NEW YORK, February 5— Over 45 students, faculty, staff, and parents, including members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) marched on the home of the City University of New York (CUNY) Chancellor Felix “Felo” Matos Rodriguez in Pelham, New York, humorously advertised as “Brunch with Felo.” We were sending a message that we, the united working class, won’t accept the racist austerity at CUNY. The relatively quiet suburb was rocked by chants, speeches, and later, music.

These struggles give PLP members and friends lessons in class struggle—learning how to organize, be bold, and struggle with friends and co-workers to step forward. We want to continue working with education workers and students to build this movement towards a strike, and, at the same time, to expose the nature of capitalist education and the limits of reform. 

 We stay ready

Under capitalism, any reforms we win are short-lived. Our students and the international working-class deserve nothing less than communism. Fighting for that new world means masses of students and workers must join PLP and fight for communist revolution.

The demonstration was called for by RAFA (Rank and File Action), a group of union members who have been leading a fight back to build strike readiness. Meanwhile PLP members are building “revolution readiness.” Capitalist education at CUNY, led by its filthy rich chancellor, is a racist disaster. The Wall Street bankers and business owners who control CUNY want to brainwash us to become compliant workers as they rake in billions and eventually they want us to be willing soldiers in their imperialist wars for profit.

While many of our students come from the Bronx, including the poorest Congressional district in the U.S. (District 15 in the South Bronx Chancellor Rodriguez lives in Pelham, one of the wealthier communities in the U.S., and enjoys a salary of $670,000 a year, plus a monthly housing stipend of $7,500. While his appointment was declared “groundbreaking,” as the first Latin Chancellor at CUNY, Rodriguez’s only real success was shuffling CUNY’s nearly 500,000 mostly Black, Latin and immigrant students into a program of racist austerity. 

As we marched up the slippery roads, we chanted and took over the streets by the Chancellor’s home, giving speeches about the need to fight racism, the need for multiracial unity, and the need to fight for communism where workers run society. 

“We accomplished a lot”

Spirits were high as we made ourselves comfortable on the chancellor’s lawn. Leaflets were distributed to passing cars  titled, “Do you know your neighbor?” We collectively organized food and small snack tables were set up with a spread of muffins, rolls, fruit, coffee, and even tamales. A radio was hung from the tree as we listened to music and chatted, getting to know each other, and continuing to exchange ideas about the struggle at CUNY. Signs were planted on the chancellor’s lawn demanding free tuition as marchers and PL’ers shared and discussed the latest issues of CHALLENGE.

Especially given the weather constraints, the fact that last week's protest was canceled due to a storm, and a travel advisory that was issued the day of, this “brunch” escalated our battle. While a patrol car sat down the street, and an irate neighbor let her dog out to bark at us, it was made clear that this was just the opening shot. One of the speakers from a student strike committee said, “I feel like we accomplished a lot.”

This rising spirit of fight-back is crucial in building an international Party. With each reform struggle, with each street we take, with each lawn we overrun, our confidence in ourselves, in our comrades, and in our ability to eventually build a communist revolution, the ultimate goal, grows sharper.

Welcome back, fight back!

CUNY is no stranger to racist austerity and has been running on the backs of underpaid adjuncts, or part timers, for a long time. But clearly, the Covid-19 pandemic has sharpened the situation on campuses and each semester, students, staff, and faculty are faced with ever worsening conditions. While there has been a push to reopen the campuses, especially with the “70-30” mandate ( 70 percent of classes in person and 30 percent virtual), many campuses are not ready.

On one Bronx campus, the library isn’t open enough to meet student needs and the buildings are falling apart. On another campus, there is nowhere for students to sit, the cafeteria is closed, there is no soap in the bathroom, and a major outdoor garden is closed. Many of the facilities are not ready, and because of the arbitrary “70/30” rule, many classes have been canceled, resulting in adjunct layoffs. On one campus, it’s so disorganized that students wait in line outside just to get on campus, on top of many more health and safety violations all over CUNY campuses. The list goes on!

Brunch was just the beginning

This was a bold idea and everyone who participated felt it was a successful event. While we are told everything is “back to normal” and forced back into dire conditions, the meetings where these decisions are made, such as Board of Trustees hearings, are still virtual. So, the idea of remaining in the Chancellor’s face is one that appeals to us!

Our “brunch” was a glimpse of what that new world could be, with everyone sharing, no bosses, and standing together as equals whether student or faculty. From immersion in these day-to-day struggles to building a strike movement against the CUNY bosses, these “schools for communism” also teach us how to build for revolution. We invite our friends to join PLP and apply these lessons to help lead our class to the ultimate victory of communism!

In 2022, as was the case over 500 hundreds years ago, Black workers remain the most brutally attacked section of our class. Now as then, they must help take the lead in building an international communist movement. U.S. history is a chronicle of genocide, slavery, segregation, and enduring racist oppression. Black workers have less invested in the capitalist status quo. Since racism infects all relations within the profit system, they stand to hold fewer illusions about “justice” or “democracy” under the bosses’ dictatorship. 

Though not immune to the false hope of reformism, Black workers are better equipped to understand its limits. As the young rebels in Ferguson declared: “It’s the whole damn system!” And so: Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their basis for class consciousness—for class solidarity with all workers and class hatred of all capitalist rulers. 

Our Party has developed the understanding that racism and capitalism are bound together; one cannot exist without the other. Only an international communist revolution can liberate the world’s working class from the ravages of racist imperialism. Only a united, multiracial working class can win the fight for communism. Black workers are central to that struggle. 

Workers in general are degraded by capitalism; as a class, we have nothing to lose but our chains. 

Latin, Muslim, Asian, and women workers all suffer under special oppression by the U.S. ruling class. From the U.S. and Mexico to Europe and the Middle East, immigrant workers—most of them dark-skinned—are terrorized and scapegoated at the fault lines of rising fascism. 

Anti-Black racism is a global epidemic. Black workers have an especially urgent case to revolt and smash the bosses’ state. Throughout U.S. history, from the time they were brought from Africa by force as a pool of no-wage labor, they have served at the forefront of every working-class movement: the war against slavery, the struggle for civil rights, the mass strikes against the industrial bosses, the fights for jobs and housing and decent schools. Wherever workers have confronted the profit system and its parasites, Black workers have stood at the front lines. 

 Black Workers Have Always Fought Back

Workers everywhere have always fought back against the bosses, with Black workers frequently leading the way. This tradition dates to the time of enslaved workers running away, many of whom fled to the mountains. They created self-sufficient communities and defended themselves with armed violence, as necessary. 

• In 1739, the Stono Rebellion involved as many as 60 slaves in the British colony of South Carolina. The The colony’s legislature was so terrified that it placed a costly 10-year moratorium on the import of Black slaves from Africa. The bosses’ property and lives were at risk. 

• In the 1790s, the Haitian Revolution defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s army and repelled British and Spanish invaders, abolishing slavery in the richest colony in the Caribbean. These Black liberators spread fear among enslavers throughout the Western Hemisphere. They inspired hundreds of rebellions throughout the Americas, all of them violent.

•  In 1831, Nat Turner led more than 60 slaves and Black freedmen in blazing a bloody trail through Virginia. The rebels did away with Turner’s master and the master’s family, then terrorized the owners of 15 other plantations. Turner inspired John Brown, who led a multiracial group in an 1859 attack on a federal arsenal in West Virginia., The raid on Harpers Ferry sparked the American Civil War to end chattel slavery. 

• Over the two centuries preceding the Civil War, historians have documented more than 250 uprisings involving 10 slaves or more on U.S. territory alone.

• In the Caribbean, rebellions like the First Maroon War in Jamaica (1728-1741) grew into all-out military combat. After the Maroons repeatedly defeated British forces, the imperialists were forced to sign a peace treaty.

• In 1760, an even larger rebellion in Jamaica called Tacky’s War became “a massive shock to the imperial system.” Black workers from the North and newly freed slaves from the South played a vital role in the U.S. Civil War (see “Marx and Du Bois,” p. 18). In the aftermath, the victorious Union capitalists—Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie—relied on racism to keep workers divided.

•  In the North, mainly white and immigrant workers waged fierce battles against steel, railroad, and coal industrialists. In the South, mainly Black workers—often led by women like Ida B. Wells, a former slave—fought against lynching and other racist abuses throughout the Jim Crow era. 

• Between 1898 and 1902, rising U.S. imperialism defeated Spain and then attacked Filipino independence fighters in the Philippine-American War. The Filipino warriors, many of whom identified as Black, made anti-racist, class-conscious appeals to Black U. S. soldiers. As one wrote, “Why don’t you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you, that took a mother’s child and sold it? In a foreshadowing of the Vietnam War, many Black U.S. soldiers deserted.

Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their role in the U.S. military, where they represent 17 percent of active-duty enlisted men and 30 percent of active-duty enlisted women. They will play a major part in the next global war—and in turning an imperialist war for profit into a class war for communist revolution. Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their disproportionate numbers in basic U.S. industry and transportation. Within major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas, Black workers are concentrated in mass transit, health care, education, the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx. They retain the potential to shut down major population centers and critical infrastructure.

If our class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership are essential for another fundamental reason. Our class cannot possibly destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership.

*This is part of a three-part series exploring a few of the Black communists from the U.S. that fought in the International Brigades against fascism. 

In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to re-establish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid. The Western imperialist countries and the United States refused to help the Republic. Only Mexico and the then-socialist Soviet Union came to the Republic’s aid, to try to stop fascism before it engulfed the world. 

In 1936, the International Communist Movement, called the “Comintern,” headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers—mainly workers—from more than 60 countries into the “International Brigades” (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. 

In hindsight, the defense of the Republic was a nationalist defense of an aspect of capitalism. At the time, this was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists. In the Progressive Labor Party, we fight all faces of capitalism and try to win people to the understanding that liberalism is the bigger danger to our victory. Our class has to go and the working class must rule—that’s communism.

After several years of heroic fighting and devastating losses, the IBs were withdrawn by the Spanish Republican government, which naively hoped that the German and Italian fascist troops would also withdraw. They did not, and Spain fell to Franco’s fascists in March, 1939. Spain remained a fascist dictatorship until 1978. But Spain was part of the European capitalist “community” as so-called liberal capitalists often get along very well with the fascist capitalists. Look at how the liberal U.S. capitalists have gotten along very well with fascist dictators all over the world.

Black Volunteers 

Among the 2,800 U.S.  volunteers—80 percent of whom were members of the Communist Party—were more than 60 Black workers from the U.S. This is the story of one of them: Douglas Roach  (1900 – 1938). 

A native of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Douglas Roach was an active member of the Communist Party from 1932. At Provincetown High School, he was an "ace" end on the football team. He graduated from the Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst, where he was a star wrestler.

He was one of the first workers from the U.S.  to volunteer in defense of Spanish capitalist democracy in the early days of the siege of Madrid (October, 1936). Roach was assigned to the 15th Brigade (the International Brigade), Lincoln Battalion and Lincoln-Washington Battalion, and served in the Tom Mooney machine gun company, often carrying his machine gun single-handedly during long marches. Roach fought with the battalion at Jarama and during the Brunete Offensive and attained the rank of Gun Commander. 

At the fierce counter-offensive launched by the fascists in July, 1937, at Brunete, he often went for water and supplies for his comrades under heavy fire.

On the Jarama front (1937), he inspired the members of the Lincoln Battalion. Time and again he held his position in the repeated charges of Franco's Moorish cavalry, saving the men in the lines behind him. In Fall 1937, wounded by shrapnel, Roach returned to the U.S. He immediately plunged into activity, working in support of trade union organization among seamen. In his spare time, he diligently studied Marxism-Leninism. 

Unfortunately, at this time the Communist Party made union organizing primary over fighting for communist revolution. At its weakest, the old communist movement at the time was engulfed in nationalism and electoral politics. In the Progressive Labor Party today, we are trying to correct those errors by making revolution primary in all of our battles against the horrors of capitalism.

Returning veterans formed the VALB—the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—late in 1937 and at their first convention they elected Roach as National Adjutant Commander. He held the post briefly before he contracted the pneumonia that killed him on July 13, 1938.

The following quote is from Benjamin J. Davis Jr., editor of The Negro Liberator,  Communist Party’s (CPUSA) newspaper targeted towards Black workers. He later became CPUSA's official English-language daily, The Daily Worker. 

When I complimented him on his war record, he said, "Oh, never mind that. Whatever I did, the [Communist] Party brought it out in me." And knowing him, one can understand very well, despite his modesty, how he made such a distinguished record in Spain.

As capitalist powers (imperialists) once again prepare for world war to redivide the world among themselves, the Progressive Labor Party fights for a world run by and for the working class, that’s communism. Join us!

One thing that is always ignored in the fight against racism is the influence the communist movement had. The great William E. B. Du Bois was one of the leading fighters against racism in the 20th century. He founded the NAACP a century ago. After 50 years of antiracist 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 against their rivals China and Russia.

Even more hidden will be the homage Du Bois — a true hero, beloved by the working class, Black and white — paid to the communist world leader, Josef Stalin, on the occasion of Stalin’s death.

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

Josef Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th 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 [czarism], capitalism and the Orthodox Church. He surrendered [to] the Little White Father [the Czar] 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. Du Bois, March 16, 1953

*capitalist alliance

**17 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.