LOS ANGELES, CA, November 6 — Our PLP college club hosted a movie night to watch the film “A Grain of Sand.” This film documents the struggle that began in the late 1970s of high school teachers in Mexico around public education. Over twenty students from various campuses in Southern California attended the event and discussed the significance of local and international fights against budget cuts to public education. Through this discussion we reached a better understanding of how these cuts reflect the crisis of U.S. capitalism, and how neo-liberal policies aiming to privatize education in Latin America are really just a form of imperialism.

The movie night resulted from our participation in the student coalitions that have been protesting fee hikes and cuts to state universities and community colleges in Southern California. This year many students have begun to question more deeply the nature of the cuts and whether it is enough to attack the university administration or state politicians for mismanaging the budget. We’ve struggled to connect the cuts to the global crisis of capitalism, pointing to the student and worker fight in Europe around austerity measures.

Adding to this international perspective, we’ve also pointed out the expanded spending on imperialist war in Afghanistan. Providing this international perspective has enabled us to explain the systemic nature of the budget cuts and to argue for the need to build working-class consciousness and unity. By looking at historical struggles such as the one portrayed in “A Grain of Sand,” we’ve also been better able to point out the limits of reform struggle and the need to fight for a revolutionary communist movement.

There was much disagreement on what lessons to draw from historical examples such as the Mexican teachers’ struggle against budget cuts, but many agreed it’s necessary to continue these discussions to better understand how capitalism works and to build a movement to destroy it. Most importantly, through these types of events we’ve slowly but steadily built a stronger communist presence within the student movement against the budget cuts to public education in Southern California.

At the end of the night, students from UCLA asked to borrow the film so that they can show it on their campus. We are now working with those students to organize a film showing. In this manner, we’re struggling to popularize the Party’s revolutionary communist politics within the struggle against cuts to schools and universities in the region.

Ninety years ago, November 7, 1917, marked the beginning of the single most important event of the 20th century, the Bolshevik revolution, which directly inspired the Chinese revolution and anti-imperialist struggles around the world from Vietnam to Africa to Latin America.

Russia’s working class, headed by the revolutionary communists of the Bolshevik Party and its leader, Vladimir Lenin, freed one-sixth of the world’s surface from capitalism. They proved once and for all that it was possible to strive for a world without exploitation, where those who produce all value, the working class, can enjoy the fruits of their labor and not have it stolen by a few parasitical bosses and their lackeys.

The Russian revolution was the first serious attempt by workers and peasants to seize, hold and consolidate state power. Even though capitalism has returned to the former Soviet Union, workers will not forget that the Soviet working class defeated capitalism in 1917; smashed the imperialist armies of 17 countries (including Japan, the U.S., Britain, France, among others) which invaded Russia in 1918 to try to crush the revolution; freed the masses, especially women, from the yoke of capitalist, feudal and religious oppression; and then in 1945 defeated the mightiest and most barbaric army the capitalists had ever organized: the Nazi Wehrmacht.

The revolution frightened the world’s bosses, who immediately sent armies from 17 countries to try — in Churchill’s words — to “strangle it in the cradle.” From 1918 to 1923, millions of workers led by the Red Army defeated the imperialists’ counter-revolution. Nearly five million died in that battle, many of whom were the most committed workers the revolution had produced. Lenin himself died because of injuries inflicted by a hired killer.

The masses showed great courage and determination to defend and build their revolution, under the leadership of their revolutionary party. They proved that the revolutionary violence on the part of the working class and peasantry were vital to the seizure of state power.

Achievements of the Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution brought Russia to heights of productive development that capitalism, given a similar time period and circumstances, could never have dreamed of. Bringing the working class to power, the Revolution coordinated their social-economic efforts for the production and exchange of the necessities, the comforts and even some luxuries of life, making them available to all. The Soviet system of production was for use, not for profit. This can only be accomplished by abolishing capitalist profits and the private ownership of property, with its exploitation, poverty, unemployment, racism, fascism and imperialist wars.

In the 1930s, when the entire capitalist world sank into depression, and tens of millions worldwide were left jobless and starving (much like today), the Soviet Union was forging ahead building a new society without unemployment and hunger. They created some measure of a decent life for workers in an incredibly short time, transforming a 90% illiteracy rate into one in which nearly everyone was literate.

Around 1938, without any official declaration, the USSR had achieved the era of free bread. One could enter a cafeteria, order little or nothing, and receive all the bread one wanted. You needed, you received — at least to that extent. Even during a drive for heavy industry, living standards rose strikingly when the rest of the world was mired in the Great Depression.<

The Soviet Union not only freed workers but also fought against racism and sexism. The battle against racism was particularly significant. As pro-communist Paul Robeson said about his trips to the Soviet Union, he “felt like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being. Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be…. Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity.”

Heroic Fight Against the Nazis

In 1941, the bosses again tried to destroy the revolution. Hitler, using all of Europe’s resources and the largest military machine ever assembled, invaded the Soviet Union with four million troops. They discovered the Soviets were no pushover as occurred in Western Europe. Hitler’s prediction — endorsed by western military “experts” — of capturing Moscow in six weeks went up in smoke.

Nazi troops found total destruction and desolation in every captured city or town — the “scorched earth” policy. Soviet defenders burned everything to the ground that they could not take with them and then organized armed resistance behind enemy lines: the Partisans.
Over 6,000 factories were dismantled and moved east of the Ural Mountains, re-assembled to produce weapons again, a feat requiring total unity and support of Soviet workers, unmatched by any country, before or since. Soviet soldiers and workers fought for Stalingrad block-by-block, house-by-house and room-by-room to halt the “unbeatable” Nazi invaders. Workers in arms factories produced weapons 24 hours a day for the Red Army, working 12-hour shifts. When Nazi troops captured factories, heroic Soviet workers and soldiers would re-take them.

The entire German Sixth Army and 24 of Hitler’s generals were surrounded and killed or captured in the battle of Stalingrad. Never again would the Nazis mount a successful offensive against the Red Army. Stalingrad was truly the turning point of the Second World War. Not until the Nazis were on the run following their defeats at Stalingrad and in the Battle of the Kursk — the biggest armored battle in world history, involving millions of soldiers and 6,000 tanks — did the U.S.-U.K. forces invade Western Europe. It was the communist-led Soviet Union that smashed the Nazis, the largest and most powerful army ever mounted by a capitalist power.

All this was accomplished under the leadership of Josef Stalin. No wonder he is reviled to this day by world capitalism.

Lessons to Be Learned

Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks suffered from many political weaknesses which led to the return of capitalism to the USSR. From the beginning they believed that to achieve communism, first socialism had to be established, a belief Karl Marx had advanced. We have learned from that experience that socialism retained capitalism’s wage system and therefore failed to wipe out many aspects of the profit system. Socialism put forward material incentives to the working class rather than political ones as the way to win workers to communism. We must win masses of workers to abolish capitalism’s wage system and its division of labor and fight directly for communism.

Today no country is led by revolutionary communists, but this is a temporary historical setback. While this era of widening imperialist wars, fascist attacks on the working class, mass unemployment, diseases like AIDS killing millions in Africa and other areas, is upon us, every dark night has its end.

PLP is a product of both the old International Communist Movement and the struggle against its revisionism. Pseudo-leftist groups have not learned history’s lessons and continue to fight for nationalist “sharing of power” with capitalists, a la Venezuela’s Chavez, not for the working-class seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Our movement is daily fighting to learn from the Soviet Union’s great battles and achievements as well as its deadly errors that led to its collapse, mainly that reformism, racism, nationalism and all forms of concessions to capitalism only lead workers to defeat. Give the ruling class an inch and they’ll grab a mile.

We honor the bold fight by the workers of the Bolshevik Revolution against capitalism and for a working-class communist world. Today, we must organize workers, students and soldiers to build a mass worldwide working class Party that will turn this era of imperialist wars into a new, international communist revolution.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, OCT. 28 — Cholera is making a comeback globally, with 100,000 deaths annually, in African countries, and in Pakistan after the floods. In the living spaces of the “wretched of the earth,” workers die all the time of completely preventable diseases. Under capitalism, workers are used only to provide the cheap supply of raw materials, assembled products, and labor power for the rich.

 We watch this with anguish today in the rural, rice-growing Artibonite region of Haiti, where cholera has killed around 300 people to date. The media give medical explanations of the epidemic focused on the contaminated Artibonite River, but never touch on the racism of capitalism which is the real explanation of such recurring, preventable epidemics.

The media blames “underdevelopment,” about which simply, tragically, nothing can be done. Nor can much be done, apparently (“it’s tied up in the Congress,” explained Bill Clinton), about the criminal, total non-delivery of promised U.S. government aid, which might have helped; nor about the thousands of undistributed rehydration kits CNN’s Sanjay Gupta found in a Port-au-Prince warehouse.

The Artibonite River, the largest in the island, is the heart of rich, irrigated  agricultural land long used for rice-growing. When the World Bank program (with Aristide’s agreement) pushed through the import of cheap U.S. rice (subsidized by the Clinton Administration), local production was crippled. On the Aeribonite River, Péligre dam is also the main source of electricity in Haiti.

The dam is now silting up and cutting the energy supply because of deforestation in the mountains. It is part of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and therefore the site, like all capitalist nation-state borders, of state violence against workers trying to cross in both directions. The border was closed for a day by the Dominican authorities, who subjected Haitians trying to cross, to an absurd ritual hand-washing and other tests. On the Haitian side, MINUSTAH (UN) troops tear-gassed people fleeing the epidemic. Nothing new there: the border river has often flowed with the blood of workers on both banks.

And now it is the source of cholera, as its water poisons those it once nourished. The bacterial illness is transmitted when people drink water that’s been contaminated by the human waste of an infected person.

Haiti is a setup for cholera. The water purification systems are gone, so people go to the river for water. This is also where people dump their waste. The disease produces a toxin in infected individuals, who experience terrible diarrhea that can result in disabling dehydration in just a few hours. Dehydration is a death sentence for people with no access to good medical care. But it is easily treated with rehydration: you give people fluid through an IV and they will do just fine. 

But why is the river so contaminated, causing cholera?  And why is treatment so limited, causing further unnecessary deaths?  The media will tell us how Doctors Without Borders (Spain) staff a clinic in St. Marc and MINUSTAH troops built a new tent clinic next door. Those are very useful in preventing deaths, it’s true. But they won’t say why a system focused on profit never manages anything but makeshift, last-minute medical care instead of planning health care rationally. Forty percent of Haitians don’t have access to clean water, and 80% lack proper sanitation, including toilets and soap.

The truth is that anything other than maximizing profit will always be secondary to capitalist ruling classes, which is why their responses to perfectly predictable disasters of their making are always so cruel and inadequate. That too is a preventable crime, as preventable as cholera. Unfortunately capitalism is not so easily treated. But we workers without borders are working on it.

Many studies are available which point towards a better understanding of such painful events. Eduardo Galeano (The Open Veins of Latin America) takes aim at flawed capitalist explanations of disease when he sarcastically recommends placing signs in the deadly areas of industrial pollution in Latin America: DO NOT BREATHE.

The Guyanese historian Walter Rodney succinctly punctured the racist myth that certain sectors of our class are doomed to underdevelopment in his much-loved book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which drew on André Gunder Frank’s concept of “the development of underdevelopment.” Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums and Patrick Bond’s Global Apartheid show the consequences of modern imperialism to be nothing less than racism on a world scale.

The rural and urban working class of the Artibonite valley must return to the revolutionary history of their region enshrined in Crête Pierrot, where Dessalines in 1802 led African slave soldiers to crush the French army in the turning-point battle of the revolution. Then workers will give a different explanation of what caused so many deaths in so many generations. 

The Rockefeller-led U.S. imperialist wing which Obama serves couldn’t have asked for more timely delivery from UPS and FedEx. Arriving the weekend before Election Day, the Yemeni parcel bombs helped shift attention, for a while at least, back to widening U.S. wars.

Until recently, this year’s election had centered almost entirely on the domestic, economic crisis facing U.S. rulers. It reflected a sharpening battle among various U.S. capitalists, waged between the Tea Partiers and the liberal politicians serving the dominant, imperialist faction.

Those forces financing the Tea party, especially the Texas billionaire Koch brothers, are focused on short-run, immediate profits, favoring tax cuts for the rich and little or no financial regulation. The Rockefeller-led group represents the long-range interests of U.S. capitalism, more dependent for profits from, and control of, foreign oil, making imperialist wars abroad vital for their system’s survival. The Tea Party election struggle has been overshadowing the main wing’s most urgent efforts overseas.

The owners of U.S.-based giants like ExxonMobil and JP Morgan Chase seek to secure the greater Middle East by force, both for its geostrategic energy supplies and to counter rival Iranian, Chinese and Russian expansion.

The bomb-plot headlines about stepping up U.S. attacks in Yemen — which borders Big Oil’s crown jewel in neighboring Saudi Arabia — edged out the latest election-related blurbs from Sarah Palin or the Daily Show. And just a week before the latest Yemeni threat broke, Wikileaks’ dumping of 400,000 incriminating war documents had turned the spotlight on Iraq, and indirectly on Iran.

Wikileaks Helps Brass Write Manual for the Next War

A seething Iraqi civil war, arising in large part from the U.S. missteps Wikileaks highlights, prevents oil companies like Exxon from realizing the six billion barrels per day (bbd) U.S. rulers hoped for when they invaded Iraq in 2003. Production has hardly reached 2.5 bbd.

Masquerading as anti-war and anti-establishment, Wikileaks actually furnishes a self-critical “what-not-to-do” guide for the Pentagon’s coming U.S. clash with Iran. Lacking any legitimate incentive, U.S. brass must rely on anti-Islamic racism to motivate troops to kill. But continued racist mass civilian “collateral-damage” deaths and torturing and murdering prisoners could spark a widespread anti-U.S. Islamic rebellion, reversing any or all U.S. military gains. Exxon could lose its top source of oil in Saudi Arabia.

Main U.S. Rulers Bent on War
Despite Tea Party Gains

Wikileaks and the Yemen plot inject a war focus into the often distracting electoral system that history has saddled on otherwise dominant imperialist U.S. rulers. Every two years just about anybody with enough money can buy a seat in Congress. The main Rockefeller faction worries that Koch brothers-type U.S. capitalists will rally an anti-tax Tea Party voter base to elect representatives that would hinder capitalism’s long-range need for its war machine.

The leading U.S. imperialist think-tank, the liberal, Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has been running a lengthy series titled “Foreign Policy and the 2010 Midterms,” highlighting, in the case of Afghanistan, “Doubts Over the Mission” and “Funding the War.”

And the Wall Street Journal, owned by Republican, but imperialist, Rupert Murdoch, worries, “At issue is whether candidates backed by Tea-party activists may force a shift in the terms of debate over the war in Afghanistan. While Republicans are traditionally hawkish on defense — and foreign policy hasn’t emerged as a major campaign issue — some GOP candidates have expressed skepticism about the scale of U.S. military involvement in the region.” (10/27/10)

On Election Eve, liberal imperialist thinkers were wishing that the incoming Tea Partiers would prove ultimately more imperialist-minded. Stephen Biddle, a CFR fellow, hopes for a GOP split: “One of the divides in the Tea Party is between hard-core libertarians who just plain believe in smaller government, and are basically isolationist in their foreign policy, versus more traditionally conservative Republican Tea Partiers who tend to believe that the non-defense parts of the government are what needs cutting.” (Public Radio International, 10/19)

Frank Rich, the liberal New York Times top Obama watcher, also foresaw a similar pro-imperialist silver lining in Republican election gains:

“Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. ‘We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,’ he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. ‘As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.’ It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge [a la Koch brothers’ types], not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client list that includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.”

Arms merchant Grumman and arch-imperialist financier Goldman-Sachs have similar interests as Exxon’s and JP Morgan’s war-making goals.

After an expected setback at the polls, the liberal imperialists’ message to the masses is to rally for Obama in 2012. The ballot box, however, is a dead end; every candidate fronts for one capitalist faction or another. PLP strives to build our revolutionary communist party through militant action in the factories and unions, on the campuses and among working-class GI’s, in the churches and other community mass organizations, against the imperialist billionaires and their politician stooges.

Such action will hasten the revolution to obliterate the profit-driven war-makers and establish the working class in state power. J

Wikileaks: Another Liberal Rulers’ Mouthpiece

Wikileaks didn’t fall from the sky. Its mastermind Julian Assange sports a lengthening liberal imperialist pedigree. In June, a profile in the ultra-liberal, Establishment New Yorker magazine canonized him as a quirky but supremely well-intentioned truth seeker. Assange and pals were front-runners for a $500,000 grant from the Knight Foundation whose president, Alberto Ibarguen, sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the top U.S. imperialist think-tank. Knight eventually turned Assange down, but only when dealing with the Times proved far more lucrative to liberal rulers in terms of public opinion. The Rockefeller-led liberal cabal of National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting System, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting have become, through their grantees Radio Pacifica and its “Democracy Now” program, the main media defenders of Assange and his Army intelligence mole Private Bradley Manning.

Would Iran Invasion Solve Capitol Gridlock?

The brightest glimpse of imperialist light through the dark Tea Party tunnel comes from Strategic Forecasting, Inc. Widely-cited Stratfor analysts provide U.S. corporations with global political insights they can use to boost profits. On October 27, Stratfor’s founder George Freidman predicted Congressional “gridlock” on domestic issues in the wake of November’s elections but said:

“If Obama were to use foreign policy to enhance his political standing through decisive action, and achieve some positive results in relations with foreign governments, the one place he could do it would be Iran.” Freidman combines the same warning of risks and wishful thinking that accompanied Washington’s initial forays into the endless Iraqi and Afghan conflicts:

“An attack on Iran would not be an invasion, nor would it be a short war. Like Yugoslavia in 1999, it would be an extended air war lasting an unknown number of months. There would be American POWs from aircraft that were shot down or suffered mechanical failure over Iranian territory. There would be many civilian casualties, which the international media would focus on. It would not be an antiseptic campaign, but it would likely (though it is important to reiterate not certainly) destroy Iran’s nuclear capability and profoundly weaken its conventional forces.”

As drastic as its proposal sounds, Stratfor in no way sits on the lunatic fringe. The ultra-establishment CFR immediately posted the piece on its own website, billing it a “Must Read.”