A reading and discussion of a recent editorial in Challenge.

In late January, in another sign of the international crisis of capitalism, masses of workers handed U.S.-friendly Argentinian President Javier Milei a humiliating defeat. More than 1.5 million workers joined a national strike against Milei’s “omnibus” austerity reform bill, a vicious attack on the working class. After four days of militant fightback in the streets, Milei’s administration was forced to withdraw the bill (Truthout, 2/7).

As Argentina continues to whiplash between rightwing and fake-left misleaders, the third largest economy in Latin America is a vivid illustration of how voting and reforms will never bring workers the world we need. Only a revolutionary mass communist party—Progressive Labor Party—will finally put an end to the terrors of capitalism.

A reading and discussion of a recent editorial in Challenge.

As the Israeli rulers’ bloodbath in Gaza reaches new depths, it’s no accident that inter-imperialist conflict is widening around the world’s largest strategic reserves of oil and gas. The latest capitalist disaster began with a ruthless, anti-worker terror attack by Hamas and a genocidal response by the state terrorist Israeli “Defense” Forces (IDF). Now it has spread into IDF violence in the occupied West Bank and bloody fights in at least four neighboring countries: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen (Guardian, 12/26/23). This knife’s-edge volatility marks the snowballing decline of the old U.S.-led world order and the rise of competing imperialist bosses in China and Russia. Along with Ukraine, Taiwan, and the South and East China Seas, the Middle East is a prime potential flashpoint for World War III.

Worldwide, the imperialists’ battle for supremacy is reshaping alliances and escalating their struggle to control markets, resources, and labor—a struggle at the hideous heart of the capitalist profit system. According to the Carter Doctrine, as proclaimed in 1980 by U.S. President Jimmy Carter: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests” of the U.S., and “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” More than forty years later, we are witnessing the legacy of the president who supposedly championed “human rights”: the horrific suffering in Gaza.

A reading and discussion of a recent editorial in Challenge.

Genocide is the natural outgrowth of a system of vicious competition for profits. The global crisis of capitalism is driving the carnage of workers in Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, and Armenia, as well as in the Gaza Strip. The bosses solve their contradictions with small wars that inevitably lead to world war. Progressive Labor Party calls for no war but class war! Let’s build an international movement from East to West, North to South, for communist revolution—our only solution.

A reading (beginning 00:57) and discussion (beginning (11:20) of the latest Challenge editorial.

On September 17, in a desperate campaign to stop global warming, thousands of climate activists, business leaders, government officials, and “civil society representatives” will converge upon New York City for the fifteenth annual Climate Week. Co-sponsored by the United Nations, an organization born in 1945 to serve U.S. imperialism and the postwar liberal world order, the event has a bold slogan: “We Can. We Will.”

In reality, the reformists can’t—and the capitalist bosses won’t. After a summer of lethal heat waves, biblical floods, hot tub oceans, runaway wildfires, and toxic orange skies, liberal reforms cannot prevent wholesale catastrophe from climate change. Climate action has hit a wall. Greenhouse gas emissions set an all-time high in 2022, and will do so again in 2023. The rulers are wedded to heat-trapping fossil fuels for two fundamental reasons: maximum profit and inter-imperialist rivalry. From China to the United States, their system is falling into crisis. With fascism rising and World War III on the horizon, capitalism has no answers for perpetual war, massive poverty, or resurgent infectious diseases. It surely has none for the vast challenge of climate change and the racist horrors we are witnessing in real time.

A reading and discussion of a recent article in Challenge.Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) week-long summer project of rallies, discussion groups, CHALLENGE newspaper sales, social events and protests was proof that today’s working-class youth are committed to building an international party for the masses of workers under rising fascism. Throughout the project, about 50 youth and workers distributed over 1,000 papers, rallied in working-class neighborhoods, and participated in our CHALLENGE workshops and sessions on fascism, sexism and more. This project increased our understanding and prepared our class to fight against the bosses’ ideas and culture. The project’s peak was in Brooklyn on Saturday, July 10, with a petitioning campaign and rally to name a street in one community after Shantel Davis, a Brooklyn youth who was brutally murdered by the NYPD a decade ago. The project revealed that building and maintaining deep political roots, especially in Black and Latin working-class communities, what we call ‘base building,’ is indeed the critical factor that will make communist ideas mass ideas and prepare our class for running a world without capitalism.

On this episode of Challenge Radio, we have a reading of the latest editorial in Challenge, SPAIN-FIGHT BOSSES’ RISING FASCISM, followed by a discussion with a comrade who's been living off and on in Europe for the past 15 years about the general trend towards Fascism in the Eurozone, its antecedents, and what can be done. Instability is everywhere; everything seems up for grabs. With the war in Ukraine escalating and World War III looming, the old liberal democratic world order is in shambles. Confronted with runaway inflation, a wave of climate catastrophes, and mass unemployment (close to 13 percent in Spain), both the open fascist insurgents and the old guard liberals are scapegoating migrating workers—a hallmark of rising fascism. As millions of workers’ lives are upended... Read more