NEW JERSEY, April 30—On the day before May Day, over 65 faculty, academic workers, graduate and undergraduate students participated in a virtual forum on “Class and Struggle in Higher Education,” organized by the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA). The forum’s theme, described by the opening speaker as “the systemic failure of capitalism to meet the needs of the great majority of the world’s people,” reflected the growing mass anger and fightback in higher education in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Even more important, however, the forum demonstrated the sharpening of Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) work among academics, addressing immediate concerns about the crisis in academic labor but also emphasizing the need for current organizing to be guided by a revolutionary outlook.

In response to the call to build a mass national—and international—higher education worker-student-faculty movement, nine speakers reported on sharp struggles they helped lead: winning a 4.5 percent raise for a new grad-student-worker union at Brown, leading a wildcat strike of grad workers at UC Santa Cruz, starting a union at Duke University Press, combating passive union leadership and calling for a strike at two New Jersey campuses, fighting for adjuncts at CUNY, and adjuncts at a Canadian campus challenging full-time faculty to wake up to their duty of care and solidarity. A lecturer from Haiti urged attendees to “use every means possible to bring revolutionary ideas into the universities with the goal of raising student consciousness and integrating militant, Marxist-revolutionary ideas into the campus.”

The April 30 forum grew out of three RC-sponsored events at the January 2021 MLA Convention: two RC panels -- on “Climate Activist Pedagogies” and “The Post-Pandemic University” -- and the RC’s annual meeting, all held virtually. Attendees strongly encouraged the RC to use the opportunity of virtual meetings to organize activities throughout the year; a core group of new and long-standing RC and PLP members volunteered to organize the pre-May Day forum on class struggles in higher education. The forum also drew upon the activism and relationships established by the long-term work of Party members in the CUNY Professional Staff Caucus (union) and the Marxist Literary Group as well as PLP membership in the MLA Radical Caucus since its founding in the crucible of the Vietnam War.
One key decision was to focus the opening talk on the importance of understanding the political economy of present-day capitalism, so that our organizing activities can draw the necessary connections between the crisis in higher education and the shifting needs of the ruling class which has produced, in the words of the opening speaker, the current “obscenity of economic inequality.“  The conference looked at the effects of this kind of crisis, a general capitalist crisis deepened by financialization and globalization and imperialist rivalry, on faculty and students in universities.  One of the key challenges facing communist organizing when mass anger erupts into class struggle, is the illusion workers have that liberal reforms can bring about real change, but history has shown us over and over that reforms will be reversed when struggle dies because the laws of capitalism depend on the drive for profit. Only a communist revolution can fundamentally change the lives of workers, since we will eliminate exploitation and capitalism.
Participants concluded the conference with plans to pursue three initiatives: (1) to build a network of radical academic organizations across disciplines; (2) to hold a second forum in the fall on “the new keywords of our struggle,” that looks at the way in which influential new terminology—terms like “intersectionality” and “social justice”—has drawn people into struggle but also limited them to reformism; and (3) to research and promote new initiatives and campaigns for academic labor organizing.
Members and friends in PLP have a pivotal role to play in this effort, developing deeper ties with fellow workers and students through discussions, study groups, and struggles. A key lesson of the forum was the necessity of having a long-term approach to communist organizing and Party building and having confidence in our fellow workers.

On May 12 our comrade, Sandy Spier, lost her 10 month fight with a brutally aggressive colon cancer.
Sandy joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) some fifty years ago while living in Minnesota.  At the time, PLP was organizing to fight against the imperialist Vietnam War. We were also spearheading the fight against academic racism. At a time when Black workers were leading a strike wave across the U.S. and  rebellions in the inner cities and were at the forefront of the fight within the military against the war, a group of academic prostitutes came up with theories that Black workers were destined to be violent and stay poor because of genetics. PL led the charge disproving these racist ideas. We were also trying to build alliances between the struggles of workers and students. The friends she made in Minnesota  remained her friends for years. People throughout the Midwest remember her coming to marches and summer projects.
About 20 years ago she moved to New York City where she has been active ever since. After a couple of years, she began working at Downstate Medical Center. She became active in the union, United University Professionals, and was known for advancing ideas of anti-racism, multi-racial unity, and supporting other workers, both in the U.S. and around the world. She was ever a voice for more militant fight back. She helped organize a demonstration outside Downstate on the first day of Desert Storm. More recently, when Downstate was threatened with closure, she spearheaded a large demonstration outside the hospital with the help of Occupy Wall Street which the union joined. That rally set the tone for future demonstrations.
Meanwhile, whenever there was a demonstration against a racist murder by cop, or in support of striking workers, or against attacks on immigrants, or in support of workers in other countries, struggling against their terrible conditions, Sandy was there.
Sandy also loved music. She always rode the May Day buses armed with song sheets to get people singing. She sang for a few years in a choral group in Brooklyn. She organized a holiday party every year that brought together her friends from work, church, and other activities .She bought a home in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania and in her time up there she got involved with folks fighting back. She traveled the world, searching out her relatives in Norway. As late as  February, 2020 she and a friend took a snowmobile trip up into the wilds of Norway and she got to see the northern lights from within the Arctic circle.
From Minnesota to Flatbush to Jim Thorpe, on the job, in her neighborhoods with family, Sandy built and maintained ties with scores of people.
She never missed a May Day march, whether in Chicago, Washington, D.C. or Flatbush. This year May Day was less than two weeks before she died. One of her comrades called her on his cell and let her hear and see our 2021 May Day march.
There is a song that PLP has adapted from a version sung by Italian partisans fighting the Nazis in World War II called “Bella Ciao” (Beautiful Goodbye). “I go out in the morning to fight the oppressor. Bella Ciao. If I die in combat, Bella Ciao. Take my gun into your hands.”  Bella ciao, Sandy. We will remember your quiet good humor, your ready laugh and your unwavering dedication to the fight of the world’s working class for a communist future. With you in our hearts, we will continue the struggle.

Three comrades remember Laszlo Berkovits
October 2, 1946 – April 19, 2021

At CCNY and in Central Europe
In 1968, at City College of New York, I was giving out Progressive LaborParty (PLP) leaflets inviting people to a demonstration against the U.S. war on Vietnam. A student read the leaflet and approached me. His name was Laszlo Berkovits and he was Hungarian. I thought he might be an anti-communist Hungarian refugee. The slide rule hanging from his belt indicated he was a math, science, or engineering major. Most leftist students were liberal arts majors. But no, Laszlo said he had studied Marxism in high school in Hungary. He thought it was a scientific analysis of capitalism and agreed with the leaflet. He started participating in our anti-war activities, joined the Students for a Democratic Society chapter, read CHALLENGE, and soon joined PLP.
In January 1969 Laszlo and Edna met while washing dishes at a birthday party. They married in 1970 and were together until April of this year, when ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) claimed Laszlo far too soon. They loved their 2 children and 3 wonderful grandchildren, and they extended their love to sons-in-law. Laszlo, a master soup chef, cooked soups for the family every Friday evening.
My wife and I travelled through Central Europe with Laszlo and Edna in 2012. We visited several Jewish cemeteries where Laszlo’s relatives were buried — those who had not been murdered by the Nazis. Laszlo had a deep-seated hatred of fascism. In Budapest, we had dinner with about 10 of Laszlo’s high school friends. It was obvious that they loved and respected him. At Laszlo’s hometown, Salgótarján, we had dinner with another 10 of his high school friends; one subscribed to CHALLENGE.
People everywhere counted him among their best friends. He loved people, took an interest in them and their families, and their problems. As a communist, he looked for the best in people. He believed that working people could unite to overthrow capitalism and rid the world of racism, sexism and the other horrors it generates.
We often sing Bella Ciao at PLP events. When we sing, “Soy comunista toda la vida,” I see Laszlo, truly “a communist all his life.”
At New York University Hospital and in New Jersey
Laszlo’s kind personality was not in contradiction to his fighting spirit and staunch antiracism. In 1979, while working at NYU Hospital, Laszlo and two comrades mounted a campaign against harassment and regular searches of the predominantly Black and Latin workers by hospital security guards. Threats of disciplinary action did not stop Laszlo and others. They even led workers to loudly picket a hospital administrator’s home.
When Laszlo and his comrades were disciplined by the hospital bosses, they filed grievances, which were dismissed by the administration and by an “impartial” arbitrator. They then hired a militant labor lawyer.
After a long battle at the National Labor Relations Board and a federal court, and supported by rank-and-file actions, NYU was forced to rescind all the disciplinary actions, and issue back pay.
Laszlo and his family moved from the Bronx to Teaneck, NJ in 1982. The Party there joined with parents and launched campaigns against racism in the schools and against racist police terror. As these battles continued, Laszlo and Edna encouraged their children to become active antiracists.
Laszlo had a sharp internationalist perspective. He understood that the fall of the old communist movement had given new life to world capitalism. He worked with other comrades to analyze the rise of imperialist China and why imperialist rivalry between China and the U.S. would inevitably lead to war.
More class struggle in New Jersey
When Laszlo and Edna moved to Teaneck, they helped us develop a PLP collective with two other families.  In joyful cooperation we helped each other raise our children with communist values. In 1982 we organized support for the township’s striking teachers, who were thrown in jail for their efforts.
Edna and Laszlo became active in the Bergen Society for Ethical Culture, which in the mid 1980s had declared sanctuary for refugees and asylum seekers. They supported expanding this fight and joined in the Society’s effort to work for climate justice. Laszlo was also a regular participant in many of the Society’s forums and gatherings. Only two weeks before his death, Laszlo spoke about David Bohm and Ilya Prigogine, scientists whose works have contributed to our understanding of the communist philosophy of dialectical materialism.
Farewell dear comrade. Farewell dear friend. Who you were and what you have done will live vividly within each of us and will continue to help shape an emerging communist world as long as the working class lives.

On the occasion of the 77th anniversary of D-Day, the U.S.-British invasion of Nazi-occupied Western Europe on June 6, 1944, we’ll hear lies telling us how the U.S. won the Second World War. The decisive role of the Soviet Red Army and working class will be deliberately underplayed or ignored altogether to avoid recognizing the fact that it was the communist-led Soviet Union, under the leadership of Josef Stalin—not the U.S.—that defeated Hitler’s Nazi armies.
As Benjamin Schwarz, national editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote in the New York Times, “Military historians have always known that the main scene of the Nazis’ downfall was the Eastern Front, which claimed 80 percent of all German military casualties in the war….The four-year conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army remains the largest and possibly most ferocious ever fought,….arguably the single most important chapter in modern military history.”
During the entire war, more than 70 percent of the active fascist troops in Europe were fighting the Red Army. The British were engaging only four German divisions in North Africa. When the Allies landed in western France on the Normandy beaches, they faced only three German divisions. The main reason was that more than 100 divisions from all over Europe had to be rushed to the East where the Red Army was moving 40 miles a day westward, crushing the fascist forces. More than a million Nazi troops were destroyed just by Soviet partisan units behind enemy lines, more than all the U.S. and British forces had destroyed during the entire war.
Over 25 million Soviet workers and soldiers died fighting Hitler’s armies. The U.S. lost 400,000 all told, in Europe and the Pacific.
In the winter of 1941, when the Nazis approached Moscow, 25 miles from the Kremlin, the entire population rose up in defense. Men joined the militia units at the front. Women and youth spent weeks out in the bitter cold, digging anti-tank ditches. Then the Soviet forces counter-attacked, pushing the enemy more than 100 miles from the city. This was the first large-scale defeat suffered by the Nazis. It was the beginning of their annihilation, six months after they had invaded. The New York Times military editor, Hanson Baldwin, along with scores of Western “experts,” had predicted the Soviets would be defeated in six weeks.
The turning point came in the battle of Stalingrad, in the winter of 1942-43, which virtually all capitalist historians have called the turning point of World War II. Soviet defenders fought battles house-to-house. Women and men voluntarily remained at their machines making tanks for the battlefield just outside their factories while bombs fell all around them. Stalingrad stands as a shining example of the  communist spirit. The Soviets surrounded and destroyed three fascist armies, causing 1.5 million Nazi casualties. After Stalingrad, the battlefield moved  in only one direction — westward toward Germany.
From 1941 to the spring of 1944, U.S.-British strategy was to wait until the Nazis and Soviets were fatigued fighting each other and then enter the war to get quick victories. They had delayed opening a second front in France for two years, until mid-1944, when it became apparent that if they didn’t the Soviets would be able to liberate all of Europe from the Nazi yoke. The Second Front was opened to stop the communist advance beyond Berlin.
In A War to Be Won (Harvard, 2009) by historians Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, they called the Soviets’ brilliant use of encirclement and what they called “deep battle” — extremely far-reaching advances behind the enemy’s lines — the most innovative and devastating display of “operational art” in World War II. Col. David Glantz, of the U.S. War College, marveled that close to one-half of wartime Soviet operations involving hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers are simply “missing from history,” either neglected or covered up.
So when the imperialists praise the U.S “victors” in World War II, the workers of the world should salute the true heroes who defeated the Nazi armies, the communist-led Red Army and working class of the Soviet Union.