The year is 2018. There is no red beacon of hope in either Russia or China. Hundreds of millions of workers are not debating and organizing for communism. Yet, capitalists today still fear communism!
They have good reason. Only communist revolution offers freedom from exploitation, oppression, poverty, fascism, and terror for the working class of the world.
Communist parties are illegal in Estonia, Indonesia, Iran, Latvia, Lithuania, Myanmar, Poland, Romania, South Korea, Ukraine, Georgia, Hungary, and in the U.S.
Today communist parties are banned:
In countries traditionally in the American ‘sphere of influence” – that have been dominated politically and economically by U.S. imperialism. In Latin America communists and militant workers are still repressed, arrested, murdered. But, as U.S. influence as weakened somewhat, legal restrictions on communist parties have been lifted.
In Indonesia, after the bloody coup d’etat of 1965-66, during which between 500,000 and two million leaders, activists, and rank-and-file supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party were murdered, along with supporters of the ousted President Sukarno, all with the help of the U.S. CIA. This disaster was caused by the communists trying to exist legally, unprepared for fascist repression and the line of “uniting with the anti-colonial bourgeoisie” (Sukarno). PLP condemned this phony Marxist line and practice then, and we still do!
In Islamist Iran, after the events of 1983, when almost all the leadership and activists in the Tudeh Party (successors to the Communist Party of Iran), plus others, were arrested and killed – as many as 30,000 persons. The Tudeh Party supported the so-called “Islamist revolution” of 1979 – which was really carried out by the “mujaheddin”, left militants—in hope of joining the government and gaining power by the revisionist “peaceful” road. Instead they were murdered. In 1979 PLP issued a pamphlet, translated into Farsi, urging Iranian communists, workers, and activists NOT to trust the Islamists.
In South Korea, a U.S. imperialist creation, dominated by fascists who collaborated with the Japanese imperialists and murdered anyone even suspected of being a protestor.
In countries where all political parties are forbidden: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the Emirates. All of these are in the U.S. economic and political “sphere of influence.”
In Thailand, “communist activity” is forbidden.
In Turkey, all “communist agitation” has been forbidden for decades.
The same was true in South Africa, after the fall of the racist, fascist, apartheid white supremacist government, which the U.S. had always supported.
In Pakistan, communist activity was outlawed during the Cold War, for 40 years, from 1954 to 1994.
The U.S. also officially banned communist organization and action under the Communist Control Act, signed into law by president Dwight Eisenhower in 1954.  
Anti-communism is making a comeback. As the U.S. rulers gear up for war with its rivals Russia and China (former socialist countries), they will use their tool of anti-communism to fool workers and build patriotism.

By all appearances, U.S. President Donald Trump’s undisciplined approach to statecraft makes him seem like an incompetent rogue and possibly a tool of Russian interests. In essence, however, Trump’s wrecking-ball trip to London and Brussels, followed by his bombshell “summit” with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin represents something far more dangerous to the main-wing, imperialist finance capitalists of the U.S. ruling class.
With each passing week, Trump seems to be  lining up more and more closely with the “small America” strategic vision pushed by a subordinate, domestically oriented, overtly racist wing of the U.S. bosses. Represented by billionaires like Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers, who are less reliant on overseas profiteering, these bosses are suspicious of  multilateral entanglements with Western Europe, as embodied by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). With each passing week, Trump seems more and more under the sway of these isolationists—a highly volatile situation for a declining superpower already well on the road to fascism and World War III.  
Trump’s shift to treating Russia as an equal partner rather than a sworn enemy reflects the position of MIT’s Barry Posen in his 2014 book, Restraint:

The United States should focus on a small number of threats, and approach those threats with subtlety and moderation…. It can do that because the United States is economically and militarily strong, well-endowed and well-defended by nature….It is not smart to spend energies transforming a recalcitrant world that we could spend renewing a United States that still needs some work.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the “MIT School” has argued against the strategy of “liberal hegemony,” the “unipolar” dominance presented to U.S. imperialism when its main rival exited the world stage (theamericanconservative.com, 8/26/14). Until recently, this was a mostly ignored minority position inside the foreign policy establishment.
Now a U.S. president has embraced Posner’s go-it-alone nationalism. Trump’s stance implies a smaller, whiter military harboring open racism—like the military that has emerged since 9/11 (Washington Post, 8/17). With backing from the Russian-connected Mercer (mypalmbeachpost.com, 3/18) and Koch interests, Trump has built a loyal and mass racist, sexist, anti-immigrant movement that makes it risky for the big bosses to remove him from power too abruptly.  
Shifting alliances
The split in the U.S. ruling class is leading capitalist rulers in Europe to look elsewhere for more reliable allies. In the days following Trump’s scorched-earth visit to Europe, the European Union sent trade delegations to China and Japan, what may be early steps toward a potential reshuffling of the liberal world order and a diminished U.S. influence.  While EU-Chinese relations continue to be tainted with mutual suspicion (aljazeera.com,  7/22), the Economic Partnership Agreement signed by the EU and Japan on July 17 has created the world’s third largest free-trade community.  The largest is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump pulled out of in January (aljazeera.com, 7/22).
On July 16, Trump doubled down by threatening the newest NATO member, tiny Montenegro, saying the U.S. shouldn’t have to defend it if Montenegro’s “aggressive” people go to war.  As Russian imperialism works overtime to expand its influence in the Balkans, the place where World War I began and where the collapse of the USSR spawned U.S.-led war through the 1990s, Putin can only welcome Trump’s posture.  
US ruling class—splits intensify
Most troubling to main-wing U.S. imperialists, represented by both Democrats and leading Congressional Republicans, is the fact that Trump’s brand of nationalism is gaining followers. An Axios poll found that 79 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance with Putin, while 85 percent think the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian interference is a distraction (New York Times, 7/22). The Times editorial page likened Trump’s base “to the members of a cult.”  
This brand of rhetoric in the leading main-wing mouthpiece could be a prelude to a domestic political conflict that could quickly turn brutal. Rasmussen polls show that  fears of a new civil war are growing (washingtonexaminer.com, 6/18), with the larger group (59 percent) concerned that anti-Trump forces will turn to violence.  
Meanwhile, the mass murderers of the FBI and CIA are presented by the main-wing media as defenders of truth, justice, and peace. This is the essence of nationalism, which misleads and terrifies working people into siding with a nation’s rulers against their sister and brother workers in other countries.   
Ex-CIA chief John Brennan, a willing executioner in Barack Obama’s targeted assassination program (foreignpolicy.com, 9/12), tweeted that Trump’s behavior was impeachable and “treasonous.”  Trump hit back by threatening to revoke Brennan’s security clearance, which former officers retain for both private business reasons and to provide continuity (npr.org, 7/23/18).  Such petty score-settling reveals the growing intensity of the fight between the “Fortress America” nationalists and the main-wing imperialists.
Reject nationalism, fight for communism
There have long been divisions among the bosses over the global reach of U.S. capitalism, from World War II through the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. What’s different now is that the main wing can no longer count on the U.S. president to do its bidding. If pushed too hard, the main-wing rulers will seek to bring Trump to heel—and to deal with his base as brutally as necessary. The U.S. Civil War reminds us that the bosses will kill one another—and many workers in the process—when their interests are threatened sharply enough.
In periods of crisis, the working class must remember that there are no good bosses, no lesser evils. Main-wing liberals—from Franklin Roosevelt through Obama—have the blood of tens of millions of workers on their hands. Though capitalists’ appearances will vary, the antidote to awful capitalist leadership is not reformed capitalist leadership. The antidote is revolutionary working-class leadership—communist leadership.
When we act on this knowledge in the class struggle, we bring us that much closer a communist world. We create the basis for a society that operates on the communist principle: from each according to commitment, to each according to need. We advance a society without racism, sexism, money, or racist borders.
Help the international working class by reading, writing for, and distributing CHALLENGE. Communism is the only society that can deliver what the international working class needs, where the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Chicago, July 14—Screams and chants filled the air—along with bottles and debris—as workers from the South Shore neighborhood rebelled after the Chicago Police Department’s racist killing of Harith “Snoop” Augustus, a 37-year-old barber and father of a five-year-old daughter.
Harith was stopped by police for “exhibiting characteristics of an armed person.”  CPD body cam footage shows Harith talking to a cop on the sidewalk. According to a witness interviewed by the Chicago Sun-Times, they were arguing over whether Harith was selling loose cigarettes. As the dispute escalated, a swarm of cops descended upon Harith. One grabbed his wrist. When Harith pulled away, his holstered weapon was revealed. He began running into the street and stumbled as Chicago’s killer cops opened fire and shot him in the back.
It’s the same old capitalist story: Chicago police murdered Harith Augustus.
This is the second racist murder of a young Black worker and father at the hands of the CPD in as many months. On June 6, in the Bronzeville neighborhood, the cops cut down 24-year-old Maurice Granton, shooting him six times in the back. Both Bronzeville and South Shore are historically Black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. They are being rapidly gentrified amid development in nearby Jackson Park of the Obama Presidential Center, a three-building complex including a library and museum. The Obama Foundation has refused to sign a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) that would bar displacement of longtime community residents because of the development. Barack Obama himself has been silent about these latest racist murders in his adopted hometown.
The South Shore rebellion ignited almost immediately after Harith was murdered. Police swarmed the neighborhood to try to intimidate the working class. But the workers didn’t back down. In the resulting standoff,  the CPD attacked unarmed workers and activists with batons. The cops arrested four activists, primarily from the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), an organization founded shortly after the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. Incubated at the University of Chicago and funded by the Ford Foundation, two elite institutions of the U.S. ruling class, BYP100 began as a research project to examine “the attitudes, resources, and culture of African American youth ages 15 to 25” in regard to civic engagement (blackyouthproject.com). The bosses’ nonprofit reform groups can never be revolutionary organizations dedicated to the liberation of the working class. Progressive Labor Party is the tool of the working class to liberate ourselves from the noose of capitalism.
After the arrests, BYP100 correctly called on everyone to march to the police station where the four people were being held, the same station where the cop who murdered Harith is based. About 70 of us immediately took the street and started to march. At two points along the way, after BYP leadership heard that their members had been freed, they stopped the march and “asked” the other marchers: “Should we keep going (to the station) or turn around?” Each time, workers disagreed with the idea that they stop. On the second occasion, an older Black worker from South Shore came to the front and said, “Y’all asked us to march and we followed you. Ain’t no turning back now, y’all can go back if you want.”
PLP immediately went up to the worker and said he was right and that we would be following his leadership moving forward. We called on the crowd to keep going and most folks came with us, including the BYP100 members. This was another example of why we must have confidence in workers to make the right decisions. In some instances, PLP will have the opportunity to lead our class; in others, we will follow their lead.
In the days following Harith’s murder, there have been more protests and demonstrations. On Sunday, July 15, PLP joined a demonstration, got out copies of CHALLENGE, and made contacts. The following day, more than 500 Black, Latin, white, and Asian workers and youth marched to protest both the murder of Augustus and the cops’ brutal attack on the demonstrators. It was called by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a mass organization that some comrades are working in. The group’s response to the torture and murderous history of the racist CPD is to demand an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). They say their goal is to give the community “control” over the police and their contract—yet another dead-end reform.
Since 1948, Chicago has had a long history of “civilian oversight” and “police accountability” boards that have consistently failed to stop—or even properly investigate—racist police murders. An elected CPAC would mean more politicians—the capitalist bosses’ stooges—overseeing a ruling-class institution whose very purpose is to control and terrorize the working class.
At another rally that ended at the barbershop where Harith worked, a speaker called for the community to put its arms around Harith’s family and to contribute toward funeral expenses. Again, hundreds of CHALLENGE’s were distributed.
At the monthly police board meeting, Black police chief Eddie Johnson was confronted about Harith’s murder. There was also a demonstration at the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has tried to pacify workers by asking them to “lower their voices and listen to other voices” (abc7chicago.com, 7/17).  
But the anger among Black workers in Chicago goes far beyond this latest killing. They are rebelling against the devastation and dismantling of communities that are riddled by racist unemployment and racist school closings. There is only one solution for our class sisters and brothers: communist revolution!
Our Party must grow and become active in our communities as we fight to build a culture of multiracial working-class unity. We must denounce divisions based on nationalism, voting wards, gang lines, or race. We are fighting for an international working class that has yet to imagine its potential. We have a world to win!

Capitalism will never be able to guarantee an acceptable level of health for the overwhelming majority of the working class. By transforming essential medical services like prescription drugs and surgery into commodities to buy and sell for profit, the capitalist bosses who run healthcare ensure that if workers and their families can’t pay, disease, disability, and death are the common consequences.
The city of Chicago, despite having a booming health care industry valued close to $70 billion, has led the way in using racist attacks as the cutting edge to decrease the overall health of workers across the region.  From racist police murder to the closure of health care facilities that serve mostly Black and immigrant workers, the city has mirrored the overall trend of capitalism in denying even a remotely healthy existence to an increasing number of our class.
This will continue to be the harsh reality until the international working masses, led by the Progressive Labor Party, overthrow the profit system through violent revolution and establish a worker-led communist society in its place. Only then will workers live in a world not only where health care access is guaranteed for all, but where the social problems that lead to racist and sexist health outcomes are eradicated through collectivity and organizing the masses.
Racist capitalist unemployment leads to death, mental illness
The racism inherent under capitalism, which is used by the bosses to divide workers so that they can maximize profit, inevitably leads to racist inequalities in health. Conservative estimates place the unemployment rate for Black men between the ages of 20-24 in Chicago to be nearly 40 percent (Chicago Tribune, 5/12). This scarcity of jobs funnels thousands of Black youth into a street economy, exposing them to inter-gang violence. As of July 15, over 271 people have been killed and over 1,500 have been shot in the city (Chicago Tribune, 7/16).
Beyond just the physical and emotional toll that this violence inflicts on the immediate victim, is the ripple effect in mental health that occurs in the Black and Latin communities of the city where the majority of the shootings occur. A study sample of Black women in a neighborhood on the city’s south side showed a rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nearing 60 percent. A significant portion of those diagnosed with PTSD in the study reported having a loved one directly impacted by physical violence (Chicago Magazine, 12/16/16). This violence stems ultimately from capitalism and its government, often directly in the case of police shootings.
For those workers who would hope to access some mental health resources to help deal with this type of intense strain that capitalism causes, liberal racist Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other Democratic Party city bosses ensured years ago that very few if any are available to those working-class communities most directly affected. The Hill reports:
Illinois cut $113.7 million in funding for mental health services from 2009 to 2012, which resulted in closing two inpatient facilities, six of twelve mental health clinics and several community health agencies. Four of the six agencies that closed were on the South and West sides of the city, where the majority of violence occurs, and where such services are desperately needed (6/26/17).
Instead of mental health clinics, more and more workers are funneled into Cook County Jail, the fourth largest jail in the U.S., where at least one-third of the inmates have a diagnosed mental illness (WTTW, 11/2/17).
Bosses shred safety net, attack immigrant workers
The Cook County Health and Hospitals System, a city-run network that provides medical services to the city’s working class, uninsured/underinsured, and undocumented workers and their families, proposed cuts to the 2018 budget in upwards of $10 million dollars (Chicago Sun-Times, 11/17/17). These cuts were deemed “necessary” by the racist city bosses, who state they need to cover a $200 million dollar deficit after the county’s anti-worker, sweetened beverage tax scheme crashed and burned at the end of last year (See CHALLENGE, 10/27/17).
The racist CEOs of the city’s “safety net” hospitals, such as Dr. Jay Shannon of Stroger Hospital and Karen Teitelbaum of Mount Sinai Hospital, have the nerve to make statements about how much they “care” about undocumented workers in press releases. Meanwhile, they attack those very same workers by cutting services that they claim are not “cost-effective,” like when both hospitals shuttered their inpatient pediatrics units in 2017. Abrupt changes such as these force immigrant workers to lose familiar health care providers as well as travel farther distances to private healthcare systems which are less likely to accept insurance programs such as Medicaid.  
This lack of access can make the difference of life and death for workers who face worsening health problems related to the ongoing threat of raids and arrests via the massive deportation apparatus of the capitalist ruling class. Even though the Chicago liberal bosses tout the status of “sanctuary city,” this flimsy designation hasn’t protected scores of the undocumented from the reality of deportation, including over 150 immigrant workers who were rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over a six-day period in May (Washington Post, 5/29).
The heightened sense of anxiety and stress of living under these fascist conditions not only contributes to an increased incidence of chronic conditions such as hypertension and mental illness; it also decreases the likelihood that immigrant workers will feel comfortable going to a medical facility and voluntarily offering up personal information for fear that it will be used by authorities for deportation.
Such is the nature of this racist, sexist profit system: making it nearly as impossible for our class to live healthily as it is to seek treatment. As communists in PLP, we say that a system that can’t guarantee healthcare for workers doesn’t deserve to exist!
Building communist revolution essential to workers’ health
Although the overall trend of healthcare access and health outcomes, in Chicago and beyond, reflects growing racist inequality for our class, workers and students in the city continue to challenge the bosses and their system through militant fightback. A collective of community activists, mostly Black youth from the city’s south side, led a protracted campaign over recent years that forced the bosses to re-open a trauma center at the University of Chicago. University public health students have published research and organized teach-ins and rallies around racist police violence as a public health crisis. Hospital workers throughout the greater city area have built the fight through their healthcare unions to demand safer staffing, higher wages, and affordable health insurance plans from the hospital bosses. Comrades from PLP have been in the thick of many of these struggles, offering leadership and a communist political analysis whenever possible.
The phenomenal gains in worker life expectancy, infant and mother mortality, and public health that occurred after the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries won state power must continue to inspire us to build these struggles against the capitalists and their deadly system. The concept of health was no longer individualized with a price tag; it was understood as something not to be connected to money and profit, but rather the experience of collective development and struggle. When millions and millions of workers are won again to this truly revolutionary outlook, our future will be very healthy indeed.