THE BRONX, December 3—Fifty students protested against racist budget cuts at Bronx Community College (BCC). These students, along with education workers, gave notice that we won’t simply accept larger class size, reduced course offerings and fewer custodians, to name just a few of the cuts, that the BCC administration is planning.
Student after student gave testimonies of how the budget cuts directly affect them— delaying graduation, reducing their access to their professors, forcing them to use dirty bathrooms, and more.
A member of Progressive Labor Party brought a message of solidarity and communist analysis. The fight at BCC is part of the global fight against capitalism. Only by fighting for a communist system with workers in power can we ensure that all students get the education we deserve.
Working class under attack
The student population at BCC is 98 percent Black and Latin, largely immigrant, and suffering from rampant food insecurity and racist unemployment. The BCC administration is putting the students under even greater pressure. The racist plans include:

• Developing a “more resilient staffing model” in order to respond to future shifts in enrollment numbers. This means hiring more part-time faculty and staff that can be laid off whenever the administration needs to.

• Increasing class size.
• Reduction of approximately 225 sections. Fewer classes means it will be harder for students to enroll in classes that they need to graduate.
• Decrease in departmental budgets.
• Increase fees that students and faculty pay for services like technology and parking

When the working class is under attack, what do we do?  We must stand up and fight back. In doing so, we expose the limits of what’s possible under capitalism. By the looks of it, capitalism can’t provide the most basic necessities for working-class students.
Taxing the rich is no solution
As PLP members have been involved in this and future demonstrations, we have raised the idea that it’s not enough to just tax billionaires. It’s not enough to increase funding for BCC. Even in the best of times, education under capitalism is about reinforcing racism and individualism.
College under capitalism is about deceiving us into thinking we can escape the working class, that we can “get ahead” (by exploiting other workers) and that we can avoid the misery of this racist, sexist system.
The international working class will never be liberated through capitalist education. The bosses don’t want to educate us all, and even if they did, it wouldn’t end exploitation and racism.
More fightback and Party-building ahead
We have another demonstration planned next week, where we will confront the administration directly over these budget cuts. The boldness of the united students and education workers will be on display, as we take small steps and train ourselves to challenge the rulers on campus. Bringing CHALLENGE to these protests is crucial to building the fightback spirit and class-consciousness of the students and workers.
As we organize more students to get involved and as the ideas of communism and PLP become ideas grasped by masses of students and faculty, these small steps will be transformed into leaps toward a communist future. Onward!

During meetings of a workers’ committee in a community organization, where some Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades do political work, reports are included in the agenda which analyze the world situation, especially everything related to the struggles of workers worldwide.   
During past meetings, we have talked about Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia. This time, we called to show solidarity with workers in Colombia, who organized themselves together with the peasants and young people in an unprecedented challenge in history. The workers are rebelling against the neoliberal policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that have forced “economic adjustments:” fascist measures that greatly affect the lives of working people already caught in poverty and misery.
For many years, the bosses have murdered hundreds of social and union leaders in Colombia. This time it was the turn of the workers, who lost their fear of all the oppression and fascism and threw themselves into the streets in massive protests in several cities and towns.
The protests became violent, due to the brutal response of the army, police and special riot forces trained by United States advisors. They shot at protesters, and used tear gas and water jets with chemicals, which caused many deaths and wounded, even though the government and the bosses’ press say there were only three.
 One of the workers murdered was a young student from the capital Bogotá, which provoked an even greater anger from the protesters. In their fury the workers destroyed numerous shops, large supermarkets, banks, and government offices. Many of the businesses were “looted” by workers who came down from impoverished and marginalized areas after so many years of abandonment under the bosses’ profit system.
For this, they were called vandals, but the true vandals in the country have been the corrupt, liberal, and repressive capitalist governments.
Workers take the streets over bosses’ cuts
These massive protests were convened mainly by trade union leaders and other sectors of the working class, who are tired of their living situation. They are fighting impending fascist reforms that Ivan Duque, an ally of the U.S government, plans to present to the National Congress. These reforms, among other things, would reduce pensions to retired workers and reduce wages to young workers. But this fascist government did not expect that workers, peasants and young people were going to organize and take to the streets!  
With the working class at the forefront, arm in arm with the peasants and youth, a massive wave of protests  was generated throughout the country and continued for several days.
Imperialist war, and
international communist
revolution through PLP
At the end of the discussion our PLP member summed up that these events were taking place within the framework of the power struggle between the imperialists of the United States, China and Russia for the control of  other countries and their wealth, especially oil and minerals like lithium. Lithium can be considered the “white gold” of these times given its widespread use in profitable products like electric cars. The largest reserves of lithium are in Latin American countries, especially in Bolivia which has recently experienced a racist and fascist coup d’etat. Despite the bosses’ violent repression there, many indigenous workers are maintaining a brave fight against the new fascist liberal government.
In the end, everyone present agreed that we must be supportive of the workers in Colombia and worldwide who are facing fascist neoliberalism that is advancing strongly across the planet.
As members of PLP we must raise the consciousness of the working class and prepare for the only way to overcome this capitalist hell: mass violent communist revolution. We have to take initiative during this wave of popular uprisings of workers and young people around the world, to direct the workers to the goals of seizure of state power from the capitalists and the construction of communism.
To work toward this goal, it is important for us in the Party to stress the importance of internationalism and working-class power, wherever we are. Confidence in the international working class, communist politics, and our Party is our only way forward.

Despite the smoke and mirrors over “corruption” in Ukraine, the Donald Trump impeachment proceedings expose the intense fight between two factions within the U.S. capitalist class. The battle between the main wing, Big Fascist liberal bosses and the Small Fascist, more domestically oriented bosses is based on something more fundamental than any “quid pro quo” in Kiev. It reflects a sharp difference over how to manage the U.S. bosses’ decline.
The U.S. rulers’ real conflict is over how to deal with the rise of the Chinese bosses as a global superpower and to preserve their vast investments in Middle East oil and around the world. Workers have no side in this fight. Both capitalist factions will give us fascism, though in different forms. For the international working class, the only choice is communist revolution—to eliminate inter-imperialist war and fascism by smashing capitalism for all time.
Ukraine and the death of the liberal world order
Trump’s impeachment was initiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other politicians controlled by the Big Fascists, the same group that established the liberal world order after World War II. These main wing bosses invested trillions of dollars and decades of effort into dismantling the old Soviet Union, the first workers’ state in the history of the world. Even after the USSR was dissolved in 1991, the U.S. rulers continued to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Russia. Toward that end, they backed anti-Soviet dissenters, corrupt politicians, and open Ukrainian fascists (Nation, 2/22).
By contrast, the domestic bosses’ isolationist playbook calls for ceding geopolitical ground to its other imperialist rival Russia. As the Daily Caller News Foundation, a Small Fascist media outlet, stated: “We need Ukraine like an alcoholic needs a drink… [The State Department has to stop] keeping our assumptions exactly where they were in the fall of 1977, when fighting the Soviet menace consumed a lion’s share of the federal budget” (RealClearPolitics.com, 11/15). However self-serving or uneven Trump may be, he is carrying out the Small Fascists’ Fortress America strategy.
Ukraine’s local bosses are adjusting accordingly. Billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who not long ago financed military attacks against eastern Ukraine’s Russian-speaking Donbas region, is now pursuing closer ties to Russia: “EU and NATO won’t take us, but Russia is ready to welcome us”(New York Times, 11/13). Further, Trump’s military withdrawal from Syria has surrendered a big piece of the Middle East to Russian and Iranian control. This is the real reason for Trump’s impending impeachment: his retreat from the U.S. empire.
A tale of two capitalist factions
Since the 1930s, the Big Fascists have dominated the U.S. capitalist class. Led originally by the Rockefeller family oil and financial monopoly, they have pulled the puppet strings of every U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the exception of Trump. In 1945, by incinerating hundreds of thousands of workers with atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. the Big Fascists established themselves as the leading genocidal butchers of the new world order. Over the 75 years since, they have butchered our class in Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Congo, South Africa, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Mexico—and in dozens of other countries, including the U.S., all to preserve the profits they’ve stolen from our class.
For decades, the Small Fascists have rankled over being taxed to pay for wars to protect the Big Fascists’ multinational investments, which compete with their own domestic-centered businesses. They have consistently opposed U.S. military intervention in the Middle East as an unfair government subsidy to their imperialist competition, like Exxon Mobil.
This domestic faction is currently led by the ultra-rightwing Koch family and Koch Industries, the top supplier of capital equipment for the petroleum industry and the second-largest privately held company in the U.S. The Kochs have financed numerous gutter racist and fascist organizations around the world, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and assorted white nationalist militias.
The unholy Trump-Koch-fundamentalist alliance
The Koch family fortune got a huge boost with the ascendance of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) at domestic oil and gas wells, to the point where the U.S. is now a net energy exporter for the first time in many years. It also gave the Kochs ample funds to consolidate their control over the Republican Party. The Small Fascists replaced traditional Big Fascist Republicans with Tea Party members and other compliant politicians. In 2016, they saw their opportunity to seize control of the presidency. The Koch family alone budgeted $889 million for the campaign.
Trump and the Small Fascists struck a deal. In exchange for choosing Koch protégé Michael Pence as his vice-presidential running mate, Trump received the Kochs’ backing, along with the support of big-money Christian fundamentalists. The ability of this unholy alliance to seize the White House reflects a longterm liberal decline, the result of more than 20 years of failed Middle East wars and the 2008 economic crisis. Though they’ve have had some differences over trade and immigration, Trump has mostly done what the Small Fascists want, especially in foreign policy, taxes, and regulation. For now, at least, he’s kept their support.
Oppose all fascists
It’s not hard to see that the Koch faction is clearly fascist. Open racists have been energized by the Trump presidency. Attacks by white nationalists are on the rise, from Texas and South Carolina to Syracuse, New York. This Nazi scum has penetrated the White House in the form of “senior policy adviser” Stephen Miller (Guardian, 11/16). Anti-racist workers everywhere are understandably appalled.
But many workers fail to see the equally fascist character of the liberal imperialist faction and the Democratic Party it controls. Behind Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the Big Fascists have imposed mass racist imprisonment and intensified racist police terror. They have done—and will do—more to build fascism than the Kochs could dream of. That’s why Progressive Labor Party calls them the greater danger to our class.
To try to survive the deepening contradictions of capitalism, the liberal bosses will use fascism to crush the Kochs and their ilk. Trump’s impeachment marks their first big step in that direction. Then the Big Fascists will intensify their brutal exploitation of the working class, in preparation for leading the U.S. into World War III.
As communists, we must organize our fellow workers to act independently of the leadership of all fascists, Big or Small. We have a long road to travel—and a world to win!

FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA, November 16—Today Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members from Washington, D.C. and PLP transit workers from New York City joined hundreds of workers in support of the 23-day Cinder Bed Road strike of 130 transit workers. The decision to strike is  a historic one, since the last time workers went on strike was in 1978.
Along with our study group members we are continuing our participation in the path breaking strike of mainly immigrant workers against Transdev, a private transit company, by helping picketing at the Cinder Bed Road garage and bringing revolutionary communist literature and ideas to many workers.
At today’s rally, a PLP member and former president of Local 689 of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union (ATU) called for all 8,000 Metro (D.C. transit) workers to prepare to strike in solidarity, to a rousing chant of “If we don’t get it, shut it down!”
Two PLP members briefly blocked a scab bus at a traffic light to the delight of the assembled workers, declaring, as the song goes, “that there’s vampire bats and sewer rats, there’s pubic lice and crabs, but the lowest form of life on earth is the slimy [Metro] scab.”
Break the bosses’ laws
Union leaders have discouraged stopping scabs due to legal concerns, but the workers were happy to see us take the lead in this action. The workers were right in supporting our “illegal” action. The bosses control the politicians who pass laws to keep workers powerless. We must learn to break these bosses’ laws as we organize a movement to get rid of the entire capitalist system. Next time we should get more workers to join us.
Metro transit workers (Local 689) are contractually barred from striking, but the Cinder Bed strike is legal (also ATU 689 members) because Metro contracted out the Cinder Bed garage to the Transdev Corporation. Transdev operates in five continents and 20 countries and is known for brutal attacks on the wages, benefits, and working conditions of public transit workers across the globe. “Bus operators, utility workers, and mechanics at the bus garage are fighting for a pay and benefits package comparable to that of workers employed by Metro who perform the same jobs”(The Washington Post, 11/13).
 Another similar Transdev site in Virginia, the Fairfax Connector, with 600 workers (organized in Local 1164 of the ATU) is set to go on strike as well on November 30.
 But both strikes will be ineffective unless the main regional Metro union prepares to shut down the entire transit system in solidarity. Metro’s contracting out is a scheme by the bosses to undercut the livelihood first of one group of workers and then all workers.
Fight racist divisions
Communist PL’ers in the union are struggling with their fellow workers to organize strike preparation and sharper action against the transit bosses. But even more importantly, we are showing that even militant class struggle is not enough because the bosses will use every trick in the book to divide workers by race, immigration status, and anything else they can figure out to keep all of us exploited and under their thumb.
Several workers that we’ve met on the picket line have agreed to receive CHALLENGE and get involved in revolutionary politics. Let’s build the Progressive Labor Party so that we can free our class from capitalist, racist exploitation by smashing the capitalist state and building communism!