The election of ex-investment banker Emmanuel Macron as president of France reflects the global crisis of capitalism. Like all other capitalist powers, the French ruling class has responded with rising fascism and heightened attacks on the working class. Like Donald Trump (and Barack Obama before him), who has surrounded himself with Wall Street bankers, French finance capital is maneuvering to maintain its rule.
Beneath Macron’s liberal, “pro-immigrant” rhetoric, this so-called outsider and his “independent” political party (En Marche!) received the full backing of France’s political elites, with unlimited media and financial support. Simultaneously, he effectively isolated the mainstream capitalist parties that have lost credibility with French workers.
Trending Decline and Disarray
Faced with an unsustainable budget deficit, the French bosses are in a bind. Heading into the April 23 presidential election and the runoff two weeks later, they knew that their next president would need to escalate the rulers’ attacks on the working class. The rulers want to eliminate job protections and to slash spending on pensions, health care, family allowances, and unemployment benefits—which altogether account for more than a third of France’s Gross Domestic Product (www.thelocal.fr, 12/22/16). Since the 1980s, the French government has either partially or fully privatized many national industries, including Air France, France Telecom and Renault.  However, the government still plays a role in certain key national sectors, such as agriculture and healthcare, including labor protection laws that are cutting into the profits and competitiveness of the French bosses (Focus Economics May 2017).
Macron has already promised to pursue the anti-worker labor reforms of his unpopular “Socialist” Party predecessor, Francois Hollande, including attacks on unions and collective bargaining, prohibition of strikes, and cuts to social benefits, while privatizing health care and education.  The French ruling class hopes that Macron can do so while winning mass applause instead of mass upheaval. The more openly fascist National Front’s Marine Le Pen, the losing candidate in the May election runoff, had similar proposals to Macron on the domestic front, but likely would have generated the intense opposition the U.S. ruling class now faces with the anti-Trump movement.  It’s hard to attack the workers and mobilize for war when the workers are on strike and fighting back in the streets!  It’s no surprise that  Obama endorsed Macron three days before the election.  
The French bosses are learning from the experience of the U.S. ruling class. For more than 30 years, the U.S. rulers have attacked wages and pensions and privatized the healthcare and education systems with relatively little fightback. Tens of millions of workers—including super-exploited black workers—have been misled and pacified by the Democratic Party.  In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton signed trade agreements that eliminated decent-paying factory jobs, mostly eliminated welfare, unleashed 100,000 more racist cops on the streets, and created the largest prison population in the world, filled with mostly Black and Latin workers. Then Obama—who, like Macron, campaigned on a “pro-immigrant” platform—deported more immigrant workers than any president in U.S. history.  
In France, Macron plans to add his “shiny new face” of liberal fascism with promises to add 10,000 more cops and 5,000 more border cops, to increase the National Guard to 85,000, and to expand their prison detention centers by 15,000 additional spaces—policies in step with those advocated by Le Pen (French Institute of International Relations, April 2017).
For French finance capital, however, Macron’s victory fails to solve the fundamental problem every ruling power faces as inter-imperialist rivals prepare for the next global war. The bosses must win the allegiance of the working class and unite workers behind their patriotic agenda while at the same time waging vicious racist, sexist attacks.  Even with Macron as an option, 25 percent of all eligible French voters abstained from casting a ballot, the highest proportion since 1969. An additional 25 percent of those voting for Macron did so only as a vote against Le Pen. (CNN, 5/8).
La Lutte
Last summer, when Macron was Hollande’s economy minister, and the country was gripped with violent protests over government attempts to eliminate job security and the 35-hour work week, Macron was pelted with eggs, one landing directly on his shiny, new face.
In the weeks leading up to this spring’s elections, masses of high school and college students, deciding that neither Macron nor Le Pen were acceptable choices for their future, waged a no-voting campaign. Led by the slogan, “No Fatherland, No Boss, No Le Pen, No Macron,” youth hit the streets around the country to protest French imperialism. Two thousand turned out in the western French city of Rennes. In Paris, protests blocked entrances to 20 high schools.
These bold youth faced off against police in riot gear, who attacked them with tear gas. While denouncing Le Pen’s racist nationalism and Macron’s pro-business front is a start, only a communist movement can bring the change these young people seek. Only a communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party, can smash the bosses and their Fatherland and create a new society: “One Party, One World, One Class.”
While workers in the U.S. have seen an uptick in fightback against the Trump administration, it remains to be seen if Macron can effectively mislead and mute workers as effectively as Obama did in the U.S. Nonetheless, the fake left in France has shown its true colors by selling out the working class to the banks and capitalist system.  And while Le Pen lost the election, her openly fascist party received more mass support from our class than ever.  
No electoral capitalist party can defend workers against rising fascism. Only a revolutionary communist party like PLP can fight for the interests and needs of our class. Join us!

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French Imperialist Role

Despite the decline and fall of their colonial empire, the French bosses retain an interest in playing an imperialist role on the world stage. The National Front’s Marine Le Pen took an isolationist stance, calling for French withdrawal from NATO and the European Union, and rejection of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).  Additionally she argued for lifting sanctions and making an alliance with Russia. Her movement stands in contradiction to the French bosses’ pro-U.S. and pro-Europe stance since World War II through the alliances with other European countries and the United States. Macron’s more traditional positions won him the main bosses’ backing and ultimately won him the election.
While calling for cuts in public spending and attacks on workers, Macron is promoting French imperialism by supporting increased spending on the military and its adventures around the world.  The French military, the largest in Europe at 205,000-strong, is actively planning to modernize its nuclear weapons. It has 30,000 troops deployed in Africa and the Middle East, in its support of the U.S.-led imperialist “war on terror.”
Under “Operation Chammal,” the French army has a full battery of Caesar 155mm gun-howitzers, along with French Rafale fighter aircraft, fighting alongside U.S. forces in their oil war in Iraq and Syria.  The French rulers continue their imperialist ravaging of Africa for oil and minerals in Libya and their “Operation Barkhane” in Mali, Mauretania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad (U.S. Department of Defense, Jan 2017).

COLOMBIA, May 1—The peace between social classes serves the criminal bosses, down with the capitalist dictatorship, arise the communist revolution, long live the international communist May Day!
In celebration of May Day the contingent of the PLP resonated these and many other chants resonated with anger and enthusiasm. This manifestation was carried out in Bogota, Colombia commemorating the International Workers’ Day. Since early on we began selling and distributing Challenge, making an emphasis on the line and the PLP program and communism as the only solution to escape the capitalist jail. Electoral groups of the left, unions, social organizations and women groups began to group and organize their banners.
Behind the banner of our paper, Challenge 65 people, women, men, students and workers took on the responsibility and the initiative to mobilize their friends and lead our protest with belligerence. We spread a powerful message, well received by many workers, rescuing the international proletariat and the need for communist revolution to end police terror, racism, nationalism, fascism, and the bosses’ war. More than 200 Challenges were distributed and 3000 fliers were given.
We had an amicable debate about the revolutionary program of the PLP with a group of farm workers that came from Guatemala, Panama, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia, and they asked us questions about socialism and communism, which were the mistakes in the way the struggles was carried out in USSR, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador and now in Venezuela, we explained that our line is based on the mistakes and wise decisions of the past to build a communist future with a revolutionary process that gives workers the importance as the main actors and avoids falling in revisionism, without dismissing the importance of past struggles and the daily ones that will liberate us. The comrades understood the message and we said bye warmly taking with them pleasantly the literature.
The unions showed their total cynism and pacifism, leading their members to march as docile lambs and the most they asked for was for justice and better conditions under capitalism. The unions limit themselves to beg for better salaries and more honest politicians given the dominant corruption, reason why many workers are dissident with those traitor politicians and organized other protests in seven different neighborhoods. PLP marched waving their red flags with pride and yelling our chants “against the profiteer capitalism for communist worker state, no more sexism fight for communism”, with great approval and admiration of the attendants, so much so that many of the marchers asked for copies, helping us chant 27 chants with communist fervor and capitalist system hate. These protest are battle camps for our ideas and practices, they have to be schools for the class struggle in which we build a mass movement for our communist goal.
Some of the ones chanted with revolutionary enthusiasm and others: “Justice will arrive, communism with win,” “let’s replace the capitalist dream for communist revolution” and “changing capitalist rulers is choosing the same”.
We picked up fliers and papers from other organizations to advance in our study of the current situation and state of class struggle. Our objective is to influence the worker organizations so that we struggle and we see communism as something possible to govern our destiny and all of humanity’s.

Park Slope Collegiate, a public secondary school that has led the fight against segregation and racist inequalities in the Department of Education, is now under assault by a DoE investigation of “Communist organizing” (New York Times, 5/4). The DoE has targeted anti-racist Principal Bloomberg as a member of Progressive Labor Party (which she isn’t) and accused her of recruiting students to PLP (which she hasn’t).
But the school bosses’ baseless charges are rooted in an antiracist history. Going back to the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s and through the Civil Rights movement and beyond, communists have led the multiracial fightback against racism in the streets, the schools and universities, the workplace, and the military.
The DoE’s attack on Park Slope Collegiate echoes the intimidation tactics of 1950s’-era communist-hunter Joseph McCarthy. Two of New York City’s most powerful liberal bosses—Mayor Bill De Blasio and DoE Chancellor Carmen Farina—are counting on anti-communism to frighten and silence anyone who stands up against their racist policies, which consign the vast majority of Black and Latin children—approximately 75 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school student population—to a segregated, second-class education. In so doing, these bosses have yet again exposed themselves as the shameless racists they are.
The Struggle at John Jay Campus
Park Slope Collegiate (PSC) is one of four schools on the long-neglected John Jay Campus, which is located in the heart of a wealthy white neighborhood in Brooklyn. Three of the schools enroll predominantly Black and Latin students from low-income families outside the neighborhood. In 2010, the DoE announced plans to install the fourth school, Millennium Brooklyn, a selective, significantly white high school that would be given more funding and resources per student than its co-located schools. Principal Bloomberg led PSC’s effort to organize against this elitist, racist plan, and proposed instead that white students in the neighborhood be integrated into the existing schools. But the struggle failed, and Millennium Brooklyn opened in 2011—one more piece in “one of [the] most deeply segregated school systems in the nation” in “polychromatic” New York City (NYT, 5/17).
Since then, the principal and a group of anti-racist teachers and parents have led a multiracial fightback to demand the removal of metal detectors from the campus, to defend students against abuse by school security agents and the New York Police Department, and to challenge the cops who herded students out of the neighborhood at dismissal each day. PL teachers are proud to have played a leading role in the many battles against racism the PSC community has fought.

Most recently, in February, Principal Bloomberg sent the DoE a complaint that documented racist inequalities in the city’s funding for varsity sports teams. The John Jay Campus sports program—which serves 1,859 students, more than 90 percent of them Black or Latin—was given only nine teams. But the Millennium sports program received 17 teams for only 1,261 students—including 641 students at Millennium High School in Manhattan, which uses John Jay’s gym facilities and is only 25 percent Black and Latin.
Two weeks after the principal made her complaint, the DoE’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) arrived at PSC and announced it was investigating “communist activities taking place at the school.”  Principal Bloomberg filed a lawsuit in federal court, charging that her civil rights and right to free speech had been violated. But “rights” under capitalism are protected only when they serve the bosses’ interests. On May 16, the OSI Gestapo invaded the school unannounced and interrogated students as young as 13, pressuring them to reveal their parents’ and teachers’ political beliefs and activities. The investigators’ witch-hunt was aided by the district superintendent and a ruthless guidance counselor. She escorted the students to her office—which had been commandeered as the interrogation room (PSC Pulse, PTA newsletter, May 16).
Why the Bosses Need Segregation
John Jay Campus is a microcosm of the racist inequalities in school systems throughout the U.S. What makes PSC different is that students, parents, and teachers at this school are fighting back.
Why is this fight such a threat to the DoE? The bosses cannot stand multiracial fightback in any form. They need to preserve school segregation to prepare Black, Latin, and immigrant children for the racism that awaits them on the job or in the military—or the prison work force. The super-exploitation of Black and Latin workers is analogous to the super-deprivation of Black and Latin students. To see Black, Latin, and white students rebelling together against racist conditions puts the bosses in a panic.  
Under Capitalism, Real Estate Trumps Learning
Public schools today are more segregated than they were in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, acknowledged that “separate” could never be equal. New York State’s schools are the most segregated in the U.S. (https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu, 2009).
De Blasio and Farina are doing their part to uphold the state’s ranking by perpetuating racist “choice” policies for secondary schools and defending elementary school zones that deliberately segregate students in the service of home real estate values for the middle class and the affluent.  As the mayor said, “You have to also respect families who have made a decision to live in a certain area oftentimes because of a specific school” (Chalkbeat, 11/6/2015). And more recently: “We cannot change the basic reality of housing in New York City” (NYT, 5/11). De Blasio, who is running for reelection this fall, relies on millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the real estate sector.
Only Option: More Fightback!
Progressive Labor Party salutes the inspirational, antiracist fightback—at John Jay Campus and everywhere workers and students are daring to fight back. In attacking Park Slope Collegiate, the bosses are exposing their true racist colors. But in fighting racism, teachers and students are learning invaluable working-class lessons. They’re also boosting workers’ confidence in our ability to resist, organize, and survive in a period of rising fascism.

History has segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
Below is part I of a series aimed at reuniting the history of communism with antiracism. Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, excerpted throughout this piece, is a good supplement for those who would like to find out more.

In the years after slavery, Southern U.S. bosses used racist terror in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, police beatings, and lynching, legal and extralegal, to keep Black workers oppressed and as a source of cheap labor to drive down the wages of all workers Black and white.
Robin D.G. Kelley in Hammer and Hoe described it as the following:

White supremacist groups [including the KKK] organized by some of [Birmingham’s] leading citizens…enjoyed huge numerical and financial support…Klansmen [through intimidation and violence] sought to cleanse their city of Jews, Catholics, labor agitators, and recalcitrant African-Americans who refused to accept “their place” in the hierarchy of race

The Southern bosses police and kangaroo courts (sham legal proceedings) were the heart of this injustice system.

Fear [of the Southern injustice system] came from the knowledge that the color of your skin made you a suspect—a suspect that looked just like the prime suspect—every time the police were looking for a black man. (WNYC 2/1/2013)

When workers united and fought back against this terror, the bosses often used racism and anti-communism to try to divide the working class.
The Scottsboro Boys
On March 25, 1931 nine Black teenagers age 13 to 19 were pulled from a freight car near Paint Rock, Alabama and charged with raping two white women. Within three days, the young men were tried by an all-white jury, convicted and sentenced to death. A lynch mob gathered at the jail in Scottsboro, demanding the young men be turned over to the racist rioters.
Courthouse lynchings like this were common for Black workers and youth living in the Jim Crow south. So common in fact that the local branch of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the other civic organizations, focused on helping small business owners, didn’t even respond to the case.
Communists, First Responders
One organization did respond, the International Labor Defense (ILD), a workers’ defense organization initiated by the Communist Party. ILD was made up of communist and non-communist workers, Black and white. Within days of the sham trial, the ILD set up a defense committee, obtained lawyers for the nine young men on death row and built the defense of the Scottsboro Boys into a worldwide cause that saved them from the electric chair and after a many years-long battle eventually won their freedom.
The fight to defend the Scottsboro Boys involved several thousands of people around the world. The ILD organized mass meetings where family members of the wrongly convicted young men would speak alongside members of the ILD.
Bosses Counter with Terror
The Southern bosses were terrified of this multiracial movement against lynchings and responded with a campaign of terror against Black and white supporters of the campaign. Along with the physical terror carried out by the Klan, a campaign of anti-communism was launched to scare workers away from the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys.
The anticommunist campaign took several forms. The kkkops arrested people, and beat people suspected of being supporters of the ILD. Black and white women were arrested and threatened with rape by the police. The bosses’ press spread anti-communism.

The Birmingham Labor Advocate warned its readers to beware of outside agitators who, “under the cover of darkness,” disseminated ”Red literature preaching free love [and] inter marriage. (Hammer and Hoe)

The local NAACP was reluctant to help defend the working-class youth. But a whole year after the arrests, one of the women accusers of rape came forward and admitted there was no rape and that the police had forced her into lying. This created an upsurge in anger about the case and the NAACP finally joined the ILD in the campaign to free the young men.
In spite of the beatings, jailings and threats, the ILD kept both the mass campaign and the legal fight going by organizing meetings, rallies and raising money to pay legal fees and other expenses for the families of the Scottsboro Boys.

The All-Southern Scottsboro and Civil Rights Conference was one such mass meeting that went on in spite of Klan and police intimidation. In the days prior to the conference Klansmen organized a twenty-car motorcade through the Black community and distributed leaflets that read “Communism Will Not Be Tolerated.”
 Nonetheless some three hundred Blacks and fifty whites packed the meeting room and between 500 and 1000 were turned away because of lack of space and by the military presence of the police who stationed eighty cops equipped with three machine guns in posts across the street from the hall.
…As Hosea Hudson [a Black communist and labour leader in Deep South] recalled many stood up to the intimidation.  “[People] just walked all under them rifles, just went on in the door and on to the meeting.” (Hammer and Hoe)

The fight to free the railroaded young men took many years. Charges were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants. Sentences for the rest ranged from 75 years to death. All but two served prison sentences; all were free by 1946.
You Cannot Kill the Working Class
Angelo Herndon, a Black communist labour organizer, summed up the significance of the struggle in his essay entitled “You Cannot Kill the Working Class.”

If you know the South as I do, you know what the Scottsboro case means. Here were the landlords in their fine plantation homes, and the big white bosses in their city mansions, and the whole brutal force of [private security] and police who do their bidding. There they sat, smug and self-satisfied, and oh, so sure that nothing could ever interfere with them and their ways. For all time they would be able to sweat and cheat the [Black] people, and jail and frame and lynch and shoot them, as they pleased.
And all of a sudden someone laid a hand on their arm and said: “STOP.” It was a great big’ hand, a powerful hand, the hand of the workers. The bosses were shocked and horrified and scared. I know that. And I know also that after the fight began for the Scottsboro boys, every [Black] worker in mill or mine, every [Black] cropper on the Black Belt plantations, breathed a little easier and held his head a little higher.