On the anniversary month of the Bolshevik Revolution, and it’s time to debunk some anti-communist myths, again. The U.S. ruling class reviles Joseph Stalin, one of the first communist leaders of the Soviet Union (USSR), and so they lie about him. But they lie about so many things, why would they tell the truth about Stalin. Yet the capitalist slander campaign against Stalin led many authors, university researchers and even ordinary people to dislike Stalin. Why so much capitalist hatred against Joseph Stalin?
First, some facts. After the Russian Revolution, 12 European countries (including the U. S. and Japan) invaded the Soviet Union to kill this new socialist society in its cradle. They were defeated. Instead Stalin led the socialist Soviet Union from being “the poor man of Europe” to a world power that challenged the worldwide empire of the capitalist United States.
Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union became powerful enough to defeat Hitler’s Nazis in World War II. Of the 250 Nazi divisions that fought in World War II, 200 of them fought to conquer the Soviet Union...and were defeated. Eighty five percent of German casualties were at the hands of the USSR. It was only after the Soviets began pushing the Nazis back, that the Allies invaded Normandy. The Soviet people and their Red Army suffered huge casualties (20 million dead) and destruction, but it was they that defeated the Nazis.
The Soviet leaders educated all citizens, including college and trade schools. They provided universal health care and employment. Workers had four weeks of paid vacation and received a pension at age 60, women at age 55. They had paid maternity leave and free childcare and they eliminated the centuries-old famines that had racked the Ukraine.
Some charge that Stalin was a dictator, yet he struggled mightily for a new constitution with secret elections so that the entrenched bureaucracy would be challenged. Local Party Secretaries defeated him in this effort.
It is helpful to see the sources of the criticisms of Stalin. The sources of the forced starvation stories in the Ukraine are anti-communist, pro-Nazi sympathizers who left the Ukraine and headed to the Western countries.
In 1956 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his achievements in a secret speech. Khrushchev wanted to take the USSR in a more capitalist direction. Professor Grover Furr documents that of the 61 charges Khrushchev levels against Stalin, 60 can be proven to be false. Needless to say that speech is the source of many of the attacks on Stalin.
Another source of attacks was the writing and organizing of Leon Trotsky. He was a charismatic individual with the emphasis on individual. Trotsky belonged to a different party than Stalin and Lenin. He joined the Bolsheviks when the Russian Revolution was imminent. When Lenin died, Trotsky thought that he should be the next leader. He organized for his ideas. They were publicized widely in the Party, but when it came to a vote, his position lost 724,000 to 4,000. The Bolsheviks and Lenin chose Stalin.
However, he continued to organize against Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership and was finally kicked out of the Party. He secretly continued his anti-Stalin organizing and propaganda. He appealed, not to the workers, but to the capitalists all over the world for support. Capitalists loved his stories because it gave them more ammunition against Stalin. But Furr speaks and reads Russian and English and has had access to Trotsky’s archives as well as the archives of the former Soviet Union. He has written and self-published several books on the period. For those who want to learn what really took place under Stalin’s leadership, please go to his website:https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/
The fact is that college professors who try to write a balanced or a favorable view of Stalin are ostracized by the system. They can’t get published. Those that promote anti-Stalinism get published, paid and praised.
The reason the capitalists hate Stalin is because he helped lead a revolution that threw them out of power. The capitalists who exploit workers, who bring death and destruction, who promote racism and sexism, hate Stalin. They benefit from our ignorance that it is possible to have a system where the capitalists do not exist. But a better world is possible. It’s communism where the workers of the world rule and the capitalists are in the trash heap of history.
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Flores Fightback Continues: Workers protest Klan in blue protected by local elections
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- 17 November 2022 307 hits
LONG BEACH, CA – On Saturday, October 26 under the leadership of the Flores Family, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and their base held a well-attended march and rally in Long Beach to protest at the home of District Attorney (DA) George Gascón. He was elected to office in December of 2020. He defeated the previous DA Jackie Lacey who refused to indict over 600 cops who murdered mainly Black and Latin workers in Los Angeles during her eight years in office. Gascón, a former cop, ran on a progressive platform. He assured the workers of Los Angeles County that he would prosecute cops and weed-out the “bad apples.” But just like Lacey before him, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and our base know that he is another tool of maintaining ruling class control that will never bring justice for workers killed by KKKops.
Gascón has a long history of protecting the police and helping to enforce racist, violent policies and corruption. In fact, he was promoted to command the LAPD training unit in April 2000 in the aftermath of the Rampart Scandal where he was supposed to clean up the department with ethics and civil rights training (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gascón).The Rampart Scandal involved widespread police corruption in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division in the late 1990s. More than 70 police officers either assigned to or associated with the Rampart CRASH unit were initially implicated in various forms of misconduct, including unprovoked shootings, unprovoked beatings, planting of false evidence, stealing and dealing narcotics, bank robbery, perjury, and the covering up of evidence of these activities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal).Just three years later he was sworn in as Assistant Chief of Police under Bill Bratton, a former NYPD police chief who served as the architect of the virulently racist Stop and Frisk Broken Windows Policing campaign in New York City. As DA in San Francisco, after serving as Chief of the San Francisco Police Department, Gascón continued to protect his fellow officers by not bringing charges in any police killings.
This is why we need a communist revolution. Politicians will never make racism illegal. We started the rally at a local park in Long Beach about a mile away from Gascón’s residence. The multi-racial group of 30 people came together to make signs specifically targeting not only Gascón but the racist system that protects killer KKKops. Young people held signs with slogans such as “No Good Cop in a Racist System” & “Gascón is a Tool of the System! Down with Capitalism.” As the group marched down a busy street with restaurants and bars, workers in cars honked their horns; those sitting outside clapped their hands, held up their fists, and nodded in agreement and 57 workers took CHALLENGE eagerly.
Once we arrived at his residence, someone from the march started chanting “Vote him Out, Vote him Out.” That chant quickly turned into “Kick him Out.” But then, a PLP member got on the mic and made a speech about how voting the DA out will not change anything; we need to organize workers to overthrow capitalism. Voting is a dead-end for the working class, there is NO ONE we can vote in or out.
The working class will only free themselves through international revolution.
DA Jackie Lacey, a Black woman, made the same promises as Gascón and the people voted her out only to end up with another tool of the system, someone who protects the racist LAPD, LA Sheriffs, and all the other killer KKKops in LA County. Gascón as the DA in San Francisco is no different than Gascón as the DA in Los Angeles. On multiple occasions he made promises to families impacted by police violence and in a year and a half has prosecuted exactly zero police. Families close to PLP are recognizing that this DA is going to be no different than the last and no different than the next. The crowd was very accepting of the idea that there is no good DA in a racist system.
Our previous marches to protest at DA Jackie Lacey’s home had a bigger turnout. Families were fed up over years of being ignored. Some families are reluctant to protest Gascón because they are afraid of alienating him while they wait on his empty promises of reopening cases. We must continue the struggle to show that Gascón and the legal system will never bring justice to the working class. The only justice will be when the international working class overthrows capitalism with a communist revolution. Then we will have justice for all the workers killed by capitalism!
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LA workers organize against capitalist profit system and slumlords
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- 17 November 2022 317 hits
LENNOX, CA, November 13—Working class solidarity and fightback around housing is growing in this area of Los Angeles County. With the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the federal eviction moratorium, and state and local moratoriums already expired, or soon to, millions of workers nationwide are behind on rent or face imminent homelessness. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are actively organizing within the local battle for the needs of our class. We are bringing communist ideas to this sharpening class struggle, such as the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist property relations.
CHALLENGE readers will remember that PLP has been actively involved in the Lennox-Inglewood Tenants’ Union (LITU). LITU has spent the last year organizing and responding to tenants who contact the organization. Tenant complaints frequently involve threats of eviction, illegal rent increases, or slumlords who refuse to do even the most basic maintenance on the apartments they rent for exorbitant amounts of money.
As part of LITU’s campaign to demand repairs in one apartment complex in Inglewood, we asked local skilled workers to volunteer their time to inspect several of the apartments affected to determine what repairs each needed. It turned out that two workers who have experience doing repairs live in an apartment complex in Lennox, a predominantly immigrant and solidly working-class city right next to Inglewood.
Workers living in the Lennox building have long had problems with their slumlord, Nic Murillo, including illegal rent increases and demands that workers pay for repairs that are the landlord’s legal responsibility. With LITU’s encouragement and help, one worker experienced in home repairs launched a door to door canvassing of his complex. The purpose of this grassroots effort is to get to know our friend’s neighbors, find out more about the rotten living conditions they are enduring, and see what they want to do about them. These are communist principles in action - workers supporting one another - from each according to commitment and ability to each according to need.
Housing problems can’t be solved under capitalism
Given how, under capitalism, property laws put landlord profits first and tenant needs last, the results were not surprising. Workers living in the building had a myriad of problems. One worker that LITU spoke to had just found out that her three-year-old son had lead in his blood. Many workers’ apartments had bed bugs and roaches. Some had carpets infested with them and showed us their children’s bite marks. Several apartments had pervasive mold. Two tenants had just received court eviction papers even though slumlord Murillo refused rent money for them from a government agency, and even though he had adamantly refused to make any necessary repairs to their apartments.
But LITU members found something else - a burning desire to strike back against these abuses, and an understanding that tenants are only as powerful as the collective working class unity that underlies their actions. Many workers signed a letter to their slumlord demanding a meeting about the lousy conditions. They promised support to the tenant families who face eviction. They came together for several meetings, involving almost half of the tenants in the complex, where grievances were aired and a plan for action made. This action revolved around the building manager’s stubborn refusal to give tenants receipts for their monthly rent payments.
After scummy Murillo learned of the tenant meetings, he began slithering around the complex promising some, but not all, needed repairs. But tenants are not fooled! This tactic was exposed at one of the meetings as an attempt by the landlord to divide and conquer.
Fired up workers confront landlord’s agent
On the evening of November 1 about 15 workers organized and gathered beforehand, before making a beeline as a group to the manager’s apartment. The manager was presented with a statement to the landlord signed by the tenants demanding that, starting in December, if receipts were not given to all tenants who paid rent, then rent payments would be stopped and held until that policy is changed. The manager at first refused to take the letter, but then gave in to the tenants demand that he do so.
No less than eight tenants spoke up, including several who spoke for the group and made sure the manager understood the anger and determination of this group of organized workers.With support from other tenants, one tenant whose family had no hot water, pinned the manager down and made him promise immediate repairs. The manager kept blathering that he had to do what his boss, Murillo, told him to do. He told the tenants they should be meeting with the landlord directly (of course, the tenants had already demanded such a meeting and been blown off by the scumlord). The next day all of the tenants who paid rent got receipts!
Working class tenants need communist ideas and leadership
Though small, this action demonstrates the potential power of a conscious and united working class. PLP’s tasks going forward will be to continue our involvement with these tenants and help sharpen the level of struggle against the slumlord. In this battle, we will show how the capitalist legal and political system protects the owners of private property. Decent housing for the entire working class, and the abolition of evictions and homelessness can and will only be achieved under communism.
NEW YORK CITY, NY, November 12—Planning for the annual Progressive Labor Party (PLP) College Conference began a couple months ago and we decided that the theme would be “Big Fascism on Campus.” We wanted to study and discuss how the Big Fascists, finance and oil bosses represented by liberal Democratic politicians, are using our colleges and universities to advance their agenda: to use liberal ideas like identity politics and “representation” to mask the naked brutality and racism of their system as an attempt to win broad political support for taking on China and/or Russia in World War III. PLP has its eye turned toward looming World War, as we see fascism world-wide rise in response to capitalism in crisis and an undisciplined ruling class.
KCC fightback inspires working class brothers and sisters
The conference was enlivened by an amazing group of students from Kingsborough Community College (KCC) in New York City, who are in the middle of a sharp struggle (see details on Page 1) against the exact kind of racist attack that is, and will always be, a part of capitalism. Racist police terror is part of capitalism and all bosses and politicians, whether they are liberal, conservative, Democrat or Republican, are committed to maintaining it. The Big Fascist playbook, however, is to use identity and representation to soften working-class anger and militancy. In this case, the president of Kingsborough Claudia V. Schrader, a Black woman, met with the students after a Black student was assaulted and detained by KCC cops, while the racist troll that he was trying to move away from the antiracist Common Grounds\ student group was left untouched. In response to the troll yelling the n-word and not facing any punitive measures, the President told students , “everyone’s racist, there’s nothing we can do about it, just be a good person…” The Kingsborough administrators offered to meet with the students on committees and have sent out emails to the campus stressing their commitment to “respect” and “understanding.”
This strategy might have worked in other situations, but the conference attendees heard first-hand how communist ideas, combined with the amazing bravery and leadership of young Black and Latin students, can transform these struggles. Friends and PLP members were active in the fight from the start, arguing for the need for multiracial unity and warning against the danger of the Big Fascist Kingsborough administration. The students eagerly took on these ideas as their own, facing up to the President, various deans and vice-presidents and public safety, and proving that liberal defenders of racist policing would not sway them.
The presence of these brave students energized the conference immensely and helped us to see clearly the dynamics of Big Fascism on our various campuses.
The power of class struggle, communist ideas and our potential to grow and to lead the working class is clear from one important example: one student, who admitted to previously being distrustful of white people, took part in the multiracial fightback on campus, then sat in an integrated conference for 4 hours and joined the Party (along with others) at the conclusion! The revolution and the creation of a communist society is that much closer!
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THE RED WRECKING BALL, COMMUNISTS VS CAPITALIST HOUSING PART 3: “REDS VS. EVICTION”
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- 17 November 2022 306 hits
The following is part three of a seven-part series reprinted and lightly edited from the communist newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, written by famous communist Mike Gold.
Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist principles 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 sank 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 councils, tenant unions that led bold actions that weakened the power of profit 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.
In this article, the popularity of communist ideas and struggles among Black workers is described by Gold, emphasizing an important aspect of our line that Black workers play a key role in organizing for communist revolution. Another important political aspect highlighted by Gold’s piece is the role of churches in misleading Black workers, winning them away from communist ideas. . During this time, Black workers were won over to the idea that they had much more in common with fellow workers than with the bosses and their corrupt misleaders. A generation of Black workers gave militant leadership to the movement.
There was the funeral of an old Black woman. She had died of hunger; the doctor’s certificate called it “malnutrition.” The councils arranged a mass funeral; they rented a large lot for such services. The great procession marched through the streets, carrying hundreds of banners and slogans telling the story. Ah, from all the sidewalks and tenement windows, what groans, wails, sobs, what shrieks of pity and anger! This mourning was real; these workers knew what the funeral said: they knew they might be next to die of – “Malnutrition.”
All the revolutionary slogans that well-fed liberals sneer at as clichés, the South Side takes to its heart. They are life. “Fight Against Hunger” is a literal command; it has helped to many victories.
On the south side, the old slavish spirituals are being rewritten. The deep yearning that once turned to a mythical heaven for freedom, now fights for a real and wonderful future on this earth.
“That New Communist Spirit”
“Gimme That Old Time Religion, it’s good enough for me,” they used to sing at their prayer meetings. Now I heard them sing it fervently:
Gimme that new Communist spirit
Gimme that new Communist spirit
Gimme that new Communist spirit
That’s good enough for me.
“It was good for Comrade Lenin,
And it’s good enough for me.
“It’s against the labor fakers.
And it’s good enough for me.
“It has built the Soviet Union,
And it’s good enough for me,
“It’ll free the world of sorrow,
And it’s good enough for me …”
(and so on, dozens of verses)
Many such new songs and singers. At mass meetings, their religious past becomes transmuted into a Communist present. They follow every word of the speaker with real emotion; they encourage him, as at a prayer meeting with cries, “Yes, yes, comrade” and often there is an involuntary and heartfelt “Amen!”
The Chicago politicians are alarmed by this local revolution. Pork-jowled pimps and bootleggers sometimes come to the forums and begin their harangues with the salutation, “Comrades!” The workers laugh at them. They hooted and laughed down Big Bill Thompson, ex-gangster mayor of Chicago when he came to Washington Park and pulled this new “Comrade” gag.
It’s hard to fool them any more. They read, study, think. They have built up the best unemployment movement in America, a model to the white comrades, in the seat of their own minds and bodies. They have developed their own leaders.
Claude Lightfoot
Of the hundreds of leaders let me give one typical biography:
Claude Lightfoot, a brilliant youth of 21 developed as a speaker at a Washington Park forum. He was a Garveyite, an American patriot, and won a large following among the young Black workers.
Democratic and Republican politicians came to him and offered him hundred dollar a week jobs to campaign for them. But he was honest, the questions fired at him by Communist hecklers made him think.
The work of the unemployment councils interested him. The fact that white workers fought and shed their blood in defense of Black workers, gave Lightfoot a new vision of the race question.
He Is Arrested
He read, studied, argued, he wrestled with his own mind. During this transition period, he happened, by accident, to be arrested in one of the eviction fights.
He was beaten, stripped, thrown into a dark unheated small stone cell on bread and water.
He personally knew the capitalist politicians who were prosecuting him. In the very prison, they came to him, and offered him his release and a good job if he would surrender his new ideas. He told them to go to hell. He was given the maximum sentence in the Bridewell, that ancient hell of stone and hate.
When he came out he joined the Communist Party. He has been an active force ever since. Read the next issue for an episode out of his new life of struggle!