The United States president exercises government power on a day-to-day basis to keep the blood-sucking, war-making U.S. profit system running. This job requires a committee of people, a Cabinet, that assists the president with the constant oversight and adjustment of executive government activity: imperialist war, law enforcement, government finances, diplomacy, preserving capitalism, and more.
In analyzing the role of presidents and prime ministers of their day, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In 1848 when capitalist classes in Europe were on the rise, they were relatively unified and focused on completing their drives to push monarchs from power and suppress early efforts of workers to organize fightback and revolution.
In 2020, Marx’s description fits the Chinese executive power under Xi Jinping, as rising Chinese capitalism prepares for world war to challenge declining U.S. imperialism (see editorial, page 2).
The U.S. ruling class, on the other hand, is fractured, contributing to the decline of U.S. capitalism’s world power in relation to a rising China. The Donald Trump presidency marked an acceleration of that decline as the “modern executive” was seized by a gang of open bandits with no loyalty to “the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”  
Compared to Trump’s team of outsiders, Biden’s crew is the ultimate collection of insiders and his choices in personnel point to an attempt to return to the smoothly-delivered imperialist and anti-worker policies of the Barack Obama era. Biden’s cynical and manipulative move to install the “most diverse cabinet ever” is a thin veil that seeks to cover the house of horrors the main imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class has in store for workers everywhere.
The managers of an empire in free fall
Joe Biden, President: He announced that military spending will expand, especially in the areas of cyberwarfare and AI (artificial intelligence) for a more mechanized and efficient surveillance and slaughter of our class overseas, combat roles for transgender workers, and updated equipment for the National Guard who is called in to suppress serious domestic rebellion (Stars and Stripes, 9/10). In 1988, Biden co-authored the infamous “100-to-1” law that targeted Black and Latin workers with mandatory 10-year sentences for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine.  For nearly half a century, Biden has played a lead role in building racism, sexism, and war while serving the interests of finance capital. In 1994, he decried “predators on our streets” and led the charge for Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill, which doubled the U.S. prison population and caged generations of Black and Latin workers. Biden’s slogan sounded a lot like Trump: “Lock the SOB’s up!” (NYT, 6/25/19).
Kamala Harris, first woman Vice
President: In this period of growing fascism and approaching war Harris will continue the long and sordid tradition of Black-led racist assaults on Black workers and sexist assaults on women that are the hallmarks of liberalism. As district attorney in San Francisco and later as California’s state attorney general, Top Cop Kamala “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions” (theguardian.com, 1/31/19). The cops’ racial profiling of Black workers flourished on her watch. As an attorney general, she criminalized parents of truant children, rather than giving them support..
Tony Blinken, Secretary of State: “...A job in which he will try to coalesce skeptical international partners into a new competition with China, according to people close to the process” (NYT, 11/24). Blinken was Biden’s chief advisor when he cast his 2002 ballot in support of imperialist assault on Iraq as well as a vocal proponent in the Obama administration to launch war in Libya.
Janet Yellen, first woman Treasury Secretary: As Chair of the Federal Reserve under Obama, she crafted the 2008 bailouts and subsequent ‘quantitative easing’ that showered billionaires with cash and left millions to languish in a ‘jobless recovery.’ Expect her to continue Trump-style stimulus bribes to pacify workers while the pandemic rages and to attack Social Security and Medicare, as she has advocated since 2012 (HuffPost, 9/13; NYT, 12/1).
Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser: This Obama-Era top aide to Hillary Clinton has recently dedicated himself to formulating “U.S. Foreign Policy for the Middle Class: A Perspective from Nebraska” a Carnegie Endowment study which seeks to solve the problem of re-energizing mass support for the U.S. military (NYT, 11/22).
Avril Haines, first woman Director of National Intelligence: Architect of Obama-era drone bombing program that has killed untold numbers of non-combatants across the Middle East and Africa.
Alejandro Mayorkas, first Latin Director of Homeland Security: Author of the  Obama-era DACA program whose false promises drew millions of undocumented youth into providing personal information in the hopes of legal residency. Oversaw the construction of an archipelago of detention centers as Obama’s deputy and innovator in implementation of family separation (vox.com, 6/14). Right-hand man to Deporter-in-Chief Obama as deputy-secretary of Department of Homeland security.
Pocket-Lining warmakers line up to join Jim Crow Joe
Biden’s repeated promises to restore U.S. leadership are backed up by a phalanx of money-grubbing Democratic Party operatives who alternate between government jobs and lucrative positions at defense-industry investment and lobbying firms like WestExec and Pine Island Capital. Past Democratic power brokers like Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt rub elbows with up-and-coming Biden picks like Anthony Blinken and Avril Haines and enrich themselves at the heart of the U.S. imperialist war machine (NYT, 11/28). Michele Flournoy, front-runner to become the first-ever woman Secretary of Defense, earned compensation of $440,000 in 2018 and 2019 from Booz Allen Hamilton, engineering consultants to U.S. imperialism.
This kind of brazen double-dealing at the heart of the empire is an outrage to workers and Trump was able to mobilize his base to propel him to the White House because Hillary Clinton represented more of the same.
Identity politics: different faces, same crime
Racist attacks were embodied by Obama himself, who commanded his Black-manager-led Justice Department to do nothing to punish the kkkops who strangled Eric Garner and shot Michael Brown. If the wave of Black and Latin mayors who were put in charge during the racist decay and gentrification of U.S. cities since the 1970s were not enough to convince you, Obama himself is the best lesson of what “Black faces in high places” gets us under capitalism  - Black-led racism.
The same goes for sexism. The rulers use women as the faces to deliver on sexist policies. Now-disgraced Bill Clinton picked the first ever woman Secretary of State in Madeleine Albright, who famously declared that the deaths of 500,000 children (half of whom were girls) in U.S. imperialism’s 1990s-era bombing and sanctions campaign against Iraq was “worth the price.”  In the same role under Obama, Hillary Clinton was the face of a crumbling US-led world order, which sowed chaos across the Middle East. The ensuing refugee crisis is the largest since World War II—70 million by 2018 and has exposed untold millions of women to increased chances of physical and sexual assault (World Health Organization, 2018).
Workers and youth, looking for an example of multiracial and antisexist leadership, should not look to the rogues’ gallery of Biden’s cabinet. We must instead spark and join struggles against capitalism’s attacks on our class, from racist police murder to school budget cuts, layoffs and more. Class struggle means that we build new leadership from the ground up. We can guarantee victory of our anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles by keeping our eye on the prize: growth of the Progressive Labor Party today to lead communist revolution tomorrow.

CHICAGO, November 24—Over 35 multiracial workers and community members braved the wind and the rain today to protest the bosses’ racist proposal to close Mercy Hospital. Members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) spread revolutionary politics to help build the struggle against this racist attack. While distributing CHALLENGE and making conversation with workers, PLP asserted that a health industry under capitalism will always sacrifice workers’ lives for profit.
Workers around the world are facing another deadly surge in coronavirus cases, with thousands dying daily. Despite this, the billion-dollar Trinity Health system is looking to shut down this safety-net hospital whose patients are 72 percent Black and Latin.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the racist and sexist bosses want to close a hospital during a pandemic; they choose their profits over workers’ lives every day. That’s the logic of capitalism. But we should be angry over these attacks and organize a mass, militant fightback.
The international PLP is committed not just to keeping Mercy Hospital open, but building a communist revolution to destroy this racist capitalist system that has no regard for our lives. We fight for a world where workers run society collectively in our own interests, and where pandemics, racist police terror, unemployment and evictions are relics of the past.
We are who we need!
What had been promoted as a rally and car caravan by various unions was little more than a press conference. Religious leaders and politicians blew a lot of hot air for the media under a protected canopy while workers huddled in the rain.
Lifelong misleader Jesse Jackson Sr never one to refuse a photo opportunity – gave his standard hollow speech, then jumped in his truck to drive away. Likely he didn’t want to be called out on his opportunism, like when antiracist rebels in Ferguson, Missouri ran him out of town after he tried to quash the fightback there! As workers we must not be blinded by the bosses’ manipulation of identity politics and race. A Black manager of oppression is still a manager of oppression.
While the misleaders babbled on, PLP members talked with other workers about keeping Mercy open. We distributed copies of CHALLENGE newspaper, along with a Party flyer specifically about Mercy and the pandemic.
Workers agreed that the fight needed to grow, not just to include more healthcare workers, but also other workers and students. Many agreed that an attack on any worker is an attack on all workers.
Those of us in PLP here have been organizing to make this a bigger campaign in our other mass organizations and workplaces. We have given speeches, gotten signatures for petitions, and testified at the state review board that ultimately will decide whether the hospital can close.
We build this fight because ultimately it’s the masses of workers and students that move society forward, not politicians. Throughout this pandemic, it’s been the workers in hospitals, transport, and other industries who have saved workers’ lives and kept society from collapsing. Why do we need to accept living under these capitalist bosses’ awful system when we clearly have the interest and ability to run a far better society on our own?
Capitalist “healthcare” will never meet workers’ needs
Right on Trinity Health website’s main page, there’s a link to a video where CEO Mike Slubowski states, “eliminating racism is essential to our Mission.” Meanwhile, his company threatens to close a hospital in a city where the majority of Covid-19 deaths have been Black and Latin workers.
In fact, the bosses have treated hospitals and clinics as places of profit for decades. This has led to a major reduction in overall hospital beds and staff (Truthout, 3/31). In mostly Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods and rural areas, hospitals were closing at a rate of almost 30 per year prior to the pandemic (Bloomberg, 8/21/18). The bosses’ racist cost-cutting guaranteed that when disaster eventually struck, the system was overwhelmed and workers died unnecessarily.
Under capitalism, racist and sexist inequalities in workers’ health prevail . Racist and sexist unemployment and toxic pollution lead to average life expectancies that are at least four years less for Black workers than white workers in the U.S. (The Balance, 3/8/19).
These racist inequalities serve as the tip of the spear to then attack and drag down the standard of health for all workers. They can only be fought by mass, multiracial, working-class unity, ultimately with the goal of crushing capitalism and replacing it with a communist society that’s organized to put our needs first.
A revolutionary shot in the arm
As the pandemic rages on, the struggle over Mercy Hospital is critical. If we workers can keep it open, it’ll be a shot in the arm to lead more class struggle to improve all workers’ lives. And as communists in PLP, we can win more workers to understanding that this system will never serve our needs, and that it will take a revolution to create one that will. Save Mercy Hospital! Join PLP!

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, December 2—The brutal murder-by-cop of Javier Ordoñez was the last straw. The video of their initial interaction, which was widely shared on social media, shows Javier Ordoñez pleading "please, no more" as cops repeatedly electrocuted him with a stun gun. He later died of head injuries while in police custody.
Outraged youth attacked the police and the CAI (Immediate Attention Command), and destroyed everything in their path, in various sectors of the city, some took the opportunity to loot, vandalize, and destroy. The police shot indiscriminately, killing 11 civilians in the capital Bogotá and three in Soacha and in other cities in the country. Not unlike the protests following the murder of George Floyd in the U.S., the rebellion spread throughout the nation here.
In Colombia, a corrupt paramilitary narco political class has governed for more than 60 years, where all kinds of atrocities are committed by the rulers and the bourgeois class. Everything goes unpunished and is getting worse every day. Capitalism is in crisis and is not capable of solving the minimum basic conditions for the survival of the working class. To maintain itself, capitalism uses all its vicious tools, typical of the system: sexism, racism, individualism, persecution, imprisonment, murder, etc. These conditions for our class in Colombia and in the world are terribly similar.
The U.S. is the champion of racism, individualism, sexism, persecution, torture, imprisonment, murder among other barbarities, especially against Black, immigrant, and Latin workers throughout its history. Lately, we have seen the frequent killings of many Black workers by the police going unpunished by the state. The Colombian police, reproducing the same patterns of behavior of the U.S. bosses, are systematically applying brute force, torture, massacres, and disappearances of all kinds of leaders and of young people in many parts of the country. The government of President Iván Duque is a faithful student of the former president, former Senator Álvaro Uribe Vélez, a pioneer of all barbarities known to all for many decades. Uribe has yet to pay for any of his murderous crimes against the working class.
The police are professionals in the art of infiltrating protests. They use many of their members to unleash chaos and to delegitimize any lawful action, so the state can prosecute. This is how high-ranking police officers speak of the connection of young people with groups outside the law such as the ELN (urban guerrillas), the FARC (rural guerrillas). These cops are laying a smoke screen to unleash the persecution and prosecution against these young fighters. The “indignant” mayor of Bogotá and the general population ask for reforms to the police. Then the defense minister and the congress, to appease the growing anger, agree to endlessly debate the matter.
Indigenous workers  mobilized against the massacres, and on Tuesday the workers' union confederations, teachers, students, and social groups also mobilized in various parts of the country, for possible labor and pension reform, among other demands.
The events of September 9, the day of Javier’s murder, which occurred after the death of Javier Ordoñez, were not  prepared, organized, well thought, but rather occurred out of indignation, repudiation,  and spontaneity. Spontaneity, a phenomenon that is not subject to any preparation or direction, is driven by reacting to heat of the moment and circumstances. Spontaneity does not give time to think, to discuss:is it anti-Marxist and anti-dialectical? Thus it can lead to political mistakes.
The Progressive Labor Party does not bet on this type of phenomenon that does not have any political and ideological sharpness, that has no future. Everything that is not prepared in advance, that is not subject to analysis, to discussion, will be doomed to failure, and this is what happened. To advance the working class must carefully prepare its political acts.

CHICAGO, December 2—We are currently seeing workers fight back by cooperating in a mass way to take on the racist capitalist bosses. Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are helping build a citywide antiracist support network, because the only defense we can count on is a unified and fighting working class.
We’re seeing more organizations come together to fight against the system. The newly-created Chicago Protester Defense Committee looks to unify different organizations and initiatives within Chicago so that we can all come together as a united front from below. Some of our efforts include raising funds to help those arrested make bail, supply and food drives for unhoused workers, building social media campaigns, and arranging legal representation.
We want to fight in defense of our fellow workers, specifically those facing felony charges and racist and sexist violence while protesting against the state terror committed by Mayor Lori Lightcop and her gang, the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The goal is to meet regularly and put in the collective work in order to advance the protection and strength of our class. As the capitalists increase their racist and sexist attacks on us and get closer to war with China and/or Russia, we will need a strengthened working class to build a revolutionary, communist movement to get rid of these parasites once and for all.
Bring the antiracist fight
Throughout most of this year we’ve been reminded just how vicious and ruthless the kkkops can be when the bosses’ power is threatened. We’ve seen them smash cameras, phones, and eyeglasses, confiscate bikes and backpacks, and regularly call protestors by racist and sexist names. These racist thugs often turn these encounters into violent situations for the protestors through taunts, shoves, and pushes which quickly turn into brutal hits with batons, strikes to the head, kicking and dragging protestors through the streets, even sometimes using chemical agents.
On November 19, there was a lawsuit filed against the city bosses on behalf of 60 people who joined protests over this summer. They were fighting to bring national attention against the racist murder of Black workers like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade. The 17-count suit alleges violations of protesters' so-called “constitutional” rights and names Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown, along with 20 officers (USA Today, 11/19).
From the end of May to early June, there were at least 3,000 arrests in Chicago alone (BlockClub Chicago, 6/9). Many arrests have turned into felony charges, including federal cases. The cops have targeted antiracist fighters such as Mohawk Johnson, a Black artist/activist who was arrested at a protest in August and remains on house arrest with eight aggravated assault charges. The bosses try to make an example out of our class sisters and brothers, instilling fear into the rest of us so that we’re hesitant to fight against their state violence.
This is by no means limited to the United States. The bosses in France recently tried to ram through a new law that would criminalize workers for filming cops. Thankfully, workers and students there fought back in the streets and on the job and the bosses were forced to back down (Reuters, 11/30).
The state is never neutral—fight for communism
In the class struggle between the working class and the capitalists, we must never expect the courts and cops to be neutral. They all serve the role of defending and upholding this racist and sexist capitalist state. The bosses’ whole apparatus of “law and order” above all protects property and profits, over workers’ lives.
Those of us in PLP are ready to fight to build this defense network, as it is through the mass movement that we grasp our power to protect ourselves as a class. But ultimately, our collective liberation and justice will only be served when we build a mass Party capable of crushing this capitalist system and replacing it with a worker-led communist one.