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!
Los Angeles, July 4-The sound of beating drums traveled for blocks through downtown Los Angeles. Mirrored music could be heard near the international airport and in Santa Monica as well. Hotel workers from the Unite Here union Local 11 wanted to make sure their work stoppage over the July 4th weekend was felt by the hotel bosses in LA. As they took action to fight for a living wage, members of Progressive Labor Party joined them on the picket lines to remind them that the workers of the world produce and run everything and deserve nothing less than the whole pie. This we know will only happen with a communist revolution.
For three straight days, workers picketed in front of over a dozen hotels from 3 AM through 11 PM. The action culminated in a large protest where hundreds of workers, 90 percent of whom are Black and Latin women, marched to demand hotel profits be shared with them since the hotels can’t function without them. Hotel bosses stand to make billions with the upcoming World Cup and Olympics being hosted in LA, but they want to maintain the current $18.86 an hour minimum wage. One would have to work 17 hours a day to afford a two-bedroom apartment in LA with that salary. These poverty wages have left hundreds of women unable to be with their families, without healthcare, hungry, or worse. One woman can only afford to live hours outside of LA, so every week, she leaves her family to sleep four nights in her car outside of the hotel that she cleans.
While workers demand a living wage, hotel bosses responded that it's not their responsibility to keep up with the cost of living in LA. We know these thieves want to keep every penny of profit for themselves. Workers have the power to unite and fight for the reform of higher wages, but the only way to end exploitation is to rid the planet of capitalism.
Liberal politicians and union misleaders only appear to care
The liberal bosses and union leadership in LA sound like they are on the side of the workers. Union leadership is pushing for a minimum wage of $25 an hour. Council members Curren Price and Katy Yaroslavsky took it a step further by introducing a motion that would make the minimum wage for hospitality workers $30 an hour by 2028. Even these wages are at poverty levels for LA though. But the larger danger comes from when workers believe these liberals and misleaders are our friends. Capitalism is never run in the interest of workers. These union misleaders and local politicians are nothing but representatives of local capital. Their appearance of care for our class is to keep us settling for reforms instead of finding true change through revolution.
The biggest farce came when Los Angeles City Council members Hugo Soto-Martínez and Nithya Raman and Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo were arrested at a rally on June 22, 2023 in support of hotel workers. This is nothing more than an attempt to launch their political careers, similar to how DiBlasio’s New York City mayoral campaign took off after being arrested while “supporting” hospital workers. We can’t be fooled by these opportunists. Two hundred workers were also arrested at that rally, but they and what they were fighting for was not the headline of any news story because workers are disposable in this rotten system.
Workers solidarity now - communism ASAP
Although it was hard to talk on the picket lines because of the successful drumming to which workers were exposed, members of the Party made some connections with workers. They were encouraged by our support as we marched side by side with them and chanted. While the union misleaders limited their chants to “si se puede” (“yes we can”) and “huelga”(“strike"), these workers are learning important lessons from the picket line about class consciousness, solidarity, and workers’ power. One of the picket leader’s comments revealed this understanding - “They are making all this money from the Olympics already and they don’t want to share it with us. But we do the work. When the LA teachers went on strike, we joined them, and we have seen a lot of teachers come and support us too. We just have to keep fighting together.” Workers in LA are learning valuable lessons on the picket lines that can’t be learned anywhere else. Many had children joining them, so they are gaining this understanding as well. Our job as revolutionaries is to build on that understanding to reveal that workers can and will run society in a communist world.
The workers went back on the picket line on July 10th after a short break. Additionally the Screen Actors Guild union joined the Writer’s Guild on strike this week. This uptick in class struggle in the LA area gives us lots of opportunity to raise ideas of class consciousness and turn them into schools for communism. We will definitely be back out there with them and struggle to bring our base along so they can learn these lessons as well. The fightback in LA continues!
It’s a hot fightback summer! From hotel workers, grad-student workers, writers, actors, workers are shutting it down!. Earlier this year, college teachers, healthcare workers, education workers, graduate students—all have walked off the job with overwhelming public support. As we go to press 40,000 rail workers from the United Kingdom are on the picket lines leading the largest rail strike in 30 years. We may see strikes by 350,000 UPS workers in August and by auto workers this fall. Clearly, capitalism’s crisis appears to have triggered a period of sharper class struggle.
Workers are fed up with the inequalities—the rising cost of living, exacerbated by the capitalist-bred pandemic’s economic effects, stagnating wages, and more—which disproportionately hit Black and brown working families the hardest.
If you live or work in an area where workers are on strike, support the picket line! Greet workers with the revolutionary ideas of CHALLENGE and the chant, “hey hey ho ho! this capitalist system has got to go!”
Workers deserve nothing less than a communist world. That’s a world run by and for our class.
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Justice for William: Combat the bosses’ state terrorism
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- 06 July 2023 974 hits
Prince George’s County, Maryland, July 5—Since 1977, Progressive Labor Party here has joined and led workers to fight against government-sponsored terrorism by police, prosecutors, judges, and jails. Today was no different!
Antiracists, PLP, and the family are demanding justice for William Green and conviction of killer kop Michael Owen. William deserves nothing short of a communist revolution, for all reforms are a dead-end plan for the working class.
Who was William?
On January 27, 2020, William had been in a car accident. He was searched, handcuffed behind his back, and put in the front seat of the police cruiser. None of the bosses’ typical racist excuses for killing applied—William was not resisting, he was not armed, and there was no warrant for him. Yet, kkkop Michael Owen entered the police cruiser and almost immediately fired seven shots, killing William, who was only 47 and a father.
Killer cop Owen was charged with second degree murder and other offenses related to the killing and has been in prison for three years, but he is still on the Prince George's County Police Force on administrative leave!
Slow-walking the murder case
The prosecutors and the cop’s attorneys seem to be determined to drag out the case against Cop Owen, hoping people will forget this racist murder or get tired of protesting. The family, however, as a result of the efforts of Nikki Owens (William’s cousin and family spokesperson), has doggedly stayed on the case. No advocate from the States Attorney’s office was assigned to the family as is usually the case, so Nikki kept checking the PG County Case Search to keep abreast of changes to the case. When she noticed changes in the trial dates, she demanded more information about the change from the prosecutors.
After multiple emails and notifying the press, her diligence forced the prosecutors to reach out to the family just two weeks before the start of his trial to schedule a meeting. At the meeting, one week before the trial, they told the family that they offered Owen a plea deal and he accepted.
That was unacceptable to Nikki! She made “NO PLEA DEAL" for this killer cop the theme of a hastily-called rally on the court day. A week of press conferences and interviews with Nikki, other local fighters, and non-profit groups all had the same demand to prosecute the killer cop fully. Ironically, the plea deal was so bad that the judge declined the deal and set a trial date of November 27, 2023.
State-sponsored terror
PLP describes police brutality as a key part of state-sponsored terrorism because police act as agents of the capitalist class and their state apparatus. Their role in capitalist society is to oppress and terrorize the working class, especially Black workers.
The rulers fear that Black workers, super exploited and oppressed by capitalism, will fight back militantly as they have in the past. Police are to protect capitalism, property over people and attack all working-class people who oppose them with strikes, rallies, protests, and rebellions.
Broadening the fight
PL’ers have joined Nikki’s family at hearings on procedural motions leading up to the trial. Recent efforts by the cop’s lawyer to move the trial to a more conservative location in Maryland failed, as family and supporters filled the courtroom.
Baltimore PLP comrades and friends active in the West Wednesdays (a struggle to seek justice for Tyrone West who was killed by police in 2013) joined local supporters in the courtroom. One is a young leader who is quickly learning about the court system! Nikki’s family and other community members welcomed the West Wednesday brothers and sisters to this fight for justice.
On September 28, 2023 at 9 am, there will be another hearing. The cop’s lawyer is trying to have evidence against Cop Owen ruled inadmissible. This type of lying lawyering led to Zimmerman's acquittal in the Trayvon Martin murder case. PLP will continue to mobilize more people to attend all hearings leading up to trial and the trial itself on November 27.
The antics of prosecutors and defense attorneys in cases that involve victims of police violence should themselves be considered criminal. Families are experiencing repeated trauma by court systems that allow trial delays for frivolous reasons, toy with the time of the court and families with unnecessary motions, and have families sit in court as defense attorneys criminalize victims in hopes of getting reduced sentences or charges dropped. And most families endure years of this government-sanctioned treatment as they fight for some resemblance of justice for their loved ones.
Reformism a dead-end
Reform groups that PLP members participate in fought in the state legislature to establish county-based Police Accountability Boards (PAB). Predictably, no county in Maryland gave their Board investigatory or subpoena powers, so such toothless organizations will, like civilian review boards across the country, rubber stamp police reports.
These groups keep focusing on who to elect and then pressure them to push a police accountability agenda. They organize many trips to Annapolis, Maryland’s state capital, to testify on bills and meet with state legislators. Canvassing to bring out workers to vote is crucial to them. This is an example of how reform misleaders dull the fightback and steer workers away from revolution.
PL members involved in all of these efforts constantly point out how these strategies are dead-ends in the struggle and that militant, revolutionary struggle for communism is the only strategy that makes sense. Some fighters are tuning in!J
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Editorial...Russia: bosses’ internal weakness drives fascism
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- 06 July 2023 1173 hits
The short-lived mutiny of a Russian mercenary highlights the growing volatility and sharpening threat of fascism and world war as rival imperialists compete for global supremacy. On June 23, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his state-funded Wagner Group rebelled against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military leadership, seizing the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advancing within 120 miles of Moscow. While many details are still unknown, Prigozhin’s plan clearly backfired. With no backing from within the government or military, or mass support from soldiers or workers, the rebellion ended in failure within 24 hours.
Even so, the instability shown by Prigozhin’s mutiny is driven by the same crisis of capitalism that’s pushing the gangster imperialists ruling the U.S., Russia. and China toward World War III. As competition among rival imperialists intensifies, so does their desperation. Fights within the ruling class are escalating, as we see in the clash in the U.S. that is playing out in the Supreme Court and the 2024 presidential race. None of these capitalists will hesitate to sacrifice millions of workers in the coming world war.
The only way out of this imperialist hellscape is for workers to turn the guns around against all of these bosses, join the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, and turn imperialist war into communist revolution!
Capitalist instability leads to world war
Just as in the U.S. and every other capitalist country, there are splits within the Russian ruling class. Billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin heads the Wagner Group, a private military contractor that Putin was glad to use for nearly a decade to project Russian imperialism throughout the world. Wagner has been most active in Syria, Mozambique, Libya, Central African Republic, and Mali. In 2014, following the U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” coup in Ukraine, Wagner was instrumental in the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Since war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, Wagner forces have been a major part of the Russian offensive.
The limits of the unity between Prigozhin and Putin were exposed during the recent bloody siege of Bakhmut, which was led by Wagner forces. For months, Prigozhin had openly criticized Russian preparation and execution of the war. With no honor among capitalist thieves, Putin replied by letting Wagner lead the attack on Bakhmut — but withheld supplies, dooming the mercenaries to tremendous losses (Seymour Hersh, 6/29).
Capitalism is based on competition, first and last. This reality rots all the way into the bones of every part of every capitalist state, without exception. Prigozhin personifies Vladimir Lenin’s analysis of the basic instability of imperialism over 100 years ago. The deepening political and economic chaos of capitalism, as Lenin noted, is reflected everywhere in the capitalist class. Until the working class overthrows the capitalist bosses with communist revolution, world wars are inevitable.
Nationalism = loyalty to imperialism
Like all imperialist warmongers, Russia is using unrelenting nationalist propaganda to win political support from workers for the war. Nationalism is the poisonous idea of unity between workers and bosses in a given nation. But the Russian bosses’ reliance on Prigozhin, like the U.S. bosses’ reliance on Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, reflects weakness. In both cases, the rulers need to rely on soldiers-for-hire instead of politically committed fighters. To correct this weakness, Russian and U.S. bosses are constantly lying through their teeth with cynical propaganda to build nationalism and win workers to support their empires.
Especially galling are Putin’s references to the communist-led Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany as he claims to be “de-nazifying” Ukraine. Yes, the Ukrainian army integrated neo-Nazi militias—the Azov, Aidar, and Sich battalions—into their National Guard, which then received training from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade (see CHALLENGE, 7/15/15). But the murderous hypocrite Putin had no problem with the fact that the Wagner Group, now officially integrated into the Russian army, openly recruited white supremacist militias like the Russian Imperial Movement and Russian National Unity (Guardian, 3/20/22). Workers have no good choices between the nazis of Russia and the nazis of Ukraine! We say smash them all!
Fascism: a violent shift out of weakness
Internal divisions and threats from rival imperialists are destabilizing Russia, China, and the U.S. As the inter-imperialist rivalry propels the world toward a potentially nuclear weapon-fueled World War III, capitalists in Russia, China and the U.S. are compelled to impose order and discipline on their own class and also upon the working class. This is the essence of fascism: the stripping away of the mask of liberal democracy to expose the bloodthirsty, nationalist, racist, sexist forces that lie at the heart of capitalism.
By contrast to the division and disunity among capitalists in the U.S., the dominant Russian bosses’ ability to discipline their ruling class opposition is far more developed. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and the Russian rulers lost rich territories such as Ukraine, they responded by hollowing out their pretense of liberal democracy and resorted to more open fascism to claw back their diminished empire. For years, Putin has exiled, jailed or murdered political opponents like Alexei Navalny, while hammering workers with racism and drowning them in blood to reassert Russian control over Chechnya and Georgia. Progressive Labor Party believes that the liberal Big Fascists of U.S. finance capital—fronted by politicians in the Democratic Party—represent the greatest danger to our class. Despite their weaknesses and internal divisions, this set of bosses is best equipped to impose the discipline on other capitalists that we see today in Russia and China.
Fight for your class, not your country! Join PLP!
As CHALLENGE goes to press, youth, and workers across France are in armed rebellion against a racist police murder, showing the international working class the way. If workers around the world are organized to fight with the bravery and militancy of our class brothers and sisters in France, under the communist leadership of PLP, we will dump every Prigozhin and Putin, every Biden and Trump, into the dustbin of history. We will liberate the international working class by creating a society led by and for workers. By organizing solidarity with the rebellion in France within our unions, classrooms, and mass organizations, we’ll advance the internationalism we need to smash all imperialist bosses. Only by building a mass PLP and fighting for communist revolution can the working class smash racism, sexism, nationalism, and imperialism once and for all! Join us!
