LOS ANGELES, October 19— A recent organizing retreat with a mass group against police brutality we’re in created an opportunity to struggle and unite with our friends to move the fight against police brutality forward by leading with communist ideas.

"I honestly have learned a lot from PLP and agree with PLP that no matter what bill, president, defunding etc you have, as long as capitalism exists there will always be racism, poverty etc. PLP is definitely going deep to the root of the cause…CAPITALISM!” This response exemplified the sentiments of our base among families impacted by police brutality in the Los Angeles area when asked what they thought about the retreat. For all the strengths of the group, those families closest to the Party immediately recognized the limitations of the reform movement. 

Within the struggle against police brutality we are having some success in having communist ideas lead the struggle. At the same time, as communist ideas are becoming more accepted the bigger movement led by reformist forces aligned with the Big Fascist liberal wing of the ruling class are shifting their rhetoric to sound more militant. It becomes clear why the liberals are the main danger for our class as they spend billions of dollars more each year on the police to attack workers while funding movements to sound revolutionary that are working to keep people tied to the bosses’ system. This left sounding reformism is part of what we have to struggle against within our anti-police brutality group.

This is a long-term struggle

We have reached this point after almost 2 years of organizing with families - study groups, club meetings, base building, and fighting in the reform movement alongside families to expose the limitations of reforms. We are in a position now where families want to struggle with other families around PLP’s ideas. Now that the mass organization’s leadership body includes both organizers and impacted family members (something we struggled for), this makes room for us to continue to sharpen the contradiction of reform vs. revolution among families.

The retreat focused on evaluating the last year of work the group has done and planning the next year. It included 6 people from 5 different impacted families and 8 people from the core organizing team. We wanted to struggle for a shift from individual family actions (which has engulfed the last year of work) to collective political campaigns. Since this was the beginning of a new leadership structure to include families, one Party member planned a session that discussed what family leadership looks like and how we build collective power. This session brought forward important lessons such as the criticality of organizing among the working class to grow our movement as well as getting to the root of a problem. This opened the door for us to raise where and how we organize. Families liked the idea of fighting back collectively. Mental health will be the focus of our first campaign. Families also agreed with meeting once a month and opening each meeting with a reading and political discussion so we can all search for the root causes together.

Continual fight against bosses reformism

Ten years ago, one of the main calls of the national movement against police brutality was for body cameras and more training for police. Since the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the sharpening of political consciousness of workers all over the world, the mass movement has been forced to move their rhetoric to the left. If someone was to talk about body cams today, they would be shouted out of the room. Defunding and even abolition of the police are the new catch phrases.  

While this creates definite opportunities for us, there are also dangers. As in every other aspect of our work, liberals are the main danger. The police brutality movement is no different.  For example, the politics of the mass movement in Los Angeles including the mass organization we belong to openly call for abolition and have some understanding of the root causes of capitalist exploitation. Having said that, in spite of their correct criticisms of the "reform movement," they fall into the same trap as they ultimately contain their fightback within the bosses state apparatus advocating for so-called "non-reformist reforms" and policy changes that would shift funding away from police and prisons towards expanding social services. Not only do they incorrectly believe the ruling class would allow this, they think that their position is fundamentally different from other reforms, and more critically do not see the need for a Party such as PLP, or the need for an armed working class to lead a communist revolution that smashes the bosses state and establish a dictatorship of the working class!  

We will be exploring this with the families in our upcoming book club and will continue to raise our communist analysis in study (including in our PL study groups) and in practice. We hope to recruit those families closest to us and support them in leading the struggle around the Party's ideas with other families.

One hundred and four 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.

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 Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution brought Russia 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 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. Soviet defenders 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 to Be Learned

Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks suffered from many political weaknesses, which led to the return of capitalism to the USSR. 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 wage system and its division of labor 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.

PLP 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.

ALABAMA and NEW YORK— As the miners fight on into month seven, support for the striking Alabama miners continues to gain momentum, despite the U.S. bosses’ media blackout. As CUNY students, staff and faculty have gone back to classes, communists in the Progressive Labor Party, friends and antiracists are finding initial successes in building solidarity campaigns at CUNY campuses across the city. As winter approaches, the growing support is coming at a crucial time for the strike.

For the miners striking against Warrior Met Coal Company, the struggle is sharpening. Even though the number of scabs working in the mines has increased to 100, the 1,000 remaining miners have closed ranks, are holding fast, and are fighting back. PLP once again salutes and supports the miners’ fightback! With more miners receiving and distributing CHALLENGE with each issue, our plans for continuing our Solidarity Campaign and building for a Winter Project are taking shape.

We invite all striking miners to join PLP and help lead a communist revolution to smash the racist, sexist capitalist system that created Warrior Met and all the capitalists like them, once and for all!

“Nothing to feel defeated about”

Every miner that crosses the picket line is a personal blow for the Warrior Met miners— “a brother lost” and “a nightmare situation,” as a miner recently explained to us, during a recent update on the struggle from one of the Party’s new friends in Alabama.

As the strike reaches seven months, and without help coming from politicians from either the Democrat or Republican Parties at the state or national level, some of the politically inexperienced miners have been seduced into crossing the picket lines and scabbing. Miners remaining on the picket lines are forced to take other jobs to defray mounting bills, while there is a growing sense among some miners that the UMWA is keeping them in the dark about ongoing negotiations.

For most miners, however, the struggle is stiffening resolve. As one Black miner recently put it, “a strike is a battle. It’s a war. That’s a challenging situation for some people. You have to make a decision about what you’re willing to sacrifice. For me, everything, but that took experience. You have to go through fire to remove impurities. This is how we go through hardship. For someone who’s never experienced hardship, it’s hard.

Black workers, especially miners in Alabama, know plenty about hardship through fierce racism—and fierce fightback. From the mass movements defending the Scottsboro Boys to the sharecroppers’, steel and miners’ unions, Black workers’ resistance has long been the key to uniting and igniting the entire working class in rebellion. This history continues being written today, and this group of Black and white miners and new CHALLENGE readers are teaching us that the course of struggle is long, and setbacks are “nothing to feel defeated about.”

“But we’re still fighting and good is coming from this. We’re making new friends, and relationships are getting stronger. The battle goes on. Some of us have been fighting for equality all our lives, and we can dig it.”

What we do counts

PL’ers and friends are organizing our base to rise to this challenge. Solidarity committees and support for the miners are being organized, with wide nets being cast across CUNY campuses and in the CUNY faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress.

The first demonstration currently in the works is for BlackRock, the $14 trillion-rich Wall Street asset management company and Warrior Met’s largest single shareholder. The second is at CSX, to help meet more rail workers and organize pressure against CSX to stop transporting scab coal. We are also planning activities and fundraiser for the miners, and a virtual international miners’ conference, where the miners will present on the strike.

Donations to UMWA District 20 continue to come in electronically and by mail, as the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) launches its Christmas Toy Drive for the children of the miners this holiday season. Currently, the miners receive only a biweekly $700 through the UMWA strike fund, which one miner with small children told us, “doesn’t pay sh*t.”

Solidarity forever

In the meantime, our new friends in Alabama are discussing and coordinating with us for a PLP Winter Project in Alabama. With more details coming in upcoming issues of CHALLENGE, we are preparing the project to bring relief and support the picket line duty during the colder months of the holiday season.

Our immediate task is to expand this campaign beyond CUNY and into the high schools, the MTA, and to cities across the U.S. and internationally (see box). Everything we do counts. Already, contact has been made with miners in two other countries. We continue to fight and make the miners’ strike a “school for communism,” and have already been humbled by the lessons. What we can learn about the persistence in struggle, confidence in the working class, and practice organizing in this strike will forge a mass PLP that will smash this entire capitalist system, from New York City to Beijing. JOIN US!

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We call on all workers, and youth, especially college and high school students, faculty, and staff supporters of the strike to help the relief effort! Every student group, union chapter, and mass organization can organize a local solidarity committee, spread the word, distribute CHALLENGE, and get people involved. Despite the complex attitudes about the UMWA’s role in the strike, donating to the strike fund and to District 20 is the surest way to send support.

For electronic donations to the UMWA Strike Aid Fund:

https://umwa.org/umwa2021strikefund

Checks can be sent to: 

UMWA 2021 Strike Aid Fund

PO Box 513

Dumfries, VA 22026

To send toys directly to District 20 for the Christmas Toy Drive, and urgently needed supplies such as diapers, sanitary napkins, formula, toothpaste, paper towels, soap, shampoo, and deodorant:

UMWA Auxiliary 2245/ 2368

21922 AL—216, McCalla, AL 35111

“Fork by fork, step by step, option by option, America or, to be more precise, the men who spoke in the name of America decided that it was going to be a white place defined negatively by the bodies and the blood of the reds and the blacks. And that decision, which was made in the 1660s and elaborated over a two-hundred-year period, foreclosed certain possibilities in America -- perhaps forever -- and set off depth charges that are still echoing and re-echoing in the commonwealth. What makes this all the more mournful is that it didn't have to happen that way. There was another road -- but that road wasn't taken. In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money.” —The Road Not Taken, Lerone Bennett (1970)

The Body of Liberties, 1641: Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery. This is done through the passage of the Body of Liberties. Under section 91 the article clearly sanctioned slavery - and creates three categories of workers: Native Americans (Reds), white people under the system of indenture, and enslaved Black workers.
 
The Body of Liberties, 1662: The Bodies of Liberties was amended to include the enslavement of a slave woman's offspring to be a legal slave. This guaranteed that offspring of all slaves were considered as the same legal status as their mother, a slave.
 
Salem Massachusetts, 1645: Emanuel Downing writes to his brother-in-law about a scheme to trade captured Native Americans for Africans, claiming that the Puritans can maintain "20 Moors cheaper than one English servant.”
 
The Royal African Company, 1672: The British Parliament charted the Royal African Company (RAC). This company would have a monopoly on the slave trade between Africa and America. All slaves were to be brought to America only through this company.
 
Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676: Stricter slave codes emerged in Virginia after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, when wealthy planters decided to abolish indentured servitude and establish permanent slavery for Africans, fearing that class conflict would undermine their tobacco plantation holdings. Also in 1676, a law was enacted that prohibited free Black people from having white servants.
 
Virginia General Assembly, 1691: Any white person married to a “black or mulatto” was banished and a systematic plan was established to capture "outlying slaves."
 
The Negro Act, 1740: The comprehensive Negro Act of 1740 passed in South Carolina made it illegal for slaves to move abroad, assemble in groups, raise food, earn money, and learn to write English. Additionally, owners were permitted to kill rebellious slaves if necessary.
 
The Naturalization Act of 1790: Alternately known as the Nationality Act, this act restricted citizenship to "any alien, being a free white person" who had been in the U.S. for two years. In effect, it left out indentured servants, slaves, and most women.
 
The Indian Removal Act, 1830: Signed into law by Andrew Jackson, The Removal Act paved the way for the forced expulsion of tens of thousands of American Indians from their traditional homelands to the West, an event widely known as the "Trail of Tears," a forced resettlement of the native population.
 
The Foreign Miners Tax, 1850: The California legislature passes the Foreign Miners Tax, which requires Chinese and Latin American gold miners to pay a special tax on their holdings, a tax not required of European American miners.
 
The Fugitive Slave Act, 1850: Passed by Congress in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act required that all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law enlisting the assistance of other whites. The act also made it possible for a Black person to be captured as a slave solely on the sworn statement of a white person with no right to challenge the claim in court.