BROOKLYN, January 8—Teachers and their friends had a delicious dinner and an even more scintillating conversation about possible presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and the current elections. This teacher discussion group was focused on the how elections are used by capitalism. We began by discussing how things were going in each other’s schools, getting to know one another, and introducing ourselves. This was the second time for most that they were all meeting, but there were some new people for the first time. We all watched a video on Trump from The Guardian and read CHALLENGE’s July 2015 editorial that discussed Sanders in depth.
One parent, also a school psychologist, provided some insight into the current contradictions in schools when she said that “some kids just aren’t ready for college.” This led into a fruitful discussion about how bosses use education to sort out the working class. Though Sanders promised free college tuition to those who earned the right to go to college, this would actually be used to reinforce the idea that those who didn’t make it into college deserve the struggles, oppression, and exploitation that they get. We identified this policy as racist, because primarily Black and Latin students are excluded from college.
We then connected free college to imperialist war. How? In order to pay for college tuition, Sanders would have to discipline the rich and effectively raise taxes. That way, when the time comes for imperialist war with China and Russia, the U.S. will have the money to fix the U.S.’s failing infrastructure and fund the military. So, if Sanders ever actually provided free college tuition, it may benefit the working class some, but it would actually benefit the bosses more in the long run.
With this in mind, we continued by discussing who was the bigger danger for the working class: a gutter racist like Trump or a left-leaning liberal like Bernie Sanders.
On the surface, it seems that Trump is the main danger. He whips up racism and openly talks about deporting millions of immigrants. A teacher and friend of the Party said that Sanders made a lot of promises and had a lot of appeal, followed up by another friend who said that he gave her hope. A PL’er countered that he still served the ruling class and was a career politician. When it was brought up that he didn’t want to take the Super Pac money, we discussed that he was doing this in order to build his image as against corporations. This is no different than some rappers who refused to sign to a major label in order to maintain his “cred” and ultimately continue to sell lots of albums the way that he had been. Sanders Sanders will not fight against the Democratic Party in the interests of the working class when the rich will be the ones financing him and putting him in the White House. Rather, he will play right into their hands: he pacifies the working class and gets them to work within the system, all the while building for imperialist war.
One PL’er highlighted that Bernie Sanders does not have a pro-worker history. His voting record is not anti-war. Sanders had anti-war protesters arrested when they occupied his office as they were protesting his support for the Bill Clinton’s bombing of Kosovo. He also supports the apartheid state of Israel. In fact, Sanders wants to be commander-in-chief of the most powerful military responsible for millions of deaths in Iraq, Syria, Mexico, El Salvador, Haiti, Vietnam, and so many other countries.  
Many well-meaning anti-racists are lining up to support Sanders because they see him as the lesser evil. CHALLENGE was a major instrument in unmasking Sanders as yet another tool of the imperialists during our discussion. Though not every person there was convinced of the need to build for communist revolution by joining PLP, they did agree to come to our next discussion in February. Small Victory! By getting teachers to consistently come and discuss these important political ideas, we will eventually be able to solidify our understanding of the world as well. We have much to learn from our friends just as they have much to learn from us.
All politicians are masters of war, or aspiring to be. “Come you masters of war, you that hide behind desks. I just want you to know I can see through your masks” Sanders is just another politician in a long line of misleaders who wears a worker-friendly mask. Support working-class struggle, not politicians and their war agendas. Learn to fight, fight to learn!

BOSTON—Black, Latin and immigrant students from working class families at a small urban community college in Boston are experiencing sharpening racist attack. The U.S. capitalists’ imperialist war machine is taking money away from workers’ education now, and soon it will try to take their lives in the coming imperialist wars. Community colleges, with their disproportionate percentage of Black, Latin and immigrant workers, are on the front line of these imperialist cuts!
Racist Farce of ‘Workforce Development’
College courses that do not serve the bosses’ agenda to train unskilled, obedient workers are considered “inappropriate” and not in alignment with the curriculum at the community college level.
In the U.S., many students come to community colleges to gain entrance to a four-year university in the hopes of achieving the racist capitalist illusion of the “American Dream.” This is a tool of division the bosses used to strengthen apartheid. Workers blame themselves when they can’t overcome the systematic racist, sexist conditions of capitalism. It pacifies them into studying their way out of the working class, instead of organizing against the bosses.
Today, four-year graduates are no longer in great demand and the trend is against encouraging working class students to actively pursue a four-year degree. Nowadays, the meaning of “workforce development” is code for “close the gateway” to the four year colleges and universities. Degree programs that provide access to four-year schools are being starved as budget cuts continue.  
Working class access to public higher education has been decreasing dramatically.  In this small urban community college in Boston, a course in science research was allowed to run with three to five students for individual instruction on science research projects. The program was a highly successful, and produced student winning national academic awards at undergraduate conferences.  Recently, the course was shut down to save money—mainly because it could not meet the college administration’s cutoff of about ten students per section. Students rallied last spring to save this and other courses cut, gathering over 300 signatures in a petition.  A small victory may be that the course may be allowed to run again in the spring of 2016—but the challenge to prepare at least 10 students for the course and maintain high quality instruction with so many students remains.
Internationalizing the Struggle
Historically, the role of the universities and colleges in the U.S. is to serve the ruling class need to maintain social control and to support their imperialist war agenda.  In the 1970s, the urban community colleges were utilized to quell future urban rebellions. They used community colleges to win Black, Latin and white workers the “American Dream” left behind to support capitalism. Today, in face of the challenges to U.S. imperialism, a new agenda has emerged: train working class youth for low-skill, low level manual labor jobs that have little job security and/or require unreasonable work and obedience to the system. This leaves many urban youth struggling with dead-end dreams, low-income jobs, less control over their lives, and open targets for the U.S. military’s recruitment efforts.
Students at this college gained practical experience in this science course, and a chance to develop critical thinking skills to help them achieve a deeper level of learning in the sciences.
Fighting back in organizing an anti-racist student movement is a science too! This year, no education cuts were announced in South Africa, after massive strikes and demonstrations rocked the liberal misleadership on their heels. In Chicago, high school teachers have overwhelmingly voted to authorize another strike against racism, while in New York City and California, students, professors and staff may declare strikes this spring. Capitalism will never educate the majority of workers. We need to unite workers and students together to fight not just these attacks on the ability to learn, but against capitalism itself!

Members and friends of PLP in the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA) will be doing important political work at the annual MLA convention in Austin, TX on January 6-10,2016. Brutal budget cuts, involuntary “furloughs,” rapidly rising tuition, threats to academic freedom, increasing pauperization of non-tenure track faculty: these are the consequences of cutbacks and escalating Middle East wars.
The annual convention of the MLA, the professional organization of teachers of language and literature, brings together over 8,000 professors, graduate students and adjuncts—most seriously affected by the current crisis. Many tenured professors face stagnant incomes or pay cuts and threatened or actual closings of humanities departments.
The non-tenure track teachers who staff most college-level writing, language and literature courses are hurt more by the attacks. Working for as little as $2,500 per semester course, disproportionately female, these super-exploited academic laborers—often excellent and committed teachers—have little or no chance of ever obtaining adequately-compensated or secure work. These attacks on education workers are also attacks on the students they serve.

For Ph.D. graduate students, the MLA Convention is known as the “meat market.” Many go to great expense to send resumes and travel to the convention to interview for the shrinking number of tenure-track jobs.

The Radical Caucus will protest the current assault on public higher education. Three-quarters of all US academics teach off the tenure track, earning less than a living wage usually with no health care, sick days, unemployment, or retirement benefits.

The context for these drastic cutbacks in Higher Education is the attack on the working class nationally and internationally:

• The US and NATO continue imperialist, murderous wars. The US would like to invade the Middle East but can’t afford to do so right now. Politicians build anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. Thin turn breeds more racism, making it hard for US rulers to field an army depending largely on Black and Latin soldiers.

• The unprecedented attack on women’s reproductive rights – anti-abortion bills in many states and attacks on Planned Parenthood – shows that the Pentagon's decision to allow women in “combat roles” is not a victory for women’s equality but part of the imperialist strategy.

• The “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP) is a declaration of trade war against China and Russia. Can a shooting war be far behind? A recent headline on Russia’s Sputnik News reads: “You Want War? Russia Is Ready for War.”

The American Dream is a pile of dust for some, a nightmare for many. One in 4 American children are on food stamps; 1 in 7 Americans overall.

But mass opposition is growing: demonstrations across the country against rising tuition and racism on campus, including multiracial protests on campuses and in communities against police brutality. The “Boycott-Divest-Sanction” movement against Israeli and US imperialist killing and oppression of Palestinians is growing in professional organizations. PLP has been in the forefront of the protests against police killings across country, including in Ferguson MO and NYC. PLP is also active at the City University of New York (CUNY), where a strike movement is growing.

The voice and aim of the Radical Caucus is a call to action. The RC is considering emergency resolutions: criticizing the governor of Texas for barring Syrian immigrants; opposing attacks on Muslims; against Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s suggestion that Black students are not qualified to attend university; against the “campus carry” laws permitting concealed guns on college campuses; the consequences of all these hurts education.

Everywhere and always, we must support students, especially in anti-racist struggles, the blocking of tuition increases, and the continued super-exploitation of adjunct faculty. We must point out the threat of imperialist and inter-imperialist was. The capitalist system is built on exploitation and can never be reformed to provide a decent life for working people and intellectuals. We stress the need for communist revolution, based in the international working-class.

The MLA Executive Council has made it much harder to get such resolutions approved in recent years. But the ongoing struggle to get the MLA to oppose the imperialist racism of the U.S. government is crucially important. We will continue to struggle with our friends in the Radical Caucus to set forth these or other issues in a principled, forceful, and comradely way.

PLP members in the MLA will be distributing CHALLENGE and participating in the activities of the Radical Caucus, which has emerged as a home for the many leftist humanities professors and graduate students who attend the convention. As the class struggle on college campuses gets more intense, communist teachers and students have an increasingly vital role to play.

Three recent events exposed the current crisis of U.S. capitalism. On December 19, the Chinese capitalist bosses accused the U.S. of a “serious military provocation” a week after a U.S. Sir Force B-52 bomber—capable of carrying long-range nuclear weapons—few within two miles of a disputed artificial island built by China in the South China Sea.
On December 21, in Afghanistan, a geopolitical linchpin for both the U.S. and Russia, six U.S. troops serving with NATO were killed by a suicide bomber in the Bagram district—an area made infamous by the torture and murders committed by U.S. military personnel at the district prison.
In Texas, the same day as the Bagram incident, a grand jury declined to indict any cops or jail guards in connection with the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman found dead in her cell last summer after an arrest for allegedly failing to use her car’s turn signal.
As a high-stakes competition intensifies among the biggest imperialist rivals, the capitalist rulers of the U.S., Russia, and China, the international working class is caught in the middle. In their efforts to terrorize and divide workers in the U.S., the bosses have unleashed their racist killer cops. Meanwhile, the same U.S. bosses are faced with increasingly difficult—and deadly—choices as they struggle to prop up their declining oil empire in the Middle East.
More than ever, the international working class needs unity under the banner of the Progressive Labor Party. PLP is the only party that represents all workers, from the undocumented in New York to those fighting the UN’s imperialist occupation of Haiti to the dozens buried December 20 by a landslide of recklessly dumped construction waste in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers to smash racist police state terror, racist borders and imperialist war with communist revolution.
Oil and Perpetual War
Ten thousand NATO troops are still stationed in Afghanistan. (NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a U.S. imperialist-led international military alliance.) Twelve years after the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq, more than 3,000 U.S. ground troops, backed by civilian-killing air and drone strikes, remain there. As the U.S. rulers escalate their war against the regional imperialist Islamic State (ISIS), growing numbers of U.S. special operations forces are being deployed in northern Syria. It is more and more apparent that more troops will soon be on their way—sent to kill their class sisters and brothers and to be killed, all to protect the bosses’ profits from cheaply extracted oil.
As gutter racist Donald Trump calls for shutting down mosques and banning all Muslim workers from entering the U.S., other presidential candidates are clashing over how to counter the ISIS threat in Syria. Liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton and mainstream Republicans Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie want to escalate U.S. involvement—and help rebels fighting the Iran-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad—by establishing a no-fly zone. Phony “socialist” Democrat Bernie Sanders and right-wing Republican Ted Cruz stand opposed, arguing that regime change in Syria could have unintended consequences that might “worsen U.S. national security interests,” as Cruz put it (Bloomberg.com, 12/20/15).
In reality, the disagreement is strictly tactical. None of these candidates question U.S. imperialism or its role in the global refugee crisis. None of them would dream of advocating that the U.S. abandon the trillions invested in the region by ExxonMobil, a flagship of the main finance capital wing of U.S. capitalism. All of them recognize the strategic imperative recently outlined by Stratfor (12/15/15), a global intelligence firm:
[T]he Middle East is a strategic supplier of oil to the global market, and the critical link connecting Africa, Asia and Europe….To bring about an acceptable level of stability — or instability, from the U.S. point of view — will require the commitment of tens of thousands of personnel on the ground and in the skies above the region, for many years to come.

Liberals Are the Main Danger

Sanders’ role is to divert workers and youth from militant fightback into the passive electoral process—and ultimately to vote for Clinton, a reliable tool of the finance capitalists. Historically, the main dangers to the international working class are the liberal politicians who run as the alternative to the likes of Trump or Cruz. For example:
Liberal Democrat Franklin Roosevelt forcibly deported up to two million workers to Mexico. He forced more than 110,000 workers of Japanese descent into concentration camps during World War II, and supported the apartheid oppression of Black workers in the U.S. South (see page xxx).
Liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson escalated the U.S. imperialist genocide in Vietnam. PLP’s predecessor, the Progressive Labor Movement, organized the first demonstration against Johnson’s war in New York City’s Times Square in 1964.
Liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter declared the imperialist “Carter Doctrine” in 1979, stating that any threat to U.S. oil interests in the Middle East would be met with a military response. A top Carter advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote The Grand Chessboard, a book arguing that that control over Central Asia, including Afghanistan, was essential for U.S. imperialism.
Liberal Democrat Bill Clinton oversaw the racist destruction of welfare, the expansion of racist mass incarceration, and the intensification of police terror against Black workers. Clinton also executed the indiscriminate bombing of the former Yugoslavia in an effort to block Russian imperialist influence.
Liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton supported every one of her husband’s anti-worker atrocities, including the Iraq sanctions that slaughtered half a million children. As a U.S. senator, she voted in favor of the 2003 Iraq genocide.

Trump the Bosses With Communism!
The U.S. rulers need a president who can galvanize the entire U.S. working class to fall in line behind imperialism, or at least to neutralize any resistance against the global conflict to come. The seeming chaos of the current presidential campaign reflects the rulers’ uncertainty over who might serve them best.
For the moment, some white workers are confused about why the U.S. has a real U.S. unemployment rate of 23 percent (shadowstats.com), or why millions have lost their homes, or why wages and social services keep declining. Misled by demagogues like Trump, they fall into the trap of blaming other Black or Latin or immigrant or Muslim workers, who are even more sharply attacked by the racist bosses. What gets overlooked is the root of all workers’ problems: the capitalist profit system.
Instead of surrendering white workers to racist politicians, PLP fights to win them to communist politics and multiracial unity. Our Party fought alongside the Black workers and youth who led the multiracial, anti-racist rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore, giving leadership and lessons to our class worldwide.
As the bosses prepare for bigger imperialist wars, the international working class needs communism—now. We will get there by smashing the mad dog racists and exposing the liberal misleaders as servants of the capitalist class. Millions of women workers, Black workers, refugees, and undocumented workers—now under the capitalists’ sharpest attack—will be our strongest leaders on the road to revolution. Won to communist ideas and to joining PLP, they will be essential in our class’s ultimate victory. Join us!