Marxist communism was an international movement from the moment Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, “Working people of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Before that, the Haitian, French and American Revolutions had all included a strain of internationalism.
This dream of a workers’ world built on smashing the capitalist institutions of borders and nation-states found its first organizational form in the International Workingmen’s Association, the “First International,” founded in London in 1864 with delegates from several European nations, who drafted Marx to write its program.

A fundamental split between communists and anarchists (in shorthand, Marx and Bakunin, the red and the black) led to Marxists forming the “Second International” (1889-1916), which floundered during World War I because most socialists abandoned internationalism and backed their own capitalist governments in that war.

The Bolsheviks, who not only opposed all capitalist armies in World War I but created a social revolution in the very midst of that war, revived the dream of a workers’ world by backing the “Third International,” the Comintern or Communist International (1919-1943), almost immediately after taking power in Russia, and while still fighting the capitalist expeditionary forces invading Russia to end the revolution.

Defying patriotism, birthing internationalism
The Comintern defied bosses’ patriotism everywhere, condemned the betrayal of internationalism by the Social Democratic parties of the Second International, and called on workers to fight for their class, not their country. It was an organization of communist parties aligned with the Soviet revolution. They planned to take power as the Bolsheviks had in as many regions as possible, unified by the same political thinking and in a single disciplined alliance of all the world’s communist parties.

Unlike the First and Second Internationals, the Comintern had a center and a foundation in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Soviet Union for short), the first workers’ state. The Soviet Union was NOT a “nation” on the bourgeois model, but a union of many socialist republics, regardless of nationality, formed from the huge polyglot territory that had been Tsarist Russia. The very name of the USSR, refused any national name or identity, and implicitly was confined to no one region. It was an indefinitely expanding collection of states where communist workers took power, in principle extending to the whole world.

Because the USSR’s workers’ state existed and defied all efforts to overthrow it, the Comintern gave a newly powerful organizational form to Marx’s dream that “Workers have no country; their country is the entire world.” The USSR was never Russian merely, but “Soviet”—a collective form of government by the working class which could be a model for communist organization of society anywhere in the world.

The Comintern was a major achievement of the Bolshevik Revolution. When one of the Comintern parties, the Chinese Communist Party, established another workers’ state in a second huge area of the world, the dream of a workers’ world looked closer than ever. But the Comintern was never revived, and today both of those gigantic workers’ states have reverted to capitalism with a vengeance. That story of tragic loss includes the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. It was a concession to the capitalist allies during World War II.  The communist parties agreed to suspend communist organizing for social revolution in the allied countries.

The failures and contradictions of the old movement
The Progressive Labor Party believes that a further organizational step needs to be taken—the abandoning of national or nation-state-based communist parties for a single international democratic-centralist party to which all revolutionary communists belong. If we want to smash all borders and the very idea of the nation-state, then our organizing weapon, our communist party, must from the get-go incorporate that principle and refuse to be confined by national borders in its organizing. The USSR and the Comintern contained this idea in principle, but nationalism as an ideology and a culture was too powerful within the communist movement for our comrades of that era, or of the era of the Chinese Revolution, to overcome.

Today the capitalists themselves have created a world more international in social production, distribution, and communication than it has ever been. A communist state or “Soviet” established throughout many regions of the world by revolutionary struggle is more than ever a possibility because of this “globalizing” development of the capitalist system. Capitalist classes still hang on to the nation-state, however, much more than international forms like the United Nations. The capitalists need the nation-state as the basis of their rule by armed force. It is their state monopoly of violence, which they use against workers and against competing capitalists.

It remains for us as communist workers  of every country, of the whole world, to organize ourselves based on a single “Soviet,” idea and to struggle in a single international revolutionary party for that further realization of the old dream of a workers’ world.

When our comrades of the future succeed, it may well be again, as the Bolshevik and Chinese comrades found, in the ruins left by another barbaric global war. War between nations is itself one of the worst – and inevitable -- consequences of the capitalist system. Part of the dream of a workers’ world, made so visible to us by the Bolshevik Revolution, is the end of the wars the capitalists’ system of nation-states has always brought with it.

One world, one party fighting directly for communism
The Second International abandoned internationalism under the stress of World War I., and the Comintern eventually did the same thing, in part under the stress of World War II. They capitulated to nationalism. How many more such wars, and such betrayals, can we bear? Worker-soldiers of ALL armies must be organized by revolutionaries belonging to a single world party, even during a war as the Bolsheviks and the Chinese comrades did in their national armies.

It will be those workers with guns in their hands who build a new and lasting communist international. When they do, they will remember the great step forward towards internationalism taken by the Bolshevik Revolution. We communists of today in the PLP salute the Comintern, and will work in a single unified international party to realize its noble dream.

The fight for African resources sharpens
BBC, 8/6–Niger has become the latest country in West Africa where the army has seized control, following Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Chad - all former French colonies. Since 1990, a striking 78% of the 27 coups in sub-Saharan Africa have occurred in Francophone states leading some commentators to ask whether France - or the legacy of French colonialism - is to blame? Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, who was named prime minister by the military junta in Mali in September 2022, launched a scathing attack on France. Criticising "neocolonialist, condescending, paternalist and vengeful policies"...

Anti-French vitriol has also flourished in Burkina Faso, where the military government ended a long-standing accord that allowed French troops to operate in the country in February, giving France one month to remove its forces...François-Xavier Verschave, a prominent French economist, coined the term Françafrique to refer to a neocolonial relationship hidden by "the secret criminality in the upper echelons of French politics and economy". These ties, he alleged, resulted in large sums of money being "misappropriated".

Chinese and U.S. imperialists develop analyses to justify war
Foreign Affairs, July/August–In March, at the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood at the door of the Kremlin to bid his friend farewell. Xi told his Russian counterpart, “Right now, there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” The Chinese leadership, from Xi on down, believes that the global architecture that was erected in the aftermath of World War II is becoming irrelevant and that attempts to preserve it are futile…Chinese leaders see the United States as the principal threat to their survival and have developed a hypothesis to explain their adversary’s actions. Beijing believes that Washington is responding to domestic polarization and its loss of global power by ramping up its competition with China. U.S. leaders, according to this thinking, have decided that it is only a matter of time before China becomes more powerful than the United States, which is why Washington is trying to pit Beijing against the entire democratic world.

Workers in Libya continue to suffer after NATO attack
Al Jazeera, 8/14–Clashes have broken out in the Libyan capital Tripoli, residents said, after the reported seizure of a powerful armed faction commander by a rival force…Monday’s clashes are already the worst to hit Tripoli for months, though there has been sporadic violence between armed factions in some other parts of northwest Libya in recent weeks. “We have heard gunfire for almost two hours now and we do not know what will happen. We fear for our safety,” said one of the residents in Furnaj district late on Monday…Libya has had little peace or security since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising, and control has been divided between warring eastern and western factions since 2014. While there has been a ceasefire since 2020, there is no sign of a lasting political solution.

Another kkkop assault in Kenosha
AP News, 8/11–Police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, have launched an internal investigation after a video posted to social media appears to show an officer punching a Black man the officer mistakenly believed was involved in a hit-and-run crash…Police said that witnesses told them they saw two Black men and a Black woman flee toward an Applebee’s restaurant. One witness said the woman was carrying a child, according to police…The officers tried to take the baby from the man and arrest him. The man yelled that he hadn’t done anything wrong and officers should let him go. The video shows that after the officers removed the baby from his arms, they threw him to the ground and an officer began punching him as he ordered the man to put his hands behind his back. Officers then discovered the people responsible for the crash in the restaurant’s bathroom…Police said the man who was punched wasn’t responsible for the crash but tried to leave in defiance of officers’ orders and resisted them.

This past June, approximately 200 literacy coaches, supporting hundreds of elementary teachers, and thousands of students, were fired from their positions with little notice. The simple fact that almost all of these positions were filled by women, many of whom were Black and Latino makes this a massively racist and sexist attack (Chalkbeat New York, 7/13). While former Black kkkop, Mayor Eric Adams and his appointed lack NYC Schools Chancellor, David Banks are responsible for this cutback, it is more complicated than blaming one administration over the other.

Big Fascists education plan: racist inequity and mediocrity for our students
From 2014 to 2021, Big Fascist (see Glossary, page 6) misleader and former NYC Mayor, Bill DeBlasio along with a ‘multicultural’ crop of NYC Public School Chancellors (Carmen Fariña, Richard Carranza, and Meisha Ross Porter) orchestrated this massive attack.  Under the sham “Equity and Excellence for All'' Initiative, they claimed that “all third graders (would) read proficiently by 2026.” As a result, approximately 500, early childhood literacy coaches were hired by the previous “Universal Literacy'' Initiative (ULit). ULit reading coaches spent the bulk of their time in Kindergarten through 2nd grade classrooms, working closely with teachers and students (NYT, 9/22/22).They learned how to apply the science of reading, developed training sessions and parent workshops, co-planned, modeled and co-taught reading and writing lessons with teachers, and built meaningful relationships with their students and families. One former ULit coach and recent CHALLENGE reader stated:

We put our heart and soul into that job. Most of us were women of color and the first time most of us had been offered a leadership role. I didn’t think that capitalism would or could teach all children to read. However, most of us successfully trained thousands of early childhood teachers to improve their literacy instruction. As a result, students in the classrooms made real improvement in reading and writing. We were the ones that teachers looked to for day-to-day leadership and support. Not their principals or phony school  bureaucrats.
Despite the sincere efforts of the ULit coaches, DeBlasio’s liberal misleaders and the bosses’ racist capitalist school system had no intention of teaching “all” (or even most) students to read. Another former ULit coach,

CHALLENGEreader, PLP study group member, and May Day marcher added:
The DOE never provided the necessary resources, interventions, and additional staff needed to support students reading below grade level.” She added, “everyone blamed the pandemic as the reason why children didn’t learn to read, but I learned in a PLP study group that in two years,  communists in Cuba taught workers  to read with limited paper, books, and other necessary supplies. In 1961, tens of thousands of volunteers, “the brigadistas,” who were mostly young women, went to every corner of Cuba to teach people to read and write.

By the end of DeBlasio’s regime, the 2021 3rd grade New York State English Language Arts test showed that less than 50 percent of students had met a passing benchmark. (NYSED, 2022) In addition, NYC public school enrollment dropped by more than 50,000 children, over 100,000 public school students were suffering from homelessness, and more than 200,000 students with disabilities did NOT receive their support services (NYT, 12/8/21). While these liberal misleaders got an ‘F’ in serving the needs of early childhood students, these 500 coaches  continued to serve their class with  the work they had spent between three to seven years developing.

Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks dealt a racist and sexist blow to this integrated team of educators. At the same time that Adams and Banks filled various high-paying city office positions with a new ‘crop’ of Black and Latin Bureaucrats, by June 2022, this integrated team of coaches were reduced to 200, leaving 300 of them to find new positions within the Department Of Education (DOE). Dozens of ULit coaches had reached out to their union, The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) for support. While their UFT Representative held a few virtual meetings with over 400 hopeful coach participants, the ULit coaches were told to passively wait for a favorable resolution. Although one coach challenged the union representative, and suggested a petition to keep their jobs, another coach responded, “Fighting will only get the Chancellor angry at us and could ruin our chances of getting a different out of classroom position.” Unfortunately, many of the coaches remained passive and followed the misleadership of the union.

One year later, the DOE slashed the entire coaching program. The rest of these 200 coaches were sent an email that told them to find work elsewhere.

Our PLP study group member added,
De Blasio set up the ULit program to fail, and Adams used it as an excuse to get rid of us entirely. Adams and Banks are now pushing a mandated curriculum reform across school districts, but without real in-class coaching support, teachers will have to do ‘more work with less support.’ I can safely say the quality of instruction for our students has suffered since 300 of our coaches were slashed. Now that everyone is gone, it will get even worse. Although cutting all the coaches was a racist and sexist attack, the greatest attack is on the students we serve.

Communism: the best education for our class
During the past seven years, these 500 literacy coaches were an inspirational group of educators and one could only imagine the impact they could have on our youngest learners if we lived under a communist society. That is why our CHALLENGE reader’s comment about the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign is critical. As a previous CHALLENGE article stated, workers “can't get mired in dead-end reforms'' and must rely on the working class to teach and care for our children. Not these capitalist politicians  or union misleaders. Let’s turn all these fightbacks education into a fight for a communist world. Only then can we truly educate our class.” Onward comrades!