​​Los Angeles, July 4-The sound of beating drums traveled for blocks through downtown Los Angeles. Mirrored music could be heard near the international airport and in Santa Monica as well.  Hotel workers from the Unite Here union Local 11 wanted to make sure their work stoppage over the July 4th weekend was felt by the hotel bosses in LA. As they took action to fight for a living wage, members of Progressive Labor Party joined them on the picket lines to remind them that the workers of the world produce and run everything and deserve nothing less than the whole pie. This we know will only happen with a communist revolution.

For three straight days, workers picketed in front of over a dozen hotels from 3 AM through 11 PM. The action culminated in a large protest where hundreds of workers, 90 percent of whom are Black and Latin women, marched to demand hotel profits be shared with them since the hotels can’t function without them. Hotel bosses stand to make billions with the upcoming World Cup and Olympics being hosted in LA, but they want to maintain the current $18.86 an hour minimum wage. One would have to work 17 hours a day to afford a two-bedroom apartment in LA with that salary. These poverty wages have left hundreds of women unable to be with their families, without healthcare, hungry, or worse. One woman can only afford to live hours outside of LA, so every week, she leaves her family to sleep four nights in her car outside of the hotel that she cleans.
While workers demand a living wage, hotel bosses responded that it's not their responsibility to keep up with the cost of living in LA. We know these thieves want to keep every penny of profit for themselves. Workers have the power to unite and fight for the reform of higher wages, but the only way to end exploitation is to rid the planet of capitalism.

Liberal politicians and union misleaders only appear to care
The liberal bosses and union leadership in LA sound like they are on the side of the workers. Union leadership is pushing for a minimum wage of $25 an hour. Council members Curren Price and Katy Yaroslavsky took it a step further by introducing a motion that would make the minimum wage for hospitality workers $30 an hour by 2028. Even these wages are at poverty levels for LA though. But the larger danger comes from when workers believe these liberals and misleaders are our friends. Capitalism is never run in the interest of workers. These union misleaders and local politicians are nothing but representatives of local capital. Their appearance of care for our class is to keep us settling for reforms instead of finding true change through revolution.

The biggest farce came when Los Angeles City Council members Hugo Soto-Martínez and Nithya Raman and Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo were arrested at a rally on June 22, 2023 in support of hotel workers. This is nothing more than an attempt to launch their political careers, similar to how DiBlasio’s New York City mayoral campaign took off after being arrested while “supporting” hospital workers. We can’t be fooled by these opportunists. Two hundred workers were also arrested at that rally, but they and what they were fighting for was not the headline of any news story because workers are disposable in this rotten system.

Workers solidarity now - communism ASAP
Although it was hard to talk on the picket lines because of the successful drumming to which workers were exposed, members of the Party made some connections with workers. They were encouraged by our support as we marched side by side with them and chanted. While the union misleaders limited their chants to “si se puede” (“yes we can”) and “huelga”(“strike"), these workers are learning important lessons from the picket line about class consciousness, solidarity, and workers’ power. One of the picket leader’s comments revealed this understanding - “They are making all this money from the Olympics already and they don’t want to share it with us. But we do the work. When the LA teachers went on strike, we joined them, and we have seen a lot of teachers come and support us too. We just have to keep fighting together.” Workers in LA are learning valuable lessons on the picket lines that can’t be learned anywhere else. Many had children joining them, so they are gaining this understanding as well. Our job as revolutionaries is to build on that understanding to reveal that workers can and will run society in a communist world.

The workers went back on the picket line on July 10th after a short break. Additionally the Screen Actors Guild union joined the Writer’s Guild on strike this week. This uptick in class struggle in the LA area gives us lots of opportunity to raise ideas of class consciousness and turn them into schools for communism. We will definitely be back out there with them and struggle to bring our base along so they can learn these lessons as well. The fightback in LA continues!

Boston, June 16–Why, at this year’s annual conference of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG), were more people than ever before talking about communism? It’s a sign of the times, the deepening crisis of imperialism and racism and war. It’s also the result of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stepping up our fight for  communism and the Party at the MLG. It’s still the Marxist as opposed to the Communist Literary Group, but by taking the Marxist work of the conference seriously we are putting communism and the question of the party more on the agenda of these mostly younger academics and grad students.

With a lot of support, we proposed for next year’s conference a reading group on revolutionary organization, so that the need for a communist party would be explicitly on the table. On the literature table this year for the first time was a stack of CHALLENGE, and our papers were all taken. Several people wanted to know more about our history, the article on the Cultural Revolution, etc. Not enough radical people know about PLP, and we are taking some simple steps to correct that at the MLG.

The conference focus this year was Capital Vol. 1 and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. To prepare, our comrades took part in three year-long study groups on Marx and Du Bois. Out of this we helped form a panel on Capital and one on Du Bois, and were often able to intervene from the Party’s point of view in the general discussions of both books.

Many people, not only PLP, emphasized that Marx’s book shows in great detail why capitalism can never be thoroughly reformed. The drive to expand capital accumulation through every corner of the world is inevitably reproducing insoluble problems: extremes of wealth and poverty; more masses of wage workers but at the same time masses of the unemployed; constant economic crisis each worse than the last; and capitalist competition leading to imperialist war. An anti-capitalist reader of Marx has to conclude as Marx did that capitalism can never be made to benefit the working class. It’s not usual to point out at the MLG that this conclusion from reading Capital entails a commitment to communist revolution. We made that point.

Racism and imperialism were not often discussed enough, although the Du Bois discussions did show how racism and capitalism are twinned both in the USA and in global imperialism. (Du Bois was an outstanding anti-imperialist voice his whole life long). Capital defines the global market as the heart of expanding capital accumulation, even in Marx’s time; and his book is full of references to the war against American slavery and the parallels between chattel and wage labor. The transition to wage slavery and the missed opportunity of a united Black and white workers’ struggle against capital is Du Bois’s great theme—inspired by Marx—in Black Reconstruction. Other panels did explore capitalist racism: one on Richard Wright, several on the so-called “surplus” (chronically unemployed) population produced by capital, others on colonial land theft. We are friends with many of these presenters and got to know others this year.

If our proposal on revolutionary organization is adopted, we can put more focus on racism and imperialism next year by bringing more Lenin into MLG Marxism, and going beyond Lenin to advocate a single global revolutionary party which summarily banishes nationalism from workers’ struggle. Examples from parties in India, South Africa and the Philippines could make the point that in our day revolutionary communism has to be organized in a single global party. Only such a party form, going further than the Comintern, can fight all the competing imperialist blocs on a global scale, in the process overcoming racism and nationalism in the workers’ ranks. PLP has a lot to contribute in MLG discussions of the theory of the party form, coming out of our analysis in  documents like Road to Revolution IV of the defeat of communism in the Soviet and Chinese parties.

There was, except for us, an eerie silence about the already begun inter-imperialist global war. Perhaps because people feel powerless? Another reason to join the Party. The door is open for us to advocate that at the moment, though we are aware that we will face anti-communism here eventually. [See Box, “The New Liberal Anti-Communism”]

For our part, what we got out of the conference is best summarized by a young comrade: “This is our theory! Marxist theory belongs to us, to the communists, to the working class.” There is a problem with the MLG: theory being divorced from practice. On the one hand, it’s good that the powerful intellectual tradition of Marxism is alive and well among some academics; on the other hand, Marxism does not belong mainly to academics. As Brecht wrote once, “Communism is simple: if you’re a worker you can understand it.” Communism is also complex, but workers trained in a revolutionary party led by workers—a party like PLP where academics too are welcome—can also master its complexity.

We are encouraged by this work among intellectuals, feeling our collective power to mobilize as a class if we can bring our academic co-workers into a worker-led PLP, building the Party to fight for communism as capitalism spins off into racist violence and war.

The new liberal anti-communism
Three comrades on a panel at the 2023 MLG conference called “The New Anti-Communism” showed how anti-communism remains alive and well in new forms, even in the absence of a mass communist movement. Why? Because communism remains the greatest threat to the ruling class, and both liberal and rightist wings of the capitalist parties in the USA and Canada are united in slandering it. In its identity-politics guise, anti-communism helps to recruit marginalized workers to fight in imperialist wars against “authoritarianism,” to subdue white workers who might want to combat racism, and to provide political cover for racist attacks on the whole working class.

For one speaker, the Florida and Texas government attacks on “wokeness” as educational brainwashing (i.e., teaching about slavery, labor insurgency or gender politics) were dog-whistle accusations that recalled McCarthy-era portrayals of Communists infesting the brains of innocent Americans. Another speaker pointed out that it is wrong to point to “the right” as the main danger in such attacks on teachers and their unions, since liberal multicultural identity politics have prepared the ground for the likes of fascist Florida Governor Ron De Santis. Often, antiracist folks are disarmed against these attacks by their allegiance to divisive liberal identity politics which hide workers’ common interests.

The third speaker discussed how the Canadian government has historically manipulated the status of “refugees.” “Good” refugees have been those fleeing from communism, like those from Vietnam decades ago, or Ukrainians today fleeing a capitalist Russia falsely identified as communist through the word “authoritarian.” But refugees from places like Haiti are to be turned away at the border. Propaganda like the short TV ads “Heritage Minutes” falsely feature Canada as a land of freedom from “totalitarian” oppression, while their multicultural imagery helps the liberal ruling class depict marginalized workers as full citizens of a free country. Liberals in Canada, fascists in Florida: both use anti-communism to shatter workers’ unity, attack workers in struggle, and prepare a population of patriots for world war.

If the far-right Vox party joins Spain’s ruling coalition after the July 23 general election, it will be the first Spanish government to include open fascists since the death of mass murderer Francisco Franco in 1975. It would also mark the latest failure of liberal democracy to manage the growing global crisis of capitalism. As the U.S. bosses keep weakening in the face of an aggressive challenge by the Chinese imperialists, their junior NATO partners—the centrist parties that have ruled Western Europe since World War II--are losing their grip as well.

Instability is everywhere; everything seems up for grabs. With the war in Ukraine escalating and World War III looming, the old liberal democratic world order is in shambles. Confronted with runaway inflation, a wave of climate catastrophes, and mass unemployment (close to 13 percent in Spain), both the open fascist insurgents and the old guard liberals are scapegoating migrating workers—a hallmark of rising fascism. As millions of workers’ lives are upended in the general turmoil, a segment of the working class has been infected by the disease of anti-immigrant racism. In this dark night of weak class consciousness, the capitalist rulers are pulling out all the stops to mislead, deceive, and divide us. Regardless of which of the bosses’ factions wins the next round of elections, the rulers will ultimately need full-blown fascism to have any chance to destroy their competition and protect their profits.

Only an international mass workers’ movement, led by communists, can beat back the rising tide of fascism. Only communist revolution, spearheaded by the fighting Progressive Labor Party, can end imperialist war and create a society run by and for the working class. The profit system can’t reform its way out of this crisis. History shows us that it can never serve workers’ needs. Capitalism must be destroyed, root and branch. Join us—we have a world to win!

As liberal democracy weakens, open fascists rise
Six years ago in Spain, nostalgic for the Franco years (foreignpolicy.com, 6/29), a splinter group denounced the right-wing Popular Party as too soft and set off on its own. Widely dismissed and underestimated, the Vox party exploited workers’ anxiety over the Catalan separatist movement, which was pushing to break away from the richest region of Spain (centered in Barcelona) and form its own country. Using the classic fascist tools of gutter racism and sexism, and taking a nationalist page from the U.S. Small Fascist forces fronted by Donald Trump (“Make Spain Great Again!”) Vox “opposes abortion rights, denies climate change and rejects the need for the government to combat gender violence” (New Indian Express, 7/18).

Now backed by 15 percent of voters nationwide, Vox is being courted to form a new parliamentary majority by the Popular Party, which is favored to win the upcoming election after shifting to a more openly racist, anti-immigrant platform (El Pais, 7/24/2018). If that alliance comes to pass, Spain would join a growing list of European countries--including the old World War II fascist axis of Germany, Italy, and Vichy France--with openly fascist parties either within the government or as a leading opposition to the government. And with Spain next in line to hold the presidency of the European Union, Spanish fascists could influence the EU’s agenda.

When liberal democracy fails the capitalist class, fascism gives the bosses more direct control over all aspects of society, from the media and universities to industrial policy and war preparations. It’s no accident that fascism is the fastest-growing political movement in Europe today. This reality would have been unthinkable in the decades following World War II, when fascist parties were outlawed In Germany and marginalized in France and Italy. But times are changing, and fast. Millions of workers have lost confidence in the ability of the traditional post-war European parties to solve the glaring problems of capitalism. Europe’s capitalist rulers—the dominant banks and industrialists—are terrified of losing the white working class, a fear compounded by Britain’s departure from the EU and recent mass protests against the French bosses’ pension reforms. At present, these rulers aren’t moving to smash Vox or the likes of open fascist leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. If anything, they appear to be hedging their bets--just as they did in Germany in 1933, when they sanctioned Adolph Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by the liberal-backed president.  

In the most recent elections in Germany, the most committed fascist nation during World War II, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) expanded its base, even after AfD members were arrested for helping to plan a fascist coup last December. The party is polling up to 20 percent, “neck-and-neck with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind only the conservative CDU/CSU bloc” (france24.com, 3/7). In France, the National Rally headed by Marine Le Pen is now the highest-polling party in the country. Amid the ongoing rebellion over the French cops’ cold-blooded killing of a 17-year-old son of North African immigrants, it’s calling for harsher treatment of migrating workers, wholesale evictions of public housing residents for minor offenses, and the building of more prisons—the bosses’ modern concentration camps.

In their desperate attempt to hold on to power, the rulers’ mainstream liberal agents, from Joe Biden to Emmanuel Macron, are quickly adopting their own more virulent racist and anti-immigrant policies. From the Texas border to the segregated suburbs of Paris, they’re enabling mad-dog police terror. In France, the kkkops have even prohibited protests against their own racist violence! The result is a political spiral toward fascism. As the big capitalists move to the right, they’re legitimizing and energizing far-right parties that have little or no stake in liberal democracy. Vox, for example, is banning unfriendly news outlets from its events and calling for them to be shut down (Reporters Without Borders). As the bosses’ contradictions continue to sharpen, we can expect the liberals to follow suit in ditching the phony freedoms of capitalist democracy.

Only communists can defeat fascism
The working class cannot afford to sit around and wait for the capitalists to try to fix their unfixable contradictions. Economic and inter-imperialist crises inevitably lead to rising fascism and wider war. In World War II, the force that stopped full-blown fascism in its tracks was a communist-led working class. Although communists and other anti-fascists were defeated in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, they inspired workers throughout the world in the global conflict that followed, culminating in the Soviet Union’s destruction of Nazi Germany. The revolutionary Chinese Communist Party played an important role in beating back fascist Japan.

The Communist Party of Italy led the resistance that smashed the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.
Today there are but two paths before us: fascism or communist revolution. There is no middle ground, no third way. As communist theorist R. Palme Dutt observed in Fascism and Social Revolution (1934), “Capitalism in its decay breeds Fascism. Capitalist democracy in decay breeds Fascism. The only final guarantee against Fascism, the only final wiping out of the causes of Fascism, is the victory of the proletarian dictatorship.”
And so our choice is clear. Build Progressive Labor Party!

New York City, July 12–Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) week-long summer project of rallies, discussion groups, CHALLENGE newspaper sales, social events and protests was proof that today’s working-class youth are committed to building an international party for the masses of workers under rising fascism.  Throughout the project, about 50 youth and workers distributed over 1,000 papers, rallied in working-class neighborhoods, and participated in our CHALLENGE workshops and sessions on fascism, sexism and more. This project increased our understanding and prepared our class to fight against the bosses’ ideas and culture.  

The project’s peak was in Brooklyn on Saturday, July 10, with a petitioning campaign and rally to name a street in one community after Shantel Davis, a Brooklyn youth who was brutally murdered by the NYPD a decade ago. The project revealed that building and maintaining deep political roots, especially in Black and Latin working-class communities, what we call ‘base building,’ is indeed the critical factor that will make communist ideas mass ideas and prepare our class  for running a world without capitalism.
Encouraging workers to participate

At our opening cookout of roughly 50 attendees, the icebreaker was successful in that people shared their reasons for attending and why they believed capitalism must be destroyed. Since getting people to speak on bullhorns has been a challenge in the past, we addressed this concern head on by asking everyone to draft their ideas on note cards that could also be used later for bullhorn speeches.  This ended up being a successful strategy since we had the widest bullhorn participation ever in recent years.

One worker discussed the recent Supreme Court rulings against affirmative action in higher education and explained that our job as revolutionaries is to not only explain how the immediate threats of openly racist bosses like DeSantis and Trump attack our class but how the even more deadly but less blatant attacks of the Democratic Party are to blame for our continued suffering in terms of global issues like unemployment, migration crises, climate catastrophes and human trafficking.  The struggle of Kingsborough Community College students and professors against police terror on campus was also given acknowledgement and put forward as a sharp example of how to fight inequality with multiracial unity and courage.

Distributing CHALLENGE  
The public newspaper sales and rallies during the project are very important opportunities for our young comrades to sharpen their internal development in understanding the main political goals of Progressive Labor Party.

These sales also allow our members to learn from workers who witness and offer feedback.  Over the course of the week, we distributed several hundred CHALLENGE papers on Broad and Market, a major thoroughfare in Newark, NJ, and over 600 papers in the Ivy Hill section of Newark as well. At these sales, members led speeches and chants such as “obreros, unidos, jamas seran vencidos,”(workers united will never be defeated) or “workers, united, will never be defeated,” and in the process sharpened their analysis and public speaking skills.

As we would chant and read out headlines from our papers, workers would confirm our ideas such as a headline about smashing racism, kkkops and capitalism that motivated one worker to reply, “Yeah, it’ll take a war to do that.”  

Workers were also very excited to see that our paper is in both English and Spanish. There was one very revealing exchange between a member of PLP and a worker who took the paper and asked, “What is capitalism?” There was a wonderful conversation that revealed that he already, in fact, knew the essence of capitalist racist inequality and also about the inter-imperialist rivalry between Russian, Chinese and U.S. bosses that was shaping so much of the instability that all workers face today. Our class has so many of the tools already to run the world, and it is our job to remind each other of this fact and build the courage needed to make it happen.

No such thing as ‘good’ bosses!
Finally, our political education sessions and climactic event for Shantel Davis revealed the power of ideas and our appeal to the working class.  In our session about racism, the recent Supreme Court decision was discussed again as a devastating, obvious attack against the working class.  While we have targeted the Democratic Party as the leading force attempting to sway Black and Latin workers away from revolution,  workers around the world also cheered on Obama.

And we now face the worst climate-driven migration crisis in human history!  So while many people want to blame Trump for fascism, he isn't the problem any more than the rest of the bosses’ politrickcians.  
The bosses will have you believe by prosecuting Trump and those who participated in the Jan 6 insurrection that the system works. But for one small victory, the working class is subjected to mass deportation, incarceration, and other horrors every single day under capitalism.  The true victory is not punishing a cop with jail time, but removing the racist conditions which breed racist police in the first place, and no reform, judge or politician can promise us that.

Workers in Brooklyn who spontaneously joined our Shantel Davis rally also know that, and this shows us that their decision to join us was not really spontaneous at all. Rather, it shows us that our class watches us, and every fight we take, every summer project we complete, is confirmation to our class that our Party is serious, committed, and ready for the fight. Join us!