Millions of public sector workers went on a two-day general strike to protest the government’s increase in fuel prices and opening markets to foreign investment in aviation and insurance. Workers say this will lead to layoffs and more price hikes. Workers are threatening further and longer walkouts if their demands are not heeded. Taxi and rickshaw drivers — victimized by police terror — are warning they’ll strike indefinitely as of March 1.
These militant workers, like the bus workers in NYC, are responding to capitalism’s attempt to put their economic crisis on workers’ backs. Once communist ideas and a party develop a base among these workers, their militancy can be transformed into a revolution that will dump the profit system and promote workers’ power.

The U.S. capitalist state has a long history of a “war on terror” against the working class and any dissenters, going as far back as 1798 in President George Washington’s second term. That year four bills known as the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed to quell anyone favoring the French Revolution. Any “alien” who was a “danger to peace and safety or subject to a foreign power” are subjected to imprisonment. Newspapers were shut down and their editors arrested for publishing “any false, scandalous or malicious writing.”
Two hundred and fifty years of black slavery were enforced by the government, North and South. The Fugitive Slave Act sent slaves who escaped to the North from Southern plantations back to slavery. Post-Civil War conditions were hardly better for ex-slaves who were terrorized by racist Ku Klux Klan vigilantes, segregated and denied basic rights by Southern state governments for another 100 years.
From the 18th century on, the U.S. military enacted genocidal murder on millions of indigenous people of the U.S., driving them off their lands and restricting them to concentration camp-like reservations, which continue today.
In 1886, Chicago cops killed protesters demonstrating for the 8-hour work day — following a general strike — and later hung four of its leaders. It was out of this strike that May Day was born, which PLP has been celebrating for the past 42 years.
From 1918 to 1921, Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer launched an anti-communist crusade, carried out by incoming FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Amid a wave of post-World War I strikes, communists were blamed for all social ills. Without warrants, Palmer thugs raided and smashed union offices and the headquarters of communist and socialist organizations. As many as 10,000 were arrested. In December, 1919, 249 resident aliens were seized and put on a ship deporting them to the Soviet Union (then two years old). The crusade’s hysteria was exemplified by the imprisonment of a Connecticut clothing salesman for saying he thought “Lenin was smart.”
Red-led Auto, Steel Workers Beat Back Bosses’ Attacks
Fifteen years later, vigilantes organized by General Motors attempted to smash the then growing communist-led auto sit-down strikes. The National Guard was ordered out to surround the plants in an attempt to starve out the workers. But 40,000 workers from four states descended on Flint, Michigan, surrounding GM’s struck plants and forced the company to recognize the United Auto Workers Union and agree to a 40-hour week.
May 30, 1937, saw the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre, when police shot at a crowd of 1,500 strikers marching peacefully on the company’s South Chicago plant. Ten workers were killed, shot in the back, and 90 others wounded. The workers eventually won union recognition.
In June, 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act — commonly known as the Smith Act — which made it a crime to belong to an organization that advocated overthrow of the U.S. government. Over 200 members of the Communist Party were indicted under its provisions and its entire leadership was convicted and jailed for from five to eight years.
A Page from Hitler’s Book: Concentration Camps
In 1941, the Roosevelt Administration seized hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps for the entire four years of World War II as “suspected spies.” They lost their homes, farms, and small businesses.
A decade later Congress passed the anti-communist Internal Security Act of 1950, the McCarran Act, mandating the fingerprinting and registration of all “subversives” in the U.S. and authorizing concentration camps “for emergency situations.” Six were constructed across the country.
That same year Congress enacted the Subversive Activities Control and Emergency Detention Acts which required “communist organizations” to register with the U.S. Attorney General. It allowed detention of  “dangerous, disloyal or subversive persons during wartime or in an “internal security emergency.” Such citizens could be barred from entering or leaving the country. The bill was used to revoke Paul Robeson’s (pro-communist artist) passport, preventing him from traveling outside the U.S. to expose its racist apartheid system.
During this period, Congress also passed two anti-communist, anti-labor laws. The Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Laws barred communists from holding union office even if elected by the rank and file. They instituted injunction clauses to prevent workers from striking upon contract expirations. They also made it more difficult to organize non-union shops and proved a bonanza for the bosses.
Throughout this era, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) operated an all-out anti-communist witch-hunt, going from city to city to subpoena leftists and communists.
When reds were asked if they were members of the Communist Party and when the latter refused to answer, citing the 5th Amendment “protection” against self-incrimination, this led to firing as well as jailing for “contempt of Congress.” But here is where HUAC met its match with PL and ultimately its demise.
PL’ers Turn the Tables
on the Anti-Communist
Witch-hunters
After members of the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM, forerunner of the Progressive Labor Party) had broken the government ban on travel to Cuba, in 1963 they were called before HUAC in Washington, DC, and asked the big question. They not only did not hide behind the 5th Amendment but shot back that they “were proud to be communists.” HUAC was dumfounded. CP members had never replied in this fashion. PL’ers turned the hearings into a political attack on HUAC, exposing the Kennedy Administration’s imperialist invasion of Vietnam. Pictures depicting this counter-attack were flashed across the front pages of newspapers across the country.
After the 1964 Harlem Rebellion, a New York City Grand Jury was convened to try to prove that PLM had “incited a riot.” PL’ers refused to cooperate with the rich man’s Jury while mass pickets lined the streets outside the hearing rooms. Several PL members were cited for contempt for their non-cooperation and sentenced to continuous 30-day jail terms to force them to cooperate. They were held in the notorious Greenwhich Women’s House of Detention where they exposed the horrific conditions inside that jail while mass picket lines ringed the prison. The exposé led to the institution’s closing.
In 1964, HUAC came to Buffalo, where PL had a base among steel, auto and other basic industrial workers, as well as in the colleges, the Committee tried to “expose” them in order to get them fired. But PL turned the tables on HUAC. In the hearings, members exposed them as fascists while outside PL organized mass demonstrations on the streets, including a broad spectrum of anti-racist, anti-fascist workers and professors. This had never happened at any of HUAC’s previous anti-communist forays. HUAC was literally run out of town and gradually faded from sight.
From this base in Buffalo and with this counter-attack, PL showed that the bosses’ anti-communism can be challenged and defeated. It was out of such experiences that the Progressive Labor Party was born and to this day is the leading force against the terrorists in the U.S. ruling class, championing the fight for communism in the international working class.

Part I  reviewed the ways U.S. rulers make their laws at will to suit their purposes, and use “illegal” methods to punish their opponents. Now they have new technologies to pursue their profit-making goods.

Many of the techniques being used here have come to light since the Arab Spring. Protesters released records showing that Western — usually U.S. — companies had been marketing to the dictators a wide array of technology for snooping on people without the latter knowing it. There are “surveillance industry conferences” all around the world (Prague, Dubai, Brasilia, Washington DC, Kuala Lumpur).
At the recent D.C. event, firms were selling products to enable a computer to snap a picture of who is using it and send the image to police; track hundreds of cell phones at once; read e-mails by the tens of thousands; use phony updates for iTunes to infiltrate phones/tablets/computers. When questioned, the firms’ response has been: we only sell to governments, and most of our customers are law enforcement agencies in the U.S.
Journalists’ probes discovered that the firms have been pushing sales to smaller and smaller police departments; what was once done only by the Feds is becoming universal. Moreover, the firms are now actively selling to private detectives. Some of the worst techniques are legal for private eyes to use. They started with contested divorce cases, but now firms are buying the technology to keep tabs on workers.
The main technique is to force internet service providers (ISP) and cell phone carriers to do the cops’ dirty work. An example: Egyptian rebels had been using Skype since they thought that wiretapping Skype is next to impossible. What they did not realize was that the secret police had required the ISP to let the cops install remote “keystroke-capture” software which let the cops learn the rebels’ passwords. The cops then listened in on every Skype conversation.
‘Stingrays’ and Mobile Phones
For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military developed devices that are now in use in the U.S. The FBI has gone to great lengths to hide its widespread use of “stingrays” which locate a mobile phone even when it is not being used to make a call.
The stingray is placed in a van which drives along mimicking a cell phone tower. Cell phones are constantly on the alert for the nearest cell phone tower, so when the phone detects the stingray, it connects just as it would to a tower. The stingray then measures how the strength of the signal changes as the van drives along, thereby pinpointing the phone’s location much more precisely than is possible with the records from the cell phone company.
The FBI claims it gets (sealed) court orders to use stingrays, but it appears that cops in Minnesota, Arizona, Miami and Durham, NC use them.
Twenty years ago, the British secretly developed very sophisticated license-plate readers to track the movement of IRA rebels. Their work at night, in the rain, for cars travelling at high speed, across four lanes of traffic. Then it quickly matches up the license plate with the car’s owner. Type in a license plate, and the system pulls up where that car has been.
This system was developed for the “war on terror” but is now used routinely. The Washington Post reports that the 73 cameras in D.C. gather more than a million license-plate readings a month (in a city of 600,000 people), but they hope to greatly increase that by incorporating the hundreds of traffic-monitoring cameras into the system. As the Post put it, “there are no laws governing how or when the Washington area policy can use the tag reader technology.” License-plate readers are just one example of cameras being spread in public places under the guise of the “war on terror.”
Communist Revolution Will Defeat Capitalist Technology
Workers should not be fooled by “legalities.” Historically, ruling classes have made, changed or eliminated laws when it suits their purpose of maintaining their class dictatorship. The question of “legality” is merely the window-dressing of “democracy” that they use to hide that dictatorship. During crises, this window dressing comes down and the fascist core at the center of capitalism can clearly be seen.
However, the news is not all bad. Each time the ruling class changes the rules or uses new technology to put down dissent, the working class fights back. Clever workers are developing ways to defeat each of the rulers’ new technologies, or even to turn it against the cops. We can be confident that the working class’s creativity is at work! However, the main way to defeat the cops’ snooping is to create such a large communist movement that the cops can’t follow us all. There is safety in numbers — yet another reason to redouble our efforts.
Masses of workers in action, especially communist-led, have overcome the enemy in the past and will do so again.

President Barack Obama is facing a liberal backlash over his hardline national security policy, which critics say is more extreme and conservative than that pursued by George W. Bush (London Observer, 2/9/13).

Obama was supposed to be the people’s savior but now is outdoing Bush. Why? Because the profit-driven U.S. ruling class needs to maintain its dominance over the world’s resources, especially oil and gas. Wider war is essential to their goal, “by any means necessary.” Enter drones and assassinations.
Obama is stirring public opposition by openly claiming the right to assassinate some White House enemies and to imprison others indefinitely, anywhere in the world, based on secret information. Many were alarmed by the recently leaked InJustice Department memo that approved drone strikes on U.S. citizens linked to al Qaeda. Equally frightening was Obama’s choice of John Brennan to head the CIA. As homeland security advisor, Brennan has handed his boss a weekly drone “kill list.” There is also a growing movement against Obama’s 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows indefinite detention of suspects.
But the liberal backlash led by Democratic politicians, imperialist think tanks and media millionaires won’t help our class or end Obama’s reign of terror. In reality, the uproar is aimed at improving the effectiveness of the murderous U.S. war machine. It also seeks to steer mass opinion down the dead end of following the bosses’ laws, as judged by the bosses’ courts.
Legitimizing Mass Murder
The liberals’ “solution” is for Congress to “create a special court to handle this sort of sensitive discussion” [on drones] (New York Times editorial, 2/6/13). To legitimize assassinations, the liberal Times demands a kangaroo court similar to the one that rubberstamps government wiretaps. That tribunal has yet to deny a single request by the FBI, the Pentagon or the CIA.
Obama’s critics include the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a foreign policy think tank bankrolled by the likes of Exxon Mobil, JP Morgan Chase and the Rockefellers. Drones, as currently deployed, could actually harm this faction’s effort to stabilize a tottering global empire based on control of oil. Last month the CFR published a report, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies.”  It warned:

Drone strikes may be indirectly increasing the number of militants. [K]illing suspected militants or civilians leads to the marked radicalization of local populations….In Yemen, for example, in 2010 the Obama administration described al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as encompassing ‘several hundred al-Qaeda members’…. By 2012, AQAP had ‘a few thousand members.’

The CFR couldn’t care less about the 1,128 civilians incinerated so far by U.S. drones (Bureau of Investigative Journalism, London). But bad press may curtail the use of a “central component of U.S. counterterrorism operations for at least another decade.” As the organization noted:

U.S. drone strikes are also widely opposed by the citizens of important allies, emerging powers, and the local populations in states where strikes occur. States polled reveal overwhelming opposition to U.S. drone strikes: Greece (90 percent), Egypt (89 percent), Turkey (81 percent), Spain (76 percent), Brazil (76 percent), Japan (75 percent), and Pakistan (83 percent).

Drones’ Rain of Terror
In addition to the outright murder of civilians, the drones rain down terror with their 24-hour-a-day reconnaissance flights. Inhabitants who see and hear these killers overhead live in constant dread of the next wave of “collateral” deaths. Adults fear to leave their houses. Children are scared to go to school. Families are too frightened to attend weddings or funerals. 

….the United States cannot conduct drone strikes in the most critical corners of the world by itself. Drone strikes require the tacit or overt support of host states or neighbors (CFR).

Needing allies for the bigger wars to come, Rockefeller, Exxon Mobil & Co. urge Obama to shoot straighter and embrace “humanitarian” transparency for the inevitable “collateral damage.”

The president of the United States should limit targeted killings to the leadership of al-Qaeda and affiliated forces and…provide information to the public, Congress, and UN special rapporteurs…on what procedures exist to prevent harm to civilians (CFR).

By the time the Justice Department’s “okay-to-assassinate-citizens” memo broke, Democratic politicians had already digested the CFR’s prescriptions.  “It has to be in the agenda of this Congress to reconsider the scope of action of drones and use of deadly force by the United States around the world,” said Delaware senator Chris Coons (Associated Press, 2/6/13).
To mislead well-meaning people opposed to Obama’s throw-away-the-key detention policy, the imperialists’ liberal front people propose futile lawsuits. On February 6, filmmaker Michael Moore, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and former NYT foreign correspondent Chris Hedges held a well-publicized forum in New York. It focused on building support for Hedges’ lawsuit against Obama’s NDAA 2012.
The Government Accountability Project (GAP) was a main organizer of the gathering. GAP cashes checks from both the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the next-generation Rockefeller Family Fund. The latter’s website says it supports GAP “because their mission fits perfectly with our understanding of the connections between transparency, accountability, and a well-functioning democracy.” This family and its allies reap trillions from U.S. Middle East oil wars, which have murdered millions. They hope to channel mass anger at the slaughter into a lawsuit.
Liberal Rulers Still Main Danger
Despite the backlash against Obama from the liberal ruling class who back him, these forces remain more dangerous than the more openly fascist conservatives or neo-con rulers. Liberal bosses hide behind a “democratic” mask and use it to develop a more populist appeal. They don’t oppose drones; they want to govern their use to make them more palatable to the working class. Meanwhile, they’re re-tooling their war machine to confront their imperialist rivals in China and Russia. Capitalist-run courts to supervise assassinations won’t slow U.S. war-making any more than lawsuits against rulers in the legal system they control.
Nor should the racist aspect of this butchery be overlooked. Drones drop their lethal bombs on Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, not on Europe or North America. Racist attacks are business as usual for U.S. rulers. Consider the routine police tactics, from stop-and-frisk assaults to murder, that single out the overwhelmingly black and Latino workers and youth in every big city in the U.S. As a direct result, these groups compose 70 percent of the country’s 2.4 million prison population.
But neither drones nor Special Forces will solve the U.S. bosses’ military problems. Only larger standing armies can fill their needs in the wider wars they’re planning and the next world war to come. (See CHALLENGE editorial, 2/13, on women in combat.)
Only Communist Leadership Can Kill KKKapitalism
History shows that a robust anti-war movement depends solely on the working class, which suffers the most and has nothing to gain in the bosses’ endless conflicts. During the U.S. Vietnam Genocide, the Progressive Labor Party built a base in factories, on campuses, in the military and in neighborhoods. We exposed and militantly attacked the local bosses’ ties to the war-making capitalists. Hundreds of thousands joined the rallies, marches and strikes we helped to lead.
We put fear into U.S. capitalists, but not enough. Wars persist because the profit system survives. Only a society free of bosses and profits — and therefore of racism, sexism and war — can enable our class to lead a decent existence. To truly succeed, anti-war workers must be organized in a mass Party with a long-term, revolutionary communist outlook to destroy capitalism. They must be organized within PLP.
This is the message we must bring to our activities in the shops and unions, the schools and campuses, the barracks and communities. The life of the working class is at stake.