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.

We are marching today to honor the great holiday of the international working class: May Day. We are uniting to build a worldwide movement, led by the Progressive Labor Party, to destroy capitalism and erect a communist society run by and for workers. PLP groups in more than twenty countries are dedicated to challenging the rival imperialist powers as they battle for control over the earth’s resources — especially oil and gas — and to exploit our class. We workers produce everything of value; the bosses steal the value of our labor for their profits, the lifeblood of capitalism.
Inevitably, the leading imperialists — and especially the rulers of the United States, Russia and China — will settle their intensifying competition in a major war, just as they did in World Wars I and II. They will use the world’s workers as cannon fodder to kill the opposing bosses’ workers. They desperately need our class to choose one nationalist side over another.
But we have no stake in these devastating fights over profits. We oppose all bosses. We must turn their imperialist wars into a class war for our interests. We need to organize a revolution to bury capitalism once and for all.
U.S. Oligarchs vs. Russian Oligarchs
As of the moment, the leading edge of this inter-imperialist rivalry pits the bosses of ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, represented by warrior-in-chief Barack Obama, against Russian bosses led by Vladimir Putin — dictator against dictator, oligarchs against oligarchs. To counter Putin’s goal of an empire built from the former republics of the Soviet Union, Obama is following a potentially catastrophic New Cold War policy endorsed by the most powerful U.S. capitalists. (See box on the old Cold War.)
Obama’s New Cold War combines economic pressure (bolstered by growing U.S. energy leverage from recent discoveries of oil and gas) with a sharp reminder of the U.S.’s nuclear superiority and its readiness to use it. For our class, the stakes couldn’t be higher. During the first Cold War, U.S. rulers slaughtered three million workers and farmers to contain Soviet (and later Chinese) influence in Vietnam. In standoffs like the Cuban missile crisis, U.S.-Soviet military brinksmanship imperiled the lives of hundreds of millions more.
On April 16, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank, wrote, “The strategy needed to resist Putin’s efforts to expand Russia’s influence beyond its borders — and to induce change within them — resembles nothing so much as the ‘containment’ doctrine that guided Western policy for the four decades of the Cold War” (CFR website). The CFR was founded by heavyweights of U.S. finance and industry: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil and Chevron. David Rockefeller, longtime leader of the finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, is honorary chairman.
For these arch-imperialists’ benefit, Haass asked Obama to impose “stronger sanctions” targeting Russian financial institutions, and to weaken Russia’s energy stranglehold on Ukraine and much of Western Europe” by exporting U.S. oil and gas. He also ominously demanded that Obama “increase...America’s presence in select NATO countries.” (See box on NATO on page 4.)
The next day, the CFR clarified Haass’s deadly message with an article, “NATO After Crimea,” by Pentagon advisor and liberal Brookings Institution fellow Michael O’Hanlon. It called for 3,000 to 7,000 GIs to be stationed in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania to create “a trip wire along the border with Russia.” Under official NATO doctrine, the term “trip wire” has nuclear significance. Translation: If Soviet troops crossed NATO borders, U.S. rulers would retaliate with atomic bombs on Russian cities.
Only U.S. Rulers Used A-Bomb
The “trip wire” scenario relies on the Big Lie that paints conventionally armed Russian invaders as the nuclear initiators. “You made us do it,” the U.S. will retort. But “trip wire” is actually a euphemism for Washington’s dreaded first-strike stance — the use of nuclear weapons to destroy the enemy’s capacity to respond. (U.S. bosses are the only ones ever to use the atomic bomb.) The “trip wire” strategy ruled NATO planning from 1957 to 1968, when the U.S.-dominated alliance had more bombs than the Soviet bloc but fewer troops and tanks near likely battle zones. U.S. warlords perceive a similar imbalance today. So they are dusting off NATO document MC 14/2.
The document’s history is outlined in a 1975 Defense Department report to Congress: “The so-called ‘trip-wire’ response [was] stated in Military Committee Document 14/2 during the period of unquestioned United States nuclear superiority. MC14/2 emphasized deterrence through the threat of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons in lieu of large conventional [U.S.-led] forces.”  
The MC 14/2’s original trip-wire ultimatum, now being revived by Obama and the imperialist liberal media, was laid out as follows:

The principal elements of the deterrent are adequate nuclear and other ready forces and the manifest determination to retaliate against any aggressor with all the forces at our disposal, including nuclear weapons, which the defense of NATO would require.
 

U.S. Sends Ground Troops
On April 16, just before Haass and O’Hanlon made their pitches for nuclear gunboat diplomacy, the Washington Post, an outlet closely linked to war-bent U.S. liberal bosses, printed an Op Ed article by imperialist flunky James Jeffrey. Jeffrey served MobilExxon as U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012 and then was hired by the energy company directly. He has strong-armed Exxon’s stated right to pump oil simultaneously from bitterly conflicted regions of the country, even though these actions destabilize the fragile nation (Reuters, 2/8/13). In the Post piece, Jeffrey welcomed a renewed “trip wire” prospect of facing down Russia with nuclear threats — and even retaking territory Putin has seized. He wrote:

Examples of effective ground force “tripwires” date to the U.S. brigade in Berlin during the Cold War. The best way to send Putin a tough message and possibly deflect a Russian campaign against more vulnerable NATO states is to back up our commitment to the sanctity of NATO territory with ground troops, the only military deployment that can make such commitments unequivocal.

To its credit, the administration has dispatched fighter aircraft to Poland and the Baltic states to reinforce NATO fighter patrols and exercises. But these deployments, as with ships temporarily in the Black Sea, have inherent weaknesses as political signals. They cannot hold terrain — the ultimate arbiter of any military calculus — and can be easily withdrawn if trouble brews. Troops, even limited in number, send a much more powerful message. More difficult to rapidly withdraw, once deployed, they can make the point that the United States is serious about defending NATO’s eastern borders.
The big capitalists welcome Barack Obama’s recent efforts in the Ukraine crisis, as evidenced by the bosses’ top liberal mouthpiece: “Even as the crisis in Ukraine continues to defy easy resolution, President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment” (New York Times, 4/20/14). A half century ago, U.S. capitalists’ “containment” policy explicitly threatened nuclear war. It does so again today.
The U.S. rulers’ problem is that they aren’t close to the military mobilization they need for a decisive confrontation of rivals Russia and China. The U.S. working class stands opposed to war, especially after Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. workers are beset by mass racist unemployment, inadequate and costly healthcare, racist attacks by the bosses’ cops, increasing poverty, and mass racist incarceration, especially of black and Latino workers and youth. Putin and his capitalist cronies face a similar obstacle, with Russian workers increasingly disenchanted as the country’s economy gets squeezed in the fight over Ukraine.
Destroying capitalism, the system that causes these problems, is the only answer for workers in the U.S., Russia and worldwide. Achieving that goal means building a revolutionary party to lead and guide the working class with communist ideas. That’s what the Progressive Labor Party is all about. Join PLP and fight to bury the bosses and their racist, sexist, war-driven system.

***

Cold War Was Pretty Hot

The old Cold War began in 1946, immediately following World War II, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been allies. U.S. rulers realized that the then-socialist Soviet Union, led by the Bolshevik Party, wasn’t merely the main force that defeated Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The USSR also inspired tens of millions of workers in Asia, Africa and Latin America to try to free themselves from the colonial imperialists of the U.S., Britain and France. By 1949, the Chinese Communist Party had led a revolution and emancipated hundreds of millions of workers and peasants.
U.S. rulers turned to a policy of “containment” to hem in the Soviet Union and smash anti-colonial liberation movements backed by the Soviets. Thus emerged the Cold War. It was “cold” in the sense that neither side seemed ready to employ the newly destructive atomic bomb to destroy one another, despite the willingness of the U.S. ruling class to use it to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when it alone had the bomb, and murder a quarter-million workers in 1945.
Even so, the Cold War was never a peaceful time. Innumerable “small” wars erupted. In 1950, U.S. rulers fought the Soviet Union and China in the three-year Korean War. U.S. bosses invaded or helped overthrow governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Chile, among many others. But a turning point came in Vietnam, when U.S. forces were driven out in defeat.
By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had reverted to full-blown capitalism. The seeds of this regression were contained in the retention of features of the profit system, especially a wage system that created tiers of privilege in the working class. Eventually, a new class system developed in the USSR. Support for anti-colonial national liberation movements degenerated into an imperialist operation for Soviet expansionism. From that point on, the Cold War became an imperialist rivalry between the rulers of the U.S. and the USSR. It ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, due mainly to internal weaknesses.