As communists, we are often asked how a communist society would function under the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party. One way to envision a communist society is by studying historical examples, such as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (CR) that occurred in China between 1966 and 1976. An excellent source of first-hand knowledge and documented facts is Dongping Han’s book, “The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village.”
The book is largely based on research done for Han’s PhD thesis. He traveled from the U.S. to his native village in China to interview villagers who lived there during the CR, and to examine records of crop production and village expenditures. As part of his thesis, he wanted to provide evidence that the educational and political reforms that took place during the CR greatly improved the lives of the average villager.
However, by 1969 Mao retreated from the CR and had the Red Guards dismantled or placed under army control. Many of the educational and political reforms that the CR initiated were reversed. Consequently, the children of many rural villagers were, and continue to be, denied an education because the schools are no longer free. With the abolishment of communal farming (and thus eliminating the societal security it created) many farmers are forced to work well beyond retirement age.
The CR empowered villagers because, for the first time, they were encouraged to criticize their leaders. Students were encouraged to criticize their teachers and principals; women were encouraged to work and get educated. Corrupt village officials were denounced and forced to reform or be removed from office. Big character posters, newspapers, and mass organizations flourished during the CR.
Before the CR, there were only two high schools in Jimo county (where the author grew up); as a result of the CR the number increased to eighty-four. The high schools were all constructed and financed by communes. Before the Cultural Revolution, a standardized test determined who would be admitted to college. In 1966, the national entrance exams were suspended, and all students had to work in rural areas or a factory for at least two years before going to college. “Students had to prove themselves as good farmers or workers before going to college.”
On communes, team leaders were no longer appointed, but chosen. Production plans were decided on by meetings of mass leaders of various mass organizations. These meetings involved as many as ten thousand, from county leaders to production team leaders. The democratic nature of the CR resulted in significant increases in yields of corn and wheat, as well as mechanization of farming techniques.
Han concludes that “economic development in the countryside was facilitated by political and cultural changes brought about by the CR.” Among the changes was a cultural shift that allowed villagers to challenge party leaders, advance a collective work ethic, including leadership participation in manual labor and democratic decision-making. These changes also resulted in giving rural children an opportunity for an education and development of skills that helped rural economic development.
Even though capitalism was restored in China and the USSR, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution serves as an example of what we in PLP are fighting for under a communist society.

Crowds of anti-capitalist protesters on June 1 blocked streets leading to the European Central Bank in Germany's to protest its role in pushing for austerity cutbacks as a way to fight the continent's debt crisis.

The following article advances some possible answers to questions raised in the thoughtful letter, “Can Class Struggle Use the Bosses’ Court?” (CHALLENGE, 4/26/13), especially about the history posed by the law professor whose lecture on the racist history of the U.S. Supreme Court inspired the letter.
There is historical evidence that the U.S. War of Independence was fought mostly to preserve slavery. By the late 1700s, the British rulers were gradually moving away from chattel slavery toward wage slavery due to the rise of industrial capitalism in Great Britain. The leaders of the War of Independence, including southern plantation slave owners and northern shipping and banking interests, all profited from the continuation of chattel slavery.
The new U.S. government wasted no time in using its power to support slave owners. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) was a logical manifestation of the intent of the “Founding Fathers.” It stated categorically “that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not” were included within the term “citizen” in the U.S. Constitution nor within the term “people” in the Declaration of Independence.
It’s important to understand the dialectics of the capitalist legal system, in its appearance and essence. The bosses wish to promote the appearance that the courts are the final resort for those seeking relief from the more oppressive aspects of capitalist rule. Dred Scott, for example, was a runaway slave represented by Abolitionists in a lawsuit arguing that since he lived in a free state he should be a free man. They turned to the Supreme Court for relief. But the latter returned him to slavery.
One of the most famous cases used to support this appearance of “relief” from oppression is the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ended legal segregation in public schools. The case was mounted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as part of a 60-year campaign of legal challenges to segregation.
A closer look at the essence of the courts, however, reveals that they are a tool of the capitalist bosses to maintain power. Thus, the Brown decision was primarily a response to the Cold War gains of the communist movement in Asia and Africa, in the wake of the Chinese Revolution and the massive anti-imperialist struggles of the 1940s and 1950s. The U.S. bosses were attacked, correctly, worldwide for the hypocrisy of their system of racial segregation.
In a “friend of the Court” brief filed in the Brown case, the U.S. Justice Department argued that legal segregation had “an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.” Interestingly, though, through various legal maneuvers as well as the result of capitalism’s overall racism in broader spheres (segregated housing, rent and income disparities), school segregation exists in the vast majority of U.S. cities.
As communists we need to separate our possible tactical use of the courts — as part of a larger mass campaign — from our understanding of how the court system itself serves strategic ruling-class interests. The Court’s function is to legally interpret the Constitution.  However, this Constitution is enshrined chattel bondage, whose main purpose is the protection of capitalist property rights. Its most “progressive” part, the Thirteenth Amendment, while abolishing slavery, permits a modern form of slavery — the mass incarceration of mainly black and Latino youth and workers.
In practice, this means that “legal interpretation” of the Constitution is solely a function of the needs of the ruling class in any historical period. At times the Court is used to mediate issues among competing factions of the ruling class, such as President Roosevelt’s efforts in the 1930s to add additional justices when the Court refused to endorse his New Deal programs, or the Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore in 2000 which settled a disputed election.
The appearance of liberal v. conservative justices is largely a smokescreen. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the Court to the Brown decision, was a conservative Republican appointed by Eisenhower. Yet he went on to become the liberal bosses’ darling in a string of cases after the Brown decision was used to expand the “rights of the accused” even as more and more workers were incarcerated.
Similarly the arch-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices in upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare because today’s capitalist class needs to control healthcare costs to fund mounting imperialist wars. The gay marriage cases, though still undecided, are getting extensive coverage because the bosses’ agenda for the military includes limiting overt discrimination in order to win more recruits willing to die for their interests.
Thus, we oppose organizing appeals to the “legal reasoning” or “humanity” of a court system established to crush the working class and maintain ruling-class power. However, just as communists involve themselves in the daily battles of reform struggles, we also involve ourselves in the bosses’ court system. It is one more arena of struggle, although by far not the most important. There are reasons for communists to take tactical advantage of the legal system and to recruit and train legal workers.

(Part II will discuss the political use of the courts as one tool within a mass communist-led campaign, as well as maintaining the necessity to recruit lawyers and legal workers into the Party.)

Three recent White House scandals — its handling of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya; its use of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) against Tea Party political groups; and its spying on Associated Press reporters — reflect serious disagreements within the ruling capitalist class.
On one side is the finance capital wing, which is preparing for long-term global conflict to maintain U.S. rulers’ top-dog status. These liberal imperialists are represented by Barack Obama’s new “Defense” Secretary, Chuck Hagel, who is seeking a U.S.-led alliance to confront rivals.
In opposition is a less powerful group of capitalists, led by the billionaire Koch brothers, with a shorter-range outlook. They are seeking immediate profits from domestic investments and are less interested in paying the bills for U.S. hegemony around the world.
In addition to this fundamental split, the liberal wing has its own internal conflict. It centers on how quickly the Obama administration can move toward fascism at home as it prepares for more imperialist wars. Even as they try to round up international allies, the bosses remain a long way from the domestic unity they need for their war plans.
U.S. workers are under brutal attack from wage cuts — Obama helped General Motors slash wages in half — and from persistent mass unemployment. The bosses have accelerated their drive for maximum profits by exploiting a temporary, part-time workforce and denying them benefits. Health care costs are sky-high for workers fortunate enough to get care at all. Police terror is on the rise, with racist cops killing black and Latino youth with impunity. Expanded oil and gas pipelines destroy the environment; oil drilling contaminates water on Native American reservations. With his storm troopers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Obama continues to set new records in his massive detention and deportation of immigrant workers.
In accord with the Democratic Party’s standard procedure, these fascist measures are being imposed behind a liberal façade. But “lesser-evil” Obama is not simply a repeat of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter.  He has moved even further to the right.

Splitting over Benghazi

Many Republicans are professing outrage that Obama failed to prevent the al Qaeda attack last September 11 that killed the U.S. ambassador and his mercenary guards in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. In reality, this furor stems from a long-simmering dispute over strategy. On one side stand the domestically oriented capitalist wing that ascended with former President George W. Bush and his top lieutenants, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. This camp tilted toward on-the-cheap, quick-hitting attacks on smaller foes like Libya and Iraq. Livid at the Benghazi fiasco, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is urging Obama’s impeachment (Business Insider, 5/12/13). He’s also proposing U.S. air strikes on Iran and North Korea and opposed Hagel’s appointment because Hagel was considered soft on Iran.
But the finance capital wing, led by Obama, wants to exercise more patience. They need more time to build a coalition for a far wider clash with a potential axis of enemies led by China and Russia. Hagel moved to the Pentagon from his chairmanship of the Atlantic Council, which is funded by the Rockefeller-JP Morgan-ExxonMobil-Pentagon forces. Shortly before Hagel left, this think tank issued a report calling for a ramping up of a U.S.-led alliance including Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and India to be in position to challenge U.S. enemies.

The IRS Frenzy

A different antagonism underlies Obama’s scandal within the IRS, which targeted Tea Party political groups by denying them nonprofit tax status during the 2012 elections. Here it’s the smaller bosses’ reluctance to fund the U.S. war machine, even though some of them profit mightily from its actions. Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch own an energy company that buys some Iraqi oil safeguarded by the U.S. Navy. But unlike ExxonMobil, Koch Industries does not pump from contested Iraqi soil. Moreover, Koch’s energy profits are concentrated in North America, far from U.S. imperialist war zones in Asia and Africa. As a result, the Koch camp requires less protection from the Pentagon.
Consider this statement from the Koch-controlled Cato Institute (5/15/13): “Economic interests are real but rarely warrant war. Stability may be a geopolitical virtue, but does not justify a neo-imperial American global presence.” In other words, the Koch-led bosses don’t want to pay for imperialist adventures to preserve the U.S. bosses’ international control.
Obama’s forces have attacked the Tea Party-Koch faction for their anti-Exxon heresy of opposing tax increases for war. On April 21, the New York Times, the leading mouthpiece for the arch-imperialist U.S. faction, warned of Koch efforts to buy the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and other papers, “to shift the country toward a smaller government with less regulation and taxes.” On May 18, the Times sought to stir anti-Koch feeling among environmentalists with the story of how Koch Industries has built a toxic petroleum coke mountain in Detroit.
Spying on the ‘Free Press’
Obama’s third disgrace, his administration’s spying on Associated Press reporters covering a terrorist plot in Yemen, exposes the maneuvering within U.S. imperialism’s main liberal wing. At the heart of the scrap is just how openly fascist U.S. rulers should appear to the U.S. working class. Wiretapping Attorney General Eric Holder is allowing Obama to seize higher ground. The same farce played out in Holder’s earlier threat to summarily execute U.S. citizen “terrorists” with drones. In both cases, the object for U.S. warmakers has nothing to do with justice. Their goal is to gauge how much brutal state power they can win the working class to support.
Meanwhile, U.S. rulers are finding an international alliance to be elusive. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law professor who advised the U.S. military in its Iraq invasion and occupation, writes: “The United States will...have to broaden its base of allies using the tools of ideology....India is the leading candidate for membership....” (Foreign Policy, 5/16/13).  Feldman counts on the irresistible pull of the “American Way”: “The strongest argument that can be made...is that Chinese hegemony would threaten their democratic freedoms.”
But the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the top policy journal bankrolled by the finance capitalists, is lamenting India’s lack of readiness to mobilize its billion-plus population in a U.S.-led war. And Feldman pointed to a more probable union: “Russia may emerge as China’s most important geostrategic ally.”
Workers Have No Stake in the Bosses’ Institutions
What the bosses aren’t talking about publicly is the ultimately crucial allegiance of our working class. The international working class, including U.S. workers, has no stake in protecting U.S. diplomats around the world. U.S. embassies and consulates are essentially CIA outposts intent on protecting U.S. corporate profits and the dictators who serve them. They also organize attacks and assassinations against pro-working-class forces that fight their exploiters.
For U.S. workers, the IRS is a bosses’ institution that bankrolls the rich, allowing them to move their profits to tax-free havens while forcing our class to pay for the rulers’ wars.
Finally, the crocodile tears being shed by the Associated Press and the New York Times over “protecting” reporters’ pursuit of the facts are laughable. The main role of the boss-controlled media is to steer the working class into supporting the profit system as the “best” system devised by humankind. Any progressive ideas that emerge are those endorsing reforms to a system that can’t be reformed.
While the capitalists maneuver and factionalize, our class must take only one side: the one that organizes for revolution to overthrow a profit system that spreads misery among the international working class. No bosses serve the interests of garment workers in Bangladesh or miners in South Africa. None of them are allied with immigrants toiling in the fields or workers suffering from boss-imposed austerity throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. None of them are the friends of tens of millions of jobless youth.

Workers Are Fighting Back

Workers are not taking their oppression lying down. Not the Bangladesh garment workers who have taken their protests to the streets. Not the platinum miners in South Africa who are wildcatting against the new apartheid’s repression. Not the Peugeot auto strikers in France, or the immigrant workers from South Asia striking in Dubai. Not the teachers in Mexico opposing the rulers’ anti-worker reforms. Not the multiracial workers and youth in New York City organizing against racist, murdering cops.
Billions of workers are now suffering capitalism’s exploitation, racism and wars. But once armed with the communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party, they have the power to destroy the tiny class that rules us. They will erect a society without bosses and profits, run by the international working class in our class interests.