February 2 is the 77th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad (1943), the turning point of World War II. It was when the communist Red Army defeated the Nazis, proving that fascism can be defeated.
The Bolsheviks organized the Soviet working class to build a mighty Red Army for the wars that they knew would come either from the fascists – Hitlerite Germany and militarist Japan – or from the big imperialist powers, Britain and France.
In June, 1941, the fascist German, Italian, and Finnish armies did invade the Soviet Union, with hundreds of thousands of troops from other fascist countries (Hungary, Spain, Rumania) and German-occupied countries (France, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Holland)  
German Blitzkrieg gets unpleasant suprises
The German “Blitzkrieg” (lightening war) tactic was to punch through defense lines with paratroopers, tanks and mechanized infantry, and loop around, cut off, and capture the encircled enemy troops. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in the first few months. But many continued to fight, forming partisan bands behind the fascist lines.
On October 8, 1941 the Nazis announced: “For all military purposes, Soviet Russia is done with.” But the Nazis had never met fighters like the Soviet troops. “The Russian troops ... [act] in striking contrast to the Poles and the Western Allies,” wrote the Nazi commanding general. “Even when encircled, the Russians stood their ground and fought.”
Stalingrad
The Nazis aimed an offensive south at Stalingrad, center of the critical remaining war production, and the southern oil fields. Without supplies, the Soviets would have to surrender. The Nazis drove the Red Army from the open fields into Stalingrad itself. Then the Nazis pushed into the city.
The Soviet 62nd Army fought to the death for literally every building in the city. Their orders from Supreme Headquarters were “Not one step back.”
Their mission was to buy time for a counter-attack. Every day brought a new crisis. The Nazis had captured 80 percent of the city. The Bolsheviks based their defense on three large factories, a housing project, a hill, and a boat landing where supplies and reinforcements landed and wounded were evacuated. At their backs was the Volga River. On the far bank was their artillery support.
The Nazis pushed forward. The 62nd Soviet Army was cut in two. Chuikov, the Soviet commander of Stalingrad, then ordered his fighters into the factories themselves. Nazis and communists fought among mazes of machinery. Chuikov organized groups of six to eight with hand-to-hand combat training. The heroic workers continued production at the tank factory. They drove each newly built tank directly from the assembly line into battle.
Red Army launches attack
Finally, in January 1943, preparations for the counterattack were complete. The Red Army launched a counter-attack with over a million well-armed reserves striking from the north, west and south in huge pincers. Outflanking and outfighting the Nazis, they linked up, encircling the Nazis, who had encircled the 62nd Army.
On February 2, 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad ended, marking the turning point of World War II and the beginning of the end of the Nazis. Today as the imperialists prepare for more wars for oil and to re-divide the world, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is fighting to rebuild the international communist movement, this time to crush all the war makers with communist revolution:
Here [in Stalingrad], heavily outnumbered and outgunned, Soviet defenders fought battles house-to-house.
It was in that city that workers, men and women, were won to the necessity of defending their new workers’ society. They voluntarily remained at their machines making tanks for the battlefield just outside their factory while bombs fell all around them. If ever an example is needed of the communist spirit, it is Stalingrad. These defenders had courage, sacrifice, determination and camaraderie–what a boundless sea of what’s best in humanity! The Soviets destroyed three fascist armies, causing 1.5 million Nazi casualties.” (Challenge Supplement, May 17, 1995.)
During the entire World War II, more than 70 percent of the active fascist troops in Europe  were fighting the Red Army. While the U.S. and British imperialists’ initial strategy was to wait it out and to come in for a quick victory, the Red Army and the communist-led partisans actually fought fascism.
Fight fascism with communism
When the Allies landed in Normandy in 1944, only three Nazi divisions faced them, because more than 100 Nazi divisions from all over Europe had to be rushed to Belarus and the South Ukraine where the Red Army had crushed all the fascist forces.
The Red Army, organized and led by communists, smashed the Nazi and fascist forces. The Soviet working class and Bolshevik Party saved the world from fascism! All this was accomplished under the leadership of
Joseph Stalin. No wonder he is hated and lied about by world capitalism’s fakers to this day.
Unfortunately, due to internal weaknesses, the world communist movement turned away from the goal of overthrowing capitalism through revolution and from reliance on the working class. After Stalin’s death in 1953, under phony communist leadership, Soviet leaders introduced more and more capitalist economic policies. These gradually eroded the foundations of the world communist movement, turning the Soviet Union into just another state capitalist and imperialist power.
Nevertheless, the defeat of fascism in World War II by the working class should inspire us with confidence in the working class, whose best is brought out by communist leadership. Let us take a long, hard look at each other and ourselves, correct our weaknesses and fight harder against the class enemy.
We have many battles to fight in an uphill struggle if humanity is to be liberated from racism, imperialist war and capitalist oppression. But fight these battles we must if we want an egalitarian society and carry on the legacy of our Soviet comrades of the Second World War.
The Bolshevik Revolution
The Bolshevik Revolution of November 7, 1917, is the most important single event of the 20th century. The working class across Russia, allied with the oppressed peasants, seized state power and held it for decades. The Bolshevik Party (name of the Communist Party of Russia) led the workers and peasants to defeat Russian and foreign armies that tried to overthrow them in a hard-fought four-year civil war (1917-1921).
From 1921 to 1941, the Bolsheviks – now under the leadership of Joseph Stalin – ended many remnants of capitalism, and collectivized agriculture to stop the endless series of devastating famines.
They outlawed racism! Black intellectuals from the U.S. like poet Langston Hughes, actor and singer Paul Robeson, and many others, praised the racial egalitarianism of the Soviet government and workers. The Bolsheviks also led the Communist Party USA to make the fight against racism primary in all its struggles, a pillar that PLP continues and advances today.

The Mexican National Guard, once again, repressed a caravan of Honduran migrants by badly beating them and firing tear gas at them. The migrants were trying to cross the border between Guatemala and Mexico. Several were arrested and deported, some managed to escape to the mountains where they will face other dangers. With this action the Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) government and the liberals in the ruling class which he represents are essentially outlawing working class migration. It also reveals that capitalism in crisis will always resort to fascism despite the appearance of a so-called transformative populist change.  
Migration is caused by capitalist inequality that condemns millions of workers to misery, exploitation and violence. These workers are forced to leave their places of origin with the false hope of improving their situation or escaping the danger of gangs or cartels, but capitalism attacks workers in every corner of the world. In more developed countries, they reach a dead end, where they are victims of racism, super-exploitation, and even slavery.
The only escape from this criminal system is a communist revolution to achieve a society organized and led by the workers. One that is based on the social needs of the majority of the working population and not of a rapacious minority of capitalist bosses.
It should be remembered that the creation of the National Guard was to support public safety.
We know that is just the cover for the Mexican bosses’ true intentions. Ever since the previous President’s administration, the center-right Calderon, the bosses have tried to pass the internal security law. This would give their army the right to act as police forces within the country’s territory.
The National Gaurd (GN) operates through a permanent Council chaired by the Secretary of Public Security, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Navy, appointed by the President. In general terms, its structure is completely military. This Council has the power to evaluate and shape action strategies, to designate commands, among other things, and to guarantee the safety of citizens. However, due to its structure, it is not accountable to the Federal Government.
All of this is worsened by the approval of another law that facilitates the use of lethal force. So that, now, what has been created is a political police force with repressive duties aimed against the working class. Before the approval of this law, the decision on the use of lethal force was based on repelling attacks. That is, they could only fire after being attacked. Now, they can attack even without being completely sure that the people are armed. Previously, during Peña Nieto’s term, the army was investigated for attacking people who they could not prove were armed. Under these fascist AMLO laws, they face no investigation threats!
AMLO: imperialist servant
As a good liberal, López Obrador feints with the left and hits with the right. He presents himself as a protector of migrants and represses them with thousands of National Guard elements deployed on the border with Guatemala. Now, the southern part of the country has a greater police and military presence, even more than the northern part of the country where crime is greater. The reason for all these troops, besides attacking migrants, is to protect AMLO’s main mega-projects: the interoceanic corridor, the Mayan train, the three-mouth refinery, and the program sowing life.
The corridor is a project long desired by the U.S. bosses and now the Chinese bosses are also interested. The armed forces are deployed in this area to contain social movements against these megaprojects and apparently in the north the containment is left to the paramilitary force of the criminal gangs.
Obrador has taken advantage of his enormous political support to realize the plans of the national capitalists and imperialists, but the worst damage has been the demobilization of social struggles. No protest has arisen from the repression of migrants. The right supports the attacks and the left keeps a complicit silence. Progressive Labor Party calls on workers to protest against fascist repression and organize our only way out: communist revolution.

Comrade Mark Shapiro, one of the original members of the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), died on January 12 at 78. Mark was a communist whose life and influence spread throughout the working class and encompassed both mental and manual labor. Married to Ann, a PLP comrade, Mark was a General Motors auto worker, a railroad brakeman, a high school and college teacher, a father to Daniel and David, a grandfather to four grandchildren and a father to two foster daughters, a musician who belonged to several bands and played the clarinet — his high school yearbook portrayed him as the “Benny Goodman of Weaver High.” Being a “birder” he and his wife Ann led the Hartford, Connecticut Audobon Society, while serving as a political leader among hundreds of workers and youth.  Truly a communist “for all seasons.”
Perhaps Mark’s most significant contribution to the working class was his uncovering of one of the most vicious racist frame-ups of the 1960s, the George Whitmore case.  The U.S. Supreme Court cited it as “the most conspicuous example of police coercion in the country” in its 1966 decision which became known as the Miranda ruling, to possibly protect those arrested from being coerced into false confessions.
After his auto and railroad jobs, and having obtained a Masters degree in physics at Columbia University, Mark began teaching science in New Jersey and later moved to Connecticut where he taught physics at Wesleyan University among other colleges in the area and social studies at Trinity College and Prince Tech.
He had been born into a communist family in Albany N.Y. His parents had been blacklisted during the McCarthy witchhunts. This background led him to join Progressive Labor Movement in 1963 and later the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Mark became a member of PLM’s first trade union club and of the staff of CHALLENGE. He put his great sense of humor to work, writing the paper’s first humor column, “Marksmanship.”  Years later his son said he liked to brag that the first big anti-Vietnam War protest in New York City was organized in his living room
Mark exposes the racist frame-up of George Whitmore
On August 28, 1963, two white professional women were murdered in Manhattan which the media  labeled the “Career Girl Murders.” At that very moment George Whitmore, a young Black man, was in Wildwood, N.J. sitting with a dozen friends watching Marin Luther King make his famous “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Whitmore had been previously acquitted of a frame-up by racist cops of a murder in Brownsville, Brooklyn. But the cops went after him again and arrested him for the murders of these two women. The cops wrote a 61-page “confession” and beat him into signing it. A Manhattan District Attorney joined in the frame-up and a judge sent the youth to Rikers Island for a “psychiatric” examination. The bosses’ press — 10 New York City newspapers at the time — lept on the case with ranting front-page “stories” smearing Whitmore as a “Black killer.”
At the very same time a civil liberties advocate, John Lawrence, who worked for a law firm, had decided to test a law by striding down Broadway in Manhattan carrying an unloaded rifle in full view, hoping to be arrested to create a test case in court. Sure enough the cops arrested him and a judge sent him to Rikers for an “examination.” He ended up in the same area as Whitmore. Lawrence had heard of Whitmore and they began talking.
Whitmore detailed to Lawrence about where he was in Wildwood, N.J. watching King’s speech on TV when the murders were committed. When Lawrence was released, he went to every newspaper in the city with his “scoop” and every paper refused to publish it, given that it exposed the racist trash they had been printing.
Lawrence then consulted the “newspaper” listing in the telephone yellow pages and saw “CHALLENGE.” He came to our office to see if we would print the story. Mark met him, listened to what he had to say and began writing a series for
CHALLENGE recounting his interviews with Lawrence exposing the racist frame-up. None of the city’s press pursued it but some out-of-town newspapers picked it up, never mentioning Mark’s reporting, of course. It became the story of the year, similar to the more recent racist “Central Park Five” frame-ups. Seven years later Telly Savalas made a TV movie dramatizing the case entitled “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,” only the second Kojak production.
Mark and Ann raised their family in Bloomfield, Connecticut, where he lived the rest of his life. He was a fixture at every May Day march until last year. He brought scores of his high school students to the anti-KKK march in Scotland, Conn., and remained passionately devoted to his communist principles and activities.
 He and Ann were avid travelers, touring the world in places like China, Alaska, and Brazil, and taking camping vacations regularly to Maine and national parks nationwide where they developed an abiding interest in birding, leading them to the Audobon Society. In recent years he joined the fight to protect Bloomfield’s water from exploitative corporate interests and became active in supporting hospital strikers in his area, selling them CHALLENGE, containing stories he had written about their struggle. In his last years he suffered from Parkinson’s Disease but never lost his interest in the clarinet. He was heard playing it on the day before he died.
Comrade Mark Shapiro was one of many who devoted their lives to building the communist movement. While he is gone in body, the fruits of his labors will live on in the continuing efforts of revolutionary communists the world over to create a society that will liberate the working class from capitalist slavery. A toast to Comrade Mark, remembered forever!

On January 28, U.S. President Donald Trump, flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unveiled an Israeli/Palestinian “peace” plan. The plan gives Israel significant parts of the West Bank and control of most of Jerusalem. It legalizes illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, gives Palestinian refugees no right of return and gives Israel security control over some future Palestinian state. None of the capitalists competing for power in the Middle East accept this plan. More chaos and war is in store for the region, with workers dying for the bosses” profits. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP)organizes to turn these imperialist wars into working class wars against all capitalist bosses.
On Dec 22, 2017 a CHALLENGE editorial stated “U.S. President Trump’s recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was a holiday gift to the Israeli ruling class, a big-power blessing of the country’s anti-Arab racism and apartheid, and a reflection of the embattled U.S. bosses’ growing isolation in the region and the world. It would also lead to even more instability in the Middle East, collateral damage to U.S. allies, and a rise in mass anger and fight-back against the U.S.”
Trump’s latest “peace” plan is more of the same. This time it is more specifically a gift to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is facing corruption and fraud charges in Israel. It is also a ploy by Trump to appeal to his racist, Zionist and evangelical base as he faces impeachment and a coming election.
Since recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital the U.S. killed the Iranian general Suleimani in Iraq and an Iranian missile strike seriously injured 30 U.S. soldiers, bringing the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war. Then masses of Iranians and Iraqis demonstrated against the U.S. and the Iraqi Parliament voted to kick the U.S. military out of Iraq. The instability and fightback that CHALLENGE predicted continues.
Further weakens U.S. imperialism
Indeed “mass anger and fight-back against the U.S.” is increasing and the imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class is losing control in the Middle East. Their allies are wavering. The European Union and the United Nations both came out in opposition to Trump’s plan. Then so did the African Union and the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (Al Jazeera, 2/4). The ambassadors from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan did not attend the unveiling of the “peace” plan (NYT, 1/28).
But Sheldon Adelson and Jared Kushner were there. The Kushner family has major investments in Israeli settlements (Real Clear Politics, 12/6/19). Adelson is a billionaire, Zionist supporter of Israel and Trump. He is aligned with the more domestically oriented U.S. capitalists who want low taxes and less regulation of business.
Israel: birthed by imperialism, raised by apartheid
This imperialist control of and competition over Palestine started in 1948 when the new Israeli state murdered or expelled over 750,000 Palestinians, 85 percent of the population. In 1967 they took over more territory and left only 22 percent of the land in Palestinian hands, albeit occupied, and exerted complete militarily control over 30 percent of the territory and nearly all of its water, its borders, and security. The West Bank (WB) has now been illegally militarily occupied for 53 years. Military incursions into Gaza have killed over 7,000 since 2000, wounded thousands more, and left that area “uninhabitable,” according to the United Nations. The 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are Palestinians have markedly fewer rights than Jewish workers. By declarating itself a “Jewish State” in 2018, Israel has officially adopted apartheid.
Reject the bosses’ nationalism
Thousands of Palestinians have demonstrated against this “peace” plan, but their leaders are corrupt. The Palestinian Authority represents the small, ruling capitalist elite in the West Bank, where inequality is as great as in the U.S. It has a long history of cooperating with Israel to suppress dissent. Hamas is a fundamentalist party that rules Gaza and gains some support by inciting doomed armed actions against Israel.
Need Black-Arab-Jewish working class unity
Workers in Israel also suffer, with shortages of housing, jobs, and good schools. Yet Israelis are blinded by racism against Arab workers, especially Black immigrants. Meanwhile Palestinians are bombarded with nationalism, loyalty to the unity of all Palestinians regardless of their class. Many focus on desiring unity between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and having their own state. As in all capitalist states, workers are misled by nationalism or patriotism- loyalty to local rulers, instead of allegiance to the international working class. The only hope for all workers in the Middle East is to build an international communist movement of Arab and Jewish workers to unite with workers around the world to overthrow imperialist capitalism. Join the Progressive Labor Party as we fight for an egalitarian, communist world.