May Day was celebrated with joy and revolutionary passion all over Pakistan. Workers, students and different trade unions organized May Day with banners explaining that we need to change capitalism with a system organized by the working class; from each according to abilities to each according to needs.

Capitalist bosses are greedy so they exploit us to work for their profit system. They want us to die in their imperialist wars while making profit for them. They want us to be exploited every minute of our lives as we work from dawn to dusk.  And then they also want us to protect their exploitative system.
But Progressive Labor Party organizes the working class to wage war against the bosses, and one day lead a communist revolution.

Capitalist misleaders
It is ironic that the majority of workers cannot participate in May Day processions because they have to work all day to earn something to feed their families. Daily wagers, contract workers and farm workers cannot leave work to celebrate May Day either because their masters don't allow them or they have to get some wage to meet their needs.

Trade union misleaders are here just to protect the interests of bosses; they are unable to bring something good to the lives of the poor working class. They are getting a monthly fund from every worker by promising that they will bend the bosses down to accept the demands of workers but behind the curtain they are bargaining with the bosses to get more advantages for themselves.

Time after time these misleaders are being used by the bosses to cool down the anger of poor workers by assuring them on behalf of bosses that ‘your demands will be accepted in a few weeks or months’! Workers are still deprived of every facility which is supposed to be provided by the factory owners to the workers according to labor laws.

Communist leadership
In May Day processions and seminars our comrades criticized the prevailing system and its defenders; those are usually union misleaders. Our comrades explained that these so-called union leaders are not essential to leading their struggle against the capitalist system. We pointed out each time workers organized a strike unleashing their class anger through militant  sit-ins to close down production, then these misleaders bargained with the bosses to break the strike.

Our comrades also explained the difference between criminals and leaders; they said we need communist leaders who believe in the power of the working class, not the criminal-minded gangsters who are using the name of workers to get benefits for themselves. These criminals are in the guise of leaders, as they torture and abuse the workers even asking the bosses to fire someone if they think that worker is going to challenge their authority.

We are trying to give communist leadership to the working class. We  visit factories to start the process of unionizing at the workplace but we are facing hurdles which are being spread by the factory owners, contractors, security personnel and the misleaders.  

Our comrades  talk about the importance of changing the system and forging the reform struggle. We explain the necessity of an international communist movement against capitalism. The Progressive Labor Party is spreading its communist ideas among the working class and the workers are responding. 

The murder of Nahel M. on June 27th by a traffic cop in Nanterre, France set off a nationwide rebellion against racist police murders. Even after the cop who shot Nahel was arrested, people’s anger and cynicism about the system continued to explode. This multiracial rebellion, led by teenage Black and North African workers, spread to more than 200 cities and towns across France. They responded with violence as the police attacked the young rebels in the streets and arrested more than 3000 people over five nights of demonstrations. The rebellion in France is inspiring as it shows the potential power of the working class. At the same time, like so many uprisings before, without an organized communist party and a political vision of fighting for a workers led society it ends as quickly as it began and leaves many people cynical about fighting back.

Nahel was shot by the police at point blank range. Initially the police lied and said he had tried to run them down, but video exposed their lies and showed them murdering Nahel by shooting him through the driver side window as the car started to drive away.

At first French President Emmanuel Macron tried to ignore the rebellion. He was recorded attending  a concert on the second night. But the clashes between young people, angered at the ongoing racism of French capitalism and the police, spread beyond the working-class areas and thousands of people marched in the center of Paris. Macron, who visited police barracks to support his racist killers, looked to the police and the more fascist elements in the country to put down the rebellion.

The rebellion exposed, once again the extreme racism of capitalism. Nanterre is a working-class suburb that has a large number of people of North African descent as well as Black workers. Youth unemployment in Nanterre is at 23 percent (CNN, 7/1) and in France more than 20 percent of teenagers live below the poverty line. Many of them live in suburbs like Nanterre. Instead of the French bosses creating jobs for young people, the area is heavily policed. Across France the police have used identity check powers to harass and terrorize the working class. Young men perceived as Black or North African are 20 times as likely to be stopped by the police than the rest of the population (Guardian, 6/30).

As the demonstrations have died down the French ruling class has organized pro-government rallies across the country. These “restore order” rallies have been led by the most openly racist elements in France, including the fascist Marie Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) which is calling for more prisons and to have people that are arrested for any reason to be evicted from public housing. The working class can’t rely on the bosses to fix capitalism. Instead of making things better the bosses respond with more racism.

These rebellions have shown once again that the working class has the power to shut down and overthrow capitalism. It has also shown that this will only happen by the building of a revolutionary communist movement that can fight to take power through communist revolution.

A PLP member attended a Town Hall podcast which included Michael Brown’s father from Ferguson and Oscar Grant’s father from Oakland and others from Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland. These directly impacted families decried Al Sharpton and Ben Crump as ambulance chasers just trying to exploit the families to get more media attention. Nikki pointed out that leaders of groups including the NAACP were similarly a problem.

She said that she wanted to be in touch with local fighters, not just the paid staff of large organizations who limit their engagement due to political connections or their non-profit status.

While community support sometimes flags, Nikki and PLP members said that one solution is to rely on the impacted families and boots-on-the-ground community outreach. On the other hand, Angelo Pinto, an attorney from New York City at the podcast, pushed the failing idea that impacted family members should try to get elected to leadership positions in groups like the NAACP and run for elected political office.

The struggle for justice and communism continues
PLP members struggle with friends in the mass organization over our strategies for struggle and our vision of a better, communist, world. Nikki is also asking questions, joining meetings, and reading CHALLENGE.
As individuals and families directly impacted by all forms of injustice become more involved in our activities, we hope to bring them closer to the PLP so they become leaders in the revolutionary struggle for communism that will eliminate racist government-sponsored terrorism.

The short-lived mutiny of a Russian mercenary highlights the growing volatility and sharpening threat of fascism and world war as rival imperialists compete for global supremacy. On June 23, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his state-funded Wagner Group rebelled against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military leadership, seizing the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advancing within 120 miles of Moscow. While many details are still unknown, Prigozhin’s plan clearly backfired. With no backing from within the government or military, or mass support from soldiers or workers, the rebellion ended in failure within 24 hours.

Even so, the instability shown by Prigozhin’s mutiny is driven by the same crisis of capitalism that’s pushing the gangster imperialists ruling the U.S., Russia. and China toward World War III. As competition among rival imperialists intensifies, so does their desperation. Fights within the ruling class are escalating, as we see in the clash in the U.S. that is playing out in the Supreme Court and the 2024 presidential race. None of these capitalists will hesitate to sacrifice millions of workers in the coming world war.

The only way out of this imperialist hellscape is for workers to turn the guns around against all of these bosses, join the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, and turn imperialist war into communist revolution!

Capitalist instability leads to world war
Just as in the U.S. and every other capitalist country, there are splits within the Russian ruling class. Billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin heads the Wagner Group, a private military contractor that Putin was glad to use for nearly a decade to project Russian imperialism throughout the world. Wagner has been most active in Syria, Mozambique, Libya, Central African Republic, and Mali. In 2014, following the U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” coup in Ukraine, Wagner was instrumental in the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Since war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, Wagner forces have been a major part of the Russian offensive.

The limits of the unity between Prigozhin and Putin were exposed during the recent bloody siege of Bakhmut, which was led by Wagner forces. For months, Prigozhin had openly criticized Russian preparation and execution of the war. With no honor among capitalist thieves, Putin replied by letting Wagner lead the attack on Bakhmut — but withheld supplies, dooming the mercenaries to tremendous losses (Seymour Hersh, 6/29).

Capitalism is based on competition, first and last. This reality rots all the way into the bones of every part of every capitalist state, without exception. Prigozhin personifies Vladimir Lenin’s analysis of the basic instability of imperialism over 100 years ago. The deepening political and economic chaos of capitalism, as Lenin noted, is reflected everywhere in the capitalist class. Until the working class overthrows the capitalist bosses with communist revolution, world wars are inevitable.

Nationalism = loyalty to imperialism
Like all imperialist warmongers, Russia is using unrelenting nationalist propaganda to win political support from workers for the war. Nationalism is the poisonous idea of unity between workers and bosses in a given nation. But the Russian bosses’ reliance on Prigozhin, like the U.S. bosses’ reliance on Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, reflects weakness. In both cases, the rulers need to rely on soldiers-for-hire instead of politically committed fighters. To correct this weakness, Russian and U.S. bosses are constantly lying through their teeth with cynical propaganda to build nationalism and win workers to support their empires.

Especially galling are Putin’s references to the communist-led Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany as he claims to be “de-nazifying” Ukraine. Yes, the Ukrainian army integrated neo-Nazi militias—the Azov, Aidar, and Sich battalions—into their National Guard, which then received training from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade (see CHALLENGE, 7/15/15). But the murderous hypocrite Putin had no problem with the fact that the Wagner Group, now officially integrated into the Russian army, openly recruited white supremacist militias like the Russian Imperial Movement and Russian National Unity (Guardian, 3/20/22). Workers have no good choices between the nazis of Russia and the nazis of Ukraine! We say smash them all!

Fascism: a violent shift out of weakness
Internal divisions and threats from rival imperialists are destabilizing Russia, China, and the U.S. As the inter-imperialist rivalry propels the world toward a potentially nuclear weapon-fueled World War III, capitalists in Russia, China and the U.S. are compelled to impose order and discipline on their own class and also upon the working class. This is the essence of fascism: the stripping away of the mask of liberal democracy to expose the bloodthirsty, nationalist, racist, sexist forces that lie at the heart of capitalism.

By contrast to the division and disunity among capitalists in the U.S., the dominant Russian bosses’ ability to discipline their ruling class opposition is far more developed. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and the Russian rulers lost rich territories such as Ukraine, they responded by hollowing out their pretense of liberal democracy and resorted to more open fascism to claw back their diminished empire. For years, Putin has exiled, jailed or murdered political opponents like Alexei Navalny, while hammering workers with racism and drowning them in blood to reassert Russian control over Chechnya and Georgia. Progressive Labor Party believes that the liberal Big Fascists of U.S. finance capital—fronted by politicians in the Democratic Party—represent the greatest danger to our class. Despite their weaknesses and internal divisions, this set of bosses is best equipped to impose the discipline on other capitalists that we see today in Russia and China.  

Fight for your class, not your country! Join PLP!
As CHALLENGE goes to press, youth, and workers across France are in armed rebellion against a racist police murder, showing the international working class the way. If workers around the world are organized to fight with the bravery and militancy of our class brothers and sisters in France, under the communist leadership of PLP, we will dump every Prigozhin and Putin, every Biden and Trump, into the dustbin of history. We will liberate the international working class by creating a society led by and for workers. By organizing solidarity with the rebellion in France within our unions, classrooms, and mass organizations, we’ll advance the internationalism we need to smash all imperialist bosses. Only by building a mass PLP and fighting for communist revolution can the working class smash racism, sexism, nationalism, and imperialism once and for all! Join us!