CHICAGO, November 24—For the third straight year, Progressive Labor Party brought a multi-racial, multi-generational spirited contingent to the Black Friday protests, organized in opposition to the racist Chicago Police Department. Beyond just fighting for another reform or targeting capitalist profits for one day, our collective struggled with workers present over international communist revolution as the only permanent solution to the racist and sexist capitalist system.
Capitalist Bosses Need Killer Kops and Fascism
The first mass Black Friday protest here in Chicago took place in November 2015, just days after the release of dashboard video showing racist killer cop Jason Van Dykkke pumping 16 rounds into the lifeless body of Black teenager Laquan McDonald. The video had been kept under wraps for over a year by the city government, including racist Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who knew perfectly well that the racist murder would undoubtedly destroy his campaign for re-election that previous April.
The protest in 2015 involved hundreds of angry workers and students blocking the entrances of high-end retail stores and shutting down traffic on the elite Magnificent Mile downtown. With each following year, the protests have decreased in size, as the city’s bosses have slickly thrown some crumbs towards the workers and given the illusion of progress and reform of their criminal injustice system.
Earlier this month, 17 people wrongly convicted by the racist courts were exonerated as preliminary charges and discipline were brought against notorious kkkop Sergeant Ronald Watts and several other goons under his command. The capitalist bosses are hoping that this news will distract workers in the city away from the fact that the City Council voted almost unanimously to build a massive new Police Academy and hire at least a thousand more kkkops to terrorize, extort, and kill more and more of our working-class sisters and brothers.
The bosses need increasing fascism and police terror to oppress the working class, who will justifiably rebel and organize against the intolerable economic and political conditions that capitalism inevitably creates. If the international working class is ever to live in a world free of fascist police terror, deportations, and imperialist war, the struggle needs to take the form of a mass international revolutionary movement led by the communist PLP to crush the bosses and capitalism once and for all!
Communist Speech Sets the Tone
Armed with communist banners, fliers, CHALLENGE, and a bullhorn, our Party contingent connected with the protest at Water Tower Plaza for the kick-off rally. Various leaders of reform struggles, community organizations, and victims of racist police terror gave their testimonies to call out the racist and sexist nature of the kkkops and the capitalist system. For the second year in a row, a PL comrade gave an impassioned speech that pushed the need for a more revolutionary scope to the struggle.
The comrade stressed the importance of international working class solidarity and revolutionary fightback in an era of increasing imperialist rivalry, deportations, and war. He highlighted the mass worker fightback in regions like Kishana, Congo and Oaxaca, Mexico that took place during the past year. He called on workers in Chicago and everywhere to be uncompromising in the struggle to destroy capitalism and build workers’ power through communism worldwide. The comrade’s speech was met with loud applause and provided more of an opening for our collective to share our literature with the workers and students present.
Sharpening Chants
After the speeches, the protest once again took to the streets in order to begin blocking the entrances to billion-dollar capitalist businesses on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Our contingent was fired up after the rally, picketing the storefronts in rhythm with our fellow anti-racist fighters and using our bullhorn to lead several chants.
When we found the chants to be too soft on the bosses, we took the opportunity to inject some more revolutionary and class-conscious messages. For example, when the chant went “The people united, will never be defeated!” we were quick to change it to “The workers united, will never be defeated!”
This caused some friction with some of the main organizers of the demonstration, who wanted us to stick to the approved chant sheet, but still won the support of a number of anti-racists nearby who were more open to our line of working class power.
Fight to Win
Although as communists we don’t believe that capitalism can be reformed in any significant or lasting way to serve the needs of our class, it is still essential and inspirational to take place in these mass demonstrations and grassroots struggles. These smaller fights help build the class consciousness and the relationships necessary to understand that the international working class can truly move mountains when we unite in our common interests against capitalism. PLP will continue to build the fight to win workers to communist revolution as the path to a better world.

This is the  part of an extensive series about the Bolshevik Revolution and the triumphs, as well as the defeats, of the world communist movement of the 20th century. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.

 In 1921, the workers in the former Russian Empire were faced with building the first workers’ state on a territory with the area of one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Much of the brand-new Soviet Union’s best farmlands and economy were shattered by the imperialist devastation of World War I; widespread peasant revolts rocked the countryside while urban populations were declining; and on top of this there was a famine affecting millions of workers and farmers. The leaders of the Communist Party (nicknamed Bolsheviks in Russian) included Vladimir Lenin, who had no blueprints or previous experiences to learn from.
Lenin proposed that the Bolsheviks temporarily adopt aspects of capitalism in order to create jobs and develop industry first, and build socialism later. After considerable debate, the Bolsheviks responded with the New Economic Policy (NEP) which lasted until 1928. The NEP allowed a limited  restoration of capitalism that was meant to be under the control of the Soviet Union. Lenin and others felt while this was a retreat from socialism, it was necessary for survival of the revolution to rebuild after the devastating civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution.
How Was the NEP Set Up?
Workers went along with changes because they saw this as a temporary sacrifice to build socialism. They formed trade unions for the first time, and were managed by a single “red manager” who was skilled in new technology. Some were even previously factory owners. These managers became Party members making ten to twenty times what a worker was paid along with “perks” such as vacations and cars. Their skills included management of large scale operations that could take advantage of technology and generate profit. Technicians, engineers and other specialists played a large role, and were favored with higher wages as well.
Expansion of industry required foreign investment and trade from the very same capitalist nations who had previously invaded the Soviet Union after 1917 in order to crush it. Imports of machinery were essential to modernize. Unfortunately, this also meant that the peasants had to supply more grain to pay for these imports, and the Party could not pay them for this surplus.
During the NEP, poor peasants were left out of the progress. The party relied on the rich and middle peasants to guarantee enough food for the cities, as well as the surplus for trade with capitalists. Some rich peasants who controlled the flow of credit joined the Party, and did not share with the poor peasants. Meanwhile the industrial sector did not make simple and cheap tools for the poor farmers since they were not so profitable. Many poor peasants were driven off the land, and the Party’s efforts to be more responsive to them were not successful.
What Was the Outcome of the NEP?
Modernization of Soviet society moved quickly under the NEP. Banking and taxation systems were created, and a stable currency was achieved. By 1925-6 industry and agriculture had recovered. The government developed a budget process and first efforts were made at planning economic development.
Social programs, especially education and literacy, expanded. The Bolsheviks launched what was at the time the largest mass literacy campaign in human history, eclipsed by the communists in China years later. By 1928, school enrollment had jumped 50% above pre-war levels, and public libraries skyrocketed to 80 million, from the 9 million across the whole Russian Empire before World War I. Training of medical doctors led to the tripling of the number of doctors to 63,000, despite most older doctors fleeing the country during the war.
On the other hand, these advances came with a political price. The experience convinced many Party members that the NEP should continue despite the absence of socialist production in either the factories or the farms. Many new Party members who joined during this period and were less committed to communist principles, and this also influenced some of the older Bolsheviks. Thus, when agricultural production could not keep up with the rapid industrialization and the Party turned to collectivization of agriculture in 1929, there were serious disagreements that led to factions and conspiracies within the Party and the government.
The End of the NEP Era
All of this occurred in the infancy of the working class’ attempts to organize a proletarian communist revolution.  Following the NEP, the Bolsheviks launched the First Five Year Plan, a drive for rapid farm collectivization and industrialization. A great deal of struggle and sacrifice was demanded, as catapulting a country into the front ranks of the most developed nations in the world within five years had never been attempted in human history. It was wildly successful, and this effectively put an end to the NEP.
The NEP did get production going again after the tremendous devastation of war, famine, and epidemic disease. In this sense, it was successful for a few crucial years.
However, the main problem was political. The NEP embraced the ideology of the same capitalist system the revolution was against – production for a market, inequality, wealth and poverty. Millions of workers were won to capitalist politics, not the communist politics the Bolsheviks had organized for years. Many rich peasants and some factory owners joined the Party because they benefitted under NEP. This harmed poor peasants and many workers, who for a time were alienated from the revolution.
Perhaps most serious, many Party leaders supported NEP and were afraid to abandon it. During the difficult years of the First Five Year Plan, from 1929-1933, some Party leaders were won to cynicism and defeatism, sure that these policies would fail. They were so sure than they formed secret factional, conspiratorial groups. Some of them plotted to kill the Bolshevik leader at the time, Stalin, and turn the Party’s policies back to NEP-style—capitalist—policies.
Ultimately, despite incredible advancements and the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, workers’ power in the Soviet Union was defeated by 1953. It was precisely because even the concessions to capitalism within full-fledged socialism - like the wage system, inequalities, and nationalism - were over the long term a one-way ticket back to full-fledged capitalism. These concessions opened the door to misleaders and traitors to communism like Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, who attacked Stalin under the guise of “returning to Lenin’s NEP” because he had decisively turned against capitalist-type policies.
With the benefit of a century of history, it’s tempting to say that the reversals of socialism were inevitable. Communist philosophy views history as a science, however, and it’s through learning from the past - not from random guesses, or rigidly following past formulas just because some great leaders said them - that the Progressive Labor Party, formed in the early 1960s, scientifically broke with socialism in the 1980s. Studying and learning from history is not the job of a few within the Party, it’s the job of everyone. Our fight for communism will depend on millions of workers understanding and applying the lessons of experiments like the NEP.

On November 24 Emmerson Mnangagwa, former vice president of Zimbabwe was named president, bookending national turmoil that began when former president Robert Mugabe fired Mnangagwa, triggering a military takeover, protests in support of Mnangagwa, and Mugabe’s own ousting by coup d’etat.
While a result of in-fighting within the ruling class of Zimbabwe, this is also a sign of China’s growing investment in Africa and the strengthening of their role as leading imperialist power.
China is Zimbabwe’s fourth largest trading partner and its largest source of investment, buying 28 percent of its exports in 2015 and a making a promise of five-billion-dollars in direct aid and investment from Chinese president Xi Jinping, who has called Zimbabwe an “all-weather friend” (BBC 11/20).
Nationalism Will Always Fail The Working Class
In the 1960s, Mugabe joined the African nationalist struggle in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) under the leadership of Joshua Nkomo and the National Democratic Party. Mugabe soon grew impatient with Nkomo’s tactics.
Mugabe broke from Nkomo and formed the Zimbabwe African National Union, which organized a guerrilla struggle against the apartheid regime of Ian Smith, which had the support of powerful U.S. officials, including Dean Acheson and Richard Nixon. After being imprisoned along with 11 allies, Mugabe became the voice of the guerrilla movement against the Rhodesian racist government.
In 1979, however, rather than aligning with the Soviet Union, Mugabe rejoined Mr. Nkomo under pressure from African rulers and comfortably sat in the pocket of the British in order to establish the state of Zimbabwe (NYT 11/15). Mugabe became president of Zimbabwe in 1980 and remained in power until recently.
Often touted as a Marxist-Leninist, Mugabe is actually a capitalist leader. Given the opportunity to choose between workers revolution and nationalism, he chose nationalism and the interest of the imperialist ruling class, allowing multinational corporations to loot Zimbabwe’s rich resources of gold, copper, diamonds, platinum and other raw materials, enriching Mugabe and his friends, but leaving ordinary people poor and with a suspected unemployment rate as high as 90 percent (BBC 11/19).
Mugabe has ruled with an iron fist. In the 1980s, in a series of massacres known as the Gukurahundi, he sent in the national army to kill 20,000 Ndebele civilians suspected of being supporters of Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe’s political rival. (The Guardian 5/19/15).
Zimbabwe Welcomes Chinese Imperialism
During Mugabe’s fight against the Rhodesian government, he turned to Beijing to support his Zimbabwe African National Union. In 1980 Zimbabwe and China formally established their diplomatic relations, a pivotal year in China’s cultural and political history.
Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China gave way to a generation that felt no connection to the Great Leap Forward of 1958 or the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s (Pew Research 11/12/15).
The 1980s marked the establishment of China and Zimbabwe as states for the ruling class, not workers. A crushing blow to those who thought a widespread communist revolution was just around the corner in the 1960s.
“According to Professor Wang Xinsong, a specialist in international development at Beijing Normal University…China has been monitoring infighting within the Mugabe regime and the country’s faltering economy for some time – and carefully weighing its options” (The Guardian 11/17).
According to The Guardian (11/17) Mnangagwa is widely believed to be behind the coup against Mugabe. He has historically allied with the Chinese, receiving ideological and military training in Beijing and Nanjing.
Just days before the military take-over in Zimbabwe and the ousting of Mugabe, General Constantino Chiwenga, Zimbabwean army general and Commander of the Zimbabwe Defense Forces, visited China – a coincidence that has not gone unnoticed by the ruling class media, which has also noticed that the Chinese have yet to publicly condemn Mugabe’s removal.
On The Brink Of World War?
If China was instrumental in the military’s ousting of Mugabe, this would be the first example of its covert involvement in a military coup d’etat and a sign of China’s growing global power. (The Guardian 11/17). As the U.S. continues to slip in its rivalry with China, the world moves closer to another world war.
An alternative explanation is that Mnangagwa’s seizure of power may just be a sign of international instability allowing smaller powers to make internal moves without large allied forces to stop them, a period strikingly similar to that just before WWI.
“[This period] looks ominously like another moment in history — the period leading up to World War I, which marked the end of a multi-decade expansion in global ties that many call the first era of globalization” (The Washington Post 12/29/16).
With both scenarios leading to world war, the international working class is in danger of being driven to the front lines in order to protect the profit and power of a ruling class that will leave them to die. Progressive Labor Party calls workers everywhere to abandon all forms of nationalism, and instead join the fight for a communist future. From Zimbabwe to China to the United States, the working class has nothing to lose but its chains.J

In Iran, as tension increases between U.S. and Iranian capitalists making World War III a growing possibility, the working class is experiencing severe ruin. The devastation from the Iran-Iraq earthquake was the deadliest in a decade.
Devastation of Workers in Iran
It mainly affected Iran—killed over 500, injured 7,460, and left countless homeless, traumatized, and in dire conditions. It also hit seven big cities and 1,950 villages in the Kermanshah province. Officials said 12,000 houses had been completely destroyed and a further 15,000 damaged (The Guardian, 11/14). Over 70,000 need emergency shelters.
The earthquake and the government’s actions have affectively increased poverty and suffering of the working class. Communism will prevent the social devastation of earthquakes by putting the lives of the workers first.
Instead of using its resources to support employment, equity, and to sufficiently fund 70,000 working class families in need of emergency shelters after the earthquake, the Iranian ruling class spent billions of dollars on its ballistic missile programs and other military and intelligence projects (NYT, 8/13). Other funds are being used to support the Assad regime in Syria. The Iranian government wants to protect their investments in Syrian oil. The ruling classes are always concerned about their profit margins and their ability to stay in power. The needs of the working class mean nothing to them.
Mass Disaster Preventable
The country lies on dozens of fault lines. The 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake killed in northern Iran killed 35,000 to 50,000 people. The 2003 Bam earthquake in the southern Kerman province killed at least 31,000. In 2012, a double earthquake killed 300.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president from 2005 to 2013, initiated a program to build low-income housing in regions that had long history of earthquakes. Housing was knowingly created along the fault lines.
Similar to the lies told by the ruling class in the U.S after Hurricane Katrina (which killed over 1800 working-class families) the rulers’ mouthpieces in Iran said, “nothing could have been done”(NY Times, 11/13). PLP knows, from our study of what the Bolsheviks achieved, that a better world is possible! It is possible to protect the lives of the working class.
After the earthquake, many people blasted the government on social media for failing to provide resources in a timely manner. “Iranians from across the country pitched in to gather water, food and tents and transported the aid with their own cars to the disaster zone” (NY Times, 11/26).
Iran-U.S. Tension
The rivalry between the U.S. and Iran to see whose ruling class will dominate the energy-rich Middle East has already killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Syria and Yemen and threatens to be much bloodier in the future. Imperialist wars benefit the ruling classes of the rivals, because they are the ones who profit from control over trillions of dollars of raw materials, markets, labor and investments. But the price of these deadly wars are paid for by workers, as they are used as cannon fodder and as massive military spending crowds out spending on vital social programs.
U.S. government complaints about the Iranian theocracy are pure hypocrisy. The U.S. has sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Saudi ruling family. Its criticism of Iran’s involvements in Syria and Lebanon is also hypocritical given the U.S. record of occupations and support for dictatorial regimes in the region, including Iran itself. (The CIA worked to overthrow the secular leader Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 who sought to nationalize oil, the U.S. armed the torture regime of the Shah of Iran, and is currently funding terrorist groups in Iran.)
Problem with Nationalism
Iran is preparing to confront the “threats, malicious, hegemonic and divisive activities of America in the region” (NYT, 8/13). The bosses use nationalism and patriotism to pit workers against workers in order to build profit-driven wars. There are reports of rising mass national unity against U.S. president Trump and Saudi Arabia, signaling more tension. However, capitalist-caused devastations such as the earthquakes in Iran that increased poverty and homelessness, and recent tax bill in the U.S that indubitably affects the poor, make it difficult for them to do so. Be it Iran, Saudi Arabia or U.S., the working class suffers, either through death due to war, death due to environmental cuts that increase “natural disasters” or death due to cuts to healthcare and other social services.
Under communism, workers’ needs will always be primary, because we won’t have a need for profit. Even as the 70,000 workers in Iran remain homeless the international working class is constantly reminded what’s important to the ruling classes everywhere. Our fight is more important than ever. Are you ready to fight for a better world? Workers of the world unite!