Stalingrad: Red Army Victory Turned the Tide of World War II Stalingrad: Red Army Victory Turned the Tide of World War II

February 2 marked the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Battle of Stalingrad, the real “Mother of All Battles.” It was the turning point of World War II, the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime.

On August 23, 1942, Luftwaffe planes, commanded by Baron Wolfram von Richtofen (who led the fascist onslaught on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War) launched the mass bombing that eventually destroyed Stalingrad. In the first week, 40,000 of the 600,000 inhabitants were killed. The “devastating attack moved Stalin to declare ‘Ni shag nasad’ (not one step backwards).” (El Mundo, Spain, 2/2/03).

In September, Field Marshall Paulus’ VI Wehrmacht army launched a series of successful attacks against the industrial center. But the Soviet 62nd Army, commanded by V. Chuikov, resisted. It was the beginning of what the Nazis called rattenkrieg (war of rats), or house-to-house combat. This prolonged the fighting until winter arrived. The commitment and courage of the Red Army and Stalingrad’s working class held off the Nazi juggernaut. Right in the middle of the fighting, the workers built tanks and other weapons for battles outside their plants.

After 170 days, the remaining 91,000 Nazi troops and 24 generals surrendered. Hundreds of thousands of Nazis died, along with over one million Soviet soldiers and civilians.

“Our Red Army was so powerful that…we would have not only reached Berlin but the Gulf of Vizcaya (Spain),” one veteran told El Mundo.

Red Army Rolling West Forced D-Day

By mid-1944, Soviet tanks and infantry were rolling westward at 40 miles a day. Only when the U.S. and Britain realized the Red Army would defeat the bulk of the Nazi army by itself did they open the second front in France on D-Day. Over 70% of the active Nazi war machine in Europe was tied up fighting the Soviets.

The capitalist implosion of the former Soviet Union achieved what the Nazis couldn’t. This was caused by the opportunism of the Soviet rulers and the weaknesses of socialism, retaining many capitalist practices like the wage system.

The lessons of the heroic Soviet workers and soldiers live on. As the world’s imperialists prepare for endless wars, the international working class will continue what the Red Army and Soviet workers achieved in Stalingrad. That’s the goal of the communist PLP.

For more information on the role played by the Red Army and the communist movement in defeating the Nazis see the CHALLENGE supplement: “50 Years Ago: Communist Red Army Defeated the Nazis, May 17, 1995” in the PL website: plp.org. 

Hidden Lesson for Black History Month; W.E.B. Dubois Hailed Stalin as A Tribune of the People

Black History Month is celebrated in February in the U.S. One thing that is always ignored is the influence of the communist movement in the civil rights movement in the U.S. The great William E. B. Dubois was one of the leading fighters against racism in the 20th century. He founded the NAACP a century ago. After 50 years of anti-racist struggle, he joined the Communist Party in 1945, declaring that becoming a communist was “the logic of my life.” That fact will be well-hidden by the hypocritical U.S. rulers as they “celebrate” Black History Month while preparing another racist war for oil in the Middle East. Even more hidden will be the homage DuBois — a true hero, beloved by the working class, black and white — paid to the communist world leader, Joseph Stalin, on the occasion of Stalin’s death in March, 1953, 59 years ago next month.

(From the National Guardian, March 16, 1953):

Josef Stalin was a great man; few other men of the twentieth century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf, but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also — and this was the highest proof of his greatness — he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.

Stalin was not a man of conventional learning; he was much more than that; he was a man who thought deeply, read understandingly and listened to wisdom, no matter whence it came. He was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy and balance; nor did he let attack drive him from his convictions or induce him to surrender positions which he knew were correct. As one of the despised minorities of man, he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality.

His judgment of men was profound. He early saw through the flamboyance and exhibitionism of Trotsky, who fooled the world, and especially America. The whole ill-bred and insulting attitude of liberals in the U.S. today began with our naive acceptance of Trotsky’s magnificent lying propaganda, which he carried around the world. Against it, Stalin stood like a rock and moved neither right nor left, as he continued to advance toward a real socialism instead of the sham* Trotsky offered.

Three great decisions faced Stalin in power and he met them magnificently; first, the problem of the peasants, then the West European attack**, and last the Second World War. The poor Russian peasant was the lowest victim of tsarism, capitalism and the Orthodox Church. He surrendered [to] the Little White Father [the Tsar] easily; he turned less readily but perceptibly from his icons; but his kulaks [rich peasants] clung tenaciously to capitalism and were near wrecking the revolution when Stalin risked a second revolution and drove out the rural bloodsuckers.

Then came intervention, the continuing threat of attack by all nations, halted by the Depression, only to be re-opened by Hitlerism. It was Stalin who steered the Soviet Union between Scylla and Charybdis***; Western Europe and the U.S. were willing to betray her to fascism, and then had to beg her aid in the Second World War. A lesser man than Stalin would have demanded vengeance for Munich, but he had the wisdom to ask only justice for his fatherland….The British Empire proposed first to save itself in Africa and southern Europe, while Hitler smashed the Soviets.

The Second Front dawdled, but Stalin pressed unfalteringly ahead. He risked the utter ruin of socialism in order to smash the dictatorship of Hitler and Mussolini. After Stalingrad the Western World did not know whether to weep or applaud. The cost of victory to the Soviet Union was frightful. To this day the outside world has no dream of the hurt, the loss and the sacrifices. For his calm, stern leadership here, if nowhere else, arises the deep worship of Stalin by the people of all the Russias.

Then came the problem of Peace. Hard as this was to Europe and America, it was far harder to Stalin and the Soviets. The conventional rulers of the world hated and feared them and would have been only too willing to see the utter failure of this attempt at socialism. At the same time the fear of Japan and Asia was also real. Diplomacy therefore took hold and Stalin was picked as the victim. He was called in conference with British Imperialism represented by its trained and well-fed aristocracy; and with the vast wealth and potential power of America represented by its most liberal leader in half a century.****

Here Stalin showed his real greatness. He neither cringed nor strutted. He never presumed, he never surrendered....He asked neither adulation nor vengeance. He was reasonable and conciliatory. But on what he deemed essential, he was inflexible. He was willing to resurrect the League of Nations, which had insulted the Soviets. He was willing to fight Japan, even though Japan was then no menace to the Soviet Union, and might be death to the British Empire and to American trade. But on two points Stalin was adamant: Clemenceau’s “Cordon Sanitaire”***** must be returned to the Soviets, whence it had been stolen as a threat. The Balkans were not to be left helpless before Western exploitation for the benefit of land monopoly….

Such was the man who lies dead, still the butt of noisy jackals and the ill-bred men of some parts of the distempered West. In life he suffered under continuous and studied insult; he was forced to make bitter decisions on his own lone responsibility. His reward comes as the common man stands in solemn acclaim.

W.E.B. Dubois, March 16, 1953

*capitalist alliance

**Seventeen nations, including the U.S. invaded the Soviet Union, attempting to crush socialism. 

***From Greek mythology, caught between two monsters.”

**** Yalta conference with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, February 1945

*****Stalin insisted that the Balkans and Eastern Europe not be an imperialist launching pad for the West to invade the Soviet Union once again.

A Communist May Day: Win the Hearts and Minds of the International Working Class

May Day organizes for revolution to destroy capitalism. This commemorates a massive strike wave in the U.S. and the particular battle in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886. The leaders of this movement demanded an 8-hour day but also advocated the “abolition of the wage system.”

Then and now the capitalists feared this revolutionary side to May Day. In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.” By 1886, the rulers of Chicago saw this specter. “The newspapers and industrialists were increasingly declaring that May 1, 1886 was in reality the date for a Communist working-class insurrection modeled on the Paris Commune. According to Melville E. Stone, head of the Chicago Daily News…a ‘repetition of the Paris Communal riots was freely predicted’ for May 1, 1886” (P. 90, Labor’s Untold Story, by Boyer and Morais).

Strike Wave Beats Up Scabs

In December 1886, San Francisco transit workers joined this strike wave. They were working up to 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. They wanted a 3-hour daily reduction in hours and a daily pay increase from $2.25 to $2.50. “Strike-breakers were hired, and there was a great deal of violence. Cars were damaged, strike-breakers were beaten, and one person was killed.” Newspapers blamed eight instances of the use of dynamite on the striking workers. No doubt feeling threatened by the union and the worldwide strength and militancy of May Day, the Governor signed a bill in March 1887 “limiting gripmen, drivers, and conductors to a 12-hour day.” (“Transit In San Francisco,” published by SF MUNI R.R. Communications Department.)

By the 1920’s the now pro-capitalist AFL union leadership, fearing the growth of communist ideas in the working class, reversed its support for May Day and the latter’s openly declared communist ideas. Since then the AFL has collaborated with the U.S. government to subvert May Day and the revolutionary trend of workers here and abroad. At the 1928 AFL Convention, the Executive Council supported a Congressional resolution to make May 1 Child Health day. “May 1 will no longer be known as either strike day or communist labor day.”

During the peak of the communist organizing of the CIO unions, May Day was celebrated in the U.S. But business unionism and anti-communism soon triumphed after World War II, with organized labor only recognizing Labor Day in September.

From the Haymarket battle in 1886, revolutionary workers spread May Day around the globe. But history is written by the conquerors. Many workers born here know nothing of the contribution the U.S. working class made to the development of this revolutionary holiday. May 1st is the official Labor Day in most countries, but the leadership of these marches demands only reforms, and stresses the common goals of labor and capital.

PLP Reclaims May Day

However, after the U.S. “communist” party abandoned May Day in the 1950s, PLP resurrected it in 1971 and has organized communist marches and celebrations for the last four decades. We proudly raised the red flag among the workers in cities across the U.S. 

PLP has learned both from the triumphs of the communist movement in the USSR and China, and from their failure to fight directly for communism. We too advocate “Abolish the Wage System” as part of changing the relationship of workers and work in a new communist society.

The abolition of money, of production for sale or profit and of the wage system is absolutely necessary to establish communism. When, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the international working class wins and holds control over all economic, political and cultural institutions of society, it will unleash a creative power that will propel the human race to its highest accomplishments in all fields of endeavor. Only a mass revolutionary communist party advocating and leading such a struggle can achieve this. Only such a party can defeat the fascism that capitalism will use to oppose it.

Long live the 1st of May, the revolutionary international working-class holiday! Fight for communism!

How U.S. Rulers Will Step Up War on Iran

In many ways, U.S. imperialism is already at war with Iran.  Assassinations and cyber-attacks by the U.S. lapdog Israel, sabotage and incursions, sanctions that can be more devastating than physical attacks — all of this has been going on for years.  

The debate in the U.S. ruling class is not whether, but how to step up this war.  There are three main camps, both in Washington and in Tel Aviv:

Assassination, a Weapon of Choice?

1. Step up the clandestine war.  Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, says there is no need to bomb Iran. What he’s really saying is: We spies can solve the problem by assassinating Iranian scientists and messing up Iran’s computers.  This camp calculates that massive bombing risks provoking a nationalist “rally-around-the-flag” response, along with international sympathy for Iran.  So clandestine war is the first choice.  But the issue is: Will that slow down Iran enough?  Iran’s fascist regime has been working on a bomb for 23 years, and they still are not there.  But they are getting closer.

2. Work to overthrow the clerical fascists.  This camp argues that Iran’s nuclear issue is only one of many threats from that country.  Iran has also sponsored Hezbollah, which has built an impressive missile arsenal to threaten Israel. It has also been active in Iraq, encouraging those who would pull down the democratic façade the U.S. created and replace it with a new dictatorship like Saddam Hussein’s — except this time run by a different faction of the Iraqi ruling class (the Shia instead of the Sunni).  So this camp advocates regime change, which means overthrowing the Islamic Republic.  

Iranian workers, professionals, and many capitalists hate the Islamic Republic, a backward, religious, fascist regime.  Ordinary Iranians want to join the world. They want to use the internet, hold hands in public, watch Western TV and movies, and wear reasonable clothes in place of the chador. As a result, some U.S. and Israeli bosses support regime change.  They calculate that the Iranian people may rise up to overthrow the detested Islamic clerics, an uprising that could happen as quickly and unexpectedly as the recent regime change in Libya and Egypt. Unfortunately, the result will probably follow those two countries’ as well. Another faction of capitalists will take over from the Islamist fascists.

3. Bomb Iran. This is a risky step.  It could backfire on U.S. imperialism or bring great rewards.  The Saudis and other Gulf monarchies are urging the U.S. to act, but they would be the first to criticize if the action failed to go well.  The Iranian ruling class makes all kinds of threats about what they would do if attacked, but they have a long track record of not responding if their only options are poor ones.  An attack on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, for example, would anger oil-importing countries like China that would otherwise sit on the sidelines.  

The most likely scenario is the first one, with U.S. imperialism stepping up the pressure and the Iranian fascists escalating their response.  That is a recipe for starting a bigger war. Iran’s ruling class appears to have convinced itself that the United States is a paper tiger that talks tough but does nothing — a dangerous illusion.  

Three Imperialist Wars Too Many?

In recent years, U.S. rulers have ignored provocations from Iran because they’ve been tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington did not want to take on another imperialist war while it was losing two others.  Now that the U.S. military has mostly exited Iraq, there may be less patience with Iran.  Standing up to Iran is one issue that unites the often bitterly divided U.S. ruling class. The Senate approved a recent law increasing sanctions on Iran by a vote of 100 to zero. In short, 2012 may be the year for a dramatic escalation of the ongoing U.S.-Iran war.  Israel may attack.  A broader war may be brewing.  

In that event, our communist position is: to hell with both of you.  We have no sympathy for either U.S. imperialism or for the clerical fascists in Iran. The only victory for the working class would be for us to use the war to win broad masses of workers for  communist revolution, in Iran, the United States and the world.

Form PL Transit Group; Communist Ideas Primary in Building Job Actions, Strikes

 Over several years, myself and other PLP members have been organizing among local transit workers to fight the transit bosses and build PLP. One particular transit worker, Jessica, has become closer to the Party.

Now, after nearly two years of shared discussions and actions, Jessica said she sees the need for a serious long-term, radical, transit rank-and-file study/action group.

Jessica and I attempted to organize a job action group. But when our campaign began this past summer, Jessica threw her energy into an Occupy anti-budget-cut campout led by liberal community groups and phony “leftists.” She thought the campout would “wake up” the whole city. The month-long campout got little media coverage past day one and none of it made front-page or top-of-the-hour coverage. Slowly the campout died out and the city passed the budget cuts.

Throughout all this Jessica stopped organizing for our rank-and-file job action group. Advancing little on my own, I stopped too. Many workers said verbally they would support job actions but in practice most were very cynical about organizing collectively to pull off slowdowns.

I had thought there was enough support for job actions to form a group in which I could spread CHALLENGE and raise the Party. Slowly I realized that a PLP comrade’s advice had been right all along:  communist ideas would help build a base for collective job actions and strikes, not the other way around.

When the Occupy movement grew, the Party decided I should spend more time there, where I ran into Jessica. To the surprise of both of us, Occupy did wake up many people, or at least opened them to discuss revolutionary ideas.  But Jessica also noticed that the media and ruling class supported OWS much more than the summer anti-budget-cut campout. The cops harassed and fined the month-long pre-OWS occupation repeatedly but with little mainstream media coverage. Somehow OWS, which initially was not much bigger than the budget-cut campout, was a front-page top-of-the-news-hour story.

A Democratic Tea Party?

I shared the Party’s analysis with Jessica, that U.S. Democrats wanted OWS to be a Democratic tea party. She agreed and said she was waiting for Obama to jump out from behind a curtain and tell Occupiers, “Gotcha!” We agreed that OWS was an important opportunity to raise militant ideas. She and I have met George, a fellow transit worker, at Occupy. But we both felt that without revolutionaries getting involved, OWS would lead to Obama’s re-election campaign or cynicism.

The Party decided we should pursue a transit study group more seriously. A comrade, Mikey, recently started working in transit. Two old friends of the Party have also recently contacted us and said they want to attend Party meetings about transit.

Mikey, Jessica and I formed a study group in late December. We noted how important correct ideas were. The last transit strike led many transit workers to cynical and reactionary ideas, not to revolutionary or even militant ones. We also discussed the basis of the study group: revolutionary communist ideas or just militant trade unionism?

Jessica agreed revolutionary ideas were important but feared driving people away. She thought the group would be too small if communism was all we talked about. I argued that it was important not to hide communist ideas and that, no matter how hard it was to challenge anti-communism among our co-workers, there’s no other way communists can build a communist movement. If we pretended we were only about militant trade unionism, workers would smell BS because the union hacks have all spit out the same militant trade union lines and then sell out.

‘Be Real About Revolution’

Jessica was still concerned how we would approach communism and the Party. But she agreed it was important to be real with people about studying revolutionary communist ideas. Otherwise other fellow transit worker activists would be driven away by the same hollow trade union rhetoric that the hacks spew.

We decided that for now we would begin the study group with non-Party readings that would enable us to raise communist ideas. Most importantly we each discussed who we would invite to the next study group, making sure to cast a wide net. In January our transit contract expired, although the union “leaders” agreed to continue negotiations. We will have the second meeting of a PLP transit study/action group. Hopefully, and with effort, it will be bigger than the first. The struggle continues.

New PL’ers’ Lesson Plan: Boldly Spread Party’s Ideas

“I think I want to join the Progressive Labor Party.”

That was how a teacher introduced herself to me after a workshop at last week’s anti-UFT union conference. The workshop was about how to build a union chapter in schools. A veteran comrade spoke about being in PLP and about the need to fight the bosses every opportunity we get. He said that we should all consider ourselves lucky to be able to dedicate our lives to fighting back.

I said I was a member of PLP and described some of the struggles we had been involved in to fight the racist bosses and their UFT lackeys. I mentioned the union’s delegate meeting where I helped unfurl a banner that attacked the union leadership for not fighting the racist budget cuts. We were kicked out of that meeting by the union’s security and then called terrorists by Randi Weingarten, the leader of the UFT at that time. Hundreds of delegates booed her and forced her to apologize. 

That was a positive action, mainly because we forced the bosses to show their true colors. The lesson I took from this conference is that we have to be bold about telling people that we are members of the communist PLP. If we don’t, we will miss countless opportunities to meet workers ready to join our movement!

Red teacher 

PLP is in it to win it...PL’ers Reducate Schools Conference

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and opposition caucuses organized a conference to bring together teachers and students who are angry at capitalism’s many attacks on education. The conference took place in The Center for Worker Education and PLP members did their best to give the participants a communist education. PL students and teachers were very vocal in the conference’s many different discussion groups.  

The unionists, liberals, and well-meaning workers all looked to the union, a pawn of capitalist rulers, to fight racism and create an education system that could meet the needs of the working class. They are ultimately wrong since education under capitalism must serve the bosses’ needs, which conflict with the needs of the working class. The ruling class needs a patriotic, loyal working class to passively accept its attacks and fight its imperialist wars, so it can remain the world’s superpower. Workers’ need a society where we make all of the decisions based on our needs to develop as full human beings collectively. That is communism.

Union Helps Resegregate Schools

One participant pointed out that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was actually a backlash against integration in the ‘60’s and is now helping to resegregate the schools. Unions walk the contradiction of appearing to fight the bosses while selling out the workers.   

The need to fight racism was brought up continually throughout the conference. A PL’er pointed out that contemporary racism isn’t about who perpetuated the action, but who is affected by the outcome. He said the bosses love to use puppets like Obama to carry out their racist attacks on the working class. The Party brought up the need to fight racism through multi-racial unity in opposition to fragmented forms of black or Latino nationalism or the Community Control of a People’s Board of Education that pushed the poison of multi-class unity.  

A PL’er also reviewed the history of the UFT. Agreeing with another speaker who challenged the anti-communist attack on the USSR, he said that without the Soviet Union, the working class had lost its beacon at the time when the Soviets were leaders of the international working class. He also pointed out that the union is made up of workers. “Look around” he said, “You’re all workers and you’re here.” Workers’ power is needed to confront the UFT misleaders at the next delegate assembly and create a wildcat strike on the next professional development day (when only teachers come to school). These types of actions are needed to learn how to fight the bosses as a class. They also provide more opportunities to expose the bosses’ democracy sham, when they use the cops and courts to attack workers’ struggles.

School with No Books

One participant taught in a Bronx school that claimed to be a college prep academy, yet it had no books. She is a technology teacher, but they had closed the computer labs for three years because three computers were stolen. The administration said that books were old and passé and that students should use the Internet instead, while keeping the computer lab closed. Only under capitalism could this kind of racist hypocrisy exist.

Such conferences create the opportunity for Party growth. As we participate in them, we can struggle to advance our communist politics. A new anti-racist caucus was established there, but we have to be in it to win it. We need to struggle with those workers around us to go to conferences like this and bring the need to struggle back to our workplaces. No union will liberate us from capitalism, let alone an anti-racist caucus in a union that’s playing ostrich. Only building the PLP to fight the wholesale attack on our class’s education will eventually give the working class the learning that it really needs.

Workers, Youth Blast Racist Killer KKKops: ‘We Charge You With Genocide!’

CALUMET CITY, IL, February 10 — On February 9, a multiracial crowd of 60 workers, students, and teachers packed a city hall meeting here to voice their outrage at the murderous racist kkkops who slaughtered 15-year-old Stephon Watts.

On February 1, Stephon, a black youth who had a form of autism known as Asperger Syndrome, experienced an extreme episode where his father could not get him to go to school. When Stephon’s father called their hospital for assistance, he was told to call the cops. He dialed 311 (the non-emergency number), hoping to get a professional trained to work with special needs children. Instead Calumet City police sent a squad car. 

Bosses’ Thugs in Blue Show True Nazi Colors

When the cops arrived, Stephon’s father insisted his son was “OK,” but they forced their way into the house anyway. These murderers proceeded to chase Stephon around his home.  When Stephon slashed one cop with a butter knife the bosses’ thugs in blue showed their true Nazi colors by slaughtering Stephon, a child with special needs, in cold blood.

But the working-class crowd at city hall would not be fooled. Speaker after speaker correctly described the cops as rabid dogs who either needed to be caged (jailed) or put down for murder. When a commenter attempted to blame Stephon for wielding a butter knife, a high school student declared, “You have no idea what went on in the head of that special needs child. I don’t care about the cuts on the cops! Think about the bullet holes in Stephon!”

Other speakers spoke at great length about decades of the city cops’ blatant, racist harassment and profiling. Some wanted to discuss “the lack of training” of these particular cops. But, especially in black neighborhoods, cops are trained to shoot first and are protected by their departments and city councils later.

To that end, one worker addressed the need to organize against the city council, the cops and the whole racist, capitalist system. The crowd erupted with, “Racist cops, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” They drowned out the city council’s feeble attempt to restore order by reciting the pledge of allegiance, to a country whose cops have full permission to systematically murder workers, especially black youth. The crowd continued to chant as we slowly marched out of the meeting. 

Sadly, no amount of anger or chanting will bring back Stephon Watts or any other victims of police slaughter. That being said, it’s good the Watts family and their mostly black, working-class community are mobilizing to fight police brutality and racism in hopes of getting justice for Stephon.

But justice won’t come from the Illinois state police (who are “investigating” this crime), the courts or the federal government, all of whom work for the same capitalist bosses. Even if — on the extremely remote chance — that these murderous cops get convicted, it won’t stop the onslaught against the working class from the bosses’ cops worldwide.

To end class war, we must fight in class war. Join with the Progressive Labor Party to organize the international working class on the basis of communism with collectivity, militancy and unyielding anti-racism. We must smash capitalism and create a society where there’s no exploiting class, racism or murderous cops serving that ruling class. That’s the only way to gain true justice for all the victims of capitalism’s crimes, including Stephon Watts.

Workers, Youth Blast Racist Killer KKKops: Multiracial March Rips Fascist Terror

THE BRONX, NY, February 7 — Once again, “New York’s Finest” have demonstrated the true purpose of the kkkops: to protect and serve the bosses’ state, not the workers of the world or in the Bronx. These fascist, racist cops use petty crimes to racially profile, beat, illegally frisk and search, and even kill our young, especially in impoverished neighborhoods where the majority are black and Latino.  

On Thursday, February 2, an unarmed black man, Ramarley Graham, 18, was chased into his grandmother’s apartment and shot dead in front of her and his six-year-old brother by Richard Haste, an NYPD cop.  The police initially claimed that Ramarley had a gun, but no weapon was found, only a small amount of marijuana.   The police then dragged Ramarley’s grandmother to the 47th precinct and held her for seven hours, refusing to release her until she gave a statement.

Not long before Ramarley’s murder, another young black man, Jatiek Reed, 19, was beaten viciously by the NYPD.  This pattern of violence is the cops’ real job. It has the single purpose of keeping working-class people, and black and Latino workers in particular, terrified and quiet.  

But the bosses’ strategy isn’t working, because the outraged neighborhood has not stood passively by.  The Monday after the attack, a demonstration of many hundreds marched on the 47th precinct.  The crowd was angry, and some young workers had to be held back from physically attacking the precinct house.  CHALLENGE has been sold for years in this neighborhood. After the incident, Progressive Labor Party distributed nearly 800 copies of a leaflet that explained why these attacks are on the rise. 

New York’s bosses fear the working class, especially the workers in the Bronx.  The Bronx is the poorest of New York’s five boroughs, with up to 45 percent living in poverty and 54 percent youth unemployment in some neighborhoods.  As the capitalist economic crisis in the U.S. and worldwide continues to get worse, workers can only expect more repression.  There will be more murders and beatings, in the Bronx and elsewhere.   

We believe there is only one way to rid the Bronx of its racist murders, along with the violence, drugs, unemployment, and substandard education and healthcare that capitalism imposes on us. We must destroy the profit system at its roots.  The only reason these conditions prevail, and the only reason that the mad-dog police ruthlessly enforce them, is because the bosses are making money on workers’ misery.

Capitalism must be wiped out once and for all.  Workers, students, soldiers; black, Asian, Latino and white, unite and FIGHT BACK!

Election Dogfight Underlies ‘State of Union’: U.S. Ruling Class Faces Internal Crisis

In Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, he said:

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

In reality, however, Obama and the U.S. ruling class he serves cannot possibly produce economic fairness. Because capitalism is a super-exploitative, racist, sexist system, based on the drive for maximum profits, it is inherently unequal. “Fairness” would require eliminating the system itself.

Under capitalism, bosses and bankers own the means of production while they themselves produce nothing. Workers create everything of value and, for the most part, receive just enough to survive — if that. Phony “Fair Share” Obama is cynically trying to manipulate Occupy Wall Street-inspired sentiment for the section of the ruling class he represents.

No matter what popular phrases he opportunistically mouths in the run-up to this November’s election, Obama has no room in his agenda for the redistribution of wealth. His proposals to raise taxes on the very rich and to tighten regulation of investors have a different aim entirely. They are designed to enable the most most powerful imperialist bosses to wage the ever-wider wars they need in order to control energy resources and cheap labor, the vital elements in maintaining U.S. supremacy over its capitalist rivals.

War and Taxes At Heart of 2012 Election Circus

But not all U.S. capitalists have the same vested interest in U.S. imperialism. As a result, taxes and war will likely be the central focus of the 2012 election dogfight, which Obama kicked off with his blatant campaign speech in the State of the Union. The candidates’ positions differ according to their capitalist backers’ varying needs. The spectrum runs from arch-imperialist Obama to isolationist Ron Paul.

But for the working class, none of these candidates will solve its problems: mass racist, long-term unemployment; constantly shrinking wages; foreclosed homes; prison-like schools; mass detention and deportation of workers who are immigrants; and a criminal injustice system that imprisons 2.4 million people, of whom 70 percent are black and Latino (see page 5). Capitalist-created horrors confront the working class worldwide even more intensively, especially

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