One hundred and five 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.
THE WORKING CLASS SEIZED STATE POWER UNDER THE COMMUNIST LEADERSHIP OF THE BOLSHEVIKS
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 Bolshevik 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. They 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. They freed the masses, especially women, from the yoke of capitalist, feudal and religious oppression. And then in 1945 the Soviet Red Army 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 revolutionary violence on the part of the working class and peasantry was vital to the seizure of state power.
Achievements of the Bolshevik Revolution
The Bolshevik Revolution brought the Soviet Union 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. They created some measure of a decent life for workers in an incredibly short time, transforming a 90 percent illiteracy rate into one in which nearly everyone was literate.
Around 1938, without any official declaration, the Soviet Union 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. 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 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 had 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. As Soviet defenders retreated, they destroyed everything that the Nazi’s might use. The communists 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 learned
Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks suffered from many political weaknesses, which led to the return of capitalism to the Soviet Union. 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 entire wage system and fight directly for communism.
Today, no country is led by communists, but this is a temporary historical setback. While this long and volatile era of widening imperialist wars and fascist attacks on the working class is upon us, every dark night has its end.
The Progressive Labor Party is a product of both the old international communist movement and the struggle against its weaknesses. Pseudo-leftist groups have not learned history’s lessons and continue to fight for nationalist “sharing of power” with capitalists, a la Venezuela’s Hugo 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.
BROOKLYN, NY, October 8–Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) hosted a study group of over 20 teachers and students from different countries to discuss the role of grading in a capitalist system. The discussion opened up with a report back from communist teachers who were involved in a rally earlier that day to garner support for Raymond Chaluisant, an 18-year old Latin teen who was murdered by the kkkops in the Bronx in July (see last issue).
This day of action and study marks PLP’s effort to win more teachers and students to the idea that capitalism uses divisions to keep workers and youth from uniting together and fighting back with communist revolution. In this study group, we put this idea into practice by fighting the division between students and teachers and between speakers of two different languages. At today’s study group, the leadership of a teacher in bringing nine students raised the stakes of what is possible to achieve that communist future. Students asked if they could bring friends to the next study group.
Grades conceal the horrors of capitalism
We asked students to take leadership in the study group by starting out the discussion with reflections about their lifelong relationship to grades. Teachers were challenged to engage students with vocabulary such as capitalism, exploitation, racism, and class consciousness to help them link their expertise regarding grades with revolutionary ideas.
Specifically we discussed an article “Grades Are Capitalism in Action. Let’s Get Them Out of Our Schools,” which argues that grades do not aid learning; instead, it perpetuates capitalism by spreading the lie of meritocracy. The school system prepares the next generation of workers for an inherently unequal system by teaching them that some deserve more than others based on productivity levels. Not only does this give capitalists more productive workers, it also makes workers blame themselves, rather than the system, for what they have, or don’t have in adulthood.
These ideas could be heard in some conversations: Some students reported feeling that their classmates–their future fellow workers–were sometimes their biggest obstacle in achieving better grades. These students, just like teachers, can be made to feel resentment toward each other rather than joining forces against their true enemy, the bosses.
There were also clear examples of class consciousness and solidarity amongst the students, as they also spoke about unfair grading practices they felt were keeping all students down and also making students feel depressed. They also spoke of racism and other forms of discrimination affecting students in schools.
Teachers shared that grading hinders, rather than aids, their ability to teach: Time that could otherwise be used providing useful feedback with students is instead spent mechanically giving students a letter or number that lacks context, an explanation, or productive feedback.
Ultimately, grades give students practice in having their labor exploited by the bosses. They are used to sort students—into As, Bs, Cs, or Fs—and to determine which group of bosses will exploit which students when they join the workforce.
Grades, Big Fascists, and World War III
World War III is on the horizon and understanding what role the working-class students play is crucial. The U.S. ruling class is facing serious consequences if unable to fend off its imperialist Russian rival in Ukraine, and the Russian ruling class is showing no signs of backing down.
Meanwhile, regardless of the grades they receive in school, millions of youth around the world are being won to share the Ukrainian flag, the Russian flag, or the flag of their nationality. Many students with “bad” grades see joining the military as the only possible alternative to a future of suffering within the working class.
Meanwhile, their classmates who get the “best” grades are won to either fight for their national bosses or become the professional workers who ask their fellow workers to be the cannon fodder in an imminent world war instead.
While Big Fascists (the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class that is dependent on its imperialist empire) amp up for World War III, Small Fascist Republicans are fighting to make students’ education more of an individual family’s choice, because they have little interest in maintaining the Big Fascists’ expensive project of controlling students through a united public school system. By Small Fascists, we mean the more domestically oriented bosses whose interests are less tied to controlling the flow of foreign oil and hence are less willing to make sacrifices (heavy taxes) for a boots-on-the-ground war against rivals Russia and China.
Meanwhile, Big Fascists are co-opting working-class impulses for multiracial unity to provide “equal opportunity” for testing for all students. These tests produce grades which are turned on, turned off, and recalibrated based on the needs of these misleaders to pacify the families they say they serve. This is necessary when the capitalist system dives into the types of crises, such as a pandemic, that make parents and students reveal how useless capitalist education is.
For students and teachers, silently accepting grades means accepting the type of self-blame necessary for Big Fascist bosses to implement wider fascism. Fascism is a capitalist system in decay where they can no longer maintain a liberal democracy and instead resort to more direct control and state terror. This includes disciplining their own ranks and building more nationalism and allegiance for the lesser-evil bosses to “save” workers from the Small Fascists.
In order to succeed, the Big Fascists need the open support of a necessary portion of the working class. When students and teachers alike are taught to blame students for their “bad” grades without understanding the system’s role in creating that reality, they are supporting the bosses’ potential for greater fascism in the future.
Healthy communist struggle and evaluation
In a communist education system, there would be no need for grades. Education and training itself would be the priority, not the division of students into a racist hierarchy for the bosses’ profit interests.
Workers from all industries would have more time to focus on the youth, build their confidence, and create a safe environment where theories can be tested in the real world and evaluated. The lifetime process of fighting to learn, and learning to fight for the needs of the international working class would be our system of education. Join us!
Washington, DC, October 19—Over 100 protestors rallied in defiance of a possible U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined this action, making contacts with fighters and bringing revolutionary communist politics to many participants by distributing CHALLENGE widely and pushing political leadership condemning inter-imperialist rivalry. A U.S. invasion of Haiti is bad for workers in Haiti and bad for workers internationally - PLP says smash racist borders!
There is economic and political disarray that has led to hunger, deaths in the street and even the return of cholera. The unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry and 18 members of his cabinet—firmly supported by the Joe Biden White House—have called for international military forces to intervene in Haiti to bring “order” to a society in upheaval. Henry had recently cut fuel subsidies, doubling the price of gasoline, which is now in short supply. The government has also called on the U.S. to send money, weapons, and police trainers to prop up the government and money. The U.S. is open to this. In addition, the Haitian government has called on the United Nations to intervene militarily.
But history shows us there is no such thing as "humanitarian intervention" in the world imperialist system. U.S. and UN troops occupied and intervened for over 100 years in Haiti, only causing ever greater impoverishment, barbaric violence, dictatorship, fascist repression, and super-exploitation of the working class. The last time the UN invaded, they left a trail of blood. The 13-year U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) brought cholera to Haiti, which killed 10,000 people and sickened more than 850,000 (AP News, 10/18). The MINUSTAH also raped and sexually exploited women as well as children (Al Jazeera, 10/6/17). THIS is what they mean by “order” and “stability.”
We can see other examples of the U.S. empire’s global trail of destruction in Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and more. Thus another U.S. invasion is a clear and present danger that will plunge the workers in Haiti deeper into the capitalist abyss. Nevertheless, as the CHALLENGE, 10/12 article chronicled, workers in Haiti are militantly fighting back: “Workers and students, fed up with their daily conditions, have blocked the streets in various neighborhoods, attacked politicians, and broken into and liberated goods from some businesses that have exploited them.”
Oust Henry and his U.S. gangsters
On October 17, thousands of workers across Haiti flooded the streets in every state and district holding banners rejecting imperialist intervention, calling for the ouster of Henry (AP News, 10/19). We stand with workers in Haiti in the struggle against the monstrosity that is U.S. imperialism for workers domestically and internationally.
Workers are right to demand Henry’s resignation, and we need to go beyond fighting for better reforms or to remove one imperialist puppet or another. As long as the twin evils of capitalism and imperialism exist, workers will be trapped in a vicious cycle of protesting to elect new champions of exploitation and misery to do the bidding of the Haitian rulers and their imperialist partners.
The international working class has the power to put an end to the merry-go-round of death by smashing the profit-grubbing and blood thirsty imperialist system that kills and exploits our class siblings around the world. WE DON’T NEED TO VOTE FOR THE BEST CAPITALIST SERVANT!
The working class must reject the bosses' deadly democracy and poisonous nationalist ideology, and organize in the mass movements. We need to build class conscious, antisexist, antiracist fightback led by Black workers and working women around the world. We need to consolidate the energy and lessons we learn in every battle against the capitalist imperialist rulers into a powerful revolutionary fighting force capable of turning the imperialist bosses' next global crisis into a class war for communism.
NEW YORK CITY, October 12—Hundreds of retired New York City workers rallied outside of city hall today in a continuing struggle to prevent reductions in their health benefits. Retirees have been fighting for over a year against a plan to force them into privatized medical insurance, the Medicare Advantage plan, rather than traditional medicare coverage with city paid secondary insurance. The original plan was for premiums of $191.00 monthly per person to be charged for those who wanted to opt out of the Medicare Advantage plan. This racist plan meant that low income retirees (disproportionately Black and Latin) would be unable to afford to opt out. Angry retirees understood that Medicare Advantage plans rip off the medicare program in order to insure maximum profits. This was found to be the case by the U.S. inspector general (NYT, 10/8). Retirees also feared that needed tests and treatments would be denied or delayed by profit seeking private insurance companies, again found to be the case in a federal audit (NYT, 4/28). Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have pointed out that capitalist medicine is dangerous for us all, be it government or private run systems. In a communist run system, medical care would be determined by need, not cost or profit. In the heat of battle, we need to build the PLP so that the alternative of communist run health care becomes real.
PL'ers involved in this struggle have pointed out how “friends'' in the city government, led by the Democratic Party (first by Mayor De Blasio and now by Mayor Adams), have teamed up with the main city worker union leaders, the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC) to put retirees into a Medicare (dis)Advantage plan. As the old saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies!
Earlier this year, a court ruling allowed the city’s new Medicare Advantage plan to begin but denied the city the right to charge premiums to those who wanted to stay with traditional Medicare and a city sponsored secondary insurance they now enjoy. That decision is now being appealed by the city and MLC. Meanwhile the city and MLC have hatched a plan to change the local law upon which the court case was decided.
When PL’ers chant “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan, all are part of the bosses’ plan” we are pointing out how the ruling class uses both state power and their allies to attack the working class. In this struggle, we have seen how the bosses have used their state apparatus and their allies in the unions to attack retirees.
Today's demonstration focused on the plan to change local administrative code 12-126, to undermine the court’s finding earlier this year. We are pointing out to current workers that this change could mean the ending of premium free health coverage for them as well as worsening the health coverage for retirees. Retirees once again are appealing to local politicians in the New York City council to block this change. Relying on the goodness of politicians is a dubious plan at best. It is leading us into the arms of the ruling class. Capitalism rules by many means. Sometimes with an open iron fist. More often by getting workers to follow the leadership of enemies of the working class who lead mass movements like the unions and the Democratic and Republican political parties.
PL’ers stand with our sisters and brothers in fighting back. While doing so, we unmask our class enemies wherever they are and whoever they may be.
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The Red Ball of Demolition: Communists vs Capitalist Housing, Part 1: 'The beginning of the revolt'
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- 20 October 2022 108 hits
The following 7-part series is reprinted and lightly edited from the Communist Newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, by famous communist writer Mike Gold.
Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist priniciples as well as the linguistic shifts that occurred over decades of antiracist class struggle.
Communists have a long history of fighting against racist attacks on our class. One such fight was against landlords and evictions. In the early 1930s, amid Jim Crow segregation, a great depression with record unemployment levels that sunk the working class—particularly Black workers living in the urban industrial core—into deeper poverty and despair, the Communist Party in the U.S. (CPUSA) was fighting for revolution inside U.S. borders. This period was a golden age of class-conscious fightback when communist ideas were popular and gripped the imaginations of the working class.Under the leadership of the CPUSA, workers organized militant housing, unemployment councils, tenant unions that led bold actions that weakened the power of gluttonous landlords.
Today our class is in a different period marked by increasing volatility. We are choked by record-high inflation, rent hikes, food price gouging compounded by stagnant wages, high unemployment, and an eviction crisis worsened by a still-raging global pandemic. Though the CPUSA is a shell of its former self, decaying into a toothless, reformist party, their history is just as valuable as they were in 1932. This series highlights this antiracist revolutionary fightback and contains kernels of working-class wisdom.
This unemployment is a famine, a Mississippi flood, a major disaster to the human race. More than 50 percent of the Black workers in the city are unemployed. But the Black and white capitalists of Chicago, like their fraternity the world over, have been concerned only with preserving dividends.
A year ago, they were throwing thousands of Black workers out into the naked streets to die. But then a revolt began. Unemployed Councils sprang up, under communist guidance, which fought the evictions. As fast as a poor worker’s furniture was thrown into the street, the councils carried it back. The police used clubs, blackjacks and jail sentences, but the revolt could not be stopped.
The landlords grew desperate. Oscar DePriest, the Black congressman, is also one of the chief landlords on the south side. He retained as lawyers certain other Judas-liberals from the National Association of Advancement for Colored People.
Then he called a secret conference. That night the profit-hoarders and racketeers decided on nothing short of murder.
There was to be an eviction on Dearborn Street the next day. A 72-year old Black working woman was to be kicked out like a dog to die. But the Council arrived to stop the crime.
While they placed back the furniture, the police appeared. This time they did not merely club, maim, gouge and crack skulls. With not the slightest warning, they shot their rifles again and again into the crowd. They killed three Black workers, one of them a communist, and wounded many others.
It was a murder plot. I found proof of this a year later when I came to Dearborn Street.
The brown ruined wooden shacks have not been painted or repaired for decades. They are allowed to rot away. It is the landlord-economy in America to buy up putrid slums that should be burned, and rent them to Black workers. When the homes finally collapse they are torn down. Meanwhile they pay high dividends and cost nothing to maintain.
On Dearborn Street the garbage is heaped everywhere, foul as a landlord’s heart. The city has not removed garbage for months; it is bankrupt. Garbage, flies, stink, leaky roofs, broken windows and doors, moldy wet shacks swarming with vermin; all the houses in crazy tatters and out of plumb.
This is Dearborn Street, which has sent so many landlord’s wives to Paris, their sons to Harvard or Fisk. And women agonize in childbirth, and strongmen rot of hunger and despair, and babies’ bones shrivel because there is no milk.
The Landlords’ Warning
We went into one of those miserable tenements, and knocked at a door. An old woman answered, a soft-voiced gentle person with a motherly face. She apologizes for her appearance: her gray hair was knotted in paper; she was dressed in a wrapper and apron.
“I’ve been clearing,” she said, “and look a fright, but do come in and rest yourself.” Her home, despite the cracked plaster and grimy walls where lathes stuck out like a pauper’s ribs, was as neat as two hands could make it. It was touching to see her beautiful natural courtesy. It moved one to find her home so painfully clean. Would a landlord’s wife have retained her human dignity in such surroundings?
She was Ms. Martha Ormshes, wife of a stockyard’s worker. She did not want to talk at first; the Black [workers] have learned not to trust white [workers]. But then, convinced that we came from the workers’ press, she told us an amazing fact.
Her windows look out over the spot where the eviction-murders took place. The night before, her landlord had phoned her a warning not to look out of those windows the next day; there would be shooting.
But we did look out until the shots began coming too thick,” she said, “and my husband and I had to throw ourselves on the floor. It was murder; the police warned nobody, just started to shoot. Such a lot of black smoke around; my my, they just kept on shooting and shooting! And those poor people had nothing to fight back with, just a few stones. It wasn’t right. Everyone on this street is still wild about it.
Others on Dearborn Street had much the same story to tell, of whispers, telephone warnings, and the like. It was a plot. The landlords evidently decided to create an atmosphere of fear, to demonstrate to all that they controlled the police. But the plot failed.
Three Black workers were killed, but during the next weeks five thousand others joined the Unemployed Councils; 500 filled out applications to the Communist Party; hundreds of others became members of the International Labor Defense. Many of these Black workers are now in the leadership of these organizations.
Some of them have since drifted away. The Party in America has not yet worked out some simple, consistent plan that would hold such masses. Yet the South Side was a forest fire of indignation. Nothing else but the eviction-murders was talked about in barbershops, restaurants and churches. Groups of Black workers, after much hunting and questioning, would discover the address of party headquarters and march there in grim, determined squads to join up.
A Great Mass Funeral
There was a mass funeral for Abe Gray, John Oneal, and Thomas Paige, the three victims of the blood stained landlord system. More than 100,000 workers, Black and white, marched through the South Side street, a great solemn army of proletarian vengeance, waving red banners. That day has never been forgotten. It marked the beginning of the revolt.
Hundreds of evictions since then have been foiled by the Unemployment Councils. They take place almost every day. As Brown Squire, one of the leaders, told me, “when the first stick of furniture gets thrown out, a crowd gathers like magic. Somebody unknown telephones at once to the nearest council; everyone knows us. We first send a few delegates to investigate, to see whether the tenant wants us to move him back. If he does, we go there and carry on.”
