CHICAGO, May 20 — Thousands entered the streets here today to protest the meeting of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). NATO was formed after World War II to contain and undermine the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. The western bosses feared that the example of the communist-led USSR, which had just defeated the German Nazis, the world’s most powerful military, would inspire workers worldwide to fight for a workers’ state. 

NATO has rained terror on workers from Kosovo to Afghanistan to Libya and all points in between. This is the military wing of the U.S.-ruling class, to protect the financial interest of western bosses. One needn’t be a communist to know that NATO bosses use extreme racism to justify their imperialist wars and the super-exploitation of black, Latino, immigrant, and Muslim workers.  One does need to be a communist to understand that the way to defeat this genocide is not through reform battles or siding with “lesser-evil” capitalist politicians.  The working class must fight for, and take, state power through communist revolution.

Today we saw all manner of well-meaning people misdirected by liberal reformist leadership. They prevented us from getting no closer than half a mile from the conference. A red beacon of light in this conglomerate of mis-leadership was about 20 PL’ers.  We distributed 500 CHALLENGEs, led revolutionary chants and made militant communist speeches, explaining the true nature of capitalism and the communist solution for its horrors heaped on the working class. Many workers approached us after each speech, telling us how much they liked what we said. Many interested workers gave us their contact information, which we will pursue. 

As communists we know that our struggle is long and hard. But, when we experience the working class’s eagerness for change and the receptiveness of those same workers to our ideas, they can be won to join PLP. We know then there will come a day when this ruling class will be overthrown and a communist world will be born.

The upcoming presidential election campaign between the U.S. capitalists’ twin stooges, Barack Obama and Mitt Romeny, marks a critical period for the candidates’ imperialist handlers. Facing large rivals (China, Russia) and smaller ones (Iran, North Korea, al Qaeda), the bosses’ solution requires ever-widening wars led by the U.S. in the Middle East and Asia, especially over energy resources. To wage them, they need to win millions of workers to back the U.S. rulers’ policies, now personified by Obama.

It’s a difficult proposition for the bosses, since these policies are directly opposed to workers’ class interests. Romney’s election could make it even more difficult, since he’s a more transparent enemy of workers and youth.

The trillion-dollar funding for war requires savage cuts in wages, pensions, healthcare, schools and other social services. As a result, Obama’s ruling-class publicists must lie to workers about his intent to end wars, while reassuring U.S. capitalists of his resolve to expand them.

On May 20, the New York Times, U.S. imperialism’s leading popular mouthpiece, informed readers of Obama’s “peaceful” Afghan intentions. In 2009, he “had reluctantly (our emphasis, ed.) decided to order a surge of more than 30,000 troops.” The Times then elaborated on Obama’s fake anti-militarism: “A year later, when the president...began to plan for the withdrawal, the generals were cut out entirely....And when Mr. Obama joins the leaders of other NATO nations in Chicago...he will announce what he has already told the leaders in private: All combat operations led by American forces will cease in summer 2013.” 

Just a month earlier, however, the Times headlined a fawning op-ed article, “Warrior in Chief.” It boasted that the “president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.” Obama’s use of deadly force — in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia — stood to his everlasting credit, the Times said. 

Bosses’ Think Tanks Pave Way For War Policies

These seemingly contradictory articles, excerpted from books aimed at pushing Obama’s re-election, flow from the same imperialist sector of U.S. capitalism. Peter Bergen, who wrote the Obama-as-warrior piece, directs the New America Foundation (NAF) and is the author of the forthcoming book Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad (the city in Pakistan where Bin Laden was killed).

The Obama-as-pacifist piece was by David Sanger, a top Times Washington correspondent and the author of the soon-to-be-published Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. He belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which — like the NAF — is bankrolled by the dominant Rockefeller wing of U.S. bosses. A large number of Obama’s foreign policy advisers hail from these two think tanks.

Political and economic reality gives the lie to Obama’s Afghan peace charade. The U.S. needs to dominate the vast Turkmenistan gas supplies that flow through Afghanistan, shaky ally Pakistan, and hesitant ally India. This was a primary motive for the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Afghanistan, but it continues to elude Obama & Co. As the Times editorialized on the eve of Obama’s NATO summit, Afghanistan’s Kandahar and Helmand Provinces are still a base for the Taliban and “remain heavily contested” (5/19/12). 

So don’t expect U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan anytime soon. In fact, Obama signed a pact with the corrupt Afghan regime to provide enough military force and finances to fight the Taliban until 2024. But all is not well between the U.S. bosses and their junior partners in Kabul, who now want the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan India (TAPI) pipeline all for themselves. Meanwhile, the U.S. invaders’ racism has provoked rank-and-file Afghan soldiers to kill their NATO mentors in a wave of escalating attacks. Neither Sanger nor Bergen mention this development.

Paid Mercenaries Fill In For Troop-Short Army

Even if most uniformed GIs leave Afghanistan someday, what will most likely follow is a bloody, Iraq-style occupation by Pentagon-paid U.S. contractors and mercenaries. These hired guns, brought in to supplement a troop-short U.S. Army, are already guarding Exxon Mobil’s oil wells. They’re being entrusted with the prize that has led a quartet of U.S. presidents to promote mass murder in and around Iraq: George H.W. Bush, with the first Gulf War; Bill Clinton’s murderous bombings and sanctions; George W. Bush’s reinvasion and racist occupation; Obama’s continued slaughter. Meanwhile, a deadly civil war seethes in the beleaguered country.

Imperialist tool Sanger, boosting Obama’s Afghan “pacifism,” suggests a bigger-fish-to-fry scenario for world war. According to a press release for Confront and Conceal, “Sanger describes how Obama’s early idealism about fighting ‘a war of necessity’ in Afghanistan quickly turned to fatigue and frustration...and how an effort to re-establish American power in the Pacific set the stage for a new era of tensions with the world’s great rising power, China.”

These plans for past, present and future U.S. imperialist wars have killed millions of workers and youth in the Middle East and South Asia, and will inevitably kill millions more. They have sent tens of thousands of U.S. GIs to their graves or to lives damaged by war wounds, physical and mental.

Obama’s Warmongering A Racist Body Blow to U.S. Workers

To pay for the U.S. war machine, Obama’s policies — which a President Mitt Romney would no doubt follow — are heaping misery on the U.S. working class. Social services have been slashed, and Social Security may follow. Wages have been halved at General Motors under Obama’s bailout plan, swelling the company’s profits. Criminal bankers reap bonuses while tens of millions endure joblessness. Undocumented workers are terrorized under threat of deportation. All of these crimes against the working class stem from the rulers’ need for its military machine to dominate its imperialist rivals.

The repercussions of the capitalists’ crisis falls most heavily on black, Latino and immigrant workers. They suffer twice as much unemployment, far lower wages, and even more pathetic social services. Daycare has been wiped out for millions of minimum-wage workers. A rotting educational system is failing millions of youth. These racist cutbacks create hundreds of billions in super-profits for U.S. bosses to maintain their decadent capitalist system.

It is the task of communists in the Progressive Labor Party, in every country and organization where we are present, to win masses to understand how the profit system is the source of all our class’s problems. They are needed to join and build PLP as the one force that can destroy this exploitative system and usher in a communist world. Then workers’ power will run society to serve the needs of the international working class, which produces everything of value.

Join PLP and emancipate our class!

BROOKLYN, May 1 — At noon today, a handful of students exited Brooklyn Technical High School and gathered at a local café. Although their numbers were smaller than they’d hoped, the students decided to go through with their planned course of action. Lined up in two rows, they began marching and chanting around the school. Soon other students from the school joined them. A march of 15 grew into a march of 50.

Chants were led by a few young people who have been in or around Progressive Labor Party. Instead of limiting the protest to racist cutbacks on education, the chants tied together a number of ills that students face under capitalism. 

There was outrage against recent acts of police brutality,  particularly last month’s murder of Tamon Robinson, a popular employee at a local café. 

In addition, the students marched in solidarity with workers all around the city, the country and the world. Chants of “Whose day? Our Day! What day? May Day!” and “Racist Cops Mean, We Got to Fight Back!” rang throughout the block.

Although the march was somewhat small, the participants’ enthusiasm was unmatched. For over two hours, the Tech students yelled at the top of their lungs. Many displayed a newfound passion for protest and broke out in spontaneous chants when a moment of silence fell over the march. For many participants, this was their first rally. They were clearly glad to be part of it.

Their enthusiasm only ballooned after the Tech group made contact with other students from Paul Robeson High School in Fort Greene. A contingent of Robeson and Tech students continued to chant and cheer at the base of the steps at Fort Greene Park, drawing attention from neighborhood workers and residents. At one point a car drove by and the driver violently honked in support of the march. 

Later, the students gathered at a larger rally at the Sailor’s Monument at the top of Ft. Greene. More than 120 students heard speeches and poems and to participate in teach-ins with progressive teachers.

It’s election season at Queens College, a time when all the register-to-vote-ers and the student government hopefuls rally to show us how effective they think elections are, both on campus and on the national scale. On our campus these election campaigns (both student and presidential) are happening in an immediate context of massive tuition hikes, a heightened exploitation of our teachers, fewer and fewer options for us when we graduate, and an intensifying criminalization of black, Latino, and Muslim students. So, we fought back! 

We organized a “Don’t register to vote, register to REVOLT!” campaign to expose the scam of elections. We made signs, gave out flyers and people took CHALLENGE. A lot of us were surprised at the number of students who connected with our message that elections are nothing but a racist battleground for the bosses to duke out disagreements amongst themselves. 

We won many students and workers to “register to REVOLT!” They gave us their contact information and expressed interest in coming to a weekly speak-out we organized on the campus green. At these speak-outs, issues like racist police brutality in our communities, increasing tuition and the inability of working-class students, especially black and Latino, to afford higher education, are at the center of our conversations. These speak-outs have been very well attended and very politically sharp, not only in ideas but also in organizing actions.

In a political climate where fascism in the forms of brutal policing, anti-immigrant laws and anti-Muslim racism seems to be intensifying, we saw fit to organize around this on campus, since a lot of the students are affected by these issues. 

It has been documented that the NYPD has sent undercover spies into — and has hacked the computers of  — the Muslim Student Associations (MSA) across CUNY, especially at Queens College. So, in the weeks that followed we successfully organized a mock incident of police brutality. 

We walked into a crowded cafeteria on campus and put on a show. Students dressed up as KKKops by wearing pig masks and harassed other students by pushing them up against the walls, emptying their bags, and frisking them. This skit was very well received by the students sitting around us and more students expressed interest in joining the speak-outs. We’re planning on putting on many more encore performances and leading this momentum in the direction of the only sustainable solution for us working people, a communist revolution. 

In a campus desperately hungry for revolutionary change, we are planting red seeds.