The blowback from inter-imperialist rivalry has hit the international working class hard again, this time in Nicaragua. Over the last month, thousands of students have led the way in protesting planned cuts to social security and an increase in payroll taxes. The criminal president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, has responded with state terror, resulting in as many as 63 dead, hundreds wounded, and mass calls for Ortega’s resignation.
The history of the Nicaraguan ruling class, as well as imperialist interests in the region, exposes the roots of the current crisis.
Nicaragua caught in imperialist crosshairs
Nicaragua’s geography, bridging the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, has placed it in the crosshairs of imperialist rivalry since the 16th-century Spanish conquest. In 1912, after German and Japanese bosses threatened to build a canal to compete with the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal, the U.S. Marines invaded Nicaragua and occupied the country until 1933.  
Today, while the U.S. remains the dominant imperialist in Central America and the Caribbean, with $80 billion in two-way trade last year, its position continues to weaken as Chinese and Russian bosses close in  (Bloomberg News, 6/5/2017). China considers Central America a part of their “New Silk Road,” a plan for world economic dominance, and has invested billions in a competing canal, an effort that stalled after workers protested their displacement. In 2016, Russia docked war ships off the Nicaraguan coast and sold the Ortega regime 50 new tanks and aircraft in exchange for access to airspace and ports. Additionally, the Russian ruling class is building a law enforcement center near Nicaragua’s Pacific coast (Miami Herald, 9/15/2016).
The U.S. has responded to China’s “soft power” and Russia’s “hard power” in kind.  In 2017, the U.S. Congress passed the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act (NICA), which threatens to cut off foreign aid. Simultaneously, the U.S. conducted naval exercises with mock invasions of 13 countries, including Nicaragua, to challenge China’s maritime claims  (Asia Times, 4/26/2016).
The U.S. bosses’ moves to ice out imperialist rivals dates to 1936, when the U.S. ruling class installed the Somoza family, representing Nicaragua’s wealthy land-owners, as a brutal and corrupt dictatorship. Meanwhile, the U.S. pillaged resources from Nicaragua for the next 43 years.
Phony Left Sandinistas
In 1979, U.S. control suffered a blow from the Sandinista “socialist” revolution, led in part by fake-leftist Ortega.  Under President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. funneled money and drugs to fund the CIA-backed Contra rebels, the rightwing terror groups that instigated a civil war and murdered as many as 50,000 people (Washington Post, 6/10/04). Voted out of office in 1990, Ortega and his wife (and current vice president), Rosario Murillo, re-invented themselves. In 2006, they partnered with former enemy and Contra leader Jaime Morales to return to electoral power.  Upon winning, “the first thing the administration would do is talk immediately with all the businessmen to maintain their confidence and reassure them everything was fine” (The Guardian, 11/8/06).
Oil-financed socialism
Ortega quickly formed an alliance with then-president Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, built a network of oil-financed businesses, and joined Chavez’s trade bloc, in direct opposition to the U.S. bosses.  According to Nicaragua’s Central Bank, Venezuela gave Nicaragua $457 million in aid, with a joint Venezuelan-Nicaraguan company managing the funds. Ortega’s family skimmed much of this wealth to consolidate its power.  In 2009, in a clear move toward fascism, Nicaragua’s Supreme Court and Supreme Electoral Council removed constitutional obstacles to Ortega standing for another term in office.  This power play effectively eliminated opponents from other political parties (BBC News 11/7/11).  
But by 2015, with the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the loss of cheap Venezuelan oil on credit, the U.S. became Nicaragua’s main source of oil. As a result, the Nicaraguan ruling class was forced to stockpile U.S. dollars to pay up front. This economic crisis triggered the latest political crisis, with the Nicaraguan bosses attempting to solve their problems on the backs of the workers.
These attacks have not been taken lying down.  In 2015, thousands of small farmers protested Ortega’s deal with Chinese billionaires to build a canal through Nicaragua. This spring, militant students and workers have taken to the streets to fight back against both the police and Ortega’s fascist Sandanista Youth gangs, which have collaborated with the police to stone protesters.  
U.S. sponsored protests
With Ortega cozying up to Russian and Chinese bosses, the U.S. rulers appear to be financing the student resistance. As The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) noted, “The 19 of April Movement shares many characteristics with…the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives” (5/14).
According to the New York Times, all of these movements have been funded and trained by the CIA and pro-imperialist groups like the National Democratic Institute and George Soros’ Freedom House (New York Times, 4/14/11). Ditto for the Color Revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, which have largely failed in ousting pro-Russian ruling class factions  (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 5/28/14).
Deepening splits within the Nicaraguan ruling class likely led to a shift by the Superior Council on Private Enterprise (COSEP), which initially supported Ortega, to organize an April 22 student march. On April 23 the U.S. Embassy closed its Managua operations (NACLA, 5/14).
Nicaragua workers need communism
Although Ortega has rolled back his proposed cuts to the social security system, the nationwide protests have continued. The working class of Nicaragua recognizes that it has long been sold out by the FSLN, the political party founded by the Sandinistas, which was rooted in the anti-revolutionary strategy of all-class unity. This fake-left movement was aligned from the start with business interests and Nicaragua’s reactionary clergy; it never had intentions of sharing wealth and power with the working class.
Nicaragua is yet another example of the detrimental impact of the collapse of the old communist movement in Russia and China. The working class needs a mass communist party now more than ever.
Absent of communist leadership and ideas, the rebellion in Nicaragua will at best be another sponsored movement under the bosses’ control, like the Arab Spring in Egypt. But workers’ fighting spirit is alive and well, and the Progressive Labor Party aims to spread it to every country worldwide. Our fight will not be for the removal of one politician, but for the destruction of the capitalist system and an end to oppression of all the workers of the world.

GARY, INDIANA, May 10—When a waste company and government bosses wanted to build a dump in a mainly Black working-class neighborhood, students and residents confronted this blatant environmental racism head on. They shut down a bosses’ meeting and physically ran out the politicians and local capitalists.
Black students from a local school have been some of the most militant leaders of this developing fightback. The communist Progressive Labor Party commends these brave fighters and is present to help build and sharpen the class struggle here against the racist bosses.
Bosses plan garbage dump next to school
Last April, students, teachers, and administrators from the Steel City Academy Charter School learned that a private corporation applied for a solid waste processing permit. They intended to build a $60 million waste facility less than 100 feet from the school. The application, completed by Maya Energy, LLC, was filed with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM).
The waste facility was presented as a “recycling center.” The school and residents often refer to the facility as a “dump” because it is expected to house and compact 2400 tons of garbage a day within close proximity to students and educators. Many already suffer from health issues as a result of toxic air pollution, lead poisoning, and other byproducts of a murderous capitalist system. Gary’s population is 80 percent Black, and the median household income is $29,522. The bosses’ racist disregard for working-class lives is self-evident.
After negative feedback from Gary workers and youth, Maya Energy was allowed to revise their application and resubmit it this past February. In March, Maya Energy was invited to explain their revised project once again to the school and residents.
One thousand people submitted their comments opposing the project, with many requesting a public hearing, that IDEM and Maya Energy reluctantly agreed to hold at a local union hall on May 10.
‘Our education over your dump’
At the union meeting, PLP joined over 200 students, teachers, administrators, and residents to put Maya and the city bosses on notice. Union misleaders said that people would be let in at the start time of the meeting, but when students, teachers and workers began chanting “Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Maya E has got to go!” the union leaders quickly showed their sell-out nature and announced that the meeting was cancelled. They even turned away union members who opposed Maya Energy and the dump!
IDEM bosses, wanting to save face, moved the meeting to the school. The working-class crowd refused to play nice with them there, either. Students were quick to hang up signs that read “Our Education Over Your Dump” and “We Will Not Sacrifice Our Community/Playground/Education.”
They lined up to ask IDEM questions about how Maya Energy’s dump would affect not only the students’ health, but also the health of the surrounding community.
Students tied in themes of environmental racism and exploitation in their questioning. When one student asked, “Do you care about our well-being?” an IDEM official responded, “It’s not my authority to do so.”
All were angry at this response that laid bare the capitalist system’s fundamental contradictions. One parent said, “We are not trash. Gary is not for sale.”
The capitalist bosses and their lackeys can only be expected to make decisions that keep their system profitable, even as those decisions constantly result in the destruction of workers’ lives.
Towards the end of the meeting, a city boss took it upon himself to verbally attack everyone in the room, noting that “the school should have never existed” and telling parents to “be quiet” in order for him to continue talking.
The antiracist crowd immediately shut him down and chased him out of the meeting. The owner of Maya Energy showed up almost on cue to make his business pitch again, but we chased him off as well. It was a real glimpse at the potential of workers’ power, and the power we can have once we unite.
For environmental change, build communism
Capitalism’s racist impact on the environment doesn’t begin and end in Gary, Indiana. Globally we see the aftermath of the havoc the profit system has wreaked on communities where mostly Black and brown workers live. From the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan and East Chicago, to allowing the levees to collapse during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, to annual flooding and mass displacement in South Asia, capitalism and workers’ health just don’t mix.
While workers and students called out the lying, manipulative nature of city officials and the system, they also spoke about reviving the environment in the same breath. Students led this discussion because before the Maya Energy struggle, many were learning about composting, alternative energy sources, and creating community gardens for their school and the city.
It remains our task as communists to connect these ecological projects and growing fightback to the need to build a mass PLP that will ultimately destroy capitalism, the fundamental source of environmental destruction. What we learn today will later help us build our egalitarian communist society, where workers’ collective health and the environment are the priority, not profit.

As sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry leads to a worldwide crisis of capitalism, the bosses are trying to strangle the working class into paying for it. Over the next several issues of CHALLENGE, we will be writing about the various ways our class is under attack.
In the latest racist assault on Black workers in Chicago, the city is closing four high schools in Englewood, a Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Robeson High School will be closed immediately, while the three others—Hope, Harper and TEAM—will be phased out.
Since 2000, 250,000 Black workers have been driven out of Chicago, a drop of 25 percent of the city’s Black population. In 2013, the city closed 50 elementary schools on the predominantly Black South and West sides. Since then, as abandonment and gentrification have continued to accelerate, 32,000 more Black children have left the public school system (Chicago Reporter, 12/19/17).
These attacks on Black working-class families are part of a racist push by the Chicago ruling class to shrink the city and make it wealthier and whiter. In both 2016 and 2017, Chicago was the only city of the largest ten in the country to lose population (Chicago Tribune, 3/22). Overall, the number of city residents has dropped from 2.9 million in 2000 to 2.7 million today.
The central feature of the Chicago bosses’ racist plan is to disperse Black and Latino workers from the city into low-service, high-poverty suburbs, while focusing large-scale development in the areas closest to downtown. “There are probably over 40 cranes currently operating primarily [near downtown]—very little in other parts of the city in the neighborhoods where working class residents live, particularly African-American and Latino communities” (Citylab 5/31/17).
Just as the capitalist system worldwide fails miserably to meet workers’ needs, the Chicago bosses are unable to provide even a basic standard of living and education for tens of thousands of local Black families. The only way out of this mess is to fight for a communist society that is run by and for the working class.
Bosses cut services to Black workers
Since the economic crisis of 2008-2010, when the bosses bailed out the banks and the real estate industry, the working class—and Black workers in particular—have paid the bill.

They closed neighborhood schools and mental health clinics; failed to rebuild public housing, dispersing thousands of poor black families across the region, and inadequately responded to … unemployment and foreclosures in Black communities…It’s a menu of disinvestment… The message that public policy sends to Black families in the city is that we’re not going to take care of you and if you just keep going away, that’s OK (Chicago Reporter 12/19/17).

It’s a brutal cycle: Racist unemployment and foreclosures drive families out of Black neighborhoods; neighborhood schools close for lack of enrollment; more families leave their destabilized communities. As a result, large areas of Englewood are now decimated:

So many homes have been demolished that some blocks are just fields of weeds. What’s left are side streets with wood frame homes, many of which are boarded up…the last decade and a half has been brutal. Not only did the housing crisis hit areas like this hard, but also the expansion of a massive rail yard swallowed up many of the homes...the school district’s policy of school closings …has contributed to population decline. In addition to Englewood High School, CPS has closed 14 [Englewood] area elementary schools over the past decade”(WBEZ News, 2/20).

The Chicago ruling class and their hit man, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, are perpetuating a long history of attacks on Black workers. Even in the mid-20th century, when Chicago was a growing center of industry and finance, Black workers were forced into segregated, underserved neighborhoods.
Now U.S. capitalism is on the decline. As the U.S. ruling class and its imperialist rivals head toward more and bigger wars, decent-paying industrial jobs have been replaced by low-paying service jobs or no jobs at all. Chicago’s Black neighborhoods were “once teeming with manufacturing companies like Brach’s Candy and Western Electric. …If you go up to Cicero [Avenue], you see all these old factories. Well, they moved out and nobody moved in….What replaced them were vacant storefronts or churches” (Chicago Reporter, 3/29/16)
Today, the situation for Black workers in Chicago is desperate. Young Black men between 20 and 24 have an unemployment rate of 47 percent (DNAInfo, 5/26/17).
Bosses need more from real estate taxes
To keep profits and power, the Chicago bosses are chasing out the very workers whose parents and grandparents built the city. Rising residential real estate prices enable the city to generate tax revenues in an era of business tax breaks. In central city neighborhoods, high real estate prices are driving out working-class families while luring affluent people with the promise of elitist, segregated public schools. In neighborhoods further from downtown, like Englewood or Austin on the West Side, the bosses have chosen to chase people out rather than reinvest in deteriorating schools and municipal services.
In the 1970s, when industry began to leave Chicago, the local ruling class lost a big part of its tax base. Instead of cutting profits or reducing the interest payments the city owed the banks, the bosses stopped fixing the schools. “By the early 1990s, audits of school facilities found them to be in abominable condition. Parents protested holding fallen bricks from their children’s schools in hand….” Great Cities Institute 11/2016).
While the city issued $2.5 billion in school bonds to renovate aging buildings and construct new ones, much of the funding was designed to encourage real estate inflation and gentrification by “expand[ing] the number of ‘high performing’ schools: i.e., Montessori and gifted elementary schools and International Baccalaureate, magnet and selective enrollment high schools. As they were intended to reach a city-wide market, most of the selective enrollment high schools were centrally located” (Great Cities Institute 11/2016).
Many billions of dollars are needed to keep the South and West sides livable. Instead, the bosses are shutting schools and cutting services to chase people out. In crisis, the capitalist rulers will always treat the working class as a disposable commodity. Like every other city, Chicago will belong to the bosses until the working class seizes power and builds a communist society to serve the needs of our class.

MEXICO CITY—For May Day celebrations, the collective decided to organize a dinner for our friends and family members, many of whom who have participated with us in rallies, marches, and study groups, in order to invite them to join Progressive Labor Party and march with us on May Day.
The dinner
The dinner’s events were moderated by a comrade who has worked with us for less than a year, and who shows great interest in understanding and carrying out the Party’s line.  We began by introducing everyone so that all were acknowledged and known. This system separates us such that knowing each other allows us to recognize that we all suffer the same exploitation, racism, and sexism.  
A comrade then gave a brief report on the international situation in a communist context, which allowed us to discuss the national situation in the midst of elections.
The next talk was by a woman comrade who explained why from a class perspective electoral democracy did not represent the working class, and only becomes a trick to allow the national oligarchy to recycle itself and to make fascism legitimate national policy.
The next talk was by another woman comrade who recounted the origins of May Day, and how it has always served as the beacon for the working class to ensure it stays the course of class struggle.
Finally, another comrade discussed the line of our party, why we are organized in a communist party, why we struggle, how we organize, and what we struggle for.  Everyone was invited to join us and march with us.
The event turned out to be very sociable and our ideas were well received, we were able to commit several attendees to agree to meet in study groups to better understand the line and the reality of the situation faced by the working class.
The march
Like every year, we met in front of the “Palacio de Bellas Artes” to have a rally at the meeting point of the few independent unions that still exist in the city. They no longer have the same influence due to the violence and the electoral climate in the country. We then withdrew to meet up with the various other collectives and march as a contingent.  By 10 am, a collection of 40 PL’ers, family members, and sympathizers. We  distributed 1,500 flyers.
We joined the march toward the Zocalo, our red flags high, with a banner and three megaphones that announced our presence. We exposed the disastrous effects of capitalism on the working class while laying out the connections between capitalists and politicians who serve one another to extract maximum profits from workers (see page 5).  We sang communist the songs of Bella Ciao and the International and chanted our slogans.
We have a long way to go to build working-class unity. We will continue to raise consciousness and organize a mass movement of workers under the leadership of PLP.

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Gearing up for May Day with young workers
A few days before May Day,  the Party collectives from Mexico City and Mexico State united in a celebration of the coming May Day. We had three dinners in different neighborhoods where the workers we are organizing, for a a communist revolution, live.  
Around 60 people participated, we talked about the crisis, oppression, and the need for a party and communism.   The main topics of discussion were the political climate with the current elections and the origins of May Day.  Most of the attendees went on to march with us on May Day.
The meeting focused on the role played by Mexican politicians in obeying the capitalist class. Compared to other capitalist nations in the U.S.-aligned Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Mexico is one of the most corrupt and unequal with the Mexican political class earning salaries far higher than those earning minimum wages.  The working class gets endlessly poorer as the basics such as fuel, among the most consumed products, become more expensive. On a daily basis it gets harder to receive basic health and social services since salaries are constantly getting cut.
We spoke about how the same politicians also own factories and are invested in the big industries, while their own family members profit and inherit wealth from the same. The negligence and nepotism by the political parties, the violent attacks against working class movements in the country, and the “structural reforms” that only serve the interests of the bosses all reflect the total lack of democracy for our class.   We understand that the vote is a farce that only allows us to decide which party watches out for the interests of the competing imperialists.
We in the PLP in Mexico have deepened our understanding of communism by having discussions that develop consciousness and allow better understanding of how the capitalist system functions.  We understand how the media are an instrument of capitalist manipulation, and that the electoral process is a form of control and merely an illusion for workers looking to better their condition.  The political parties claim they are on the side of the working class despite their opulent lifestyles, and they use their bourgeois democracy to maintain their elite status while workers have no real say in how their society is run. We understand the political class are lying parasites, and voting for the lesser evil only breathes life into capitalism keeping it from being destroyed.
We live under a capitalist regime where constitutional instruments, like periodic elections, only serve the dominant class to elect which of their sectors will rule. Given the complete capitalist control from the get go over these elections through various instruments of manipulation (the media, academics, religion, and electoral justice system) it is clear the working class will remain in the same oppressed condition. The only difference is some bosses may be willing to offer us crumbs. Some politicians may be a servant for a competing ruler or imperialist.
In countries like Mexico, where economic inequality exists, and the dictatorship of capital gets bloodier by the day, elections only serve to manipulate and maintain control over the working classes by achieving the appearance of democracy.