If the far-right Vox party joins Spain’s ruling coalition after the July 23 general election, it will be the first Spanish government to include open fascists since the death of mass murderer Francisco Franco in 1975. It would also mark the latest failure of liberal democracy to manage the growing global crisis of capitalism. As the U.S. bosses keep weakening in the face of an aggressive challenge by the Chinese imperialists, their junior NATO partners—the centrist parties that have ruled Western Europe since World War II--are losing their grip as well.
Instability is everywhere; everything seems up for grabs. With the war in Ukraine escalating and World War III looming, the old liberal democratic world order is in shambles. Confronted with runaway inflation, a wave of climate catastrophes, and mass unemployment (close to 13 percent in Spain), both the open fascist insurgents and the old guard liberals are scapegoating migrating workers—a hallmark of rising fascism. As millions of workers’ lives are upended in the general turmoil, a segment of the working class has been infected by the disease of anti-immigrant racism. In this dark night of weak class consciousness, the capitalist rulers are pulling out all the stops to mislead, deceive, and divide us. Regardless of which of the bosses’ factions wins the next round of elections, the rulers will ultimately need full-blown fascism to have any chance to destroy their competition and protect their profits.
Only an international mass workers’ movement, led by communists, can beat back the rising tide of fascism. Only communist revolution, spearheaded by the fighting Progressive Labor Party, can end imperialist war and create a society run by and for the working class. The profit system can’t reform its way out of this crisis. History shows us that it can never serve workers’ needs. Capitalism must be destroyed, root and branch. Join us—we have a world to win!
As liberal democracy weakens, open fascists rise
Six years ago in Spain, nostalgic for the Franco years (foreignpolicy.com, 6/29), a splinter group denounced the right-wing Popular Party as too soft and set off on its own. Widely dismissed and underestimated, the Vox party exploited workers’ anxiety over the Catalan separatist movement, which was pushing to break away from the richest region of Spain (centered in Barcelona) and form its own country. Using the classic fascist tools of gutter racism and sexism, and taking a nationalist page from the U.S. Small Fascist forces fronted by Donald Trump (“Make Spain Great Again!”) Vox “opposes abortion rights, denies climate change and rejects the need for the government to combat gender violence” (New Indian Express, 7/18).
Now backed by 15 percent of voters nationwide, Vox is being courted to form a new parliamentary majority by the Popular Party, which is favored to win the upcoming election after shifting to a more openly racist, anti-immigrant platform (El Pais, 7/24/2018). If that alliance comes to pass, Spain would join a growing list of European countries--including the old World War II fascist axis of Germany, Italy, and Vichy France--with openly fascist parties either within the government or as a leading opposition to the government. And with Spain next in line to hold the presidency of the European Union, Spanish fascists could influence the EU’s agenda.
When liberal democracy fails the capitalist class, fascism gives the bosses more direct control over all aspects of society, from the media and universities to industrial policy and war preparations. It’s no accident that fascism is the fastest-growing political movement in Europe today. This reality would have been unthinkable in the decades following World War II, when fascist parties were outlawed In Germany and marginalized in France and Italy. But times are changing, and fast. Millions of workers have lost confidence in the ability of the traditional post-war European parties to solve the glaring problems of capitalism. Europe’s capitalist rulers—the dominant banks and industrialists—are terrified of losing the white working class, a fear compounded by Britain’s departure from the EU and recent mass protests against the French bosses’ pension reforms. At present, these rulers aren’t moving to smash Vox or the likes of open fascist leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. If anything, they appear to be hedging their bets--just as they did in Germany in 1933, when they sanctioned Adolph Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by the liberal-backed president.
In the most recent elections in Germany, the most committed fascist nation during World War II, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) expanded its base, even after AfD members were arrested for helping to plan a fascist coup last December. The party is polling up to 20 percent, “neck-and-neck with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind only the conservative CDU/CSU bloc” (france24.com, 3/7). In France, the National Rally headed by Marine Le Pen is now the highest-polling party in the country. Amid the ongoing rebellion over the French cops’ cold-blooded killing of a 17-year-old son of North African immigrants, it’s calling for harsher treatment of migrating workers, wholesale evictions of public housing residents for minor offenses, and the building of more prisons—the bosses’ modern concentration camps.
In their desperate attempt to hold on to power, the rulers’ mainstream liberal agents, from Joe Biden to Emmanuel Macron, are quickly adopting their own more virulent racist and anti-immigrant policies. From the Texas border to the segregated suburbs of Paris, they’re enabling mad-dog police terror. In France, the kkkops have even prohibited protests against their own racist violence! The result is a political spiral toward fascism. As the big capitalists move to the right, they’re legitimizing and energizing far-right parties that have little or no stake in liberal democracy. Vox, for example, is banning unfriendly news outlets from its events and calling for them to be shut down (Reporters Without Borders). As the bosses’ contradictions continue to sharpen, we can expect the liberals to follow suit in ditching the phony freedoms of capitalist democracy.
Only communists can defeat fascism
The working class cannot afford to sit around and wait for the capitalists to try to fix their unfixable contradictions. Economic and inter-imperialist crises inevitably lead to rising fascism and wider war. In World War II, the force that stopped full-blown fascism in its tracks was a communist-led working class. Although communists and other anti-fascists were defeated in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, they inspired workers throughout the world in the global conflict that followed, culminating in the Soviet Union’s destruction of Nazi Germany. The revolutionary Chinese Communist Party played an important role in beating back fascist Japan.
The Communist Party of Italy led the resistance that smashed the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.
Today there are but two paths before us: fascism or communist revolution. There is no middle ground, no third way. As communist theorist R. Palme Dutt observed in Fascism and Social Revolution (1934), “Capitalism in its decay breeds Fascism. Capitalist democracy in decay breeds Fascism. The only final guarantee against Fascism, the only final wiping out of the causes of Fascism, is the victory of the proletarian dictatorship.”
And so our choice is clear. Build Progressive Labor Party!
Boston, June 16–Why, at this year’s annual conference of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG), were more people than ever before talking about communism? It’s a sign of the times, the deepening crisis of imperialism and racism and war. It’s also the result of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stepping up our fight for communism and the Party at the MLG. It’s still the Marxist as opposed to the Communist Literary Group, but by taking the Marxist work of the conference seriously we are putting communism and the question of the party more on the agenda of these mostly younger academics and grad students.
With a lot of support, we proposed for next year’s conference a reading group on revolutionary organization, so that the need for a communist party would be explicitly on the table. On the literature table this year for the first time was a stack of CHALLENGE, and our papers were all taken. Several people wanted to know more about our history, the article on the Cultural Revolution, etc. Not enough radical people know about PLP, and we are taking some simple steps to correct that at the MLG.
The conference focus this year was Capital Vol. 1 and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. To prepare, our comrades took part in three year-long study groups on Marx and Du Bois. Out of this we helped form a panel on Capital and one on Du Bois, and were often able to intervene from the Party’s point of view in the general discussions of both books.
Many people, not only PLP, emphasized that Marx’s book shows in great detail why capitalism can never be thoroughly reformed. The drive to expand capital accumulation through every corner of the world is inevitably reproducing insoluble problems: extremes of wealth and poverty; more masses of wage workers but at the same time masses of the unemployed; constant economic crisis each worse than the last; and capitalist competition leading to imperialist war. An anti-capitalist reader of Marx has to conclude as Marx did that capitalism can never be made to benefit the working class. It’s not usual to point out at the MLG that this conclusion from reading Capital entails a commitment to communist revolution. We made that point.
Racism and imperialism were not often discussed enough, although the Du Bois discussions did show how racism and capitalism are twinned both in the USA and in global imperialism. (Du Bois was an outstanding anti-imperialist voice his whole life long). Capital defines the global market as the heart of expanding capital accumulation, even in Marx’s time; and his book is full of references to the war against American slavery and the parallels between chattel and wage labor. The transition to wage slavery and the missed opportunity of a united Black and white workers’ struggle against capital is Du Bois’s great theme—inspired by Marx—in Black Reconstruction. Other panels did explore capitalist racism: one on Richard Wright, several on the so-called “surplus” (chronically unemployed) population produced by capital, others on colonial land theft. We are friends with many of these presenters and got to know others this year.
If our proposal on revolutionary organization is adopted, we can put more focus on racism and imperialism next year by bringing more Lenin into MLG Marxism, and going beyond Lenin to advocate a single global revolutionary party which summarily banishes nationalism from workers’ struggle. Examples from parties in India, South Africa and the Philippines could make the point that in our day revolutionary communism has to be organized in a single global party. Only such a party form, going further than the Comintern, can fight all the competing imperialist blocs on a global scale, in the process overcoming racism and nationalism in the workers’ ranks. PLP has a lot to contribute in MLG discussions of the theory of the party form, coming out of our analysis in documents like Road to Revolution IV of the defeat of communism in the Soviet and Chinese parties.
There was, except for us, an eerie silence about the already begun inter-imperialist global war. Perhaps because people feel powerless? Another reason to join the Party. The door is open for us to advocate that at the moment, though we are aware that we will face anti-communism here eventually. [See Box, “The New Liberal Anti-Communism”]
For our part, what we got out of the conference is best summarized by a young comrade: “This is our theory! Marxist theory belongs to us, to the communists, to the working class.” There is a problem with the MLG: theory being divorced from practice. On the one hand, it’s good that the powerful intellectual tradition of Marxism is alive and well among some academics; on the other hand, Marxism does not belong mainly to academics. As Brecht wrote once, “Communism is simple: if you’re a worker you can understand it.” Communism is also complex, but workers trained in a revolutionary party led by workers—a party like PLP where academics too are welcome—can also master its complexity.
We are encouraged by this work among intellectuals, feeling our collective power to mobilize as a class if we can bring our academic co-workers into a worker-led PLP, building the Party to fight for communism as capitalism spins off into racist violence and war.
The new liberal anti-communism
Three comrades on a panel at the 2023 MLG conference called “The New Anti-Communism” showed how anti-communism remains alive and well in new forms, even in the absence of a mass communist movement. Why? Because communism remains the greatest threat to the ruling class, and both liberal and rightist wings of the capitalist parties in the USA and Canada are united in slandering it. In its identity-politics guise, anti-communism helps to recruit marginalized workers to fight in imperialist wars against “authoritarianism,” to subdue white workers who might want to combat racism, and to provide political cover for racist attacks on the whole working class.
For one speaker, the Florida and Texas government attacks on “wokeness” as educational brainwashing (i.e., teaching about slavery, labor insurgency or gender politics) were dog-whistle accusations that recalled McCarthy-era portrayals of Communists infesting the brains of innocent Americans. Another speaker pointed out that it is wrong to point to “the right” as the main danger in such attacks on teachers and their unions, since liberal multicultural identity politics have prepared the ground for the likes of fascist Florida Governor Ron De Santis. Often, antiracist folks are disarmed against these attacks by their allegiance to divisive liberal identity politics which hide workers’ common interests.
The third speaker discussed how the Canadian government has historically manipulated the status of “refugees.” “Good” refugees have been those fleeing from communism, like those from Vietnam decades ago, or Ukrainians today fleeing a capitalist Russia falsely identified as communist through the word “authoritarian.” But refugees from places like Haiti are to be turned away at the border. Propaganda like the short TV ads “Heritage Minutes” falsely feature Canada as a land of freedom from “totalitarian” oppression, while their multicultural imagery helps the liberal ruling class depict marginalized workers as full citizens of a free country. Liberals in Canada, fascists in Florida: both use anti-communism to shatter workers’ unity, attack workers in struggle, and prepare a population of patriots for world war.
It’s been awhile, but we had our first Wine Tasting fundraiser since April 2019. We raised money for the Progressive Labor Party’s 2023 Summer Project and it was a rousing success! Over 50 comrades and friends showed up and it was quite a collective effort as many people stepped up and contributed to its success. As capitalism ravages the workers of the world more and more, it was inspiring to see a multiracial crowd of women and men committed to a better world for the working class. It was a little bit of the working class that under communism will run the world.
These Wine Tasting socials have always been fun events with a strong political component. They have helped to strengthen ties with friends that want a better world and with friends that are in struggles against racism and sexism and are also interested in that better world, communism. This year was a little different as we struggled with a short organizing timeline and also threatening weather. But the working class again came through as many people stepped up to help out. A friend collected money; she was friendly but efficient, making an important task easy. Another longtime friend took care of an auction that was meant to raise a little money. Wandering through the crowd, joking and cajoling, he raised a lot more. The food was not only plentiful, but fantastic. And people committed to taking part in the Party Summer Project.
Fight racism - organize for communism
But, most important was who came and who spoke and what was said. Many old friends showed up, but also new comrades and friends came from recent struggles. And it was clear that capitalism cannot be reformed. Whether it’s racist harassment of students in Brooklyn or the horrible, intentional racism of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, the whole damn capitalist system has to go!
At one high school where teachers and students fought to have a memorial for a Black student who was killed (see CHALLENGE, 4/12), the struggle goes on. The same principal who took down memorial posters is the same principal refusing to provide mandated services for English language learners. On the same campus, union misleaders are pushing a racist contract proposal and attacking teachers for merely asking questions (see CHALLENGE, 7/5). Some of these teachers came to the fundraiser. One of the teachers compared how the capitalist media is so concerned about some billionaires who died in a ridiculously lavish underwater excursion, while hundreds of migrants on a sinking boat (seeking refuge from the perils of imperialism) are allowed to die in the Mediterranean Sea with no effort to save them.
Meanwhile some students and faculty from Kingsborough Community College attended. They spoke about the continuing harassment of students at their college by an administration led by liberals including a Black woman president (see CHALLENGE, 1/18). These liberals are pursuing a baseless investigation of two faculty who defended a student who was tackled and arrested at the college for trying to stop a fight. They have forced students to drop out of school and they constantly harass students in the school cafeteria. The fightback has been active and ongoing with many students attending various actions and Party events.
At this fundraiser two students spoke about how this struggle has helped them see the power of the working class when we unite and fight back. They have both joined the Party.
Join the 2023 Summer Project
This fundraiser was a small step toward a successful Summer Project 2023. We will rededicate ourselves to building a revolutionary communist movement, train new young leaders and welcome many more leaders into the PLP as we fight for an egalitarian, communist world.
The Progressive Labor Party in Haiti takes this opportunity to greet our comrades on the occasion of the PLP convention this month. We would like to be there with you, discussing the way we can build our Party into a fighting force for communist revolution, and building the PLP’s influence in the working class and among students and soldiers around the world. However, the phony borders erected by the capitalists around the world have prevented us from sending representatives to our Party’s gathering. We know that one day, those borders will be smashed, and workers will be able to move freely around the world, based on the needs of our class and our Party.
Another racist assault by kkkops on Black workers
Washington Post, 6/15–Six sheriff’s deputies responding to a report of drug activity at a Mississippi home in January deactivated their body cameras before forcibly entering the house…Once inside, the…deputies allegedly handcuffed two Black men and subjected them to a night of abuse. While Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker were subdued, the deputies beat them, hurled racist slurs and repeatedly used Tasers on the men…The deputies, who are White, also waterboarded Jenkins and Parker, pelted them with eggs and attempted to sexually assault them with a sex toy…The encounter ended nearly two hours later when a deputy placed a gun in Jenkins’s mouth and shot him, permanently injuring his face…Jenkins was transported by medics to the University of Mississippi Medical Center and received several surgeries, according to the lawsuit. Parker was arrested and transported to the Rankin County Jail on a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia…
Capitalism is always at war with workers
Al Jazeera, 7/3–The number of women who died within a year after pregnancy more than doubled between 1999 and 2019 in the United States, a new study has found, with the highest number of deaths recorded among Black women. The study, published on Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at maternal deaths between 1999 and 2019 — but not the COVID-19 pandemic spike — for every U.S. state and five racial and ethnic groups. There were an estimated 1,210 maternal deaths in 2019, compared with 505 in 1999, the researchers found.Overall, the number of deaths per 100,000 live births rose from 12.7 to 32.2 in that 20-year span, while the number of deaths among Black women increased from 26.7 to 55.4. The greatest jump over time was seen among American Indian and Alaska Native women, however – from 14 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1999 to 49.2 in 2009.
East Asia bosses realize fewer babies is a problem
Economist, 6/30–Ultra-low birth rates and stiff resistance to immigration produce shrinking populations: according to the United Nations, the four East Asian territories will see their combined populations shrink by 28% between 2020 and 2075. During the same period, their combined share of global gdp is projected to drop from 26.7% to 17.4%, according to Goldman Sachs…political leaders see families as an urgent policy priority.
Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has promised “a national policy system to boost birth rates” and launched a national effort to promote “new-era marriage culture.” Japan’s low birth rate leaves it “on the brink of whether it can continue to function as a society,” according to its prime minister, Kishida Fumio…Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s president, called his country’s birth rate a “crucial national agenda” in need of an “emergency mindset.” Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, has called its declining birth rate a “national-security problem”... Mr Paul Chang, a sociologist at Harvard University argues: “The changes are driven by anxieties, social problems and social conflicts,” not the triumph of the individual.
Big Fascists rediscover need for centralized war production
Foreign Affairs, 7/3–Weeks after the fighting began, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued that the United States and its allies are “serving as the ‘arsenal of democracy,’...But this lofty rhetoric does not match the reality on the ground. Shortages in production, inadequate labor pools, and interruptions in supply chains have hamstrung the United States’ ability to deliver weapons to Ukraine and enhance the country’s defense capabilities more broadly. These problems have much to do with the history of the U.S. defense industry since World War II…Back then, the industry was predominantly a government-run business. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal emphasized economic regulation and relied on “alphabet agencies” such as the Works Progress Administration to boost employment, paving the way for later wartime contracting. New Deal agencies inspired the creation of the War Production Board in 1942, which mobilized business and rationed resources for the battlefront…The government owned nearly 90 percent of the productive capacity of aircraft, ships, and guns and ammunition.
