“Less than 1% of Americans are willing and able to serve.”
—U.S. Major General Jeffrey Snow, the U.S. Army’s top recruiting boss (The Economist, 10/24/15).
The U.S. capitalist rulers are worried. U.S. imperialism still dominates the world, over the rival gangs of bosses ruling Russia and China. But in a relative sense, U.S. power is declining. The bosses see their options narrowing. To preserve their empire in the next big ground war, they know they’ll need to draft masses of U.S. workers to slaughter and be slaughtered. They’ll need workers to sacrifice their lives for the capitalists’ narrow interests.
On October 24, The Economist, a British magazine owned by the pro-U.S. Rothschild and Agnelli (Fiat-Chrysler) families, published “Who Will Fight the Next War?”
[T]he civil-military disconnect… concerns America’s future ability to mobilise for war….when the army next needs to surge, it will be for a war much bloodier than the recent ones…..America may be unable, within reasonable cost limits and without reinstituting the draft, to raise the much bigger army it might need for such wars.
U.S. Bosses in Disarray
The dominant, imperialist, finance capital wing of U.S. capitalism inevitably needs to confront its enemies with armed force. Russian and U.S. imperialists are already indirectly fighting one another by financing and arming warring factions in Syria’s bloody civil conflict. Top U.S. strategists see Syria, with its strategic location in the oil-rich Middle East, as just one of many hotspots bringing direct conflict closer. Neither the U.S. nor Russia can afford to cede control over that critical region without a fight.
But as it stands today, two obstacles block the U.S. bosses from fielding 500,000 troops anywhere. The first consists of U.S. capitalists at odds with the dominant, finance capital wing. The domestically oriented Koch brothers, lacking trillions of U.S. dollars invested in the Middle East, do not share the finance capital wing’s imperialist vision or needs. Koch-organized funding, amounting to $889 million (New York Times, 1/26/15), will play a major role in choosing the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for the 2016 election.
The influential Brookings Institution is an organization that helps formulate U.S. imperialist policy. It gets most of its funding from JPMorgan Chase, the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. government, and the government of Qatar, home to the U.S. Air Force’s main base in the Middle East. Brookings recently released a book titled The Future of Land War, the first installment in a series called “Order from Chaos.” Designed to guide presidential candidates as well as their capitalist backers, Land War explores the most likely flashpoints for clashes between major imperialist powers—the 21st-century Pearl Harbors. One is “a major [war] in the Middle East, perhaps in Syria.” Another is “a Russian invasion threat to the Baltic [countries].”
The history of fascist movements in Nazi Germany, Japan and Italy, before and during World War II, shows us that capitalist disorganization is temporary. As the global stakes become higher for the U.S. bosses, sooner or later the dominant finance capitalists will use their state power either to force their rivals to play along or to cut them out completely. One early sign of this development is the bosses’ recruitment of Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House of Representatives. His job is to keep the imperialist machinery running smoothly and bring the Tea Party right-wingers to heel.
The Bosses Need the Working Class…
But the bigger obstacle by far for the U.S. bosses is mass working-class opposition to imperialist war. This healthy attitude stems in part from the vast, militant, anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the working class in Vietnam and large sections of students and workers in the U.S., led by Black workers, actively fought back.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party played the most politically significant role in this struggle. We led strikes and protests in factories and on campuses attacking U.S. war-makers. We exposed the fake “communist” North Vietnamese leaders as just another bunch of capitalists who wrapped themselves in the red flag.
…Workers Don’t Need Bosses
PLP fights to build a mass international party of millions that can turn imperialist war into a class war against capitalism and smash this rotten system once and for all. The bosses are right to be worried about a working class armed with revolutionary communist ideas!
During the Vietnam War, instead of encouraging students and workers to avoid the military draft, PL’ers led rebellions and anti-racist fightback inside the military. From Vietnam to bases across the U.S., PLP organized, joined, or supported anti-racist struggles to help build international working-class consciousness.
Mindful of Vietnam-era mutinies, the Brookings Institute envisions a compulsory U.S. troop building program. Land War proposes “[o]bligatory national service for the nation’s youth….[M]ilitary service should be just one option among many, with the armed forces themselves having a major say on whom they would accept.”
Fascist Terror Reveals Bosses’ Weakness
Amid the current economic misery and racist police terror, it’s no wonder that U.S. workers aren’t rushing to enlist. As their mad-dog police murder Black youth across the country and millions are permanently unemployed, the bosses can’t possibly inspire working-class loyalty. They have only one alternative: the imposition of fascism.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis, the way the bosses rule when they are weak and desperate to keep control. Within the ruling class, it means bringing rivals like the Koch brothers into line—by force, if necessary. For the working class, it means more open state terror.
But this crisis of loyalty can also be an opportunity for communists and class-conscious workers around the world. Capitalism means perpetual imperialist war, with rival powers relying on the working class to do the fighting and dying. Communism, with the leadership of PLP, means arming the international working class with revolutionary ideas. It means fighting for a world without imperialism, capitalism, racism or sexism. We are open to all workers, students and soldiers. Join us!
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Kyam Struggle: ‘I Still Haven’t Seen My Daughter’s Killer!’
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- 29 October 2015 62 hits
BROOKLYN, October 21 — Members of Progressive Labor Party joined the Committee for Justice for Kyam Livingston in a demonstration marking twenty-seven months since Kyam was killed by medical disregard in a holding cell.
On the 21st of each month, the Committee holds an event to call for the arrest and punishment of all those responsible for Kyam’s death. Tonight, family members of others killed by the racist NYPD joined in. Among those remembered was Shantel Davis, a 23-year-old Black woman murdered by racist kkkop Phillip Atkins on June 14, 2012. The unity of these families is an important part of the growing movement against racist police terror. That’s why we chant: “Kyam means we’ve got to fight back! Shantel means we’ve got to fight back!”
We heard from a mother and a sister who lost a family member to police murder. Black women are leading the fight against racist police terror. Their strength and stamina and fearlessness inspire us all.
Several members of PLP spoke about how all cops serve the interests of the capitalist ruling class. Racism is the bosses’ main tool to prevent workers from uniting in our class interest. As part of this plan of divide and conquer, Black, Latin, and immigrant workers face brutal oppression by police on a daily basis, from metal detectors in schools to stop-and-frisk in communities to mass incarceration in U.S. prisons and jails. Murder by cops—whether the weapon is a bullet or the denial of urgent medical care—is all racist terror. From New York to California, from Ayotzinapa, Mexico to Palestine, the bosses cannot and will not provide justice for our class. Their cops are free to kill again and again.
The rulers know they are vastly outnumbered by the working class. They cannot keep exploiting workers—and super-exploiting Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant workers—without using racist state terror. That’s why we chant, “Shut it down, shut it down, shut this racist system down!”
Tonight, when one speaker tried to argue that not all cops are bad, his remarks were swiftly rejected by the crowd. PLP doesn’t argue about individual cops; our job is to expose the role cops play in maintaining capitalist class rule. Our duty is to build working-class fightback. As Kyam’s mom said, “I still haven’t seen my daughter’s killer. How do I know which one did it?”
This struggle is a school for learning how to put communist ideas forward, to advance our vision of a world without racism, sexism, or inequality. We are unmasking the killers in blue and the killers in suits, along with the capitalist system that enables them. Our teachers are the women leading struggles for Kyam, Shantel and so many others.
We encourage all CHALLENGE readers to take the struggle for Kyam and Shantel into their schools and workplaces. Share this article with friends and start the discussion about who and what the cops serve. Turn your anger against capitalism into organized fightback. If you are in New York City, come out at noon Saturday, November 21, for the next Kyam demonstration. We will rally at Church Avenue and East 18th Street in Brooklyn.
TEL-AVIV, October 27 — The working class in Israel-Palestine is once again in open rebellion against the racist Israeli apartsheid regime. Workers in the West Bank and Gaza have been unleashing fury at the escalating racist oppression here. Some respond with stabbing attacks on Israeli citizens—or, more often, on Israeli soldiers. The Israeli bosses are seizing this opportunity to brutally repress Arab and Muslim workers—a repression that enables the capitalists to further exploit all workers, including Jewish workers.
Out of Oppression, Resistance
Now Israeli cops have a ready-made excuse to shoot Arab and Muslim workers in cold blood, by claiming afterward “they had knives.” On October 18, at the Beersheba central bus station, a racist mob beat to death a Black refugee from Eritrea after the cops had shot the innocent man, claiming they thought he was a terrorist. The divisive, racist double standards of the police are more apparent every day. Last summer, a violent homophobe named Yishai Slisel murdered a woman in the Jerusalem Pride Parade. The cops arrested him without resorting to live fire, just as they have in recent criminal stabbings where the perpetrators were Israeli Jews. But Arab, Muslim and African immigrant workers are simply murdered in cold blood.
Israel is a crucial tool of U.S. imperialism to help control oil wealth in the Middle East. To solidify this role, the Israeli bosses use extreme repression to divide and control the working class. For example, while religious Jews can go to both the Wailing Wall and the Temple Mount, Muslim entry into the Temple Mount is restricted by age and sometimes completely forbidden. Racist pro-Israeli groups threaten to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Arab and Muslim workers in the West Bank have their movements restricted by checkpoints and roadblocks, and their lands stolen by settlers. Since the West Bank is exempt from Israeli labor laws, many Arab and Muslim workers, including children, work for starvation wages in the settlements. In Gaza, both Israel and Egypt besiege the population, creating starvation and mass unemployment.
Transform Resistance to Revolution
This is not the first mass revolt. In the 1980s, Palestinian workers rose against the Zionist apartheid regime in the first Intifada. Fifteen years ago, they rose again against the regime once it became obvious that the Oslo “peace” treaty was garbage. In October 2000, Israeli cops murdered thirteen unarmed Arab demonstrators. After a subsequent government investigation let the killer cops off, there were years of mass butcherings of Arab and Muslim workers by Israeli “Defense” Force (IDF) stormtroopers in the West Bank and Gaza.
The vacuum left by the collapse of the old international communist movement allowed murderous Islamist movements like Hamas to rise to prominence. Hamas receives political support from the Russian and Chinese bosses. The fascist Israeli regime tries to paint the current uprising as a “religious insurrection,” and to link it to terrorists like ISIS. The wave of stabbing attacks is a pretext to launch a racist wave of nationalism among Jewish workers. Zionism promises Jewish workers nothing but endless war for the sake of the bosses’ profits. Meanwhile, the Palestinian bosses try to exploit the Arab and Muslim workers’ anger while making dirty backroom deals with the Israeli fascists they pretend to be fighting. Whatever new “peace” settlement they cook up could eventually lead to a separate capitalist state of Palestine, or to a single capitalist state that encompasses both Israel and Palestine. Either way, the working classs loses.
Workers need to ask themselves: Do we want two states ruled by rival gangs of bosses? Or should working-class Arab, Muslim, Jewish, immigrant and all other workers join the Progressive Labor Party and fight for a world without racism and capitalism? The only answer is to fight against fascism and build a mass PLP in Israel-Palestine! We must fight toward the only way forward for our class: communist revolution.
As long as the Zionist occupation continues, no worker in Israel-Palestine can be free. Workers only need one communist workers’ state—from the River to the Sea!
COLOMBIA, October 20 —The long-yearned-for peace for the working class of Colombia has once again been made into a joke, as a result of capitalism and its contradictions, in which the working class has nothing to gain. It is a truly shameful joke, to the point that the people affected by the war, those who have suffered displacement and assassinations, are simply spectators in the process.
The only people who will receive landholdings as a result of the “restitution” will be the politicians who lead the opposition parties and those with influence and privilege. And of course the other beneficiaries: the multinational corporations in mining, oil, and other industries who will be able to invest in Colombia at the expense of the exploitation of the working class, with pitiful wages and terrible working conditions. One example is the case of the Alabama-based Drummond mining company which paid paramilitaries to torture and murder union leaders in 2001.
Now they suppress any protests or workers’ struggles, murdering workers and union leaders. There is widespread rape of female wage workers and agricultural workers by the armies (both official and private), which shows the racist and sexist character of the exploitation. European, American, and Asian capitalism all want a piece of the pie, so they offer generous donations supposedly to guarantee and end to the conflict, but we revolutionaries understand that these capitalists are only buying their right to exploit the working class of Colombia.
World capitalism is in crisis. The apparent sympathy shown by legislation in favor of undocumented workers in the USA or the abolition of visas in Europe are only strategies to prop up the falling rate of profit. As revolutionaries, we are aware of these situations and we avoid siding with any capitalist gang. We redouble our efforts to organize and fight based on our revolutionary program, winning a communist base for the not-to-distant future, when we will put an end to capitalism and its imperialist war with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
LOS ANGELES, September 26—A multiracial group of 50 women and men marched up the Venice Beach Boardwalk for the second time in two months to demand justice for homeless workers Brendon Glenn and Jason Davis, killed by LAPD cops—and for one of the latest local victims, Jascent-Jamal Lee “Shakespeare” Warren, slain on August 30 by a Cadillac Hotel security guard.
Shakespeare was killed when he went to the aid of homeless friends being harassed by the hotel owner, Sris Sinnathamby, who used a racial epithet as he ordered guard Francisco Guzman to shoot Shakespeare. Charged with murder, Sinnathamby has been released on $1 million bail. Guzman, a felon, ran away but was captured six days later. He is charged with murder, attempted murder (he shot another man in the leg), and firearms possession.
As Google and other tech firms transform Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey and other Westside neighborhoods into “Silicon Beach,” they are accelerating these neighborhoods’ gentrification and pushing to rid the boardwalk of homeless workers. The racist Los Angeles City Council has declared a homeless state of emergency and pledged $100 million to address the problem, with no known source for the funding or a plan to spend it. Of a previous $100 million the city earmarked to combat homelessness, $87 million went to “law enforcement.” Currently, there are police-escorted sanitation sweeps every Friday morning to run homeless workers off the beach, but no plans to provide housing or even bathroom facilities. As L.A. continues to plan for a 2024 Olympic bid, these crackdowns will only increase. L.A. bosses are eliminating homeless people, not homelessness.
One speaker at the rally raised the issue of racism and recent efforts to integrate police forces throughout the U.S. He concluded that having Black, Latin, and Asian cops, whether rank and file or top brass, does nothing to change the racist, brutal essence of the job. Capitalist bosses in every country use the police to terrorize the working class, he explained, as can be seen with the 43 disappeared students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, and the striking miners murdered in the Marikana Massacre in South Africa. The cops in those countries are the same color as the workers they slaughter, but they’re on the opposite side of the class war.
We are meeting new faces and groups who are cosponsoring these protests. The two Unitarian Universalist church contingents were larger this time. PLP distributed CHALLENGE to marchers and passersby. We identified capitalism as the root cause of the problems of homelessness, racism, and police brutality, and communist revolution as the solution. We are inspired by reading in CHALLENGE about the ongoing protests PLP has helped build in New York City around the murders of Kyam Livingston, Shantel Davis, and others. We will be marching in Venice again on Sunday, October 25.
