“... the Communists remain the only Vietnamese still capable of rallying millions of their countrymen to sacrifice and hardship.” 
--Neil Sheehan, New York Times, 1964

The small country of Vietnam beat the mighty war machine of U.S. imperialism because the working class of Vietnam had strong communist leadership. The courageous Vietnamese fighters were inspired by the revolutions in Russia and China and by the fight for a just and egalitarian society. 

But today the successors of the leaders of People’s War welcome imperialists to come exploit the working class once again. The leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) abandoned the struggle for communism in favor of nationalism—first to win independence and then to live and profit side-by-side with capitalists.

Communists Built a Base Through Class Struggle

The French imperialists conquered Vietnam in the late 19th century. Like all imperialists, they oppressed and exploited the people brutally. In 1954, the Communist-led Vietminh defeated the French imperialists. Then they led a bold program of land reform and social reorganization in the countryside. As Eric Wolf notes in Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, “land was taken from landlords and redistributed among the remainder of the peasantry; at the same time political control was taken from the landlords and rich peasants and transferred to the poor and middle peasantry.” 

People’s War Defeats U.S. Military

After World War II and the communist revolution in China, the international communist movement appeared poised to defeat capitalism everywhere. Desperate to stop the communist advance, U.S. rulers replaced the French in Vietnam and installed regimes of fascist brutality that lasted for 20 years. In 1956, after the CIA installed a puppet government in the South, the communist leadership began to organize People’s War, mobilizing masses of workers to fight for working class power–communism. According to U.S. foreign service agent Douglas Pike, “The Vietnamese [peasant] was not regarded simply as a pawn in a power struggle, but as the active element.” 

Millions of peasants joined this movement. Pike noted: 

.. almost all Vietnamese were of the firm opinion that as a result of [Communist] activity, . . . fundamental change had occurred in the social order...the liberated area was characterized by a greater sense of egalitarianism and a greater awareness of class consciousness, or social solidarity.

By 1965, People’s War had toppled the U.S.-backed dictator Ngo Dinh Diem. Desperate to hold on to Vietnam, U.S. bosses launched a full-scale invasion. By 1967, they’d sent 500,000 U.S. troops. They dropped more bombs on the North than during all of World War II. 
Between three and five million Vietnamese, mostly civilians, were killed in the war. But despite suffering tremendous casualties and hardships, the Vietnamese peasants and workers, led by communists, defeated the U.S. Army on the ground. On April 30, 1975, the last U.S. forces fled Saigon.

Bargaining with the Bosses: A Fatal Error

Ho Chi Minh, founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party, vacillated between the goals of communism and “a war of national salvation.” Since Lenin’s day, the Communist International had supported national liberation struggles in colonial countries. This line led to alliances with capitalist forces that wanted independence but not communism. The Vietnamese communists’ nationalism reflected similar weaknesses in Russia, China, and the international communist movement. It led them to miss the opportunity to win U.S. soldiers to the fight for communism, as the Russian communists had done with German soldiers during World War I. 

Over time, the nationalist line won out. The goal of an egalitarian communist society was abandoned. When Ho died in 1969, James Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, lamented that the U.S. could and should have made deals, not war, with Ho. In fact, the Vietnamese communists showed themselves willing to bargain with the enemy from the start. They signed a treaty with the defeated French imperialists that foreshadowed the sellout to come.

What counted was that the Vietminh was withdrawing troops to the north for two years. This gave the U.S. rulers what they needed ... to install a puppet [in the south]. With this ... the U.S. could wreak havoc on southern Vietnamese working people, smash up their revolutionary organizations. This was a terrible setback for Vietnamese working people.” (PLP pamphlet, Vietnam, Defeat U.S. Imperialism, 1971) 

The Tet Offensive: Betrayal of the Workers

In the Tet Offensive in early 1968, communist troops attacked and expelled the U.S. from nearly every major city. This heroic effort, made at a high cost in the lives of dedicated fighters, was used by the VCP leadership to push U.S. imperialists to negotiate. Tet was a big step back from the People’s War. 

It was in fact a gigantic bluff aimed at convincing the U.S. to begin talks right away. LBJ got the message. He answered with a gesture: on Feb. 9 he called a bombing halt. By November of 1968 the North Vietnamese were involved in full-fledged talks with the U.S. rulers (PLP, 1971). 
These talks ultimately resulted in U.S. withdrawal and independence for a united Vietnam. It also meant the betrayal and defeat of the Vietnamese working class by its own leadership, which had abandoned the fight for a communist society. 

In the 1970s, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, pro-communist forces in the VCP won the collectivization of agriculture. But in the 1980s and 1990s, this huge reform was gradually abandoned, as it was in China and the former Soviet Union. The goal of a classless communist society was abandoned too. Today a post-colonial elite rules a “socialist” Vietnam that is home to some of the world’s worst garment sweat shops. A study of working conditions in Vietnamese factories found “forced labour, child labour and child slavery” (Anti-Slavery International 2019). 

Only Communism Can Defeat Imperialism

In 1964, Progressive Labor Movement, the forerunner of today’s PLP, organized the first anti-war demonstration to protest U.S. imperialism in Vietnam. Seven years later, PLP offered comradely criticism of the Vietnamese leadership for negotiating with U.S. and Soviet bosses—a decisive turn in the creation of a new international communist movement from the ashes of the old. Vietnam’s workers, like workers worldwide, are now faced with the task of helping to rebuild the communist movement and making a new revolution. 

The great victories and tragic betrayal of workers in Vietnam offer today’s communists a powerful lesson. No matter how valiant the fight, no matter how great the sacrifice, only a fight for communism—not nationalism and “socialism”—will liberate the international working class.

Washington, D.C., March 15- Unity Health Clinic staff and physicians led the chant “Unite for our Patients” at a city hall rally in downtown Washington, D.C.. These health care workers demanded more staff and realistic scheduling of patients. Nearly 40 percent of their workers have quit in recent years due to despicable, untenable working conditions. A year ago they joined the Union of American Physicians and Dentists and walked out to demand a change to the unrealistic scheduling of patients which continues to this day. Unity Health was founded to serve unhoused and previously incarcerated workers and provide them with services beyond just health care. The understaffing is a racist attack on the mainly Black and Latin workers who depend on the clinics for their healthcare. A physician who had struck against similar abysmal working conditions years earlier joined the rally, sharing CHALLENGE and Progressive Labor Party's communist analysis. 

Racist understaffing makes workers sicker

Physician Assistants (PAs) and doctors told us that their patients are primarily Spanish speaking and, while many providers are bilingual, some are not. Poverty, immigration fears, and complex medical problems as well as the language barrier drive the challenges facing these patients. Doctors are scheduled for 24 patients a day and physician assistants for 20 patients per day making it impossible to properly deal with these health issues. “It is exhausting for me to speak Spanish all day and manage medical and social issues,” said one of the new PAs. Another doctor who is not bilingual said, “I do use phone translation but it is time consuming, sometimes wrong, and I know I can’t do right by my patients.” 

Besides being understaffed and over scheduled, continuity of care is also lacking which means patients cannot see the same PA or doctor every visit without waiting months for an appointment.

We talked about capitalist health care, the union-busting lawyers the city would rather pay instead of health care workers, and the need for a totally new system that serves workers' interests, not profits. Sharing CHALLENGE with several providers deepened the discussion about the need for revolutionary change in this critical moment. Highlighting the sharpening struggle all around us, another health worker who had just been forced to return from Malawi when President Donald Trump abolished the United States Agency For International Development (USAID) discovered that she had been fired the next day! Unity Health is a federally funded clinic, many of which are facing challenges from Trump's funding freeze and cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. 

In addition, the city budget for D.C. is being held hostage by Congress with $1 billion in spending cuts to city services including community clinics (Washington Post, 04/07). These are blatant racist and sexist attacks on workers who need these programs to stay alive. Nothing short of the complete and utter destruction of the heinous capitalist system will do. Capitalism drives fascist cutbacks in programs serving working people across the globe. Communism will, through collectivity and empathy, meet the needs of the world’s workers!

CHICAGO, March 29—We have to keep struggling for a better communist world, where the workers, not the capitalists, are in charge, and it’s more urgent than ever to fight for workers’ power… During these years I’ve had the chance to learn that it doesn’t matter how difficult the struggle may be, or how small the accomplishment, we have to keep on struggling together for a world free of racism, injustices, and dictators.

With this statement and others, a worker helped summarize political lessons drawn from the mighty antisexist struggle to defend the “La Casita” fieldhouse in Chicago from demolition. To celebrate both International Working Women’s Day and the fifteenth anniversary of the original sit-in, our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) immigrant workers’ club organized a panel presentation and discussion today in the Pilsen neighborhood where the struggle happened.

In September 2010, immigrant parents of students from Whittier Elementary school – mainly mothers – protested plans from the racist, sexist Chicago Public Schools (CPS) bosses to demolish a small fieldhouse (La Casita, or “little house”) that served as a community space and library. The protest rapidly escalated to an occupation by the parents and other workers for 43 days and drew international attention, praise and support from countless workers.

The fight over La Casita remains a bold reminder of the power of a united working class and the necessity of a communist revolution. The same Black, Latin, migrant and women workers that capitalism attacks today will tomorrow form the backbone of a mass international PLP that buries the bosses and their wretched profit system for all time.

Immigrant women workers fight sexism, defend La Casita

Our all women-worker panel was able to reunite four mothers from the original 2010 struggle, including a long-time PLP member. Because of the racist nature of capitalism, Whittier Elementary School with its majority Latin students did not have a library inside of it (and still doesn’t) and La Casita next door served as a makeshift library among other essential community uses. However, CPS bosses and the alderman at the time wanted the space where La Casita stood for their own profit-driven purposes and therefore declared it “structurally unsound” and up for demolition. 

The sit-in was the first time protesting for many workers. But they felt motivated to push back against the bosses because they saw no other way to secure not only the library that their children deserved but this worker-centered space they were attached to. Without any formal hierarchy, workers demonstrated cooperation and solidarity, glimpses of an egalitarian communist society in action.

The panelists shared how immigrant women workers were at the front lines of political leadership at La Casita, from making sure the space was protected 24 hours a day, while organizing classes, feeding people, speaking to the press, and assisting with childcare responsibilities. They were able to accomplish this not only in the face of the sexist attacks of the Chicago bosses trying to undermine them, but also at times from the sexist attitudes of spouses and family members who tried to discourage them from getting involved in the struggle. 

Equally important, the panelists as well as those in the audience today shared important lessons of the treachery and danger presented by the liberal capitalist bosses when it comes to fighting for working-class liberation. PLP holds that liberal bosses are the main danger to the working class not only for their ability to disarm our class through feeble reforms but chiefly for their goals to dominate world markets and resources through imperialist war. 

Sure enough, it was the Democratic politicians who have run Chicago for generations who succeeded in undermining the fightback until they were able to demolish La Casita nearly three years later. Although it was a heartbreaking lesson to accept, it reinforced to many workers the necessity to rely on one another, and never the lying racist bosses.

Capitalism fails us daily fight for communism

Fighting back tears, another veteran PLP member shared her thoughts after the presentation:

I was so honored to be part of that struggle with them because it helped me understand the power of the working class. They (the bosses) had to come in the middle of the night and tear down La Casita, like thieves, because they knew the power of these women… I just want to thank you all and understand that we need to destroy this system, because it’s not gonna work, it can’t work, and they will do everything they can to make it not (work).

Through relentless daily attacks, we workers grasp the truth that this capitalist system can never be reformed to serve our needs. It’s up to us from the PLP to win millions more workers, students and soldiers to take the fight to the next level of joining the Party and building communist revolution. The fighters from La Casita and billions more deserve nothing less.

Catatumbo, a resource-rich region in Colombia, has become a battleground where armed conflict has created a humanitarian crisis of poverty, displacement, and violence. This article examines how capitalist interests have fueled this conflict, the various armed groups competing for control, and the devastating impact on local populations caught in the crossfire. PL’ers in Colombia have been involved in this struggle, raising consciousness about this capitalist hellscape,  introducing workers to communist ideas using Desafio (CHALLENGE), our sharpest ideological weapon in the fightback against these vicious attacks.

Catatumbo is a region in Colombia marked by ongoing armed conflict. Its poverty and marginalization have surpassed any barbaric threshold, sparking political and electoral interest among opportunists. This region, rich in food and mineral production, is ravaged by the capitalist laws of war and profit. A population of 80,000 workers are caught in the crossfire of this escalating war, forcing 56,000 to flee the carnage in the region, in what is being characterized as the largest displacement crisis in the region in decades (Human Rights Watch, 3/27). The violence in Catatumbo underscores the urgent need for a communist revolution. Only when workers organize collectively to smash the imperialist and their local capitalist rulers, responsible for these destructive profit-driven wars, can the working class become the custodians of a world and guarantee a future free from war, displacement, and exploitation for all humankind.

Catatumbo: a capitalist battleground and hellscape for the working class

The workers of Catatumbo are mired in forced displacement, fleeing the confrontation and targeting of armed groups fighting for control of this area and dominating drug trafficking, natural resources, and slave labor. These groups include the The National Liberation Army (ELN acronym in Spanish), which emerged as a revolutionary guerrilla group with a nationalist ideology; The Popular Front for Liberation (EPI acronym in Spanish), a reformist guerrilla group; the Rastrojos paramilitary group; the Gulf Clan; and state repression through its military forces.

All of these armed factions seek to dominate land ownership and oil production. This contradiction has claimed the lives of 60 people in the last month and displaced more than 40,000 people who resisted the plunder and exploitation of imperialist capitalism.

The social crisis in Colombia is part of the economic crisis of global capitalism, which is why there is no solution to problems that have lasted for more than a century. In this region, conditions of marginalization and neglect have left its inhabitants living for decades in uncertainty and instability due to violence.

The current and previous governments have promised investments, peace processes, demobilization, and the implementation of alternative developments to remove the population from these activities, but everything remains promises. The inhabitants have no choice but to work for organizations that murder, rape women, and impose terror, with the complacency of politicians, corrupt officials, and all kinds of mafias fighting over the multimillion-dollar profits.

These profits are generated by the smuggling of weapons, people, supplies, and drug trafficking. The internal boss struggles generate terror and racist displacement. These are not limited to Colombia; in Palestine, Mexico, Peru, and throughout the world, many workers are fleeing wars, unemployment, droughts, sexism, police brutality, and economic exploitation.

From Catatumbo to Gaza workers need communism!

Workers in Catatumbo have long struggled to escape these situations, but the state bosses have not allowed residents to propose solutions due to the contradictions surrounding capitalist profits. Instead, they enable armed groups to stigmatize social leaders, putting their lives at risk. Due to the border position of the region, armed groups exercise parallel governance, which benefits companies such as Ecopetrol, Hocal, Drummond, 

Cerrejón, Cemex, Fedearroz, Alpina, and others.

These conditions also benefit corrupt rulers, public forces, and thugs, who demonstrate that wage exploitation and capitalist scourges are inevitable. Only the power and unity of the working class in the countryside and the city, students, and the dispossessed from all over the world, through struggle and organization for communist society, will we be able to put an end to the hell and dark night that capitalism has created.
Meanwhile, the current government makes deals with class enemies, speaks of total peace, saving democracy, and electoral politics to distance the working masses from the revolutionary path. Armed with our newspaper, DESAFIO (CHALLENGE), we are participating with different organizations in sit-ins, rallies, political discussions, and helping to paint murals in solidarity with displaced people.