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Editorial: Imperialists bomb, workers bleed — Smash war machine with communism
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- 28 March 2025 279 hits
On March 15, less than 100 days into his reign of terror, “peacemaker” President Donald Trump unleashed a series of airstrikes in Yemen, killing and maiming over 100 workers (NBC, 3/16). The assault was a desperate attempt by the U.S. imperialists to regain some control over the Red Sea, a vital global shipping route. This fight is a move toward a wider war between the U.S. and the Chinese and Iranian imperialists who back the Yemeni Houthi militia. It shows that the “Fortress America” version of U.S. imperialism, the one favored by Trump and his capitalist backers, can’t save workers from the bloodbath of world war. Only building a mass international movement to fight for communist revolution can turn this impending conflict into a fight for the liberation of our class.
Imperialists kill over trade routes
The conflict between the U.S. and Chinese bosses has been sharpening for years, and workers are paying the price. Yemen was one of seven countries bombed by Barack Obama, the “drone-strike” president who massacred thousands of workers to defend the U.S. bosses’ profits and shipping lanes (vox.com, 1/10/17). Joe Biden resumed the bombing of Yemen last year, and now Trump continues the slaughter. But after their debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. bosses can’t murder enough people to stem their decline in the oil-rich Middle East. Meanwhile, China has strengthened its position as the region’s dominant power through its support of Iran and Iran’s proxy groups, including the Houthi militia (Atlantic Council, 1/14).
With the Houthis blocking shipments of oil and other goods across the Red Sea, U.S. ships have been forced to take a much longer and more expensive route around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. Meanwhile, tankers and cargo ships from China and Russia, the two biggest U.S. imperialist rivals, have been able to continue to use the Red Sea route, adding to China’s advantage (Foreign Policy, 2/14/24).
As they build toward war, the bosses turn to rising fascism and racist scapegoating of immigrants and Muslims to divide the working class and shift the blame for the international crisis of capitalism. The attacks on immigrant students who protested the genocide in Gaza, alongside sweeps by the ICE gestapo and Trump’s plans for mass deportations, are designed solely to build fear and racism. It is essential that the working class fight back against these racist atrocities by uniting and defending workers whenever they come under attack.
As the battle among imperialists spreads, it becomes even clearer that the international working class shares the same common interest: to smash the profit system and the capitalist parasites who rely on it. The workers now dying in wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, and Gaza are all one class. But around the globe, too many workers remain tied to the deadly leadership of one imperialist and nationalist faction or another. It’s the task of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party to lead our class to break free of these chains and create a society run by and for the working class.
Oil is STILL the lifeblood of capitalism
As much as Trump talks about avoiding wars in the Middle East, the U.S. rulers can’t afford to lose control over the world’s largest reserves of cheaply extractable oil—or the shipping routes that control its distribution. Oil is still the lifeblood of capitalism. The U.S. military’s enormous fleet of tanks, trucks, planes, and ships runs on it. Global warming and climate catastrophes notwithstanding, the world will be mostly powered by fossil fuels for the indefinite future. Beyond its military applications, oil and gas are the most abundant and profitable ways to power critical industries like steel and cement. At a time of global economic crisis, the capitalists aren’t about to sacrifice short-term profits to switch to renewable “clean” energy, which accounts for only a small fraction of U.S. industrial production (Energy Information Administration, 7/13/23). Goldman Sachs recently projected a “growing demand for natural gas as a transition fuel until 2050, and the need for new oil & gas development beyond 2040” (JP Morgan, 3/44). Even in Europe, where the finance capitalists have led the clean energy “transition,” renewables’ share of the energy mix is growing at less than one percent per year.
Nationalism is a death trap!
Out of desperation, in the face of an onslaught of racit violence from the bosses, many workers are siding with small-time capitalists under the banner of “national liberation.” From Vietnam to South Africa, this strategy has been proven a disaster for the working class around the world. Time and again, alliances with “lesser evil” capitalist bosses have wrecked the possibility of working-class emancipation. In many cases, they’ve led to thousands or even millions of workers’ deaths.
In 1968, after ousting the British imperialists, the National Front took power in southern Yemen. Because they identified with the bosses and lacked confidence in the working class, these fake “revolutionaries” maintained the British-built civil service and used British-trained forces to smash the workers who’d created a revolutionary workers’ militia. Today’s Houthi nationalist bosses, backed by Iran, are now battling the old regime of nationalist capitalists who are backed by the royal leeches of Saudi Arabia. The resulting civil war has killed more than 300,000 workers, all to replace one vicious oppressor with another.
In spite of these many betrayals, the heartbeat of working-class international solidarity persists. College students across the U.S. have risked expulsion and threats of deportation to protest the anti-Muslim genocide in Gaza. But even as Mahmoud Khalil and other brave students and workers are brutalized and jailed, the working class must fight back even more aggressively to defend our class. As the Trump regime expands its reign of state terror, as conditions for workers around the world keep getting worse, we must seize the opportunity of this moment. Most of all, we must call upon our class to build Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Without a commitment to antiracism, anti-sexism, and communist revolution, the most courageous struggles will lead to dead-end reformist battles settled on the bosses’ terms. Only an organized working class with a revolutionary outlook can lead us toward our final liberation: communism. Join us!
New York, April 1—It’s been almost two years since we’ve had a cafeteria on our campus and students and workers are angry! We are half-way through our spring semester and despite the promises from the administration, Bronx Community College’s (BCC) majority Black and Brown students still can’t buy food without walking ten minutes to the overpriced deli nearby. In response, our student-led club, Common Ground, along with a PL’er and campus workers, are preparing to intensify the fight against this racist capitalist austerity.
It’s clear that under capitalism, our health and wellbeing is of little to no concern to the bosses. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to build grassroots struggle to demand our immediate needs with fellow workers and students, and to grow the understanding that only a worker-run communist society can guarantee healthy nutrition to all of our class.
People’s pantry reflects communism in action
As reported in a previous issue of CHALLENGE [1/15], our club has been organizing students to fight back against the racist campus bosses who have offered us nothing but excuses as to why students and workers on our campus are unable to buy anything that doesn’t come out of a vending machine. Instead of affordable, nutritious, healthy options, the students, 98 percent of whom are Black or Latin, are forced to buy overpriced garbage from vending machines that poison our bodies.
In response to this racist neglect, we organized a People’s Pantry at the end of last semester to give away healthy snacks to students. Relying completely on donations from students and workers, we fed hundreds of students as they prepared for final exams. In contrast to the bosses’ lies about how communism can’t work because workers are “disorganized” or “individualistic,” our pantry shows successful communist organizing in action!
We’ve continued this important work this semester, setting up in the library on Wednesdays. The support for the Pantry has been astounding. As the weeks progressed the movement gained traction as regular Pantry patrons would frustratingly ask for updates on the cafeteria's progress, or lack thereof, and were met with the same answer. Probably no time soon.
Expand the struggle – take aim at capitalism
This week we are planning a further escalation of our struggle with a rally and march. We’ll begin outside of campus, where we can draw in members of the community, which is a food desert itself and where many residents suffer from racist food and housing insecurity. After the rally we will march to the administration building to directly call out the college president and their stooges for their failure to ensure the availability of food on our campus. Finally, we wil set up our pantry to continue to serve students and workers.
CHALLENGE newspaper has been present at the pantry and has helped to spark many interesting discussions with students and workers. We’ve discussed the imortance of building confidence in students to build power so we can win this demand. We’ve discussed how the administration is essentially the enemy of students and workers, serving only to make excuses and to get us to accept racist austerity as the norm. We’ve also discussed the connections between the situation at our small campus and wider geopolitical events.
Making these connections is crucial because it ties together the racism we’re experiencing on our campus and U.S. imperialism. We’ve raised the fact that the U.S. has sent more than $20 billion to Israel and yet we don’t have a cafeteria and students have responded enthusiastically to this point. One of the chants for our upcoming rally is “From the Bronx to Palestine, malnutrition is a crime!” The racist brutality of capitalism comes in many forms and linking them together builds the solidarity and class consciousness that we need to build our movement and our Party.
Excitement is building as we prepare to increase our righteous anger and pin it on our small-time administration and the big-time racist, capitalist system. We will send a report for the next issue of CHALLENGE and keep the working class informed on the small steps we are taking in the Bronx to bring down capitalism and replace it with workers’ power!
Baltimore, MD, March 18 —“Tear down ICE, Tear down the walls” was one of many lively call and response chants as over 100 people challenged the role of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention at Baltimore’s George H. Fallon Federal Building. Immigrants detained in this hell hole are held for days without beds and showers in violation of the Department of Homeland Security’s own 12-hour detention rule since Maryland closed its immigration detention center next to the state’s maximum security prison. Progressive Labor Party members have been supporting the legislative fight for Maryland to outlaw 287G arrangements that deputize cops as immigration agents.
At the same time, at this rally, we also shared with our friends over 30 CHALLENGE newspapers that called for communist revolution as the solution to fascist attacks on immigrants by the capitalist state. We were pleased to be part of a rally that included many groups we have been working with, including our friends from the West Wednesday coalition that fights police murder, Filipino students we’ve joined in fighting for human rights in the Philippines, and CASA members (advocates for immigrants) with whom we’ve worked many times. The bosses’ press, as usual, ignored this significant rally while only mentioning an earlier press conference – clearly not wanting to inspire a more militant approach to fighting fascism in this critical moment. The struggle to win many of our friends in these groups to a communist vision of the future and to join our Party that is building that movement continues!
Thousands of furious workers are protesting the detention and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student and green card holder, who began life as a Palestinian refugee in Syria and led demonstrations at Columbia against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Khalil committed no crime but is being called a security threat and terrorist supporter, terms that have been used to violently silence workers throughout the U.S.’ genocidal, blood-soaked history. As U.S. imperialism weakens against rival Russian and Chinese imperialism and world war looms on the horizon, the Trump regime threatens this will be the first of many deportations to come.
The deportation apparatus Trump is using today to target Khalil and hunt additional antiracist students was built by liberal presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden, but this isn’t new for the U.S. capitalist class; the U.S. has been forcefully removing workers since its inception. The bosses use racist mass removals and deportations as tools to increase profits, lower wages, build racism and nationalism, and dampen working class opposition (Multiracialunity.org, 5/7/16).
Below, we will discuss the history of U.S. deportations, current events at Columbia, the limitations of a nationalist outlook, and why joining the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party and overthrowing capitalism is the only solution.
Racism and deportations – established U.S. practices
Since 1882, the U.S. has forced the removal of nearly 57 million people, more than any other country in the world. The vast majority were “voluntary” departures, meaning ordered by federal authorities. In the last 100 years, more people have been expelled than have been allowed to stay in the US permanently.
As the U.S.’ genocidal “manifest destiny” and decades of mass exterminations during the “Indian Wars” were winding down, the U.S. capitalists were consolidating their stranglehold over the continental U.S. — and the modern deportation mechanism got rolling, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. By 1870, twenty percent of California’s workforce was from China, but they were no longer needed as the native-born population grew. The Act not only restricted immigration but denied citizenship or the right to marry a non-Chinese, even to longtime residents.
Over 22,000 immigrants had their citizenship revoked from 1906-1967, most often on a political basis. Terrified by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, U.S. leaders targeted left-wing leaders. Perhaps the most famous case is that of anarchist Emma Goldman, and nearly 250 leftists were deported to then-communist-led Soviet Union that same year.
Thousands were deported under the Nationality Act of 1940, and in 1952 during McCarthyism, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, that required citizenship applicants to prove their Constitutional loyalty. One of the best-known victims, the Trinidad-born communist Claudia Jones, was expelled in 1955.
Despite undocumented immigrants being vital to the agriculture, construction, and home health industries, Trump is building racism and nationalism by resurrecting the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allowed a President to remove non-citizens during a “declared war,” including those who are long-term residents, without any hearing or due process. The Supreme Court has said in the past that the Act can be used only during an “invasion or predatory incursion,” but that’s exactly what Trump calls immigrants – an invasion – especially those who cross the southern border.
Mahmoud Khalil and anti-imperialism
Whether a student expresses verbal sympathy for Hamas or not is currently not a legal basis for arrest, academic sanctions or deportation. Khalil, however, actually said in a CNN interview, “I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other.” Although we do not know Khalil personally and do not know if by this he means he supports a single binational state with equal rights or if he thinks an Islamic state under Hamas is desirable for Palestinians, he at least does not believe that a state of continual occupation and war benefits either Israelis or Palestinians.
PLP fights beyond the positions of the groups leading the Columbia and nationwide student protests for a mass party for communism – the only force that threatens imperialism and genocide. Most of these groups are committed to the “right of self-determination,” which is a common position of most groups on the “left” today, but lacks a class analysis of capitalism. “Self-determination” or “nationalism of the oppressed” essentially argues U.S. capitalists are bad, but capitalists in Palestine, Sudan, Haiti or China are okay, with no distinction between workers and bosses.
Capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of the working class by a small group of owners, and both imperialist nations and colonized nations are so divided. Even within the “imperialist core” nations, the vast majority of the population is exploited and repressed. Columbia students know this, as does anyone who protested for George Floyd or with the coal or with the coal miners in Alabama. Workers in imperialist nations have far more in common with workers of colonized or formerly colonized ones in the so-called Global South. PLP endorses Marx’s revolutionary slogan, “workers of the world, unite!”
The second fallacy, however, is that these same class divisions do not exist within colonized or oppressed nations, like Palestine, Sudan or Haiti. For example, the pro-Palestine movement outside of the occupied territories expresses unmitigated support of Hamas, mostly on the basis that they are the leaders of an oppressed society and thus cannot be criticized.
However, the institutions and representatives of the imperialists are always deeply implanted in these nations’ political and financial institutions, whether before or after battles for liberation. In every state where national liberation struggles have been victorious, from South Africa to Algeria to El Salvador and many, many more, conditions are as bad or worse, despite having ruling classes of the same ethnicity as them. The local economic structure remains tied to international imperialist institutions like the IMF – or increasingly to China — and the economies remain limited to resource extraction.
In Palestine, Fatah, the openly corrupt ruling party of the West Bank, is in league with Israeli rulers and their rabid police. Hamas, the Islamic group that rules in Gaza, has accepted millions of dollars from Israel both at its entry into Gaza in 1987 and in recent years, so Israel could promote Palestinian divisions. Hamas ruled Gaza by taxing the general population at exorbitant rates and suppressing its opposition. Many leaders lived in wealth in Qatar, while most of the population is food insecure. And although many Gazans may admire the courage of Hamas fighters, there is a widespread dislike of the consequences.
The communist movement we deserve
It’s misleading to declare that all rulers who oppose the U.S. have the interests of any workers at heart, even their own. All workers in imperialist and oppressed nations are victimized by capitalism and, we must unite as class sisters and brothers to overthrow it. As the U.S. loses ground to China in productivity and influence in much of the world and as inter-imperialist war grows closer, fascist repression will be needed no matter which politicians are in power. Join PLP, and fight to link these struggles together into a mass anti-imperialist movement for communist revolution!
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UK's anti-migrant attacks: WORKING PEOPLE HAVE NO NATION
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- 28 March 2025 135 hits
The struggles of immigrants in the United Kingdom are deeply connected to the broader contradictions of capitalism—oppression, inequality, and racist super-exploitation. The Progressive Labor Party asserts that these issues are not random misfortunes but rather immigration policies and borders are designed to serve the interests of the increasingly fascist national imperialist ruling classes from the U.S. to Europe, and their junior partners in the ruling classes around the world. Capitalism thrives on cheap labor, divisions within the working class, and the scapegoating of immigrants to divert attention from their own failures and control labor and resources.
Economic exploitation and class struggle
Capitalism consistently drives immigrants into exploitative economic conditions. Highly skilled and educated individuals are often relegated to insecure, low-paying jobs. Employers take advantage of their vulnerable status by subjecting them to poor working conditions and minimal job security. Zero-hours contracts, wage theft, and hazardous workplaces disproportionately affect migrant workers, perpetuating a system that prioritizes profit over people.
The Progressive Labor Party fights for an end to anti-worker migration policies, stronger labor protections, unionization, and the eradication of exploitative work conditions. The struggle of immigrants is inherently a class struggle—both migrant and native-born workers must unite against their shared enemy: capitalist exploitation. However our long term goal is to smash all borders and fight for a communist world run by and for the international working class.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric and divide-and-rule tactics
Capitalists fuel anti-immigrant sentiment to divide the working class. By blaming immigrants for low wages, housing shortages, and strained public services, they shift attention away from the real culprits—corporate greed, privatization, and austerity policies. The ruling class benefits from pitting workers against one another instead of against the exploitative system that oppresses them all.
The Progressive Labor Party actively opposes such scapegoating and champions international worker solidarity. The challenges facing the working class in Britain can not be solved by closing borders or deporting immigrants, but rather by smashing the capitalist system that creates inequality in the first place.
Border controls and the immigration system
The UK’s immigration system is designed to serve capitalist interests, selectively admitting workers when needed while criminalizing and deporting others. Policies like the "hostile environment" push migrants into precarious situations, exposing them to deportation threats and restricting their access to essential services such as healthcare and education.
We argue that borders function as tools of the ruling class to control labor and enforce alienation. The Progressive Labor Party demands the abolition of exploitative capitalism and its racist immigration laws and fights for a world where all workers, regardless of origin, should have full rights, including citizenship. This can only be achieved in a communist world where all workers from around the world are in power.
Housing and social services
Immigrants face widespread discrimination in housing, overcrowding, and homelessness. The lack of affordable housing is not a result of immigration but a consequence of a capitalist system that prioritizes profit over people’s needs. Real estate speculation, the privatization of public housing, and government austerity measures have fueled a housing crisis that affects both immigrants and native citizens alike.
Communists call for state investment in social housing, rent controls, while also fighting for an end to landlord exploitation. The struggle for fair housing is an essential part of the broader fight against capitalist oppression. Under communism housing will not be rented or sold for profit. There will be free, safe, and good housing for all.
Racism and state repression
Racism serves as a tool of capitalist repression, reinforcing economic exploitation and social exclusion. Police brutality, surveillance, and discriminatory immigration enforcement are used to intimidate and oppress immigrant communities. Detention centers, deportations, and restrictions on asylum seekers are all part of the state's broader strategy to criminalize migrants.
The Progressive Labor Party fights for the destruction of racist state institutions and detention centres. Only through an international communist revolution, under the banner of the Progressive Labor Party, can systemic racism and capitalist oppression be eradicated.
Long live the international working class and the Progressive Labour Party!
