The city of Tapachula in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala has become the largest refugee camp in the Americas with 35,000 people trapped in a makeshift city of barbed-wired streets (El Pais, 9/12). This is a direct consequence of joint policies between the governments of U.S. President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO).
This mass incarceration of workers, primarily from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti is cruel evidence of liberals’ willingness and ability to exploit the power of the state in naked attempts to control and divide the working class to drive down wages and build nationalism.
Both AMLO and Biden campaigned as alternatives to unrestrained fascism and unregulated capitalism. But despite the liberals feigning horror at Donald Trump’s immigration politics, under Biden the hunt for workers at the border between the U.S. and Mexico has not only continued, it has become more brutal (see Editorial). In Mexico, AMLO is willing to do the dirty work of corralling workers at its borders in exchange for U.S. funding for programs – cynically called “Sowing Life” and “Building the Future”–that will create temporary worker programs to supply cheap labor for AMLO’s megaprojects in southern Mexico.
The capitalists have always used borders and immigration policy to meet their imperial needs and keep the working class divided. They build maquiladoras (factories) close to the border to exploit low wages while facilitating the movement of goods.
They institute guest worker or bracero programs to move cheap labor across the border only when they need it. AMLO and Biden both make a show of welcoming workers fleeing the U.S. disaster in Afghanistan. But in Tapachula, like in northern Mexico, workers desperate for relief from the brutality of capitalism find themselves herded into overcrowded camps with inadequate food and facilities. Those who risk fleeing to the surrounding mountains or jungle are pursued by AMLO’s newly formed National Guard or by criminal gangs ignored by the police.
Under communism there will be no nations or borders. All workers will work to meet the needs of workers all over the world. Capitalism is brutal for the working class. And the biggest capitalists in both the U.S. and Mexico are the liberals who are inflicting tremendous attacks on our class. Elections offer no hope of changing this as the choice between the Small Fascists like Donald Trump or the Big Fascists like Biden is a lose-lose for the working class (See glossary, page 6). Liberation for our class across the globe will only come through communist revolution and a society based on workers’ power.

HAITI, October 3–The caravans of immigrants heading to the United States making news are the result of the failure of capitalism and imperialism. This is not only true of migration to the U.S.; workers the world over leave their homes in search of safety from war, famine, climate disasters and violence, and for a decent life for themselves and their families. The Haiti refugee crisis yet again exposes capitalism’s inability to meet workers’ needs.
Racist rhetoric
For many decades now, migrants from the Caribbean and Central America have moved towards the U.S. and other countries in the western hemisphere. As soon as migrant workers are on the move, the bosses and their media begin demonizing them. Migrants are labeled “parasites, lazy, job stealers and disease carriers” as if they wouldn’t rather stay in their homes to build their lives.
Today, most migrants arriving on the U.S. southern border are from Central and Latin America, but many are also from Haiti. Tens of thousands are making the trek across Latin America seeking safety.
The pictures coming from the U.S. border (See editorial on page 2). are a warning to migrants of the fascist terror that awaits them: border agents on horseback riding down and whipping migrants from Haiti like the old slave catchers in Saint Domingue (what the French slavers called Haiti). More warnings to worker migrating from Central America come from photos of refugee workers and their families being kept in concentration camps
How it started
Historically, the European ruling classes sent their representatives around the world freely—to invade and set up colonies and slavery as economic models. In the so-called New World, the colonizers attacked the indigenous population with murder, rape, and disease. They stole land and wealth and forced some into slavery.
Later, the colonialists brought Black workers from Africa to be enslaved. Each group of oppressed workers in turn resisted. As time passed and the economy matured, the bosses needed to come up with a new form of slavery to take advantage of industrialization. Wage slavery was born. Today all countries are capitalist.
How it’s continuing
The impact of imperialism has been intense: racism and sexism, devastating effects of “natural” disasters, joblessness, political instability, and failing infrastructure. For almost two centuries, the countries of Latin America have been under U.S. imperialist domination. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine forbade any other power from intervening in this hemisphere.
In Haiti, this has meant the U.S. has been free to invade in 1915, 1994 and 2004 putting puppets in office and fomenting coups when their interests were in danger. This policy has been applied throughout Latin America.
Migrant workers did not create the conditions that forced them to move—capitalism did. However, nothing stays the same, change is inevitable, but how things change depends on us. What we do counts: fighting anti-immigrant racism with expressions of solidarity at any border, organizing on the job, in the military, and in our neighborhoods. But we must use these fights to build and recruit to the international communist Progressive Labor Party.
 We will abolish wage slavery
There will come a time when slavery—chattel or wage—will no longer be tolerated; and like the masses in Haiti (the first enslaved people to successfully overthrow slavery), revolutionaries will lead the way for all humanity for an egalitarian society called communism.
Then workers across the world will be armed to fight the capitalist system and its lackeys— politicians, media, gangs, and bosses. We stand shoulder to shoulder with migrants around the world—workers of the world, unite, we have nothing to lose but our chains!

SEPTEMBER 11— On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, more than 65 faculty, academic workers, and graduate students gathered in a virtual forum sponsored by the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA) to analyze “New Keywords of Our Struggle.” Setting a key theme of the conference—“capitalism continues to kill us, as it is intended to do”—the keynote speaker, an adjunct, quoted Karl Marx’s statement that the original accumulation of capital in Europe was a story written “in letters of blood and fire.” He urged “communism” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as the keywords needed to end climate catastrophe, pandemic mass death, and racist killer cops.
He said that he looked forward to the day when words like “race”, “exploitation”, “property”, and “wages” joined “the lexicon of archaic terms.” Six speakers and a vigorous open discussion followed, demonstrating the sharpening of Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) work among academics and emphasizing the need for current organizing to be guided by a revolutionary outlook and party.
The politics of words
Speakers highlighted how certain “keywords” either open doors for more radical organizing or obscure or discourage such organizing. A Black professor criticized the new keyword “intersectionality”, arguing how it can also cover up campus policies better described by an old keyword, “exploitation.”A university union leader analyzed the term “union” as itself a contradiction: workers are weaker facing the boss without a union, which makes more unified struggle against capitalist exploitation possible; however, the union itself, narrowly focused only on its own members, becomes a barrier to wider working-class consciousness.  
A recent Black college grad, now an elementary school teacher, described how she is pushed by her bosses to use the keyword “professionalism,” even with her very young students, which she criticized as a way to obscure the exploitation of teachers and fill young students with self-blame.
Other speakers, like one organizer from Colombia, highlighted the need to bring words in other languages and struggles in other countries into the political awareness of people in the Global North. She explained the power of terms like “la primera línea”(the frontline, youth brigades who protect marchers) and “la minga” (collective decisions in popular assemblies) to building anti-capitalist and revolutionary consciousness. A speaker from Afghanistan, now teaching in CUNY, interrogated the keyword of “the state,” noting how imperialists have used the capitalist concepts of modernization, human rights, and women’s rights to obscure the aims of the U.S. invasions and occupations.
The final speaker sharpened the discussion of keywords by introducing the concept of joining a communist party, specifically PLP. Only by building a mass communist party can we actually abolish the death trap of capitalism. He contrasted communism with socialism, which at best only moderates capitalist exploitation. Social Democrats (liberal fascists) like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders want to give workers a few crumbs while they lead us into dead end electoral politics. Communists know we have to destroy the bosses’ state and smash their ability to exploit our labor.
 PLP’s line made clear
Vigorous debates followed, including sharp questions about the contradiction between communist revolution and national liberation. PLP’s line against nationalism was made clear. Participants concluded the conference urging the Radical Caucus to hold future keywords discussions focusing on individual or juxtaposed words: “communism” or even “communism vs. socialism” or “communism vs. climate collapse. “Having a member of PLP speak openly about the need to build not only a communist movement but also a communist party like PLP reflected the growing awareness of the inability of capitalism to meet the needs of the world’s workers. It also reflected the crucial role of PLP’s long-term organizing and relationships established in the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (union), the Marxist Literary Group, and the Radical Caucus.
Since the January 2021 MLA Convention, we have worked closely in the Radical Caucus to build friendships and political ties with faculty and students, organizing an April 30 Conference on “Class Struggles in Higher Education,” three “Keywords” Reading Groups leading up to the Sept. 11 Forum, and panels for the upcoming MLA Convention in January 2022. Given the anti-communism in fake-left circles, having a long term approach to base building, communist organizing and Party building is crucial to making the discussion of communism and the need for a communist party front and center.

The anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is soon approaching, and it’s time to debunk some anti-communist myths, again. The U.S. ruling class reviles Joseph Stalin, one of the first communist leaders of the Soviet Union (USSR), and so they lie about him.  But they lie about so many things, why would they tell the truth about Stalin. Yet the capitalist slander campaign against Stalin led many authors, university researchers and even ordinary people to dislike Stalin. Why so much capitalist hatred against Joseph Stalin?
 First, some facts. After the Russian Revolution, 12 European countries (including the U. S. and Japan) invaded the Soviet Union to kill this new socialist society in its cradle. They were defeated. Instead Stalin led the socialist Soviet Union from being “the poor man of Europe” to a world power that challenged the worldwide empire of the capitalist United States.
Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union became powerful enough to defeat Hitler’s Nazis in World War II. Of the 250 Nazi divisions that fought in World War II, 200 of them fought to conquer the Soviet Union...and were defeated. Eighty five percent of German casualties were at the hands of the USSR. It was only after the Soviets began pushing the Nazis back, that the Allies invaded Normandy. The Soviet people and their Red Army suffered huge casualties (20 million dead) and destruction, but it was they that defeated the Nazis.
 The Soviet leaders educated all citizens, including college and trade schools. They provided universal health care and employment. Workers had four weeks of paid vacation and received a pension at age 60, women at age 55. They had paid maternity leave and free childcare and they eliminated the centuries-old famines that had racked the Ukraine.
Some charge that Stalin was a dictator, yet he struggled mightily for a new constitution with secret elections so that the entrenched bureaucracy would be challenged. Local Party Secretaries defeated him in this effort.
It is helpful to see the sources of the criticisms of Stalin. The sources of the forced starvation stories in the Ukraine are anti-communist, pro-Nazi sympathizers who left the Ukraine and headed to the Western countries.
 In 1956 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his achievements in a secret speech. Khrushchev wanted to take the USSR in a more capitalist direction. Professor Grover Furr documents that of the 61 charges Khrushchev levels against Stalin, 60 can be proven to be false. Needless to say that speech is the source of many of the attacks on Stalin.
 Another source of attacks was the writing and organizing of Leon Trotsky. He was a charismatic individual with the emphasis on individual. Trotsky belonged to a different party than Stalin and Lenin. He joined the Bolsheviks when the Russian Revolution was imminent. When Lenin died, Trotsky thought that he should be the next leader. He organized for his ideas. They were publicized widely in the Party, but when it came to a vote, his position lost 724,000 to 4,000. The Bolsheviks and Lenin chose Stalin.
However, he continued to organize against Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership and was finally kicked out of the Party. He secretly continued his anti-Stalin organizing and propaganda. He appealed, not to the workers, but to the capitalists all over the world for support. Capitalists loved his stories because it gave them more ammunition against Stalin. But Furr speaks and reads Russian and English and has had access to Trotsky’s archives as well as the archives of the former Soviet Union. He has written and self-published several books on the period. For those who want to learn what really took place under Stalin’s leadership, please go to his website:https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/
The fact is that college professors who try to write a balanced or a favorable view of Stalin are ostracized by the system. They can’t get published. Those that promote anti-Stalinism get published, paid and praised.
The reason the capitalists hate Stalin is because he helped lead a revolution that threw them out of power. The capitalists who exploit workers, who bring death and destruction, who promote racism and sexism, hate Stalin. They benefit from our ignorance that it is possible to have a system where the capitalists do not exist. But a better world is possible. It’s communism where the workers of the world rule and the capitalists are in the trash heap of history.