STANDING ROCK, December 4 — After months of protest, thousands of courageous, multiracial fighters forced a small concession from the Obama administration. The Army Corp of Engineers decided to deny the permit to complete the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). But the oil billionaires behind DAPL and their politician puppets are already vowing to finish the pipeline.
The victory in this struggle is the fighting ethos, cooperation, and class-consciousness that have developed in the protesters’ camp. As some leaders are telling the protesters to go home, many are staying. Join the Progressive Labor Party in the lifelong struggle for an egalitarian, communist world without racism and sexism.
Racism, Oil Pipeline Threaten Indigenous Workers’ Water
DAPL was rerouted because it was too close to water sources near the mostly-white city of Bismarck, North Dakota. Because of racism, it was rerouted under the Missouri River near the Sioux Reservation, potentially ruining the water supply for thousands of indigenous workers. Businesses and the U.S. government have been devastating reservation lands for decades by dumping nuclear and chemical waste. Whether at Standing Rock or Flint, Michigan, the bosses kill workers with poisoned water or radioactive material. Pipeline leaks are routine. And so, thousands of protesters began setting up camps in to block DAPL.
Cultivating Communist Values
These courageous fighters faced fascist conditions and countless brutal attacks by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department. Within the main camp, you see the DAPL floodlights, and police drones circling overhead 24 hours a day. On Thanksgiving weekend, protesters attempted to remove a barricade in the middle of the road. The militarized police attacked with tear gas, concussion grenades, rubber bullets, and water cannons in below freezing temperatures. Over 167 were injured and one young woman almost lost her arm from a concussion grenade.
One victory of this struggle was the communist values realized in the camp. A PLP comrade at Standing Rock said:

It felt like communism because the interactions aren’t premised on what I can get from you but on how I help your wellbeing, and there was an understanding that this would be reciprocated. Everyone knew that feeding one person was also nourishing the collective, because they would be able to help the camp in other ways by putting that energy into the struggle. People willing to work for the wellbeing of the collective with no money incentive sustained the camp. Whether you were working in the kitchen, the medic tents, the art collective, or chopping wood, it was clear that you were working so that the struggle could continue moving forward. That was motivation enough.
At the end of a long day of work in freezing temperatures, you could expect to be invited to eat a communal meal with workers you’d just met that day. People were genuinely happy and willing to work hard for the betterment of the entire camp. In times of struggle, we come closer to communistic practices. Experiences like these help me see that the world PLP is fighting for is possible.

Losing Strategies
In the face of massive government violence, spirituality, non-violence and negotiating with politicians are losing strategies. They are prominent parts of the NoDAPL movement, led largely by tribal “Elders.” These strategies will not stop the pipeline and will not end the violent capitalist system. The bosses and their government clearly do not care how many workers live or die.
Now the tribal chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux wants to end the protests: “’I’m asking them to go,” Dave Archambault III told Reuters, saying that the Obama administration ‘did the right thing,’ and that he hoped to ‘educate the incoming administration’ of President-elect Donald Trump” (NPR, 12/6).
The thousands of workers involved in this courageous fightback are told to go home. PLP fights for a mass Party where all workers are involved in making decisions and providing leadership. We don’t rely on a few leaders or “Elders” of the tribes.
Smash All Borders
Another inspiring part of the fightback at Standing Rock is that it is multiracial. Workers from all over the world have come to fight. They understand that these attacks are similar to attacks all workers face under capitalism. Everyone should have access to clean drinking water. However, the struggle is limited by the identity politics that make the fight an “indigenous fight.” This prevents us from uniting as a class. From the protesters at DAPL, to the refugees in Syria, to the iPhone factory workers in China, we are all part of the same struggle.
Fighting for the right of indigenous tribes to own land is a dead end. Drawing more borders cannot liberate the working class. Only the bosses have “self-determination” under capitalism. Regardless of historical treaties and agreements, the Standing Rock reservation has never had actual autonomy from U.S. state power. Making this an “indigenous fight” abandons the fight of Black, white, Asian, and Latin workers who are also terrorized and oppressed by capitalism. PLP fights for a world with no borders where all workers can live and work together.
Need Communism
The Army Corp of Engineers has put the current DAPL plans on hold, but the capitalist owners and their politician stooges have vowed to push it through to completion. But it is impossible to build the pipeline without crossing a body of water. Whether it is a water source that supplies indigenous, Black, white, Asian, or Latin workers, we still need to fight against DAPL and all other capitalist threats to our class. We cannot be fooled into thinking that the capitalists have given up, and we cannot give up either. We must build for a communist revolution to get rid of the violent capitalist system once and for all. The world we want is possible if we fight for it. Join us in fighting for a communism!

NEW YORK CITY, November 20—NYC Transit bosses are guilty of murder, and the transit workers’ union leader is guilty of helping them get away it.
On November 3, train conductor Louis Gray was struck and killed by a subway train in Brooklyn.  Another worker, Jeffrey Fleming, was badly injured. They were setting up warning lights for a construction zone when a train came around a curve and pinned them. Louis was the fourth worker killed on the tracks in the last 10 years, but there have been countless injuries and near misses. A woman worker recently lost her arm when she tripped and touched the third rail. The blood of these workers and anyone hurt before or in the future, is on the bosses’ hands.
Before the body was cold, Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 President John Samuelsen defended the racist MTA bosses and called this murder a “perfect-storm.” He said the operator and the track workers could not see each other because of the curve in the tracks. He said the union and MTA will create new rules for work zones with curved tracks, to which one worker responded, “All these rules are written in blood!” He said they wait until someone is killed before they address a problem that has existed for decades, like curved tracks.
Fighting Racism in all Workers’ Interests
The MTA bosses try to spend the bare minimum on pay, training and safety and claim there’s no money for better benefits, but they spend millions on overtime, that they dish out like treats, instead of hiring more workers. The bosses’ media then focuses on a few high seniority workers who make big bucks and tries to paint us as rich, lazy and greedy in order to undermine any unity with the millions of our fellow workers and students we carry to work and school every day.
The union is no better. In the last negotiations, the union sold out the not-yet-hired member, expanding the pay progression to top pay from three to five years, while giving billions to the biggest banks year after year in interest on bonds used to pay for capital projects.
Transit workers are also directly affected by the rise of racist terror, on and off the job. The sister of Eric Garner, who was killed in a NYPD choke hold in 2014, is a transit worker in TWU Local 100. And a few months ago, an off duty copy brutally assaulted a train conductor, slamming her to the ground in front of horrified passengers because the train was delayed! Yet the union leadership did not make an issue out of the attack on the conductor and gave little more than lip service to the murder of Eric Garner. A large number of white transit workers supported Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant racism, however, we must win them to see these racist attacks are attacks on them, too. Their futures are threatened because the futures of their black and Latin co-workers are threatened.
Workers’ Power Can Cripple Bosses
On November 15, thousands of transit workers rallied to demand wage increases in their next contract. The current contract expires on January 15, and with the Trump administration about to take power on January 20, the union leaders are feeling the pressure to get what they can before the promised cuts in federal spending. (SEPTA transit workers in Philadelphia recently went on strike and CTA transit workers in Chicago are also in contract talks.) A fare increase takes affect on January 1, which will hit Black, Latin and immigrant workers and youth the hardest. Not surprisingly, the union has taken no stand against the fare hike.
Globally, transit workers have the power to bring capitalism’s daily functioning to a screeching halt. Populations and production are more concentrated in congested urban areas. Therefore, transit workers are a vital link in the profit chain of the big corporations, finance capitalists like banks, and big retail. PLP is building a base in transit under the conditions of growing fascism and spreading war. The challenges of our contract, the Trump election, and racist police terror offer both danger and opportunity for building the revolutionary communist movement among transit workers. It won’t be easy. But we have confidence in our co-workers, and will learn from them how to be better communists.

BROOKLYN, November 22—A multiracial group of twenty-five students, teachers, and parents armed with chant sheets and signs returned to Brooklyn Tech High School where school security agents had treated the students like criminals weeks earlier. Students and members and friends of Progressive Labor Party are leading the fight against racism (see student letter, page 6). We are giving School Safety, the arm of the NYPD that criminalizes mainly Black and Latin students, a taste of what an organized and committed group can do.
NYPD Criminalizes Students
On November 1, the volleyball team from Park Slope Collegiate High School (PSC), comprised of Black, Latin, and South Asian students, arrived at Brooklyn Tech for the game that would decide their entrance into the playoffs. Immediately upon arrival, they were treated like criminals by security. The team was forced to line up against the wall. The team’s managers and supporters were not allowed into the game and were told that only people on the roster were allowed in, even though for the last ten years of playing games at the school they were never asked for rosters. One student yelled, “What, are we in prison?”
The team’s captain protested a security guard’s abuse, saying, “This is racist!” to which the security guard yelled, “Keep your opinions to yourself.” The coach overheard another security guard saying, “That’s what happens when you go shopping.” This comment was in reference to the last match the team played where a member of the team was implicated in the theft of a phone, which was immediately returned. The implicated student was not in attendance as a consequence of these events. While these students were being treated like criminals, another school, made up of mostly white students, was allowed to walk right into the gym without being checked or made to line up.
This discriminatory treatment from School Safety is part of the racism that is necessary for capitalists. Capitalists need to maintain the lie that Black and Latin kids and teens are criminals, in order to justify mass incarceration and police terror. This ideology also justifies unemployment, low wages, and homelessness, even though huge numbers of white workers suffer the same oppression. Anti-Black racism is why oppression and terrorization of Black workers is not taken as seriously as other struggles like DAPL (see front page).
Students Fight Back
That our students felt the indignity of racism while simply trying to play a game understandably angered and upset members of the volleyball team, student body, staff, parents, and alumni from Tech. Unwilling to take the racist treatment of the other team lying down, the team met with members of the student government to tell their story and asked for help in preparing a sit-in if the three agents who treated them horribly refused to apologize.
In preparation for the sit-in the captain of the team wrote a letter about the experience, which was sent to every teacher and parent in our school asking for support. Parents e-mailed and made phone calls to the principal of Brooklyn Tech and other higher ups in school safety demanding that these agents apologize to the team.
Knowing the team’s intention to have a sit-in, the principal and assistant principal of Tech greeted everyone and invited them to a meeting with the head of School Safety. The team received apologies from all three but the students were not having it. The team’s demand for an apology from the actual agents that treated them like criminals baffled the lieutenant who came to give lip service to the NYPD’s “Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect” motto. She assumed her apology would be enough and tried to relate to the parents and students in the room by pointing out that she’s both Black and a parent. Our students and parents still weren’t having it. When the students wanted to go through with the sit-in, the Tech principal Randy J. Asher said that he wouldn’t stop the officers from arresting the team. He would rather have Black and Latin students with their hands behind their backs than being treated with simple dignity and respect.
Our school community is used to fighting back whether that be against racist budget cuts, school segregation, or school scanning that makes our students feel more like criminals than students. This fightback and the multiracial, teacher-parent-student alliance that we have built over the years has forced the powers that be to respond much faster to this incident. We have been told to expect an apology from one of the three officers any day now. If we don’t, we’re prepared to keep fighting for it.
The leadership the students have given to this fightback has been amazing. They have stood up against racism and criminalization of Black and Latin students. We are up against a segregated and therefore inherently unequal school system. This system is no accident. Capitalism needs racism to survive, by dividing white from Black and Latin students and workers so that all can be oppressed and exploited for profit. Mayors, governors, and presidents claim that Black lives matter that police brutality needs to stop; meanwhile their troops on the ground (the police) brutalize and terrorize the working class. Capitalist leaders don’t actually care about Black and Latin workers, and that is what we saw. The higher-ups were hoping that their willingness to say the right thing would satisfy us, while their agents continue doing exactly as they’re supposed to—terrorize our students.
It is a victory every time we stand up to racism. All students and workers need to be ready to take action over and over again. Racism isn’t going away as long as we have capitalism. Fighting smaller battles steels us for bigger battles ahead. We are now even more committed to the struggle against racism and students are more confident in themselves and each other. This struggle is just one more nail in the bosses’ coffin. We are one step closer to building class consciousness and one step closer to defeating capitalism. Stay tuned for more fightback!

The legacy of Fidel Castro contains two critical lessons for the international working class. The first is that workers will never advance toward communism under a leadership that holds on to capitalist inequalities. The second: Reform victories under the profit system are neither adequate nor lasting. Only a dictatorship of the proletariat can smash racism, sexism, and capitalist exploitation. Only a communist society, run by and for workers, can serve the needs of our class.
In the wake of Castro’s death on November 25, the bosses’ media celebrated “the end of communism” in Cuba. The left-liberal media acclaimed “the Cuban experiment” was to move the working class toward “socialist” or even “communist” liberation. Both camps are wrong. Essentially, the Fidelistas were liberal reformers. They exerted state control over the means of production while preserving the rotten core of the profit system, from wages and social inequality to racist unemployment and incarceration. In short, they were state capitalists. They traded domination by U.S. imperialism for the heavy hand of the imperialist Soviet Union under the rotten, revisionist (fake-left) Nikita Khrushchev. Fidel actively encouraged a cult of personality, elevating his own erratic judgment over the collective wisdom of the working class. Eventually, Cuba’s market-oriented tilt under Castro exposed his self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninism for what it always was—a deception.
Where Castro Went Wrong
Initially, Fidel was daring and resourceful. In 1959, his small rebel group won state power through armed struggle. It smashed the oppressive ruling clique of President Fulgencio Batista—a big defeat for U.S. imperialism, which had enjoyed free rein in exploiting Cuba since the Spanish-American War of 1898. Castro won support from Cuban workers with significant reforms: a price freeze, a tax cut, reduced rents, and, most notably, universal literacy and health care. He abolished official segregation and opened labor unions to Black members. He expelled the Mafia gangsters who controlled Havana and ran its gambling, drug, and commercial sex rackets. He made mortal enemies of the U.S. bosses by expropriating $1 billion worth of U.S. corporate holdings, including oil refineries, banks, and sugar mills.
In response, the U.S. rulers slapped an economic embargo on the island nation. Beginning under the Dwight Eisenhower administration and escalating under President John F. Kennedy, the U.S. began organizing an invasion to overthrow Castro. Meanwhile, several hundred thousand white middle-class Cubans—virtually the entire urban professional class and commercial bourgeoisie—fled to Miami, taking much of the country’s financial reserves with them.
Facing desperate shortages of basic commodities, Castro could have pursued a communist path of self-sufficient economic development. He could have liberated Cuba from the world market and freed workers from the grip of imperialism. Had he chosen that path, it would have lowered material living conditions for many in the short term—though not for the most oppressed workers, who might have become the base for a true revolution.
But Castro was limited by his nationalist ideology. He could not envision a fundamental reorganization of social and production relations. Instead, he turned to a new trading partner—Moscow. By 1960, Khrushchev had openly renounced the revolutionary goal of a working-class dictatorship over society. The Soviet Union’s state capitalist regime wanted to supplant U.S. imperialism in the world market and saw its opening in Cuba, on the doorstep of the U.S. bosses. The Soviet Union agreed to provide Cuba with crude oil, industrial goods, and a $100 million loan in return for sugar, fruit, fiber, and hides (Peter Bourne, Fidel: A Biography of Fidel Castro, 1986). Cuba’s die was cast. For the next three decades, until the Soviets’ economy collapsed, Cuba was tied to an imperialist super-power that systematically betrayed the great Russian Revolution.
Socialist Speeches, Capitalist Deeds
In April 1961, Castro’s forces routed the U.S. CIA-directed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, drawing Cuba even more tightly within the Soviet orbit. Fidel declared, “What the imperialists cannot forgive us, is that we have made a socialist revolution under their noses” (Bourne, 1986). In fact, Castro’s socialism had a solid capitalist foundation. Workers were exploited to increase profits and accumulate capital. Guided by Soviet advisors, Fidel’s regime imposed rigid discipline in production, with higher pay for more efficient workers. As with every wage system, these differentials divided the working class.  
By 1962, Cuba’s economy had reached full capacity. More coal and electric plants, transmission lines, and roads were needed. Short of hard currency, Castro’s government subordinated the country to the world market by expanding exports of its one marketable commodity. Cuba became the Soviets’ “sugar colony.” To accumulate more capital, the government imposed “communist consciousness” by cutting wages in the state sector for all but the lowest-paid.
Slowly but surely, capitalist policies expanded the private profit sector. First, licenses were sold to individuals to open small businesses for auto repair, carpentry, and plumbing. By 1981, private contracting cooperatives were building 38 percent of new housing units. Private farmers diverted produce from the state, which paid low fixed prices, and sold it instead on the open market for their private benefit. To increase production and profits, the sugar industry was mechanized, reducing the number of cane cutters from 350,000 in the 1960s to 72,000 in 1985. A new elite was born, defined by their wealth in money.
Apartheid Tourism and Racist Inequalities
In recent years, these capitalist practices have grown even stronger. After a boost from Barack Obama and the reopening of U.S. diplomatic relations, the Cuban tourist industry now earns as much hard currency as the sugar industry. Mexican and Spanish bosses can own up to 51 percent of hotels and export 100 percent of their profits, earned on the sweat of powerless hotel workers. Prostitution, a hallmark of the bad old Batista/Mafia days, is booming once again.
Local workers are barred from these hotels as guests; they call it “apartheid tourism.” Like capitalism everywhere, capitalism in Cuba needs racism to divide and super-exploit workers. [Spanish ships brought 900,000 Africans to Cuba as slaves, about twice the number forced brought to what is now the U.S. (http://bit.ly/2gE6fH5.] While Fidel’s early reforms undeniably helped poor Black workers, he overstated the case in 1961, when he claimed that racist discrimination in Cuba was a thing of the past. In 2005, a year before the end of Fidel’s rule as president, Black workers were unemployed at double the rate of white workers. While darker-skinned Cubans made up somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the population, they accounted for 85 percent of the nation’s inmate population (Al Jazeera, 8/13/15). Under Fidel’s brother and successor, Raul Castro, as Cuba has accelerated its market capitalist reforms, racist inequalities have kept pace. From Al Jazeera:
“The problem,” said Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Institute of Afro-Latin Studies at Harvard University, “is that the new policies produce losers, because their chief concern is not social justice, but economic growth and survival. None of these policies is racially defined, but they produce new forms of social inequalities, and those inequalities tend to be racialized quickly because of unequal access.”
Under the relentless pressure of the profit system, Fidel’s most admired reforms have suffered. “[A]doption of the Soviet model of economic development contributed to two internal factors that have undermined health care: low productivity of labor and the growth of bureaucracy. Social expenditures declined from 70% of the GNP in 1970 to 36% in 1995,” after the end of Soviet bloc aid (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7593738). As of 2012, according to Al Jazeera, Cuba’s infant mortality rate remained lower than the rate in the U.S. Life expectancy was among the world’s highest. But non-emergency operations were routinely delayed, and there was a chronic shortage of medicines (6/18/12).
The Only Solution is a Communist Revolution!
Yes, the liberal reformers of Fidel’s Cuba improved most workers’ standard of living, at least for a time. They constructed a defense against hurricanes unequaled in the hemisphere. But despite these achievements, the return of capitalism to Cuba is restoring all the evils that are part and parcel of the profit system. In field and factory, Cuban workers need an egalitarian society that will abolish the wage system and its artificial division between intellectual and manual labor. Like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the sweatshop economy in today’s China, Castro-style “socialism” has confirmed the fallacy of the two-stage theory of communism. When a revolution leaves capitalist components in place, it inevitably decays back to full-blown capitalism.
The working class of Cuba needs what Fidel Castro often promised but never pursued: a communist revolution.