On January 16, when Canadian and Chinese capitalist bosses signed a trade agreement to retaliate against U.S. tariffs, they exposed the decay of U.S. imperialism, the surging global volatility on the road to world war, and the rising fascism faced by the working class.  At the World Economic Forum, millionaire banker and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney bluntly noted that the old U.S.-led “rules-based order is fading.”

Though no two nations are more economically tied than the U.S. than Canada, there is no honor among thieves. As the international crisis of capitalism intensifies, old alliances will be cast aside. With everything up for grabs, the junior rulers of the world–from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Arctic, the latest arena for global rivalry–must try to guess which imperialist power gives them the best chance to survive. 

Workers know no borders and have nothing to gain by choosing one set of parasitic capitalists over another. There are no good bosses. When their profits are at stake, every one of them will sacrifice millions of our class sisters and brothers. In their anti-tariff protests in Europe and across the U.S.-Canada border, workers around the world are organizing and fighting back. They are showing us each day that WE can lead society. But only the communist politics of Progressive Labor Party–infused into struggles on the job, in our schools, in the streets, and in the military–can empower our class to turn these trade wars, and the shooting wars to come, into communist revolution. 

“Donroe” Doctrine deepens U.S. imperialist decline

The snatch-and-go bandits led by Trump are imploding the foundations of the post-World War II U.S. empire. Rather than take on arch-rival China and project U.S. power throughout East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Trump’s “Donroe” Doctrine puts the Americas, from Venezuela to Greenland and Canada, in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism (Read about attacks on Cuba on page 5). Meanwhile, long-term U.S. alliances with Europe, Japan, India, and Australia are in jeopardy. In defiance of Trump’s threats, Canada agreed to slash tariffs on a small but symbolic number of electric vehicles manufactured in China. Across the other U.S. border, 20 percent of cars sold in Mexico come from China as well (Mexico News Daily, 1/15). Trump’s strong-man bluster has pushed these and other allies into the waiting arms of the fiercest U.S. imperialist rival.  In a similar vein, amid Trump’s ongoing threats to take over Greenland, the European imperialists convened an emergency meeting in Brussels to consider counter-tariffs against the U.S. and expanded partnerships with China (Channel News Asia, 2/2).

It would be a grave mistake to see these developments as dictated by the whims of a deranged and increasingly unhinged maniac. Trump’s Donroe Doctrine represents the interests of the Small Fascist, Fortress America section of the U.S. ruling class. These gutter racists came to power after decades of failures, corruption, and brutality from the Big Fascist liberals of finance capital. Fascism does not spring from the impulses of a madman. It grows when the entire capitalist system is in crisis. All we are now witnessing, from ICE murders and abductions to the frantic scrambling of global alliances, reflect this crisis. The origin of today’s mass deportation, hyper-militarized surveillance state traces back a quarter-century to 9/11. Every president since, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, has done his part in the rise of U.S. fascism.  While Trump may be making a qualitative leap, we can’t save our class by voting his party out. The Democrats’ next great liberal hope will have no choice but to pursue the same lethal trajectory.  Only masses of organized workers, led by communist politics, can stop the bosses in their tracks. And only a communist revolution can destroy capitalism and fascism for all time. 

The Arctic: new imperialist battlefield

As the world warms from capitalist-caused climate change,  the commercial and military significance of two Arctic passageways, the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage, makes them objects of desire for Canada, the U.S., Russia, and China. In 1996, spurred by the already apparent melting of the polar ice caps, these rivals joined with several Scandinavian countries to form the Arctic Council, a vehicle to manage the competition over the region’s vast reserves of oil, coal, and rare earth minerals. But three decades later, such cooperative arrangements are now relics of the past.

In 2019, the U.S. Defense Department published its “Arctic Strategy” to limit Chinese and Russian leverage in the region. Trump’s threats to move into Greenland and even Canada are simply more belligerent expressions of these long-term strategic goals.  Beginning  in 2023 under Biden, U.S. and NATO troops engaged in military exercises to deploy “a combat-credible force to enhance the power in NATO’s northern flank” (Newsweek, February 2023). Last month, as the old coalition splintered, NATO members Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, and Norway felt compelled to send troops to Greenland to counter Trump’s threatened aggression. While communist revolution won’t immediately stem the tide of global warming, it’s safe to say that a world run by workers won’t be turning melting ice caps into an opportunity for further degradation of the planet–or for profit-driven war. 

Down with all bosses and their borders!

The popular anti-Trump slogan–“Canada is Not For Sale”-- belies the fact that the racist Canadian bosses have been brutalizing workers for centuries.  Even as it celebrates the “world’s longest undefended border,” Canada  “incarcerates thousands of people on immigration-related grounds every year,” with longer and harsher detentions for Black workers (CBC, 6/17/21). 

Canada has a long, ugly history of racist terror against Indigenous workers, whose children were forcibly removed from their families and interned in government schools. Indigenous women and girls were targeted for racist, sexist violence. These atrocities are not relics of the distant past. A 2017 analysis found that Indigenous workers were more than 10 times more likely to be shot and killed by police (CTV News). “Despite making up just five percent of Canada’s population, 30 percent of the country’s prisoners are Indigenous. Across the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta – regions that have higher populations of Indigenous people – that number rises to 54 percent” (Al Jazeera, March 2021). 

For the workers of the world, there is no good choice between the imperialist, viciously racist nationalism of Trump’s U.S. and the “underdog” nationalism of Canada and other junior capitalist powers. Whether delivered with Trump’s truculent buffoonery or Carney’s slickness, nationalism is a deadly trap. It aims to bind workers to “their” ruling class, all the way to the concentration camps and killing fields, to war and fascism and genocide.  PLP organizes around internationalism, the idea that workers worldwide must unite to defeat this racist, sexist profit system. Only by smashing all bosses and borders can we build a world that workers deserve.

CHICAGO, January 27—“What do we want? ICE out! When do we want it? Now!” 100 Veterans Administration employees and community members gathered outside Jesse Brown VA Medical Center on a sunny, 10-degree day in a demonstration of solidarity against the ICE/CBP murder of Alex Pretti (see box for definitions). Alex Pretti was a nurse at the Minneapolis VA and was killed by ICE/CBP agents when he stepped in to help another worker. But he is not the only one killed by ICE/CBP – these fascist thugs have murdered Renee Good, Keith Porter, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, not to mention the 32 workers who have died in ICE custody in 2025 (Guardian, 1/4/26).  Capitalism in decline leads to fascism and fascism needs a scapegoat. The ruling class is scapegoating immigrants to enact violence against all Black and brown workers.

Racism is key to capitalism and the bosses will always resort to racist state violence to keep us divided and living in fear. 

The rally was organized by several unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), SEIU and NNU. Speakers included nurses, veterans, and medical residents. Some pushed for removing ICE from neighborhoods and spoke on BP’s yearslong ongoing violence (WTTW, 1/27/26).  While the good-heartedness of the speakers was clear, the politics needed sharpening—nobody mentioned racism or capitalism.  Luckily comrades from Progressive Labor Party were there and distributed more than 50 copies of CHALLENGE, bringing communist ideas to the masses. 

The rally ended with a march around the VA medical center.  Of the three rallies held this year at the Chicago VA in response to attacks on federal workers, this was the most well attended and the most militant, and it was great to identify more coworkers to build the Party.

Organizing on the job

Workers, including Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members, also organized a moment of silence for Pretti at the VA. The hospital bosses were asked to have a moment of silence over the loudspeaker, which is the standard when a veteran dies in the hospital. They refused even this small show of support and one of the hospital bosses even said that the moment of silence wasn’t allowed. But workers don’t give up just because the bosses say so. It did take more time to organize on the five units compared to getting a moment over the loudspeaker, but it was worth it. Every supervising physician and medical resident working that day in the hospital was told about it. Many brought their teams, including their medical students. Nursing managers told all the nurses in their units. Working collectively and building up our numbers increased our strength and safety. 

The workers leading the moment of silence at their individual units made a collective decision to tell the attendees that the bosses had not allowed the moment of silence over the loudspeaker, but we had organized one anyway. People who attended said how glad they were that it had happened.  This is just a small example of bosses being unnecessary. Workers decided a moment of silence was important and made it happen despite the bosses’ saying no. Everything that matters, like healthcare, teaching, industry, only happens because the working class makes it happen. Workers can only rely on each other and never the bosses.

These small acts of defiance build our bonds with friends and coworkers and build our organizing skills for the next fight, always with the goal of building towards a communist revolution. We need to keep organizing, struggling with workers to build a mass movement, and be ready when ICE/CBP returns to Chicago. We have already discussed how to keep our patients and coworkers safe from ICE/CBP at work.  We learned from and took inspiration from Minneapolis healthcare workers who have shared their experiences with ICE in their hospitals. Another struggle for federal workers will be within the AFGE union. AFGE represents both VA employees and CBP which means that Alex Pretti was murdered by two fellow union members!  Workers are already starting to organize to push AFGE to stop representing CBP.  

Racist liberal politicians are not the answer to state violence

Liberal politicians will try to convince us that voting for them is the solution to ICE/CBP terror. And what are their solutions? Body cameras, banning the ICE gestapo from wearing masks, and judicial warrants (CNBC, 2/4) According to the liberals, if these demands are met, terrorizing workers, deporting them, separating families and letting workers die in ICE custody is fine! 
Another “solution” the liberals will tell us is a win for the working class is better training for ICE. How could better training for fascist thugs ever help the working class? Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, the ICE agents that murdered Pretti, joined ICE in 2018 and 2014, respectively (ProPublica, 2/1). Jonathan Ross, who murdered Renee Good, has been with ICE for 10 years (NBC News, 1/9). The only class that benefits from better trained ICE killers is the ruling class. 

The last month has shown that workers know that the system is rotten. PLP will keep doing the work of building relationships with workers, and building a mass movement for a communist revolution – the only way that the working class will have an egalitarian society free of police terror, poverty, racism, sexism, and borders. Join us!

In 2026, as was the case over 500 hundreds years ago, Black workers remain the most brutally attacked section of our class. Now as then, they must help take the lead in building an international communist movement. U.S. history is a chronicle of genocide, slavery, segregation, and enduring racist oppression. Black workers have less invested in the capitalist status quo. Since racism infects all relations within the profit system, they stand to hold fewer illusions about “justice” or “democracy” under the bosses’ dictatorship. 

Though not immune to the false hope of reformism, Black workers are better equipped to understand its limits. As the young rebels in Ferguson declared: “The whole damn system has to go!” And so: Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their basis for class consciousness—for class solidarity with all workers and class hatred of all capitalist rulers. 

Our Party has developed the understanding that racism and capitalism are bound together. One cannot exist without the other. Only an international communist revolution can liberate the world’s working class from the ravages of racist imperialism. Only a united, multiracial working class can win the fight for communism. Black workers are central to that struggle. 

Workers in general are degraded by capitalism. As a class, we have nothing to lose but our chains. Latin, Muslim, Asian, and women workers all suffer under special oppression by the U.S. ruling class. From the U.S. and Mexico to Europe and the Middle East, immigrant workers—most of them dark-skinned—are terrorized and scapegoated at the fault lines of rising fascism. 

Anti-Black racism is a global epidemic. Black workers have an especially urgent case to revolt and smash the bosses’ state. Throughout U.S. history, from the time they were brought from Africa by force as a pool of no-wage labor, they have served at the forefront of every working-class movement: the war against slavery, the struggle for civil rights, the mass strikes against the industrial bosses, the fights for jobs and housing and decent schools, and led the fight in Vietnam against the U.S. military. Wherever workers have confronted the profit system and its parasites, Black workers have stood at the front lines. 

Wherever workers have confronted the profit system and its parasites, Black workers have stood at the front lines. 

Black workers have always fought back

Workers everywhere have always fought back against the bosses, with Black workers frequently leading the way. This tradition dates to the time of enslaved workers running away, many of whom fled to the mountains. They created self-sufficient communities and defended themselves with armed violence, as necessary. 

In 1739, the Stono Rebellion involved as many as 60 enslaved workers in the British colony of South Carolina. The colony’s legislature was so terrified that it placed a costly 10-year moratorium on the import of Black slaves from Africa. The bosses’ property and lives were at risk. 

In the 1790s, the Haitian Revolution defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s army and repelled British and Spanish invaders, abolishing slavery in the richest colony in the Caribbean. These Black liberators spread fear among enslavers throughout the Western Hemisphere. They inspired hundreds of rebellions throughout the Americas, all of them violent.

In 1831, Nat Turner led more than 60 slaves and Black freedmen in blazing a bloody trail through Virginia. The rebels did away with Turner’s master and the master’s family, then terrorized the owners of 15 other plantations. Turner inspired John Brown, who led a multiracial group in an 1859 attack on a federal arsenal in West Virginia. The raid on Harpers Ferry sparked the American Civil War to end chattel slavery. 
Over the two centuries preceding the Civil War, historians have documented more than 250 uprisings involving 10 slaves or more on U.S. territory alone.

In the Caribbean, rebellions like the First Maroon War in Jamaica (1728-1741) grew into all-out military combat. After the Maroons repeatedly defeated British forces, the imperialists were forced to sign a peace treaty.

In 1760, an even larger rebellion in Jamaica called Tacky’s War became “a massive shock to the imperial system.” Black workers from the North and newly freed slaves from the South played a vital role in the U.S. Civil War (see “Marx and Du Bois,” p. 18). In the aftermath, the victorious Union capitalists—Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie—relied on racism to keep workers divided.

In the North, mainly white and immigrant workers waged fierce battles against steel, railroad, and coal industrialists. In the South, mainly Black workers—often led by women like Ida B. Wells, a former slave—fought against lynching and other racist abuses throughout the Jim Crow era. 
Between 1898 and 1902, rising U.S. imperialism defeated Spain and then attacked Filipino independence fighters in the Philippine-American War.

The Filipino warriors, many of whom identified as Black, made antiracist, class-conscious appeals to Black U.S. soldiers. As one wrote, “Why don’t you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you, that took a mother’s child and sold it?" In a foreshadowing of the Vietnam War, many Black U.S. soldiers deserted.

Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their role in the U.S. military, where they represent 17 percent of active-duty enlisted men and 30 percent of active-duty enlisted women. They will play a major part in the next global war—and in turning an imperialist war for profit into a class war for communist revolution. Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their disproportionate numbers in basic U.S. industry and transportation. Within major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas, Black workers are concentrated in mass transit, health care, education, the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx. They retain the potential to shut down major population centers and critical infrastructure.
If our class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership are essential for another fundamental reason. Our class cannot possibly destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership.

In the shadow of the fascist ICE crackdown throughout the U.S., about 30 workers and students from Northern and Southern California joined together for our annual Progressive Labor Party (PLP) political retreat. New and veteran members of the Party and their base came together to discuss political theory, its relationship to practice in this period of growing fascism and looming imperialist war, and ways to build the Party and advance the fight for communist revolution.

Why capitalism can't be fixed

The first session of the weekend focused on political eonomy, a document that demonstrates that capitalism cannot be reformed to meet the needs of the workers because it is structurally based on commodity production for profit, not the well-being of workers. Party members created presentations linking theory from Karl Marx’s Capital to current-day examples. They pointed out that workers are forced to sell their labor in order to survive. They explained that only human labor can add value to raw materials. Workers’ labor is thus the source of capitalists’ “surplus value.” 

We discussed how capitalists compete with each other to make as much profit as possible in order to beat out their competitors. When technology advances, individual capitalists lay off workers in order to use this change to produce commodities more cheaply than other capitalists. But soon all competing capitalists are using the new technology. And each capitalist projects that they are going to take a bigger share of the market than they will. The presenters pointed out that these basic elements of capitalism make it inherently unstable, causing cycles of overproduction, economic crisis, and mass hardship for workers. To maintain profits, capitalists attack wages, expand repression, consolidate monopolies, engage in speculation, and turn to war and fascism.

What is our role in fighting fascism?

Our Black and brown class siblings have long been terrorized by the naked brutality of this racist capitalist system. The events in Minneapolis prove without a shadow of a doubt that we are moving toward full-blown fascism. This means that the bosses are no longer able to use democracy to hide the brutality of their system, leading to heightened racist attacks on Black, Latin, and immigrant workers—and, ultimately, attacks on the entire working class. Protesting fascist ICE raids has become a death sentence for white workers, as it has always been for Black and brown workers. 

The second session focused on how our Party must adapt to a prolonged period of fascism and severe capitalist crisis, as well as impending imperialist wars. We discussed why and how we should have a long-term approach to working in mass organizations. 

The third session focused on the dead end of electoral politics. Even the most “progressive” politicians such as Zohran Mamdani, AOC,  and Bernie Sanders cannot give workers what we need. Their role is to squash revolutionary sentiment. The liberals’ role is to convince the working class that capitalism can be reformed. But we in the PLP know that it isn’t just about government-run grocery stores or free child care. The root of all workers’ misery is capitalism, which cannot be voted out, but must be uprooted and consigned to the graveyard of history. 

In the final session members of the Party and their base discussed plans for our respective areas in Northern and Southern California. May Day committees were formed so that we can plan large marches and celebrations. Our retreat was brought to a close on a very positive note when two of the workers who participated announced they wanted to join PLP. All in all, this was a very positive event for our Party, with our growth proving that our confidence in the working class to rise to this historic occasion is well-placed and with many comrades recommitting to the struggle for a communist world!