The document below is the flyer that members of the Progressive Labor Party distributed at the striking teachers’ encampment in Mexico City and during the protest against energy reform. In total, we distributed 3,000 flyers. Most teachers welcomed them. Many are already familiar with CHALLENGE and some asked for the paper. There was a huge national teachers’ rally to demand the repeal of the approved reforms, including clashes with the police and arrests. A group of comrades once again distributed our literature. There will be more protests in coming weeks, and we will be there to show our support — and, more important, to advance our revolutionary communist perspective.

Global capitalism is in crisis and inter-imperialist rivalry is sharpening, particularly between the U.S. and China. Eventually the bosses’ economic competition will lead to armed confrontation and push the world toward a broader war. The center of this fight is over the control of oil and gas, the raw materials essential to the capitalists’ militaries and industries.
The struggle over energy reform reflects the inter-imperialist rivalry within Mexico. The accord forged by President Enrique Peña Nieto — along with other politicians in the PRI, PAN and PRD parties — is mainly an attempt to benefit the biggest oil companies in the U.S. and Britain: Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron.
Over the last three decades, U.S. Imperialists have massacred millions of workers in the Middle East in the name of oil profits.  In spite of their ruthless brutality, their control of the region grows weaker by the day. As inter-imperialist war looms closer, the U.S. will need more secure and accessible sources of energy. Mexico’s energy resources are a big part of the U.S. bosses’ plan.  They have already placed their reliable servants in key positions. For example, Emilio Lozoya Austin, the CEO of PEMEX (Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company), is closely tied to Condoleezza Rice, former Chevron director and former U.S. Secretary of State.      
The Mexican Secretary of the Treasury, Luis Videgaray Caso, is allied with Pedro Aspe, his predecessor under former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Aspe is now co-chairman of Evercore Partners, a leading U.S. investment bank. Through his ties to Alberto Bailleres, Mexico’s third richest man, he also is connected to the largest bank in the world, JP Morgan Chase. In turn, JP Morgan Chase is closely linked to ExxonMobil and Chevron (Bajo la Lupa, July & August 2013). As inter-imperialist rivalries sharpen, these relationships are critical. Some day the U.S. may be in a position to militarily occupy Mexico’s oil reserves.
Nationalism: A False Option
Energy reform will wreak havoc with the lives of workers, perhaps even more so than labor or educational reform. PEMEX currently contributes 40 percent of the federal budget. If the company is privatized, that number would drop sharply and lead to budget cuts to health, education, and social development.
The bosses are using tax hikes to try to compensate for their falling rate of profits. This affects all workers, but particularly public-sector employees working at the mercy of the Secretary of the Treasury.  Both the budget cuts and tax increases will deepen misery and inequality. Meanwhile, the super-rich keep getting tax breaks that amounted to 132 million pesos in 2008 alone. This year the Treasury forgave millions of pesos owed by Televisa.
Andres Manuel López Obrador and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas have called on workers to oppose oil privatization with the argument that natural resources “belong” to the nation. In reality, they are defending the interests of a competing group of capitalists. Their struggle revolves around the question of which set of bosses should own the oil. Even when oil is state property, it is never used to meet workers’ needs.    
Bosses like Carlos Slim (Carso Group), the Garza Sada family from Monterrey ( the ALFA conglomerate), the Del Valle brothers (Latina Drills and Mexichem), and Carlos Ruíz Sacristán (IEnova), among others, have business deals with PEMEX of about $3 million USD (El Financiero, August 2013). A similar amount will be required to build the gas pipeline Los Ramones, which is licensed to the Spanish company OHL (in alliance with British capital), IEnova. and the financial division of Protego de Aspe (Reporte Indigo, August 2013)
During the last five years, PEMEX had earnings of $550 million USD (Bajo la Lupa, August 2013). In the same period, the number of poor people in Mexico increased by 4.5 million (El Economista, July, 2013). Whether they nationalize or privatize, the bosses prosper as workers get poorer. Nationalism is a false option.
We Need Communism
As long as the capitalist system is in place, it doesn’t matter which group of millionaires controls the oil wealth. Under capitalism workers get only crumbs. Assets are concentrated in the hands of the greedy, predatory minority that holds political and economic power.
Only a communist society can be organized for the benefit of the working class. Only under communism can we use oil wealth to meet the needs of the population.
The struggle for a communist society must be led by the workers themselves, united and organized by the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party. We fight to overthrow the dictatorship of the bosses and establish the dictatorship of the working class. Join us!

Nine members and close friends of PLP participated in the week-long annual summer institute of the Marxist Literary Group/Institute on Culture and Society (MLG-ICS) at Ohio State University. Over many years, a number of us have attended this gathering — which draws together faculty, graduate students and artists in the humanities.  This year’s experience was the best ever.
The worldwide economic crisis has generated profound skepticism about the ability of capitalism to meet the needs of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the planet.  While a decade ago it was difficult to utter the word “communism”— even among self-described Marxists! — the word is now on the lips of many.  Although the “New Communist Philosophers” — most notably Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jodi Dean, and Bruno Bosteels — hardly envision the same path to communism as PLP, the fact that leftist academics are vigorously discussing how to get past capitalism opens up significant possibilities for deeper political work.
Our presentations ranged over a wide array of topics.  We offered critical commentaries on the representations of race, class, gender and nation in popular movies and TV shows.
We argued that widely accepted anticommunist versions of Soviet history are false. We examined the financially-saturated language in which sexual and romantic relations are formulated in the mass media.  We urged a critical reexamination of the unscientific terms in which the connections between capitalism and nuclear power are widely construed.  We proposed friendly but sharp critiques of the shortcomings of various New Communist Philosophers, particularly in connection with the need for antiracism and internationalism.  No one could fault PL members for being focused on a narrow agenda!
In the sessions where papers were given, we engaged in sharp but friendly commentary and critique of the ways in which Marxist theory was being applied to literature, philosophy and history. In conversations with fellow graduate students and faculty members, we discussed matters of common concern, such as turning academic labor into more contingent, temporary, unstable jobs without benefits. We discussed the dismal job market, as well as the need for a mass communist movement in which the fight against racism plays a central role.  Although we could have done a better job of distributing Challenge, we had better discussions this year than in the past about the role that PL is currently playing in the building of that mass communist movement.
The barriers to political work in this group remain formidable. Neo-Marxism and post-Marxism, while less fashionable than they were a decade ago, continue to divert potential radicals into hyper-theoretical discussions having little to do with revolutionary practice.  Anticommunism, while more on the defensive, continues to guide many assumptions about politics and history.
Too many presumably leftist academics remain unbothered by the nearly all-white participation in gatherings like the Summer Institute. We need to wage a continuing struggle for a more objective and dialectical understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the past century’s attempts to move past capitalism and build egalitarian societies.
Most of the PL members and friends who took part in this summer’s MLG-ICS meeting built new friendships, consolidated old ones, and deepened our ties with a number of academics who take seriously the need for communism.  We were also energized to enter the fall semester with a renewed commitment to campus organizing.

Barack Obama and the U.S. capitalists he serves care nothing about the working-class children murdered in Syria or anywhere else. The war in Syria is two years old and has already killed 100,000 people, with nothing but useless rhetoric from Obama along the way. Now he is ready to slaughter thousands more in a racist attack on yet another Middle Eastern country.
In its imperialist assault on Iraq, the U.S. ruling class had no qualms about dropping bombs with depleted uranium, which causes widespread birth defects and cancer in children. It is now using drones to terrorize thousands in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. The U.S. military used Agent Orange and napalm to spread death and destruction among millions in Vietnam. Later, in the 1980s, the U.S. supplied sarin, the lethal nerve agent that may have been used in Syria, to one-time ally Saddam Hussein. He used it to kill thousands of Kurds in Iraq and untold civilians in his war with Iran.
Profit, not morality, drives Obama to bomb Syria, which houses a Russian naval base. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, by allegedly gassing his own citizens, crossed Obama’s “redline.” But rather than safeguard civilians, Obama’s ultimatum is one of several tripwires meant to assure U.S. global dominance in weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Obama’s real targets are potential nuclear powers Iran and North Korea, allies of rising U.S. rivals China and Russia.
Assad, with arms supplied by Russia’s Putin, has scored a tactical coup in the civil war. Sapped by a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. rulers had hoped to avoid fighting in Syria as they prepare for broader, global combat [see CHALLENGE, 7/31/13]. But with their need to control world oil supplies, Syria is sucking them even deeper into the Middle East quagmire.
The hypocrisy of Obama & Co. knows no bounds. U.S. imperialists, both conservatives and liberals, have far surpassed Hitler’s death toll of innocents. Supposedly “outraged” at Assad’s alleged killing of 426 children, Secretary of State John Kerry seems to have forgotten the orders he gave as a naval officer in Vietnam in 1968, in an encounter with Vietnamese civilians: “Open fire; let’s take ‘em” (Boston Globe 6/16/03).
Obama’s war machine also ignores the “collateral damage” its drones indiscriminately inflict from Pakistan to the Philippines. Kerry’s predecessor, Madeleine Albright, declared it was “worth it” when President Bill Clinton’s sanctions wiped out half a million children in Iraq (“60 Minutes,” CBS, 6/12/96). Nor is poison gas “morally obscene” to the White House when Middle East crude oil supplies are at stake:
In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent. The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence (Foreign Policy magazine, 8/25/13).
As U.S. bosses chastise or condone others’ use of WMD’s, they keep the lion’s share for themselves. The Pentagon maintains the most destructive nuclear, chemical and biological capabilities on earth. U.S.-sponsored arms “reduction,” “non-proliferation” and “elimination” treaties invariably seek to maintain a U.S. advantage.
When Britain, “the staunchest U.S. ally,” opted out of the Syria strike plan, and Obama was forced to seek Congressional approval, the disarray of U.S. imperialism was exposed for all to see. While every member of Britain’s Parliament and the U.S. Congress advances capitalist interests, they also reflect the rulers’ divisions. Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron represent Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and the big banks behind them. But the UK Labor Party, which torpedoed a resolution to shell Syria, is allied with Lakshmi Mittal, the billionaire owner of Arcelor Steel and the party’s biggest donor. Since Mittal does huge business with Iran, Labor urges “engagement” with Teheran rather than the bombardment of Syria, an Iranian satellite.
In any case, the effectiveness of Obama’s proposed air-war foray seems doubtful. If Assad survives to maintain his rule, it will embolden Iran and North Korea and their backers in Moscow and Beijing. If the strike somehow weakens Assad, then what? Will anti-U.S. al Qaeda militants gain the upper hand among the Assad opposition? Or will the U.S., already stretched thin by its failed adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, escalate the war by using ground troops to occupy Syrian soil?
Much more than Syria lies at stake here. Saudi Arabia, with its unsurpassed oil reserves, remains the lynchpin of the Middle East crusade U.S. rulers launched in World War II, when President Franklin Roosevelt vowed to defend the Saudis against any attack. Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden represented a non-royal faction of Saudi capitalists who were excluded from the nation’s oil wealth — and hell-bent on seizing it. Meanwhile, ascending imperialist China — which must have oil in quantities only the Middle East can furnish — would benefit from any anti-U.S. regime in the region. This explains Obama’s  refusal to aid Islamist anti-military forces in Egypt.
The only useful action against U.S. imperialism can come from the international working class, the class that fights and dies in the bosses’ wars. According to U.S. polls, a majority disapproves of Obama’s Syria scheme, despite nationalist appeals by Obama and the ruling-class media to “support America.” In fact, the interests of the U.S. capitalist class and the U.S. working class are diametrically opposed. Class struggle is a collision of the exploiters and the exploited.
At the moment, the widespread working-class disgust with U.S. rulers has yet to find organized political expression. This is the task of Progressive Labor Party. We must organize and influence demonstrations against the Obama war machine. From our base in mass organizations, we must expose capitalism’s attacks on the working class — including its wars, its racist cop-killers, its mass racist unemployment and poverty, from Bangladesh to Cairo, from Greece to Mexico to the U.S. Only the overthrow of capitalism, and the creation of a communist society run by and for the international working class, led by a mass revolutionary PLP, can free workers from the ravages of a profit-driven ruling class. Build PLP. Join us!

MEXICO CITY, September 2 — For the last two weeks, 80,000 Oaxaca teachers from the CNTE (Coordinator of Education Workers) Local 22 have been on an indefinite strike against the education reform proposed by the bosses’ government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. They have organized massive blockades of government buildings, the stock exchange, TV stations and the Mexico City airport.
Teachers from the states of Michoacan, Guerrero and the Federal District have joined these protests. Members of Progressive Labor Party have participated as well, distributing more than 5,000 flyers advancing our communist politics. We’re planning a series of talks on dialectics with a group of teachers who are participating in the struggle.
At one distribution, a teacher told us, “I already have that flyer, I kept it to make copies and pass around.” Two other teachers asked us to spread the struggle, and we said we were doing just that. We explained that this fight is an inspiration to the working class worldwide. Both teachers raised their fists in agreement and comradeship.
Bosses’ Atrocities Spark Workers’ Rebellion
Class struggle is the motor of history. The capitalists’ greed is limitless. Their system’s inequities and atrocities have sparked workers’ rebellions around the world.
In Mexico, the bosses have used Pena Nieto and other stooges in the congress to pass the secondary law of education that regulates “competency exams” for teachers. The hiring and firing power then is taken away from the unions and schools. Their future plan is to eliminate the state-owned companies for oil, electricity and water, the only industries left to privatize. The bosses divide up their loot from our natural resources. “Labor reform,” meanwhile, creates a legal framework for the capitalists to super-exploit the working class.
By using standardized tests, without concern for the cultural social and economic differences of certain regions, indigenous and marginalized communities will be at a disadvantage and as a result will be evaluated in a racist manner. In Mexico, the capitalists have concentrated their educational investments in the country’s most industrialized northern regions, which generate profits. The southern regions are left behind. These reforms will be used to foster an increase in racist inequality.
In the capitalist jungle, only the “most capable” survive (meaning those who get “better” evaluations) — those who follow the system’s ideology. That’s fascism. The bosses need a working class that’s easy to control, is productive but with a minimum of technical training. The reforms, through evaluations, try to standardize our youth with a fascist and competitive ideology.
Teachers’ Struggle Fights Passivity
Police and military terror, a product of the so-called war on drugs, along with the alienating culture promoted by the bosses’ mass media, have induced passivity among large sections of the working class and in many trade unions. The militancy of the CNTE’s class-conscious teachers is therefore vital to class struggle.
 The debate over energy reform, now active among politicians in the electoral parties PRI, PAN and PRD, aims only to establish which group of bosses will control the energy wealth. PRI and PAN want to share oil profits with a sector of Mexico’s capitalist class and the U.S., European, and Chinese imperialists. The fake left PRD, led by Andres Manuel López Obrador and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, pretends that the profits will go mainly to Mexican bosses. Neither proposal has any benefits for workers. Only under a communist society, where the working class holds state power, will resources be distributed among those who produce all value through our labor.
Under capitalism, oil belongs to the “nation.” That bourgeois concept has divided workers for hundreds of years, in every corner of the world. But the working class has no nation!
Oil wealth inevitably winds up in the pockets of the big bosses even when considered “state property.” Over the last 12 years, with the government led by the right-wing PAN, oil earnings were the highest in history, with total profits of more than $70 billion. During Felipe Calderon’s recent six-year term, the number of millionaires in Mexico increased by 32 percent, while officially 53 million workers live in poverty.
In the criminal capitalist system, everything is a commodity; for the capitalists, everything is driven by profit. The bosses will never worry about workers’ well-being. We must not fall into the trap of fighting for one group of bosses’ politicians in their squabble over energy wealth.
Today we fight for our jobs, for public education, and for the freedom of political prisoners. But we are also fighting to destroy capitalism, the root of inequality, racism, sexism, imperialism and war. Our aim is a classless society, communism, led by a mass revolutionary Progressive Labor Party.