The struggle in Oakland, California is heating up!  The last couple of weeks have been action packed as the multi-racial working class, students, teachers, parents and community supporters, has mobilized against on-going, racist plans to dismantle public education from k-12 to Community College.  In the following three instances, Progressive Labor Party members and friends are actively promoting communist ideas, as they fight for better schools.

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No More Chances for the Chancellor
January 17—As Oakland teachers gear up for a potential strike, Laney College and Peralta District staff put the bosses’ minions and cowardly unions on notice. A contingent of faculty at Laney Community College riled up the crowd at a pre-semester gathering and faced down the Chancellor.  300 members of the morning audience stood up, turned their backs for 30 seconds, and chanted along with us, “When education is under attack, what do we do? Stand up! Fight back!” Even though the chancellor was flanked by three large Alameda County Sheriffs, a cowardly boss tactic, the courageous workers did not back down and set the tone for the new semester.  We cannot allow the status quo abuse to continue without causing a ruckus and hoped our action would spark more fight back.
For years now, the Chancellor has funneled money for needed classes and programs to hire chums and associates in the usual administrative shell gaming of public funds. A year ago, a collective of staff, students, community and at the last minute, union members campaigned to help defeat his attempts to sell district land to the Oakland A’s baseball team. He’s a true capitalist school boss, unapologetic, and as we say in the Bay, really “feelin’ himself.”
This fightback was discussed about a month ago. It was popularly received by a large part of the local union but it took the leadership of some teachers to turn talk into action. Despite the lack of time, we organized: created & printed a leaflet which documented the chancellor’s well known abuses, blasted fight tunes and crafted handmade signs.  
Days later, the Chancellor tried to contain the damage and “flip the script” of this bold action with an email to the staff in the four Colleges in the Peralta Community College District. He called for unity “to institute a new culture” a New Peralta Way. Many know that this “unity” is garbage. The Chancellor’s “culture” is to destabilize the curriculum so students can’t get needed courses for graduation, create “debt peonage” among students who can’t afford the fees, destroy adjunct teaching positions with part-timing and drive dedicated teachers out of a job with below subsistence wages.
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Oakland Unified School District, Ready to Strike!
January 18—Teachers and students from five Oakland high schools staged a sick out/wildcat rally and march on Oakland Unified SchoDistrict (OUSD). Not officially sectioned by the Oakland Education Association (OEA) meant that this action, like the previous wildcat, represented rank and file teachers on the move organizing at the school level and reaching out to students and families. “Ready to Strike” was the theme of the day. As we distributed over sixty Challenges, PLP members learned that many teachers in Oakland are committed to schools for the common good just like the teachers in Los Angeles(LA). They understand that teachers’ teaching conditions are students learning conditions. Students and parents both talked about how the high turnover rate of Oakland teachers was due to unsustainable pay, housing insecurity and arbitrary administration decision to “non reelect” teachers after one or two years.
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Workers & students dig deep to keep Roots Academy open
January 23—Teachers, parents and students from Roots Academy shut down the OUSD to stop school closing. Citing Budget problems, “empty seats” and “under enrollment”, OUSD plans to close 24 schools over the next years while they process “public” Charter School applications to use “empty classroom” on public school sites.   
Roots Academy is the first on the chopping block. Closing Roots is the epitome of institutional racism and displacement; it is a predominately Black and Latin school in the working class neighborhood of East Oakland, which is also subject to foreclosures, evictions, and profiteering in the housing market.  The board’s “experts” have cited Roots as a “failing school.”
The bureaucratic drivel about following Board procedure and listening to the staff recommendations to close the school did not impress the students as they continued to denounce the board. A few days later at a special meeting packed again with Roots supporters—OUSD racist Board of Ed voted to close Roots Academy. OEA plans a legal challenge and the Roots community vowed that the struggle continues.  
In the midst of these battles, PLP held a study/action meeting (see letter, page 6) on education under capitalism.  We hoped to better prepare ourselves to marry the immediate fight against the destabilizing, privatization and re-segregation of education for the working class with the long-range goal of building an egalitarian communist world.

Washington, DC, January 19 – At the third annual Women’s March, thousands of protestors gathered and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue past the Trump Hotel. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined both the feeder rally at the New York City union headquarters of the AFL-CIO, and the main rally, getting our communist line out with sales of CHALLENGE and flyers inviting marchers to an event sponsored by Mass Liberation, a local anti-racist group on January 26.
Mass Liberation’s event  focused on the case of Roxana Santos, a Salvadoran worker who has been threatened with deportation after being unlawfully arrested a decade ago in Maryland (Washington Post 1/1). Workers at the Women’s March were astounded to learn that Ms. Santos was arrested by ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) for deportation, as she was leaving the courthouse after winning her civil rights lawsuit against the Maryland county sheriff’s department for racial profiling and illegal detention.
The issue resonated with the crowd and generated a lot of interest at the AFL-CIO rally because it supported the workers leading the Los Angeles teachers’ strike. The strike, a militant reform action, was anti-sexist, pro-education and pro-labor, challenging the exploitation of public school privatization; it gave workers the opportunity to organize and work together. Some workers even saluted CHALLENGE sellers with a clenched fist in response to the “STRIKE!” headline as they passed by.
The AFL-CIO speakers were a disappointment, limiting their strategy for change to electoral activity. Workers’ rights will never be won by voting, but only by an international, worker-led revolution. In stark contrast, one local protestor, and friend of PLP gave a fiery speech calling for a general strike against the shutdown of the government. Young workers cheered in support, while AFL-CIO hacks simply studied their shoes carefully during the speech.
 Meanwhile, a Ford worker from Kentucky suggested we should respond the way workers in France do—all walk out!  We had a lengthy conversation with a Black steelworker from Pittsburgh, who wondered, like the Kentucky Ford worker, why the 800,000 workers furloughed by the shutdown weren’t in the streets, shutting down the city.
“We need worker solidarity across unions,” he said, “to shut down the country until they get people back to work.” He added, “workers have to be less afraid.” He went on to describe how the Pittsburgh bosses have dressed up the city’s waterfront, but have left the neighborhoods in terrible shape due to corruption and cutbacks.
One young woman from San Diego, whose brother is incarcerated, was interested in the APHA (American Public Health Assn) resolution that names police violence as a public health threat (see CHALLENGE, December 19, 2018). A former guard from North Carolina told us he was horrified and quit his job once he realized the private prison industry just wanted to make profits by getting more and more prisoners. Two young Black D.C. teachers also took CHALLENGE, saying that conditions in D.C. schools were deteriorating as well.
With new friends and connections made at the rally, PLP will continue to grow the communist movement, fight past the no-win electoral strategies, and advance on the road to revolution.

The bosses’ media, and their two flunky parties are flooding us with glowing accounts about “low jobless” figures and rising prosperity for the working class. Yet this “prosperity” completely ignores the fact that every rise of 1.4 percent in the jobless rate leads directly to the deaths of over 30,000 workers in the following five years from stress-related ailments, suicide and homicide!
A 1976 Congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee attempted to “estimate the cost in human suffering of people being out of work (N.Y. Times, 10/31/76). Think of what that translates into from the recent Great Recession when the jobless rate reached 10 percent, seven times the 1.4 percent figure. To say nothing of the loss in wages, and homes due to the inability to make mortgage payments, incurred by the millions of unemployed. How does that figure into the alleged “prosperity”? So any time a company lays off thousands of workers, it is contributing to masses of deaths over the following five years.Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins University testified to that Congressional Committee that, “The national rate of suicide in the United States can be viewed as an economic indicator,” so closely is the link between joblessness and workers’ violent deaths due to capitalism’s constant and inevitable recessions.
The report was based on 40 years of statistics and found “a consistent relationship in the unemployment rate” that affects “all ages, both sexes, for whites and non-whites.” And none of this deals with the related effects on the families of the jobless workers, in terms of malnutrition, mental anguish and sickness. The study said that infant mortality rates show dramatic increases within one to two years of an economic recession. Brenner said “short-term general hospital admissions in the U.S. respond very sharply to adverse changes in the economy as do mental hospital admissions for an unbroken period of about 127 years in the U.S.” Death by suicide rises within the first month or two of a recession Heart disease peaks three to five years after the start of a recession.
Racism doubles the toll
And the government’s own statistics show that jobless rates for Black workers are twice the rate for white workers, and result in increased rates for Latino workers as well. So all the categories cited above fall doubly harsh on the lives of these workers.
The millions of workers sent to an early grave as a direct result of joblessness over the years of the Great Depression and the multiple recessions since then could probably rival any mass killing anywhere in the world. But, of course, added to this are those affected by the same economic downturns in the rest of the capitalist world. Capitalism is an international phenomenon.
None of the above includes workers killed on the job in industrial “accidents”—about 100,00 a year in the U.S.—because bosses refuse to spend profits on safety. Nor does it account for millions hurt or made sick (some terminally as in ”cancer alley” in northeastern New Jersey) by their working conditions.
Phony figures
Never mind that—as CHALLENGE has reported—the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) so-called U3 U.S. unemployment rate of 4.0 doesn’t count workers who have stopped looking for a job after four weeks of unemployment (which would double that 4.0 to 8.0, the BLS’s so-called U6 rate); doesn’t figure in millions of workers who take part-time jobs because full-time ones are unavailable (the so-called underemployed); doesn’t count workers removed altogether from the unemployment rolls after being jobless for six months, nor those who join the military because they can’t find a job, nor those who can’t look for a needed job because day-care for their children is out of reach; nor the first-time job seekers just graduating high school or college. Shadowstats.com, which accounts for much of this, puts the true unemployment figure at 21.3 percent.
You best believe that capitalism is a murderous system. To eliminate these horrors, only a communist revolution—abolishing bosses, profits, a divisive wage system, racism and sexism—can do the job.

As the rivalry between U.S. and Chinese capitalists intensifies, Canada is the latest country forced to choose which imperialist master’s orders to follow.

Since the December arrest in Vancouver of a top Chinese business executive, Meng Wangzhou, at the order of the U.S., tensions between China and Canada have been rising. After threatening “severe consequences,” China retaliated by arresting two Canadians for “harming national security” (code for spying) and sentencing a third to death for drug smuggling. The latest word is that the U.S. will escalate the fight by pressing Canada to extradite Meng for a criminal trial in the U.S.

Meng is chief financial officer and daughter of the founder of Huawei, the world’s largest telecom manufacturer and a big part of China’s plan to overtake the U.S. as the world leader in 21st-century technology. She was arrested on suspicion of violating U.S. sanctions by selling products to Iran. But her more serious offense may be her part in challenging U.S. control over its own backyard. Although U.S. trade still dominates the Canadian economy, China is now Canada’s second-largest trading partner, “one of Canada’s biggest buyers of agricultural products from oilseeds to softwood lumber and … a growing market for the nation’s banks, insurers and luxury-good makers” (business.financialpost.com, 12/13/18).
As Chinese imperialism extends its influence at the expense of the U.S. bosses, and world war looms on the horizon, the international working class must play its role in organizing for class war across borders. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) aims to organize millions to fulfill that historical duty.

U.S.-China Cold War

The latest dogfight is a lot bigger than Canada. Through their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, see box), China’s bosses are forging new alliances and expanding their power throughout the world, a trend that accelerated after the U.S. economic collapse of 2008. The BRI is the largest capitalist infrastructure and investment plan since the U.S. Marshall Plan after World War II. (Through economic coercion and military dependence, the Marshall Plan became the foundation for U.S. imperialism around the world.)

In an effort to curb Chinese ambitions in new technologies, the U.S. has successfully convinced some allies (Australia, New Zealand, Britain) to ban the use of Huawei products in their next-generation telecom infrastructure. Claiming that Huawei is an arm of the Chinese government, the U.S. bosses have launched an investigation into the company for violating sanctions against Iran, Cuba, and North Korea. China’s Global Times slapped back, pointing out that the U.S. never abides by international rules and arbitrarily launches unilateral sanctions and wars against other countries (Global Times, 1/18).
The new cold war between the U.S. and China is a fight between the old U.S.dominated liberal world order and China’s rising imperialist order, controlled by an openly fascist state. Despite their differences, however, both superpowers are capitalist dictatorships.  Either form of capitalist rule is deadly for the working class.
Most important, the current period is a time when the weaknesses of capitalism will be on full display—an opportunity for communists. The goal of PLP is to change the main contradiction from the bosses fighting each other to the international working class fighting the bosses to establish a communist world.

Golden Age of Chinese imperialism?

In Africa, China has pledged over $60 billion in loans in exchange for minerals, roads, airports, oil, and natural gas. In response, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton said “the United States would lavish money and greater attention on the African continent, casting it as a crucial battleground in the global economic contest between the United States and China.” The “greatest threat” Bolton said, “came not from poverty or Islamist extremism but from an expansionist China, as well as Russia” (New York Times, 12/13/18).

China and Finland have agreed to jointly build the Polar Silk Road shipping routes (Global Times, 1/15). China’s increasing activity in the Arctic region also gives them access to huge amounts of liquefied natural gas (Reuters, 1/26/18).

In Latin America, China has pledged to increase trade by $500 billion and foreign investment to $250 billion by 2025. The China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China now provide more development financing to Latin America than the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) combined.

In Europe, Chinese state-backed and private companies have been involved in deals worth at least $255 billion. Approximately 360 companies have been taken over, from airports and seaports to wind farms and stock markets and even football teams. “The available figures underestimate the true size and scope of China’s ambitions in Europe” (Bloomberg, 4/23/18).

China v. U.S. gunboat diplomacy

As China works to control access in the South China Sea with a continuing military buildup, the U.S. has responded with so-called Freedom of Navigation operations, which are really shows of military readiness. Japan, Australia, France, and Britain have participated as well.
The Council on Foreign Relations, the leading think tank for the U.S. main-wing finance capitalists, has called for the U.S. to enlist a multilateral coalition “to help deter further Chinese aggression or new claims in the South China Sea” (1/16). A hot war between China and the U.S. is growing more and more likely.

Two gangs of loan sharks

Lately the U.S. bosses’ media have cried foul over China’s “predatory loans” to developing nations. The U.S.-backed international loan sharks, the IMF and World Bank, focus more on controlling a country’s resources and spending habits. They offer lengthy grace periods for repayment. China’s loans, on the other hand, give debtor nations more autonomy in how they spend the money. They also charge above-market interest rates, with punishing clauses that force debtor nations to absorb any losses from failed projects (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018)

Since China’s bosses grabbed a port in Sri Lanka for loan delinquency, the backlash—manipulated by the U.S.—has led a number of countries to rethink their relationship with China’s BRI:

• Malaysia canceled a $20 billion railroad and a $2.3 billion natural gas pipeline project with China.
• In the Maldives, voters elected a new president, Ibrahim Solih, who ran on an anti-China campaign.
• Kenya began cracking down on officials taking Chinese bribes.
• Bangladesh canceled a plan for a Chinese state-run firm to build a $2 billion highway.

Only resolution: communist revolution

Both U.S market capitalism and Chinese state capitalism are deadly ideologies for the working class. World war is the only way capitalists can resolve their conflicts. War is the ultimate decider in choosing which imperialist order will rule the world.

As we saw in Russia in World War I, and in China after World War II, the communist-led working class has seized state power in periods of instability and global conflict. Workers must be prepared once again to take power and build a world free of exploitation. They must smash the capitalist parasites who put profits above the needs of our class. Join Progressive Labor Party!  We have a communist world to win!