Break Bosses’ Nationalism with Communist Internationalism

On the fourth of July, the day celebrating the birth of U.S. imperialism, we organized an “Anti-fourth of July” BBQ to educate our base about the dangers of nationalism and to win them to a more international view. The BBQ brought out a significant group of families, friends, and neighbors. It was organized around ideas that came from our base about how to organize events that involve more participation from everyone.
To kick off the BBQ a comrade expressed how nationalism is a threat to all working people because it’s an ideological tool of control. She explained that patriotism gives working people a false sense of identity and belonging to a group that includes their oppressors. U.S. patriotism is always divisive because it promotes racism against the people who are not considered to be “real Americans.” She also mentioned the U.S. is bombing seven different countries, more Americans are incarcerated than anywhere else in the world, and three million immigrants have been deported. Due to the bosses’ propaganda, the working class falsely believes that “their” country is looking out for their best interests, but in fact the bosses’ aims and ambitions drive this system.
What About the Working Class?
We read a short one-page excerpt from historian Howard Zinn that explains how independence from the English meant nothing for slaves, the indigenous, and poor white farmers. It explains how the ruling class uses nationalism to make poor working people fight and die in wars they do not benefit from. The article puts the history in a class perspective and argues that no slave, indigenous or poor person benefited from the victory of the American Revolution—only rich white male property owners did. Slavery continued to exist post-revolution, the indigenous continued to be beaten off their land, and poor white farmers were promised land but got very little or none at all. Today, working people must understand how nationalism is used by the bosses to justify racist attacks and drum up support for imperialist wars.
Need No Borders
In the following small group discussions, we talked about why borders exist, and how only the ruling class benefits from borders. We discussed how nationalism plays into the attacks on immigrants and refugees, who are fleeing countries destroyed by U.S. imperialism. We then talked about the solution to capitalist nationalism—working class internationalism. For their survival, the ruling classes of the world needs the working class divided, so that we are weakened. Organizing the working class on the job and in the factories—breaking the bosses’ racist, sexist, and nationalist divisions—is the only true way to fight the capitalist system and establish power for the working class.
Many in our base added constructive ideas to the discussion. Whenever the working class starts to understand these ideas, it’s one more qualitative step towards a communist future. More participation from our friends and coworkers is key to getting everyone to understand and think about these ideas more critically. Workers can organize to understand this system and smash it.

North Korean Missile On Track for Imperialist War

When the leaders speak of peace,
The common people know that war is coming.    
When the leaders curse war, the mobilization orders are already written out.
—Bertolt Brecht, German communist

On July 4, the celebration of U.S. imperialism, and just three days prior to the G20, the annual gathering of the world’s leading capitalist states and their bankers, North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching Alaska. The launch intensified tensions between the U.S. and China and moved the world closer to the next major war.
While war is inevitable under capitalism, none of the major imperialist powers are presently able to win masses of workers to fight and die for the rulers’ interests. Although the bosses are all planning for war, world events are not fully under their control. Historically, an important task of communists is to warn the working class of coming war and to organize to turn imperialist war into class war for communism, where the working class seizes state power. That task is now more important than ever.

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Bosses’ Cops Protect Racists Workers Shut Down Klan

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, July 8—Fifteen hundred anti-racists militantly confronted the KKK
today, shouting powerful chants that forced them to shut down their racist rally. PLP and members of the Seven Hills Progressive Society from Lynchburg Virginia joined this multiracial rally of workers and students. As usual, the local ruling class used their state power to protect these racists, deploying around 200 kkkops in riot gear to attempt to hold back the anti-racist counter-protesters. This exercise of state power was a reminder that racism is critical to the life of their capitalist system.

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Chicago Mayor’s Racism Grad Plan Props Up Wider War & Growing Fascism

Barack Obama’s best buddy Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has once again proven himself equal to  his buddy in the task of generating ever-new ways of attacking Black youth in this city. Workers here will never forget his sixteen month cover-up of the police murder of sixteen year old Laquan McDonald. Now Emmanuel is trying to pass off a thinly veiled stratagy to bolster U.S. troop levels in an era of widening war as an act of “compassion” for the mainly Black youth of Chicago.
Racist Rahm has cooked up this insidious operation by intrroducing new high school graduation requirements for Chicago Public Schools. Starting with the class of 2020, students who have completed all academic requirements to graduate will not receive a diploma without a “post graduation plan”: seniors must certify they have a college acceptance, a job, a “gap year” (a year off before starting college), a job training program, or have joined the military in order to finish high school.
The finely tuned gradations for “worthiness” inherent in Emmanuel’s multi-track proposal leave unspoken the fate of the many tens of thousands of students who

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Bosses Put Profit Over Disabled Workers’ Health

Healthcare and Congress’ alternative to the (Un)Affordable Care Act is a hot topic. People all over the U.S. have been fighting back on these possible health care cuts. On this date there was a rally held in Indianapolis, Indiana to confront Senator Todd. Todd, and the ruling class are proposing cutting Medicaid, which will have a deadly effect on people with disabilities. The racist cuts will also hit Black workers heavily. Twenty-eight percent of adult Black workers under 65 depend on Medicaid. At the demonstration, cops showed no mercy to workers with disabilities as they stole phones to erase evidence and assaulted others—sending one person to the hospital.

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Colombia Construction Workers Halt Bosses’ Production

COLOMBIA—In response to the delay in payment of salaries, 60 angry and courageous construction workers went on strike several months ago, demanding to get back stolen pay. Members of Progressive Labor Party have been working with these workers for more than a year, distributing the paper, discussing the situation of the working class, wage slavery and dialectical materialism. One member of PLP even participated in the activities by advising the workers and trying to prevent retaliations from the bosses.
In reaction to the strike, the bosses brought workers from other sites to sabotage the strike. The bosses tried to convince workers that he wasn’t responsible for the scabs and that “other factors” brought them in. Disgusted at his lies, the workers refused to believe him. They intensified their struggle by blocking the entrance to the site, not even letting in supplies. The member of PLP involved tried to protect workers from the bosses’ retaliation. Despite best efforts, the desperate bosses fired ten workers.

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Remember Korea and the ‘Forgotten War’

The U.S. bosses are contemplating another imperialist war on the Korean peninsula. Like all imperialists they don’t want the international working class knowing the real history of Korea. Like all imperialists they are terrified that if the workers in the U.S. and Korea knew about the “forgotten” Korean War, the workers would unite, turn the guns around, and shoot this imperialist system down.
Jeju. Koje. No Gun Ri. Daejeon. Sinchon. These are the names of some places in present-day North Korea that the international working class must never forget, alongside countless others where workers said “enough” to imperialist war and fought back.

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Housing Segregation, A Pillar of Capitalist Control

Many in the U.S. believe Black and white workers live separately and attend separate schools because they want to live with “their own kind.” This belief couldn’t be further from the truth! Black, white, and immigrant workers in the U.S. live separately because of housing segregation, a history not taught in capitalist schools. Segregation means the deliberate racial separation the capitalist class enforces through their state—their government, laws, courts, schools, prisons, and racist police. The capitalist class relies on housing segregation to enable other types of segregation, which all promote racism and divisions within the working class.

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Philando Castile: Black Workers Assassinated Once in the Street, Once More in Courts

Capitalism rules by both deception and force. This is apparent in the murder of Philando Castile, and the subsequent acquittal of the kkkop who killed him. On July 6, 2016, Diamond Reynolds live-streamed the moments directly after her boyfriend was shot multiple times by police officer Jeronimo Yanez. About eleven months later, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all three charges against Yanez.
A huge part of Yanez’s defense was the accusation that Philando was a drug user, but police reports and news made no mention of drug use. It was only later that, kkkop Yanez said, and implored jurors to believe, “I feared for my life...I thought...if he had the audacity to use marijuana...to just smoke in front of his five-year-old...if he could just do that and give her secondhand smoke and endanger her life, what did he care about me. I really felt scared.”

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PL’er Confronts Anti-Immigrant Fascists, Galvanize Antiracists

NEW YORK CITY—We can’t permit any racist actions! This thought was on my mind today, the day the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light for openly racist President Donald Trump’s fascist executive order to go into effect. The Supreme Court allowed the ban which prohibits persons from six mostly Arab, Muslim countries from entering the U.S., an attempt by the US government to further divide the working class along racial and nationalistic lines.

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