Stalin Over Wisconsin: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 by Stephen Meyer documents the struggle to organize the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company in Wisconsin. At its peak, the factory employed over 10,000 workers.  In 1935 the Communist Party (CP) and United Auto Workers (UAW) both sought to organize the workers resulting in a red witch hunt that brought to light the limits of reform struggles and the need for a united and militant working-class revolution worldwide.
Role of the CPUSA
In 1935, the Communist Party took a direct role in the organizing campaign. They began to meet with workers from the plant to plan the campaign. However, in the book, Meyers makes no clear statement that any of the workers in the plant were members of the Communist Party. The company constantly attacked the worker’s organizing efforts as communist-led as did the AFL unions that had members in the plants. But the CPUSA did not respond to this red-baiting nor did it explain why communist leadership was important.
John Blair, an Alis-Chalmers worker and a communist, believed there were about 100 party members in the plant and most of them were shop floor leaders. The book gives no indication of what it meant to be a CP member other than to organize the fight against the bosses and to provide leadership in the 1939, 1941, and 1946 strikes.
Throughout various campaigns, Allis-Chalmers refused to create a union shop. They insisted on an absolute right to terminate workers at their discretion. Their only concession was to give workers a written explanation for their termination.
The 1941 strike was the most successful. This was helped by the National War Labor Board which ordered the company to withhold union dues from members’ checks and send them to the union. It shifted the balance of power in the plant by establishing an independent arbitrator to settle grievances, Allis-Chalmers management would no longer have the final say in worker discipline. It did not resolve disputes over wages and job classifications.
Issue of racism
The UAW Local 248 took on the issue of racism. It supported the 1941 march on Washington for jobs in the defense industries for Black workers. They also protested the requirement that Black sailors wear an “N” insignia to indicate they were “Negroes” in a letter to the Secretary of the Navy. The Local supported the efforts of R. J. Thomas, the international president of the UAW in his efforts to integrate some Detroit locals. At Allis-Chalmers in 1941, there were 141 Black workers. This grew to 693 by 1945. The Local fought for the advancement of Black workers in the plants. Luther McBride, a Black worker, was a shop steward who helped lead this fight.
Harry Christoffel, the local president, was determined by management to not be an essential worker and he was then drafted into the Army in 1944.
When WWII ended and the U.S.-Soviet alliance ended, there began a vigorous attack on unions that were considered to be influenced by the Communist Party. Local 248 was considered one of the unions that communists were in the leadership of. This set the stage for an 11-month strike in 1946-47.
At the start of the strike, 11,000 workers walked off the job. But at the same time, in Wisconsin and around the country there was a growing anti-communist sentiment. Joseph Mc Carthy was elected senator from Wisconsin and the Taft-Hartley Act was passed. The Act prevented members of the Communist Party from being on the union negotiating committee or being a union officer.
The leadership of Local 248 was unprepared. The attacks came not only from the company and right wing politicians but also from Walter Reuther and other national leaders of the CIO. After 11 months, the workers returned to work without a contract. Over 80 rank and file strike leaders were fired by the company and put on a blacklist by other local employers.
The key lessons
The red-baiting by the company and various AFL unions were never seriously addressed, so the workers were vulnerable to these attacks. There was also no clear understanding of what it meant to be a communist. These are mistakes of the old communist movement and that is this PLP fights to expose the misleadership of union leaders and make revolution primary over reform. We cannot hide communism from the workers.
Christoffel never admitted to being a communist. He was convicted in 1950 of lying to a Senate committee. After a series of appeals, he spent three years in jail, being released in 1956.
Did the 100 or so party members in the plant have a clear understanding of Marxism-Leninism and the need for a revolutionary party?  The book does not address any of these questions.
The closest it comes is a quote from Christoffel at the 50th anniversary of the founding of Local 248 in 1986. He stated, “To hell with the nickel. I am interested in much more than that. I want to make a better world…”
Winning workers to a communist vision of the future and fighting for it by building the party must be one’s main goal.

In recent weeks across Russia, tens of thousands of workers in over 100 cities have taken to the streets. Many have risked beatings and jailing to protest the bosses’ oppression and the arrest and imminent imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, the racist, arch-nationalist misleader who is challenging the fascist regime of President Vladimir Putin.
Workers united in militant solidarity can grind the bosses’ profit system to a halt. But when that passion is misdirected in defense of capitalist reformists like Navalny, workers cannot win. There are no good bosses! Though their strategies and tactics may differ, all capitalist rulers rely on racism, sexism, and the exploitation of the working class. They are driven by one principle: maximum profit.
While we don’t know for sure which capitalist forces have orchestrated the latest wave of protests in Russia, we do know that workers there have ample cause for rage: economic stagnation, gaping inequality, repressive security laws, and a deadly bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic. Each day they watch the bosses cheat the working class while ramping up the military for the next inter-imperialist war.
The only solution to capitalist state terror is the total destruction of the profit system:  international communist revolution. Choosing one oppressor over another will never liberate our class. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls on workers and students in Russia and worldwide to reject all bosses and build for communism and workers’ power.
New nationalist on the block
Navalny has emerged as a symbol of defiance against Putin’s 21-year rule. He first surfaced in the late 2000s with a blog that attacked corruption within the Russian leadership. Despite his blunt criticism of the status quo, Navalny has shown himself to be even more openly racist than Putin’s crew. In a video post from 2007, he compared immigrant Muslim workers from the Caucasus to “cockroaches” that need to be exterminated with “a pistol” (Salon, 4/2/17).
In 2014, after Russia seized Crimea, Navalny applauded the annexation: "The reality is that Crimea is now part of Russia… Crimea is ours” (BBC, 1/23). Russia’s imperialist land grab set off a conflict in Eastern Ukraine between U.S.-backed nationalists and Russian-backed separatists. It has killed at least 10,000 and displaced many more (The Balance, 8/21/20).
With shrewd public relations moves and backing from liberal media, Navalny has rebranded himself as a freedom fighter in front of a small but growing mass movement. In reality, however, his vision for Russia is for a new set of bloodsucking bosses to cash in. Although Navalny has faced assassination attempts as well as legal sanctions, he’s succeeded in securing political office for allies in Siberia, Novosibirsk, and Tomsk (Guardian, 9/13/20).
A weakening of Russia’s dominant bosses
Much like the Donald Trump phenomenon in the U.S., the inroads made by a worm-like Navalny reflect a weakening of the country’s dominant bosses and Putin’s once-iron grip on state affairs. As the contradictions within Russia grow even sharper, we can expect more intense infighting between ruling-class cliques and ramped-up attacks on workers.
In the second half of 2020, Covid-19 lockdowns caused Russia’s GDP to contract by close to 10 percent (Reuters, 7/17/20). According to government sources, unemployment is up at least 30 percent since last spring (Moscow Times, 5/20/20). Even before the pandemic, Putin’s approval ratings took a hit when his government raised the retirement pension age, which brought out thousands to protest (NBC News, 9/10/18).
Seeing the writing on the wall, Putin’s group has pushed through more openly fascist legislation to protect their control over the state apparatus. One law allows Putin to remain in power until 2036 and grants him life immunity from prosecution, while others make it easier to brand dissidents as “foreign agents” and clamp down on social media (Washington Post, 12/27/20).
Russian, U.S. imperialists on a collision course
Putin and his thieving gang understand the need for a unified ruling class, both to challenge their imperialist rivals and to contain worker fightback. While the isolationist Trump mostly deferred to Putin, new U.S. Imperialist in Chief Joe Biden, represents finance capital, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. As such, he’ll seek to re-establish U.S. dominance around the globe. The U.S. and Russia are on a collision course.
In his first official phone call as president, Biden warned Putin that the U.S. “will act firmly in defense of its national interests in response to actions by Russia that harm us or our allies” (Wall Street Journal, 1/26). Beyond Crimea, Russian expansionism is evident in proxy conflicts in Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Venezuela. U.S. finance capital was alarmed by Russia’s massive SolarWinds cyberattack last December and repeated hacks into the U.S. election apparatus.
As Washington’s arms modernization efforts lag behind Moscow’s, main-wing mouthpieces are clamoring for Biden to renegotiate a Russia treaty that would limit further proliferation of nuclear weapons (Foreign Affairs, 1/19). The finance capital bosses are also troubled by expanded joint military exercises between China and Russia that hint at a potential future alliance (AP News, 12/22/20). For the main-wing U.S. rulers, Navalny is a useful lightning rod—and a possible pretext for imperialist countermoves. On February 2, after Navalny was sentenced to more than two years in prison for trumped-up parole violations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for his immediate release and said the U.S. “would coordinate closely with allies about how to hold Russia accountable” (Reuters, 2/2).
Although we cannot predict when or where the next global conflict will begin, the laws of capitalist development tell us that imperialist contradictions are never resolved peacefully. As Putin himself acknowledged at the World Economic Forum, “[T]here is a possibility that we may experience an actual collapse of global development that might result in a fight of all against all” (CNBC, 1/27).
The revolutionary communist tradition
When the international working class takes to the streets, we need to be clear about what we’re fighting for. To support bosses like Navalny or Biden serves to strengthen the brutal hand of the capitalist bosses. Only by marching under the red banner of communism and workers’ power can we advance our class struggle for liberation from the capitalist parasites.
The one future worth fighting for is international communist revolution, led by the Progressive Labor Party. Over a century ago, workers and soldiers in Russia helped point the way to that future. They seized state power from the bosses amid the carnage of imperialist war and established the first workers’ state. Learning from both their triumphs and their errors, we can and will take power again. Workers of the world, unite! Join PLP!

LOS ANGELES, February 2—The fight to defend a working-class family and their home against the housing profiteers reveals the seeds of  communism.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has always said that the seeds of communism, the egalitarian society that we are fighting for, and that humanity deserves, are already present in everyday life. It is PLP’s historical role to nourish the growth of those seeds. We must prepare our new comrades for a lifetime of struggle. We will construct unbreakable political and personal bonds that will withstand all the blows from our class enemy and lead the international working class to victory in that fight. In the midst of multiple crises of capitalism, we in PLP are seeing small but important signs of this revolutionary potential for our class.
At the beginning of the campaign to reclaim the home of a working class family in Inglewood, most of the “shifters”, the scores of people who have kept up a 24/7 security watch over the family and their home, thought they would be keeping watch for only a day or two. We were sure the cops would come in almost immediately to raid the home and, for a second time, drag the family out of the house they had lived in for 14 years. But the “shifters”, including several PLP members, were wrong – we have now completed our sixth  week of vigilance.
We have learned some valuable lessons and seen some encouraging and uplifting signs during this campaign.  The “shifters” are a group of young, committed organizers.  Some call themselves socialists, some anarchists, some are attracted to communism. Some just want to fight back against yet another atrocity of capitalism. The gatherings at the house have afforded us the opportunity to have countless, long political discussions with our fellow “shifters”, who are hungry for alternatives to what they already recognize to be a deadly, dehumanizing entity – capitalism.
Many ways to win people to communism
We have learned that the Party’s line can be brought forward in many creative ways while working in a mass organization – even in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. The co-sponsoring groups, a local non-profit and a tenants’ union, organized a virtual forum on Covid-19. From this, we developed a list of “community agreements” aimed at keeping ourselves and the family safe from the virus. The presenter at that forum, a PLP health care worker, put forward a class analysis of the racist, capitalist health care system, which continues to fail workers affected by the pandemic and its terrible consequences.
We also had an open mic night, at which “shifters”, including two Party members, read poetry, played instruments and sang political songs. The artistic presentations gave us another opportunity to put forward the idea that capitalism can never provide housing for everyone. But communism means exactly that: housing for all.
Additionally, there was a forum on how to deal with anxiety in the middle of the pandemic. Everyone understood this has been made worse than necessary by the ravages of capitalism.  There were forums on topics as wide-spread as gardening, including growing one’s own vegetables, to self-defense. An upcoming forum will discuss the history of tenants and homeowners militantly fighting back against evictions under communist leadership.
Whatever the outcome of the campaign, we have seen a glimmer of the possibility of life under communism. The “shifters”, few of whom knew each other before the December 18 reclamation of the house, have developed strong bonds of friendship and support over these last weeks. They see themselves as a community of people, each looking out for the needs of the other and working together to keep each other safe. Invariably a call goes out on the campaign’s thread from “shifters” coming on duty as to whether the people already there need anything, be it firewood to keep warm, food, water or other supplies.
Plans to sharpen the struggle
Members of the campaign see this struggle as larger than just saving a single home for a single working-class family. Future actions are planned regardless of whether or not “ownership” of the house is returned to the family. A key one will be an anti-gentrification car caravan through the Inglewood neighborhood, culminating at the SoFi stadium, a concrete symbol of capitalism’s voracious appetite for profits over people’s needs.
Party members involved in the campaign have openly discussed communism with other “shifters” and have distributed copies of CHALLENGE to both the family and several “shifters”. We feel confident that we will soon be able to organize a study group with a number of people in the campaign.  
The fight for a communist revolution will be long and hard, but this campaign has shown us that ingredients for the growth of that fight already lie within many of our working class brothers and sisters. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win.

KEARNY, NJ, January 18—A  multiracial, multi-generational crowd of antiracists and communists gathered on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention death camps, where 21 workers have died in the past year. Progressive Labor Party and friends seized the day by sharing our ideas with working-class fighters and putting communist tactics into practice.
Incarcerated workers in New Jersey have been protesting their imprisonment and fighting back against the inhumane conditions of the rulers’ for-profit jails. Members of the working class from the Congo, Haiti, Honduras, and all worldwide are being forced to live cramped on top of other workers with rats, improper medical care, and all-around neglect. Our class is also experiencing the effects of capitalism in crisis with a raging pandemic to boot. It is the fight of all workers–Black, Latin, Asian, Arab, and white to smash these cages built by both Small Fascists like Donald Trump and the multiracial coalition of Big Fascists like the U.S. President Joe Biden.
Keep communist politics primary
For the last few years, members of PLP have actively fought alongside workers from Movimiento Cosecha to smash the racist division between undocumented and documented workers. With Covid-19 hitting Black and Latin communities at an alarming rate, the struggle and fight have only intensified. In NJ, ICE death camps have the highest rate of Covid-19 in the country (NJ.com, 6/21) and deportation flights have been linked to the confirmed spread of Covid-19 in more than 11 countries (CIDRAP, 1/19). (See article, page 5).
When PLP heard the call that Anti-ICE organizers planned to protest these conditions on MLK Day, we jumped at the opportunity. The plan was to take a heavily trafficked truck route, but as soon as we arrived there were already cops dressed in riot gear. Plans to occupy a large bridge with a small number of workers made our group feel unsafe and put the optics of militancy over building working-class power. We all agreed to talk to workers involved in organizing the event to collectively and dialectically decide a new course of action.
Build confidence in the working class
We knew we were in the presence of friends when one Black worker said, “The reason ICE exists and Martin [Luther King Jr] was killed are connected–CAPITALISM.” We found some faces in the crowd of workers that we met at previous antiracist protests in the summer around the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two Black workers murdered by kkkops.
As a way to unite struggles, one PL’er chanted, “Citizen and undocumented, same enemy same fight, workers of the world unite!” After a series of speeches, one organizer said while there were fewer protesters than expected, police retaliation was still a possibility. We planned to see how far we could go along the route and keep making communist politics primary.
We marched on the sidewalks along the truck route, shared CHALLENGE with truck drivers, and shouted “worker” as a substitute for “people” in chants. Those marching paused for us to make small speeches about the relationship between racist state terror and the profit system. The bosses divide workers by super exploiting and criminalizing some sections of our class while using the threat of deportations and police to keep us in line. Of course, no worker is free until all are free. We are proud to call ourselves “workers.” The “people” in the ruling class are our exploiters who will one day be smashed by a communist revolution.  Many workers appreciated this. In response, we gave them CHALLENGE.
Not pro-worker, just nationalist
On his first day in office, Big Fascist Joe Biden signed an executive order halting “most” deportations for 100 days. The same day, antiracist fighters in Portland, Oregon were tear-gassed and terrorized by fascist pigs for hurling rocks at both ICE and U.S. Democratic Party facilities (ABC News, 1/21).
Days later, Biden instructed the U.S. Justice Department to stop contracting with private prisons but exempted ICE. Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who gave supporters of Small Fascist Trump moral support earlier in the day, before they stormed the U.S. Capitol, successfully sued the halt in deportations (Time, 1/26).  
Contrast this with Biden silence on the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala William Popp, a previous appointee of Trump, endorsed the violent repression of more than 9,000 migrants at the hands of Mexican and Guatemalan bosses' police forces (Bangkok Post, 1/23). The Biden administration said they would refuse these workers fleeing hurricane-stricken Honduras. They will only afford some concessions for the documented and undocumented workers that are already present domestically, but not the ones that are currently fleeing their homes due to U.S. bosses’ imperialist crises.
Biden doesn’t care about workers in the U.S. or internationally. His goal is to convince workers that their loyalty lies with the U.S.bosses, and not with our class brothers and sisters who risk their lives crossing their deadly borders. Biden will use nationalism disguised as multiculturalism to build a war-ready nation to fight U.S.’s imperialist rivals China and Russia. PLP says turn this imperialist war into a class war to smash all borders.
 Hate nationalism? You might be a communist
When workers refuse to identify with any of the bosses’ nations and make the choice to unite around our class’s common interests, we are showing other workers what it takes to build communism. PLP is an international, communist party that’s committed to fighting racism, sexism, and exploitation in our neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. The class struggle may reveal a communist inside all of us! Join PLP to join the fight!