China is putting military muscle behind president Xi Jinpeng’s call for “a new type of great power relationship.”  World domination is, of course, the ultimate goal for all imperialist  powers. What is China’s strategic intent? That’s what U.S. intelligence analysts are considering in regard to China’s recent aggressive military moves in East Asia.  
Of course, pro-China commentators are asking the same question about U.S. (and Japanese) strategy. Spurred by inter-imperialist rivalry on a global scale, the arms race and military confrontations between China and the U.S. have reached a new level of intensity in the Western Pacific.
A dramatic new stage began Nov. 23 when China declared a new Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea. The declaration demands that anyone flying into the zone notify Chinese authorities and follow instructions from China’s air-traffic controllers. That’s a challenge to the U.S., Japan and South Korea because it claims control over an area that not only is very close to their territory but also includes an area that surveys indicate is rich in resources.
The situation quickly heated up. On the day of the announcement China flew a “maritime patrol,” including fighter escorts and an airborne warning and control-type plane within the ADIZ. In response, Japanese “self-defense” aircraft intercepted the Chinese aircraft. The U.S. quickly denounced China’s move and on Nov. 26 flew B-52s over the area without complying with China’s demands. On Dec. 15, South Korea announced an expanded air defense zone that overlaps China’s, and stated it would fly over the area to defy the Chinese.
Another ominous confrontation occurred a few days later in the South China Sea near Hainan, a Chinese island province in the Tonkin Gulf. The USS Cowpens, a guided missile cruiser, narrowly missed colliding with an escort ship operating with the Liaoning, China’s only aircraft carrier. China objects to U.S. surveillance operations in what it considers its exclusive economic zone, while the U.S. insists the area is part of international waters and that all nations have the right to be there. It is only a matter of time before a deadly incident occurs.
It is clear that the growth of China’s economy and power is pushing other imperialists into preparations for confrontation, if not war. These moves include lining up new support, mainly from Japan, the Philippines and South Korea.
The U.S. has long pressed Japan to expand its already formidable military strength, despite Article 9 of Japan’s constitution that bans it from maintaining military forces. The Japanese “Self-Defense Forces” have been growing since the 1980s, when the U.S. and Japan were confronting the Soviet Union, China and North Korea.
Led by far-right prime minister Shinzo Abe, the Japanese cabinet, on Dec. 17, approved a five-year buildup and $24 billion in military spending, a five percent increase over the previous five. (All understate real spending. U.S. annual “defense” spending is well over $700 billion and China’s is probably well over $100 billion.) The budget came with a national security strategy stating that Japan will seek more “proactive” roles for its Self-Defense Forces abroad and loosen guidelines on arms exports. It also emphasized a strong Japan-U.S. security alliance.  
Just the day before, U.S. Secretary of State Kerry was in Vietnam offering assistance with Vietnam’s disputed maritime borders with China in exchange for more trade and security cooperation. Earlier in the year, U.S. and Philippines agreed to more U.S. military presence in the Philippines, including pre-positioning of equipment. The U.S. promised to help the Philippines defend its territorial waters in any conflict with China.
On a broader diplomatic front, on Dec. 14, Abe and leaders of the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) agreed at a Tokyo summit on the need for “freedom of the high seas and skies.” This was a response to diplomatic gains by China at other regional conferences, where it used lucrative investment projects to win support from Cambodia and other Asian nations.
What are the chances of large-scale military engagements in the short run? The Chinese strategy is a protracted one, and although China is angry about being encircled by the U.S., it realizes it has much to lose in military engagements with a Japan backed by the U.S. The Pentagon is refocusing on Asia with moves that include reinforcing bases in Guam, continuing to station thousands of troops in Japan and Korea, and positioning smaller units of marines and soldiers in Australia and the Philippines.  On Dec 14, the U.S. sent a fleet of drone aircraft to a Japanese air base.
China has mounted a “charm offensive” accompanied by lots of cash aimed at most countries in Asia. It seems to be adopting a divide-and-conquer strategy toward Japan and the Philippines, which are already in the U.S. camp. Over time it might be able to detach these countries from alliances with the U.S. Therefore it probably sees nothing to lose in ratcheting up pressure on those countries. This type of strategy has traditionally been called “inflicting death by a thousand cuts.” Along with steadily expanding economic ties, this approach seems to be paying off in regard to Taiwan, which many CIA officials concede will be in China’s camp in the foreseeable future.
No workers in any of the countries involved have anything to gain by supporting the imperialist aims of their national bosses. The bourgeois political leaders of all large countries only represent the interests of the giant banks and corporations that exploit the working class. All they offer working people is ongoing poverty and military atrocities. Rather than accepting nationalistic propaganda issued by corrupt capitalists, workers must strive to build international ties for communist revolution. Progressive Labor Party is committed to this effort. Join PLP to smash imperialism.

As U.S. rulers and international capitalism glorify Nelson Mandela, they have a hidden agenda: to conceal his collaboration with the murderous profit system that controls South Africa and the world. Mandela allied himself with the biggest U.S. and British bosses. Under the cloak of black nationalism, he “empowered” black capitalists and helped create a tiny class of black billionaires. Along with some of the biggest international capitalists, these black bosses continue to exploit workers in South Africa and hold them in abject poverty.
Unemployment today in South Africa is 40 percent, higher than it was under apartheid, the system of legalized segregation that preceded Mandela’s rise to power. According to the United Nations, one of four persons tries to survive on less than $1.25 a day. Millions live in miserable shacks without clean water, electricity or sanitation. In many respects, the country’s working class is worse off now than under the apartheid regime of the 1980s.  
The international working class carried on a worldwide struggle against this fascist system. As a leader of the African National Congress and a member of the Communist Party of South Africa (which led the movement against apartheid), Mandela was part of a mass movement that waged armed struggle against a brutally racist state. He and others made great personal sacrifices to the cause; Mandela spent 27 years in prison, most of them at hard labor in a rock quarry. He became an international media symbol for the workers’ heroic, anti-racist fight.
By the time he got out of jail, however, Mandela was following the liberal politicians’ script and sided with the bosses. Soon after he became president in 1994, his phony call for “liberation” was exposed when he stopped workers from striking for higher wages, telling them it would “hurt foreign investment.” His legacy lives on in the ANC, whose desegregated police force massacred 36 striking black miners in 2012.
Mandela betrayed the class he pretended to serve. We have no reason to mourn or worship such a traitor. He gained his secular sainthood by delivering millions of militant workers into the hands of their capitalist oppressors. He helped his mine-owning masters misdirect the anti-apartheid struggle into supporting the profit system rather than destroying it. His ANC continues to back U.S. imperialists who are hell-bent on global war.
U.S. Rulers Backed South Africa’s Open Racists
Mandela never changed his stripes. Born into an aristocratic family of the Thembu tribe, his sympathies were always for the ruling class. His evolution from terrorist to capitalist servant, at least in the eyes of U.S. and allied British rulers, reflected a shift in the inter-imperialist rivalry as well as splits among South Africa’s bosses.
The nationalist Afrikaners chafed under imperialist British influence in South Africa. In 1948, with Britain still weakened by World War II, they seized political power in an election and established apartheid. During the Cold War, when launched by the U.S. against the Soviet Union in a worldwide battle for spheres of influence, Mandela rotted in prison as long as his ANC leaned toward the Soviet Union, their only source of weapons. For decades the U.S. stood firmly behind South Africa’s openly white-supremacist, Afrikaans-speaking regime despite worldwide opposition to apartheid. Both the U.S. and UK branded Mandela and the ANC as terrorists.
It wasn’t until the 1990, when the Soviet threat was receding, that U.S. and UK strategists pounced on the chance to manipulate Mandela and dump the Afrikaners.
Anti-Communist Secret Weapon
British-leaning Harry Oppenheimer, head of South Africa’s richest family and despised by the ruling Afrikaners, was Mandela’s biggest champion. For more than a century, black workers have perished by the thousands in the Oppenheimers’ Anglo-American gold, diamond and platinum mines. Oppenheim kept Mandela on ice for decades as his anti-communist, anti-Afrikaner trump card.
The website for the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory, founded by the Oppenheimers (along with David Rockefeller and Bill Clinton), fondly retraces the ANC’s anti-communist history. It quotes Mandela in a 1960 trial: “I strongly supported the resolution to expel the Communists from the ANC.” Then it says, “A small political party formed in 1960. A major sponsor was Harry Oppenheimer, then the Chairperson of Anglo-American Corporation.” This led to formation of the Progressive Federal Party, “the main opposition party in the white parliament.” Helen Suzman, the Progressive Federal party’s sole member of parliament, began meeting with the imprisoned Mandela in 1967.
Post-Soviet Turnabout
But because Mandela’s ANC remained pro-Soviet, Oppenheimer had to wait for the Kremlin’s collapse to play his trump. By 1985, the Soviet military had been defeated in Afghanistan. Its oil revenues tanked after President George H. W. Bush made a price-lowering deal with Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, U.S. bosses’ backing of Poland’s Solidarity Party and its anti-Soviet miners’ rebellion was sapping the political influence of Moscow’s bloc.
That was also the year that Chase Manhattan Bank, under board chairman David Rockefeller, dramatically stopped lending to the Afrikaners. In October 1985, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher informed South Africa President P.W. Botha of the coming turnabout. Mandela’s release, she told him, “would have more impact than almost any single action you could undertake.” As the New York Times wrote (12/8/13), “Once the Soviet bloc had disintegrated and China had gone capitalist, the last white rulers of South Africa could no longer pose as necessary allies on the right [U.S.] side of the Cold War. They knew the game was up.”
Mandela’s Phony Communism
A rare disparaging article, “Nelson Mandela, Communist,” by former Times executive editor Bill Keller, ranks among the paper’s best efforts at anti-communist disinformation. Keller accurately nails Mandela’s unprincipled opportunism: “He was at various times a black nationalist and a non-racialist, an opponent of armed struggle and an advocate of violence, a hothead and the calmest man in the room, a consumer of Marxist tracts and an admirer of Western democracy, a close partner of communists and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists.”
At the same time, however, Keller attributes the current misery of South African workers to Mandela’s ties with phony leftists, rather than his abject service to capitalists. The columnist says, “[Mandela’s] Communist affiliation...helps explain why South Africa has not made greater progress toward improving the lives of its large underclass.” But the writer’s real grievance with Mandela is rooted in his own family’s history; Keller’s father chaired Chevron in the 1980s and made millions off the apartheid regime. It’s true enough that the global outcry against Chevron and other apartheid business partners endangered their profits. But it’s also true that Mandela was a die-hard capitalist. After Harry Oppenheimer died in 2000, he eulogized his guardian angel: “His contribution to building partnership… [with] big business…can never be appreciated too much” ( Independent Online, 21 August 2000).
A broader war now looms between various capitalist coalitions, including China and Russia, versus the U.S. South Africa holds immense strategic importance for this coming conflict, both for its minerals and its location astride the Cape of Good Hope, a shipping chokepoint. Mandela’s last service to his U.S. and UK imperialist masters was his endorsement of the Oppenheimers’ Brenthurst Foundation, also funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Brenthurst urges all Africa to follow “the example of Australia” in how to deal with China. In other words: Sell China raw materials for now, but forge military alliances with the U.S. to prepare for a clash.
Lessons for Our Class
There is much to learn from the Mandela/South African experience:
   • To emancipate the international working class, we must never ally with one capitalist faction or another. Whichever side wins will exploit us all the more. Only by organizing and relying ourselves can workers destroy capitalism.
   • Voting in capitalist elections can only produce more capitalism. In South Africa it produced a small class of black billionaires who have joined forces with their white counterparts.
   • Non-violence protects the violence perpetrated by the bosses. When the black Marikana miners struck the mining billionaires in 2012, the “non-violent” ANC government called out the cops and slaughtered 36 strikers. Whenever the bosses see their profits threatened by an organized working class, they do not hesitate to use their state power. What is it but racist violence when South Africa’s black and white rulers subject workers to slave-like conditions? What is it but racist violence when these bosses cause countless deaths through poverty, lack of health care, malnutrition and massive unemployment?
   • Finally, what does “liberation” entail? Masses of workers and youth in South Africa aspired first to national liberation and then, later, to communism.  (Or socialism, as they saw it.) They were betrayed because this two-stage theory enabled the anti-apartheid capitalists to maintain the profit system and continue to exploit the working class. This nationalist strategy was a great weakness of the old communist movement in the Soviet Union and China. South Africa’s Communist Party (SACP) followed the same political line. Equally damaging, the SACP submerged its politics into the mass reformist, anti-apartheid movement that pledged to “normalize” capitalism. By allying with “progressive capitalists,” the workers only got more capitalism. The biggest winners of the smashing of apartheid were U.S. and British bosses.
Liberation for the working class means to be free from the wage system that creates profits for bosses and misery for workers. The heroism of communist leaders like Joe Slovo and of thousands of youth in the 1976 Soweto Uprising, when over 700 were slaughtered, cannot be questioned. But their movement was undermined and effectively destroyed from within because they followed the wrong politics.
When Mandela and the ANC took power and were unanimously praised as “liberators” of the working masses by every pseudo-left group in the world, as well as by all the liberal capitalists, only the Progressive Labor Party exposed the fallacy of uniting with “progressive” capitalists. PLP was denounced by every one of these forces. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Mass poverty and racist brutality continues to afflict South Africa. Billionaires — black and white — still profit by exploiting workers. The lesson of South Africa is clear: Nationalism spells death for the working class.
While mass anti-racist struggle can squeeze and disrupt the ruling capitalist class, there is no liberation for workers while capitalism flourishes. We cannot follow the Mandela path of exchanging one group of exploiters for another. As the celebrations of Mandela’s capitalist legacy flood the world, we must bring our communist message to the international working class.
The real lesson of the fight against apartheid is: Join and build the PLP!

WASHINGTON, DC, December 9 — As communists, we must be involved in all aspects of the class struggle — on the job or in the community — always sharply struggling against the bosses’ tool of racism and advancing our vision of a future communist society run by the international working class. By sharpening the struggle against the bosses who oppress us, we hope to demonstrate the necessity of the longer-term struggle to permanently secure a better life for us and our children.
Recently an opportunity to do this took place here at a meeting of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 at its union hall. The meeting was called by the union to develop a plan to fight the privatization of the public transit system here. The union leadership had not developed a serious plan, so I was able to get the members to discuss a report written by several rank-and-filers, including a PL’er.
We showed how privatization is part of a broader racist attack on Metro workers and the riding public. Mass transit is growing in the Washington region, but most of that growth involves private contractors who pay workers low wages and offer few benefits. This puts downward pressure on the wages and benefits of the public transit workers.
To facilitate this attack, the Metro management has expanded its criminal background checks of workers. It hopes to portray us workers as criminals. Rising fares are blamed on “greedy” Metro workers who supposedly show no consideration for the riding public — another lie.
The report emphasized how Metro uses racism to divide transit workers from the riding public.
This analysis enabled us to propose a strategy for fighting privatization. The bosses plan a fare increase in July. We need to join with the riding public to oppose it. The local business community and the federal government who profit from the system should be forced to pay more of the operational expenses. Instead, they try to shift costs onto the backs of the riding public. We agreed to plan a major rally in March to oppose any fare increase.
Unity must be built by Metro workers with their brothers and sisters who work for the private contractors so we can fight together for one wage and benefit package for all transit workers in the region. Eliminating the financial incentive to privatize will help stop the process.  
The power to accomplish these goals comes from our ability to shut the transit system down. The unity of all transit workers and the riding public in support of a transit strike is a force the bosses cannot ignore.  
After the report and strategy discussion, several rank-and-file workers indicated their support for the class-struggle approach it advocated. Most of these supporters are regular CHALLENGE readers. The union leadership called for “further investigation” before we decide on our strategy.  Given the support for class struggle at the meeting, the conservative union leaders were unwilling to even present their losing strategy of lobbying the politicians and preparing for the April primary elections in DC.
The plan is to discuss our strategy with more workers and win them to come to the January meeting and to build this movement. Even more importantly, several of our CHALLENGE reader-supporters will be brought into PLP study groups. With more intense work, the Party group at Metro will grow and help lead the long struggle for revolution and communism.

NEW YORK CITY, December 4 — A forum organized by professors and grad students called “The War Here & Abroad: CUNY and U.S. Empire” drew a packed audience of 60 in a room meant for 40 today, a sign that the fight against CUNY’s complicity with the imperialist war machine is on many people’s minds.  There were no communist panelists but many key points were raised and debated.  PLP’s ideas were summarized in a flyer.
Grad student/adjuncts, undergrads and some senior professors united in the desire to research CUNY’s involvement in “defense” research, to oppose any more ROTC chapters, and to challenge the hiring of war-criminal generals like David Petraeus.  Teachers asked how they could teach Arabic language or International Relations classes from an anti-imperialist point of view; how they could reach students who are drawn to security-state or police jobs out of economic need; and how organizers can reach beyond the mostly left-wing folks already active. One young student challenged a famous Marxist professor to dig deeper into his Marxism and expose the main contradiction underlying the capitalist drive to war — social production vs. private expropriation — and not simply claim that a lot of capitalists profit from war (a secondary factor).  
PLP’s stress on inter-imperialist rivalry as the main manifestation of that principal contradiction in capitalism was our flier’s main point. We will have to fight for this perspective, which seems to come up rarely in discussion. Many are limited in opposition to unipolar U.S. imperialism as the only focus of anti-imperialist struggle.  But imperialism is now multipolar (as it has always been, in fact). All imperialisms are our deadly enemy, and international proletarian solidarity our strength and our hope.  
There is great potential to widen and deepen this struggle, but as two of the panelists said we have to link it to other workers’ struggles, especially to the social movements in other lands which imperialist armies are designed to crush.  One called New York City’s stop-and-frisk “counterinsurgency before the insurgency,” to underline our common fate facing such armies overseas and militarized police here. “War IS Terror” was the striking slogan of the forum.  How can we dig deeper and show how capital is terror, how capitalism drives war? PLP study groups and expanded CHALLENGE sales are crucially needed in this moment of honest searching and political desire.