The Red Army plants the communist flag over Berlin’s Reichstag building in May 1945. The Soviet Union under Stalin defeated the fascists in World War II. Celebrate the power of the working class at PLP’s 50 anniversary this May Day.
Most working people have heard of Hitler and Nazi Germany, and the concentration camps like Auschwitz, which occurred under fascist rule in Germany. Workers in the United States will have definitely heard of the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror, and witnessed the police terror unleashed on Black workers in Ferguson, Missouri and in cities across the U.S. Klan and police terror, like the Nazis, reveal capitalism’s true face, with the mask of capitalist democracy removed. “Fascism,” a word that is used often and rarely defined, is a vital concept that enables us to understand capitalist rule in its most racist, violent form.
Fascism is the open, naked rule of capitalism, a type that the capitalist ruling class turns to in times of crisis when their sham democracy no longer can serve their needs. Today fascism is increasing around the world, and the Progressive Labor Party is organizing the international working class to defeat it with communist revolution!
Imperialist Rivals Use War to Become Top Dog
Imperialist war, racism, sexism and global devastation are business-as-usual for the capitalist class. Contrary to what hypocritical politicians say, competing capitalist factions and competing imperialist powers must use military and police violence in vieing to control the world’s natural resources and position themselves to become the world’s top dog imperialist power.
Fascism results from a type of crisis that is specific to the capitalist rulers. Each country’s capitalist class contains many factions, representing capitalists who derive their profits from different groups of banks and industries. The rivalries between different imperialist country sharpens (as for example, the current U.S. rulers’ desperate struggle to maintain control over Middle Eastern oil resources). At the same time, the internal rivalry between capitalist factions in each imperialist power also sharpen. The usual form of capitalist “democracy” breaks down. (Take for example the current government paralysis reflecting the fight between the older finance capital and Big Oil, which supported Obama and the newer upstart capitalists led by the Koch brothers who created and support Tea Party forces.)
Many severe problems plagued the ruling class of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Following its defeat in World War I, the German economy was in shambles. Millions of workers, including war veterans, were unemployed or desperately struggling. As the volatile post-war German economy sank, work became increasingly scarce, runaway inflation made money worthless and massive strike waves rocked the country.
Bolshevik Revolution Inspired Millions
Even worse for the German ruling class was the creation of a communist-led working-class state in 1917, the Soviet Union, which inspired millions of workers in Germany. Many began looking to the Communist Party of Germany for political leadership, even to the point of staging a revolt and declaring a short-lived Soviet Republic in Bavaria in 1918.
The largest political party in Germany at the time was the liberal Social-Democratic Party (SPD), which declared itself on the side of the working class in speeches and in election campaigns to earn the loyalty and votes of the working class. Behind the scenes, the pro-capitalist SPD leadership regularly met with representatives of the German banks and industries like Deutsche Bank, steel giants Thyssen and Krupp, Volkswagen, the pharmaceutical monopoly I.G. Farben (Bayer), and other companies still around today. This dominant section of the German capitalist class became increasingly concerned throughout the 1920s that the SPD would be unable to control the working class and prepare it for another imperialist war.
Throughout this time, Adolf Hitler was busy organizing right-wing, nationalist World War I veterans, small shopkeepers and business owners to build a movement called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” or Nazis. The Nazi movement had nothing to do with socialism, workers’ power, or the Soviet Union. Very few actual German workers belonged to the Nazi Party before the 1930s. The Nazis blamed immigrants, Jews, and the Communist Party for betraying Germany.
Hitler’s Bosses: Ditch Social Democrat, Destroy Communists
In private speeches made to the German capitalists, Hitler persuaded the biggest bosses that their strategy of using the Social Democrats to control the working class was failing. Militant strikes and the growing Communist Party’s relentless attacks on the Social Democratic Party as tools of the German ruling class increased capitalist rulers’ fear that workers in Germany would follow the example of workers in the Soviet Union. Hitler declared that Germany’s solution lay in following fascist Italy’s lead: ditching the liberal Social Democrats, violently destroying the Communist Party and all trade unions and workers’ organizations, to terrorize and discipline the working class into obedience.
Not every faction of the German ruling class went along with Hitler’s proposals, but when the liberal Social Democrat-supported Chancellor legally appointed Hitler the new Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Nazis, with the backing of Germany’s largest banks and industries, arrested the heads of those businesses that refused to cooperate. The German ruling class was brought into line first.
Then, the Nazis turned their attention to the working class by first destroying its most powerful organization, the Communist Party. The communists were the first to go into the concentration camps and the first inside the gas chambers. Once the Communist Party and its supporting organizations were smashed, the Nazis were free to round up trade unionists, Jews, homosexuals, the handicapped, Christians, Romanis, and immigrant groups — even workers associated with the Social Democratic Party, all to be used as slave labor or, later, sent to the death camps like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau.
The Nazis eventually launched a war of annihilation against the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. Bosses in the United States and Europe armed the Nazis to the teeth and pinned their hopes on them to defeat the Soviets. However, it was millions of communist women and men organized by the Soviet Union who ultimately beat the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. The Soviet Union also led the communist resistance movement’s fight against fascism all over the world, and during that time was a beacon of hope for workers on every continent.
U.S. Bosses Supplied Gas for Nazis’ Ovens
Communists defended the working class against fascist violence and racist terror at the same time as capitalist leaders like Henry Ford (U.S. auto boss) made under-the-table deals with Hitler to share fascist-made profits. U.S. chemical companies sold Germany the poison gas for use in genocidal gas chambers. While the failures of the old communist movement, including its fight for socialism which retained wages and inequality, eventually allowed capitalism to be restored in every socialist country, those failures do not detract from the courageous sacrifices of millions of communists and their friends in the fight to defeat fascism’s terror.
Fascism is not something unique to Germany, or any other country. It grows out of capitalism. Many capitalist countries like the U.S., members of the European Union, South Africa have a democratic facade, where some workers are allowed certain amounts of freedom. But, in truth, all workers live under a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Fascism is not different from capitalism. It is a tactic that the capitalist class uses to stay in power and maintain its class dictatorship over the working class.
Communism is the opposite of fascism. Communism means the dictatorship of the working class. After the working class has overthrown the capitalist class and abolished wages and money, the workers will run society for the good of the workers, and protect it with force to prevent the capitalists from ever regaining power. This is what Progressive Labor Party fights for.
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Israel Elections: Smash Racist State with Workers’ Revolution
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- 26 March 2015 28 hits
Tel-Aviv, March 17 — Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister since 2009 (and before that between 1996 and 1999) was re-elected once more to the office of prime minister. This open fascist servant of the U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adleson won the election by warning his voters that “Arabs are going to the polls en-masse.” This racist ploy drove many racist Israelis to vote for him rather than the competing right-wingers, bringing him a victory against the Zionist Camp —the so-called “left-wing” party based on the old Labor party and elements of the now-defunct Kadima list.
Racism runs rampant on both sides of the Zionist political map: both the Netanyahu camp with their open anti-Palestinian propaganda, as well as the so-called “Left” of the Zionist movement. The Israel foreign minister Lieberman said that Arab Israel critics should be beheaded. Various people in the orbit of the Labor Party, such as the “publicist” Yair Garbuz, expressed their dissatisfaction with their party’s failure to win the election in blatantly racist terms about the “primitive Mizrachi [Middle Eastern] Jews who kiss Mezuzoth and worship talismans. Another racist, Prof. Amir Hezroni, even told a Mizrachi woman who came to an interview alongside him that “it would have been better if her parents were left to rot in Morrocco.” This election allowed all Zionists to show their true faces: they are racist pawns of U.S. imperialism, who hate the working class.
Many people on the Israeli left were very dissatisfied with the results of these elections. But we as communists point out to our friends that we should not despair when one bosses’ stooge is beaten by another bosses’ stooge. Even if Herzog (Zionist Camp) would have won the elections, we would still face the same tax hikes, budget cuts and growing wars, not to mention a continued siege of Gaza.
Election = Bosses’ Stooges Fight It Out
Netanyahu is the servant of the U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adelson, it is true. But Herzog is similarly the slave of local bosses such as the press tycoon Arnon Moses, owner of the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, as well as a servile lackey of the Rockefeller wing of U.S. capitalists.
The elections were a fight between racist bosses. We workers have no side in this fight, and should instead focus on the real fight for working-class emancipation and an end to Zionist apartheid in Israel-Palestine. We also point out that approximately four million Palestinians who live in areas under de-facto Israeli military rule are not allowed to participate in these phony elections; the rulers decide who is allowed to vote and who counts the votes and then boast about how their country is a “democracy” where one-third of the population they lord over is not allowed to vote in the capitalist elections.
We tell workers that the road for liberation is communist revolution. We must build a mass working-class movement encompassing workers of all ethnic backgrounds — Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrachi Jews, Palestinian-Arabs, immigrants, and refugees.
The ruling class has only racism to offer. They intensify their attack on our class, imprisoning hundreds of refugees in a so-called “open residential facility” in Holot (i.e., a prison camp) without trial; they murder hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza. They prepare Jewish workers for more and more imperialist wars to kill and be killed for the bosses’ glory and profits.
Our answer is to build a unified workers’ movement for the liberation of our class. It is time we organize to kick out this rotten system of war and oppression and replace it with a communist system which will serve our class.
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Nypd’s ‘Strategic Response Group’: One More Step To Fascism
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- 26 March 2015 48 hits
NEW YORK CITY — Never let it be said that the liberal politicians and their appointees don’t serve the needs of the ruling capitalist class as well as or better than the conservatives. William Bratton, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s choice for police commissioner, is a perfect example of this.
Under capitalism, we are taught that the job of the police is to protect “society” from serious crime. But because capitalism is based on the exploitation of a large group of workers by a tiny minority of bankers and bosses, the rulers need a group of armed cops to help them enforce their aims. The real role of the police is to protect private property and serve the capitalists. This includes using terror to intimidate sections of society which are dissatisfied with the status quo of a few billionaires dictating to the rest of us.
Mass Protests Hit Cops’ Racist Murders
In the wake of an epidemic of police killings, a mass upsurge of protests engulfed NYC, the whole U.S. and the world. Mass hatred of racist murders by the cops, and class love for our brothers and sisters who were struck down, provided the spark for this movement. In response, Bratton recently announced a two-pronged program to “fight terrorism and improve community relations” (NY Times 1/30/15). Under this program, the NYPD “will spend more time visiting with community members to learn their concerns.” The idea here is to win workers to side with the cops in the sharpening debate over racist police terror.
At the same time, the NYPD will create a “heavily armed unit to patrol the city and to respond to large-scale events, such as protests or terrorist attacks” called the Strategic Response Group (SRG). Cops assigned to the unit “would be equipped with heavy protective gear and machine guns and receive advanced training in counterterrorism tactics and “advanced disorder control” (NYT, 1/30). Workers must see this for what it is: a dangerous move by the NYC bosses.
Remember, it was Bratton who claimed that anti-police brutality demonstrators were partly responsible for the murder of two cops in Brooklyn by a mentally unstable man who later committed suicide back in December (NY Post, 12/22/14). It was Bratton and de Blasio who blasted demonstrators’ calls for the death penalty for Darren Wilson, the cop who murdered Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO., and for the Staten Island cops who killed Eric Garner.
The openly fascist SRG unit is not mainly designed to go after ISIS supporters in the U.S.
From the rulers’ point of view, in order to create a larger base of support for imperialist war, they need to paint workers from the Middle East and South Asia as the enemy. And if they can win workers to equate militant rebellion against racist conditions in the U.S. with “terrorism,” so much the better for them.
Bosses Equate Anti-Racist Rebellion with ‘Terrorism’
But the reality is — under the cover of “the fight against terrorism” — the SRG is an attack on militant anti-racists and communists who give leadership to those fighters. By lumping “protests” with “disorder control” and then with “terrorism”, Bratton & Co. continue to implement the ruling-class strategy of using “homeland security” to justify fascist measures.
While the cops, the politicians, and the big bosses who stand behind them continue to use a “carrot-and-stick” approach, make no mistake that the last thing the U.S. ruling class needs as they prepare for war against their imperialist rivals is a vibrant, growing anti-racist movement that is challenging the whole nature of policing under a viciously racist capitalist system. However, the rulers are going all out to try to pacify or buy off as many workers as they can with reforms and politicians. But they are holding their rabid dogs for when they need them to crush any future uprisings against police terror, mass racist unemployment, poverty wages and lousy working conditions. SRG is a step towards that.
Although our numbers may be small now, the ideas of PLP have broad appeal to the masses. Workers who have fought back have earned the bosses’ wrath. But the bosses’ attempt to clamp down on dissent will backfire, exposing what their “democracy” really means for workers. Join the fight against racist police terror by joining the fight for communist revolution.
NEW YORK CITY, March 18 — I joined several comrades at the City Univeristy of New York Graduate Center to hear a professor from Mexico. He was representing the parents of the 43 students from a rural teachers college who were kidnapped in September 2014 and never found. Since tens of thousands of disappeared people have turned up dead in the last decade, the parents dread they will never see their children again.
The teachers college, in the town of Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero, admits students from poor backgrounds, trains them to become teachers, and sends them back to their community to educate others. The college views teachers not simply as transmitters of knowledge, but as agents of social change who will join with workers and peasants to demand a better life. When they were kidnapped, these students had been rallying for more funding for their college, just as students and faculty at CUNY are demanding more funding now.
What I found most admirable about the professor’s talk were his repeated calls for a revolution in Mexico to — in his words — “end the exploitation of man,” referring to the corporations and the politicians who serve them. He said the parents had no faith in any of the bourgeois political parties and that all of them “should be dumped in the trash can.”
On May 4, 1886, in what led to the first May Day, 80,000 workers marched down Michigan Avenue to Haymarket Square in Chicago to demand a reduction in their workday from ten hours to eight with no loss of pay. We’re often told that people can’t change. But one of the leaders of that march was Albert Parsons, who as a teenager had fought for the Confederacy — that is, he’d fought for slavery, on the opposite side of Harriet Tubman. After the war, however, Parsons moved to Texas, worked with ex-slaves and dramatically changed his outlook. He became an advocate for equal rights for former slaves. He also married a former slave, Lucy, who became an important radical activist in her own right.
Albert Parsons was among four trade union leaders hung in 1887 after being falsely convicted of throwing a bomb at the Haymarket Square rally. He was targeted because he was a well-known socialist and anarchist who edited The Alarm, a newspaper whose banner headline read: “Workingmen of All Countries, Unite!” In the week before he was executed, Parsons advised his followers, “Lay bare the inequities of capitalism; expose the slavery of law; proclaim the tyranny of government; denounce the greed, cruelty, abominations of the privileged class who riot and revel on the labor of their wage-slaves.”
Like the students and teachers in Mexico, Albert and Lucy stood for something more than reforms. They believed in bringing to birth a new society, one that would end class exploitation — a society where we share the fruits of our labor.
A friend of mine is one of the hardest-working, most determined young people I know. Tragically, her mother died when she was young and her life has not been easy. Yet she’s worked hard and well as an Emergency Medical Technician. She would like to go to college and get her degree, but it’s been difficult for lack of money and time. When we talk about a new society — a communist society — we’re talking about one where everyone has the right to a life-long education, to decent housing, to proper food and health care. These won’t be commodities for sale; they will be basic human rights. Socially-needed work will be shared, to give everyone the opportunity to learn and to teach. Racist and sexist practices will be abolished, and we’ll erase those capitalist-created lines called borders.
There will be two May Days this year in New York City. The first will be on Friday, May 1, and it will demand some worthwhile reforms. But in the end, all reforms to capitalism are inadequate bandages on a system of festering wounds. The Progressive Labor Party understands that radical surgery is necessary. The following day — Saturday, May 2 — PLP will lead a rally and march in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to put forward our vision of the classless, egalitarian society so urgently needed by the workers of the world. Join us!
NEW YORK CITY, March 17 — Monday night, my friends and I had a dinner and discussion about sexism. This is part of a series of study groups for college students leading up to May Day. We began by looking at clippings from ruling-class newspapers. One “news” article was about pop-star Taylor Swift insuring her legs for $40 million. Another was about the systemic starvation of women in India, a country where kids are shorter, smaller, and more likely to be malnourished than the world’s poorest countries: Congo, Zimbabwe, or Somalia.
We then watched clips of PLP’s “The Fight against Sexism” educational documentary. We learned that sexism is the super-exploitation of women and the gendered division by the bosses for profit. It also includes the brutal ideas and practices that justify this oppression. Some target culture and religion as the origin. We agreed that human nature is not the cause of sexism.
We searched for the economic foundation of sexism: class society. There wouldn’t be unequal gender division of labor without such things as private property and surplus value. What became “women’s work” was free and cheap. Now, we have the division between unpaid work and paid work, which is the root of sexism. Raising the next generation of workers and sustaining family units just enough to be exploited is a lot of work, and saves the bosses a lot of money.
Today, sexism equals profit. Capitalism isn’t the birthplace of sexism, but it has intensified the super-exploitation and oppression of women. Sexism helps the bosses to make their money. It has become the lifeblood of capitalism along with racism and all the other ills that capitalism breeds.
We also watched a clip about violence against women during the depression of the 1930s.
This clip helped us target the root of domestic violence, and violence against women in general, such as cuts on healthcare, food stamps, and other social services.
One student commented how just a couple of years ago, he thought he couldn’t be with a woman who made more money than he did. However, being around the Party and his life experience has taught him the importance of uniting with women. He noted that, “Now, taking care of the kids, massaging her feet when she gets home after work, I could do that.”
The final clip we watched was about how feminism cannot defeat sexism. While well-intended people who consider themselves feminists are fighting for the equality of workers regardless of gender and sexual orientation, we asked what solution does feminism offer? We can elect Hillary Clinton as president. Or we can equalize exploitation to the same level as men workers.
Or, there is a better alternative than feminism.
I don’t want to be associated with an ideology where Miley Cyrus, Bell Hooks, and Allexandra Kollantai can exist in the same sphere. A movement that could be diluted so that anyone no matter their class can identify with it, where the bosses can promote it, is a losing strategy for women workers. Feminism is a ruling-class movement that dilutes, muddies, avoids, or outright rejects a class analysis.
If we believe in an anti-sexist society, fight directly for communism. No half-way houses needed! One student commented, “I never understood how you could marginalize your power [by labeling men as the enemy]!”
Now the most important question remains: how do we combat sexism? Fight against the cuts in daycare at work? Wage a campaign against the rise of sexual violence on campus? Join the fight against police murders? Target the enemy: the administrators, the politicians, the school and hospital bosses, the cops, the state? Develop women leaders to lead mass struggle? The people around the table had a lot to think about.
Finally, I looked around and noticed the international quality of the dinner. We had mostly Black students from the Caribbean and Africa. We also had someone from Europe and South Asia.
One student was someone we met just four hours ago through a friend on campus during a CHALLENGE sale. After the study group, he said, “I vaguely knew a teacher in high school who had these communist ideas like you.”
We quickly figured out who that teacher was. “If you come to our retreat next weekend, you will be sure to meet him,” we said.
This just goes to show how the work our high school teacher did a decade ago had a profound effect on this youth, enough to identify communist politics years later through a chance encounter. Thank you to PL teachers who plant deep roots in working-class youth, for their work continues to bear fruit years later.
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We are getting ready for May Day! More than 30 people, including many City University New York (CUNY) professors and students, came to Astoria, Queens for a spirited radical cultural event this evening. It was a collective effort: members and friends of Progressive Labor Party prepared delicious food for dinner, helped set up, and provided amazing performances. We sang revolutionary songs celebrating anti-racist and militant workers struggles, we listened to powerful anti-racist poems from a young artist whose book of poetry has just been published, and we listened to the virtuoso guitar playing of a young comrade.
We watched a phenomenal one-woman performance of a short play about the life of Harriet Tubman, the courageous abolitionist who escaped slavery, but then returned to the South thirteen times to liberate 70 other slaves via the Underground Railroad. Tubman was an important figure in the great 19th century struggle against chattel slavery. She was an ardent friend and supporter of militant abolitionist John Brown, and she helped him prepare his attack on Harper’s Ferry, which was the opening shot in what would become the U.S. Civil War that decisively crushed the country’s slave regime. When Brown was hung, Tubman declared he had “done more in dying, than 100 men would in living.”
Today the struggle is to end capitalist wage slavery and to bring to birth a new society that isn’t based on class exploitation and profits. That was the dream of Albert and Lucy Parsons, the radical leaders of the first May Day march in 1886, when 80,000 workers marched down Michigan Avenue in Chicago on behalf of the eight-hour day. They advocated the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
Our May Day rallies and marches this year will carry on the hopes and aspirations of the Parsons and the millions of others who have fought hard for a communist society, which is needed today more than ever, as capitalist crisis pushes down the living standards of workers everywhere, from Greece to South Africa to Mexico. A comrade urged every one at the event to join PLP on Saturday, May 2 in marching along Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn on behalf of revolution and a communist future. We collected money for the May Day dinner, and our friends said they were looking forward to May 2.