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    Mexico: May Day Spurs Goal to Topple Capitalism

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    23 May 2013 226 hits

    A weekend before May Day, members and friends of PLP in Mexico organized three meetings to discuss its historical and international significance. We also presented the flyer we planned to distribute at the march and briefly discussed the current situation in Mexico, in relation to the reforms pushed by the new government. (See Mexico article above)
    The achievements at these dinners — which we planned since the beginning of the year — were few, but important. Four friends of the Party, all CHALLENGE readers, participated in the first one; two friends and a youth who joined during our last Summer Project participated in the second, and during the third we were joined by a comrades’ family and by two CHALLENGE reader friends.
    They all expressed their commitment to participate in the May Day march, since we’d be the only contingent that’s an international organization promoting the overthrow of capitalism and replacing it with the dictatorship of the working class.
    In the three meetings we highlighted the imperialist struggles between China and the U.S., which will probably lead to a confrontation between these  bosses and their respective allies.
    There is a long road before we reach our goal and there is a lot to be done. This is the only Party that fights for collective work and the destruction of the profit system that creates inequality the world over. PLP is the only Party that struggles against nationalism and sexism, and the only one that holds that the working class should direct all aspects of society.

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    Inspiring Workers to Study PL’s Ideas

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    23 May 2013 234 hits

    Each week, without exception, our PLP club meets as an active study group. We’ve already discussed the political economy documents and the majority of 2011 Challenge editorials. A new member has transcribed “Towards a New Communist Movement.”  We’ve also discussed “Reform and Revolution.”
    Our objective is not only to understand and discuss the Party’s ideas, but also to revise and re-edit documents to put forward revolutionary ideas clearly, in writing as well as in conversation.
    We recently showed  “Road to Revolution IV” (our Party’s ideas) to a militant fighter focused on reformist and pro-socialist ideals and projects. He said he wasn’t convinced we should reject the socialist and reformist ideas and instead fight for communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
    PLP aims to destroy the entire capitalist system, that much was made clear. It’s not important how intellectually equipped our opponents may be. There is no argument that can trump our Party’s politics.
    We invited a worker and his family to join PLP and attend a May Day forum. In a later conversation, this worker discussed his ideas and feelings about the labor situation. Most workers are influenced by wrong ideas against their class. But through our interactions at the forum and our May Day dinner, he has expressed interest in getting involved and studying our ideas to get to know PLP better.
    Red Youth

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    Miners’ Wildcats Resist S. African Apartheid

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    23 May 2013 250 hits

    MARIKANA, SOUTH AFRICA, May 17 — A new strike wave is sweeping this country’s minefields as thousands at the Lonmin mine here wildcatted on May 14, reacting to the murder of one of their union organizers and to looming job cuts. Lonmin is the world’s third largest producer of platinum and was the site of last August’s police massacre of 34 striking miners. The strikers have vowed to stop all scabs and have blocked highways, while marching to the area of last year’s atrocity.
    This month is the region’s “strike season” when tens of thousands of workers pour into the streets demanding wage increases. The bosses and the government — dominated by the African National Congress (ANC) — fear the strike wave may reach the vineyards around Capetown and the auto industry in Durban.
    Meanwhile, a wildcat looms at Anglo-American Platinum — the world’s top platinum producer — which announced a layoff of 6,000.
    None of the essential demands and grievances stemming from last year’s strikes have been met. “It [our wage] is too little for us for the kind of work we do,” said miner Ayanda Ndabent. “I plant dynamite…inside the mines. We can die any time,” he continued. “We know the company makes a lot of money from the work we do.”
    The black capitalists who took power from the former apartheid rulers and promised “liberation” of the masses have joined with the apartheid-era bosses who still control large sections of the country’s industries. They mirror the oppression of the racist apartheid system which was enforced by the kind of police massacres that occurred here last year. Unemployment is even higher than it was previously and workers still suffer the housing squalor that existed then.
    This is the capitalism which the Mandela-led ANC maintained and used to cut out a slice of the profit pie for a small black ruling class. Liberation for the masses can only come from the overthrow of capitalism and creation of a worker-run communist society in which the miners and the entire working class will reap the fruits of their labors.

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    Peugeot Strike Ends:

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    23 May 2013 261 hits

    ‘The only struggles you don’t win are the ones you don’t wage…’

     

    AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, FRANCE, May 17 — The four-month strike of Peugeot workers against one of the richest and most powerful bosses in France ended today, unable to prevent the planned closing of the plant here, scheduled for 2014. The strikers received $1.1 million in donations, indicating enormous popular support, but were weakened by the fact that they could not widen the walkout to the rest of the company’s factories nor to the country’s auto industry. The strike cost Peugeot a production loss of 40,000 cars.
    The workers condemned the active complicity of the Socialist Party government. They fought the latter’s attempt to throw a monkey wrench into the strike, hauling militant workers into police stations. A local strike leader declared, “We have been treated like delinquents whereas our struggle is…against unemployment and for jobs.”
    The workers did win payment for unemployed days, holidays and a bonus equivalent to a month’s wages. Those choosing to leave prior to May 31 will receive 19,700 euros ($25,400) and strikers will get 60,000 euros ($77,400) severance pay. All other workers will receive 40,000 euros ($51,600). They also forced the company to re-hire the four fired strikers, canceling any criminal charges.
    A local strike leader said, “We didn’t have the strength necessary to bring Peugeot to its knees, but we thwarted them for four months and we are finishing still standing, our heads high. The only struggles you don’t win are the ones you don’t wage…”

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    USSR, First Workers’ State — Won and Lost

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    23 May 2013 243 hits

    When the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War that followed it, ended in 1921, the new workers’ state was facing exhuasting conditions. It was largely destroyed, 4.5 million killed by 17 invading capitalist countries, with a raging famine. Millions of homeless people wandered the land, and starvation was rampant. The worldwide typhus epidemic of 1919 had killed tens of thousands.
    Seven years of war and invasion by Imperial Germany, then Poland, and all the Allied countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, and Japan, had created a culture of violence. Crime — robbery, murder, gangs — was everywhere. Armed bands from Poland raided border areas, robbed, raped, and killed, then fled back across the border. Industry and agriculture were almost at a standstill.
    The Bolsheviks’ task was to build socialism with the traumatized people in this devastated country. They had no blueprint, for it had never been done. No communist theorist — neither Marx and Engels, nor Lenin, nor any other — had ever thought the first workers’ state would look anything like this.
    In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks debated the best course of action to build the new society. Communists then believed that communism could only come in an industrialized country. The party leadership knew that the advanced capitalist countries would attack the USSR as soon as possible. Their position — that the USSR could and must quickly industrialize by itself — won over the vast majority of rank-and-file Bolsheviks.1
    Led by Stalin, the mainly working-class Bolshevik Party took the country on to a great “leap into the unknown.” By the mid-‘30s, collectivization was almost complete, and the USSR was becoming a major industrial power. Nothing like this had ever been accomplished before in world history!
    During the 1930s, Oppositionist leaders conspired to try to overthrow Stalin and the Party leadership. Some also conspired with German and Japanese fascists. Additionally, fascist organizers infiltrated into every European country and Russia.
    The Soviet leadership found out about these plots and tried and executed the guilty. But two successive heads of the political police were involved in these plots too. The second, Nikolai Ezhov, had his men arrest, torture, and murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Soviet workers and Party members to cover up his own plot, and to sow dissatisfaction. This too was eventually uncovered, but not until huge damage had been done.2
    Workers’ power was thought to be guaranteed as long as the communist party was in charge. In fact, capitalist ideas and practices turned the Bolshevik Party into its opposite. At Stalin’s death in March 1953 the communist movement appeared stronger than ever. Yet within three years the new head of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, had pushed the country towards capitalism, while attacking Stalin as a monstrous murderer and egomaniac. How could this happen?
    All other socialists and communists, along with the Soviet leadership, believed there had to be an intermediate stage called “socialism” between capitalism and real communism. It would preserve many capitalist features: wage inequalities, inequalities between countryside and city; between workers and managers, the uneducated and the educated, nationalisms of various kinds, and so on. In industry, science, technology, art and literature, it meant preserving many capitalist ways of doing things, though with pro-worker reforms.
    No human undertaking can ever be free of error, and the Bolsheviks made lots of mistakes. The basic reason is: They were the first! Never before had a communist movement seized and held power, then tried to build socialism/communism in any country, much less one that was not industrialized to begin with and, moreover, hugely destroyed by World War, a Civil War, foreign invasion, epidemic and famine.
    The Bolsheviks then led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II. After losing over 20 million lives and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure in the war, the USSR rebuilt in record time. The socialist USSR built nuclear weapons through the political commitment of its scientists.
    The history of the USSR is an invaluable “textbook” for all workers! We must study the Soviet experience (and that of the other great 20th century communist revolution, the Chinese) to learn essential lessons about what Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks did right, and what they did wrong, so we can do it right next time and win a communist world!

     

    1 The plan was:
    • Collectivize agriculture, so the collective farms could give up all their surplus to fund the industrialization drive;
    • Build whole cities of industry overnight, making the huge investments of industrializing a gigantic country within a few years instead of the decades it had taken the capitalist countries;
    • Mechanize the new collective farms with tractors and farm equipment, making them even more productive;
    • Build a large modern army with advanced weapons, able to defeat the armies of the capitalist countries that the USSR knew would attack, probably soon;
    • Delay the attack as long as possible through diplomacy, trying to play off the capitalist countries against one another.
    2 For one version of these events see Grover Furr, “Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform (two parts) at http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/2005.html. For another, see The Great Conspiracy by Sayers and Kahn. 

    1. May Day Advances the Fight for Communist Revolution
    2. Syria — Another Front for Imperialist War
    3. March vs. War-driven Closings of 61 Chicago Schools
    4. Jewish, Arab Women vs. Israeli Racist Land Grab

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