Communists strive to serve the working class by boldly providing leadership to the working-class struggle, modestly and without the bombast of the bosses’ politicians. Cecile Rol-Tanguy, a model for all of us, died earlier this year on May 8, 2020 at the age of 101. You probably never heard of her, but her life is an inspiration in our battle against the catastrophic effects of capitalism.
Communists’ historic role has been to warn of war and fight fascism, which is capitalism at its late state. As fascism continues to rise worldwide, we look back at how our predecessors have fought fascism around World War II.
Cecile, a proud communist leader
Cecile was a leader of the French Resistance when the Nazis occupied France in the 1940s. Germany had installed the collaborationist French Vichy government under Petain to control French opposition. The Resistance played a heroic role fighting the Nazis and the French traitors. They attacked Nazis, organized and distributed propaganda, rescued Allied soldiers, sabotaged enemy weapons, and liberated Paris in August 1944.
Cecile was a communist leader of the Resistance following the example set by her father, François Le Bihan, an electrician and a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920 who was killed by Nazis at the Auschwitz death camp. She said, “I was born into an anti-fascist family, or to be more precise, a communist family” (The Washington Post, 5/13). She grew up in a home that also hosted many communist refugees and exiles from across Europe.
Cecile met her future-husband in the struggle as well. She married the communist Resistance leader, Henri Rol-Tanguy. They dedicated their lives to fighting fascist Spain and Germany. During the early stages of their relationship, he volunteered in the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Later, Henri deployed with the International Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
My strength was remaining cool
As a liaison officer, Cecile used her skills to outwit the Nazi occupation of Paris by carrying anti-fascist fliers, pistols, bullets, and grenades, and attack plans, among other supplies, in her children’s baby carriage as she maneuvered her way around the city, posing as an innocent Parisian mother. She said My strength was always in remaining cool,” in an interview (The Washington Post, 5/13).
She and her children lived with Henri’s mother barely having enough to eat. Her young baby died under these circumstances followed by her father’s capture and deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Despairing that she had nothing to lose, she threw herself into the anti-fascist struggle. “My father had been arrested, I didn’t know where my husband was, and I had lost my little girl. What could hold me back?” she said in an interview with Times of London in 2012.
A woman’s place is in the class struggle
While Henri received acclaim after the war, France hardly recognized her contributions because of her unapologetic identity as a communist (The Washington Post, 5/13). It wasn’t until 2014 and 2017 when France finally presented her with two prestigious awards. Thousands of other French women suffered from the sexist scapegoating by the French after the war. Portrayed as collaborators, they were stripped, branded, and beaten for allegedly sleeping with Nazis in exchange for safety and food. This false picture became the popular image of French women, eclipsing the courageous efforts of the women in the Resistance.
Charles de Gaulle, the anti-communist leader of the French Free Army, took power away from the Resistance armies. Dedicated to a pro-Western capitalist France, he stole all the credit for the French victory and barely recognized the communists’ critical insurrectionary role. The lesson here is that the liberal democrats historically plays an anti-communist role. They are never our friends, as their intent is to maintain capitalism.
While the French Communist Party ultimately squandered their triumph in Paris by entering a coalition government with the capitalist political parties, the French communist resistance reveals how we can organize under difficult political, economic, social, and psychological conditions for a world based on egalitarianism and workers’ power. As the world imperialist powers China and U.S. accelerate towards world war, communists and friends everywhere can seek inspiration from leaders like Cecile to fulfill our historic role as fighters against fascism. One day, we will eliminate these evils once and for all with a communist revolution.
One club’s efforts to organize during pandemic
The time spent confined due to the pandemic has been a time of action that started since the beginning of quarantine. Our club has been very active having virtual meetings and group studies with friends. We have also been participating in the meetings and activities organized by the community organization, where we are building our base. We have been a part of their campaigns to cancel rents; close the immigration jails, where our sisters and brothers are being exposed and dying of Covid-19; and approve a package for more than three billion dollars from the state government for people who have been excluded from federal aid. We have distributed many issues of CHALLENGE especially during the last two protests and we have always expounded our Party line.
In those struggles for reforms, we have militantly participated, providing leadership with our chants and with our newspaper, CHALLENGE, in which it explains to people that the only way is communist revolution, which will lead the workers to power.
I have been very excited to participate with my comrades from our club. Guided by our leader and other comrades, especially a friend from another club, who is a school teacher and has set up the Zoom meetings and participated in all of them. We have been witnesses and a part of these important days that we have lived for the development of our communist ideology. That is why at every march, in every protest and in every struggle, we have brought our line.
We should continue to be a part of this movement that prepares us for the Great Battle for the defeat of capitalism and imperialism, where we will be, in the front line of combat.
Communism is the salvation and the future of humanity. Join our struggle.
*****
The tide of rising fascism
The struggle against racist police terror continues to provide us with the responsibility to explain fascism and expose the liberal politicians’ role in developing fascism.
Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) called the NYPD's response to the current wave of protests "shocking and unprecedented.” "I don't think in 50 years we had the level of protest we've seen in New York City and we certainly have not seen the level of police violence directed at protesters."
Like all liberal misleaders, Mayor Bill de Blasio has backed the NYPD terrorists including "kettling" demonstrators who posed no threat whatever! Commissioner Dermot Shea, however, has decried the few reforms de Blasio has been forced to sign including a ban on chokeholds like the one that murdered Eric Garner in 2014. The mayor has made no response to Shea's criticisms implying that the cops can continue their brutal, deadly “business as usual" to intimidate multiracial protesters.
The most obvious turning of the fascist screw has been Trump’s stormtroopers. In Portland, Oregon, the Homeland Security goons in unmarked cars teargassed and arrested antiracist protesters. The President has threatened to do this to the Chicago working class as well. We must mobilize more widely and sharper than ever against this expanded fascist attack!
Another facet of fascist oppression is this oncoming tsunami of racist evictions nationwide. Clearly the police are part of the bosses' arsenal to enforce brutal, mass homelessness caused by the capitalist depression deepening by the week.
Our PL club is reaching out to all of our members and friends to prepare to mobilize fightback wherever there is a threat of eviction. Two tenant actions have already challenged housing courts in Brooklyn and the Bronx. We must join them.
Our organizing outreach is finding more of our base than in years open to the Party's analysis and considering JOINING! This is the real victory!
CHALLENGE responds: This forward thinking is very much needed in the coming period. While Small Fascist Trump may be the most obvious, the analysis here is incomplete. While it is difficult to swim against the current, communists must warn of war and fascism led by the liberals. The ruling class is divided. The Big Fascists—the main wing finance capitalists—are committed to U.S. dominance for the world’s resources and the world land war such dominance will require. Meanwhile, the domestic-oriented Small Fascists, who Trump represents, have little interest in making the sacrifices such a war will require. While Trump’s stormtroopers pose an immediate danger in this period; the liberal rulers, who are posing as the savior and alternative to this rotten system, are the principal danger. We must attack the liberals in the same breath as everyone attacks Trump. If we fail to do so, the working class will be hit hard by the high tide of fascism.
*****
An international Class Perspective on Tulsa
The 7/22 CHALLENGE article on the Tulsa Massacre lacked an international class perspective and viewed it as another domestic racist U.S. tragedy. The article does not mention the role of European radical immigrant workers, or the massive U.S. strike wave and Red Scare that triggered the U.S. government’s racist terror. Only the anarchists, anti-communist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Party, which sought an alliance with capitalism, are credited with any struggle against the capitalist bosses.
An international class perspective would reveal that in 1917 Russian workers made the first communist revolution and the U.S. entered imperialist World War I against Germany. In 1918 US troops were sent to put down the Russian workers’ revolution, which was part of a worldwide revolution against the capitalist world. In 1919 the U.S. Communist Party and the Communist International in the Soviet Union were formed. In the same year, the eight-hour working day was won in the U.S. where a massive strike wave swept the country triggering a Red Scare. In 1920 the U.S. Palmer Raids deported tens of thousands of immigrant workers who were radicalized in European class struggles and were accused of worker unity and union organizing. The 1921 Tulsa massacre was very probably capitalist organized racist terror to split white and Black workers (many WWI vets) and break the Red Scare strike wave.
Today’s antiracist movement should not be viewed as a U.S. racist terror struggle alone. It should be viewed but as part of an international class struggle against the worldwide system that oppresses all workers not only with racism but sexism, inequality and endless wars. Black-white unity today in the U.S. with support of this movement by millions of workers in most countries worldwide testifies to its class nature.
*****
The allegations that Russia paid cash bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with no response from the floundering U.S. government, is yet another sign of the decay of U.S. imperialism. Facing an out-of-control pandemic, a full-blown economic depression, and mass fightback against the racist kkkops, the U.S. ruling class is in crisis. Their institutions are in freefall. Their leadership—both Republican and Democrat—is incompetent and divided.
For the international working class and the revolutionary communist party that must lead it, the resulting chaos is both an opportunity and a danger. For the first time in many years, masses of workers are openly seeking alternatives to the bankrupt profit system. But we must also be aware that intensified state terror and inter-imperialist global war are heading our way.
Fascists big and small
After 18 years of fruitless U.S. combat in Central Asia and the Middle East, open racist President Donald Trump has pushed for a pullout from flashpoints like Afghanistan and Syria. Trump fronts for the isolationist Small Fascists, whose profits come mainly from U.S. energy and other domestic sources. Trump’s wing is fundamentally at odds with the imperialist finance capitalists, the liberal Big Fascists, who rely on dominance over cheap Middle Eastern oil. Both sides have become tired of “the forever war” in Afghanistan—a conflict, says the New York Times, the liberal bosses’ top mouthpiece, that “needs to be brought to an end” (7/7).
But we shouldn’t confuse the Big Fascists’ push for “peace” with any aversion to spilling workers’ blood. The liberal rulers want to conserve their military and political collateral for the superpower war to come. They see Trump’s failure to check rival Russia’s rise in the region as a dangerous strategic weakness. As U.S. finance capital fights to regain control in the upcoming elections and beyond, these splits within the ruling class will become only sharper and more violent.
As workers, we can have no illusions that the Big Fascists’ attacks on Trump will serve our class interests. These liberal capitalists represent the greatest danger to our class. They co-opt mass uprisings into voting and dead-end struggles for minor reforms as they build a patriotic boss-run movement for full-blown fascism and World War III.
For workers to escape this nightmare, our goal must be clear: communist revolution and the building of an egalitarian, worker-run society. The international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to organize the world’s masses, from Kabul to Moscow to Minneapolis, into an armed force of millions to crush this racist, sexist capitalist system forever.
Liberals pile on Trump in rush to war
The Big Fascists, represented mainly by Democratic Party stooges and sell-outs, wasted no time jumping on the bounty report to further discredit and discipline the rogue president. They recognize Trump for the deranged, self-serving clown that he is, completely unfit to manage the long-term interests of their U.S. empire.
Numerous past U.S. military leaders have joined the attack. John R. Allen, head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan under ex-President Barack Obama, a reliable Big Fascist front man, blasted Trump and Co. on the recent “peace” deal brokered between the arch-sexist, criminal Taliban and the battered and corrupt Afghan government:
From an administration that has… abandoned the Kurds in Syria and undercut the Palestinians, it’s hard to imagine an American strategic counterattack into Afghanistan when the Taliban inevitably violate the terms of this agreement….(Brookings, 3/5).
The Big Fascists are desperate to win back the presidency to try to “right the ship” of U.S. imperialism and prepare for war against Russia or China or both. Though they’ve yet to find the internal discipline required for the job, they’re seeking to restore some semblance of legitimacy to capitalist legal and economic institutions. Hence the liberals’ calls to address glaring racist and sexist inequalities in wealth, health, housing, jobs, and incarceration. They also realize that they need a more aggressive stance to keep their imperialist rivals from rolling over them.
Within days of the bounty scheme becoming public, prominent liberals like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded to be briefed by national intelligence officials while calling for renewed sanctions against Russia (NYT, 7/1). Joe Biden, the segregationist nitwit the Democrats plan to run against Trump, boasted that if he were elected, Russian President Vladimir Putin “would be confronted and we’ll impose serious costs on Russia” (MSN, 6/28).
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the premier Big Fascist think tank, chimed in on Twitter: “Russia is carrying out covert wars vs US troops in Afghanistan and our democracy here at home. A proportionate response would increase the costs to Russia of its military presence in Ukraine & Syria and, using sanctions & cyber, to challenge Putin at home” (6/27).
With the liberal world order and U.S. supremacy collapsing before their eyes, the Big Fascists will be forced to escalate their imperialist onslaughts—not out of strength, but out of weakness.
Russia’s covert imperialist game
A Russian covert intelligence attack against U.S. and British military forces in Afghanistan fits with Putin’s approach of “hybrid” warfare. With Russia’s military not up to the task of confronting U.S. or NATO forces head-on, its state capitalist bosses have sharpened their destabilization skills with cyberattacks, meddling in foreign elections, and arming proxy armies (RAND Corporation Report, 3/22/17).
As details of the alleged bounties surface, so too does evidence that Russia has been cultivating both the Taliban and the central Afghan government to engineer a quicker U.S. withdrawal (CNN, 7/1). A shrinking U.S. presence will leave a vacuum for the Russian bosses’ own imperialist designs on the region. After being forced out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s by the U.S.-backed mujahideen (the forerunners of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS), Russian imperialists are eager to restore their neighbor and greater Central Asia into their orbit for wider regional security, lucrative military contracts, and access to natural resource wealth (The Interpreter, 5/7).
Fight for communism!
When the contradictions of inter-imperialist rivalry eventually explode, all sets of national capitalist bosses will be eager to send countless workers to fight and die in their wars for profit. As communists, our revolutionary objective is to win millions of workers and students worldwide to join Progressive Labor Party. We must smash capitalism’s genocidal business as usual and fight for international workers’ power. We must link the struggles against racist police terror, devastating unemployment, and imperialist war into a unified revolutionary battle against this entire rotten system. PLP represents the mass working class, the one force that can wipe the profit system and all its misery from the face of the earth. Join us!
CHICAGO—Dozens of Black, white, and Latin women and men of all ages shut down streets on the city’s west side. The bold actions of these anti-racist fighters peaked with a demonstration in front of the District 10 Chicago Police Department (CPD) station. As more people joined in, the killer Klan-in-blue made a hasty retreat into the station. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated and helped lead, promoting communist revolution as the solution to racist killer cops.
The march was led by friends and relatives of Steve Rosenthal. This 15-year-old Black teen was executed by racist cops in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood in August 2018. The lying kkkops naturally rationalized their violent murder, leading with the standard lie that they “thought he might have a gun.”
After chasing him into a stairwell at his grandmother’s home, they shot him in the back of the head. They claimed it was “suicide.” He was brought to the local hospital, dead on arrival, but the family was not allowed to see his body. We have been fighting for justice for Steve ever since. During the first month after Steve’s murder, demonstrations were held almost daily.
Communists in the international PLP fight injustice alongside our class sisters and brothers wherever and whenever the bosses attack. We promote the idea that the whole racist capitalist system is at the root of our collective misery and must be destroyed. Racist police murder, pandemics, unemployment and deportations will cease to exist when we organize millions of our class into PLP to crush capitalism with communist revolution!
Antiracists take the street, fascist cops retreat
The massive worldwide rebellions set off by the police murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor inspired the renewed energy to fight and march for Steve. Organized mainly through social media, flyers, and personal contacts, a crowd of a few dozen multi-racial workers and youth turned up in front of the local west side high school that served as the rallying point for past marches.
Soon after setting off on our march, we quickly took over a major street in front of the police station where Steve’s murderers operated and found protection. A line of cops soon filtered out and tried to intimidate and disperse the crowd. But the anger of the family, friends, and supporters would not be stopped!
We quickly shouted down the racist hitmen, pointing out that 22 months had passed and the family still had little to no information about getting justice for their loved one. The cops were forced to retreat as we continued to block the street and the station’s front entrance.
Continuing the march through Steve’s home neighborhood, his friends and relatives led the march with chants, songs, and speeches. Some of the marchers were grade school age, like Steve’s younger brother, but still spoke into the bullhorn as boldly as any seasoned fighter.
The leadership shown by the young Black workers who organized a militant march and stood up to the police was powerful. It bodes well for the future of the struggle to overthrow capitalism.
Workers embrace communist line
PLP comrades, who have been fighting alongside Steve’s family since his 2018 murder, helped give leadership as well. Our speeches called out liberal politicians, such as Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Black woman posing as an anti-racist, who fully supports Chicago’s racist police.
Marchers applauded our message to continue organizing for communism, instead of falling into the bosses’ election traps. They asked PLP to lead the second half of the march with our banner that read CPD: Guilty of Racist Murder. Unite to Overthrow Capitalism. Join PLP.
Participants also loudly repeated PLP-led chants:
“CPD, KKK—How many kids did you kill today?”
“CPD you can’t hide—We charge you with genocide!”
We distributed hundreds of PLP leaflets and CHALLENGE newspapers to marchers and working-class residents. Our long-term efforts to build a base in this particular neighborhood – holding other rallies, marches, May Day dinners, and CHALLENGE sales – have helped to make us a welcome, antiracist fighting force in the area. We intend to continue deepening these relationships and building our base for our mass Party.
No retreats from communism
The movement against racist police murder worldwide is at a crossroads, and we have the potential to play a vital role. Either we boldly advocate for communist revolution as the solution, or we allow the liberals and the misleaders to dilute the struggle as they have done time and time before.
For us, the second option is a definite no-go. The road to justice for Steve Rosenthal, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless others takes the form of building the international PLP. Fight back against racist capitalism – Fight for communist revolution!
- Information
On the question of racism: Black workers’ leadership key to communist revolution
- Information
- 10 July 2020 137 hits
Readers of CHALLENGE are aware of Progressive Labor Party’s(PLP) insistence upon the centrality of the struggle against racism to the fight for working-class liberation. The history of this strategic communist emphasis reveals the importance of proletarian (that is, working-class) internationalism in both theory and practice.
Although the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is widely credited (even by anticommunist historians) with leading the fight against racism during the Depression years, during most of the previous decade the CPUSA—following in the tradition of the prewar U.S. Socialist Party—insisted that Black oppression (then called the “Negro Question”) was exclusively an economic matter. Undue emphasis upon the violence, poverty, and harsh conditions of labor disproportionately endured by the Black working class, it was argued, would alienate white workers. Unsurprisingly, Black membership in the CPUSA remained low through the 1920s: by 1929, there were still fewer than 300 Black members in a total membership of over 15,000 (Zumoff).
The contradictory policy of Black liberation
It was the intervention of the Comintern (the worldwide association of Communist parties formed in 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution) that enabled the CPUSA to put the fight against racism front and center. At the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, there was intense debate over race, class, and nation. (1) Should Black workers in the U.S. be viewed as a “people,” a “race,” or a “nation”? (2) Did class divisions in the Black population make it impossible to have commonly shared material interests? (3) Did the call for “self-determination” of oppressed peoples and nations—a proposition key to both Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings on the “national question”—pertain to U.S. Black workers, and if so, how? (4) Were Black workers in the United States, by virtue of their greater degree of oppression and exploitation, particularly positioned to lead the global struggle against capitalism?
Notably, Black communists in the U.S. delegation to the Sixth World Congress were—while actively recruited to play a prominent role in these debates—themselves split on these issues (Haywood). It was largely delegates from other countries—especially Japan, Finland, and the USSR—who pressed for the position that would be endorsed as CPUSA policy during the coming period (Solomon). This policy was complex and contradictory.
On the one hand, it asserted that the Black peasantry (agricultural workers), located mostly in the “Black Belt” of the rural South, constituted an oppressed nation in need of self-determination, comparable to the separate peoples that had joined together to form the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) after the Bolshevik Revolution. On the other hand, particularly in the North, the Comintern policy called for an intensified fight against racism in all spheres of life, expressed in the slogan, “Black and White, Unite and Fight!”
Black nationalism is a failing strategy
It was assumed that the Black Belt—upon attaining self-determination through a “bourgeois-democratic” (capitalist) revolution that would help it overcome its capitalist-engendered uneven development—would then join the multiracial working class in the unified revolutionary movement needed to abolish capitalism.
This strategy was then and is now subject to serious critique. The call for a Black Republic, while intended to benefit working-class people of all races and ethnicities, even at the time smacked of Black nationalist separatism.
The post-World War II history of national liberation movements premised upon self-determination, moreover, has shown that the two-stage theory of revolution (first the bourgeois-democratic revolution, then the socialist revolution) has yielded only disappointment and betrayal, particularly in those parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America where it was most fervently embraced.
Progressive Labor Party asserts that the early twentieth-century theorizations of the “national question,” while plausible in their time, have proven to be impediments rather than spurs to working-class liberation. We see its failure playing out to this day. That is why PLP fights for nothing less than multiracial unity and one international fight against capitalism. We have one common enemy and one world to win.
Communists fight racism
Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the sharp struggles undertaken at the Sixth World Congress, the CPUSA greatly intensified its commitment to the fight against racism. Focusing both upon the special oppression of nonwhite workers and upon the destructive and divisive impact of racism upon the entire working class, the CPUSA took the lead in building a class-conscious multiracial movement, one whose legacy lasts to this day, especially in the ranks of PLP.
There would have been no Scottsboro campaign, no sharecropper organizing, no multiracial unionism, no massive eviction protests throughout the USA without the debates that had taken place in Comintern meetings on the other side of the world (Kelley; Naison). Moreover, where racism (“white chauvinism”) within the Party raised its ugly head, it was combated head-on, as in the so-called Yokinen trial of 1931 (Hudson).
One of the favorite canards of anticommunist historiography is the claim that the Comintern—often equated with a demonized construct designated as “Stalin”—never had at heart the interests of the workers of the world: that it sought only to defend the USSR and its ruling circles. The history of the struggle over the “Negro Question” in the United States shows quite the opposite.
In fact, whatever their nationalist limitations, when seen in retrospect, it was communists from around the world whose intervention helped communists in the U.S. reset their priorities. For this gesture of proletarian internationalism revolutionary antiracists remain indebted to this day.
Black workers key
The international communist PLP is fighting for the idea that liberal bosses and politicians are the main danger and that fascism is being expressed most sharply today in fights within ruling classes over how they will align themselves or respond to the reality of U.S. imperialism in decline.
We also fight for the idea that leadership of Black workers is uniquely key to the global victory of communism. Join the fight.
Further readings:
Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist.
Hudson, Hosea. The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Depression.
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression.
Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936.
Zumoff, Jacob. The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919 – 1929.
