PINEVILLE, KENTUCKY, May 27—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a cadre school and sponsored a booth at the Kentucky Mountain Laurel Festival. We met a lot of people whose relatives were in bloody Harlan in the 1930s and told us some of their stories about armed battles between striking coal miners and mine owners and their goons.

We had a lot of good conversations. We engaged with about 70+ people.  We gave out free water, tootsie rolls, flyers for the cadre school, and lots of CHALLENGE newspapers. We had a backpack full of PLP literature that we shared as well as a pamphlet we wrote about rebellions in Appalachia. We also learned not to get chocolate that melts.

There were far more good people than bad at the Festival,  but we faced some reactionaries on the first day. We left our table for 10 minutes to put things away and they spilled something sticky like Sprite on our table and wrote "f@#x you commies". Still, we were able to answer all questions of some of the people who had reactionary ideas. Of course, if someone is just a bully there’s no good response!

They have this special potato chip only in Appalachia called grippos like spicy barbecue chips, they were really good! We also had many comrades from Chicago come too and at the end of the cadre school we sent them home with plenty of grippos.

The outdoor cadre school went well, but rain kept the attendance a little lower than we expected. We had talks on the opioid crisis and the history of addiction under capitalism. A comrade from Kentucky talked about how Appalachia seems like a colony since much of their economy revolves around a single commodity like coal or timber, and most Appalachian capitalist enterprises and land are owned by people outside of Appalachia.
Build the revolutionary  communist movement everywhere!

On July 14, 1789, poor workers took over the Bastille, a medieval prison in the center of working-class Paris and a symbol of feudal, aristocratic power. The great French Revolution had begun! The capitalist class (bourgeoisie) would replace the monarchy (king and nobles).

But some advanced revolutionaries were advocating an egalitarian, communist society. This was the birth of the modern working-class communist movement!

Lessons from the storming of Bastille
France was then an agricultural society ruled by noble landowners and a powerful Catholic church, with the king at the top. The urban bourgeoisie wanted a constitutional monarchy. That would give them more political power. They needed the urban workers, called “sans-culottes” – a French word meaning “worker’s pants”– to fight for them against the monarchy. But for a few years the “sans-culottes” fought for their own interests.

The sudden, violent overthrow of the French monarchy and landed aristocracy proved that the status quo was not “God-given,” not inevitable, not the product of “human nature.” It proved that the political structure could be changed for the better. A society with more equality and less exploitation was possible! The French Revolution also gave birth to future revolutionary communist movements.

The French Revolution was inspired by the Enlightenment, a bourgeois movement that attacked monarchies and feudalism. The Enlightenment popularized talk of human rights— liberal democracy, the so called rights of the people and equality for all. It argued that the power of kings and aristocrats was illegitimate.

In 1789 the French King had called a nationwide meeting (Estates-General) of nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie, to vote for new taxes. When the bourgeoisie refused the King tried to shut them down. But the “sans-culottes” rebelled and stormed the Bastille. The revolution began.

Here are some lessons, especially from the most radical and democratic period of 1789 to 1795.

The “sans-culottes” of the cities—workers, journeymen, apprentices, working women—always pushed the Revolution ahead, towards more equality, more rights and power for working people.

The “sans-culottes” had no political party. The party of petty-bourgeois revolutionaries and sincere idealists who worked most closely with them was called the Jacobins.
But the working class needs its own party. This is the greatest discovery of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik ( communist) Revolution of 1917 in Russia. Today, it’s the job of the Progressive Labor Party to fulfill that historic task.

It was the mass actions of the “sans-culottes”, sometimes supported by the most radical Jacobins, who pushed the Revolution to adopt the most democratic reforms.
The bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and “sans-culottes” all united to get rid of the king and aristocracy and to take land from the Church. But after that, their interests no longer coincided. The radical bourgeoisie needed the “sans-culottes” only as long as foreign armies threatened to destroy the Revolution.

Seizing the lands of aristocrats and the Church gave peasants their own land. They wanted higher prices for the food they grew. But the urban “sans-culottes” needed low prices. So, the peasants’ economic interests were more aligned with the bourgeois merchants, traders, and landlords than with those of the “sans-culottes”.

Once foreign armies were driven back, the bourgeois representatives—some of whom had been executed as counter-revolutionaries—turned against the Jacobins and the “sans-culottes” and established a more repressive state. After 1795 the propertied bourgeoisie was in firm control. They organized a bourgeois dictatorship, and then an authoritarian empire under Napoleon Bonaparte.

The communist movement begins
Gracchus Babeuf, a poor, self-taught worker, headed the last and most radical movement of the Revolution. His “Conspiracy for Equality” was crushed, and Babeuf executed. But one of his followers, Buonarroti, survived to influence the working-class and student militants of the 1840s, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The working class of Europe learned from the experience of the “sans-culottes” of France. The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, were the first revolutions by the industrial working class, the proletariat. They all sprang from the lessons of the great French Revolution.

Source: CHALLENGE, July 11, 2018. Suggested Reading: Suzanne Desan, Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon (2013); Jacques Pauwels, Le Paris des sans-culottes : guide du Paris révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris, 2021).

Boston, June 16–Why, at this year’s annual conference of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG), were more people than ever before talking about communism? It’s a sign of the times, the deepening crisis of imperialism and racism and war. It’s also the result of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stepping up our fight for  communism and the Party at the MLG. It’s still the Marxist as opposed to the Communist Literary Group, but by taking the Marxist work of the conference seriously we are putting communism and the question of the party more on the agenda of these mostly younger academics and grad students.

With a lot of support, we proposed for next year’s conference a reading group on revolutionary organization, so that the need for a communist party would be explicitly on the table. On the literature table this year for the first time was a stack of CHALLENGE, and our papers were all taken. Several people wanted to know more about our history, the article on the Cultural Revolution, etc. Not enough radical people know about PLP, and we are taking some simple steps to correct that at the MLG.

The conference focus this year was Capital Vol. 1 and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. To prepare, our comrades took part in three year-long study groups on Marx and Du Bois. Out of this we helped form a panel on Capital and one on Du Bois, and were often able to intervene from the Party’s point of view in the general discussions of both books.

Many people, not only PLP, emphasized that Marx’s book shows in great detail why capitalism can never be thoroughly reformed. The drive to expand capital accumulation through every corner of the world is inevitably reproducing insoluble problems: extremes of wealth and poverty; more masses of wage workers but at the same time masses of the unemployed; constant economic crisis each worse than the last; and capitalist competition leading to imperialist war. An anti-capitalist reader of Marx has to conclude as Marx did that capitalism can never be made to benefit the working class. It’s not usual to point out at the MLG that this conclusion from reading Capital entails a commitment to communist revolution. We made that point.

Racism and imperialism were not often discussed enough, although the Du Bois discussions did show how racism and capitalism are twinned both in the USA and in global imperialism. (Du Bois was an outstanding anti-imperialist voice his whole life long). Capital defines the global market as the heart of expanding capital accumulation, even in Marx’s time; and his book is full of references to the war against American slavery and the parallels between chattel and wage labor. The transition to wage slavery and the missed opportunity of a united Black and white workers’ struggle against capital is Du Bois’s great theme—inspired by Marx—in Black Reconstruction. Other panels did explore capitalist racism: one on Richard Wright, several on the so-called “surplus” (chronically unemployed) population produced by capital, others on colonial land theft. We are friends with many of these presenters and got to know others this year.

If our proposal on revolutionary organization is adopted, we can put more focus on racism and imperialism next year by bringing more Lenin into MLG Marxism, and going beyond Lenin to advocate a single global revolutionary party which summarily banishes nationalism from workers’ struggle. Examples from parties in India, South Africa and the Philippines could make the point that in our day revolutionary communism has to be organized in a single global party. Only such a party form, going further than the Comintern, can fight all the competing imperialist blocs on a global scale, in the process overcoming racism and nationalism in the workers’ ranks. PLP has a lot to contribute in MLG discussions of the theory of the party form, coming out of our analysis in  documents like Road to Revolution IV of the defeat of communism in the Soviet and Chinese parties.

There was, except for us, an eerie silence about the already begun inter-imperialist global war. Perhaps because people feel powerless? Another reason to join the Party. The door is open for us to advocate that at the moment, though we are aware that we will face anti-communism here eventually. [See Box, “The New Liberal Anti-Communism”]

For our part, what we got out of the conference is best summarized by a young comrade: “This is our theory! Marxist theory belongs to us, to the communists, to the working class.” There is a problem with the MLG: theory being divorced from practice. On the one hand, it’s good that the powerful intellectual tradition of Marxism is alive and well among some academics; on the other hand, Marxism does not belong mainly to academics. As Brecht wrote once, “Communism is simple: if you’re a worker you can understand it.” Communism is also complex, but workers trained in a revolutionary party led by workers—a party like PLP where academics too are welcome—can also master its complexity.

We are encouraged by this work among intellectuals, feeling our collective power to mobilize as a class if we can bring our academic co-workers into a worker-led PLP, building the Party to fight for communism as capitalism spins off into racist violence and war.

The new liberal anti-communism
Three comrades on a panel at the 2023 MLG conference called “The New Anti-Communism” showed how anti-communism remains alive and well in new forms, even in the absence of a mass communist movement. Why? Because communism remains the greatest threat to the ruling class, and both liberal and rightist wings of the capitalist parties in the USA and Canada are united in slandering it. In its identity-politics guise, anti-communism helps to recruit marginalized workers to fight in imperialist wars against “authoritarianism,” to subdue white workers who might want to combat racism, and to provide political cover for racist attacks on the whole working class.

For one speaker, the Florida and Texas government attacks on “wokeness” as educational brainwashing (i.e., teaching about slavery, labor insurgency or gender politics) were dog-whistle accusations that recalled McCarthy-era portrayals of Communists infesting the brains of innocent Americans. Another speaker pointed out that it is wrong to point to “the right” as the main danger in such attacks on teachers and their unions, since liberal multicultural identity politics have prepared the ground for the likes of fascist Florida Governor Ron De Santis. Often, antiracist folks are disarmed against these attacks by their allegiance to divisive liberal identity politics which hide workers’ common interests.

The third speaker discussed how the Canadian government has historically manipulated the status of “refugees.” “Good” refugees have been those fleeing from communism, like those from Vietnam decades ago, or Ukrainians today fleeing a capitalist Russia falsely identified as communist through the word “authoritarian.” But refugees from places like Haiti are to be turned away at the border. Propaganda like the short TV ads “Heritage Minutes” falsely feature Canada as a land of freedom from “totalitarian” oppression, while their multicultural imagery helps the liberal ruling class depict marginalized workers as full citizens of a free country. Liberals in Canada, fascists in Florida: both use anti-communism to shatter workers’ unity, attack workers in struggle, and prepare a population of patriots for world war.

It’s a hot fightback summer! From hotel workers, grad-student workers, writers, actors, workers are shutting it down!. Earlier this year, college teachers, healthcare workers, education workers, graduate students—all have walked off the job with overwhelming public support. As we go to press 40,000  rail workers from the United Kingdom are on the picket lines  leading the largest rail strike in 30 years. We may see strikes by 350,000 UPS workers in August and by auto workers this fall. Clearly, capitalism’s crisis appears to have triggered a period of sharper class struggle.

Workers are fed up with the inequalities—the rising cost of living, exacerbated by the capitalist-bred pandemic’s economic effects, stagnating wages, and more—which disproportionately hit Black and brown working families the hardest.

If you live or work in an area where workers are on strike, support the picket line! Greet workers with the revolutionary ideas of CHALLENGE and the chant, “hey hey ho ho! this capitalist system has got to go!”
Workers deserve nothing less than a communist world. That’s a world run by and for our class.