A Donald Trump presidency means a continuation of Barack Obama’s wage-killing exploitation, economic crises, racist and sexist demagoguery, persecution of immigrants, ever-widening inequality, and plans for broader inter-imperialist conflict. It can also be one of mass fightback! Communists have a vital role to play in this volatile period. Multiracial unity is our most powerful weapon. Our job is to organize the international working class to defend itself and fight back.
Trump was clearly not the first choice of the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. The finance capitalists were more comfortable with the racist, sexist Hillary Clinton, a proven general for U.S. imperialism. But the bosses are flexible and resourceful, and they’ll exert all of their power to bend Trump to their will. To maintain their dominance, protect their oil profits, and build support for the next big ground war, the bosses will move to bring workers from across the political spectrum into line. As the Council on Foreign Relations, the leading think tank for U.S. main-wing, finance capitalism, observes:
Trump may provoke lasting political realignments. On the right, this will most likely take the form of a resurgence in muscular exceptionalism, which would call Americans to unite in confronting a freedom-hating enemy (perhaps China, Iran, or Russia). Less predictable, but potentially more interesting, will be the opposition from the left. After eight years of deferring to Obama, the left now has an opportunity to get creative. For instance, left-wing Democrats (and some Republicans) may attempt to constrain the power of the executive, as occurred after World War I and the Vietnam War, but after the war in Iraq has not.
Relative to its rivals in Russia and China, the U.S. ruling class is internally divided and in accelerating decline. The volatility around Trump’s incoming presidency makes the U.S. bosses even more vulnerable. It is too early to gauge Trump’s impact on the splits that plague the ruling class. The rulers themselves are as unsure of how to make a Trump presidency work best for them. But we can be certain that the bosses’ relentless drive for profits will intensify their attacks on the international working class.
Obama’s War Legacy
Assassin-in-Chief Obama paved the road for Trump to continue wholesale killing with drones. As of January 2016, Obama had authorized more than five hundred drone strikes, killing 3,040 people labeled as terrorists and 391 civilians (New York Times, 1/12/16). Trump’s racist anti-Muslim policies were derived from Obama’s racist military attacks on the working class in the Middle East.  Obama’s efforts to institutionalize and normalize the practice of drone strikes will be now be pushed by Trump.
Eight years of a Barack Obama presidency has resulted in mass deportations (a record 2.5 million through 2015), a bank bailout ($700 billion) and rampant, racist police terror. But Obama did little to assuage the bosses’ biggest concern: the waning of patriotism among disaffected U.S. workers, and their lack of enthusiasm for a military draft for the next ground war.
The U.S. military is essential to U.S. capitalist dominance around the world. While Trump may have made isolationist-sounding campaign promises to cancel trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or to step back from NATO and give Russia freer rein in Eastern Europe, make no mistake. Trump will be a war president. As Foreign Affairs (1/3) noted,
Trump never promised to retract the United States’ global power. To the contrary, he vowed to build up the military, go after Islamist terrorism, and counter Chinese aggression. An isolationist he is not.
The Brookings Institute, another top imperialist think tank, laments Obama’s decision to avoid “messy” conflicts that would require, “sizing military forces in particular for larger-scale stabilization missions. In other words, he directed the armed forces not even to retain the capability to do big things that extended beyond their warfighting comfort zones” (1/6).  The report encourages Trump to correct Obama’s mistake before the next war.
All Capitalists Are Our Enemies
Based on the people he’s nominated to cabinet-level positions, Trump could represent an opportunity to unify the rulers’ dominant section with the wing represented by more domestically oriented capitalists.
The jobs that deal directly with profits generated within the U.S. are going to allies of domestically focused bosses like Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are “well positioned to influence the Trump administration, with many allies in important cabinet and transition positions” (Times, 1/6). For example, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, received $175,000 from the Koch brothers’ network for a nonprofit Pruitt helps lead (Politico, 12/27/16).
On the other hand, Trump’s appointment of Walter “Jay” Clayton to head the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency that polices and regulates Wall Street, is a clear nod to the finance capital section of the ruling class.  Clayton is a lawyer who has represented mega-banks like Barclays and JPMorgan Chase. He also handled the U.S. Treasury Department’s capital investment in Goldman Sachs, where  his wife is a private wealth advisor. Mike Sherrod, a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, stated,
“It’s hard to see how an attorney who’s spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap will keep President-elect Trump’s promise to stop big banks and hedge funds from ‘getting away with murder’” (NYT, 1/4).
The bosses will continue to use Trump’s racist rhetoric to divide the working class by blaming Black and Latin workers for unlivable wages and housing conditions. The Republican Party, in particular, will use openly racist, far-right movements to deepen this divide. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party will use Trump’s presidency to mislead the working class into dead-end, liberal social reform movements, while pushing the lie that voting can change capitalism.
Even as friction within the ruling class heightens, the bosses will do their best to use Trump’s presidency to serve their common interest in maximum profit, and to attack the working class to that end.
Same Enemy, Same Fight
Historically, workers have fought together against their oppressors from the very inception of capitalism. Although we understand that the profit system can never be reformed to serve workers’ needs, reform movements and tactics--rallies, strikes, walkouts, and local fights against racism and sexism—can be extremely valuable for our class. They build unity with our class brothers and sisters. Most important, they teach us how to fight the bosses.
Like the Obama presidency before it, Trump’s presidency is hazardous to the international working class--and an opportunity for mass militancy. Since the November elections, we have seen thousands of workers hit the streets with their fists in the air, ready to fight back against capitalism. Trump’s open racism can be smashed only by multiracial unity.   We must continue to struggle with misled workers to fight back against the true beast. Only a multiracial mass movement for communist revolution can smash capitalism and all of its lies.
Our ultimate goal is communism. It can be realized only with mass revolutionary violence by millions of workers and youth--by people just like you. United as one class, freed from exploitation and artificial borders, the working class can build a new world from the ashes of the old. Join the Progressive Labor Party!  When you do, you will be joining hands with billions of fighters past, present, and future. The world belongs to the international working class, but only if we dare to fight for it.

WASHINGTON, DC, January 5—The path to revolution for a communist society includes leading militant battles against racist, capitalist attacks on our class. In the Amalgamated Transportation Union Local 689, Progressive Labor Party members are struggling with their co-workers to intensify the fight against management.
A strong union strike would not only push back against management attacks, but would strengthen the working class for the many battles ahead on the road to a communist revolution. For transit workers this requires exposing how the current union leaders collaborate with management. At Metro, and all around the world, communist leadership is needed for the struggles against the bosses’ attacks today, and for communism, workers’ power, tomorrow. A stronger PLP organization at Metro is a step in this direction.
Progressive Labor Party joined over 100 workers and riders at a union town hall meeting. The union leadership called the meeting supposedly to resist Metro’s efforts to balance its budget for the next fiscal year. The anti-working class attacks that Metro is proposing includes cutting bus and rail service, laying off workers, freezing wages, and eliminating new workers from the defined benefit pension plan. These attacks are all racist as they disproportionately affect Black workers the most. And racism weakens the working class and hurts all workers.
Politicians, Bosses, and Union Leaders Cozy Up
Some politicians spoke at the meeting to “support” our struggle, but this lie was met with much skepticism. Malcolm Augustine, a member of the Metro Board of Directors, said he favored increasing headways (the time between runs) rather than eliminating lines. Workers told him that this proposal would also mean cutting jobs. He quickly tried to change his story.
Another worker asked him about the Board’s efforts to eliminate new workers from the pension system. When he claimed he did not know about this, the local union president jumped in to defend him and his supposed ignorance, claiming the Board was not responsible for the proposals attacking the union pension system.
We got a glimpse of the way the current union leadership fawns over Metro bosses instead of taking them on!
From Rallies to Revolution,Workers Must Fight Back
The ongoing crisis of capitalism and the weakness of the labor movement have made the bosses much more determined to make these cuts. A PLP member at the meeting drove home this point. Although Metro management has proposed cuts in the past, workers and riders have fought them with partial success through rallies and mass attendance at public hearings. Today, more intense struggle is needed. We are organizing for a strike while strengthening the working class for future battles.
The union is planning a major rally at the final budget hearing at Metro Headquarters on January 30. We will be there fighting the bosses’ cutbacks and building a strong, multiracial working class that builds for a communist revolution!

In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, major capitalist media outlets immediately blamed the working class, particularly white workers, for Donald Trump’s victory. It is a given in the U.S. that many workers—Black, white, Latin and others—are angry. That white workers are somehow responsible for a Nazi like Trump is ruling class nonsense.
The history of white workers is intimately bound in common struggle with Black and immigrant workers since the U.S. was a British colony. The bosses’ lies represent sharpening capitalist efforts to alienate Black, Latin, Muslim and immigrant workers, those hardest hit by racism, from their white working class sisters and brothers. While the bosses write working-class politics out of history, CHALLENGE strives to preserve and commemorate the long tradition of the all-necessary force of multiracial unity of our class.
The communist Progressive Labor Party fights back against capitalism across the globe for revolution for a communist world, where the international working class runs society. Part of our fight is dispelling the anti-working class lies spun by the bosses about one or another sector of the working class. The capitalists hate and fear communism with good reason—it means an end to their money, their borders, their empires, their racist and sexist ideas, and their class.
Trump: Creature of Capitalism
Donald Trump is rightfully hated by hundreds of millions of workers around the globe, and by masses of workers, Black and white, in the U.S. Donald Trump, however, is no more than a servant of the U.S. capitalist class. The capitalist controlled media, instead of analyzing the class nature of Trump’s presidency, has settled on finger pointing at the white working class.
“Call [the U.S. presidential election] the triumph of angry white men everywhere…The only thing that can be said for certain is that angry white men are now dominant” (Huffington Post, 11/9/16).
Or as former U.S. president Bill Clinton explained, “Trump doesn’t know much. One thing he knows is how to get angry, white men to vote for him” (Politico, 12/19/16).
While Trump’s brand of open racism and sexism represent a lethal danger to the international working class, white workers are not to “blame” for Trump’s election. Capitalism created Trump,  or specifically, laid the groundwork for the rise of open racism and sexism he could exploit. Trump is merely the latest in line to serve U.S. imperialism, whose history of creating racism and racist divisions within the working class dates back to the founding of the country.
Racism: Capitalism’s Greatest Weapon and Weakness

“Before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the [U.S.] Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures…They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy -- the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen.”
 —“The Road Not Taken” Lerone Bennett

Lubbers, clay-eaters, rubbish—these were the words and raw imagery used to describe the masses of workers, many of them children, arriving from Europe to the British colonies in North America in the 15-1600s. The promotion of America as a land of opportunity was in stark contrast to its reality as a sink hole of oppression for Europe’s displaced labor force, and growing African slave population. However, as Bennett notes above, the “color line” between white and Black took time to create.   
The development of capitalism in the U.S. coincided with genocide against the largely defiant indigenous population and laws defining color line among its labor force throughout the 1600s. This hastened after a major rebellion by a wealthy English planter in 1676. Known as Bacon’s Rebellion, over one thousand enslaved Black and indentured white labor (bound by bond contracts to the same bosses) burned Britain’s colonial capital, Jamestown, Virginia, to the ground. The multiracial rebellion took years to defeat, and terrified the local colonial bosses. This led to the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, the first laws enforcing a legal divide between slaves and indentured servants (see page 4).
Black chattel slavery exploited by the U.S. capitalists enabled the country, over time, to emerge as an industrial power. In the meantime, the working class showed no signs of stopping resistance. What follows are some examples from U.S. history, by no means complete, of how the history of white workers is inseparable from every other sector of the working class.
Racism Hurts All Workers
Immigration to the U.S. continued unabated throughout the 1800s. The southern slave states grew in wealth and power, as did northern industry. The first labor unions, formed in the northeast in the 1790s, struggled to negotiate with employers while in nearby Maryland, Black slaves were driven to exhaustion for the same work with no pay.
With the victory of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, nightmares of Bacon’s Rebellion haunted the rulers of the new United States. Then-president Thomas Jefferson, famed author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, shared the slaveholders’ fears that rebellion could spread via trade with Haiti. As Jefferson blockaded weapons shipments to Haiti, he cracked down on white workers. For the first time, in 1805, unions organized by shoemakers in Philadelphia were indicted as foreign conspiracies against the government, a tactic the bosses learned to love (Labor’s Untold Story, Richard O. Boyer).
By 1846, the New England Workingmen’s Association, organized by women and men mill workers of European descent, resolved: “American slavery must be uprooted before the elevation sought by the laboring classes can be affected” (Boyer). Others sought more radical means, while, in the meantime, hundreds of recorded slave rebellions, large and small, rocked the U.S.
Workers Enlist in Civil War
In 1859, a white abolitionist, John Brown, led a multiracial band of 22 men in an attempt to capture a federal arsenal in Virginia, at Harper’s Ferry. Their failure to end slavery by arming freed slaves and waging guerrilla warfare, however, made John Brown’s raid a rallying cry. During the U.S. Civil War that followed, between 500-750,000 northern industrial workers enlisted in the army. The first company of soldiers mobilized to defend Washington, DC, was an entire union local of textile workers from Massachusetts.
Trade unions enlisted unanimously in this way, many ceasing to exist for the duration of the war. Companies of the workers of the Illinois Miners’ Union and Brooklyn Painters’ Union resolved to smash “the slaveholders’ conspiracy” (Boyer). Masses of Irish, German, Polish and Italian veterans of revolutions in Europe, Jewish workers, English miners and deported trade unionists, and more than 40,000 Canadians, were the among the first regiments to enter the war and scored important victories.
By no means were all white workers committed antiracists. In 1863, the same week the first all-Black regiment of the war, the 54th, saw action alongside white regiments, lynchings and race rioting of the New York Draft Riots occurred. These riots indicate the extent to the danger that all workers, if not organized around class politics and fighting back, can be won to racism.

Hidden History of Multiracial Fightback
There are many more examples of how as the U.S. bosses turned the screws of their terror, intensified segregation and enforcement of race-based laws, Black and white workers resisted., From the multiracial New Orleans General Strike of 1892, to the several decades of armed struggle between workers and the bosses’ militias and police from the 1880s to the 1920s from Virginia to Colorado, white workers have shared writing our class’ history, in blood, alongside Black and immigrant workers.
One especially notable multiracial armed uprising of coal miners in 1921, West Virginia, known as the Battle of Blair Mountain (see box for one of its lasting consequences).  It was defeated in what became the U.S. Army’s largest engagement within U.S. borders since the Civil War. During the battle, striking white workers, partly inspired by the Soviet Union, joined with Black and immigrant workers sent to break the strike. They effectively created created a workers’ army 13,000 strong (immortalized in the 1987 pro-worker film Matewan).
The U.S. bosses, determined to crush armed insurrection, deployed planes armed with gas and bombs left over from World War I, some of which were captured by the workers’ army.
Red-Led Workers Fight Like Hell
The rise of the communist movement provided our class with a template for a new world—and nearly one century ago, a revolution in the Russian Empire led by the Bolsheviks (communists) who comprised many languages and ethnic groups seized power over one-sixth of the earth’s surface.
By the 1930s in the U.S., the communist-led mass multiracial organizing of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was openly joining Black and white workers, north and south, side by side into struggle.
Seizing power for communism will mean combating the bosses’ ideas and ultimately the bosses’ state. There is a growing base of racism in the U.S., but this truth is buried under capitalist anti-working class propaganda that paints all white workers with the same brush. Dismissing all white workers as racists deprives all workers of unity with, and learning from, their class sisters and brothers worldwide.
This is nothing new. Capitalists have always blamed the working class for the problems created by capitalism. Black workers, especially Black women, have particularly been singled out worldwide for capitalism’s worst racist and sexist devastation.
The ruling class of the U.S. is the world’s top global imperialist power. Its trillions of dollars worth of investments straddle the globe from the Middle East, to sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America.
PLP carries on this legacy of multiracial unity. With the sharpening attacks on the international working class and growing threat of all out inter-imperialist wars looming, our understanding of history is more important than ever as workers from every part of the working class seek out answers that only a new international communist movement can provide.

How The U.S. Created Race & Racism to Divide the Working Class

“Fork by fork, step by step, option by option, America or, to be more precise, the men who spoke in the name of America decided that it was going to be a white place defined negatively by the bodies and the blood of the reds and the blacks. And that decision, which was made in the 1660s and elaborated over a two-hundred-year period, foreclosed certain possibilities in America—perhaps forever—and set off depth charges that are still echoing and re-echoing in the commonwealth. What makes this all the more mournful is that it didn’t have to happen that way. There was another road -- but that road wasn’t taken. In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money.”
—”The Road Not Taken,” Lerone Bennett (1970)

The Body of Liberties, 1641: Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery. This is done through the passage of the Body of Liberties. Under section 91 the article clearly sanctioned slavery - and creates three categories of workers: Native Americans (Reds), white people under the system of indenture, and Blacks.

Salem Massachusetts, 1645: Emanuel Downing writes to his brother-in-law about a scheme to trade captured Native Americans for Africans, claiming that the Puritans can maintain “20 Moors cheaper than one English servant.”

The Body of Liberties, 1662: The Bodies of Liberties was amended to include the enslavement of a slave woman’s offspring to be a legal slave. This guaranteed that offspring of all slaves were considered as the same legal status as their mother, a slave.

The Royal African Company, 1672: The British Parliament charted the Royal African Company (RAC). This company would have a monopoly on the slave trade between Africa and America. All slaves were to be brought to America only through this company.

Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676: Stricter slave codes emerged in Virginia after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, when wealthy planters decided to abolish indentured servitude and establish permanent slavery for Africans, fearing that class conflict would undermine their tobacco plantation holdings. Also in 1676, a law was enacted that prohibited free blacks from having white servants.

Virginia General Assembly, 1691: Any white person married to a “black or mulatto” was banished and a systematic plan was established to capture “outlying slaves.”

The Negro Act, 1740: The comprehensive Negro Act of 1740 passed in South Carolina made it illegal for slaves to move abroad, assemble in groups, raise food, earn money, and learn to write English. Additionally, owners were permitted to kill rebellious slaves if necessary.

The Naturalization Act of 1790: Alternately known as the Nationality Act, this act restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” who had been in the U.S. for two years. In effect, it left out indentured servants, slaves, and most women.

The Indian Removal Act, 1830: Signed into law by Andrew Jackson, The Removal Act paved the way for the forced expulsion of tens of thousands of American Indians from their traditional homelands to the West, an event widely known as the “Trail of Tears,” a forced resettlement of the native population.

The Foreign Miners Tax, 1850: The California legislature passes the Foreign Miners Tax, which requires Chinese and Latin American gold miners to pay a special tax on their holdings, a tax not required of European American miners.

The Fugitive Slave Act, 1850: Passed by Congress in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act required that all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law enlisting the assistance of other whites. The act also made it possible for a black person to be captured as a slave solely on the sworn statement of a white person with no right to challenge the claim in court.