For centuries, schools in France were run by the Catholic church. It was only in 1882 that the promotion of religion in public schools was ended. Ever since then, keeping religion out of the schools has been a left-wing position.
The fascist National Front (FN) copies the Hitler-era Nazis.  The FN tries to co-opt left-wing causes. This is one way they attract workers disgusted with the broken promises of the Socialist Party and other fake left organizations.
The latest case in point was on April 4, when FN leader Marine Le Pen announced on RTL radio that the fascists would begin serving pork again in school canteens in the ten cities where the FN controls the city council. She claimed that Muslims were preventing non-Muslim students from eating pork because Islam forbids eating pork. She said the FN would defend the exclusion of religion from public schools.
Journalists from Libération newspaper discovered that it was all a big lie. Pork is on the menu in all French schools. In schools with Muslim and Jewish students, but there is often also a school lunch without pork.
The basis for the big lie was the fact that, for one week in 2011, in the town of Séméac (population 4,700), the school canteen only served non-pork meals – not because Muslims had imposed religious dietary laws, but because of a temporary kitchen problem that prevented the chef from preparing two different meals. The fascists used this to create a rumor to stir up hatred between Muslim and non-Muslim workers.
This is a typical example of the fascist technique of the big lie. Workers everywhere, and not just in France, must beware of this. In particular, the fascists are very clever at spreading their lies and rumors on the Internet.
Anti-fascist from France

The following letter is from a comrade in Haiti who heard one of his United States comrades had some health problems. She was touched by his comradely concern and revolutionary outlook and thought to share it with our CHALLENGE readers.

I just received the news of your health. I am moved to my innermost being. But I do not doubt your courage and your will to win for our class, despite illness and bad news about this “world without heart!”
Comrade, we are often betrayed by the size of our tasks. So much arduous work, worries and heartbreak to change the world from top to bottom spoils our physique. The long journeys here and there to help develop class conscience in our class, wear down our strength. But there is always the hope of our future that animates us, despite the daily task which becomes more difficult. Especially when there are borders between us, and we are divided by sexism, and racism kills us, the unjust system we live under tries to undermine us, then our solidarity becomes increasingly necessary and urgent.I regret frankly that I cannot come to see you physically. It is only possible to me to write to you.
Dear friend, I won’t keep you too long, just want to let you know that we are continuing the struggle here. The rulers of the world do not know now that they are going to have to face the wrath of the entire international working class. That those of us who do not own the means of production, those without, will rise up one day to improve not only the material conditions of our lives, but also to fulfill our destiny and rule the earth. The stakes are enormous. But we will take the risk! It continues until the final victory .
My sincere greetings to all our comrades and friends. On to May Day!
Compère Général Soleil

12 Years a Slave is the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man living in Saratoga, New York around 1841. He is kidnapped and sold into slavery. The film does a good job of depicting the horrors of slavery, from beatings to the humiliations of being treated like animals, with men and women paraded naked for potential buyers to inspect. I watched the movie with clenched fists and tight jaws — I wanted to see the slavers punished for their wrongdoing.
For all the degradation the slaves went through, the situation cried out for scenes of rebellion, but they are missing. There were many in those years that could have been referred to. Northup and some other kidnapped slaves do talk of a rebellion on the slave ship taking them to the South. It doesn’t happen, though: Although Solomon says “The crew is fairly small...if it were well-planned, “I believe they could be strong armed.”  Another replies, “Three can’t stand against the whole crew , the rest are N****** born and bred slaves. N****** ain’t got the stomach for a fight, not a damn one.” The movie illustrates racist division rather than unity. It ignores the unity of many white women and men — indentured servants — with slaves.
The movie also failed to show the critical role of women. Fighters such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet
Tubman, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, were crucial in the fight against slavery, revealing that the fight against racism and sexism is one intertwined battle.
Personal vs. Collective Freedom
The movie also portrays Solomon as depending on the legal system for his personal freedom — if only he could get his “papers” from New York he could prove that he was a free man. The slave traders mocked him in this quest. This movie is concerned with the freedom of one slave while the whole system of slavery was causing misery for millions. It was not the legal system or a court or Abraham Lincoln that ended slavery; it took hundreds of slave rebellions, the abolitionists and a civil war to end it.
Never in mainstream media has the real story of Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and John Brown been told. In fact, there are over 400 accounts of recorded slave rebellions and revolts in the United States. Instead, the story of Solomon Northup highlights a single courageous black man’s struggle to survive slavery only to wait 12 years to be freed by a stroke of luck and a sympathetic Canadian.
The end of slavery was not a simple death, either. The racism it rested on continued, and so did the power of the plantation-owning  aristocrats. Within a few years after the Civil War ended they were back in power, using state, local and Federal governments, their courts and the Ku Klux Klan to spread racist terror throughout the South, ushering in the era of Jim Crow. They used intimidation and lynching to enforce power to terrorize the black working-class population — and to warn off any whites who understood the need for unity between black and white workers.
The power of workers fighting back together can be seen in one incident: the attempted judicial lynching of nine young black men by the state of Alabama in 1931. Known as the Scottsboro Boys, they were arrested and tried on fake charges of raping two white women on a train. Even though one of the accusers admitted it was a lie, within two weeks their trial was over and they were sentenced to death.
But the International Labor Defense (ILD), led by the U.S. Communist Party, took their case, determined that “they shall not die.” Unlike the movie, they used but didn’t depend on the legal system. The ILD provided the lawyers and the legal fight; the Communist Party organized mass demonstrations around the world, in Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Soviet Union and across the U.S. The campaign saved them from the electric chair — but even though they were innocent some of them still served many years in jail.
In the movie 12 Years a Slave, it is a big letdown to see one man freed by a sheriff, while all the others on the plantation are left in bondage. The sharp contrast to the case of the Scottsboro Boys, and the mass actions led by communists, exposing Jim Crowism to the whole world, show us how to fight against slavery and racism, and that fight continues to this day.

Almost 45 years after the reversal of the Chinese Revolution, China has emerged as a major capitalist power and appears to be on a collision course with U.S. imperialism. The Chinese Revolution was one of the great achievements of the 20th Century — an advance over the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
In 1967, more than 40 million workers, soldiers, and students launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). It was an effort to stop the return to capitalism in China. Ultimately it was defeated, in part because the Red Guards and other revolutionary forces were unable to organize a new revolutionary communist party.
The following account shows the need for further advances in the international revolutionary movement. Wages must be eliminated, along with the special oppression of women. Above all, we must create a worker-run society based on one unwavering principle:
From each according to commitment, to each according to need.
Progressive Labor Party, in our infancy at the time of the GPCR, was a fraternal party of the Chinese Communist Party. And we supported the GPCR. The defeat of the GPCR and the reversal of the Chinese revolution signaled the end of the old communist movement. These setbacks plunged the international working class into the Dark Night we have struggled through for more than two generations.
But Dark Night will have its end. World War I gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution. World War II give birth to the Chinese Revolution. PLP, organizing across all borders, aims to make the next imperialist war the last one, with worldwide communist revolution.

This is a story of a collectively owned village factory. In the winter of 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the eighth production team of my Village decided to set up a metal shop. The team employed two old farmers who had worked with sheet metal before, and three other people with no experience in metal work. In need of a site, they rented a vacant three-room house from my family.
The workshop was to produce metal pieces for both ornamental and practical purposes — handles for drawers, doorknobs, and so on. The production team bought a truckload of leftover metal pieces from a factory in Qingdao City for very little money, and began to make their products with simple metal cutters and hammers.
The products sold very well on the local market. Shortly before the Chinese New Year that winter, every family in the production team — including those taking care of the farm work — received a collective bonus from the extra earnings from the metal shop.
Noting the success of this enterprise, village leaders proposed expanding the metal shop into a bigger operation. The production team leaders agreed, so the metal shop moved into the village-owned motel, which for years had catered to travelers with horse-drawn carts. There were more than a dozen rooms and three to four acres of yard space. The village invested in more tools and hired a few more workers.
Apart from maintaining the original product line, the new workshop also sought to expand production into other areas. The village sent several young people to a farming machine factory, a state-owned enterprise about three kilometers from the village, to be trained for different industrial skills. Some learned to assemble or operate lathes, others to weld with electricity or weld and cut with gas torches.
As a state-owned enterprise, the factory’s mission was in part to help rural areas in whatever way they could. The factory leadership trained village youth for free for six months. At the end of the training period, they donated to the village all the tools the young people had been trained to use: an old lathe, a planer, a drill, and a thirty-ton press, along with many smaller tools. The factory also donated the parts needed to assemble two newer lathes and a sixty-ton press. With these tools and more than a dozen trained workers, the factory’s technical capacity was greatly expanded.
The village factory also received contributions from other factories, including some electric motors. The political climate at the time eased the transfer of old equipment from state-owned enterprises to the villages for collective use, most of it free of charge.
At the time, most tractors in China’s rural areas had no shelter for the driver’s head. The village factory set out to make a metal cab for the driver with a roof and two doors. It shielded the driver from the sun and the cold in winter, and became a highly popular product. The line of tractor drivers desiring the metal cab was very long; people had to wait for months for their turn.
The cab was designed by Huang Jianguo together with Liu Jiawen and Liu Jiazhou. Huang, a middle-school graduate, drew the blueprints; Liu Jiawen and Liu Jiazhou developed the manufacturing process. The factory made good money from this product line for a number of years. More important, the process trained many young people in working with sheet metal. Soon the factory gained a reputation for innovative practices. It took on the name of Mohan (Welding and Fixing) Factory.
Soon Mohan began making ventilation fans for textile factories in Qingdao. The textile industry was expanding at the time and needed a great quantity of these fans for the health and safety of the textile workers. A group of our factory workers specialized in making this product. They cut the sheet metal into the right-sized pieces and used our sixty-ton press to shape them. Then they welded these blades onto the axis. The production line was streamlined and standardized, and the products were continuously shipped out to Qingdao.
Our county was on the coast, where fishing was a traditional industry. At the time, fishermen still used sails, which were dangerous when the boats were caught in storms. When I was still a young child, a serious storm took the lives of 70 fishermen. The county government was determined to modernize the industry by replacing sails with diesel engines.
Our factory got the contract to produce transmission boxes for the fishing boats. Two high school graduates, Liu Kefeng and Li Yuxun, were assigned the task. With blueprints from a state-owned enterprise in Rongcheng County, they began to figure out how to make the different parts and assemble them into a transmission box.
In 1973, a major contractor wanted to manufacture two ventilation blowers to improve workers’ conditions. These blowers were huge, as large as small houses, and the contractor was not sure we’d be able to do it. After their technicians inspected our equipment, they said they did not believe we could do the work. (In fact, at first our own business manager wasn’t sure we could do it. One of the visiting technicians was an eighth-rank metal worker, the highest in China at the time. He said that many factories with greater technical capacity than ours had turned the contract down.
Relying on the Workers
But our factory had a secret weapon, one of its original five workers: Wang Xuejin. In his early forties at the time, he could not draw or read a blueprint. But Wang had a rare knack when it came to innovation. Whenever the factory had a technical difficulty, the leaders would discuss it with him. He would work on it by drawing some lines on the ground with a stick. Then he would chat with other people in the factory and work on it some more. Sometimes he would have to think about it for a long time. Once Wang had developed an idea, he would call in a few technically savvy people to work with him and draw the blueprints.
The factory leaders badly wanted the contract for the two big blowers, but first they had to be sure the factory could handle it. The factory manager explained the difficulties to Wang. The main obstacle was that the factory lacked a press powerful enough to form the sheet metal into a horn-shaped part that drew air through the blowers. This one part was more than two meters in diameter at its smaller end and close to three meters at its larger end!
The manager asked Wang to find a way to circumvent the problem. Wang considered it for a whole morning by himself, then brainstormed with a few other workers in the factory. Toward the end of the afternoon, they managed to draw a simple blueprint showing how the part could be made without heavy equipment.
The factory manager went back to the top technician and told him he was now certain they’d be able to meet the contractor’s three-month deadline for the blowers. We got the contract, since no one else could be found to do the work. But the technician was less than absolutely convinced we could do it, either. He left with the words that he would return in one month to check on our progress.
Next issue: The author graduates from high school, becomes a factory worker; a medical emergency; wages and collectivity.