Three recent events exposed the current crisis of U.S. capitalism. On December 19, the Chinese capitalist bosses accused the U.S. of a “serious military provocation” a week after a U.S. Sir Force B-52 bomber—capable of carrying long-range nuclear weapons—few within two miles of a disputed artificial island built by China in the South China Sea.
On December 21, in Afghanistan, a geopolitical linchpin for both the U.S. and Russia, six U.S. troops serving with NATO were killed by a suicide bomber in the Bagram district—an area made infamous by the torture and murders committed by U.S. military personnel at the district prison.
In Texas, the same day as the Bagram incident, a grand jury declined to indict any cops or jail guards in connection with the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman found dead in her cell last summer after an arrest for allegedly failing to use her car’s turn signal.
As a high-stakes competition intensifies among the biggest imperialist rivals, the capitalist rulers of the U.S., Russia, and China, the international working class is caught in the middle. In their efforts to terrorize and divide workers in the U.S., the bosses have unleashed their racist killer cops. Meanwhile, the same U.S. bosses are faced with increasingly difficult—and deadly—choices as they struggle to prop up their declining oil empire in the Middle East.
More than ever, the international working class needs unity under the banner of the Progressive Labor Party. PLP is the only party that represents all workers, from the undocumented in New York to those fighting the UN’s imperialist occupation of Haiti to the dozens buried December 20 by a landslide of recklessly dumped construction waste in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers to smash racist police state terror, racist borders and imperialist war with communist revolution.
Oil and Perpetual War
Ten thousand NATO troops are still stationed in Afghanistan. (NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a U.S. imperialist-led international military alliance.) Twelve years after the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq, more than 3,000 U.S. ground troops, backed by civilian-killing air and drone strikes, remain there. As the U.S. rulers escalate their war against the regional imperialist Islamic State (ISIS), growing numbers of U.S. special operations forces are being deployed in northern Syria. It is more and more apparent that more troops will soon be on their way—sent to kill their class sisters and brothers and to be killed, all to protect the bosses’ profits from cheaply extracted oil.
As gutter racist Donald Trump calls for shutting down mosques and banning all Muslim workers from entering the U.S., other presidential candidates are clashing over how to counter the ISIS threat in Syria. Liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton and mainstream Republicans Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie want to escalate U.S. involvement—and help rebels fighting the Iran-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad—by establishing a no-fly zone. Phony “socialist” Democrat Bernie Sanders and right-wing Republican Ted Cruz stand opposed, arguing that regime change in Syria could have unintended consequences that might “worsen U.S. national security interests,” as Cruz put it (Bloomberg.com, 12/20/15).
In reality, the disagreement is strictly tactical. None of these candidates question U.S. imperialism or its role in the global refugee crisis. None of them would dream of advocating that the U.S. abandon the trillions invested in the region by ExxonMobil, a flagship of the main finance capital wing of U.S. capitalism. All of them recognize the strategic imperative recently outlined by Stratfor (12/15/15), a global intelligence firm:
[T]he Middle East is a strategic supplier of oil to the global market, and the critical link connecting Africa, Asia and Europe….To bring about an acceptable level of stability — or instability, from the U.S. point of view — will require the commitment of tens of thousands of personnel on the ground and in the skies above the region, for many years to come.
Liberals Are the Main Danger
Sanders’ role is to divert workers and youth from militant fightback into the passive electoral process—and ultimately to vote for Clinton, a reliable tool of the finance capitalists. Historically, the main dangers to the international working class are the liberal politicians who run as the alternative to the likes of Trump or Cruz. For example:
Liberal Democrat Franklin Roosevelt forcibly deported up to two million workers to Mexico. He forced more than 110,000 workers of Japanese descent into concentration camps during World War II, and supported the apartheid oppression of Black workers in the U.S. South (see page xxx).
Liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson escalated the U.S. imperialist genocide in Vietnam. PLP’s predecessor, the Progressive Labor Movement, organized the first demonstration against Johnson’s war in New York City’s Times Square in 1964.
Liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter declared the imperialist “Carter Doctrine” in 1979, stating that any threat to U.S. oil interests in the Middle East would be met with a military response. A top Carter advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote The Grand Chessboard, a book arguing that that control over Central Asia, including Afghanistan, was essential for U.S. imperialism.
Liberal Democrat Bill Clinton oversaw the racist destruction of welfare, the expansion of racist mass incarceration, and the intensification of police terror against Black workers. Clinton also executed the indiscriminate bombing of the former Yugoslavia in an effort to block Russian imperialist influence.
Liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton supported every one of her husband’s anti-worker atrocities, including the Iraq sanctions that slaughtered half a million children. As a U.S. senator, she voted in favor of the 2003 Iraq genocide.
Trump the Bosses With Communism!
The U.S. rulers need a president who can galvanize the entire U.S. working class to fall in line behind imperialism, or at least to neutralize any resistance against the global conflict to come. The seeming chaos of the current presidential campaign reflects the rulers’ uncertainty over who might serve them best.
For the moment, some white workers are confused about why the U.S. has a real U.S. unemployment rate of 23 percent (shadowstats.com), or why millions have lost their homes, or why wages and social services keep declining. Misled by demagogues like Trump, they fall into the trap of blaming other Black or Latin or immigrant or Muslim workers, who are even more sharply attacked by the racist bosses. What gets overlooked is the root of all workers’ problems: the capitalist profit system.
Instead of surrendering white workers to racist politicians, PLP fights to win them to communist politics and multiracial unity. Our Party fought alongside the Black workers and youth who led the multiracial, anti-racist rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore, giving leadership and lessons to our class worldwide.
As the bosses prepare for bigger imperialist wars, the international working class needs communism—now. We will get there by smashing the mad dog racists and exposing the liberal misleaders as servants of the capitalist class. Millions of women workers, Black workers, refugees, and undocumented workers—now under the capitalists’ sharpest attack—will be our strongest leaders on the road to revolution. Won to communist ideas and to joining PLP, they will be essential in our class’s ultimate victory. Join us!