PAKISTAN, December 16—High inflation of wheat and sugar; low wages and factory closures. The working class has been forced into the streets, chanting against the brutal capitalist system which is producing poverty, unemployment, nationalism, and other horrors. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is spreading class-consciousness among workers associated with different trade union organizations, government employees’ organizations, student unions, and more. We are striving to bring communist politics in practice.
Economy spirals into chaos
Pakistan’s economy is dependent upon the financial support of lending mafias and capitalist monetary institutions. Under prime minister Imran Khan, the economy is crashing. It has nothing to deliver except unemployment, starvation, chaos, political instability and social destruction to the working class masses. Capitalist bosses are hungry of profit, so they are making the lives of the working class more miserable by increasing prices of basic commodities. Right-wing capitalists, mafias and corporations financed the election campaign of the ruling party and are now extracting more than what they spent during the last elections in 2018. They are super-exploiting the working class.
Recently we were involved in a struggle to unite different trade unions and groups of working class people against all aspects of capitalist exploitation—unemployment, low wages, price hikes, poverty, and workplace harassment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) dictated policies. Thousands of workers across more than 61 labor organizations and trade unions united under the umbrella of the All Pakistan Employees, Labor and Pensioners Movement (APELPM).
This APELPM brought thousands of workers to Islamabad, the federal capital of Pakistan.  Participants in this demonstration protested against the capitalist bosses’ vicious policies. The protest is a message to the bosses that workers are united. However, the protests in Islamabad have set a new precedent in the history of the country in terms of worker’s joint struggle. Last time such overwhelming workers unity was demonstrated in 1968-69.
Protesters sat in front of the Parliament House, while chanting, “No To IMF, Long Live the Workers’ Union, Go Imran Go.” They were demanding raises in their salaries in proportion to the recent price-hike due inflation. Active and retired workers were angry that the government failed to raise salaries and pensions for government employees in the current fiscal budget presented in June 2020.
Police used water cannons, batons, tear gas shells, cruelty and other fascist tactics to stop the working class from demonstrating in front of the Parliament house. But after a vigorous face-to-face fight with police, workers defeated the police. Bosses used all their power to empty the area from demonstrating workers but failed. Finally the government decided to sign an agreement with the demonstrators. They accepted the demands and begged the protesters to vacate the area. Next, the workers need to move beyond economist demands and join the political fight for the whole working class’s liberation.
A system in crisis makes workers pay the price
Workers cannot get medicines for themselves or their families from hospitals. They cannot afford to send their children to schools, so they send them to work as beggars or to work at automobile workshops, restaurants or bakeries, earning very little. All the subsidies on wheat, flour and some other basic items have been withdrawn by the government. This makes basic items that used to be subsidized beyond the reach of many working class people.
So-called leftists here in Pakistan, and also all over the world, are afraid of talking about communist revolution. These so-called progressives are using terms like nationalism, secularism, democracy, equality, and to some extent socialism, but never communism. They are hiding the truth that only a communist society can serve humanity. But we in PLP are talking about communism, the creation of a society and the need of an international revolution led by the international communist Progressive Labor Party.
PLP is consistently and enthusiastically participating in different activities of working class people wherever we are active. We are bringing revolutionary communist ideas to workers around us to challenge the bosses and their capitalist system. We always try to play an active political role while organizing sit-ins, strikes, protests and rallies.
We are not hiding the truth that only an international communist revolution under the red banner of PLP can bring prosperity and peace to the lives of the working class.
We emphasized that the bosses are making agreements just to get demonstrators out of this sensitive area. They may give some reforms to the workers to avoid their struggle in the near future, but it’s very true that the working class cannot achieve their goals of equality, justice and prosperity under capitalism. We must establish a communist society through an international communist revolution under the leadership of the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Join us.

Under capitalism profit comes before all and at the expense of workers’ lives. During a global pandemic that has left many workers unemployed and starving, the bosses and their mouth pieces are working overtime to hide their present day agricultural atrocities.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) however, wants to remind workers that with communist revolution we will bring back the collectivization of agriculture - a practice that ensures sufficient production to feed the entire working class.
Proletariat over profits
“Collectivization, [was a] policy adopted by the Soviet government, pursued most intensively between 1929 and 1933, to transform traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union and to reduce the economic power of [land owners]...” (Britannica 12/20). Workers were asked to forgo individual property ownership and collectivize their farms.
With the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and China, agricultural collectivization meant ending massive famines that, over centuries, had killed millions of workers due to starvation.
Politics, not profit, were primary. The aim was to structure society, in this case the production of food, a basic human need, in a way that benefited all members of the working class. Many farmers who considered themselves members of what Karl Marx called the petite bourgeoisie (small business owners) needed to be won to the idea of taking leadership from politically-conscious poor peasants and put the promotion of egalitarian communism first. Maximum production can only be attained when farm workers are inspired by a commitment to help each other.
Russian reforms end legacy of famines
Famine has struck Russia hundreds of times during the past millennium. 1917 saw a serious crop failure causing an urban famine in 1917-18. In the 1920s the USSR had a series of famines: in 1920-1923 in the Volga and Ukraine, plus one in western Siberia in 1923; in the Volga and Ukraine again in 1924-25, and a serious although little-studied famine in Ukraine in 1928-1929. This history is essential in understanding the famine of 1932-1933 and the response of the Soviet government.
Soviet collectivization of agriculture was a reform — but a significant improvement, none-the-less, in the security and lives of the peasant population and therefore of the entire population. It was not undertaken to “tax” or “exploit” the peasants or to extract value from the countryside. On the contrary: during the decade 1929-1939 the Soviet government spent tens of billions of rubles on agriculture.
At the time, Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks viewed collectivization as the only way to swiftly modernize agriculture, to put an end to the wasteful and labor-consuming cultivation of individual land holdings.
As with many reform struggles, there was fightback from land-owners who were blind to the failings of capitalism. Many peasants, however, actively supported collectivization. This number increased when local organizers were sharp enough to explain that smashing a profit system that benefited only the bosses was in all workers’ interest.
When another famine occurred there was no choice but to redistribute food and resources. Mark Tauger, an agricultural historian, writes:
This evidence shows, in particular, that collectivisation allowed the mobilisation and distribution of resources, like tractors, seed aid, and food relief, to enable farmers to produce a large harvest during a serious famine, which was unprecedented in Russian history and almost so in Soviet history… this research shows that collectivisation … did in fact function as a means to modernise and aid Soviet agriculture.
Soviet collective farms remained until the end of the USSR in 1991. But like many reforms, they did not develop more egalitarian practices or an advance towards a classless society and were eventually reversed. Land owners kept private plots for individual farming. These became important sources of private income.
Without class consciousness China’s communes fail  
China too was a “land of famine,” with devastating natural disasters every few years,
compounded by feudal and capitalist governments who cared nothing for the workers’ lives. In liberated areas and after the victory of the communist revolution (1949) the Chinese Communist Party instituted land reform, which created a small peasant economy without landlord exploitation. In the mid 1950s the Rural People’s Commune movement began. Within a few years all agriculture had been collectivized into communes.
A class analysis is needed to understand the communes – why they succeeded, and why they were eventually abolished. Working class farmers were the backbone of the communes. Middle peasants – the petite bourgeoisie – those with some land, tools, animals, etc., were often ambivalent.
The basic political question was whether production and profit would win out over communist politics. At the basic level the communes (collective farms) awarded work points and points for a peasant family’s contribution of tools, animals, etc., to the collective. The goal was to move towards a more egalitarian system of production, one not based on profit. This was gradually rolled out in most communes, with the support of many peasants and, in the leadership, revolutionaries around Mao Zedong.
Reforms lead to party splits
While many party leaders claimed to view the communist movement as the best vehicle for liberating China from imperialist domination they saw the founding principle – “from each according to  his ability, to each according to his need” – as secondary, attainable only after a long historical period, if at all.
In 1958-61 there was a serious famine and reformist members (members who wanted to retain aspects of capitalism) in the Party leadership blamed the communes for not reserving enough of their production. The communes were accused of allowing over-consumption so that there was not enough food during the famine. Reformist members immediately pushed for dismantling the more egalitarian aspects of the communes and for material incentives based on production.
Poor peasants, plus the revolutionary forces around Mao, were the key force supporting the more egalitarian policies in the communes. In the end, however, they were no match for those in the Party who wanted to abolish the communes and revoke the once won reforms.
A vision of communist collectivism
The communes provided not only food but education, health care, and infrastructure work. While they could certainly have done much better if they had had the support of the Party leadership on all levels, at their peak they provided schools for what workers’ lives post revolution might look like.
As we continue to fight for communism, even during the darkest of nights, PLP remembers that it is only with worker-led, communist revolution that we will smash the chains of capitalism that are built to kill our class.
Sources: Zhun Xu, From Commune to Capitalism. How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty (2018); Grover Furr, Blood Lies Chapters 2 & 3 (2014); PLP, “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution & the Reversal of Worker's Power in China.” PL Magazine vol. 8 no. 3 Nov. 1971;. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After. A History of the People’s Republic. 3rd edition, 1999.

Friedrich Engels, the comrade in arms of Karl Marx, was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Germany. His father was a textile manufacturer, a reactionary and religious man. He forced young Engels into a commercial apprenticeship, first in his own company, then in another. Despite his reluctance, Engels mastered this profession.
In 1841-2, Engels did voluntary military service in Berlin where he could attend lectures at the university. There he made contact with liberal, anarchist and left-Hegelian circles, and studied military science. In 1842, he began work in his father’s cotton mill in Manchester, England. Engels would go after work into the working-class neighborhoods where he saw the misery of the proletariat. He got to know English labor leaders and married an Irish worker, Mary Burns.
Workers of Manchester made Engels a communist
Engels read everything that had been written about the situation of the English working class and carefully studied available official documents. Engels came to understand that it is their dire economic situation that drives workers to fight for their liberation. However, liberation from capitalism will only happen if the working class consciously sets it as its goal. At the age of 25, Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. As early as 1844, he had published Outline of a Critique of Political Economy in Franco-German Yearbooks where Marx also worked.  Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution (Lenin).
In 1848, Marx and Engels published the world-famous Manifesto of the Communist Party. In that year, as democratic revolutions broke out in Europe, both worked on the revolutionary newspaper,  Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The Prussian state persecuted the paper and its editors, and expelled Marx from Germany.
In May 1849, Engels fought on the barricades in his homeland during an uprising. In June, he fought in another uprising. After Prussian troops crushed it, he fled to Switzerland. In 1850, Engels returned to Manchester, where he worked again in the Ermen & Engels spinning mill. Meanwhile he carried out revolutionary organizing, and supported Marx financially. Both men joined the International Workers Association, the First International, which helped workers' parties, newspapers and organizations worldwide.
During this period Marx began systematic work on the materialist criticism of bourgeois political economy, culminating in the first volume of Capital in 1867. Could Marx have done this without the constant professional and scientific advice and material support from Engels? It is doubtful. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels published two more volumes of Capital and was a leader of the international socialist and communist labor movement.
Engels fought for materialism
Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view  that it is the development of the mind that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the ideas of the mind must be derived from nature, from matter. ...Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels were materialists. Regarding the world and humanity materialistically, they perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by the development of material forces, the productive forces (Lenin, Frederick Engels 1895).
Lenin fought for Engels’ elaboration of this revolutionary-materialistic point of view in his great philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. While Marx at that time worked his way further into the depths of the critique of political economy, Engels … dealt with general scientific problems and with diverse phenomena of the past and present in the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx's economic theory in works such as Anti-Dühring (analyzing highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Peasant War in Germany, and other works
There are many stories about the generous, humorous, witty host, who was a disinterested helper to countless comrades. Engels put all his strength and inheritance at the disposal of the working class. “The European proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always … placed himself after Marx. … His love for the living Marx and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless (Lenin “Fredrick Engels”).

Engels has no grave. “In accordance with Engels’s instructions his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea …” (T. Carver, The Life and Thought of Fredrich Engels)

The struggle continues to force the racist bosses to drop all charges against Black artist/organizer Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson. Mohawk was attacked and arrested in August during an anti-kkkop protest in downtown Chicago with many others, and remains on house arrest connected to “aggravated assault.” Communists from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active in trying to build this battle in the streets, courts, and our workplaces.
The fight to free Mohawk has expanded into a wider mass campaign to challenge capitalist state terror that faces antiracist fighters here in the city. A grassroots citywide defense committee has been created, and over 60 antiracists filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department after being targeted and beaten by the bosses’ attack dogs (See CHALLENGE, 12/16).
So if you’re in the Chicago area on December 29th, come support the fight by joining the rally and picket in front of Leighton Courthouse on 26th Street and California Avenue at 9:30 am CST. The capitalist bosses fear nothing more than a multiracial united working-class armed with communist politics. Let’s keep up the fight to free Mohawk, and tear down this whole racist system!