Tel-Aviv, May 1 — Hundreds of workers and activists marched in central Tel-Aviv with red flags and banners, some decorated with the hammer and sickle, the traditional communist symbol of industrial and farm workers’ unity. We, the PL’ers in Israel-Palestine, all came to this march, with our red shirts, as well as the local leaflet “Why Communism?”
While the May Day march was organized by the thoroughly pseudo-leftist “Communist” Party of Israel, as well as the usual liberals, many radicalized and militant youth and workers came as well. One demonstrator, who was dressed in a WWII-era Red Army uniform, upon seeing our leaflet told us that he supports the way of Stalin and Mao! Another young worker from the “C”P Youth, told us he stands against the CP leadership and supports what was written in our leaflet.
The main call of the march was for a 30 ILS ($8.5) hourly minimum wage, instead of the current 25 ILS ($7), which is now the main campaign of the reformists. This is an important struggle, as one cannot make a living out of a minimum wage even when working full-time. But we must ask — would asking for a few more crumbs off the bosses’ table change the essential nature of the working class’s exploitation by the tycoons?
What we need to fight for is not a few more scraps of bread, but the whole bakery. This is why we openly call for communist revolution.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 1 — PLP here planned two events to celebrate May Day: a Backyard BBQ and a contingent in the May 1 Oakland Sin Fronteras (No Borders) Coalition.
Workers Struggles Have No Borders
As we marched alongside our sisters and brothers to celebrate May Day we chanted in Spanish and English “Obreras unidos jamas seran vencidos,”  “The workers united can never be defeated” and “Fight for Communism, Power to the workers,” Primero de Mayo, Communista  y Proletario.”
  We traded chants with other groups about international solidarity and multiracial unity.  Some from other groups joined us in our call for communist revolution.
A multiracial, international, and multi-generational crowd of over 60 gathered to socialize and celebrate May Day.  It was a wide circle of friends, comrades, neighbors, family, coworkers, retirees, and friends of friends.
A short speech discussed lessons PLP has drawn from the world communist movement and the rise of a police state. One main point was that under President Obama, “the deporter-in-chief”, a police state apparatus has deported more than two million undocumented workers.  The racist USA has the biggest incarcerated population in the world, mostly black and Latino workers and youth.
This May Day shows the potential for international workers’ unity to grow since workers from every continent were present. PLP members’ active participation in the schools, on the job and in community groups can help move the agenda towards developing class consciousness: we are all in one huge, international working class. We think these are small steps to building a mass communist party and movement among workers of the world.  The International working class can become a tornado to destroy capitalism.

DONGGUAN, CHINA, April 30 — On April 15, one of the largest strikes in this country’s private sector saw 45,000 workers, mostly women, shut down Yue Yuen, the world’s largest manufacturer of sneakers and footwear. The company produces 300 million pairs for Nike, Adidas, Puma, New Balance, Reebok and Timberland, among others. Yue Yuen, a $5.6 billion conglomerate, employs 423,000 workers.
Riot police played their usual strike-breaking role. They detained rank-and-file leaders and arrested scores of workers, forcing them back inside the factories. When once inside, those workers refused to work, and then were beaten for “not working.” One worker told Agence France-Presse (4/28) that “the factory is controlled by police.” A 17-year-old who earns around $500 a month working on Nike Air Jordans said she went back because she feared losing her job, saying, “Factory officials have warned us that those who make a fuss will be sacked without compensation.” A 45-year-old sanitation worker surnamed Li added, “The government is forcing us back to work.”
Massive crowds surrounding factory buildings carried banners reading, “Give me back my social insurance, give me back my housing benefits!”
The grassroots uprising was led by workers approaching retirement. They reported that the company had fallen way behind on payments for pensions, housing funds, unemployment and medical insurance — social welfare benefits which are supposedly mandated by Chinese law. “If you don’t have social security, your life’s work will be useless when you return home,” said Li, who, like nearly all the factory’s workers, comes from a poor rural village to which he plans one day to return.
The strikers were focusing on what will happen if many of the companies move elsewhere. Nike and Adidas have begun shifting operations to lower-wage areas like Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Bangladesh.
Carrot and Stick:
Bosses Promise,
Cops Attack
As the strike continued, the bosses promised some retroactive payments to the state-mandated social insurance and housing funds, but one worker, Xiang Feng, 28, told Bloomberg News, “Workers may end up with a take-home salary almost unchanged or maybe even lower than before.” Many are demanding a 30 percent pay hike, saying that their wages can’t keep up with the rising cost of living. As of today, most of the strikers have returned to work based on the “carrot-and-stick” concept: company promises and police action.
How much longer this struggle will continue and what the workers may win remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: the betrayal of China’s revolution is blatantly revealed in the actions of its leaders in keeping tens of millions of workers in near slavery. While passing labor reform laws, they flagrantly ignore them as they use the state apparatus to break this strike.
Millions of workers and peasants still remember being freed from some of the oppression of the pre-revolutionary days. Now that the present traitors to that revolution have reinstituted full-blown capitalism, fertile ground exists for the emergence of a true communist party that would learn from past errors — that there is no such thing as a “two-stage” revolution, that socialism only brings workers back to capitalism.
One of the lessons of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is that our class must be won directly to communism, a society without a wage system, without bosses, without profits, without money — a society run by and for the workers, governed by workers’ state power. This is the goal of the Progressive Labor Party. Our fight is international and can eventually help the emergence of such a party throughout the world.

In 1966, at the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Progressive Labor Party was one year old. Our Chinese comrades influenced our political line and inspired our work. They showed us the critical importance of breaking with revisionism — the fake-leftist ideology, put forward by “capitalist roaders,” that actually serves the bosses. They taught us about the power of the collective and of leadership that comes from the masses, and the need to rely on workers over elite experts and technocrats. The Chinese comrades’ experience also underlined the danger of keeping remnants of capitalism — like money and wages — in a worker-run state, and how these elements pave the way for the return of full-blown capitalism.
The first two parts of this first-person account of the Cultural Revolution told the story of a village factory and the author’s evolution from high school student to factory manager. He left his village in 1978 to attend a teachers college. By the following year, he would find it much changed.     
‘I Missed the Village Life’
In July the college closed for summer vacation, and I came back home. The train stopped at Qingdao, but there was no bus to my hometown. I went to the Qingdao steel factory, where my former colleagues were assembling the cranes. Guan Dunyan, my predecessor as factory manager, was excited to see me, and asked one of the workers to carry me back home on his bike. It was Huang Jianguo, the worker who’d designed the tractor cabs.
On the way to the village, Huang objected to the accent I’d acquired at college — I hadn’t even been aware of it. He warned me to change back, which proved not to be difficult. Once I was back with my friends in the village, I spoke like them again.
I visited Wang Xuejin and we talked about conditions in the factory and my successor, Guan Dunxiao. The son of a former landlord, Guan was also one of the two first high school graduates in the village. I also visited Zhao Licheng, the party leader who’d insisted that I run for factory manager and made sure I was honored as standard bearer four years in a row. He said that he really missed me. I missed him as well — I missed village life.
After the summer, back in college, I heard that Deng Xiaoping’s government was breaking up the collectives. Farmers would be given a piece of land to farm on their own. Collective assets, including the factories, would be broken up as well to give people more incentive to work hard. I immediately realized this was a terrible mistake.
‘Defend the Collective’
By late January, 1979, when I came back to the village for winter break, the collective land was already broken into individual lots. Anyone who refused to carry out this policy — including all seventeen of the Party’s county secretaries in Yantai Prefecture — was summarily removed from office by Deng’s government. The new leaders, appointed by the central government, forced the breakup of the collective down the people’s throats.
Zhang Fugui — model farmer, party secretary of Xia Dingjia village, and a member of Shandong Provincial Party Committee — yelled through the village loudspeaker that as long as he was alive, collective assets in the village would be defended and the collective would stay intact. But he was removed from office and taken away from his village. He was taken by surprise by the comeback of the capitalist roaders.
Millions of people like Zhang were purged from the Party, and many wound up in prison for twenty years or life. The struggle between the two camps inside the Chinese Communist Party was not a mere difference of opinion — it was a struggle of life and death. Deng Xiaoping was ruthless, like Jiang Jieshi’s brutal regime during the civil war.
In my village, land was laid to waste because farming did not make enough money. The collective had farmed because people needed to be fed, and combined the income of the farming section with that of the collective-owned industry. Now that the factory workers were given individual pieces of land, they had no time to take care of it because of their factory work. Meanwhile, the farmers now needed to make more money and looked for side employment. As a result, they failed to take care of their plots.
The village factory was privatized as well. Zhao Licheng bought equipment from the village and took some people with him to set up his own factory. Guan Dunxiao did the same.
What held the village factory together was the spirit of equality among the workers under collectivization. With collective ownership, everybody benefited when the factory did well and everybody suffered when it did poorly. This was no longer true after the factory was privatized. The private owners wanted to increase their profits, which meant they paid workers less and compelled them to work longer hours. Class conflicts emerged that led to resentment and disintegration.
Wang Xuejin, the village factory’s secret weapon in the early days, was convinced to work for Zhao in the beginning. Zhao offered to pay him 5,000 yuan a year, a lot of money at the time — nearly ten times more than the average wage. Wang was happy with this arrangement, and worked very hard. But at the end of the year, he discovered that Zhao cleared more than 100,000 yuan in profits from the operation. Under collectivization they’d earned the same number of work points. Now their lives were very different.
Wang complained to Zhao by citing an old saying from Confucius: that people were unhappy not because they were poor, but because others made more than they did. In response, Zhao promised to increase Wang’s salary for the following year and also to buy him a new apartment. Wang made a couple thousand more yuan the next year, and another few thousand the year after. But he was no longer happy. And the other workers from the original factory left to set up their own operations, leaving Zhao to hire workers from other areas.

Part Four of this memoir will examine widening inequality in the author’s village as Chinese society falls apart after the defeat of the Cultural Revolution.