BROOKLYN, NY, August 19—Over a dozen multiracial, women and men members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party rallied in Brooklyn today with signs and leaflets that read “No Free Speech for Racists” and “Death to the Klan with Multiracial Unity.” In one hour, contacts were made, over 550 leaflets were distributed, and over 200 CHALLENGEs were sold at a busy street corner in the heart of this Black and immigrant neighborhood.
In particular, workers responded to the call for “death to the Klan from Charlottesville to New York City.” Many workers stopped to read the leaflet and discuss how we can organize; on one street corner, a worker helped advertise our leaflet and called other workers over to read a leaflet and buy a newspaper.
Even the Christian groups passing out their own literature listened to our discussions and took our leaflets. At one point a lively and friendly debate was held between a Black, religiously-minded woman worker and a white, communist-minded male worker in PLP. The debate was brought down to earth when the Black worker opened up about her disgust at the open revival of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis. Religious or not, masses of workers share this workers’ exasperation at what we can do about the Klan, apart from “having faith.”
The religious worker and the communist worker did not reach consensus on whether or not there is life after death. However, they both agreed in freeing workers - in this life - from the Klan, racial segregation, racist borders, and imperialist war. Both agreed in multiracial unity, and the need to organize and fight back. While clear disagreements regarding religious faith remain and cannot be casually dismissed, agreement on these points of unity in action can be important to our class in building a political base for the sharpening struggles to come. Hopefully this dialogue will continue developing into genuine friendship, based on antiracism and political struggle!
Above all, communists don’t write off or surrender whole sections of workers to the bosses’ ideas, ever; from white workers to Black workers to religious Christian and Muslim workers! All workers are hurt by racism, sexism, and imperialism, and capitalism uses its most vicious attacks on Black workers, especially women. Today more than ever, masses of them are looking for a way out. Charlottesville has sharpened the mood of the masses. For how long is impossible to predict, but the workers who took hundreds of leaflets and CHALLENGEs, who donated their money to our Party and shared their time to discuss politics and life, taught us we can return to work bolder. And, more confident that communist revolution is an idea whose time has come, if we persist and struggle to spread it.

Osip Piatnitsky was a revolutionary leader who played a key role in organizing the working class before, during, and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Much of this three-part series was taken from his memoir, Memoirs of a Bolshevik. The first of the three-part series looked Piatnitsky’s early life and his role in guaranteeing communist propaganda, including the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra. The following part deals with his life while in prison and exile under Czarist Russia, leading up to the year of the Bolshevik Revolution—the first successful workers’ state in history. At every turn, any accomplishments were made possible by the masses and working collectively.  

Early in March of 1902, Osip Piatnitsky was traveling with a comrade to secure the underground route to smuggling their newspaper, Iskra, from Germany to Russia. They were arrested and sent to the Kiev prison in Russia.
Inside the prison, hundreds of arrested students protested, creating such an uproar, crowds from the distant town came to the prison gates. It was in this prison that Piatnitsky had the time to be a teacher of Marxist literature. At age 17, he had four years of organizing.
The Great Escape from Kiev
Plans were made to escape. For weeks of preparation: getting ladders, a grapple, money, addresses in Kiev, practicing a human pyramid the height of the yard wall, singing in chorus, beating a tin can to mask the sound of the escapees climbing on the outside wall composed partly of tin, obtaining wine to get the guards drunk, and sleeping powder with which to keep them unconscious—all acquired from the outside.
Through collective organizing, they did escape! But the Kiev safe house addresses were wrong. They had to ride in cabs all night to avoid detection. Of the 11 men involved with Iskra, 10 survived the escape and arrived in Germany according to plan.
Odessa: Soldiers Unite
In January 1905, Piatnitsky arrived in Odessa. Prior to the January 22 uprising and march on the Tsar’s palace, he was arrested with others at a meeting. The police left soldiers to guard them. With the absence of gendarmes (French armed police) they tore up all papers. When the police returned, they questioned who had destroyed the papers. The soldiers replied, “EVERYBODY.”
The comrades and scores of others from all walks of politics remained imprisoned without trial for five months. When they were released pending a future trial, Piatnitsky decided not to appear at the trial and left for Moscow.
‘Recognized’ as Innocent
In 1907, many were arrested; detectives shadowing Piatnitsky increased. The Party suggested he leave Moscow. In his hometown, he was arrested. Due to the differences in his several passport pictures, the gendarmes couldn’t identify him. At this time, jails were filled with peasants and intellectuals rebelling against landlords. With ongoing tortures and staging of trials, keeping Piatnitsky’s identity safe also meant the safety of many others associated with him.
He was taken by foot to a town where he had never been, which had a notoriously vicious police chief. Several days later waiting in a cell where many had been tortured, he was called out to be recognized. He was “recognized” to be innocent by five people in that town who had never seen him before. On his way back to the cell, a stranger approached him and handed him five rubles. He realized relatives and friends had arranged the “recognition.”
Cheated by Provocateur
In June of 1914, betrayed by a provocateur who had deliberately photographed him in Paris with other comrades so he could be identified—Piatnitsky was arrested, put in solitary for 2.5 months and sentenced to Siberia. Before they were transferred, he heard that World War I had begun and recalled that the Russo-Japanese war brought on the 1905 revolts.
In January 1915, he and 60 other comrades and criminals were forced to march 250 miles. They spent their nights in peasant huts. Larger villages held many exiled political prisoners where the peasants received them warmly. Piatnitsky was forced to walk to the furthest village in Siberia: Fedino, because of his escape reputation from Kiev.
It Takes a Collective Village
Fedino was more prosperous than the villages they’d walked through and consisted of 40 households who cultivated land outside the village. The economy was not collective in the least; men and women of the same family kept separate accounts. No one was taught to read and write.
During the next two years, 23 exiles came to live in Fedino. A few condemned by administrative decrees received eight rubles a month. Deportees received nothing.
The exiles worked out communal dining, collective buying and fair division of food and provisions. To sustain their sanity, the exiles read material provided by the local “Congress of Exiles.” Piatnitsky taught children of the peasant family to read.
The snow at times was six feet deep. The last year, all staple articles disappeared from town markets. He organized a cooperative with the peasants, which was necessary for everyone’s survival.
On the evening of March 9, 1917, he lay in his room in the dark without answering the door, the only time in his memoir he admitted depression. Late that evening, an exile from outside Fedino rushed in to announce that a bourgeoisie revolution had taken place in Russia (the February Revolution). Piatnitsky had one burning question: which party would organize more quickly—the party leading the proletariat and the peasantry or the party of the bourgeoisie?
Later the peasants of Fedino handed Piatnitsky the village seal and all the attributes of the office of “guard.” After leaving for Moscow, he learned that during the remainder of 1917 Fedino peasants, led by exiles who remained there, took an active part in the guerilla battles against Kolchak bands.
Security: Build the Party
As we saw, Piatnisky’s safety lay in the hands of the masses. Be it escaping from prison, falling under the police radar, or bare survival, it was possible when class-consciousness is planted deep and wide. Likewise, the security of communist work today lay in the hands of the working class—all communists and friends must build a base wherever they are: work, school, military, farm, or prison.

A third and final article will deal with some reasons why a revolution did not take place in the trade-union-organized country of Germany, as Marx predicted. The contrast of political life in Germany to the revolts in Odessa, and the struggle between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks over the publishing of the paper in Samara (near St. Petersburg) will reflect the intensification of repression in Russia from 1908 through 1914.

KKK and Nazi fascists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, have murdered antiracist fighter Heather Heyer as the local ruling class used their state power to protect these racists. They deployed hundreds of kkkops in riot geclick image for leafletar to protect their banks and racist monuments, only intervening after it became clear the antiracist students and workers were bloodying the fascists.

Whether the president is Obama or Trump, this exercise of state power – and the Nazi murder - proves again that racism is critical to the life of capitalism.

State Terror Unleashed on Antiracist Students and Workers

It’s no surprise that the bosses use their cops to protect the KKK instead. Since the founding of this country, racism was used to justify slavery. Numerous local, state and federal laws passed over centuries were required to entrench racist divisions inside the working class, and weaken our ability to fight back against our exploitation. The most vicious state terror was used by police on working people who insisted on struggling together against exploitation (see Lerone Bennett’s “Road Not Taken” on the lynch law of colonial era, as well as the Hollywood film “Free State of Jones” on the Reconstruction era which followed the Civil War.)

When kkkops are brought out against the antiracists, they function in this capitalist tradition. As the PLP chant goes: “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan: all are part of the bosses’ plan.”

The mayor of Charlottesville called on residents to stay away from the rally- as if nonviolence defeated the Confederacy! He tried to encourage workers to attend alternate events orchestrated by NAACP misleaders. Whenever the KKK or Nazis rear their ugly head, these liberal misleaders and churches try to keep the working class from fighting back.

When the Klan is confronted by multiracial fightback, they are terrified.

The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has a 52-year history of beating them back and driving them out of our streets and neighborhoods!

The militancy of thousands of antiracists shows the potential of our working class to go all the way. When masses of workers reject passivity and organize multiracial fightback against gutter racists and the racism of capitalism, we can smash capitalism and its racist borders - and their servants, the Obamas, the Trumps, and the KKK - with armed revolution.

Turning the fight against imperialism, racism, sexism, and nationalism into an international fight for a working-class run society—communism—is the only way to once and for all smash the horrors of this imperialist, racist and sexist capitalist system. Fight back! JOIN US!

On August 2, the U.S. declared new economic sanctions against Russia. This move reflects a growing desperation among U.S. capitalist bosses, whose declining but still-lethal empire faces growing challenges from Russian and Chinese imperialists—especially after Russia’s successful military intervention in Syria.
Sanctions are a standard tactic in capitalist competition. In this latest economic attack, U.S. bosses will be freezing money and blocking business deals involving the Russian bosses. For the international working class, it’s only a matter of time before trade wars among major imperialists become a global shooting war—a war in which workers have no side.
The international communist Progressive Labor Party calls on workers, students, and soldiers to fight for their class, not their country! We fight for a world without money, racist borders, racism, or sexism—a world ruled by the working class. The capitalist class will never give up its rule or profits without a fight. It’s up to our class to turn the looming inter-imperialist war into a war for communist revolution.
What “Sanctions” Mean
Allegations of Russian election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election are echoed constantly in the U.S. bosses’ media. While the charges may well be true, they also provide political cover for the U.S. to drive a wedge between Russia and the European Union. In reality, the sanctions have nothing to do with election meddling. For years, the U.S. bosses have been looking to curb the dependence of Europe, and particularly Germany, on Russian natural gas—the bulk of it piped through Russia’s western neighbor, Ukraine.
Since the formal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. bosses have spent $5.1 billion on so-called “democracy building” in Ukraine (Politifact, 3/19/14). In February 2014, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president was removed from office following massive U.S.-backed demonstrations. Its current pro-U.S. president, Petro Poroshenko, has vowed to join the U.S.-led NATO military alliance, which could bring U.S. military forces to Russia’s border.
But the U.S. has been less successful in undermining Russia’s gas monopoly in Europe or its growing influence in the Middle East. The latest sanctions are a desperate attempt by U.S. bosses to regain some momentum.
Natural Gas Can Ignite War
Nord Stream is the world’s largest underwater natural gas pipeline. It connects Russia and Germany through the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine completely. (A major expansion project, Nord Stream 2, is currently underway by Russia’s state-owned gas company, Gazprom.) The U.S. sanctions target more than 200 EU-based contractors and subcontractors providing steel and other materials for Nord Stream (Reuters, 8/3/17). Meanwhile, the U.S. hopes that its first delivery of liquified natural gas to Eastern Europe seduces European countries to dump Russia (Foreign Policy, 6/8/17).
In any case, the U.S. bosses can no longer dictate global politics as they once did. Economically, the sanctions are too little, too late: “[M]ost of the big contracts for steel, port logistics, and construction have already been concluded” (Reuters). Politically, the U.S. bosses’ desperation may be driving historical allies like Germany into the arms of Russian imperialism. The German bosses went so far as to say that the new sanctions “breach international law” (CNN, 8/2).
Following the vote of Britain, the most reliable U.S. ally, to exit the European Union, it’s unclear how much influence the U.S. has left in Europe. But it’s very clear that deadlier imperialist wars are on the horizon, and that workers around the world have no stake in them. The need to organize for communist revolution grows only more urgent. Join PLP!