential to win more of our class politically to communism and away from the deadly mis-leadership and illusions of the liberal bosses. As the vile Donald Trump administration has ratcheted up its racist hate speech against immigrant and refugee workers, these liberal bosses have cynically seized on the opportunity to pose as the defenders of workers. On a local level, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker like to talk tough at press conferences about how they’re ready to stand up against Trump’s faction of capitalist bosses. But the fact is that they’re just two sides to the same capitalist coin.

We won’t forget that under Brandon Johnson’s watch thousands of migrant workers and their children were overcrowded into filthy shelters, served rotten food, and denied proper medical attention with deadly consequences (see CHALLENGE, 1/31/24). And J.B. Pritzker, whose family wealth reaches into the billions, slashed healthcare coverage programs for undocumented workers in recent state budgets (WTTW, 2/28).

The truth is that capitalists of all countries depend on the higher profits gained from super-exploiting immigrant labor. And all politicians are defenders of capitalism, in one form or another, so we can never expect any of them to stop terrorizing, dividing, deporting and murdering members of our class. The only way to secure a dignified existence for all workers without exploitation is to destroy capitalism and build a communist society where the needs of the working class are primary, never profits.

Hate deportations? Fight for communism!

Our party collective here is optimistic of the struggles we’re currently involved in, and reflective of the hard work that remains to continue to grow the mass fight for communism. We’re confident that the Mexican and U.S. flags waved at parades today will in time be replaced with the red flags of the international working class and its mass PLP, but that all depends on the work we do today, and the weeks, months, years, and decades to come.

If you hate deportations, racism and borders, then you’re ready to fight for a communist world! PLP is your party to defend our class and fight for the egalitarian future all workers need and deserve – Join us!