The United States presidential election circus has moved to the White House, where the volatile Donald Trump has become the face of the U.S. ruling class. While Trump tweets his “alternative facts” (also known as “lies”), he is inheriting a weakening U.S. empire under threat from inter-imperialist rivals Russia and China. The growing instability of the worldwide capitalist order points the way to the next world war.
Trump is assuming the presidency as U.S. bosses’ world dominance faces its greatest challenge since World War II. The old global order—where a far superior U.S. military held sway over the Atlantic and Pacific, dominated the Middle East and Latin America, and controlled every oil route—is under attack from all sides.
U.S. losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of internal divisions within the U.S. ruling class, have emboldened Russian and Chinese bosses to expand their spheres of influence. Seeing a power vacuum, smaller capitalists are seizing any opportunity to assert their autonomy. As the U.S. bosses scramble to put their own house in order, fend off their challengers, and hold on to their faltering empire, they are stuck for now with the undisciplined, unreliable Trump.
The rulers hope to keep the new president in line by surrounding him with loyalists to finance capital, the dominant wing of U.S. Imperialism: ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state; Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, a pair of retired generals who know how to take orders; a slew of Goldman-Sachs bankers; and disciplined capitalist servants like Vice President Mike Pence and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the Alabama arch-racist nominated for attorney general. But if events of last week are any indication, with Trump flailing out at whim, the president’s handlers have a lot of work to do.
As they grow relatively weaker, U.S. bosses will lash out even more lethally. Only an international working class, organized for revolution by Progressive Labor Party, can end this murderous system. More than 500,000 have died in Syria since the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton team instigated and financed that country’s civil war. Trump is a horror show, but he follows in the footsteps of the racist, imperialist, criminal misleaders who preceded him. All bosses, liberals and right-wingers alike, are the sworn enemies of our class.
While the path forward will not be an easy one, there is a way out of this capitalist quagmire. It is up to us to have the courage and confidence in the working class to create and run a new world. To get there will demand patient yet urgent collective struggle against the bosses’ oppression and ideology. The path to freeing ourselves starts by building a mass Progressive Labor Party and a communist movement for workers’ power.
U.S.-Russia Battle Widens
For the last 70 years, the big U.S. oil bosses and Wall Street capitalists have profited from their position as top-dog imperialists. But Russian capitalists are threatening the old order in both the Middle East and Europe.
Trump’s flirtation with President Vladimir Putin is secondary to the divisions in the FBI and CIA over how the U.S. ruling class should deal with Russia. Lacking working-class commitment to fight and die for the U.S. empire, the bosses know they cannot confront the Chinese and Russian bosses at the same time. In one of his last acts as president, Obama signaled the main wing’s top priority by sending 4,000 combat troops, tanks, trucks, and heavy artillery into Russia’s backyard in Poland, Romania, and the three Baltic states: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania (CNN 1/14). Additionally, more than 300 Marines were deployed to Norway, which borders Russia for more than 120 miles on the Scandinavian Peninsula—the first foreign military posting in Norway since World War II (New York Times, 1/16). To this point, neither Tillerson nor Mattis have objected to the previous administration’s provocative display of power.
The U.S. bosses are straining to hold together NATO, the historic Cold War military alliance, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of Ukraine. Russia has undermined NATO by cutting a gas pipeline deal with Turkey, the second largest NATO military power, and by subsidizing nationalist movements to break away from the European Union. Meanwhile, Putin has outflanked the U.S. rulers by forming a coalition with Turkey, Iran, and the Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime: “Russia signed a long-term agreement on Friday to greatly enlarge its military presence in Syria, more than doubling the space for warships in Russia’s only Mediterranean port and securing rights to an air base that may already be adding a second runway” (New York Times, 1/20).
China Moves in on U.S. Turf
Sensing the U.S. bosses’ reluctance to take them on, at least in the short term, Chinese rulers are expanding their own empire across the globe. The recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, featured Chinese President Xi Jinping calling for a new world order, with China playing the leading role. In introducing Ji, the Forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, showed which way the winds are blowing: “In a world marked by great uncertainty and volatility, the world is looking to China”( Al Jazeera, 1/17).
Under Xi’s proposed new alignment, China would guarantee that imperialist trade kept flowing: “It is Xi’s China that is promising to expand the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative to link Asia to Europe and Africa using land, air, and sea” (Newsweek, 1/18). According to this vision, China would dominate the Pacific Rim, weakening U.S. influence there. Countries previously subordinate to the U.S., including the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand, are being both enticed and threatened to join this new China-led club.
While the U.S. bosses are keeping their powder dry for now, they will not surrender their imperialist spoils without a fight. At some point, Chinese expansion beyond Asia will trigger a response. The U.S. will strike back with all the power the rulers can muster. Workers in the U.S. and China will be caught in the middle.
Bosses Desperate to Build Pro-War Movement
Despite Trump’s promises to put “America First” (a phrase invoked by isolationists and anti-Jewish racists in the 1940s), U.S. foreign policy can be counted on to pursue the interests of U.S. capitalism at the expense of the international working class. U.S. businesses amassed vast fortunes in rebuilding Europe after World War II. According to the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. has attempted to influence 81 elections around the world since 1946—not including military coups or regime change efforts after the elections (12/21/16). As the world’s balance of power shifts, and old postwar alliances weaken, defense of “America First” will inevitably mean more and broader war.
In the November election, the biggest U.S. capitalists, including Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, and JPMorgan Chase, lined up behind Hillary Clinton. These main-wing bosses are now heavily represented in Trump’s cabinet. To hold onto their empire, they will not blink at killing millions of workers around the world. If Trump fails to deliver the pro-war movement they need, some other politician will take his place. Only communist revolution, led by PLP, can smash this carousel of exploitation and mass murder for all time.

VALLE DE CHALCO, MEXICO, January 25— Occupations, demonstrations, marches and road blockades throughout Mexico greeted the government’s twenty percent price increase on gasoline and diesel. On January 1, as the new price increase went into effect, the government said that if they didn’t increase gasoline prices, they would have to make more cuts in healthcare, education and other social programs.
No matter what, increasing the price of gasoline is unsustainable for the working class, which increases the cost of transportation and the most basic products nationwide.
For workers in Valle de Chalco, this is another chapter in a long battle over securing energy sources like gasoline and electricity for the working class. For members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party, it is an important battle in the struggle for workers’ power.
Capitalist “Gasolinazo,” Electricity Prices = Robbery
The taxes on gasoline and diesel, nicknamed the “gasolinazo” (in Spanish, meaning “gasoline price surge”) are occurring alongside increased prices for electricity for many workers. In Valle de Chalco, the Federal Electricity Commission (Spanish acronym CFE) has been increasing prices for the past seven years, and these new gasoline and diesel taxes find a working class already organizing to fight back.
Here, many workers are marginalized from basic services, including connection to an electrical grid due to the high costs. To get around this, workers built their own improvised bypasses into the electrical grid, called “diablitos” in local Spanish slang (“little devils”). While technically against the law, the diablitos were the only way masses of workers could obtain electricity.
Under the pretense of “modernizing” the electrical grid, the CFE has been slowly implementing new technology to dismantle the networks of diablitos. These changes, which will benefit private interests and not the working class, are being done in complicity with federal, state, and municipal governments in exchange for crumbs received from the wealthy business of production, distribution, and commercialization of the electrical power. Today, the price per kilowatt-hour for the workers is $4.5 pesos, marked up from its real cost of .40 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The working class in Valle has not taken these attacks lying down! On December 14, the residents of Valle organized and formed a group called ANUES (National Assembly of Electric Energy Consumers) and opposed the dismantling of the electricity networks on their streets. This has temporarily forced the retreat of the utility companies and contractors from installing this technology.
A group of workers in ANUES and residents of Valle are CHALLENGE readers, and have been helping organize among the workers of Valle to build a mass fightback. PLP has a history of fighting back, as well as connecting these price increases and attacks to global capitalism in crisis. This is the same capitalist system which is destroying our youth with violence and drugs, that pushes insecurity, unemployment, and poverty. This struggle against CFE is connected to these problems, as well as the recent gasoline price increases.
PLP has been involved in fighting back in the reform struggle, while organizing a party for communist revolution. Four months ago, some workers formed a cooperative and associated themselves with a Portuguese company, called Mota-Engil, with 49 percent of the capital from the workers and 51 percent from the company, to sell the kilowatt-hour at 0.60 cents. Due to the capitalist government’s interference and protection of CFE and its favored companies, they have not been able to obtain the permits needed for the commercialization of electricity.  
We in PLP have been struggling to gain support and awareness of the workers in the cooperative, whose efforts to build this cooperative may be absorbed into the private electricity companies, and lose everything. At the same time, we fight to organize and build a revolutionary communist PLP.
Workers Face Down Capitalist Crises
The struggles for electricity in Valle de Chalco are directly connected to the “gasolinazo” price gouging of petroleum by the capitalist government. While workers in Mexico recently saw a salary increase of 3.9 percent in 2017, it’s a mockery, compared to the increase of twenty per cent to the gasoline price. Our living conditions will worsen, poverty will increase, and all of it will benefit the big capitalists and the parasitic capitalist state. In general terms, oil-rich countries tend to have lower overall gas prices. Yet, in Mexico, gas was already expensive, and has a tax of up to 40 percent per liter. For the bosses, that is $300 million pesos per year.  This money is used by the government to cover the budget gap caused by the price of oil production, and a current drop in value of the peso.
The working class in Mexico also has one of the lowest minimum salaries in the world, which reflects the need for the bosses to super-exploit the working class of Mexico to extract super-profits. For example, today, a worker in Mexico, with a minimum salary, will have to work a whole week to fill an automobile tank with 41 liters of gasoline. In Brazil, it takes a worker less than two days to fill up the same gas tank, while in Norway, less than one. The capitalist system extracts profits from all workers worldwide, which makes these differences between workers from one place to another ultimately irrelevant. In countries like Mexico, the exploitation and oppression can be much sharper, however, that is why we have to organize and fight in mass to face the attacks against our class that much harder. These price increases are just one of these attacks.  
As with the government’s complicity with the disappeared students in Ayotzinapa, the bosses always look to deflect the blame for capitalism’s problems back on the working class. During the demonstrations against the “gasolinazo,” the capitalist media highlighted only the looting that occurred during the demonstrations. The workers knew the government hired groups to do this  looting. The bosses wanted to discredit those who legitimately stand up against the abuses of the capitalist system.
Other working class leaders who refused to be bought and controlled by the government were threatened with beatings, creating terror among the population. This threat prevented many from joining the protests and gave the government a green light to use their military and police presence to try and instill even more fear.
The state apparatus is trying to terrorize the population so we will not recognize the power we have as a class, and the power we have to take control of the means of production when organized in the revolutionary PLP.
Capitalism’s crises cannot be reformed, they must be destroyed with revolution. The bosses’ fear tactics cannot control the working class forever, and CHALLENGE is helping the workers expose them. Capitalism’s crisis will grow as the U.S., Russian and Chinese bosses gear up for bigger wars, and we can only fight it organized in the communist PLP. We’re a party that fights for a communist society and will end exploitation and capitalist inequality. PLP calls on all workers in Valle de Chalco to organize and fight to stop the network change and the high costs of electricity. We call on workers of the world to organize and fight against the capitalist system. Fight back!

Davis, CA, January 13—Several hundred students and workers at the University of California at Davis shut down a planned fascist rally featuring Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and drug price-gouger Martin Shkreli. This sharp confrontation was a small lesson on the role of the state (the government) in protecting fascists, their capitalist masters, and the whole capitalist system. The Progressive Labor Party wants to destroy this bosses’ government and put the working class in power. That’s communism!
Fascist Yiannopoulos was kicked off Twitter when he led the vile, racist harassment of “Ghostbusters” actress Leslie Jones. He also made a vicious, sexist attack on a transgender student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, leading to the student’s withdrawal from college. Shkreli raised the price of an anti-protozoal medication often used by HIV patients from $13.50 to $750, making money by killing people. Davis College Republicans, the sponsors of this event, claim the rally was about free speech. But there was no interest in debating serious issues, only in racist, sexist, anti-gay, anti-transgender harassment. This fascist event needed to be shut down—and it was.
The role of the bosses’ state in defending fascism was clear as a line of campus police separated the anti-fascist demonstrators from the building and auditorium where the rally was to be held. The cops were met with chants of “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” and “From here to Mexico, tear down walls!” Other chants targeted the fascism of Milo and Trump (but let off the hook the equally but less blatantly fascist Democrats). The strength of our action was the fierce chanting and militancy against these open fascists.
At 7 PM the administration announced that the event was cancelled. We didn’t believe them and continued our protest for more than 30 minutes—protesting for more than an hour and a half!
A Students for a Democratic Society chapter on campus had been organizing against the event for weeks. A local Black Lives Matter group, Students and Workers Ending Racist Violence (SWERV) brought large contingents to the action. SDS and SWERV members planned to stage some disruptions inside the auditorium where the rally was to be held and passed out whistles, finger puppets, signs, and banners.
At one point some protesters grabbed large plastic barricades that had been placed in front of the police line, pulling them into the demonstration. This had the effect of empowering others to be bolder in approaching and confronting the cops. Our PLP study group is reading Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Now we can combine theory with practice. We learn not just by reading and discussing, but also by doing. We invite workers and students everywhere to join the Progressive Labor Party in study groups, in fights against this sexist and racist system, and in the long struggle for a communist revolution!

OAKLAND, January 21—Progressive Labor Party and friends energized a passive crowd at the National Women’s March with our militant anti-capitalist chants and speeches. The turnout was 60,000 people marching without speeches or chants. We decided we had to turn it up. We chanted, “Hey Trump, you fascist, we’ll burn your house to ashes.”
While some appeared confused and apprehensive to join us, many joined in and asked for multiple copies of our 800 leaflets and copies of CHALLENGE. It is out job as communists to expose the whole system, not just trump.
Learning in the Streets
Our PLP contingent was a visual representation of worker unity across gender, race, and age. Two young women gave political leadership for the first time. Part of their apprehension to lead stemmed from the passive tone of the march. There were no apparent political demands or calls to action. When we tried to lead chants at first, only a few joined in. Some seemed upset that we were saying anything political because they said, “We were asked not to do that.”
The other PL comrades pushed the younger women to lead with confidence. What began as hesitation gave way to leading dozens of people with speeches and chants. When one young woman gave a speech that profits are the problem, and sexist and racist divisions only hurt us, many people cheered in agreement!
Friends helped distribute hundreds of CHALLENGEs and leaflets and lead discussions about police murders in the Bay Area. The antiracist, antisexist militancy of our communist contingent had a visible impact on the engagement and morale of the workers around us.
Democrats, Republics All the Same
It was clear the march brought out many for whom it was their first time in the streets, and who were devastated that Barack Obama would no longer be their Bomber-in-Chief. That’s why it’s important that PLP was struggling with people to understand that Obama and the Democrats have never been friends of the working class, and that the only way to defeat global fascism is by smashing capitalism.
While workers taking to the streets en masse for the first time provides the possibility for us to push their politics further to the left, it does not necessarily mean that this movement will spontaneously lead to workers fighting to smash capitalism. It is vital that PLP continues to build a Party and movement to take power and build the communist world that all workers deserve.
Marching in the streets demanding reproductive rights is important, but these demands are limited and will continue to lead us to the hamster wheel of reform unless we are building a worker led Progressive Labor Party to fight for state power.
Women & Men, Unite!
Capitalism needs sexism to divide and blind workers from the reality that we are all being exploited and oppressed by the same ruling class. The role of identity politics has been to exacerbate these divisions and to perpetuate the suppression of class-consciousness by making identity primary.
During the march a woman told a comrade, “The male race as always looked out for itself, so the female race needs to do the same and stick together.” Aside from historical and logical error in that statement, a fight that shuns half of our force is one we are guaranteed to lose. When we view ourselves as inherently different or opposed to an entire group of workers, we are doing the bosses’ work. Many of our friends were able to see how conflicting these politics were to our fight for a worker-led society.
As we continue to navigate our way through this dark night, the work of the Progressive Labor Party is essential to building worker’s confidence in their class brothers and sisters.