Chicago, October 4—Our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) collective here organized a “Smash All Borders” rally in a working-class neighborhood on the southwest side of the city, an area facing intensified immigration raids. We got out hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE with some friends of the Party joining us. 

A newer member and their partner designed signs for passing traffic that read “Honk if you hate racism” and “Honk if you hate ICE,” both of which were hits. Other comrades gave fiery antiracist speeches in both Spanish and English on the bullhorn. Shortly after our rally ended, we got a message from a rapid response group we’re active in to go a few blocks west to another neighborhood where ICE had shot a woman worker in her car for trying to block them from carrying out their abductions of workers.

Workers showed up en masse to the intersection, creating a stand-off while hurling insults at the racist ICE thugs. Seeing that their situation was compromised, ICE was forced to fire off tear canisters to clear an escape route (Block Club Chicago, 10/5). Along with dozens of other workers we were forced to retreat at the time, but it was inspiring to witness the dedication and fightback of our class in action.

Fascists attack but workers strike back

Since Klansman-in-Chief Donald Trump’s declaration of war and terror on immigrant workers in major urban “sanctuary” cities, Chicago has not gone unscathed. However, “Midway Blitz,” the fascist operation Trump and company are carrying out here has been met with the same fightback, resistance and courage from the working class seen in other major targeted cities.

The Gestapo-like attacks are coming from nearly all sides, including ICE, FBI, DHS, local police and state troopers, and the more recent attempt to deploy the National Guard. The Trump administration has enlisted several forces of the capitalist state to attack and terrorize the working class. 

The liberal bosses running Illinois and Chicago, far from providing any real leadership to fight back, are showing their ineffective and complicit character when it comes to capitalism needing to divide and attack the working class for profit. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed a toothless bill recently, establishing “ICE-free zones” in the city, a performance theater that has done nothing to stop their fascist rampage (Office of The Mayor, 10/6).

Masked ICE nazis have kidnapped people off the streets all over the city and suburbs - documented and undocumented workers alike,  taking them to Broadview, a suburb right outside of Chicago. Broadview was initially set up as a processing center for those abducted. Now it has become a detention center with horrible conditions.

Protesters have shown up here daily, only to be tear-gassed and shot with pepper bullets. Dozens of protesters have been arrested with a range of charges that include aggravated battery on a police officer to mob action. At one of the protests, the fascist Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, paraded out of the Broadview facility with ICE agents in a military tank with guns pointed at protesters while drones hovered overhead. 

The Party has attended these protests and gotten CHALLENGE out to protesters that are open to our ideas. We have invited some to our PLP study group and will continue to do so. We  also hope  to work with some of these younger protesters who want training on building a base and how to escalate tactics in a collective and disciplined way in these chaotic situations. 

Many of us have also joined rapid response groups in our communities which are limited to the politics of people “knowing their rights.” Our participation in these groups is to struggle with our friends and coworkers that we have no rights that the capitalist class must honor under fascism. We must make the connections that the ruling class are in an economic crisis, and  are preparing for war, and that is what is happening in these cities in real time. War is being waged on the working class, and there is no time to waste to build our own fighting force: a Red Army to achieve international communist revolution. 

Communism is the change workers need

Exactly a week after the struggle on October 4th, two PLP members went to the apartment complex where ICE conducted a raid with storm troopers and Blackhawk helicopters in the middle of the night.  Black and Latin workers and their families were dragged out of their homes (see editorial on page 2). We went door to door in the building that looked like a war zone. We were able to find workers in the building and in the community that were interested in reading CHALLENGE after what they experienced. 

One worker explained to us: “A reporter just wanted to interview me. I told her I don’t need to be interviewed. We need a change and if you can’t do that I don’t want to be interviewed.” We made contacts and will be going back to offer workers that change. A communist society is the change we all desire, and a communist revolution is the only way we will fight fascism and win.

One hundred and eight years ago, November 7, 1917, marked the beginning of the single most important event of the 20th century, the Bolshevik Revolution, which directly inspired the Chinese Revolution and anti-imperialist struggles around the world from Vietnam to Africa to Latin America.
Russia’s working class, headed by the revolutionary communists of the Bolshevik Party and its leader, Vladimir Lenin, freed one-sixth of the world’s surface from capitalism. They proved once and for all that it was possible to strive for a world without exploitation, where those who produce all value, the working class, can enjoy the fruits of their labor and not have it stolen by a few parasitical bosses and their lackeys.

The Bolshevik revolution was the first serious attempt by workers and peasants to seize, hold, and consolidate state power. Even though capitalism has returned to the former Soviet Union, workers will not forget that the Soviet working class defeated capitalism in 1917. They smashed the imperialist armies of 17 countries (including Japan, the U.S., Britain, France, among others) which invaded Russia in 1918 to try to crush the revolution. They freed the masses, especially women, from the yoke of capitalist, feudal and religious oppression. Then in 1945 the Soviet Red Army defeated the mightiest and most barbaric army the capitalists had ever organized: the Nazi Wehrmacht.

The revolution frightened the world’s bosses 

That’s why they immediately sent armies from 17 countries to try—in Churchill’s words—to “strangle it in the cradle.” From 1918 to 1923, millions of workers led by the Red Army defeated the imperialists’ counter-revolution. Nearly five million died in that battle, many of whom were the most committed workers the revolution had produced. Lenin himself died because of injuries inflicted by a hired killer.

The masses showed great courage and determination to defend and build their revolution under the leadership of their revolutionary party. They proved that revolutionary violence on the part of the working class and peasantry was vital to the seizure of state power.

Achievements of the Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution brought Russia to heights of productive development that capitalism, given a similar time period and circumstances, could never have dreamed of. Bringing the working class to power, the Revolution coordinated their social-economic efforts for the production and exchange of the necessities, the comforts and even some luxuries of life, making them available to all. The Soviet system of production was for use, not for profit. This can only be accomplished by abolishing capitalist profits and the private ownership of property, with its exploitation, poverty, unemployment, racism, fascism and imperialist wars.

In the 1930s, when the entire capitalist world sank into depression, and tens of millions worldwide were left jobless and starving (much like today), the Soviet Union was forging ahead building a new society without unemployment. They created some measure of a decent life for workers in an incredibly short time, transforming a 90 percent illiteracy rate into one in which nearly everyone was literate.

Around 1938, without any official declaration, the Soviet Union had achieved the era of free bread. One could enter a cafeteria, order little or nothing, and receive all the bread one wanted. You needed, you received. Even during a drive for heavy industry, living standards rose strikingly when the rest of the world was mired in the Great Depression.

The Soviet Union not only freed workers but also fought against racism and sexism. The battle against racism was particularly significant. As communist Paul Robeson said about his trips to the Soviet Union, he “felt like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being. Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be…. Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity.”

Heroic fight against the Nazis

In 1941, the bosses again tried to destroy the revolution. Hitler, using all of Europe’s resources and the largest military machine ever assembled, invaded the Soviet Union with four million troops. They discovered the Soviets were no pushover as occurred in Western Europe. Hitler’s prediction — endorsed by western military “experts” — of capturing Moscow in six weeks went up in smoke.

Nazi troops found total destruction and desolation in every captured city or town — the “scorched earth” policy. Soviet defenders destroyed everything that the Nazi’s might use. The communists then organized armed resistance behind enemy lines: the Partisans.

Over 6,000 factories were dismantled and moved east of the Ural Mountains, re-assembled to produce weapons again, a feat requiring total unity and support of Soviet workers, unmatched by any country, before or since. Soviet soldiers and workers fought for Stalingrad block-by-block, house-by-house and room-by-room to halt the “unbeatable” Nazi invaders. Workers in arms factories produced weapons 24 hours a day for the Red Army, working 12-hour shifts. When Nazi troops captured factories, heroic Soviet workers and soldiers would re-take them.

The entire German Sixth Army and 24 of Hitler’s generals were surrounded and killed or captured in the battle of Stalingrad. Never again would the Nazis mount a successful offensive against the Red Army. Stalingrad was truly the turning point of the Second World War. Not until the Nazis were on the run following their defeats at Stalingrad and in the Battle of the Kursk — the biggest armored battle in world history, involving millions of soldiers and 6,000 tanks — did the U.S.-U.K. forces invade Western Europe. It was the communist-led Soviet Union that smashed the Nazis, the largest and most powerful army ever mounted by a capitalist power.

All this was accomplished under the leadership of Josef Stalin. No wonder he is reviled to this day by world capitalism.

Lessons to be learned

Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks suffered from political weaknesses, which led to the return of capitalism to the USSR. From the beginning they believed that to achieve communism, first socialism had to be established, a belief Karl Marx had advanced. We have learned from that experience that socialism retained capitalism’s wage system and therefore failed to wipe out many aspects of the profit system. Socialism put forward material incentives to the working class rather than political ones as the way to win workers to communism. We must win over masses of workers to abolish capitalism’s wage system and its division of labor and fight directly for communism.

Today, no country is led by communists, but this is a temporary historical setback. While this long and volatile era of widening imperialist wars and fascist attacks on the working class is upon us, every dark night has its end.

The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is a product of both the old International Communist Movement and the struggle against its weaknesses. Pseudo-leftist groups have not learned history’s lessons and continue to fight for nationalist “sharing of power” with capitalists, a la Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, not for the working-class seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Our movement is daily fighting to learn from the Soviet Union’s great battles and achievements as well as its deadly errors that led to its collapse, mainly that reformism, racism, nationalism and all forms of concessions to capitalism only lead workers to defeat. Give the ruling class an inch and they’ll grab a mile.

We honor the bold fight by the workers of the Bolshevik Revolution against capitalism and for a working-class communist world. Today, we must organize workers, students and soldiers to build a mass worldwide working class party that will turn this era of imperialist wars into a new, international communist revolution.

New York, October 4—The streets of Northern Manhattan were resounding today with the militant bilingual chants of multiracial, multigenerational workers’ unity, as several hundred marchers took to the streets to denounce ICE raids and deportations, racist federal budget cuts, and to unite this largely immigrant-Dominican neighborhood as one working class.  Multiple chant leaders, led by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), brought forth chants to unite and inspire not only the marchers, but the many hundreds of people who lined the streets to listen to us and cheer us on:

“Racism means, WE GOT TO FIGHT BACK! Deportations mean, WE GOT TO FIGHT BACK! Fascism means, WE GOT TO FIGHT BACK! To unite the Heights, WE GOT TO FIGHT BACK!”

PLP chants unify and empower workers

The march itself was a beacon of potential for local workers. By responding to the needs of the moment, we were able to deftly move back and forth from Spanish to English to involve the entire march in action from start to finish, continually reminding workers that we are part of a larger, international struggle. “The fight of the workers, it has no racist borders!”

We also made sure to shout out to our local street vendors, who we are involved with in a related struggle against the local KKKops who racially profile and harass them as they try to sell their wares to survive (proving once again, it’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism!).
Over the course of the march, PLP also distributed 600 CHALLENGE newspapers (many before the march even began!) and about 550 PLP leaflets written for the occasion.

More poison from liberal reformism, nationalism, & religion

As reported in previous articles, liberal reformist politics and nationalism continue to poison the workers’ struggle and dull the potential of our recently-formed uptown coalition of Dominican political parties and community organizations that put together this march. Despite weeks of planning and struggle, the speeches at the beginning of the march were all in Spanish, leaving about half of the march in the dark as to our political outlook and plans. And unfortunately, our planned Haitian speaker was unable to attend at the last minute, so even in Spanish, marchers were left with no understanding of the larger forces that are shaping the sharp increase of fascism in the U.S. and worldwide. In addition, coalition organizers added another foe—religion—to further confuse and dampen our struggle. An opening “invocation” appealed to God, “higher powers,” and Jesus to liberate the working class. You could feel these losing strategies suck the power and energy from the crowd. 

Despite these obstacles, the main memory of the march is not the phony speeches before and after, but the powerful collective voice of workers marching uptown united and fighting against ICE raids, deportations, and budget cuts and for multiracial workers’ unity. Today we lived it!

What is winning?

And because of our strategic outlook of immersing ourselves inside multiple uptown mass organizations, PLP is winning! Even as several leading coalition leaders push their brand of nationalism or Democratic Party loyalty, we continue to win workers closer to our revolutionary communist outlook and—we are struggling with them—to join our Party. Because of our base, in coalition meetings leading up to the march, we were able to stave off the most reactionary positions (such as trying to ban support for Haitian workers in their struggle against the Dominican ruling class’s racist assaults in the Dominican Republic, or restricting our fight to only ICE and deportations and ignoring more systemic demands against imperialist war in places like Palestine).

At the march itself, our PLP contingent was once again a magnet for the most militant workers, both younger and older. PLP members also brought out members of our base, who are seeing us in action as not only the most devoted fighters, but the only ones with a revolutionary line that can actually change material conditions for the working class by overthrowing once and for all the capitalist system responsible for causing this gigantic mess the capitalists have made of our world.

At the end of the march, a particularly bitter and cynical speaker once again tried to destroy the powerful unity we had just created. In a long, meandering speech in Spanish (again excluding half the marchers), she criticized the Spanish-speaking marchers for not bringing more people, which is not in and of itself a bad thing, but her tone was condescending and demeaning. Her only words in English addressed the many non-Spanish speakers as foreign-sounding “North Americans,” and said they themselves had to bring more Latin workers because they were the ones affected by President Donald Trump’s attacks, ignoring the many recent attacks that have targeted the entire working class. After a rare and precious victory unifying our entire neighborhood in militant struggle, this divisive message was exactly what we didn’t need. 

Luckily, once again we were able to counter this dead-end nationalist divisiveness by closing the day with the powerful international fight song “Bella Ciao” (currently being sung in Gaza against the Israeli fascists!). Although we sang the Spanish version, we were able to explain its meaning to all and get everyone together to sing along its mighty refrain: “We are fighters, all our lives, and we’ll be fighters—communists—until we die.” There is much struggle ahead, and we are ready for it.

Free Dylan Lopez-Contreras!

At the end of the march, we called on Uptown to join the fight to support freedom for Dylan López-Contreras, a NYC high school student who ICE detained this past spring, and who—as reported last issue—just had his asylum case denied, once again demonstrating that the courts serve the bosses’ capitalist system. 

In what seems like a coordinated series of events, local politicians have held two press conferences in our area, both passive affairs dominated by droning speeches that criticize Donald Trump’s immigration policies, but are mainly designed to steer people into the arms of the Democratic Party, advocating voting as the solution. The Democrats have betrayed workers time and time again because they support the same capitalist system as the Republicans, and—despite their slightly different tactics—exploit immigrant labor just the same as Republicans. 

Once again, PLP was there with our communist paper and our unrelenting message: We don’t need press conferences or capitalist politicians; we need a mass multiracial workers’ movement and revolutionary communist party—PLP!

The working class in Italy is rising up against the U.S.-backed Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is there, taking part in the struggle, giving political leadership  where possible, and drawing leadership from the heartbeat of the growing, militant, internationalist movement led by dockworkers. On October 4th, PL’ers in Rome handed out multiple CHALLENGES and made crucial connections. This came a day after workers shut down every industry in a mass, one day general strike, a backlash against Israeli forces intercept the Global Sumud Flotilla, a convoy of dozens of ships with crews from 40 countries that was attempting to deliver aid to the desperate inhabitants of Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of defiant protesters have marched in Milan, Florence, Turin, Genoa, Rome, and more than 60 other cities. All transportation and nonessential public services were shut down. Workers took to the streets across the country, denouncing the Israeli bosses’ endless bloodshed in Palestine. When these workers eventually take up the red flag with their class brothers and sisters in every country, they will have the power to permanently end this genocide and bring communism to the world!

Let’s block everything! 

The October 3 strike follows another general strike on September 22nd, after Italian dockworkers shut down all trade between the European Union (EU) and Israel when Benjamin Netanyahu’s baby killers attacked the flotilla on September 8th (Truthout, 9/30). “Blocchiamo tutto!” (“Let’s block everything!”) became a war cry chanted throughout Italy in massive rallies against the genocidal war in Gaza. More generally, however, the slogan echoes the words of the militant dockworkers throughout the Mediterranean basin—from Piraeus to Genoa, from Marseille to Ravenna, from Tangier to Livorno—who have for several months been preventing the shipping of war materiel to Israel. The international movement among dockworkers, led largely by Italy’s second most powerful trade union coalition, Unione sindicale di base (USB), is being consolidated in a new organization called the Autonomous Dockworkers Union. 

Internationalism is key

Opponents of the Gazan genocide throughout the world are taking inspiration from these recent events. Demonstrations have taken place not just across Europe but in Asia, the Middle East, Tunis, Sydney, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Tripoli, and Chicago, among other places. It will take workers uniting across cultures and continents to seize the means of production for our class! In the face of rising inter imperialist rivalry among the leading world empires, continually dividing ourselves among race, gender, sex and borders will be the death knell to any real fightback.

Strikes good schools for communism

Though they will never create a global workers’ state, strikes are a good building ground for communist ideas. Strikes can help build class consciousness, as workers are led to realize their interests are intertwined with one another, and not the ruling class. When multiple industries go on strike simultaneously, the bosses panic!

Specifically, dockworkers, like those in the Mediterranean basin, are positioned to inhibit—in fact stop—the bosses’ pursuit of imperialist war because of their pivotal place in the capitalist world economy. 

The dockworkers’ decision to strike around explicitly internationalist political demands, rather than around the bread-and-butter issues usually at stake in Italy’s frequent strikes by public-sector workers, makes clear the connection between the imperialist war on Palestine and the declining living standards of Italy’s working-class population. This is true especially now, since millions of euros are being diverted from Italy’s already-strained educational and medical public institutions to invest in a massive expenditure on rearmament. As NATO becomes more militaristic and the world moves closer and closer to war on a global scale, the dockworkers’ refusal to ship death-dealing weaponry becomes more important in economic and political significance.  

Only we can liberate ourselves!

The dockworkers’ movement points the way toward the possibility—indeed the necessity—of worldwide communist revolution.  If the global working class does not organize itself to abolish capitalism and establish an egalitarian society, all bets are off for the survival of most life on the planet. This possibility can be realized, however, only if class-conscious workers of all lands form a single, unified party that is dedicated to anti-imperialist class struggle and the creation of a communist world. PLP aspires to be that party. We need to root ourselves more deeply in the working class of Italy and build a base for international working-class revolution. 

Reformist roadblocks ahead

This will not be easy. There is a commendable tradition in Italy of antifascism and worker militancy going back to World War II and before. To this day, people often sing the antifascist anthem “Bella Ciao.”  But there is also a history of violent fascist repression and racist colonial invasion. Moreover, there is an ignoble history of gradual reformist retreat from the theory and practice of communism on the part of the PCI (Partito comunista italiano) that has left the working class cynical about the prospects for dislodging the power of capital and the capitalist state. Indeed, Italian workers have been to a degree inoculated against the idea of communism.

All the same, the union leading the current dockworkers’ movement, USB, founded in 2010, has no obvious ties to the old PCI or any of its revisionist spin-offs. Perhaps the inoculation is losing potency. We need to engage in discussion with members of USB: look for future reports in CHALLENGE. We have a world to win.