Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a tried-and-true racist, sexist, and fascist of the internationalist main wing of the U.S. ruling class, is rising in the polls after spending $338 million on media ads—to date—in his bid for the presidency. Bloomberg’s candidacy reveals the dilemma of the banks and multinational corporations that rule the U.S. When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election in 2016, it marked finance capital’s loss of control over the Republican Party. Trump has mostly allied with the isolationist Small Fascists led by the Koch family, the “Fortress America” capitalist bosses who don’t want to invest in a global war with China and/or Russia. As a former stock and bond trader who made his fortune by selling data to Wall Street, Bloomberg and his checkbook candidacy reflect a desperate bid by the main wing, the Big Fascists, to impose direct control over the elections and the state apparatus. But unfortunately for the bosses, Bloomberg brings a lot of negative baggage with him.
Over the last 30 years, the most powerful ruling class in history has been on an epic losing streak: two disastrous wars in the Middle East, a devastating economic crisis, and a stubborn challenge from the Koch faction. The main wing bosses have responded with intensifying fascism, from mass incarceration to mass deportations to record levels of kkkop murders of Black workers. Meanwhile, the rulers’ ranks are divided, undisciplined and openly corrupt. Barely half of U.S. workers bother to vote for president. Alienation and disgust with the capitalist system is widespread and profound.
At the moment, finance capital’s best bets to unseat Small Fascist Trump are three white men close to 80.  Bernie Sanders is a fake leftist who backs U.S. imperialism and garners support among desperate young workers buried in debt. Joe Biden is a racist bumbler who has yet to come close to winning a primary in three presidential campaigns. Bloomberg is a richer and more disciplined version of Trump, with a personal fortune estimated at $64 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the U.S. (Forbes). His well-documented history of outrageous racism and sexism will make him a tough sell for the younger workers the bosses will need to fight World War III.  
Big Racists
The main wing capitalists have a long history of seeking Black loyalty while simultaneously launching vicious assaults on the Black working class.  We can see this from the Civil War to World War II, from Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs to Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech, where he peddled the old racist myth that the plight of Black workers was the fault of Black male irresponsibility (New York Times, 6/15/08).
Arch-racist Bloomberg is a shameful part of this tradition. As mayor of New York City, he unleashed the cops to stop and frisk innocent workers more than five million times during his 12 years in office. The vast majority of those terrorized and abused were Black and Latin males, “even though their white counterparts were twice as likely to be found with a gun, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union” (NYT, 11/17/19). Bloomberg arrogantly defended his Jim Crow policy right up until he decided to run for president last fall. If anything, he said, “we disproportionately stop whites too much, and minorities too little” (6/28/13 interview on WOR).  
While Bloomberg is a Klansman in a three-piece suit, his racist approach to criminal injustice is part of the liberal Democratic Party tradition. Stop-and-frisk was a logical extension of the mass incarceration policies rooted in Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, “tough-on-crime legislation that was championed by [presidential candidate] Joe Biden and supported by Bernie Sanders” (Politico, 2/13).
There is also no shortage of older Black misleaders, from senior ministers like New York’s Calvin Butts to the Congressional Black Caucus, lining up to pocket some of racist Bloomberg’s cash and support his campaign. Among these class traitors is former Black Panther and Chicago hack Bobby Rush.
Big Sexists
Over the last four years, the Democratic Party has been posing as the anti-sexist savior of the working class by exposing Trump’s crude sexism.  But in reality, liberals’ assaults on women may be worse. Since the 1980s, 64 women have brought sex discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits against Bloomberg and his organizations (GQ, 2/13). According to the Washington Post, he told a pregnant employee to “kill” her unborn child and “talked kind of crudely about women all the time” (Washington Post, 2/15).
When Bloomberg helped to engineer the massive wave of gentrification in Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods, he disproportionately displaced women and families (NYT, 11/9/19).
Big Fascists
Bloomberg is used to suspending liberal democratic laws and rules, a hallmark of fascism. As New York’s mayor, with the Democratic Party’s blessing, he used his fat bankroll to change the term limits law and then buy himself a third term. More recently, the Democratic National Committee changed its rules to give Bloomberg a place in the February 19 debate, despite the fact that he essentially has just one donor: himself.
For years now, main wing liberals have championed direct ruling-class control over education through the heavily segregated charter school movement, where powerful bosses like Eli Broad or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg privatize schools and run them on the taxpayers’ dime without interference from elected school boards, teachers’ unions, or parents. After Bloomberg won mayoral control over the New York City school system, the number of charter schools expanded from 18 to 183 under his administration  (Politico, 1/20).
Bloomberg wants a national ID work card system based on DNA and fingerprints. He expanded camera surveillancein Manhattan, bragging “you’re never going to know where all of our cameras are” (politico.com, 1/18). He gave drones to the NYPD and deployed the Sky Watch towers used at the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor Black and Latin neighborhoods. He spied on Occupy Wall Street protesters and sent police agents to snoop on Muslims up and down the East Coast (Politico, 1/18).
Before they can try to impose full-blown fascism on the working class, the bosses must get their own house in order. Bloomberg is showing a new willingness to discipline the capitalist ruling class. Though he’d opposed financial regulation and oversight in the past, “the candidate announced an ambitious financial policy plan on Tuesday that includes imposing a tax on financial transactions and toughening restrictions on risky banking practices…Perhaps the most surprising proposal, given the billionaire’s close personal ties to Wall Street movers and shakers, is a plan for the Justice Department to create a dedicated team to fight corporate crime by “encouraging prosecutors to pursue individuals, not only corporations, for infractions” (NYT, 2/18).
Workers need communism: join PLP
Election-year rhetoric aside, the bosses’ political parties always defend the capitalists’ class interests. At the moment, Republicans and Democrats are serving different wings of the U.S. ruling class. But both parties represent anti-worker sexism, racism, and fascism.  
The Progressive Labor Party seeks to champion the interests of the international working class. By joining the class struggle in our areas of work, by expanding the readership of Challenge and most of all by recruiting workers and youth to our revolutionary communist organization, we help the working class prepare to turn imperialist war into class war and lead armed struggle for a dictatorship of the proletariat.  Because the working class is international, we are organized as one international party dedicated to communism, and nothing less.  Don’t vote, join PLP!

CHICAGO, February 18—Class struggle is in session at one racist high school. Black and Latin working-class youth are teaching a lesson in fightback.
Students refused to stand during the national anthem, causing some teachers to react with gutter racism. In protest, students organized a sit-in, got a racist teacher removed, and exposed the liberal misleaders. In short, they provided the kind of working-class leadership needed to change the world.
The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) extends a giant salute to these bold multiracial students for the antiracist example they are setting. It is working-class youth all over the world that are providing leadership and energy to the struggles against racism, sexism, environmental destruction, mass shootings, and deportations. Their revolutionary potential can hardly be understated.
Communist need to support, learn from, and offer leadership to these working-class youth. Connecting the struggles they are leading to an international movement and mass Party fighting to destroy racism and capitalism brings us all the closer to communist revolution and our collective liberation.
Stand for a racist anthem? Hell no!
On January 30 at Senn High School, students refused to stand for the national anthem during the  school’s Hispanic Heritage Assembly. At least three multiracial students, including the daughter of two PLP comrades, remained seated in order to protest the flag of the imperialist U.S. bosses and its racist symbolism. Specifically, they were protesting racist police terror, ICE raids and deportations, and the 500 years of racist oppression of Black workers.
This protest caused a physical education teacher, Robert Spurlin, to spew racist ideas at the students. He told a Black student that if she gets free lunch, then she “should be standing.”
He told a Latin student that she “should go back to her country.” This enraged the surrounding students. Other teachers, apologists for racism, intervened and threw the students out of the assembly.
Students organize a sit-in
The students exposed the racist nature of schools under capitalism, where racism against Black and Latin students is the norm, not the exception. For two weeks, the principal stalled and sat on the numerous complaints she received from students and parents.
The students were fed up and took matters into their own hands. They organized a mass multiracial sit-in on February 12, which received local and national coverage. Over 150 students chanted, “this is our school.”
The principal and the district were forced to remove the racist gym teacher from the building on paid leave as they “carry on their investigation.” The principal also reached a written agreement to several demands put forward by the students:

• More town halls to hear student voices
• Better information on how to report offending teachers and staff
• More signs and posters communicating “our” values
• Cultural training for all staff

To make the fight a mass issue, students also plan to circulate a petition online to other schools and workplaces. Fighting for these demands can build a culture of fightback for future attacks at the school, as well as expose the limits of antiracism under capitalism.
Liberal bosses try to smother fightback
The liberal capitalist misleaders will only ultimately steer their struggle into deadends, if not smother it entirely. The liberal principal is already trying to stifle and control the antiracist anger of these working-class rebels.
A clear example of liberal racism at the school is the demographics of the elite International Baccalaureate (IB) program teaching staff, which is mainly white. The majority of the student rebels come from the other programs at the school.
The rebels are told that they are not as smart as the IB students and consequently they are treated worse. Every day all students go through metal detectors and some have their possessions searched. In reality, the rebels demonstrate a greater understanding of capitalism. Their leadership at the school can attest to that. Meanwhile, the IB students are more likely to be brainwashed and bought into the racist divisions of the system.
Worthless words from union misleaders
Be it metal detectors, racist teachers, or union leaders and politicians who enforce deplorable learning conditions, Black and Latin students get attacked by racism on the daily.
In response to the attack on the antiracist students, the supposedly militant leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) could only meekly offer through their spokesperson that the union expects “tolerance and inclusivity” from its members and all CPS staff (Block Club Chicago, 2/13).
Mayor Lightfoot stomps on past fightback
New racist liberal mayor Lori Lightfoot is carrying on the ruthless tradition of her Democratic predecessors as she attacks the working class of the City. Whatever her self-proclaimed “progressive” credentials, she fought tooth and nail during last year’s education worker strike against increasing funding and staffing in the mostly Black and Latin public school system. Meanwhile, she was more than happy to hand out over a billion dollars in workers taxes to finance private real estate developments in the City.
By attacking the strikers, Lightfoot attacked the ones who will get hurt the most—students.
We can never count on liberal politicians and union leaders to give the kind of anti-capitalist leadership and communist education that the international working-class needs and deserves.
All the more important to win working-class youth such as these Senn students to fight to abolish racism, something impossible under capitalism.
Carrying on the fight
These students are correctly protesting the racist nature of capitalist society and the Party must win them to continue their struggle. These liberal rulers run a devastatingly racist society and system. The students at Senn are carrying on and helping build a spirited movement led by working-class students from major U.S. cities such as Brooklyn and Los Angeles, to the schools of Paris and New Delhi and all over the world that are fighting back.
One more red salute to the Senn students! Stay tuned to this struggle!

NEW YORK CITY, February 16—At least 30 were arrested in Times Square as antiracists protested against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the tech companies that profit off of the racist terror against undocumented workers.
Nearly 500 antiracists protested in a march sponsored by Close the Camps/Cosecha against the Thomson Reuters Corporation. One protester said, “We will not remain silent as corporations profit from human suffering” (NY Post, 2/16). Such is the nature of a system defined by profit, exploitation, and theft of labor.
They chanted, “Brick by brick, wall by wall, we will make the system fall.” That system is capitalism. It will fall when we smash it with communist revolution under the leadership of Progressive Labor Party.
Passersby looked on; many chanted along. Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), some active in Close the Camps/Cosecha in New York and New Jersey, played an active role in the march. Nearly two hundred people took the communist newspaper, CHALLENGE.
The protest occurred just as Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump announced he will unleash ICE SWAT teams, units from the Southern border, on the workers and youth of New York City and other metropolitan hubs across the U.S.
Against such gutter racism, workers can and will fight back. We can beat back this racist attack, as long as we expose both Republican and Democrat leaders for the misleaders that they are.
Tech serves gestapo
Thomson Reuters and its subsidiaries give ICE access to numbers of databases in exchange for tens of millions of dollars. According to ICE, Reuters provides license plate scanning data and “continuous monitoring and alert service that provides real-time jail booking data to support the identification and location” of immigrant workers (VICE, 11/11/19).
This data feeds the gestapo deportation machine that tracks, captures, and terrorizes immigrant workers—many of whom are children—like animals. These are similar tactics used by slave catchers and the Ku Klux Klan who hunted down escaping enslaved workers in the 1800s. What the capitalist state did to Black workers then is what they are doing to mainly Latin workers now.
By collaborating with ICE, Thomson Reuters is following the same grisly racist path of IBM, which powered the Nazis. The U.S. tech company played “a pivotal role in the Holocaust —all six phases: identification, expulsion from society, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination” (Huffington Post, 2/27/2012).
Of course, Thomson Reuters is just one of numerous technology companies using their innovations to serve bipartisan state terrorism. “Hewlett Packard Enterprise…Microsoft, Motorola Solutions…Palantir [Amazon, Dell, Canon, UPS, LinkedIn, and more] all have active contracts with…ICE” (NBC News, 6/20/2018). And yes, IBM continues to upload its legacy as a fascist collaborator, with the Border Patrol this time.  
Capitalism is the crime
The U.S. gestapo criminalizes workers and children, destroys lives, breaks families, and sheds blood. The raids also succeed in terrorizing and pacifying countless more workers.
Workers and children who risk their lives to cross a capitalist-made border are not criminals; they are refugees. They are our sisters and brothers who have the same aspirations as all other members of our class—to get our needs met against an impossible system.
The real crime is committed by the U.S. imperialists who created borders and the economic situation forcing workers to escape in the first place. The countries—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador—that workers mostly hail from “provide the cheap labor to cut the sugar cane, haul the coffee and bananas, and slave in sweatshops and the kitchens of tourist resorts” (Huffington Post, 6/24/14).
Know your enemy
Workers and youth who stand up to this racism must be encouraged. The challenge is to turn the antiracist rage of protesters into recognizing the need for an international movement and revolutionary Party against capitalism. If the antiracist protesters unite under the banner of the racist Democratic Party, the working class is under greater danger (see page 2). Liberal politicians and bosses are not friends of the working class. They seek to exploit the desperation of workers in order to build allegiance to the very system that oppresses us.
Smash borders and profit
To eliminate racist deportations, we need to abolish borders once and for all and create a society that is run by and for the working class. No politician can do that. Only a communist party, Progessive Labor Party, can.
As Langston Hughes wrote, the fight is the same everywhere (see page 8). PLP fights for multiracial unity among all workers across all borders. Divisions by race and nationality, economically and politically weaken the entire working class. Only a united class under the leadership of Black and Latin workers in the international PLP has the power to break this system, brick by brick. Join us.

He was an antiracist, a fighter, and a Black communist. Langston Hughes (1901-1967) both reflected and shaped the history of his time. Promoting multiracial unity and internationalism, Hughes serves as an inspiration for antiracists and communists everywhere.
A fighter
A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hughes moved to the left during the “red decade” of the 1930s, when he worked tirelessly with the Communist Party (CPUSA) to free the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white women—from legal lynching (“Scottsboro, Ltd.”). He hailed Communist Party led multiracial unionism (“Open Letter to the South”), praised the uprooting of racism in Soviet Central Asia, and reported on the multiracial Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (I Wonder as I Wander).
He later nurtured the militancy of the Civil Rights Movement (“Freedom Train”) and the emergence of post-colonial African literature. While Hughes’s political organizing was primarily in his writing, his life was threatened when he toured the U.S. South giving poetry readings in support of the Scottsboro Boys, and he was almost killed by a fascist-fired mortar shell in Spain.
Poems of communist virtues
The first Black U.S. author to make a living entirely from his writings, Hughes published some 35 books, ranging from novels and short stories to plays, autobiography to journalism, musicals to children’s books. His Chicago Defender newspaper columns featuring the forthright opinions of the fictional Harlem worker Jesse B. Semple (e.g., Simple Speaks His Mind) cemented his popularity.  Above all, Hughes was known for the hundreds of poems he penned voicing the anger, bravery, and wry irony of Black U.S. workers.
He also promoted the necessity for multiracial working-class internationalism. “Dreams” are, for Hughes, not idle imaginings, but expressions of actual human need.  If indefinitely “deferred,” however, a dream either “dr[ies] up like a raisin in the sun” or “explode[s]” (“Harlem”).  (The poem inspired the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun.) What is needed is a world “Where black or white, / Whatever race you be, / Will share the bounties of the earth/ And every man is free” (“I Dream a World”).
Bosses censor his revolutionary side
What most people know—or think they know—about Hughes, however, has been warped by anticommunism. Grilled about some of his revolutionary poems of the 1930s (“Goodbye, Christ,” “Good Morning, Revolution!”, and “Put Another ‘S’ in the U.S.A.”) he was hauled before Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in 1954. Hughes never “named names” or repudiated the Communist Party.  But he increasingly engaged in self-censorship, ventriloquizing his sharpest criticisms of ruling-class red-baiting through the sardonic commentary of Jesse B. Semple and excluding all his Depression-era pro-communist poetry from the 1957 edition of his Selected Poems. Both Hughes the man and Hughes the poet were victims of the Cold War.
The political censorship of Hughes’s pro-communism still continues in the selection of Hughes’s works in the textbooks used in high school and college classrooms.  The standard anthologies feature almost exclusively his 1920s blues- and jazz-inflected poems, such as “The Weary Blues,” and works affirming the value and beauty of Negro identity, such as the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the short story “The Blues I’m Playing,” and the poems “Mother to Son” (“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”) and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (“My soul has grown deep like the rivers”).  
The effect of selecting such texts and excluding his pro-communist, anti-capitalist works is to convert Hughes’s revolutionary, class-based politics into a politics of Black cultural nationalism that overlooks the grounding of racism in capitalist social relations. The pro-communist Hughes is then made safe for the capitalist classroom. The Hughes who celebrated the achievements of Soviet socialism is expelled.
Weaknesses of old movement
Because of his closeness to the CPUSA, however, Hughes’s works reflect not just its strengths but also its shortcomings. For instance, his ambiguous relationship to U.S. patriotism is linked to the CPUSA’s view (especially pronounced during the era of the Popular Front Against Fascism (1936-1945)—of communism as “twentieth-century Americanism.” In the frequently anthologized “I Too,” the “darker brother” proclaims that he’ll eventually be invited to the table from which he has been excluded because “they’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed . . . I, too, am America.”
In “Let America Be America Again,” there is a tug-of-war between two speakers, one readily assimilated to the American Dream, the other voicing the standpoint of those historically excluded (“the Negro . . . the poor white, . . . the red man . . . the immigrant”) who proclaim, “America never was America to me.” But the poem ends, “And yet I swear this oath—America will be!”
Here a liberal politics of inclusion—premised upon the extension of U.S. “democracy”—substitutes for the revolutionary view that U.S. capitalism is founded upon racist exploitation and division, and that only proletarian revolution can produce the “dream” of a better world.
Progressive Labor Party (its founding members broke away from the CPUSA in the early 1960s) has learned from the mistakes of the old  communist movement. It is now clear that in the contradiction between nationalism and internationalism, communists must denounce nationalism in all forms. Nationalist politics only serve the interests of the  capitalist ruling class.
Barack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration speech is a case in point. Quoting Hughes, he asserted, “I too, am America,” as well as in Martin Luther King’s riffing on “Let America Be America Again” in several key speeches (Miller 2016, 2020).
Clearly, ruling class defenders have no trouble co-opting ideas when it suits them.
Undying commitment
Despite these ideological contradictions, Hughes’s principal legacy is an undying commitment to the struggle against racism and the fight for an egalitarian communist future, one in which the blood-sucking “life robbers” of colonialism and imperialism will be overthrown by the “Red Armies of the international proletariat / Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown . . . / Rais[ing] the blood-red flag that / Never will come down!” (“Always the Same”). Hughes was a poet laureate for the workers of the world.