Osip Piatnitsky was a revolutionary leader who played a key role in organizing the working class before, during, and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Much of this three-part series was taken from his memoir, Memoirs of a Bolshevik. The first of the three-part series looked Piatnitsky’s early life and his role in guaranteeing communist propaganda, including the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra. The following part deals with his life while in prison and exile under Czarist Russia, leading up to the year of the Bolshevik Revolution—the first successful workers’ state in history. At every turn, any accomplishments were made possible by the masses and working collectively.
Early in March of 1902, Osip Piatnitsky was traveling with a comrade to secure the underground route to smuggling their newspaper, Iskra, from Germany to Russia. They were arrested and sent to the Kiev prison in Russia.
Inside the prison, hundreds of arrested students protested, creating such an uproar, crowds from the distant town came to the prison gates. It was in this prison that Piatnitsky had the time to be a teacher of Marxist literature. At age 17, he had four years of organizing.
The Great Escape from Kiev
Plans were made to escape. For weeks of preparation: getting ladders, a grapple, money, addresses in Kiev, practicing a human pyramid the height of the yard wall, singing in chorus, beating a tin can to mask the sound of the escapees climbing on the outside wall composed partly of tin, obtaining wine to get the guards drunk, and sleeping powder with which to keep them unconscious—all acquired from the outside.
Through collective organizing, they did escape! But the Kiev safe house addresses were wrong. They had to ride in cabs all night to avoid detection. Of the 11 men involved with Iskra, 10 survived the escape and arrived in Germany according to plan.
Odessa: Soldiers Unite
In January 1905, Piatnitsky arrived in Odessa. Prior to the January 22 uprising and march on the Tsar’s palace, he was arrested with others at a meeting. The police left soldiers to guard them. With the absence of gendarmes (French armed police) they tore up all papers. When the police returned, they questioned who had destroyed the papers. The soldiers replied, “EVERYBODY.”
The comrades and scores of others from all walks of politics remained imprisoned without trial for five months. When they were released pending a future trial, Piatnitsky decided not to appear at the trial and left for Moscow.
‘Recognized’ as Innocent
In 1907, many were arrested; detectives shadowing Piatnitsky increased. The Party suggested he leave Moscow. In his hometown, he was arrested. Due to the differences in his several passport pictures, the gendarmes couldn’t identify him. At this time, jails were filled with peasants and intellectuals rebelling against landlords. With ongoing tortures and staging of trials, keeping Piatnitsky’s identity safe also meant the safety of many others associated with him.
He was taken by foot to a town where he had never been, which had a notoriously vicious police chief. Several days later waiting in a cell where many had been tortured, he was called out to be recognized. He was “recognized” to be innocent by five people in that town who had never seen him before. On his way back to the cell, a stranger approached him and handed him five rubles. He realized relatives and friends had arranged the “recognition.”
Cheated by Provocateur
In June of 1914, betrayed by a provocateur who had deliberately photographed him in Paris with other comrades so he could be identified—Piatnitsky was arrested, put in solitary for 2.5 months and sentenced to Siberia. Before they were transferred, he heard that World War I had begun and recalled that the Russo-Japanese war brought on the 1905 revolts.
In January 1915, he and 60 other comrades and criminals were forced to march 250 miles. They spent their nights in peasant huts. Larger villages held many exiled political prisoners where the peasants received them warmly. Piatnitsky was forced to walk to the furthest village in Siberia: Fedino, because of his escape reputation from Kiev.
It Takes a Collective Village
Fedino was more prosperous than the villages they’d walked through and consisted of 40 households who cultivated land outside the village. The economy was not collective in the least; men and women of the same family kept separate accounts. No one was taught to read and write.
During the next two years, 23 exiles came to live in Fedino. A few condemned by administrative decrees received eight rubles a month. Deportees received nothing.
The exiles worked out communal dining, collective buying and fair division of food and provisions. To sustain their sanity, the exiles read material provided by the local “Congress of Exiles.” Piatnitsky taught children of the peasant family to read.
The snow at times was six feet deep. The last year, all staple articles disappeared from town markets. He organized a cooperative with the peasants, which was necessary for everyone’s survival.
On the evening of March 9, 1917, he lay in his room in the dark without answering the door, the only time in his memoir he admitted depression. Late that evening, an exile from outside Fedino rushed in to announce that a bourgeoisie revolution had taken place in Russia (the February Revolution). Piatnitsky had one burning question: which party would organize more quickly—the party leading the proletariat and the peasantry or the party of the bourgeoisie?
Later the peasants of Fedino handed Piatnitsky the village seal and all the attributes of the office of “guard.” After leaving for Moscow, he learned that during the remainder of 1917 Fedino peasants, led by exiles who remained there, took an active part in the guerilla battles against Kolchak bands.
Security: Build the Party
As we saw, Piatnisky’s safety lay in the hands of the masses. Be it escaping from prison, falling under the police radar, or bare survival, it was possible when class-consciousness is planted deep and wide. Likewise, the security of communist work today lay in the hands of the working class—all communists and friends must build a base wherever they are: work, school, military, farm, or prison.
A third and final article will deal with some reasons why a revolution did not take place in the trade-union-organized country of Germany, as Marx predicted. The contrast of political life in Germany to the revolts in Odessa, and the struggle between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks over the publishing of the paper in Samara (near St. Petersburg) will reflect the intensification of repression in Russia from 1908 through 1914.
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NO FREE SPEECH FOR RACISTS! DEATH TO THE KLAN WITH MULTIRACIAL UNITY
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- 15 August 2017 197 hits
KKK and Nazi fascists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, have murdered antiracist fighter Heather Heyer as the local ruling class used their state power to protect these racists. They deployed hundreds of kkkops in riot ge
click image for leafletar to protect their banks and racist monuments, only intervening after it became clear the antiracist students and workers were bloodying the fascists.
Whether the president is Obama or Trump, this exercise of state power – and the Nazi murder - proves again that racism is critical to the life of capitalism.
State Terror Unleashed on Antiracist Students and Workers
It’s no surprise that the bosses use their cops to protect the KKK instead. Since the founding of this country, racism was used to justify slavery. Numerous local, state and federal laws passed over centuries were required to entrench racist divisions inside the working class, and weaken our ability to fight back against our exploitation. The most vicious state terror was used by police on working people who insisted on struggling together against exploitation (see Lerone Bennett’s “Road Not Taken” on the lynch law of colonial era, as well as the Hollywood film “Free State of Jones” on the Reconstruction era which followed the Civil War.)
When kkkops are brought out against the antiracists, they function in this capitalist tradition. As the PLP chant goes: “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan: all are part of the bosses’ plan.”
The mayor of Charlottesville called on residents to stay away from the rally- as if nonviolence defeated the Confederacy! He tried to encourage workers to attend alternate events orchestrated by NAACP misleaders. Whenever the KKK or Nazis rear their ugly head, these liberal misleaders and churches try to keep the working class from fighting back.
When the Klan is confronted by multiracial fightback, they are terrified.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has a 52-year history of beating them back and driving them out of our streets and neighborhoods!
The militancy of thousands of antiracists shows the potential of our working class to go all the way. When masses of workers reject passivity and organize multiracial fightback against gutter racists and the racism of capitalism, we can smash capitalism and its racist borders - and their servants, the Obamas, the Trumps, and the KKK - with armed revolution.
Turning the fight against imperialism, racism, sexism, and nationalism into an international fight for a working-class run society—communism—is the only way to once and for all smash the horrors of this imperialist, racist and sexist capitalist system. Fight back! JOIN US!
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Russia Sanctions: U.S. Desperate to Regain Imperialist Control in EU
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- 11 August 2017 197 hits
On August 2, the U.S. declared new economic sanctions against Russia. This move reflects a growing desperation among U.S. capitalist bosses, whose declining but still-lethal empire faces growing challenges from Russian and Chinese imperialists—especially after Russia’s successful military intervention in Syria.
Sanctions are a standard tactic in capitalist competition. In this latest economic attack, U.S. bosses will be freezing money and blocking business deals involving the Russian bosses. For the international working class, it’s only a matter of time before trade wars among major imperialists become a global shooting war—a war in which workers have no side.
The international communist Progressive Labor Party calls on workers, students, and soldiers to fight for their class, not their country! We fight for a world without money, racist borders, racism, or sexism—a world ruled by the working class. The capitalist class will never give up its rule or profits without a fight. It’s up to our class to turn the looming inter-imperialist war into a war for communist revolution.
What “Sanctions” Mean
Allegations of Russian election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election are echoed constantly in the U.S. bosses’ media. While the charges may well be true, they also provide political cover for the U.S. to drive a wedge between Russia and the European Union. In reality, the sanctions have nothing to do with election meddling. For years, the U.S. bosses have been looking to curb the dependence of Europe, and particularly Germany, on Russian natural gas—the bulk of it piped through Russia’s western neighbor, Ukraine.
Since the formal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. bosses have spent $5.1 billion on so-called “democracy building” in Ukraine (Politifact, 3/19/14). In February 2014, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president was removed from office following massive U.S.-backed demonstrations. Its current pro-U.S. president, Petro Poroshenko, has vowed to join the U.S.-led NATO military alliance, which could bring U.S. military forces to Russia’s border.
But the U.S. has been less successful in undermining Russia’s gas monopoly in Europe or its growing influence in the Middle East. The latest sanctions are a desperate attempt by U.S. bosses to regain some momentum.
Natural Gas Can Ignite War
Nord Stream is the world’s largest underwater natural gas pipeline. It connects Russia and Germany through the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine completely. (A major expansion project, Nord Stream 2, is currently underway by Russia’s state-owned gas company, Gazprom.) The U.S. sanctions target more than 200 EU-based contractors and subcontractors providing steel and other materials for Nord Stream (Reuters, 8/3/17). Meanwhile, the U.S. hopes that its first delivery of liquified natural gas to Eastern Europe seduces European countries to dump Russia (Foreign Policy, 6/8/17).
In any case, the U.S. bosses can no longer dictate global politics as they once did. Economically, the sanctions are too little, too late: “[M]ost of the big contracts for steel, port logistics, and construction have already been concluded” (Reuters). Politically, the U.S. bosses’ desperation may be driving historical allies like Germany into the arms of Russian imperialism. The German bosses went so far as to say that the new sanctions “breach international law” (CNN, 8/2).
Following the vote of Britain, the most reliable U.S. ally, to exit the European Union, it’s unclear how much influence the U.S. has left in Europe. But it’s very clear that deadlier imperialist wars are on the horizon, and that workers around the world have no stake in them. The need to organize for communist revolution grows only more urgent. Join PLP!
From Nigeria, South Sudan, and Somalia to Yemen across the Red Sea, famines threaten the lives of tens of millions of workers. Mass starvation in Africa and the Middle East has been triggered by climate change (including more intense and longer-lasting droughts) and, even more significantly, by ever wider and more brutal wars. The root cause of this genocidal disaster is the sharpening rivalry between U.S. imperialism and capitalist bosses in China. As the U.S. rulers’ own mouthpiece, the New York Times, noted, “Each country facing famine is in war, or in the case of Somalia, recovering from decades of conflict” (NYT, 2/22).
Half of the 20 million threatened with starvation are children, including 1.4 million “at imminent risk of death” (NYT, 2/22). How did imperialism lead to this famine disaster? More important, how do we respond to it? The United Nations, controlled by the world’s dominant imperialist powers, can offer no real solution. While UN chiefs circle the planet begging for billions of dollars for food aid from the very imperialists causing the wars that created the famine, the institution itself has a murderous track record in similar disasters (NYT, 3/27).
Imperialist Roots of Famine
The famine in South Sudan is a case study in how imperialism and deadly proxy wars lead directly to mass misery for workers. China controls 75 percent of Sudan’s oil, and has invested billions of dollars in the country’s infrastructure (Sudan Tribune, 8/3/16). The Chinese bosses’ interests have been threatened by U.S. financing of rebel groups in the oil-rich south, which led to the creation in 2012 of South Sudan. The resulting civil war has conscripted tens of thousands of child soldiers, among other atrocities (TeleSur, 2/21/15). Meanwhile, China has maneuvered among South Sudan’s bosses to regain access to oil there (Huffington Post, 6/23/16), and even to instigate attacks against U.S. aid workers (Foreign Policy, 8/16/16).
As among all thieves, there is no honor among capitalists. The U.S. and China continue funding whatever proxy forces might benefit their interests, no matter the cost. More than 250,000 workers have been forced to abandon crops and flee for their lives. Famine is the inevitable result. As Stephen O’Brien, the UN’s chief of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, noted, “The famine in South Sudan is man-made. Parties to the conflict are parties to the famine—as are those not intervening to make the conflict stop” (Al Jazeera, 3/11). Predictably, O’Brien avoided any direct criticism of the two imperialist super-powers responsible for this catastrophe.
Dark Night Shall Have Its End
To build a mass anti-imperialist movement to smash this capitalist system, its racist borders, and imperialist wars and famines, the international working class must organize a revolutionary communist party. Communism means a world where workers unite to free us from hunger and material deprivation while sharing what we have in times of both abundance and scarcity. We need all workers, students, and soldiers—you!—to join Progressive Labor Party and fight to make communism a reality.
TRENTON, NJ—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined a multiracial group of over thirty protesters who marched through the state’s capital chanting “No Cops—In Our Schools” to protest the racist A1114, “Police Respectability” Bill.
In response to police murders and subsequent protests, the bosse are fearful of working-class youth armed with class consciousness. They are trying to pass a bill aimed to fool workers into believing the police are on our side.
A1114 will force all schools—from elementary to high school—to create courses that teaches students how to “interact” with cops, essentially putting the responsibility of an arrest, shooting, or murder on the victim rather than the police force. According to the bill, the class will give students information on “the role and responsibilities of a law enforcement official in providing for public safety; and an individual’s responsibilities to comply with a directive from a law enforcement official” (NJLEG). This bill is fascist, as it aims to build all-class unity between class enemies—working-class kids and ruling-class forces.
To smash racism, we must smash capitalism. Only a revolutionary communist PLP can bury this racist system once and for all. Many protesters received CHALLENGE and responded warmly to discussions about capitalism and communism.
‘Respectability’ Politics Kill Youth
The politicians primarily sponsoring A1114 primary were all from Essex County (highest percentage of Black workers in New Jersey), including Sheila Oliver, the Black candidate for lieutenant governor running with Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Phil Murphy. It easily passed through the Assembly 76-0 seemlessly. This bill shows that relying on the Democratic Party to fight against the openly racist Trump administration is a dead-end for workers.
The racist bill going to clear the Senate until young antiracist fighters got word and responded with protests. Labeling the protest “Good Kids, Bad Cities,” the antiracists not only addressed the conditions of the cities, but they also challenged what students should be learning in schools.
Fascist Police Bill Exposes Capitalist Role of Schools
Since schools are factories for reproducing capitalist ideas, it is clear that students will not be taught the truth about the roles and responsibilities of cops. They will not be taught about the origins of the police from slave catchers, or the role that they played in attacking striking workers during the 19th and 20th century fightbacks against the bosses. “Slave patrols to hunt down escaped slaves were the original police in the South…They [police] were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late 19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class” (LAWCHA, 12/29/14).
Our children must not pledge allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan in blue—yesterday’s Klan members are today’s cops (and judges, politicians, and bosses).
Aiming to Build an Obedient Workforce
By teaching students that they have “responsibilities to comply” with police, they are doing two things. First, this A1114 implies that most men and women murdered by the cops died because they didn’t comply. “If only they complied they would still be alive.” We know that this is the furthest thing from the truth. Philando Castile (Minnesota, 2016) is just one example of many who did everything he was “supposed to do.” He was murdered and the killer cop still walks free.
Second, this bill looks to create a more compliant working class—one of the main functions of education under capitalism. When workers fight back—whether against racism, sexism, or imperialism—the police suppress it. A compliant working-class youth taught to always obey cops is good for the bosses, as it lessens the chance of militant fightback, let alone revolution. Militant fightback led by Black and Latin youth is extremely threatening to the rulers (i.e., Ferguson and Baltimore).
A speaker at the NJ rally spoke about the need for cops under capitalism. He surveyed the crowd to see how many protesters were under the age of 30. More than a majority raised their hands. He then asked if they knew someone who is unemployed or underemployed. All of the protesters raised their hand. As inequality becomes more visible and revolutionary ideas spread through the population, the system itself is in trouble, and the ruling class is searching for ways to discpline the working class with police force.
Throughout history, we have seen the physical force that has ben used by the cops and military to suppress workers’ uprisings. While the ruling class will never hesitate to use this force to keep the workers in line, they prefer to control our ideas. It is a much easier way to maintain their capitalist system. That is why PLP joined these young fighters in protesting Bill A1114 and others like it. We have a lot to learn from the working class. We also have a lot to contribute to the movement. Possessing a communist analysis is key for our victory. We don’t just want to see this bill die; we want to see this capitalist system die.
