The deadly August 26 suicide bombing at Kabul’s international airport was yet another gut punch to the stature of the United States, an imperialist world power in steep decline. After the ISIS-K small-time terrorists claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed close to 200 workers and 13 U.S. military personnel, the leader of the world’s largest terrorist gang countered with a drone strike that slaughtered at least 10 civilians, including seven children (New York Times, 9/5). “We will hunt you down and make you pay” (Reuters, 8/27), said U.S. President Joe Biden. But Biden’s bluster fooled no one. The chaotic military withdrawal exposed the weakness of the U.S. ruling class as they move toward fascism and broader war in a more and more volatile world.
Because make no mistake: The end of the latest imperialist disaster in Afghanistan is no move toward peace. In fact, it opens the door for the U.S. bosses to accelerate their fascist build-up to a conflict with China and possibly Russia, their main capitalist rivals. But the U.S. rulers’ disunity, incompetence, and general disarray are only intensifying as they prepare for the inevitable collision.
In a period when the international working class is faced with the worst that capitalism has to offer—a deepening climate crisis, an unchecked pandemic, racist and sexist terror, and mass unemployment—the absolute necessity for workers to fight back is clear. Our only path forward is to build the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) as our weapon to destroy capitalism and the mass-murdering bosses once and for all.
U.S. bosses struggle to chart a course toward war
At a time when Biden—and the finance capital Big Fascist (see glossary, page 6) bosses he represents—desperately need internal unity to chart a new path, their system lies in turmoil. Killer floods and wildfires, a new wave of Covid-19 deaths, and mounting unemployment are the glaring realities of pandemic-era capitalism.
Biden faces his own crisis of legitimacy. He rebuked his top military brass after they opposed the abrupt pullout. Now his generals are predicting that Afghanistan could soon collapse into civil war (Al Jazeera, 9/5). Biden’s trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure bill, a necessity for the U.S. bosses to compete with their Chinese adversaries, could wind up torpedoed—not just by the isolationist Small Fascists who have hijacked the Republican Party, but also by some of Biden’s assumed allies in Congress (ABC News, 9/5).
The Big Fascists’ long-term plan to use higher tax rates to raise money for war and discipline their own class, a hallmark of fascism, is meeting fierce resistance from companies like the multi-trillion-dollar Apple and finance capital mainstay Exxon Mobil (Business Insider, 9/3).
Most concerning for the U.S. rulers is their inability to win allegiance from a war-weary population to fight the bigger wars to come. Working-class youth—many of them jobless and in crushing debt, and infuriated by racist and sexist police terror—reject the notion of dying for a rotten U.S. empire. Among polled workers under the age of 30, only 38 percent voiced a “great deal of support” for the military, down 15 percentage points from just three years ago (military.com, 3/10).
Chinese, Russian imperialists exploit U.S. debacles
The U.S. debacle in Afghanistan has handed China and Russia an opportunity to present themselves as more reliable partners in Central Asia and other regions. As most nations were forced to evacuate their embassy staff during the upheaval in Kabul, both China and Russia kept their embassies open (Foreign Policy, 9/2).
A Chinese state spokeswoman gladly poured salt in the U.S. bosses’ open wound, describing a teenager’s deadly fall from a jet as “American myth down… More and more people are awakening” (Wall Street Journal, 9/1).
While the U.S. bosses spin their wheels trying to patch their crumbling infrastructure, strengthening ties between the drug cartel known as the Taliban and Chinese imperialism will be a big boost for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has already tied more than 130 countries to the rising global powerhouse (CFR, 3/24). The more China expands its economic and military influence, the greater the risk of a big-power clash spilling into war.
Perhaps the biggest wild card in this unstable mix remains the Russian bosses, who have joined China in bashing the U.S. According to President Vladimir Putin, the U.S. achieved nothing in Afghanistan “but tragedy and loss of life” (Reuters, 9/1). Analysts believe that Biden’s abandonment of the Afghan government could embolden Russian military forces in their ongoing conflict with U.S. ally Ukraine (Atlantic Council, 8/16).
No honor among thieves—capitalist alliances waver
The so-called “Biden Doctrine,” an open rejection of “nation-building,” could spell the end of U.S. leadership of the old and faltering liberal world order. It’s also a big concern for traditional U.S. allies. The U.S. unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, said the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, was “a catastrophe for the Afghan people, for Western values and credibility and for the developing of international relations’’ (NYT, 9/4).
U.S. unreliability has led France, Italy, and Germany, among other nations, to turn to self-preservation and new affiliations. Armin Laschet, the minister-president of Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, stated that European nations needed to “lessen their dependence on the U.S.” (Washington Post, 8/31).
As the U.S. burns bridges with European leaders, it’s making overtures toward Asian nations that lie within striking distance of China. Around the same time that the suicide blast rocked the airport in Kabul, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris visited Singapore and Vietnam in a brazen move to curry favor (Yahoo News, 8/31). Even more ominously, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command recently laid out a proposal calling for construction of a missile chain among islands in Japan and the Philippines (Nikkei Asia, 4/16).
The international fight for communism will free our class
The imperialist bosses continue to show that they are driven by their need for maximum profits—at any and all costs to the working class. But workers continue to fight back! In Afghanistan today, the most victimized workers—including a number of women—have led fearless actions against the violent Taliban bosses, demanding safety even as they are beaten (CNN, 9/4).
These fighters have bravely displayed their allegiance to the working class despite the retaliation they knew they’d receive. But to end the brutality and oppression of capitalism, they must take the next step and join the international fight for communist revolution. Only by smashing the profit system can we end sexism, racism, and imperialist war. Join the PLP and fight to win!

LOS ANGELES, CA, September 7—Progressive Labor Party (PLP), families from police murder victims, and friends from here and Balitmore joined the PLP in Washington, DC for the National March Against Police Brutality. Communist leadership in the movement against police terror is bringing fighters closer to a communist outlook and PLP.
Fighters get closer to communism
At the march, a young Latin worker mentioned her family was struggling after her youngest brother returned from war with PTSD. Last March, she witnessed the Los Angeles sheriff murder her other brother. Now, our sister-in-arms and her family struggle with mental health. This is just one of many examples of how imperialist war abroad and fascism at home have struck deadly blows on this family, like so many Black, Latin, immigrant and working-class folks around the country! Meanwhile, the kkkops continue to protect this racist, capitalist system, using terror to intimidate workers from fighting back.
The woman is one of the 40 family members representing 25 young Black and Latin workers murdered by kkkops in the LA area that travelled to Washington DC to attend the reformist Mass Action protest.
She seeks mental health support and helps destigmatize mental illness in her community and with other families.  She’s also making the political connections between police funding and their function in society. She sees how their exorbitant government budgets, including direct donations from Wall Street banks and major corporations, continue to soar, as cops continue to kill workers.  
Since returning from the Mass Action Protest in DC, she’s asked comrades and supporters to help her organize a protest to demand justice for her brother and expose the funding of the police. In the Party,  we say that the capitalist class needs cops to defend their racist system. The only way to “defund” the cops is to smash the profit system with the hammer of communist revolution.
In addition to fundraising and organizing mass actions for families through the mass organization, PL’ers used communist literature as an organizing tool with the families. We have written multiple articles together and now have three families meeting in a Party club. The trip to DC was one more way in which to embed our communist analysis into the reformist mass action and “abolitionist” politics that permeate the mass organization.  
LA families unite with Antwan’s family
These murderous pigs continue to kill us and kill us and bring families together (see page 8). Two nights before we arrived in DC, multiple cops murdered Antwan Gilmore in his car after being startled awake by guns pointed in his window in the middle of the night. It turned out he was killed just outside of the hotel where we would be staying for the weekend. He was only 27 years old.
After we finished the main mass action at the “Dept. of Injustice,” multiple families from Los Angeles joined the family of Antwan Gilmore and occupied the intersection for hours, exchanging condolences, solidarity, and a fighting spirit. When the racist pigs kill, they unwittingly force families to unite coast to coast. Our goal is to win these families to our Party and be revolutionary leaders in our fight to destroy capitalism with communist revolution!
Communist influence spreads
PL’ers  from DC and Baltimore brought much-needed supplies, offered rides, and brought a communist banner. Their work for the last eight years organizing with the family of Tyrone West (killed by police in 2013) has shown us a path in this fight. It was especially important for our LA families to see comrades from the East Coast in their PLP T-shirts, distributing CHALLENGE openly (75 papers and 150 flyers) along with a banner.
One of the Mass Action leaders tried to get our East Coast PL’ers  to relocate their literature table. An LA comrade was able to talk with him, and given the fact that he knew the number of families we brought and the support we have among them, the organizer was forced to back down and allow our comrades to operate openly.  
Our leadership was illustrated in all aspects of the trip.  Although we were unsure whether our mass organization could pull it off, leadership from PLP yielded in donations to cover flights and hotel expenses. One PL’er  celebrated her birthday by asking for funds and dozens of supporters of this mass organization created art to raise money.
Another comrade gave logistical leadership—organized the tickets, hotels, and more. She was also asked by the Flores family (family of Alex Flores, murdered by LAPD in 2019) to give the English translation of their speech, which highlighted their trust in this PL’er that developed over nearly two years.
It also helped dispel some of the anti-white working-class sentiment that tends to come up inside and outside our mass organization. She is seen as a leader, comrade, and trusted confidante of many families, and her leadership role in DC has helped strengthen this.
Longhaul fight
The families appreciated the role PLP and the LA mass organization played in getting them to DC.  The families closest to the Party mentioned that it was emotional and overwhelming being on stage and speaking to so many other families and hearing their stories that were all so similar, particularly with folks being murdered while in a mental crisis. “It was difficult to speak, like I had a knot in my throat, but it was a blessing to meet with so many other families from all over the country.”  
It was especially hard for one PL’er; the next day marked the four-year Angelversary of her brother who was murdered by killer cops after being thrown in front of a moving train! We had a small ceremony for her with a few of the families we are close with that was led by the aforementioned sister whose brother was killed in front of her. It was a powerful moment. Heartbreaking and yet the pulse of the masses could be felt.  
Another mother’s class anger helped her ask the PLP to organize with families for a nationwide march. While it is true that the mother has some faith in reforms, she also says that we will likely need a revolution to really stop these killer cops.
If we are immersed with these families for the long haul, these lifelong fighters will become the gravediggers of this racist, sexist, murderous capitalist system!  It has been an honor to fight alongside these families!
PLP fights for a communist revolution. Join the fightback!

BROOKWOOD, AL—City University of New York (CUNY) students and faculty in the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) concluded a solidarity week in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, supporting 1,100 Black and white striking miners at the Warrior Met Coal Company. The miners have been striking since April 1 over outrageous safety violations, deep wage cuts, and slashed benefits, amid record coal profits. They have made history as Alabama’s longest strike.
Thousands of other miners, nearby Amazon workers, and railroad workers at CSX (see sidebar) are watching this strike. Warrior Met miners can potentially spread working-class rebellion throughout the South. PLP stands with these miners who have exposed “democracy” as a capitalist dictatorship. We are learning from the militant fightback and leadership of our new friends, as we build a mass Party for communism, where workers like the Alabama miners run the world.
Despite the lies told about communism, many miners already have an idea of communism through solidarity. In Alabama, Black and white miners and their families are experiencing a glimpse of communism, as antiracist solidarity characterizes their strike. Communism means smashing racism, sexism, imperialism, money, and nationalism. The working class can and will run society, without Warrior Met, Wall Street, or any capitalists.
Antiracist solidarity sets the tone
In Alabama, we drove into the mountains to a mine portal (entrance) that we found on a map. Miners maintain 24/7 camps at each mine portal. We were met with two contradictory responses. First came anticommunism: one miner told us, before we even spoke, to take our “agenda” and leave. We ignored the hostility and introduced ourselves to every miner. The second response set the tone for the week: solidarity. Most miners welcomed us, offering food and shade. They invited us to their picket line for anti-scab duties during shift change.  
This initial anticommunism came partially from the poisonous role played by revisionists (fake leftist groups). They had descended on the strike like parasites, shouting empty political slogans, giving wooden speeches, and acting like bosses. We were thanked for first showing up to stand alongside fellow workers and listening, learning, and helping with whatever work the strike required.
As we made friends and talked about workers' power and revolution, we picketed and volunteered with the union’s Women’s Auxiliary. These strong women workers kept the miners and families fed and supplied. Soon, we were “part of the family” and given important tasks like ferrying supplies to picket lines and union halls in the mountains.
The bosses’ government and revolution
The U.S. capitalist state (government) power in Tuscaloosa County is palpable.
The entire state apparatus is in the bosses’ pockets, from the county judge to the governor; from the police to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington; Republican Party to Democratic Party.
Court injunctions issued by the local judge forbid miners from blocking the scabs. The judge said the word scab was “offensive” and may constitute hate speech. In Alabama, a state with virtually no gun regulations, strikers are forbidden to carry firearms on the picket line.
Meanwhile, scabs and owners have openly shot at miners and run over several with their cars while police looked the other way. The state troopers told us they could do nothing if we got shot.
The miners are facing down the entire capitalist state. Warrior Met and its top Wall Street investor, BlackRock, want to crush the largest unionized mine in Alabama. PLP fights to organize workers to break the bosses’ laws that only serve the capitalists. We invite the miners to join PLP and organize to overthrow this entire capitalist state with communist revolution and build our own workers’ state.
Black workers: key to communist revolution
The bonds of comradeship between Black and white miners painted a vibrant picture of multiracial unity. Unlike the fake liberal woke garbage of identity politics, these miners show why multiracial unity is so deadly to capitalism and vital for the working class.
The bosses’ electoral circus offers nothing for workers. The Democratic Party promotes liberal fascist identity politics. They have abandoned white workers to gutter racist Donald Trump, who just had a mass rally in Alabama and never mentioned the strike.
Black miners hail from the most brutally attacked section of the working class. As one Black miner and new CHALLENGE reader confided, Black miners know enemies from friends, and our communist politics are a threat to the bosses.
 They share their sharp analysis of the bosses’ state with their white sisters and brothers. They are clear on how racism divides and hurts all workers.
Power of industrial workers
The bosses divide us to maintain their racist profit system. Warrior Met miners know better than anyone how much profits the bosses make. Coal miners, like all workers in basic industries, are closest to the heart of capitalist production. They’re also closest to shutting down the entire capitalist system. Capitalists worldwide rely on Alabama miners’ quality, high-sulfur coal for everything from construction to weapons, and rail workers at CSX transport $2 million per day of coal to the Port of Mobile. Under the leadership of industrial workers like the Warrior Met coal miners, a mass, fighting PLP can transform the coming imperialist war into a class war for workers’ power.
Meanwhile, through our unions, student groups, and mass organizations, we are gearing up to send relief to the miners. From the early days of our Party with the Hazard Miners’ Solidarity Campaign of 1962 (see CHALLENGE, 5/7/15) to today, solidarity runs deep in our Party’s history. With two dozen contacts and eight CHALLENGE subscriptions, multiracial class solidarity like this will bring a communist world even closer.

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Rail workers in antiracist solidarity with miners

The striking miners at Warrior Met Coal have much to teach the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the international working class about multiracial unity. During one political conversation, a white coal miner explained: “If I’m racist toward [a Black coworker] it gets you killed. You can’t bring any of that down there because we all depend on each other to survive.”
A Black miner agreed, “It means we all die. Besides after 12  hours, we’re all covered in coal dust and you can’t really tell anyway.”
This multiracial solidarity is having an impact on rail workers at CSX, one of the largest freight railroads east of the Mississippi River. We learned from the miners that the rail workers at CSX are angry at being overworked and are pissed off that CSX is carrying scab coal.
As soon as we learned this, PL’ers moved into action. We drafted and printed a leaflet while researching CSX rail yards. After first failing, we finally found a railroad yard. While distributing 100 leaflets, we met enthusiastic rail workers who told us “all of us are pissed! But our union is in bed with CSX and the mine owners.
 We talk about it every day but there’s no leadership.” Just like that, we gained a friendship and a CHALLENGE subscription.
PLP applauds the CSX train engineers for refusing to drive trains into mine portals, and forcing their supervisors to do it. PLP also supports the mass movement among CSX workers pushing their union misleadership to stop ALL train shipments of scab coal anywhere in the railroad system. While the miners have been bleeding Warrior Met of superprofits, one of the ways that Warrior Met is trying to starve the miners out is through moving scab coal by CSX-owned railroads to the Port of Mobile, Alabama.
Like with Warrior Met, BlackRock is a major CSX shareholder. Like the overworked miners, the bosses are overworking CSX rail workers. In recent years CSX has been exhausting rail workers with schedule changes so bad they risk workers’ safety and have cut their time off.
The U.S. bosses have always used the Southern states as a low-wage, non-union haven where the widest pay gaps between Black and white workers sharpen racism and drag down wages everywhere. Armed with communist politics, miners and rail workers united in working-class solidarity can engulf the entire South in rebellion and workers’ power!

LOS ANGELES, September 7—The worldwide multiracial, antiracist upsurge in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others was a positive development for the international working class. The mass rebellions and flurry of protests activated countless previously-passive antiracists, and became possibly the largest worldwide movement against racism in recent history. These mass actions gave revolutionary communists an enormous opportunity to expose how racism is endemic to the capitalist system, and that it can never be eliminated without the violent overthrow of the ruling class that profits from it (see front page).   
But, we must also be clear about who leads this movement—the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. The actions of the masses were quickly misled into electoral politics by groups loyal to the Big Fascists (see glossary, page 6).These Big Fascists are the dominant finance capitalist faction of the U.S. ruling class. They are also the imperialists who are trying to defend their worldwide empire against competition from Chinese and Russian imperialists.
We must attack the capitalist leadership, expose the limits of reform, and show the need for a communist revolution. In the mass movement against police violence, that means pointing out the fundamental role of the police under capitalism: to preserve the private property of the capitalist class, protect the profits they reap from the exploitation of the labor power of the working class, and terrorize workers from fighting back.
Liberal racist push pro-cop bills
In the aftermath of the rebellions, calls for “defunding (or dismantling) the police”, “reimagining policing”, and “investing in the community” emanated from the mouths of Democratic Party politicians, including some prominent leaders of liberal-faced fascism, congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Vice-President Kamala Harris, among others. These public statements were meant to quell the militancy of the movement and mislead honest antiracists into supporting now-President Joe Biden and the Democrats in the 2020 elections.
With the help of the capitalist media, an organ of class rule, the Democrats were largely successful in getting many people off the streets, and into the voting booths. CNN, MSNBC, and other liberal media had attacked the Small Fascist (see glossary, page 6) President Donald Trump and promoted Biden’s candidacy, and a few highly-publicized prosecutions of particularly grisly murders by cop terrorists.
Now, there is a competition between Republicans and Democrats over who is more pro-cop. This battle has included attacks on Republican Senators and Congresspeople for opposing president Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP), which restored funding that had been cut during the pandemic to hundreds of police departments all over the U.S., and brazen support for pro-cop Republican amendments to Biden’s $3.5 trillion federal budget plan.
When openly racist Senator Tommy Tuberville from Alabama proposed an amendment to the budget resolution requiring the “defunding” of any local government entity that has the audacity to vote to shift money from police budgets to social services, New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker got up on the Senate floor to hug Tuberville.
A “reach across the aisle” that boldly communicated Black and Latin working-class lives will never matter to ruling-class leadership. Booker thanked Tuberville for his “gift”, which he said would allow the Democratic Party to “put to bed this scurrilous accusation that” anybody in the Senate “would want to defund the police.” The Senate then voted 99-0 to adopt Tuberville’s amendment (Forbes, 8/11).   
When right-wing Missouri Senator Josh Hawley proposed a budget amendment to fund the hiring of 100,000 more cops by cities and counties, the Dems voted overwhelmingly (95-3) to adopt that one, too (Intelligencer at nymag.com, August 13). Not wanting there to be any confusion about the liberal bosses’ history of abject pro-cop advocacy, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin pointed out during debate that Hawley’s funding plan was merely an extension of a program established through 1994 legislation spearheaded by then-Senator Biden and signed into law under former President Bill Clinton (Forbes, 8/11).
Old ‘Jim Crow’ Biden
The Republican-Democratic unanimity in these votes harkened back to Biden’s love affair with two powerful segregationist Senators, Democrat James O. Eastland, and Republican Strom Thurmond. Biden’s sordid history of support for racist cop terror and mass incarceration goes back decades (NY Times, 6/5/19).
Starting in 1984, Biden, in concert with his two openly racist pals, engineered three major federal crime bills that both led to large increases in a disproportionately Black and Latin federal jail population, and encouraged states to tighten the police state in their own jurisdictions. These laws included the infamous “100 to one” disparity in the amount of powder compared to crack cocaine sufficient to trigger mandatory minimum sentences, which led to much longer federal jail sentences for predominately Black defendants. Other bills legalized “civil asset forfeiture,” allowing cop and prosecutor seizures of cash, cars, etc. before a criminal conviction, and increased federal penalties for drug possession (Vox, 6/20/19).
The liberal bosses’ disgusting racism on a national level has been mirrored in state and local legislative bodies. For example, in California, Democrats hold a supermajority of seats in both the State Senate and Assembly, allowing them to pass legislation without any Republican support, and have held the governorship for a decade. To buy off the hundreds of thousands in California who hit the streets after the murder of George Floyd, some “progressive” Democrats introduced “police reform” bills.
If they had passed, they would have at best played a minor role in reining in cop terror. Examples of changes: the bills would have authorized cutting back on tear gas and rubber bullets, allowing more access to police records, and “decertification” of brutal cops fired from one department who try to get hired as cops elsewhere. But, “under the pressure of intense lobbying by” police unions, Democratic legislators “publically sympathetic to the cause but privately circumspect” blocked any of the bills from being voted on (LA Times, 9/2/20). These changes do not change the fundamental oppressive relationship of the police to the working class.
In 2020, amid mass demonstrations against police murders in Los Angeles and a great deal of hoopla about “reimagining policing” by some Democratic council people here, the Council voted to transfer some funds from the LAPD to social services and mental health “initiatives.”
All that changed this year.
The Council ratified Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposed three percent increase in LAPD funding, voting 15-0 to give part of LA’s pandemic-rescue-plan funds to the cops. (LA Times, 5/21) The unanimous vote included Councilperson Nithya Raman, a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” (read: Fascist).
The liberal bosses are attempting to build back some legitimacy in their racist institutions. Posturing as friends of antiracists is part of their move as warmakers. The bosses are in desperate need of a population willing to fight in the coming war against their rivals China and Russia (see editorial, page 2).   
The capitalist class will never allow its front-line defenders to be defunded or abolished. A communist revolution will abolish the theft of wage slavery, a crime for which the capitalists will be found guilty as charged.