More than 150,000 workers and youth shut down France in response to anti-working-class labor reforms. The strike is hitting the bosses where it hurts the most—their profit margin and the rise of class consciousness. Strikers have also blockaded oil refineries and shut down transportation. Half of the country’s 10,000 petrol stations are either partially or completely out of fuel. Many fighters have been arrested. Protesters hurled rocks at police.
“The law eases conditions for laying off workers, strongly regulated in France. It is hoped companies will take on more people if they know they can shed jobs in case of a downturn. The law also gives employers more leeway to negotiate holidays and special leave, such as maternity or for getting married” (Nigerian Bulletin, 5/26).
Clearly, the bosses’ laws can’t and won’t protect workers. Only the working class has the power to fight in its own interests. With communist leadership, the workers of France can turn this strike against labor reforms into a battle against capitalism.
Stand up in international solidarity for the working class of France, the birthplace of the first workers’ revolutionary seizure of power, known as the Paris Commune of 1871.

NEW YORK CITY, May 14—Nearly 150 rank-and-file workers from a dozen NYC unions attended a teach-in on the massive $72 billion debt crisis in Puerto Rico. The teach-in was organized by three U.S. unions whose membership in Puerto Rico has been decimated by austerity measures — SEIU Local 32BJ, AFSCME and the UAW. Showing international working-class solidary, workers listened to the devastation unfolding on our class in Puerto Rico stemming from decades of U.S. imperialism.
The union leaders offered reformist solutions, steering away from revolution. Such devastations are inevitable under capitalism, which staggers from one economic crisis to another. For workers, communist revolution is the only road to a decent life — a life free of debt crisis, unemployment and poverty.
U.S. Imperialism at Work
Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is a direct result of its long history under U.S. imperialist rule. It became a U.S colony in 1898 based on U.S. bosses’ need to keep Latin America — its supposed “backyard” — under its’ economic and military control. Since then, U.S. capitalist bosses has wreacked havoc on workers here, stealing profits off their labor as well as vast resources, all in the name of “democracy.”  
In recent years alone, U.S. companies have extracted hundreds of billions of dollars in profit from Puerto Rico. Pharmaceutical giants like Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Proctor & Gamble produce 16 of their 20 top-selling U.S. drugs on the island. These companies have netted $30 billion a year in profits, but pay only four percent of that in taxes. Meanwhile, hedge funds and other investors flock to buy bonds issued by the Puerto Rican government. They pay no taxes on the interest they collect. Needless to say, Puerto Rico’s workers have shouldered much of the taxes these capitalist vultures do not pay!
Given the continued exploitation by U.S. bosses, the country’s economy has unsurprisingly spiraled downward, contracting an average 1.5 percent each year since 2006. Imperialist-in-chief Barack Obama and other capitalist cronies have blamed the crisis on “mismanagement” of the economy. Workers worldwide know better: the crisis is a direct result of decades of U.S. imperialism.
Workers Pay the Price
Workers in Puerto Rico bear the brunt of this exploitation. Inequality is currently higher than in any of the 50 U.S. states; 46 percent of the population lives in poverty. Per capita income is less than half that of Mississippi, the poorest state in the U.S., while food prices are often higher because 85 percent of the food is imported. One woman reported that milk is $6 a gallon!
The two major capitalist parties, the New Progressive Party and the Popular Democratic Party, have taken turns reducing pensions for government workers, increasing taxes on water and other essentials and firing thousands of public employees. One hundred schools have been closed, teachers laid off, college tuition increased, and social programs slashed. Most doctors have fled to the U.S. mainland seeking better pay and working conditions. Women and kids suffer the most under these horrible conditions. Over 80 percent of teachers are women and most have families. As is expected under capitalism, the working class in Puerto Rico and worldwide will have the burden of paying back the debts owed.
Phony Solutions
While workers are suffering, billionaire hedge-fund owners are lobbying the U.S. Congress for PROMESA, a bill which would establish an oversight panel similar to the Emergency Managers who’ve wrecked Detroit and Flint, Michigan, to decide what gets spent on schools, hospitals and other vital social services. These austerity measures are meant to secure the bosses’ profits, not alleviate workers’ conditions.
Democrats and the unions say they want to protect pensions, provide stimulus money and extend Medicare and Medicaid payments. These proposals, however, guarantee investors’ profits while continuing to avoid paying taxes, the predatory practice that helped caused the crisis in the first place. If enacted, these proposals might temporarily alleviate some workers’ conditions, but these “solutions” by the unions and Democrats while offering workers a material and ideological buy-in for exploitative class relations, do not get at the root of Puerto Rico’s problem — the capitalist system that drives bosses to exploit workers for profits at any cost. The mis-leaders of unions and liberal parties are not our class friends.
Not surprisingly, the teach-in failed to mention workers’ class struggles here against capitalist exploitation.  In the last two years, teachers, students and parents have walked out of schools and marched on the government to demand an end to school closings, cuts in funding, and lowering of teacher pensions.
While strikes and walk-outs won’t be nearly enough to reverse these massive bosses’ attacks, they can be a learning experience in building a revolutionary communist movement that can one day overthrow the local capitalists and their imperialist masters. If anything, this teach-in showed that international solidarity among the working class is possible, and moreover is needed. In one “brain-storming” session, at the teach-in a woman’s offer of “revolution” as her answer to the crisis was met with enthusiastic applause.
Only a communist revolution would ensure that the working class would no longer carry the racist, sexist burdens of capitalism.

Naomi Klein’s most recent book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014) comes at a time when the discussion of climate change and its impacts is constant and growing. Capitalists come together to make phony promises to reduce carbon emissions and slow the climate shifts while perpetuating the myth that individual workers are responsible for the condition of the planet.
Klein’s book has become something of a “bible” for the movement against anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW). Klein appears to attack the economic system as a whole. It’s a well-written book, but at the same time a very bad book—good on describing the problem but bad on providing a real solution.
Klein makes some good points: she describes the consequences of AGW, including extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires, heat waves, and sea level rise, and she explains why poor Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant workers of the world are hurt the most. Klein explained that burning coal, oil, and natural gas is currently the main cause of AGW and that huge corporations (e.g., ExxonMobil) profit while the rest of us suffer the consequences. She relates AGW to surface features of capitalism, including, perhaps the most useful, how the laws passed to facilitate global world trade directly prevent any government from lessening AGW.
Capitalism Fuels Global Warming
Among solutions, Klein promotes mass organization as the way to fight AGW by trying to force all governments to end AGW and lessen its devastations. But the mass organizing she proposes is to reform capitalism, implying that capitalism could be made to be more environmentally friendly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism, by its very nature will always put the ruling class’s profit and power over the long-term health and wellbeing of the planet and the working class.
It is because of the super-exploitation, lacking healthcare, profit-driven utilities, extreme homelessness, and horrendous living conditions that capitalism forces our working class brothers and sisters into that the devastating effects of climate change will always fall most extremely on the working class.
In India, an extreme heatwave in 2015 left at least 2,500 of the poorest members of the working class dead.
Drought and rising temperatures across southern and eastern Africa leave the working class there vulnerable, with nearly 16 million people already going hungry and “more than 40 million rural and 9 million poor urban people at risk [of going hungry]” (The Guardian, 3/16).
In Ethiopia in particular, it is predicted that 2 million children will need to be treated for malnutrition, 10 million people will need food aid, and 3.9 million children will have their education interrupted (Guardian, 3/16).
These attacks are part and parcel of capitalism—no amount of laws or reforms will change the exploitative and deadly essence. And this is how the book fails. First, Klein mistakes the appearance of capitalism for its true essence. She attacks deregulated free-market capitalism, advocating a change in the form of the system, in which government intervention force fossil fuel companies to shut down.
Only communist revolution is a solution, in fact the only solution, to AGW. A world run by the working class would make wholesale shifts in production, prioritizing the needs of the working class and the need for a healthy planet.
Under capitalism, the main ideology—the ideas that are allowed to grow and spread—are limited to the ones that do not threaten the capitalists’ position. Those that do threaten, such as the idea that the world’s workers need revolution and communism, are outlawed and repressed. Klein repeatedly says that if only the government and corporations would shed their belief in free-market and other aspects of capitalist ideology, we could solve the problem. She ignores the source of these ideas and that they are critical to the ruling class maintaining profit.
A serious weakness of Klein’s analysis, and those of other liberal misleaders is the belief that the right politicians can be convinced or pressured to force the big corporations to get in line. This is not how capitalism works. The state (the government) is the instrument of outlawing and repression, through legislatures, cops, courts, prisons, and the military.
Contrary to Klein’s misleading analysis, the bosses maintain power through the state. Legislation and courts function in their interest. She does correctly point out that mass movements have occasionally extracted concessions from the state and its rulers—concessions that are always temporary and are often followed by increased repression of the working class (for example, the use of the “War on Drugs” and mass incarceration to attack the working class in response to the Black-led worker rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s). But these occasional concessions lead her to conclude that sheer numbers enable us to use the state against the capitalists.
The reality is that neither persuasion nor voting majorities count. The state embodies sheer force and violence to protect the class interests of the rulers. It cannot be turned to our use against the rulers, but rather requires our gathering sufficient unity and numbers to physically overpower and demolish the capitalist state, and construct in its place a worker-controlled state with a completely different form of organization—communism!
For the world’s working class to end AGW and to improve our position permanently, it requires us to engage in armed revolution. Mass movements within the confines of capitalist rules and laws are relatively impotent. Yes, let us organize within these mass organizations—for communist politics.
Capitalism, its rulers, and their state must be abolished for the working class to win any permanent gains—including the abolition of capitalist-fostered racism, sexism, and nationalism.
Communist philosophy provides the only guidelines to evaluate the real world and arrive at valid answers. Klein raises many useful ideas as to the science of what needs to be done to stop AGW, but misses the point entirely about how to bring these ideas to fruition—not just a change of form, but the overthrow of capitalism altogether, and the development of a worker-run communist society.

The remaining U.S. presidential candidates—Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—all aspire to be the next master of U.S. imperialism. The next president will be expected to unify the bosses’ ranks while beating discipline into a disaffected working class—all to prepare for an impending global conflict with imperialist rivals like China or Russia or both. All three candidates reflect the movement of the capitalist ruling class toward fascism, the stage of capitalism in crisis and decay, when the bosses’ sham democracy no longer serves their needs (see box).
The good news: These conditions are also ripe for building a communist movement by Progressive Labor Party.
Imperialism Drives Fascist Path
The latest electoral circus is unfolding amid a sharpening, high-stakes competition that challenges the U.S. in every corner of the globe. China is pushing for control of the South China Sea; Russia is inserting troops into the Ukraine. In Syria, a vital crossroads in the oil-rich Middle East, Russia is quickly becoming the dominant imperialist.
The rulers’ move away from liberal capitalist democracy and toward fascism is compelled by their need to prepare for the coming world war while extracting even more profit from the labor of the working class. It’s the bosses’ last gasp to save monopoly capitalism. For the international working class, this trend translates into increased racist unemployment, lower real wages, dysfunctional schools, mass deportations, more open state terror against working-class women and men, and hyper-nationalist politics backed by a swollen military and militarized police forces.
No Unity Among Thieves
As the U.S. bosses struggle to maintain their status as the world’s most profitable—and lethal—imperialist power, they are hobbled by infighting. The main finance capital wing, represented by giant banks like JPMorgan Chase and oil companies like ExxonMobil, is committed to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and worldwide. The subordinate wing of U.S. capitalists, represented by Koch Industries, its Tea Party allies, and other domestically focused bosses, are less willing to foot the tax bill for an even larger Middle East ground war. Meanwhile, some new-generation, Silicon Valley billionaires seem up for grabs—or coercion. The bosses’ factional fault lines are deep, complex and fluid.
The battle between these capitalist factions is playing out in the U.S. Congress, the military, the presidential election, and the mass movements they’re trying to build to mobilize the working class to their side.
Splits in the ruling class matter. The better we understand the current crisis of capitalism, the better we can turn attacks on the working class into opportunities to smash the bosses and build communism. At the outset, we must smash the illusion of a “lesser evil” in this capitalist election dogfight. Whatever their differences, all bosses are dedicated to the exploitation of the international working class. All of them are ready and willing to intensify their murderous oppression of workers in the U.S. and throughout the world. All of them—and the politicians they use to confuse and mislead us—are our mortal class enemies.
Why Trump Matters
Donald Trump stands to become the first openly racist and sexist major-party presidential nominee of the modern era. In contrast to George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton, who coded their racist appeals as candidates into “acceptable” language, Trump brazenly vilifies and scapegoats Mexican workers, Muslims, and undocumented immigrants. He routinely insults women. He calls for mob violence against anti-racist protesters, a hallmark of rising fascism. Trump has done his best to undermine working-class unity, the main threat to the capitalist bosses.
For the rulers. elections are a critical tool both to keep workers tied to capitalist ideology and to sort out their own differences. While hardly the main wing’s first choice among Republicans, Trump has succeeded in splitting the base of the Tea Party. He has effectively poached masses of workers organized by Koch-funded groups (Bloomberg, 11/20/15).
Trump’s volatility and constantly shifting positions may seem to cloud his ultimate allegiances. But his growing support among mainstream Republicans, along with his appointment of second-generation Wall Streeter Steven Mnuchin as his national finance chairman, suggests that the main capitalist wing will be banking on one of two contingencies. Either Trump will lose the general election (as of now, the likelier eventuality), or he will win and the biggest bosses will find a way to control him.
The Danger of Hillary Clinton
In the meantime, Trump’s public gutter racism has helped embolden President Barack Obama to escalate the sexist, racist deportations of women and children fleeing capitalist violence in Central America. (Over a recent six-month period, as the New York Times reported on May 13, the capture of families at the southwest border was up 131 percent over the same period a year earlier.)  Looking forward, Trump’s extreme racist rhetoric will give Hillary Clinton cover to “more safely embrace the Bill Clinton years,” an administration responsible for the mass incarceration of Black workers and a welfare system overhaul “that cut federal assistance to the poor by nearly $55 billion over six years” (NYT, 5/17).
By scapegoating, brutalizing, and impoverishing the most vulnerable U.S. workers, Bill Clinton advanced the bosses’ move toward fascism in the 1990s. (It’s a long process!) Regardless of who is elected in November, we can expect this trend to accelerate.
Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic candidate, is an established stooge of finance capital. No active U.S. politician is more experienced at attacking the working class domestically or internationally (see CHALLENGE, 3/23). As a U.S. senator, Clinton backed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed more than a million to maintain U.S. control over Middle East oil. As Obama’s secretary of state, she engineered the devastation of millions in Syria, Libya, Haiti and Honduras. The New York Times, the leading mouthpiece of the bosses’ main wing, has applauded Clinton for her decades of service to U.S. imperialism (NYT, 4/21).
From the bosses’ point of view, Clinton’s negatives are her broad unpopularity among young workers and students and her weakness for fat speaking fees (read: bribes) from Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs. Could she sell a military draft, a necessity for a global ground war? Could she mobilize a mass movement for fascism? It seems unlikely but, again, the shift to fascism is a long-term process. A holding pattern under Hillary may be the best the bosses can do for the next four years.
How Workers Get Berned
For left-leaning workers and youth, Bernie Sanders is a deadly choice. More than any other candidate, he has used his “outsider” status to set forth the fascist agenda the U.S. rulers need to remain top-dog imperialists—even if most of them are not yet ready to accept it. Beyond their own disunity and lack of discipline, the bosses must surmount the Vietnam Syndrome, a working class that is weary of “war and remain[s] suspicious of foreign entanglements” (NYT, 4/21).
Much of Sanders’ platform is designed to bring the finance bosses into line. His push to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, eliminate offshore tax havens, increase regulation of Wall Street, and improve infrastructure and military efficiency are essential to the bosses’ preparations for the next world war. Essentially, Sanders is echoing the call of billionaires like Warren Buffett, who see the danger of short-term greed to the long-term interests of their class. While workers are bled dry under fascism, the bosses must also take some of the losses, at least in the short run.
Sanders’ platform is geared to win the working class to global war with phony promises to raise wages. Even as he criticizes Hillary Clinton’s pro-war record, he endorses Obama’s eight years of imperialist war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. As commander-in-chief, Sanders vows on his campaign website, “I will defend this nation, its people, and America’s vital strategic interests, but I will do it responsibly.” As an “independent” U.S. senator, he “always ‘supports the troops’ [and] never opposes any defense spending bill.…Sanders is the darling of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the right-wing Likud government of Israel” (Counterpunch, 9/30/11).
Sanders’ immediate appeal to the ruling class is his demonstrated ability to build a mass movement and bind disaffected workers and young people to the capitalist trap of electoral politics. A big part of “feeling the Bern” is the reform promise of higher wages in a country where median household income fell significantly between 1999 and 2013, even after controlling for an aging population and a smaller average household (fivethirtyeight.com, 9/22/14). Historically, however, full-blown fascism reverses any short-term gains for workers and devastates their standard of living, since the big capitalists are now ruling without constraints.
Capitalist-directed mass movements are critical to rising fascism; that’s why the bosses are fighting to control the leadership of organizations like Black Lives Matter. The rulers use mass movements to pressure (or eliminate) rogue bosses, and also to enforce loyalty to the rulers’ anti-worker agenda, often under a populist or anti-racist facade.
Turn Imperialist War into Class War
Workers in Ferguson and Baltimore have showed the way forward for the international working class: multiracial fightback. Led by Black workers and youth, these rebellions inspired millions worldwide.
World War I brought the Bolshevik Revolution; World War II brought the Chinese Communist Revolution. World War III, when it comes, will lead to international communist revolution—if PLP has organized a mass communist party to seize the day. In periods of impending world war, economic crisis and intensifying fascism, workers, students, and soldiers are wide open to revolutionary ideas.
Our Party is fighting for communist revolution because capitalism can never serve the working class. Only communism will smash the bosses’ dictatorship. Workers built this world; workers know best how to collectively run it. We don’t need politicians—we need communist state power!

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Fascism: Define It to Defeat It

Fascism is not inevitable. Fascism only becomes inevitable if the working class follows the line of reformism, of trust in the capitalist state.
—R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1934

The Progressive Labor Party has characterized the current period as one of rising fascism, a transitional phase between capitalist democracy and mature fascism.
While we believe that capitalist democracy is still primary in the U.S., we can see elements of full-blown fascism in the:
world’s largest prison population and highest incarceration rate, with Black workers imprisoned at more than five times the rate of white workers;
mass deportations and terrorization of undocumented families;
routine police violence against Black, Latin workers and youth;
militarization of police in places like Ferguson, Missouri;
open, racist scapegoating of immigrant and Muslim workers.
Fascism is the true face of capitalism—the state of the profit system in decay, when the bosses can no longer rule in the old, “democratic” way. As rivalries sharpen among imperialist powers, leading inevitably to broader global conflict, the ruling class rips off the mask of liberal capitalist democracy within its own country. In a desperate effort to protect their capital, put down resistance, and raise funds and troops for war, they turn to naked intimidation and open state terror—to unrestricted rule.
The transition from capitalist democracy to fascism is a natural process of capitalist dictatorship. It’s a deadly mistake to view one as contradictory to the other. While liberal democracy is the characteristic form of rising capitalism, fascism is the deepest form of monopoly capitalism, in which a small group of corporations and billionaires control the lion’s share of a society’s wealth.
While the phenomenon is best known for its bestial manifestation in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s, fascists of that era also seized state power in Italy, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Portugal, and found willing collaborators for fascist regimes in France, China, Denmark, Norway, and more than a dozen other countries.
The particularities of fascism may vary, and there is no way to predict the precise form it could take in the U.S. But history points to certain critical elements of capitalist dictatorship in its most transparent form:
Fascism typically begins with ruthless disciplining within the ruling class, to bring unity to its ranks. In Germany, in 1934, the main wing of the Nazis exterminated the rabid SA paramilitary (the Brown Shirts), whose leadership had called for nationalization of major industries and was viewed as a threat by Krupp, IG Farben, and other major German companies and banks. In today’s U.S., the big finance capitalists, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, will eventually either bring the Tea Party wing (including the Koch brothers) to heel, or eliminate it.
Fascism is characterized by intensified racism, sexism, and nationalism, a wholesale attack on workers’ living standards, and ultimately the mass murder of workers both internally and through imperialist war. It uses these tactics to target and destroy sections of the working class—the ultimate exercise of divide-and-conquer.
For the bosses, fascism is a temporary solution to the perpetual crisis of capitalist overproduction—it weeds out the competition. The slaughter of workers and wholesale destruction of industry during World War II paved the way for the “postwar prosperity” of the 1950s and ‘60s, when capitalists in the U.S. and Europe hauled in record profits.
The fascists’ next step is to attack the one force with the potential to defeat them. It’s no accident that communists were the first to be sent to the Nazi death camps. With communists out of the fray, save for a small underground, it was far easier for the Nazi administration to round up Jews, trade unionists, and other targeted groups.
When capitalism has decayed to fascism, there is no turning back to the false refuge of liberal democracy. Misleaders—like the Social Democrats in Nazi Germany, or Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton today—serve only to foster illusions, encourage pacifism, and pave the way for the fascists. They must be seen for who they are: deadly collaborators of the big capitalists. They cannot be part of any anti-fascist force. Only mass, organized violence can stop fascism in its tracks. Communism—the dictatorship of the working class—is the only alternative to fascism. Only a mass, international communist party, PLP, can eliminate fascism for all time by destroying its capitalist roots.