This is the  part of in an extensive series about the Bolshevik Revolution and the triumphs, as well as the defeats, of the world communist movement of the 20th century. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.
The following illustrates Bolshevik work under the Czar before the Revolution of 1917.

Progressive Labor Party is following in the footsteps of Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in struggling to “fit the reform struggle into the revolutionary struggle,” making revolution primary. This is very hard to do when the bosses still rely on liberalism to fool the working class. But this liberalism is in the process of turning into fascism. If we have followed our line of “revolution and reform” and have prepared a base for communism among the working class, we will be prepared to turn the bosses’ fascism into its opposite—workers’ communist revolution. A look at the history of the Bolshevik party illustrates this.
In What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin denounced the tendency of putting trade union work around reform issues on an equal or even a higher footing with Party work. The “economist” or reformist outlook Lenin criticized was dominant in the Second International. It turned the German Social Democratic Party, the party of Marx and Engels, into a pro-imperialist, anti-worker party by 1914 (see Schorske, German Social Democracy). The Mensheviks, that part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party with which Lenin and the Bolsheviks split, also practiced it. The occasion for this split in 1903 was Lenin’s insistence upon the primacy of illegal Party (revolutionary) work, and on making sure that communist politics guided all reform activity.
Baku Under Russian Empire
A study by U.S. historian Ronald Grigor Suny (published in Soviet Studies, 1972) shows how Stalin put Lenin’s strategy or ‘‘revolution over reform” into practice in the oil-producing Caspian region around Baku (present-day country of Azerbaijan) from 1907 to 1910. A. V. Williams Jackson of Columbia University wrote in his work From Constantinople to the Home of Omar Khayyam (1911):
Baku is a city founded upon oil…At present Baku produces one-fifth of the oil that is used in the world, and the immense output in crude petroleum from this single city far surpasses that in any other district where oil is found.
The Czar legalized land ownership in Baku, turning it into the oil capital of the world. Between the 1880s and 1900s, Baku belonged to the Nobels, the Rothschilds and more generally to the British oil bosses. Between 1856 and 1910 Baku’s population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris or New York. It is in the flashpoint of imperialism that the Bolsheviks, soon to lead the revolution in the next decade, organized class struggle.
Organize Among Most Oppressed
The workers fought hard against the oil bosses. After the workers’ rebellions of 1905-6 the oil bosses of Baku opted for liberalism, raising wages and legalizing unions. They hoped to divert the oil workers’ struggles towards reform, away from socialism at the time. The Mensheviks abandoned Party work and devoted themselves entirely to the Trade Union. Further, they organized only among skilled workers, who were mainly Russians.
A young Georgian leader in his late 20s, born into a struggling family, led the Bolsheviks who, under his urging, concentrated upon the unskilled industrial workers, who were mostly Muslim workers—most numerous, poorest, and most militant. His name was Joseph Stalin.
The bosses used racism to divide the workers: as Suny puts it, “Sometimes … workers of one nationality … were used as strikebreakers against workers of a different nationality.” The Bolsheviks insisted on fighting these racist divisions by uniting the separate unions of skilled and unskilled workers (the Mensheviks wanted to keep them separate). These workers were won to revolutionary politics and became fighters for the revolution.
Within five months of Stalin’s arrival in Baku in June 1907, the Bolsheviks had won over enough unskilled workers to capture the city committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from the Mensheviks.
Leading Class Struggle
Following their new “liberal” policy, the oil bosses offered to set up a “conference…with equal worker-management representation, to work out a general labor agreement. Stalin was “militant and uncompromising. His attitude was consistently suspicious of compromise, wary of those who expected meaningful concessions from the industrialists in a conference” (Suny).
At first Stalin held out for a general strike and a boycott of the conference. When his position was defeated. Stalin led the Bolsheviks into the “conference” campaign under the platform that the workers’ representatives be the union leaders—mainly, Bolshevik revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks won 19,000 votes to the Mensheviks’ 8,000. Confronted with a workforce united under Bolshevik leadership, the bosses called off the conference, thus showing their true colors. As a result, the Bolsheviks won even more support.
Primacy of Preserving Underground Work
Another of Lenin’s tenets was the primacy of preserving illegal, underground Party work. Throughout this period of “liberalism,” Suny writes: “Stalin, while participating somewhat in union affairs, gave most of his strength to party work, of which he was in charge.”
By 1908 the bosses had dropped their liberal facade, outlawed the unions, and arrested their leaders. Stalin stayed out of prison for almost two more years and so was able to preserve Bolshevik organization under this period repression. Suny admits, “Stalin and the Left were vindicated in some sense in the next few years as the unions practically disappeared, and as the only center of Social Democratic activity that remained was hidden “deep in the underground.”
The Bolsheviks fought for the most left politics in a period of liberalism and repression. Though they were small, they embedded themselves in the class struggle, called out lesser-evil politics of the bosses, fought against racist divisions, and organized among the most oppressed group of workers. Only through organizing day in and day out, they recruited workers to join the fight for a better world.

Next issue, we will look at class struggle forged the Bolshevik Party in Transcaucasia.

INDIANA, October 6–Confronted by a fascist police force in military gear, Progressive Labor Party comrades joined over 200 multi-racial anti-deportation fighters today in a demonstration at the city’s airport. Our communist contingent made progress in sharing our revolutionary line that safety for our immigrant sisters and brothers won’t be achieved through another reform, but only by the destruction of capitalism and its borders, through international working-class revolution.
It’s Not Just Trump—It’s Capitalism
The Gary/Chicago International Airport has been a site of racist mass deportations of workers for years. Since June 2013, more than 12,000 immigrant workers have been bused to this site in order to be shipped as prisoners to the Texas/Mexico border (Chicago Tribune, 10/7). Today’s rally was another effort made through various regional community organizations, churches, and labor unions to stop the weekly arrival of buses full of immigrant workers slated for deportation.
There were some speeches made linking the attacks on immigrant workers with the attacks on all workers’ rights, but the main message was one of support to reinstate the liberal bosses’ Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, recently revoked by Trump. Although pro-immigrant rights groups have been stirred to action by the Trump administration’s openly racist hate speech, the fact remains that mass deportations were taking place well before his election. During eight years of Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama and Democrats holding majority in office, over three million immigrant workers were shamelessly deported from the U.S., violently uprooted and ripped away from family and friends.
The PL’ers in attendance worked to push the political tone of the event more towards communist politics and workers’ power. We made signs in Spanish and English that read “Smash All Racist Borders” and “Working People Have No Nations,” in order to confront the poisonous nationalism being promoted at the rally and get others thinking about the power of the international working class. We distributed CHALLENGE, along with a Party flier that called out DACA as a liberal reform scheme of the bosses, its main goal being to get undocumented workers to fight and die for U.S. imperialism (See CHALLENGE, 9/27). We reunited with fellow fighters and made even more contacts through these efforts.
Anti-racist Workers Fight Back
About an hour into the rally, someone called out, “the buses are here!” The 200-plus fighters quickly ran to the side of the fence closest to the runway, pressing close so that our chants could be heard by the immigrant workers inside the vehicles. The kkkops, determined not to let us anti-racists block the buses and interrupt their fascist terror, had sectioned us off in the parking lot behind barricades, barbed wire fences, and officers with assault weapons. We chanted even louder in support of our undocumented sisters and brothers, while blasting the kkkops for being racist and sexist murderers for the bosses.
Pressed against the fence, we got in more discussions about the need for communist revolution. While hearing chants of “Not One More!” we pointed out that putting faith in the bosses’ political and legal system will never get us to a world free of racist deportations. We explained the need of the capitalist class to divide and terrorize the working class. Through fascist terror like deportations and killer cops, the bosses try and prevent us as workers from uniting worldwide to challenge their brutal profit system.
Workers’ responses make it clear that many see through the bosses’ lies, understanding the connections of all these problems to capitalism and rising in multi-racial fightback against the divisions and state violence. It’s on us, PLP, to continue to deepen our roots in the working class to win them to the fact that only a communist world offers an existence free from exploitation, profits, sexism, racism, and war. Only by workers running society based on their collective needs guarantees the right for all working people to lead healthy, productive, and meaningful lives.
The Struggle Continues
Inspired by the growing fightback of workers all over the world, these local struggles show no sign of dying down anytime soon. We look forward to continue organizing and struggling with our fellow anti-racist fighters. With each struggle, more workers can be won to rejecting the bosses’ deadly reform bait and build PLP for the permanent solution of communist revolution.

Washington, DC, September 30—Today the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a rally, march, and protest in solidarity with the oppressed workers of Myanmar (formerly Burma), in particular against the genocidal campaign by the military against the Rohingya Muslim minority workers and farmers. The army has driven hundreds of thousands of Rohingya off their land into neighboring Bangladesh, where they meet rejection of refugee status by the Bangladeshi rulers. Ostensibly the army is acting in response to terrorist attacks on Burmese police stations by an organization of Rohingya jihadists, but the masses are made to suffer.
Refugees from many countries meet similar rejection in Europe and elsewhere, leaving them homeless and without livelihoods, as warring imperialists from the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China fight each other for oil, natural gas, and minerals over the dead and dying bodies of workers and farmers whom they mislead into believing that these wars are in their interests.
Despite the pretense that the root of this genocide is religious oppression against Muslims in a predominantly Buddhist nation, it is mainly the backing by contending imperialists, who cynically jump on any bandwagon to appear to support one group of workers over another, that drives the attacks. Land theft by the military from Rohingya farmers is an additional motivation, but many poor Buddhist farmers have also been subject to the same thefts of land, making unity between both groups against this oppression an absolute necessity for survival. Unity among all groups of workers everywhere is the only possible way to defend ourselves, while capitalists use all kinds of divisions—racism, sexism, nationalism—to set us against each other and destroy our ability to resist.
PL’ers launched our action with a bullhorn rally in a busy commercial area, handing out over 200 flyers and 50 copies of CHALLENGE. We spoke with passersby about the crisis, as well as the mission of the PLP for revolution to rid the entire world of capitalism and imperialism.
PLP members then marched to the Myanmar (Burmese) Embassy (just blocks away from Obama’s $8.1 million-dollar residence and the $5.5 million home of Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner). We left our leaflets condemning the genocide on the spikes of the fences surrounding the embassy, to put the fascist regime of Myanmar (Burma) on notice that we are fully determined to build support for their Muslim and Buddhist victims and to organize millions of workers and farmers for the day that we can drive fascism, imperialism, and capitalism from the planet.
This modest demonstration is the beginning of a resistance campaign against this genocide and against the reactionary capitalist forces from China and U.S. who seek to exploit, by proxy, ethnic strife and conflict as their imperialist interests clash (see CHALLENGE, October 11, 2107). In particular, we are determined to build sufficient support around the world to force the government of Myanmar and its imperialist backers to allow the Rohingya, clinging to life in refugee camps in Bangladesh, to return to their homes and farms.
The lead speaker declared “We must remember that the source of this genocide, and indeed of every genocide, is economic imperialism. Every ethnic cleansing can be traced to attempts by capitalists to appropriate the land of workers for their own ends, and to rally one part of the working class against another to maintain the dominance of the bourgeoisie [capitalists]. Even if we can stop this genocide, and save the Rohingya from annihilation, we will see further genocide around the world until the reactionary capitalist forces are crushed, and global worker solidarity is achieved.”
We urge all workers, students, and soldiers to join this campaign by contacting the D.C. chapter of PLP at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

BROOKLYN, NY, October 10—After a McCarthy-style investigation that lasted half a year, the New York City Department Of Education’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) has declared that it cannot substantiate accusations of wrong-doing against teachers, some communists, in Park Slope Collegiate. This is a huge victory for the school and its community.
It is also continuing to investigate several minor claims against the principal and a bogus conflict of interest charge against one of the teachers.
The School that Dared to Fight
In a segregated school system of 1.1 million students, Park Slope Collegiate dared to fight racism with an organized alliance of students, parents, and staff.  It is a mainly Black and Latin school in the John Jay campus. In 2010, the DoE fought to install a segregated high school in the building: Millennium, a mainly white and Asian school. While the DoE claimed to not have money for the existing schools in the building, they had no problem starting Millennium. PSC organized against this racist divide but failed.
No matter, for nearly a decade, the students, parents, teachers, and staff continued “fighting the installation of metal detectors in their school, helped organize school assemblies to talk about police violence, and had spoken out passionately against segregation” (NYT, 5/4). For this, the DoE used a Red Scare to strangle workers’ fightback against racism.
Racist Rats in the School
While clearing the charges, the OSI released a document summarizing witness statements, which reveal that suspicions that the union leader initiated the investigation were correct. Now the staff has to face the facts that several co-workers, including the union chapter leader, tried to destroy the lives not only of their principal, but also of fellow workers.
Even more disgusting is that this was a racist attack on the students of the school, one that targeted student leaders and if successful could have destroyed a bastion of anti-racist multiracial fight back. In the case of the union representative, this lays bare where her true loyalties have always lain.
The course of the investigation has also laid bare the ugly reality that liberal politicians are the main enemy under capitalism. Even though this attack was initiated from three anti-communist staff members inside of the school, the DoE along with the liberal mayor, de Blasio and the school chancellor Farina, were silent during this attack on this integrating school while publically paying lip service to school integration. De Blasio and Farina are doing their part to uphold the state’s ranking by perpetuating racist “choice” policies for secondary schools and defending elementary school zones that deliberately segregate students in the service of home real estate values for the middle class and the affluent.
Parent-Teacher-Student Unity
Many parents that are deeply involved in this anti-racist struggle are the same constituents the politicians depend on to keep them in office. Parents who thought that their ties to these politicians would save the school from the investigation have seen their emails and phone calls mainly ignored. No amount of calls to their representatives fixed the situation, just as similar calls did not integrate the school, provide equity in the building or remove the prison-like metal detectors.
At the same time, the response in the school to the investigation has revealed the true power of the working class united. Teachers, staff, parents and students have stood up and organized like never before while this anti-racist community was attacked. Friends who have waited for communist teachers to lead the way in proposing actions before, have stepped to the foreground, spear-heading the petition to remove the chapter leader from office last year and the founding of a new leadership committee at the school. Large, visible actions outside the school, on the steps of City Hall and outside the courthouse during attempts to legally stop the investigation definitely had an impact on the decision of the uber-facist OSI to drop the investigation.
Truly integrated schools are rare in New York City, and schools that fight back against the racist policies that attempt to keep them segregated are even more rare. The John Jay Campus is a microcosm of the racist inequalities in school systems throughout the U.S.
This investigation is clear evidence that the institutions of capitalism are ready and willing to impose fascism on workers. It is also clear evidence that the most powerful way to stop their attacks is multiracial fightback. The multiracial unity this school community demonstrated led to a victory for now.
We must learn from this attack and move forward better prepared for the next one, because there will always be another.