On September 23, 2013, the Dominican Republic Supreme Court issued a ruling that strips citizenship from over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian ancestry. It applies retroactively to anyone born after 1929 who does not have at least one parent of “Dominican blood.” Those affected can no longer get birth certificates, attend school or college, marry, travel, or obtain jobs legally.
This act has galvanized the anger of Dominican and Haitian immigrant groups around the U.S., in Haiti, and in the D.R. itself. Far from dividing them, many are standing together to protest this ruling. In the U.S., they see how similar racist, anti-immigrant laws have affected all of them. Many protesters blame Dominican political and judicial leaders for creating the climate that paved the way for this ruling. We in the Progressive Labor Party believe that all borders need to be smashed so that all workers around the world can unite as one class.
This type of institutional racism is not new to the Dominican ruling class. In 1912, the government passed laws restricting the number of black-skinned immigrants, but the bosses in the sugar industry completely ignored that restriction to maximize profits by using Haitians as cheap labor. The majority of these workers were brought in by the sugar mill bosses, and forced to live and work in sub-human conditions in the notorious “bateyes” around sugar cane plantations. The descendants of these workers are the direct targets of this most recent racist act.
In 1937, U.S. Marine-trained Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, then the bloody dictator of the D.R., ordered all Haitians along the border to be tracked down and executed. Many reasons have been given for the killings, the most convincing of which is that Haitian workers were organizing into trade unions alongside Dominicans. Tens of thousands were murdered and their bodies thrown into the Massacre River along the border.
Another U.S. puppet in D.R., Joaquin Balaguer (Trujillo’s right-hand man and the political brain behind him), published a book in 1983 titled “La Isla al Reves (The Island in Reverse)” in which he expressed deeply racist ideas about Haitians. Then, when Francisco Pena Gomez, leader of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) who was black, ran for president in 1996, Balaguer openly promoted the idea that Pena Gomez was an undercover Haitian spy who, once in power, had planned to turn D.R. over to Haiti.  
Balaguer was rekindling past enmities against Haitians. In 1822, the Haitian army — which had already defeated and driven out its French slave-masters on the western part of Hispaniola — invaded the D.R., which was called Spanish Haiti at the time. Although the subsequent 22-year Haitian occupation succeeded in ending slavery in the D.R., it also led to much hardship and animosity among Dominicans. The bosses were able to exploit those conditions into long-lasting anti-Haitian racism and Dominican nationalism.
So, why does the Dominican ruling class want this law now?
Because workers from Haiti make up more than 80% of the workforce in agriculture, especially on sugar plantations. There are also high concentrations in construction, tourism, and domestic services. They earn starvation wages and their collective labor has been a big factor in the overall economic upswing D.R. has enjoyed in recent years. But, following in the footsteps of their slave-master predecessors, the Dominican bosses are not satisfied with their racist profits. They insist on pushing for this law that will not only strip Dominicans of Haitian descent of their rights, but also deprive them and their families of vital social, health and educational services needed for their well-being and survival, and making their labor even cheaper.
Another reason that pushes the Dominican government to intensify a racist crisis is to help create a smokescreen for its attacks on the entire working class there. The Dominican Republic has some of the highest income disparity and unemployment rates in Latin America: Unemployment is officially at 14.4%, and the wealthiest 10% control 40% of the economy while the poorest half controls less than 20%.
Although the economy survived the 2010-12 global recession, and is one of the fastest growing economies in the region, it also has growing deficits. As a result, the International Monetary Fund has demanded more revenues, leading the government to pass a new tax law in 2012. As it always happens, the working class has to pay the bulk of the new taxes. However, workers and students throughout the country have been fighting back against the policy. On several occasions these actions have resulted in several deaths and injuries in confrontation with police.
The new law is so blatantly racist that many of those who have historically harmed Haiti are compelled to speak out. This includes the UN’s own Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. This is the same UN that is responsible for bringing the deadly cholera epidemic to Haiti, killing over 8,500 and sickening over 700,000.
The working class in the Dominican Republic and the rest of us across the globe must send a clear message to these governments. We must not tolerate the racist treatment of our sisters and brothers in Hispaniola. The border that divides the island of Hispaniola was made by the colonialists and their imperialist successors who continue to exploit all of us. We must reject the nationalism and racism that is being pushed to divide us — we must unite as one class, one fist. With communist revolution we can rid ourselves of this vicious profit system. Only then can we construct a healthy world and a safe future for all our children.

BROOKLYN, NY— In the past few months CHALLENGE has been covering the racist murder of Kyam Livingston, a 37-year-old worker and mother who died in a cell in Brooklyn Central Booking on July 21, 2013. She was ill and crying out in pain for over seven hours while her pleas, and the pleas for help from people in the cell with her, were ignored.  
Her family is demanding answers: the surveillance tapes of the cell, the names of the jailers who callously allowed her to die, the prosecution of those jailers, and a real and thorough investigation of conditions in Central Booking to change the culture of cruelty and indifference to the working class.
The next event in this campaign for justice will be a Community Speakout to air other stories of racist treatment and dehumanization under the “justice” system of U.S. capitalism. All are invited to attend and add to the event.
Community Speakout on Tuesday, January 21 from 6:00-9:00 PM
Flatbush Dutch Reform Church
890 Flatbush Avenue (at Church Avenue)

“We all hustle to survive.” That’s not just the reality of the millions of unemployed discarded by capitalism, it also the tagline for the new Golden Globe winner film American Hustle. It is the latest in a series of David O. Russell films about survival and self-reinvention — cornerstones of capitalism’s big “American Dream” lie. These themes speak to millions in the working class who struggle to survive and who hold on to the hope that one day they will be able to reinvent their lives to escape the daily grind of capitalism.
However, in this current period of economic crisis and imperialist competition, U.S. capitalism appears unable to offer the working class anything other than continued misery. Conditions for the working class are becoming visibly worse: mass deportations, mass unemployment, slashing of food stamps and unemployment benefits, prolonged war in the Middle East, and a growing National Security Agency (NSA) security state.
It is the job of capitalism’s Hollywood propaganda machine to keep the American Dream myth alive, by repackaging it as something that is obtainable even in a period of crisis. And American Hustle does just that.
The film, a comedy-crime drama set in the late 1970s, begins with the words: “Some of this actually happened.” It is a fictional account loosely based on a real FBI sting operation, “Abscam” (Arab Scam). In that operation, the FBI set up a fake Middle Eastern investment company and hired a con man to lure in white-collar criminals. The scam eventually attracted high-ranking politicians, including a U.S. Senator and several members of the House, who were convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for political services.
In the film’s interpretation of “Abscam,” con man Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), his mistress/accomplice Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) balance an odd love triangle with a half-baked scheme to bring down a few white-collar criminals.
Throughout the film everyone is hustling to get their piece of the pie. Rosenfeld and Prosser attempt to live the American Dream by selling forged paintings and fake loans. The FBI catches them. They eventually cut a deal, offering to help bring down a few criminals in exchange for their freedom. DiMaso’s dream to move up in the FBI and have people work for him pushes him to go after bigger fish, including Congress and the mob. In the end, the politicians go to jail and Rosenfeld and Prosser, after conning the FBI, live happily ever after. They put their hustling days behind them in order to run their own legitimate art business. The takeaway message: the American Dream is possible, even in the midst of crisis, you just have to hustle your way to the top.
The reviews in the mainstream press praise the acting but have little to say about the politics raised in the film. To its credit, the film calls attention to an episode of political corruption in U.S. history few know anything about. But while the director has stated that he is more interested in telling a story about his characters than he is about telling history, his account of the 1970s (and what he leaves out) must be taken seriously.
The capitalist crisis of today had its origins in the crises of the1970s caused by the rise of U.S. imperialist rivals in Japan and Germany, stagflation (a condition of slow economic growth, high unemployment, and rise in prices), and the failure of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam. The Watergate scandal, Nixon’s resignation and the subsequent exposés by Sen. Church’s Senate committee revealing illegal activities of the FBI, CIA and NSA were part of the bosses’ attempts to blame the crises of that period on individuals rather than on capitalism itself.
“Abscam” occurred in the wake of these crises, at a time when public confidence in capitalism and the U.S. government was at an all-time low. At the same time, however, the international communist movement and the militant labor and civil rights struggles it had inspired were also collapsing because of their reliance on liberal reforms and bourgeois elections. The possibility of revolution was being abandoned and a new era of cynicism and individualism began to set in.
The “Abscam” operation was an attempt by the FBI to restore public confidence in both the FBI and in the larger U.S. political system. By focusing on “bad-apple” politicians, the FBI hoped to repair the damage to its image caused by the Church committee hearings and to show that the political system was ultimately sound. And while the bosses have been successful in winning many in the working class to once again believe in capitalist “democracy” and the American Dream, the ongoing crisis of capitalism has again shaken the faith of many workers.
The film uses the “Abscam” story of the past to teach us how to view the present. In the same way the FBI attempted to restore faith in the U.S. political system by exposing some of its problems, American Hustle attempts to rebuild faith in the American Dream by revealing its flaws. The film taps into the ideology of cynicism that has been brewing since the 1970s and seems to proclaim, “Yeah, the American Dream is a bunch of bullshit. It’s one big hustle. It’s a corrupt game of survival of the fittest. So what — maybe you can survive, too.”
Lacking any visible alternative to capitalism, workers are invited to “hustle” in pursuit of this new American Dream — to do whatever it takes to get theirs. Today the old American Dream’s myth that hard work brings success is joined with a hustle mentality sold to a generation of youth through rap. The bosses promote drug dealers turned rappers like Jay-Z who hustled to survive the ghetto but climbed his way to being a billionaire boss.
The message to our youth: Under capitalism, everyone hustles and only the strong survive. Working class youth are taught to accept that capitalism is a game of survival of the fittest, and that those on the bottom are either weak or lazy. This hustle mentality erases working-class consciousness and teaches workers to strive to be a boss. It hides the fact that the working class, united and armed with communist ideas, is the only class that has the power to end the misery of capitalism.
Only communist ideas that promote collectivity over individualism and faith in the working class over cynicism can combat the death spiral of capitalist ideas. We must redouble our efforts in this period to combat the bosses’ lies and hold up the torch of communism under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party to fight for a world where workers don’t have to hustle to survive, and where the American nightmare of capitalism becomes a story of the past.

As the rivalry between the U.S. and Russia is seemingly moving closer to open conflict, Ukraine’s strategic importance is re-emerging. In mid-December, Russian President Vladimir Putin successfully pressured cash-strapped Ukraine into remaining in Russia’s orbit and canceling its planned alliances with the U.S.-leaning European Union (EU) and the U.S.-run International Monetary Fund (IMF). Putin bought off Ukraine by pledging a $15 billion loan and a 33 percent cut in gas prices. In return, Moscow gets control of Ukraine’s energy pipeline network. But the stakes here run beyond economics. They have everything to do with military preparations for future wars.
On December 17, Stratfor, an intelligence analysis outfit that advises Exxon and other major corporations, warned its capitalist readers:

Ukraine is as important to Russian national security as Scotland is to England or Texas is to the United States. In the hands of an enemy, these places would pose an existential threat to all three countries….Neither Scotland nor Texas is going anywhere. Nor is Ukraine, if Russia has anything to do with it….Ukraine is Russia’s soft underbelly….Under the influence or control of a Western power, Russia’s (and Belarus’) southern flank is wide open…running from the Polish border east almost to Volgograd [originally Stalingrad] then south to the Sea of Azov,… [over] 1,000 miles, more than 700 of which lie along Russia proper….

For Russia, Ukraine is a matter of fundamental national security. For a Western power, Ukraine is of value only if that power is planning to engage and defeat Russia, as the Germans tried to do in World War II.
Putin Stops NATO Expansion Dead
Putin didn’t merely frustrate the EU and the IMF; he stopped the expansion of Pentagon-led NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in its tracks. Founded in 1949, four years after the end of World War II, NATO’s main mission was to prepare for a European war against the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). After the Soviet Union imploded, NATO expanded into a worldwide military operation across three continents. It invaded Eastern Europe (Kosovo), North Africa (Libya), Iraq and Afghanistan in order to maintain its dominance among imperialist rivals for strategic and economic goals.
In the 1990s, with the phony-communist Soviet empire a thing of the past, opportunistic U.S. rulers successfully enlisted 12 of Moscow’s ex-satellites into NATO. But Ukraine is a special case because it commands Russia’s warm-water Black Sea naval ports. These outlets do not freeze over in winter, a crucial advantage in wartime. Putin and the Russian capitalists he represents cannot permit Ukraine to join the military alliance led by the U.S., their bitter imperialist rival.
Putin’s Ukraine pushback signals a hardening Russian position that was anticipated by the more foresighted U.S. planners. In the late 1940s, diplomat George Kennan formulated the U.S. policy of “containment” of the USSR, the central Cold War strategy followed by U.S. presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Containment was the ideological basis for U.S. atrocities in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. At the same time, it allowed U.S. bosses to avoid a direct confrontation with the mighty Soviet forces that crushed the Nazis in World War II. Kennan warned that moving beyond containment and NATOizing the old Soviet bloc was a “tragic mistake.... the Russians will gradually react quite adversely” (New York Times, 5/2/98). He also pinpointed the critical failure of U.S. capitalists. While relying more and more on regional military actions, they have yet to mobilize the nation for global war. “We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries,” Kennan wrote, “even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.”
U.S. bosses by and large ignored Kennan. They thought they had Ukraine wrapped up after the Orange Revolution of 2004, one of the so-called “color revolutions” in former republics within the old USSR. Financed largely by various foundations controlled by liberal billionaire George Soros, the Orange Revolution brought pro-NATO Yulia Tymoshenko to power in a contested election.
Revolution = Working-Class Seizure of State Power
In reality, these “revolutions” had no revolutionary content. Revolution occurs only when the working class violently overthrows the ruling class, smashes the rulers’ state power, and establishes new class rule and its own state power. Neither capitalist-run elections nor an “Arab spring” can make a revolution. Only workers, led by a mass communist party, can accomplish that.
In 2008, Russian rulers dealt with the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia by invading its Black Sea neighbor. But Putin’s real target was Ukraine. On August 28, 2008, Agence France Press quoted the RAND Corporation’s F. Stephen Larrabee:

Georgia is a sideshow. What the Russians are really concerned about is Ukraine. Georgia’s entry into NATO wouldn’t have major strategic consequences for Russia. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a very different matter. If Ukraine joins NATO, Russia would not only be forced to remove its ships based in Crimea; it also would see dashed its hopes of founding a…union with Ukraine and Belarus. What’s more, Russian and Ukrainian defense industries are closely linked.

Tymoshenko is now serving a seven-year jail sentence on trumped-up charges of abuse of power and embezzlement. Her country, meanwhile, has become even more pivotal to ruling-class strategists with an eye to a potential Word War III. U.S. capitalists constitute the “Western power planning to defeat Russia” as Stratfor put it. Their top policy-shaping think tank is the Council on Foreign Relations, which is dominated by ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. The Council’s current Foreign Policy web page highlights two Kennan essays from 1939 and 1942: “Preparing Civilian America for War” and “Policy and Strategy in the War in Russia.”
Ukraine’s Workers Suffer Miseries of Capitalism
What the rulers omit from the equation is the working class in Ukraine and in all the other places victimized by the imperialists. Ukraine’s workers are voicing intense dissatisfaction with the miseries of capitalism. The country’s death rate exceeds its birth rate; Ukraine’s population has dropped from a peak of 52.2 million in 1993 to 45.5 million today.
While official unemployment has recently fluctuated between 8 and 9.5 percent, the actual jobless figure is closer to 25 percent. (Ukrainian employers do not report laid-off workers.) Often workers go unpaid for several months before being laid off. Wages are so low that a high percentage of families need at least two wage-earners to survive. The lack of job opportunities has driven 4.5 million Ukrainians — 10 percent of the population — to work abroad.
These conditions have fueled the workers’ mass protests since November 21, when the regime of Moscow-backed President Victor Yanukovich suspended talks on an “Association Agreement” with the European Union. The exploitation of Ukrainian workers reflects the worldwide fight for profits among the major imperialist powers. In Ukraine it pits Russian billionaires (known as oligarchs) against their European counterparts. U.S. rulers are backing the European Union; Yanukovich represents the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs. The western Ukraine in particular is a hotbed of anti-communism, and much media publicity was given to the tearing down of a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the capital, Kiev.
Rinat Akhmetov, the richest Ukrainian oligarch, owns a $250 million mansion in London and has taken much of his $15 billion fortune out of Ukraine. He’s a pro-Russian supporter of Yanukovich but appears to be hedging his bets. Recently he seemed to favor the protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square.
A Boss Is A Boss Is A Boss
An alliance with the EU is widely popular among Ukrainian workers, in part because Europe’s fake-democratic veneer seems more appealing than Putin’s more open fascism. The EU fosters a lot of talk about civil society, transparency and the rule of law. Much of this blabber comes from the same oligarchs who made their obscene fortunes by trampling over both society and the law. There is little or nothing in the Association Agreement that would benefit workers. In fact, both the EU and the IMF (following the Greek example) are demanding strict austerity measures in Ukraine, from tax increases to budget cuts.
All of Ukraine’s workers — east or west, Ukrainian- or Russian-speaking, industrial or agricultural — need communism. They don’t need more exploitation by the Putin-led capitalists or the anti-Putin gang. They need the Progressive Labor Party.
PLP Only Hope for World’s Workers
The struggle for communism is a long and hard one, but it’s the only solution. As inter-imperialist rivalry leads inevitably toward a broader and bloodier war, and the rulers attack wages and living conditions around the globe, the international growth of the Progressive Labor Party is the only hope for the workers of the world. We need to expand PLP to Ukraine so communist ideas can begin to take root there.
Most of all, we must rebuild the worldwide communist movement. In the past it was a beacon for the working class. It helped restrain capitalism’s murderous exploitation. It defeated fascism in World War II. With its retreat, the world’s capitalists have a freer hand to maim and murder for their profits. A rebuilt communist movement can take the next step and destroy capitalism forever. Spread communism and build PLP everywhere!