This school year, my three-year old son and I attended a school program called Family Literacy. The program is scheduled for half a day and is designed for 2-to-5 year-old children to learn phonemic awareness and social skills while the parents are receiving English instruction in another classroom. Not only are the children learning but they also have the opportunity to interact with their parents at certain times during the day.
Three weeks before the school year ended, teachers and staff got the news: we had one week to pack up all our belongings and school material and turn it in to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). These racist district officials told the school staff that no school funds are available for the program serving immigrant families, which was a operating on a grant from First Five LA.
Fighting this massive cut and not giving up, teachers, staff, parents, and children have led rallies in front of LAUSD headquarters, inside the Board of Education meetings and last week in front of one of the four schools involved. Reporters from a local radio station and major TV channel interviewed parents and children at these rallies. Mothers, students, and staff shouted their anger at the abrupt termination of a program that has been recognized nationally for its approach to cooperative learning and job skill effectiveness.
The racist LAUSD does not want to provide funding for this program ($750,000 out of a $6 billion budget!) because it benefits immigrant families and working-class parents who are learning English as a second language and completing their GED, parents who cannot afford childcare or private schools. Because the program is for children and adults, it is funded under the Adult Education budget, which the racist LAUSD continues to cut. Teachers and staff will lose their jobs.
What do they want to fund? School superintendent John Deasy and the Board of Ed want to implement the use of IPADS in the classroom. This will only benefit Deasy’s ruling class friends, who have invested their capital in selling their software to the district. Cutting programs for working-class families — whether in education, jobs, or healthcare — continues as corporations like Apple and banks struggle to gain more profit.
This is a good example of how capitalism imposes limits on the working class’s ability to meet its basic needs for work, housing, food, education, and healthcare. With communism, the working class can change education so that it won’t be based on profits. Having participated in this rally and attended the program I understand the need to organize those close to me and win them to fight for a communist future.

PARIS, June 16 — Tens of thousands of railroad workers are striking the government-owned railroads against a proposed law that would split the system into three public companies. It would open the railroads to private company competition in accordance with a 1991 European Union (EU) deregulation directive 91/440.
The workers refuse to bow down to an EU globalization plan laid down for all countries in the EU: turning public-service railroads into for-profit railroads. The workers know that this is a capitalist scheme to push through a race to the bottom, channeling everyone into the worst possible working conditions and wages existing in the most backward countries in the EU.
The Socialist government is introducing legislation to do this in France. Already the French national budget for 2014 includes an austerity plan to eliminate 2,500 jobs.
The system is drowning under a 40-billion euro debt (US $55 billion) incurred when the high-speed rail system was developed in the 1980s. The EU’s destruction of public sector monopolies in passenger and freight transport, scheduled for 2019, will lead to creeping privatization. The government officially plans to stabilize the public railroad company’s debt, but reducing the debt to allow the public company to compete with private railroad companies will depend on even more job cuts and the worsening of working conditions. The bosses want to “save the system” on the workers’ backs, axing their jobs and throwing safety out the window.
As one 30-year veteran locomotive driver said, “I’ll tell you what I see from my cab. Management talks to us about safety, but it’s the high-speed train that is clipping the branches off the trees! We sounded the alarm a dozen times and the hierarchy plays dead. We’re fed up with bailing out a company that is taking on water” (Liberation newspaper, 6/15).
A TV report recounting the “comfort” of train drivers disgusted him. “Come and see… It seems we have bucket seats and a micro-wave oven! But we don’t even have toilets!”
The unions that called the strike are not challenging the EU dictum that the rail network has to be opened up to private company competition. They’re not challenging the fact that the capitalists are using the EU to make these so-called reforms obligatory. They’re just advocating a different reform that would be less unfavorable to the workers, to maintain reunification of the whole rail system. Nor are they organizing for a Europe-wide working-class unity, building ties with rail workers in Germany, Britain and Italy to oppose these pro-capitalist reforms.
The walkout began on June 10. Every 24 hours workers across France hold local general assemblies and vote on continuing the strike. The workers are demanding that the government postpone introducing legislation (scheduled for June 17) in the French National Assembly and that the government rewrite the law to suit them. Workers have blocked tracks in a number of cities and the rank and file appears to be highly mobilized, ahead of the union leadership and intent on broadening the strike. Only the largest and third-largest of the six rail unions are striking, with possibly half of the 250,000 rail workers participating.
The workers are caught between a public-sector rail company that answers to a bosses’ government which does not have to represent the workers’ or riders’ interest and a bosses’ plan to have private companies run the industry with even greater ability to oppress the workers. The union leaders do not challenge the capitalist system that presents these “choices” to the workers but rather look to the crumbs of a reform that would be “less unfavorable” to the workers.
There is no communist leadership to advocate a real alternative, a system run by and for the workers, with no bosses, profits or reliance on a bosses’ government. That is the only answer to the problems these strikers and all workers face. The organization of a communist party must become the future for these workers and the whole working class.

Inter-imperialist rivalry is heating up between the U.S. ruling class and its two main rivals. The capitalist bosses of China and Russia are rapidly consolidating a bloc to extract Eurasia’s huge oil and gas reserves. The fight over these strategic resources — and for military and economic domination of the world — will inevitably lead to the wider wars imperialists must use to settle their differences.
As the liberal Asia Times (5/1/14) pointed out, “All around Asia, China is pushing and probing at America’s alliances, trying to loosen the bonds that have kept the countries close to Washington and allowed the United States to be the pre-eminent power in the region since World War II.” In addition, China has fast become the dominant economic power in Africa, surpassing the U.S. without investing a single soldier. Meanwhile, the U.S. spent a trillion dollars and deployed hundreds of thousands of troops in Afghanistan for 13 years, yet has suffered a big defeat.
As profit-driven bosses escalate their conflicts, the international working class suffers. Millions of workers and youth die in these wars. Hundreds of millions of others ultimately pay for these conflicts with mass poverty, constant wage and budget cuts, massive unemployment, destruction of homes, inadequate health care, and the most ruthless racist and sexist attacks.
For the working class, the only way out of capitalist hell is to overthrow this system, seize state power from the bosses, and destroy them with communist revolution. This is the road followed by the Progressive Labor Party. We are organizing our revolutionary party in more than twenty five countries toward the goal of eliminating the profit system at the root of all our problems.
To the Victors Go the Spoils
U.S. corporations once drooled over Afghanistan’s profit potential. Now they’re losing the spoils of war to China and Russia. In 2010, when the U.S. had more than 100,000 troops in the country, the U.S. Geological Survey scanned Afghanistan’s mineral assets and found a trillion dollars’ worth of mainly copper, lithium, and iron. But today the largest mining contract in the country is held by China, a $3.5 billion deal to exploit vast copper deposits at Mes Aynak.
Referring to this contract and to President Hamid Karzai’s May visit to Beijing, Afghanistan’s state news agency said, “Chinese companies...enjoy a more positive relationship with Afghans [than the U.S.], making their investments less likely to be targeted for attack by insurgents” (Khaama Press, 5/19/14).
Pepe Escobar, who critiques global imperialism for the Asia Times, went so far as to declare (5/29/14):
In more ways than one, last week heralded the birth of a Eurasian century…. The $400 billion Russia-China gas deal was clinched… in Shanghai, on Wednesday (a complement to the June 2013, 25-year, $270 billion oil deal between Rosneft [Russian oil giant] and China’s CNPC.) Then, on Thursday, most of the main players were at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — the Russian answer to Davos [annual U.S.-led gathering with its capitalist allies]. And on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from his Shanghai triumph, addressed the participants.... St. Petersburg…made it clear how China wants to finance an array of projects in Crimea, whose waters, …boasting untold, still unexplored, energy wealth, are now Russian property. Projects include a crucial bridge across the Kerch Strait to connect Crimea to mainland Russia; expansion of Crimean ports; solar power plants; and even manufacturing special economic zones (SEZs). Moscow could not but interpret it as Beijing’s endorsement of the annexation of Crimea. 
The St. Petersburg meeting had a decidedly militaristic thrust, according to attendee Escobar:
One day before the clinching of the Russia-China gas deal, President Xi Jinping called for no less than a new Asian security cooperation architecture, including of course Russia and Iran and excluding the U.S.... Xi described NATO as a Cold War relic.
U.S. Rulers Losing Gas Pipeline Control
Even worse for U.S. bosses, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project — the main reason for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan under President George W. Bush — seems to be slipping into Moscow’s hands. President Bill Clinton launched the TAPI scheme in the 1990s. A consortium led by the Union Oil Company of California, or Unocal (now a Chevron subsidiary), was designated as the pipeline’s prospective operator. U.S. oil interests needed cooperation from the Taliban, which then controlled 90 percent of the country — and which was avidly seeking recognition by the U.S. government. But the pipeline negotiations skidded to a halt in 1998, after Taliban ally Osama bin Laden directed the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Clinton declared the Taliban enemies of the U.S. Attacks on the U.S. mainland followed with 9/11, something CHALLENGE warned about a year before.
The Clinton administration chartered the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, in 1998. On January 31, 2001, seven months before 9/11, the Commission released its report and pointed the way forward for U.S. imperialism. Noting that U.S. workers had opposed foreign interventions since the U.S. defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s, the report argued there was only one way to gain support for a war for oil: through an attack on the homeland. Lo and behold, it happened. The bosses were able to mobilize for the invasion of resource-rich Afghanistan and, six months later, for intervention in Iraq.
While ExxonMobil and Chevron have current bids on the table for TAPI rights, they have stiff competition:
[Russia’s] Gazprom has expressed an interest in
building the … pipeline, in addition to its interest in ultimately connecting its gas fields in Russia’s Altai
region to TAPI. Beyond this, proposals for building a Rosneft oil pipeline parallel to TAPI, or even a Gazprom gas pipeline next to it, are being considered.
Essentially Indian companies want to bring in Russia as stakeholder in the energy corridor they seek to create between Central Asia and India
(World Politics Review, 5/10/14).
The U.S. is drawing down their original 100,000 troops in Afghanistan to an announced 10,000, including 6,000 Special Forces and possibly mercenary contractors. Should Russia and India move in with their joint TAPI-type pipeline, they will have to provide their own security along that corridor. That could put them in direct conflict with U.S. forces, which “have abandoned more than 90 percent of the 600 bases they once held” (Wall Street Journal, 6/2). The U.S. will use its remaining bases to launch drone attacks in Pakistan — and kill even more innocent civilians.
Afghan Fiasco v. Obama’s Spin
Through all of this, Obama is feebly trying to spin U.S. imperialism’s Afghan fiasco as a successful pacification. On May 28, he told newly commissioned West Pointers, “We are winding down our war....You are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.”
Three days later, Obama announced a prisoner swap with the Taliban that freed a U.S. soldier who had gone missing — or deserted — five years ago. He continued the spin: “Families across America share in the joy.” He triumphantly envisioned a “hard-earned peace within a sovereign and unified Afghanistan.” As the New York Times (6/1/14) reported, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had departed for Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany eight hours earlier, but that did not stop Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel from taking a figurative victory lap” around Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan “to celebrate the release of the lone remaining American prisoner of war in the Afghan conflict.”
For the world’s workers, the Bush-Obama Afghan invasion has proved a disaster. Post-9/11 combat there needlessly killed at least 8,000 working-class U.S. and NATO soldiers from Britain, France, and other EU countries, and more than 20,000 Afghan civilians. Innocent Afghans are still being slaughtered by drones. And thousands of GIs are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and battle wounds while they wait for months and even years for treatment in a dysfunctional Veterans Administration system.
Workers’ Trump Card:International Unity
Desperate to fend off the emerging China-Russia alliance, U.S. rulers will pull out all stops to win U.S. workers to support a potential war against these imperialist rivals. Look for more racism directed against Chinese people in the U.S., along with assaults on Muslims worldwide. The bosses’ attack black, Latino, Muslim and immigrant workers in an effort to divide and weaken the working class and drag down conditions for all workers.
PLP’s answer is to organize the international working class against the murderous capitalists. Our Party says, Workers of the world, unite! Smash all borders! Join us!

BROOKLYN, May 21 — “Justice for Kyam Livingston — Killed in a Brooklyn Cell!” chanted the group that broke away from the picket line outside the Kings County district attorney’s office here. The protesters entered the building and walked up the stairs. A group of suited security officers stood at the top. Kyam’s mother, Anita, reached the very top of the stairs and faced the kkkop in charge.
He warned, “If you go in, you’ll all be arrested.”
“I have a petition here to give to the district attorney,” Anita said.
“If you go in, you’ll all be arrested,” repeated the security cop.  
Anita shouted, “Someone from the DA’s office was there in January at our speakout, and again in March. And you said you’d deal with my daughter’s case. But you didn’t do anything!” She waved a bag full of signed petitions demanding prosecution of the New York Police Department jailers who refused her daughter, a 37-year-old mother of two, needed medical help.
The head security officer said, “You can’t take them inside.”
Anita took one of the petitions out of the bag and showed it to him. She said, “This is all we have. I just want to hand in the petitions for my daughter — it’s my daughter!” The rest of the group stood on the staircase chanting, “We want justice!”
The cops were unmoved and shouted, “You can’t chant in here!”  
Finally Anita said, “You’re all full of s—t!  You make promises, you get into office, and you don’t care about ordinary people. You only care if a policeman is hurt or killed!”  
Ten minutes later, we left the building and rejoined the picket line outside at 350 Jay Street, which houses two courts as well as the district attorney’s office. A group of suits came out of the building, stared at our picket line, and talked among themselves.  The picket line formed for a final rally and continued to chant “We want Justice for Kyam Livingston — Killed in a Brooklyn Cell!” and “We’ll be back!”
Hundreds of “Justice for Kyam” leaflets were passed out prior to the attempt to storm the building and reach the DA’s office to give him the petitions. About a hundred Challenges were distributed to the crowds on the street. The demonstration sparked many political discussions on the street between the protesters and passersby. Members of Progressive Labor Party put forward their analysis that racism and capitalism were the root causes of police terror and getting away with murder. When two teachers on their way to their union office saw a teacher they knew at the demonstration, they said, “Keep it up. We’ll see you later!”
Before the demonstration, members of our committee spoke on Kyam’s case to the crowd on the street. We told how she had been arrested last July on a minor matter, became sick in a holding cell at Brooklyn central booking, and was callously denied medical care. After seven hours of intense suffering and begging for help with no response, she died in the cell. She was never accused of a crime, and no one has been held accountable for her death. The demonstration marked our tenth remembrance of Kyam’s death.
Afterward, PL’ers involved in the struggle evaluated the demonstration. Although the rally itself was smaller than usual because it was during regular working hours, it was nonetheless inspiring. We spoke to many students from the local technical college and Westinghouse High School about the case and the horrors of capitalism, namely racism, sexism, and imperialist war. We try to insure that PLP’s communist politics are not lost in the day-to-day details that are necessary in fighting reform battles. As revolutionary Soviet leader Lenin said about reform struggles, comrades should spend five minutes talking about heating the factory and 25 minutes talking about communism. We are struggling to follow that recipe for revolution.