Tanzania is home to the genocide of workers who have a condition known as albinism. The genocide occurs mainly in the city of Mwanza and in the mining regions of Geita, Kagera, and Shinyanga. The Progressive Labor Party in Tanzania is the only group connecting this genocide to capitalism, and we fight for a communist world where it will be abolished!
Albinism is an inherited, genetic skin condition caused by a mutation affecting the enzyme in human skin responsible for skin, hair, and eye color.  It’s believed that albino workers were persecuted in many other places and fled to Tanzania, which may explain why Tanzania has the greatest concentration of albino people in the world.  Tanzania is a former British colony, and the British encouraged beliefs that albino workers were cursed. These racist superstitions led many albino infants to be thrown away in the forests.
Capitalism Keeps Racist Colonial Legacy Alive
British colonialism ended in the early 1960s with an upsurge of anti-racism and anti-imperialism among workers and peasants.  The sellout nationalist government was pressured to outlaw violence against albino workers. Under capitalism, however, all reforms are short-lived. In 1985, a capitalist crisis struck Tanzania, forcing the government to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. imperialist-backed bank. After waves of IMF decrees destroyed the educational system and welfare and led to a massive increase in poverty, the ruling class of Tanzania brought anti-albino racism back with a vengeance. Murders of albino workers began again, this time out of the belief that their body parts would bring wealth if presented to a witch doctor.
Since 2006, 76 albino workers were killed and 56 injured, 11 of those with permanent injuries. Eighteen albino graves have been desecrated and the bodies removed. In 2014, an albino child known as Upendo Emanuel was kidnapped and still hasn’t been found. This past February 15, another child, one year-old Yohana Bahati, was taken from his mother, who was cut up with machetes. Later, when the child’s grave was dug up, some of Yohana’s body parts were missing.
Only Communism Can Protect All Workers
Violence between workers will continue as long as capitalism remains. The capitalist government of Tanzania can never truly address these crimes because it’s the capitalist ruling class that profits off of the division of the working class. These capitalists support the racist superstitions against albino workers, along with apartheid-like laws against many of the country’s 120 ethnic groups. This keeps workers from seeing capitalism as their enemy and communist revolution as their solution.
In 1992, greater “freedoms” were supposedly given to workers here by allowing multiple capitalist electoral parties to compete in elections. The result has been more poverty and more terror, especially against the albino population.
Workers in Tanzania, like workers in Greece, the United States and everywhere else, must unite behind the red banner of the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. PLP will eradicate the capitalist dictatorship that thrives off imperialism and genocide worldwide with a dictatorship of millions of armed workers organized in our Party to build communism.
PLP in Tanzania has been organizing CHALLENGE study groups among workers on anti-albino racism. We are bringing this fight against superstition, racism, sexism, and capitalism to  schools and workplaces to demand an end to the killings. These struggles are strengthening us for the revolutionary struggles to come.

It’s inspiring to read that high school students are leading classes in political economy (“Spring Communist School: Youth Take Lead Building for Revolution,” CHALLENGE, 4/22). However, we need to correct a mistake in one part of the article that says that capitalist crises, also known as depressions or recessions, occur because workers can’t “buy back” what they produce. Depressions and recessions are actually periodic “crises of overproduction,” meaning too much of something is produced for capitalists to make a profit.
The most recent recession, in 2007-2008, began with overproduction of houses. In spite of mass homelessness and a general housing shortage for workers, like everything produced under capitalism, profitability isn’t related to how many workers are able to buy homes. Capitalists can only realize profits when competing groups of capitalists sell more homes and expand their share of the market.
In the last boom year, 2006, 1.05 million new homes were sold in the U.S. In 2007, only 774,000 (CNN Money, 1/28/08), despite a cut in the average price of 10.4 percent. CNN wrote, “Glut of homes driving down prices,” and noted that “Lennar, the nation’s largest home builder, reported a $1.25 billion fourth-quarter loss, the largest in the company’ s history.”
Lennar and its five or six major national competitors all knew the housing boom — fueled by cheap and fraudulent mortgages — would end, as every previous housing boom had ended. They kept building as fast as they could, borrowing money to buy land, equipment, and materials and to hire more construction workers—they were in a race. To survive, each had to capture a larger and larger market share. Each reasoned that if they could pile up profits fast, they could get through the bust stronger than their competitors, maybe even drive one or two out of business, and emerge in an even stronger position during the next boom.
Capitalist crises have happened every 10 years or so in every capitalist country for centuries, and communists and their friends must be armed with the understanding that it’s not because workers cannot buy back their products.
Workers are never paid the full value of what they produce. For every house or car a group of workers build, they receive a fraction of its value as a wage. The full value is realized when the capitalist sells it, and the difference is called “surplus value,” or profit.
Workers never have enough money to “buy back” what they produce. Much of what they produce is meant to be bought by capitalist institutions or by the capitalist class itself, not by workers. A few examples: machine tools, construction and mining equipment, oil wells, pipelines, military and police gear, roads, bridges, tunnels, large trucks, buses, railroad cars, airports, commercial airliners, business jets, factories, office buildings, hospitals, medical equipment, luxury goods.
It’s impossible to predict exactly when the next bust will occur, and dropping out of the race while the boom is still on means giving up a competitive advantage. The “anarchy of capitalist production” is built into the system. Capitalists know they will end up with more product than they can sell, but they have to produce it anyway. The boom generates the bust.
Returning to the 2007 crisis, it began in the housing sector but soon became a general crisis. Homebuilders canceled orders for construction equipment (bulldozers, cranes, power tools), materials (lumber, bricks cement, wire, pipes) and appliances (furnaces, air conditioners, sinks, toilets, stoves, refrigerators). The suppliers in turn stopped buying steel, aluminum, rubber, and electricity. The homebuilders, suppliers, mortgage lenders, title insurers, and real estate agencies laid off workers, who cut back on purchases of consumer goods.
Trade union leaders and liberal politicians put forward the “buy back” explanation because it supports their position that capitalism, by paying higher wages, can be fundamentally reformed to benefit the working class. They then say that to prevent these crises, the bankers and bosses have to stop being so greedy and pay workers more.
Communists must not put forward this false explanation. Instead, we must demonstrate that crises are inherent to capitalism, part of its competitive essence. While some individual capitalists certainly appear more greedy and callous in their disregard for the working class than others, these periodic crises have nothing to do with individual greed. As capitalist crises worsen, the need for capitalists to conquer other rival bosses’ labor markets and resources through imperialist war sharpens. Crises will end only when the system that causes them, capitalism, is destroyed by communist revolution.

Since May 6, we have been publishing articles in celebration of PLP’s 50th anniversary. These articles describe the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — as well as our concentration among industrial workers and why the fight against racism is of strategic importance in the fight to overthrow capitalism. Here we will review our Party’s leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the breaking of the government ban on travel to Cuba, and the defeat of the fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
PLM Leads the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
In the early 1960s, class struggle was heating up. The U.S. bosses embarked on a genocidal war in Vietnam. The leadership shown by the working class in Vietnam after decades of resistance to French imperialism inspired millions of workers worldwide. Black workers led rebellions in almost every major U.S. city and rocked the capitalist class back on its heels. In the midst of intensifying class struggle in March 1964, a Yale University conference on socialism was attended by many pseudo-left organizations, including the “Communist” Party USA and various Trotskyite groups. The conference was geared for a scholarly debate on theory. Only PLM broke through this nonsense to advocate building a militant anti-imperialist movement!
PLM leader Milt Rosen electrified the audience of 500 students and faculty by focusing on opposing U.S. imperialism’s efforts to crush the revolutionary movement in Vietnam. He called for a nation-wide mobilization on May 2 to protest U.S. aggression there. The proposal was approved overwhelmingly and a May 2nd Committee was organized under PLM’s leadership.
On May 2, thousands of workers and students marched and rallied in cities nationwide. In New York City, 1,000 heard PL speeches about the necessity for communist revolution. They broke a police ban on demonstrations in midtown Manhattan, winding their way through Times Square to the United Nations, demanding: “U.S. Get Out of Vietnam Now!” It was the first national demonstration against the U.S. imperialist invasion and the forerunner of countless protests against U.S. rulers in the years ahead.
The Committee became a national organization called the May 2nd Movement (M2M). Hundreds joined. They played a major role in popularizing the struggle against U.S. imperialism’s war against workers and peasants in Vietnam. They issued hundreds of thousands of leaflets, buttons and pamphlets; initiated numerous university teach-ins; organized rallies and marches; and developed “Free Universities” as an off-campus alternative to the rulers’ educational system.
Following a massive Washington, D.C. anti-war rally of 25,000 organized by Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) in the spring of 1965, PLM’s leadership fought inside M2M to dissolve it and join SDS, a move supported by the overwhelming majority within M2M.
M2M did play a vanguard role in opposing U.S. imperialist aggression in Vietnam and successfully broke with the old pacifist “peace movement” dominated by the Communist Party USA. That movement was never anti-imperialist but rather championed ruling-class collaboration behind slogans like “Ban the Bomb”; “Peaceful Co-existence”; and “For A Sane Nuclear Policy” — as if the working class could ever make peace with imperialist rulers! PL’s slogan--“U.S. Get Out of Vietnam Now!”—was eventually adopted by millions.
M2M helped move the emerging anti-war forces to the left and toward anti-imperialism. Many youthful fighters joined PLM, having learned from their mass struggles in the M2M.
Breaking the Cuba Travel Ban
Although Cuba eventually became a state capitalist country, the Cuban Revolution of the early 1960s had great appeal for youth in the U.S., and especially for Black and Latin workers. U.S. imperialist rulers feared the Cuban revolt would spark similar uprisings throughout Latin America and radicalize U.S. workers and students. President Kennedy’s CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasion had failed miserably.
Prior to that invasion, PLM distributed tens of thousands of leaflets and held streets rallies warning about Kennedy’s plans. It even unfurled the first “Hands Off Cuba” banner in the galleries of the United Nations during the UN debate over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, a crisis that aroused fears of a nuclear war.
After Cuba confiscated a billion dollars worth of U.S corporate property, the Kennedy Administration instituted an economic boycott of Cuba and established a ban on travel there. While other pseudo-left groups merely reprinted Castro’s speeches, PLM boldly announced they would break the travel ban.
Over 500 students applied to the PLM-led Ad Hoc Committee to Travel to Cuba to defy the U.S. State Department. Seventy-five were selected. In the summer of 1963, the Committee outwitted a government plan to block them and flew to Cuba via Czechoslovakia. The trip succeeded; 59 students broke the “Kennedy curtain.” It was reported in headlines nationwide. Attorney General Robert Kennedy condemned the organizers and promised to punish them.
Upon returning to New York, in a showdown at the airport, immigration officials tried to seize the ban-breakers’ passports, mark them “invalid” and refuse their entry back into the U.S., based on a 1918 law to control the travel of spies for Germany’s kaiser during World War I.  The students refused to surrender their passports and sat down in the airport. Hundreds of family members and supporters were waiting nearby, along with newspaper and TV reporters. The standoff lasted two hours. Finally the agents gave in, allowing the students to enter while serving them with letters revoking their passports.
The pro-fascist New York Daily News ran a front-page photo of the students cheering as they came through immigration barriers, along with a headline scorecard: “PUNKS 1, STATE DEPARTMENT 0!”
Within weeks, more than 50 students were either cited for contempt or indicted for conspiracy to break the ban. Some faced 20-year prison terms, but the government’s attack failed miserably. A national defense campaign won widespread support. Most of the young PLM comrades and friends held firm and grew stronger in their commitment to fight the rulers. They announced they were organizing another trip to Cuba! The following year, almost a thousand students applied; 84 were selected and again broke the ban.
Afterward, four student committee leaders were indicted for illegal travel to Cuba. After a two-year fight, eventually reaching the Supreme Court, the charges were dropped. The ban had been beaten. Many students who had participated in the trips or supported them joined PLM, which emerged as a vigorous force in the emerging New Left in the U.S. The Cuba trips were a decisive turning point for PLM. As a head-on challenge to President Kennedy’s State Department travel ban, as well as a demonstration of solidarity with the working class in Cuba, they were a huge success — groundbreaking events in the development of student radicalism in the 1960s.  
Wiping Out HUAC
In 1963, when the first group of students returned from Cuba after breaking the travel ban, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched an anti-communist attack by summoning many of them to hearings in Washington in an attempt to intimidate and possibly jail them. Until then, the Committee had focused on asking Hollywood stars, Communist Party USA leaders and others if they were communists. Virtually all took refuge in the 5th Amendment, citing their constitutional right to refuse to answer. HUAC’s strategy was to cite them for contempt and threaten jail terms. The famous “Hollywood Ten” were imprisoned for up to a year.
CPUSA leaders “took the 5th,” posing as “defenders of the Constitution and of democracy.” No one ever answered the question directly. If they said “no,” the Committee would haul in some stoolpigeon to testify that they were communists. If they said that they once had been communists but had quit, the Committee would then ask them to name others they knew to be communists. It was a lose-lose proposition, but PLM changed the game.
While hundreds picketed outside, PL’ers took the stand and answered by declaring: “Yes, we are communists and proud of it!” This set HUAC members back on their heels; they weren’t prepared for that answer. It represented PL’s principle of openly advocating socialism, the term used prior to PLP’s proclaiming a direct goal of communism.
In April 1964, HUAC descended on Buffalo, where PLM had established an industrial and campus base. The Committed prattled on about a “threat of a new communist movement” that “needed to be dealt with.” A Buffalo Courier-Express headline clarified HUAC’s aim: “New Communist Operation Here A Prime Target.”
But in sharp contrast to the CPUSA’s defensive stance, PLM launched an all-out offensive; 1,500 pickets greeted the anti-communist red-baiters. The University of Buffalo Student Senate appropriated funds to support the protest. The entire city was in an uproar. Front-page headlines screamed: “Red Probers in Buffalo Hear the Sound of Fury”; “Witnesses Spark Uproar, Grapple With Marshals”; “UB Instructor Ridicules HUAC”; “Rain-Soaked Pickets’ Chants Echo Outside HUAC Session.” The demonstrators were supported by various mass groups, some printing full-page ads in the Buffalo paper. Clerics joined the picket line.
The hearings were completely disrupted. HUAC fled town. PL’s principle of confronting anti-communism directly and organizing mass support, rather than hiding behind the bosses’ Constitution, proved decisive.
In 1966, HUAC launched an investigation of “subversive activities” in the anti-war movement, subpoenaing many, including five student members of PL. The Party mobilized 800 protestors to pack the Washington, D.C. hearing room to disrupt the proceedings while also demonstrating outside Congress. They exposed the racist HUAC as Nazis, turning the hearings into an attack on capitalism and on the liberal Johnson Administration, accusing it of mass murder in Vietnam and racist policies in the U.S.
That was the last straw. Three years of bold  PL actions led to HUAC’s demise as an official Congressional committee.
From our beginning, PL has stood at the forefront of attacking racism and imperialism, fighting back against every attack the bosses can throw at it. The lessons of all these struggles are that it’s necessary to anticipate ruling-class attacks and develop alternative plans to defeat them. <any different avenues of struggle must be employed to smash the bosses. Dare to struggle! Dare to win! Be bold! Always be guided by the principle of acting in the best interests of the working class. Grow stronger through struggle. Ruling-class terror will never destroy the communist movement.

When the leaders speak of peace
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.
-Bertolt Brecht, A German War Primer

Around the planet, the potential for global war among imperialists is escalating—and with it the threat of devastation for the international working class. At the moment, the Russian rulers loom as the U.S. bosses’ sharpest rivals. As Russia pursues an undeclared war with NATO ally Ukraine and moving nuclear-capable weapons near NATO borders, the Pentagon prepares to mobilize heavy weaponry and up to 5,000 troops in the Baltic states and former Eastern Bloc. Tensions between the two imperialist powers are higher than at any time since the Cold War. Seeking both battlefield superiority and game-changing alliances, they seem to be on a collision course.
Imperialist war is essential to capitalism. Rival capitalists must either expand their profit-making empires or fall to one of their rivals, a competition that creates constant instability and periodic crises. Each day, even during “peacetime,” this grow-or-die behavior devastates hundreds of millions of workers. It will end only when millions throughout the world join and help to lead a mass Progressive Labor Party, and to smash this racist, sexist, and imperialist profit system with armed communist revolution.
The Russians Are Coming
When Barack Obama nominated General Joe Dunford to be chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, it reflected the imperialist needs of the biggest U.S. capitalists. According to the Wall Street Journal (7/10/15), Dunford told Congress:

Russia poses the biggest threat to U.S. national security….Amid potential threats that include China, Islamic State, Iranian influence across the Middle East and other challenges...If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, you’d have to point to Russia,” Gen. Dunford said….North Korea, China and Islamic State are what he ranks as the second, third and fourth among potential security challenges.

Dunford’s remarks echoed those made the same day by a leading bank for U.S. imperialism. As Business Insider reported (7/10/15):

The Russia-NATO confrontation is becoming one of the defining aspects of the global strategic landscape. And according to the head of Goldman Sachs’s Office of Global Security, the situation is going to remain tense — or even intensify. Robert Dannenberg, who is also a 24-year CIA veteran, believes that Russia is the top strategic threat from a U.S. perspective. “We are in an extraordinarily dangerous time right now because both Russia and NATO are starting to exercise substantial military activity in close proximity to each other.”
While military buildups by both sides in Europe are heavily publicized, it’s less well known that “U.S. Army Alaska troops…have been taking part in a massive training exercise stretching from Alaska to Australia. Training exercise Talisman Saber involves over 33,000 military personnel from three continents” (Alaska Public Media, 7/10/15). This U.S.-led rehearsal targets both Russia and China with “airborne operations…uncommon…since World War II…The goal is to be able to drop an instant fighting force on the other side of the world within 24 hours” (APM).

Courting India
While U.S. rulers are glad to have Australia as a coalition partner, their bigger wish is to count India and its billion-plus population as an ally. But the bosses of Russia and China may have a better offer for India’s bosses. BRICS, an anti-U.S. economic coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, recently founded its own bank to challenge the U.S.-backed IMF and World Bank. As the imperialists in Russia court allies of their own, BRICS is also developing a military alliance.
India is set to become a full-fledged member of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a Eurasian political and military alliance that includes China and most of Central Asia, Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday.
“Under your (Putin’s) leadership in BRICS, India has become a member of SCO. I am very grateful,” the [Indian] prime minister said (Gulf Times, 7/9/15).

Unite Soldiers, Workers, Students
Another challenge to the U.S. rulers’ global war schemes comes from within, and it is one that PLP members and friends can use to our advantage. While regular U.S. army troops rehearse a European invasion with large-scale tank exercises at Fort Riley, Kansas, U.S. Special Forces are practicing a counterinsurgency Operation “Jade Helm” at bases throughout the U.S. Southwest. Many workers in the Southwest furiously oppose Jade Helm as an attempt to impose Ferguson-style federal martial law. States like Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, and the Carolinas provide U.S. rulers with the bulk of their enlisted cannon fodder. Many of these soldiers are white workers temporarily under the influence of racism and false ideologies like libertarianism. These bad ideas obscure the real source of their suffering: capitalism.
There is more immediate opportunity, however, in the hundreds of thousands of GIs who reject the Obama/Bush/Clinton/Exxon/JP Morgan/Goldman agenda for imperialist war and fascist control at home. By focusing its organizing efforts on students, industrial workers and soldiers, PLP is the one force capable of uniting these GIs with U.S. workers in the South and Southwest who are frustrated by mass unemployment, and with working-class Black, Latin and immigrant class sisters and brothers who face intensifying racist terror.
All the elections in the world cannot settle the imperialists’ disputes. The wars to come will be more devastating than any the world has ever seen. World War I and World War II were both settled by revolutions led by communists. PLP is building an international mass movement of millions to finish the job and smash the capitalist profit system once and for all. Join us!