World military situation mirrors 1930s
Foreign Affairs, 1/26–World War II began as a trio of loosely connected contests for primacy in key regions stretching from Europe to the Asia-Pacific—contests that eventually climaxed and coalesced in globally consuming ways. The history…illustrates uncomfortable parallels to the situation Washington currently confronts…with wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East already raging, and ties between revisionist states becoming more pronounced, all it would take is a clash in the contested western Pacific to bring about another awful scenario—one in which intense, interrelated regional struggles overwhelm the international system and create a crisis of global security unlike anything since 1945. A world at risk could become a world at war.
The parallels between this earlier era and the present are striking. Today, as in the 1930s, the international system is facing three sharp regional challenges…Russia and China are drawing closer through their “no limits” strategic partnership, which features arms sales, deepening defense-technological cooperation, and displays of geopolitical solidarity such as military exercises in global hot spots…the Sino-Russian partnership has pacified what was once the world’s most militarized border and enabled both countries to focus on their contests with Washington and its friends.
Preparing soldiers to fight in nuclear war
Business Insider, 1/26–Russian scientists have created a new simulator to train Moscow's troops on how to operate in the event of a nuclear explosion…The simulator… is set to be used in military exercises to prepare Russian ground forces for post-explosion combat missions, the state-run Tass news agency reported on Tuesday. State media said the simulator would also instruct chemical, biological, and radiation reconnaissance teams on how to find the epicenter and determine the characteristics of a blast.
"The purpose of the model is to simulate what a nuclear strike looks like — the shock effect, flash of light and mushroom cloud of a ground-based nuclear explosion," the description of the simulator's patent says, according to Tass.
The US is working toward upgrading its silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, building new bombers, and developing ballistic-missile submarines. In October, the Pentagon announced that it would pursue a new variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, an air-launched weapon to be designated the B61-13, pending approval from lawmakers.
Farmers aim to shut down Paris
France24, 1/28–Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin on Sunday tasked law enforcement officials with putting into place "extensive security measures" to prevent farmers from blocking Paris area airports or its Rungis market and “to prohibit any entry into Paris”. The leaders of two of France's largest farming unions said Saturday that members from the regions around Paris "will begin an indefinite siege of the capital" on Monday. "All the major roads leading to the capital will be occupied by farmers," they said, announcing their intention to blockade the massive Rungis wholesale food market south of the capital. French farmers are furious at what they say is a squeeze on purchase prices for produce by supermarket and industrial buyers, as well as complex environmental regulations. But the last straw for many was the phasing-out of a tax break on diesel fuel for farm equipment.
West African nations move further away from French control
Al Jazeera, 1/28–Three military-led West African nations have announced their immediate withdrawal from regional bloc ECOWAS, accusing the body of becoming a threat to its members. Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso “decide in complete sovereignty on the immediate withdrawal” from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), read a joint statement published on Sunday. ECOWAS “under the influence of foreign powers, betraying its founding principles, has become a threat to its member states and its population”, read the statement…“There is bad faith within this organization,” lamented Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, Niger’s army-appointed prime minister…The three countries have cut military ties with France, the former colonial power. France once had a strong presence across the Sahel, but announced the withdrawal of its troops from the three countries after the coups.
Felt ‘urgency and emotional rawness’
I was impressed by the seriousness of the comrades at the recent cadre school. The school was proof the Party is developing young, working-class, Black and Latin, women leadership to lead the working class to power.
The discussions were advanced, focused, and honest. People shared their questions and disagreements, and we struggled for everyone to be heard. People came from different walks of life, but we were united in our commitment to study the world and fight for a communist future.
We contemplated some of the most complicated issues we face in the class struggle, like the need to confront nationalism and fight for internationalism, the need to fight directly for communism, the necessity of armed struggle and revolutionary violence to defeat the capitalist class once and for all.
You could feel the urgency and emotional rawness in the voices of the comrades in the room: the fate of the international working class is on our shoulders! I came away feeling fortified to apply myself more resolutely to struggling in my neighborhood to win my friends and neighbors to the Progressive Labor Party.
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This is what liberal fascism looks like: 5-year-old Jean Carlos killed in Chicago’s concentration camp
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- 21 January 2024 791 hits
CHICAGO, December 23 – Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here are putting the racist liberal bosses on blast for their role in murdering our working-class siblings. Today and earlier in the week we have shared communist solidarity outside a mass shelter for migrant workers and families on the city’s near west side, where a five-year-old boy named Jean Carlos Martinez Rivero fell ill and died on December 17th.
As communist revolutionaries, we openly declare that a racist capitalist system that cannot guarantee the safety of children doesn’t deserve to exist and needs to be destroyed. While liberal politicians like Mayor Brandon Johnson offer empty words of condolences and point blame at their political rivals for stoking chaos, none of them have any real solutions for the genocides unleashed on our class. Their position under the system keeps them beholden to capitalism’s need for profit and war.
The only solution to genocide and war, to this sick system murdering children from Chicago to Gaza, is to build a revolutionary class struggle under the leadership of the mass PLP. When we say justice for Jean Carlos and so many others, we mean building the fight for an egalitarian communist world!
In the scene with communist solidarity
The thing most tragic about the death of Jean Carlos is that it was almost certainly avoidable. He and his family had been staying at the former warehouse turned shelter for barely three weeks, herded like cattle next to hundreds of others in a public health catastrophe. Over 2,000 migrant workers and youth were cramped at the same wretched site. In addition to Jean Carlos, four other children and two adults from the shelter were hospitalized in the same week (WTTW, 12/21).
Community organizers quickly organized a memorial vigil outside the shelter for Jean Carlos on the Wednesday after his death. PLP members attended, bringing not just our sympathy, medicine, and some clothes to donate but also our righteous class anger. While everyone present found some comfort in grieving collectively, many workers felt inspired by our sign that read “Justice for Jean Carlos – A system that can’t guarantee the safety of children doesn’t deserve to exist.” Many came up to take pictures, get a copy of CHALLENGE, exchange contact information, and share stories of their struggles under the system.
Today we returned to the same site with an even larger contingent of comrades to continue expressing our solidarity with workers all over the world. We brought pitchers full of warm champurrado to share, along with more CHALLENGEs, medicine, and winter clothing. PLP members took to the bullhorn and gave speeches in Spanish that placed the blame squarely on the bosses for so much chaos. We quickly distributed close to 200 CHALLENGEs and made more contacts.
In a situation of seemingly inescapable desperation and disorder, we point out not only the limits but also the potential. As one comrade shared in his speech, “We are a small party of workers and students. We don’t have many resources and we haven’t taken state power yet from the bosses. But what we do have is our communist ideas and internationalism, which are powerful and will one day create a revolution to build a better world.”
The capitalists’ “solutions” are killing us
The train wreck of a response from the Chicago city bosses to tens of thousands of migrant workers and youth arriving over the past year and a half demonstrates not only their treachery to our class but also the bankruptcy of their so-called “solutions.”
“Progressive” but still capitalist politicians like Brandon Johnson can call out the blatant racism of gutter fascists like Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Florida’s Ron DeSantis for sending busloads of workers from the southern U.S. states. However, his criticism conveniently leaves out the role that his faction of the U.S. ruling class, the Big Fascist wing, has historically played in destabilizing national economies around the world through their control of international finance capital and command of the world’s largest military.
These Big Fascist bosses (mostly Democratic Party “liberal” hacks) position themselves as the more “humane” alternative even as their aid can never be more than a Band-Aid on a mortal wound. Even if shelter conditions were to dramatically improve, there is little to no path for most migrant workers to integrate themselves more widely into a capitalist system in crisis. The status quo of the system will continue to relegate them into positions of instability and as a reserve labor pool for the bosses to super-exploit for higher profits.
We must contrast such notions of capitalism’s “charity” with our vision for a worker-run communist society. Beyond just the working class receiving what we need based on our collective control of distribution, we would be free of the alienation and waste of potential that exists under capitalism. Billions of workers would finally be able to contribute towards the organization and functioning of society.
Planting the seeds for an egalitarian world
Such a reality might seem far off, but we can see the seeds of a more communist world planted in the current struggle. Countless workers in the city have volunteered their time in recent months -- from cooks to carpenters to student doctors -- not because they expect to be paid, but rather because they understand their common existence with workers forced to migrate by capitalism.
PLP will continue to fight alongside workers wherever we are to minimize the immediate harm of this racist system while stressing the need to overthrow it entirely. In the memory of Jean Carlos and so many others, we deserve nothing less.
We want to make it clear that we can win to a [communist] perspective 99 percent of the forces who hold nationalist ideas.
NEW YORK, January 14—Over the long weekend, 25 members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated in a cadre school that exposed nationalism and advanced the need for an internationalist communist movement organized by the PLP. Our collective discussions will help us better understand the world, steel ourselves to fight back and grow PLP to liberate our class from capitalism. Our conclusion: we need communism to do so.
Participants included recent college graduates, a high school student, and workers with several different occupations (teachers, fitness trainers, a paraprofessional, a construction worker, a journalist, a lash tech, a social worker, a stay-at-home dad, and a retired doctor, just to name a few). The cadre school was multi-racial and multi-gendered, with leadership provided by younger members, several of whom are Black workers.
1. Where we are at
In the first workshop of the weekend, we discussed the state of the world. We read how 2023 was chock full of tragedies and capitalist horrors for the international working class, yet it was also brimming with fightback and brought with it more opportunities to build PLP and a working-class movement to smash this genocidal system.
We discussed how hard it can be to combat the cynicism and apathy that many workers and youth feel with the capitalist world as it is. Still, to not fight back is to resign ourselves to defeat. By building a communist movement with a long-term outlook, we know that one day we will turn these tragedies into their opposite. One worker shared how despite being one of the few Latino workers on his job, he is committed to fighting racist ideas and ignorance around him. This commitment to fighting back is exactly the sort of resistance with a long-term outlook the cadre school aimed to foster.
2. What we need to fight
In our second workshop, we discussed the dangers of all forms of nationalism, even so-called revolutionary nationalism. We read about specific case studies in Ukraine, Palestine, the Horn of Africa, and Israel to see how nationalism hurts workers in those regions of the world. We broke into smaller groups to focus on these case studies and then shared what we learned with one another.
As the Israeli ruling class carries out a genocide against workers in Palestine, Palestinian bosses have nothing to offer our class siblings but profiteering and pipedreams. The Palestinian ruling class, which only consists of a handful of rich families, has historically fled to neighboring nations to invest in new commercial ventures and rebuild their businesses.
In the Horn of Africa, imperialists and their lackeys have driven workers to famine through ongoing wars and power struggles. In Ukraine, the construction of a national identity and state has done nothing but give workers the option to die allying themselves with bloodsoaked US imperialists over bloodsoaked Russian imperialists.
One youth expressed his desire to join the army to defend workers in Ukraine against Russian imperialism. This prompted one of the most lively discussions of the weekend. While some friends thought it important to warn of the dangers of war, several PL’ers chimed in to explain that no imperialist war would benefit workers. If we are enlisting in the military, it must be to help turn soldiers’ guns around. The only war the working class needs is class war!
3. Where we are going
To finish out the weekend, our final workshop discussed the need for communism and critiqued the rise of identity politics. We discussed the ways that Black capitalists, women capitalists, and queer capitalists have only continued the racism and exploitation of workers around the world. We highlighted PLP’s line that we can and must move directly from capitalism to communism and asked the group whether such dramatic change is indeed possible.
In response, one PL’er shared her family’s history of fighting in wars in Eritrea. Although the struggle was ultimately nationalist despite having some Marxist-Leninist elements, her point was about how much can change in 30 years. If we fight for communism, rather than a nationalist revolution, and build our Party, imagine the amount of real change workers can achieve in even a short time!
Confidence in the working class
The cadre school showed glimmers of what is possible with communist leadership and the type of society we hope to build after a revolution. All of us took turns cooking and cleaning up after meals, and participants took turns with childcare. One member pointed out how exhausting capitalism can be and raised the need to “give one another grace” as we fight to learn and learn to fight.
One veteran comrade called this “the most united cadre school” he has been a part of. It was an example of how we can win millions to a communist understanding of the world through study and struggle. As one participant said, “ordinary people can do extraordinary things.” We have a better world to win. Join us.
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East Africa: Hell to Zionist ideology, long live working-class unity
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- 21 January 2024 830 hits
EAST AFRICA, January 12—On this day when East Africa celebrates the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a meeting of young students and teachers to discuss the genocide in Gaza and how we can fight against this imperialist oppression that is killing innocent children and women and disrupting the day-to-day life of millions of people.
Many participants who are religious Christians were defending Israel’s killing of Palestinians because the Bible says Israel is a holy state given to the Jews by God. We presented the real history behind this war as the product of capitalist expansion, and we exposed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s role in continuing the Nakba of 1948 when the October 7th ethnic cleansing campaign to decimate Palestinians began. We also exposed the religious ideology as a tool of capitalists to maintain their interests and disunite workers.
We watched different revolutionary movies about why Zanzibar had a bloody revolution in 1964 and about Marxist Thomas Sankara (the Upright Man), former president of Burkina Faso. Under his leadership, the rate of literacy there increased from 13 percent in 1983 to 73 percent in 1987. We discussed that only by making a revolution with a mass working-class movement can we win the struggle against all false ideas and the humiliation by imperialists against other states and societies in the world. If we build a strong movement led by PLP to fight for a communist society we can win our struggle and form one society in the world with no racism, gender inequality, or nationalist fighting as is happening in Gaza and Sudan. Only by achieving communism can we build a new international peace.
