The government of hope has arrived…We are going to develop capitalism in Colombia.
--Gustavo Petro in a June 19 victory speech
The election of misleader Gustavo Petro as president of Colombia is a desperate move by the country’s capitalist rulers to pacify millions of angry workers with empty promises of a social “transformation.” On the heels of a humiliating Summit of the Americas (see CHALLENGE, June 22), his victory reflects the U.S. bosses’ decline in their old imperialist backyard. But while every electoral circus is a lose-lose proposition for the working class, liberals and fake leftists like Petro are especially dangerous. Reforms by “anti-establishment” politicians will never meet workers’ needs. Liberal democracy is a dictatorship of the capitalist ruling class; the game is rigged to serve their interests. Capitalism everywhere is built on racism, sexism, exploitation, and violence. Only communist revolution, led by the international Progressive Labor Party, can transform society by smashing the vicious profit system and creating a world run by and for the working class. From Colombia to Haiti, from Mexico to Pakistan, workers will continue to rise up against poverty, state terror, gangster impunity, and racist inequality and need a Party like PLP to smash this system once and for all.
Racist inequality and state terror
Latin America has the highest level of economic inequality in the world, and Colombia has the worst income inequality and the least social mobility in Latin America (statista.com; Foreign Affairs, 6/19). Forty percent of the country’s population lives in poverty; 20 percent of young adults are jobless. The income gap has widened in the pandemic, especially in rural areas that are home to large indigenous and Black neighborhoods.
Enraged by the breakdown of public services, tax hikes, a plan to privatize health care, and more than five decades of civil war, hundreds of thousands of workers and students have mounted mass demonstrations, culminating in last summer’s “national strike.” At least 46 protesters were killed by Colombia’s kkkops (New York Times, 6/19). It was Petro’s job to steer the angriest workers with the least to lose—women, young people, the most impoverished sections of the working class, and Black and indigenous workers—off the streets and back into dead-end electoral politics. He did it well enough to beat Rodolfo Hernandez, a Trump-type businessman who praised Adolf Hitler and declared that Venezuelan women were “a factory for making poor children” (New York Times, 6/19). In a sign of workers’ disgust with the status quo, the old guard’s candidate, Federico Gutierrez, failed to make the runoff.
Guerrilla capitalist
Petro came of age as an urban “rebel” who refused to rock the capitalist boat. At age 17 he joined M-19, whose members “defined themselves as more reformist than revolutionary, closer to the teachings of South American liberation hero Simon Bolivar than those of Marx” (Americas Quarterly, 10/31/17). After 12 years as a noncombatant guerrilla and 16 months in jail, Petro jumped inside the bosses’ tent with both feet. Over the last three decades, mostly in Colombia’s Congress and Senate, this self-styled “socialist” has served as a willing capitalist stooge, moving steadily to the right as he got closer to real power.
From 2012 to 2015, as mayor of Bogotá, Petro fired hundreds of bus drivers, cut aid to the disabled, and closed community kitchens. Those who dared to demonstrate were bashed by Petro’s allies in the unions and brutalized by Petro’s police. Fitch, the U.S. credit agency, praised the mayor’s “conservative debt policy” (finance.yahoo.com, 6/22)—capitalist code for austerity attacks on workers.
In Petro’s latest presidential campaign, his third try, he promised big changes: land reforms, tax reforms, pension reforms, guaranteed employment, subsidies for single mothers, free higher education for all. Playing to reactionary identity politics, he recruited a Black woman as his running mate for vice president. But Petro was careful not to go too far or to alienate Colombia’s wealthy landowning elite. He promised not to expropriate private property and danced around the issue of abortion rights. To expand his voter base, he embraced allies of ex-president Alvaro Uribe, the fascist butcher who gave free rein to murderous paramilitaries and drug traffickers, and whose military slaughtered thousands of civilians and dressed them as guerrillas to earn bonuses (americasquarterly.org, 1/10). A booster of clean energy, Petro said he would ban new oil projects but leave existing ones intact—enabling oil and gas producers to keep drilling through 2026, when the great reformer has promised to step down after one term (finance.yahoo.com, 6/20).
Meanwhile, splits in the Colombian ruling class—and the nature of capitalism—will place severe limits on Petro’s agenda. His minority party can be outvoted in Congress, and the country’s constitutional courts are run by judges tied to the big landowners. Colombia has a narrow tax base and is awash in debt, and Petro will need the corrupt private pension funds to keep buying the bonds that keep the government afloat. Like pathetic Jim Crow Joe Biden, Petro will struggle to push through even weak reforms. According to a political science professor at Bogota’s Rosario University, he will “have to abandon certain parts of this program….[H]e does not have a majority to implement everything he has promised” (NYT, 6/20). Or as Bruce Mac Master, president of the National Business Association of Colombia, put it: “Petro is an economist. He understands economic issues” (Financial Times, 6/19).
Capitalism is built around maximum profit for the few at the expense of the many. History shows that any crumbs the bosses give us will be small and short-lived—and taken back in their inevitable next crisis.
Playing both sides
Colombia has long been the most reliable U.S. ally in Latin America and is now the region’s second largest recipient, after Mexico, of U.S. arms (visualcapitalist.com, 5/9). Beginning in the 1960s under President John F. Kennedy, and escalating in the Dirty War waged by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the U.S. promoted state terror in Colombia, Guatemala, and El Salvador. According to Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, Colombia’s former minister of foreign affairs, Washington “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades” (Huffington Post, 3/24/14). To this day, the U.S. “war on drugs” has done nothing to constrain Colombia’s cocaine industry. But with the CIA running point, the U.S. played a central role in funding the fascist paramilitaries and death squads that targeted trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights monitors, journalists, and other suspected "subversives” (Progressive, June 1998).
During the Cold War, when U.S. imperialism dominated the atmosphere, it sponsored coups against elected leaders who threatened its interests, from Guatemala to Brazil to Chile to Argentina. But with the rise of imperialist arch-rival China, the game has changed. Deals must be cut with politicians the U.S. might once have assassinated. With the latest wave of reformist “pink tide” misleaders now in place in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, and Mexico, and Lula da Silva mounting a strong comeback campaign in Brazil, the U.S. needs to hold on to its foothold in Colombia to slow the spread of Chinese influence in the hemisphere.
Like any good opportunist, Petro is playing both sides. While recognizing China as a strategic partner in trade and finance, he declared that the relationship between Colombia and the U.S. was “of great importance…and the historic closeness of this relationship must continue” (El Espectador, 2/6). Petro might not have been the first choice for U.S. finance capital, but the biggest bosses seem to think they can work with him. After the president-elect strongly hinted that he would name a “moderate”—possibly an ex-central banker—as his finance minister, Morgan Stanley, the multinational banking giant, heaved a sigh of relief: “In the near term, we expect the administration to look to broaden its coalition and do not foresee disruptive policy proposals” (Financial Times, 6/19). In other words, the rich will keep getting richer while Colombia’s workers sink more deeply into poverty.
Fight for communism!
The election of class traitors like Gustavo Petro can’t change the fundamental conflict between the capitalist bosses and the international working class. The only good boss is a dead one! Workers’ anger won’t be contained by a few limited reforms. In the end, only the destruction of capitalism can resolve these contradictions. Only communism can create the world we need. Onward, working class! Join PLP!
CHICAGO, Jun 15—On a 100-degree afternoon, 100 students, parents, and workers marched through the south side Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago in the fifth annual “We Walk For Her” march organized to bring awareness to the Black and Latin women and girls that have gone missing because of sexist violence. This deadly sexism and racism is part and parcel of a system based on profit and exploitation.
Militant students led the action, from chants to marshaling the march. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members marched with dozens of workers and distributed fliers and CHALLENGE. Workers were receptive to our message of communist revolution and a worker-run society as being the only solution to the countless attacks that the international working class faces daily. Many took the Party’s literature and engaged in deep discussions in the blazing heat.
A system flooded with racist and sexist violence
Chicago has tragically been home to an increasing number of murders of women workers, the majority of them Black. These deaths have spanned from the South to West sides where the most vulnerable Black and brown working-class people live. Chicago’s long history of racist discrimination has facilitated the unsolved and forgotten fate of our working-class sisters.
The capitalist kkkops and kourts, far from protecting women workers, are some of the worst abusers, guilty of terrorizing, incarcerating, and murdering them! Having Lori Lightfoot as the city’s first Black gay woman mayor has done nothing to alter this state-sponsored violence, and no politician ever will. The bosses make billions of dollars in profits from racist and sexist super exploitation, and the role of the state is to manage and ensure that. They are not neutral, nor do they have the interests of the working class at heart.
As capitalism spirals into chaos, it has become a free for all, with violence against workers on the rise, and Black women taking the brunt. In May, a 36-year old Black woman was found chained up in an abandoned building after screaming in order to get the neighbors attention (Block Club Chicago, 5/23). Also in May, a teenager from Chicago was found by hotel workers in a hotel in Tuscaloosa, Alabama after she had been sex-trafficked (WVTM-13, 5/23). In both instances, it was not politicians, the kkkops or capitalists with many institutions at their disposal that found these Black women; it was other workers who stood up and did something.
Black trans women workers have faced relentless attacks in Chicago, often times going missing and later found to be murdered by men who let the dehumanizing alienation and sexism abundant under the profit system to determine their actions.
A system that perpetuates violence and inequality against women and young girls should not exist. The political and economic system of capitalism is designed to do just that! In 2020, there were over 200,000 women under the age of 21 who were reported missing (Dame, 1/10).
Black women account for less than 15 percent of the U.S. population but more than one third of all missing women. The racist and sexist foundation of capitalism in the U.S. would have it no other way.
Lessons from Claudia Jones, Black communist woman leader
In 1949, revolutionary Black communist Claudia Jones wrote and published the pamphlet An End To The Neglect Of The Problems Of The Negro Woman! where she laid forward the argument that the struggles faced by Black women workers had been not only ignored obviously by the capitalists, but also by the left and the Communist Party USA. This racist and sexist indifference occurred despite the fact that Black women were a super-exploited labor force and gave outsized but often unrecognized leadership to the international working-class movement. Her sharp insight back then guides how we build the struggle today.
The leadership of Black women workers is key, and it holds true today when we witness their fearless fightback during the 2020 antiracist uprisings, to the strikes in healthcare currently erupting in Zimbabwe and in textile factories in Haiti. Black women workers regularly face the most brutal exploitation and oppression under capitalism, and for this reason are a section of the working class best suited to be leaders in the fight for revolution.
PLP is organizing to build this new egalitarian communist society, but it will not happen until many more working-class people decide to rise up and break the chains of capitalism. Bold leadership is essential to fighting back, but only communism is able to smash sexist exploitation and violence at their root and establish an egalitarian society. The international PLP invites workers here in Chicago and everywhere else to join us in building this fight!
LANDOVER, MARYLAND, June 15—“The bosses can’t profit when the workers unite, shut it down and shut it tight” rang out in front of the Transdev Metro Access site, located on Hubbard Road in suburban Maryland. Transit workers at Metro Access garages are fighting for a living wage and decent benefits as they prepare to strike. These frontline workers drove disabled workers to doctors’ appointments, emergency rooms and other essential trips during the COVID pandemic and continue to serve despite their lower wages and benefits compared to other transit workers.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends at Metro are involved in the day to day organizing and help provide leadership to the workers. But PL’ers are also talking with drivers to think beyond the immediate contract. We are building a force to intensify the antiracist class struggle and march towards a communist revolution, a society run by workers serving other workers instead of profit-hungry bosses.
PLP believes that strikes can be turned into schools for communism, helping to build workers’ class consciousness, to help our class brothers and sisters recognize their true labor power. However, strikes on their own will never be enough to secure worker’s future as reforms are temporary. Workers must free themselves from the treadmill of reform to smash capitalism once and for all. We, the working class, have the power to build the world we want our families to live in free from racist and sexist inequality, low wages, and racist, mediocre health care. But, this world is only possible through a class conscious antiracist, antisexist, revolutionary movement for communism led by PLP.
Reformism and union sellouts derail revolutionary potential
As negotiations drag on, the workers are getting ready to step up the action. ATU 689 union workers turned out in force today to support these workers with retirees, circulator, and Metro drivers joining Metro Access workers against the Transdev bosses. These are the same bosses who fought against the striking Cinderbed transit operators for 84 days in Virginia before settling (see CHALLENGE, 12/4/2019). Circulator drivers recently showed the way with a three-day strike to get a better contract (see CHALLENGE, 4/27).
The bosses have cited “short-staffing,” caused by considerable turnover rates, to squeeze the Metro Access workers further. For over half a year, they have been forced to work grueling overtime schedules – up to 58 hours weekly – to make up for poor retention rates (atulocal689.org, 2/7). As subcontracted workers, they are grossly underpaid in comparison to workers at WMATA (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority). Many of them, unsurprisingly, are Black and Latin.
According to strike organizers, they are seeking a 20-30 percent increase in overall wages for pay parity with other paratransit workers in the region, better healthcare plans, expanded vacation, and a seat at the table when management discusses rule and policy changes. But perhaps the most important demand is for the drivers to become part of WMATA, which would immediately give them access to better wages and benefits.
Union bosses only exist to negotiate the terms of exploitation for workers. Union bosses have sent strikers back to work with pitiful contracts billed as “victories,” and even “successful” strikes do not go farther than getting larger crumbs for workers. Under capitalism reforms workers mightily fought for are easily stripped away. Moreover, bosses need racism, sexism, unemployment, and imperialist war like living organisms need oxygen. Thus, no sweeping progressive reforms will eliminate these evils because they form the bedrock of the capitalist system.
Put class struggle on the right track towards comunism
When one worker described their lack of health insurance and oppressive unscheduled late pickups required by management, a comrade responded, “Wow, we really need a revolution; check out our communist newspaper CHALLENGE.
The worker took the paper and we looked over the latest newsletter on negotiations together. Some retired workers eagerly took the paper to discuss the racist Buffalo murders and think about how to get younger transit workers engaged in the struggle. Only a communist world run by workers for the benefit of all can truly free workers from this violent system that routinely sacrifices human life and the environment on the altar of profits. The PLP needs all of these workers to join the broad struggle for a communist world!
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MLA caucus: Capitalism is dictatorship for workers, democracy for bosses
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- 30 June 2022 792 hits
NEW JERSEY/NEW YORK CITY, June 4—The Radical Caucus of the MLA (Modern Languages Association) organized a session, “’Democracy’ in a Time of War,” in recognition of the fact that workers worldwide are becoming more aware of the deadly nature of capitalist democracy and open to ideas of communist revolution. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) emphasized and supported the most internationalist, pro-working class ideas of this discussion, while putting forward the idea that a workers’ communist party is the only way to advance the cause of workers’ democracy. This session took place as part of the “Keywords project,” which regularly brings MLA people together to critically examine concepts important to antiracist- and anti-capitalist struggle.
break mental vs manual labor—all workers use philosophy
Three progressive scholars briefly analyzed the term from different points of view—how Karl Marx thought about democracy, what W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about “abolition democracy” in Black Reconstruction, and how the term “democracy” is weaponized in U.S. war propaganda today. PLP was there with our MLA Radical Caucus friends as co-organizers and co-questioners. Our base at the event included professors, a K-12 teacher, a group from the PSC/CUNY left, a philosopher of art in Berlin, and a comrade who called this in from the tow-truck he was driving on Route 80: “Most working people I know are totally cynical about democracy. They, in a completely organic way, find it to be a tool of elites.” This was one of the most significant statements made at the entire conference, and it set the stage for PLP to help put forward the call for organizing a party and not leaving these conversations in the realm of the purely academic.
The first presenter said that Marx doesn’t discuss democracy much but does focus on the closely related keywords freedom and equality, “key features of capital’s self-image” and ideology. Marx sees freedom dialectically: more of humanity is formally free under capitalism than in serfdom or slavery—which is why progressives including Marx fought against slavery and for universal suffrage. Liberal democracy does not liberate workers, the speaker continued, because capital first “frees” or separates workers from their own means of production. A “Marxist conception of democracy” must attack the impersonal economic domination of capital, which operates as Marx often said “behind our backs,” behind the appearances of political democracy in the state. But, the speaker concluded, our project of workers’ liberation from capitalism cannot avoid the terms freedom, equality, and democracy: “We must struggle to supersede capital from within capital” and reclaim the promise of democracy from its capitalist distortion and for the immense majority.
Du Bois, for his part, decried the loss of power by workers freed from slavery as Northern capitalists and former enslavers took all political power from them and smashed the Reconstruction of the South. The presenter said that what Du Bois revealed about Northern capital’s racist power grab in the South was the start of U.S. imperialist racism moving to do the same thing to workers globally, across the “Global Color Line.” “Abolition democracy” to Du Bois meant that any real democracy was impossible without the abolition of “property relations,” that is, really, capitalism, though he didn’t join the Communist Party till near the end of his life.
He ascribed the destruction of workers’ power in Reconstruction to bourgeois panic at the idea of the freed enslaved people and the proletariat banding together with real power. So much for democracy when it threatens the right to own and exploit labor. The direct, personal power of the enslaver was replaced “behind our backs'' by the economic domination of the owner of capital.
Workers need democratic centralism
The lively Chat brought up Mao Zedong’s theory of “New Democracy,” or “People’s Democracy,” which PLP sees as one of the roots of revisionism (abandoning communism) in the Chinese Communist Party, combated in the Cultural Revolution by views taken from the 1871 Paris Commune.
Democratic centralism needs to be explained in greater depth. What is the dialectic between mass participation and the local, on the one hand, and synthesizing leadership at the center, on the other? Here’s an excerpt from a key PL document, “For Communist Economics and Communist Power”
For the “democratic” part, one meaning is that there should be full discussion of a proposal before a decision is made. Another meaning is that decisions should be made in the interests of the working class, and in a way that not only will benefit the working class, but also train more and more working-class people to contribute to the running of the society….The word "centralist" means that after a decision is made, everyone should work to carry it out, whether or not they agreed with the decision. all centralism is for the purpose of building a society free of privilege and exploitation, based on "from each according to his ability, to each according to need." and developing the consciousness of the people to be able to implement that.
See www.plp.org for the full version. There is much writing about this which we did not take up here.
We ended by noting that armed imperialist democracy turning the world into its battlefield is a living refutation of the lies and illusions widespread about democracy under capitalism. The presenter on Du Bois spoke for us all, sick of the slaughter in Yemen and Ukraine and Buffalo and Uvalde, when he said: “When people in the Global South hear the word democracy, they shudder, because they know what is about to be dropped on them is not leaflets.” The work of questioning brought us together in a powerful way. It strengthened us for the fights ahead as democracy shades into fascism.
The discussion maybe brought some friends closer to seeing the need to join and build PLP. When campuses return in-person, Radical Caucus members can carry some of these insights into work on campus, such as teach-ins on the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, where “democracy” means Javelins and Stingers and heavy artillery. A communist democracy means the working class running society based on need and commitment.
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Pakistan: workers caught between multiple crises of capitalism
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- 30 June 2022 1093 hits
The working class in Pakistan is under attack. Inflation is rising out of control. The May inflation rate was officially over 13 percent and unofficially prices on key staples are rising at five to ten times that rate. Capitalism is utterly failing the working class, the crisis in Pakistan cannot be fixed, more war and fascism are on the horizon and the only way to combat it is by building the fight for communist revolution.We in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are trying to give the working class leadership and courage to fight against all these evils that hold back the struggle for an international communist revolution.
The rise in inflation is being triggered around the world by the breakdown in capitalism. Beyond the official inflation rate, the prices of basic food staples in Pakistan are skyrocketing: tomatoes are up 125 percent, onions are up over 60 percent as is butter and cooking oil (Pakistan Today, 5/2). When basic necessities rise, the working class, which pays a huge part of their income toward staples, suffers inflation at an extremely high rate. In Pakistan the unofficial inflation rate is likely around 40 percent. More than 50 percent of the total population of Pakistan is living below the poverty line and it is increasing every day. The unemployment rate in Pakistan has reached 25-30 percent. According to a report to the Senate Standing Committee on Planning and Development, 40 percent of Pakistan's youth are currently unemployed even though many of them hold professional degrees!
U.S. and Chinese bosses squeeze the working class in Pakistan
On top of this crisis the big imperialists are squeezing the working class even more. The Pakistani bosses are in danger of defaulting on their international debt. Both the U.S. and Chinese imperialists told the Pakistani bosses to get a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To appease the IMF, the government raised the price of fuel by over 33 percent and the IMF is still not satisfied and wants the price of electricity to go up by 50 percent (Financial Times, 6/3).
Within the Pakistani ruling class competing factions are nearly at war with each other and the ruling faction is terrorizing the working class to contain fightback against the worsening economic conditions and shut down the competing faction of bosses. Recently the government arrested hundreds of supporters of former president Imran Khan’s PTI party and banned Khan’s planned march on the capital (Reuters, 5/24).
This is leading to a division in the rank and file of the military establishment, civil bureaucracy and judiciary. The bosses are spreading fascism to curb the pro-working-class forces along with the supporters of Khan. Both factions of bosses are using different prejudices to keep the working class fighting with each other in the name of sectarianism, nationalism, racism and so-called political parties. Whenever the working class tries to forge a united struggle against exploitation and fascism the bosses use politicians to divide the working class on the basis of personality cults and other backward ideas.
The working class in Pakistan is caught in several inevitable crises of capitalism at once. Inflation was rising under the Khan government and has continued under the new bosses. The Chinese and U.S. bosses are competing to exploit Pakistan’s strategic position and their nuclear arsenal while bleeding the working class dry. The Pakistani bosses are at each other’s throats and are building violent racist and fascist movements to mobilize and control the working class. Reforms or better politicians won’t solve these problems. Only communist revolution and a society based on workers’ power will.
Workers must unite to smash capitalism
The working class is in search of basic food and shelter from severe weather conditions, but pro-capitalist misleaders are turning them against each other for their own interests. The working class in Pakistan is getting poorer everyday. They are deprived of basic necessities and can be prosecuted if they chant any slogan against the atrocities they are facing every day at work or at home. There are two groups of bosses fighting over the bones of the working class but both of them are against the working class. As for the middle class, it has for the most part been opportunist and has aligned themselves with both groups and supported imperialist interests by remaining in one party of capitalists or the other. They are also misleading the unions to serve the interest of the capitalist class. In the unions it is their duty to not allow poor workers to come forward and lead the real struggle for a classless society.
The capitalists are controlling our lives; they decide our working conditions, wages and our future. Their economic policies are spreading poverty, exploitation, oppression, injustice and inequality. Their social policies are based on “divide and rule” which is why they are able to keep the working class deprived of every right to live happily. They are using fundamentalism, nationalism, sexism, sectarianism, racism and terrorism to keep workers silent.
PL’ers in Pakistan are helping to break the chains of our workers oppression link by link. We hope to lead our class brothers and sisters on the long march towards communist revolution. Join us!
