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).

NEW YORK CITY, July 3—It's sellout contract season at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) New York City Transit Authority section (NYCTA). The boss-loving TWU Local 100 misleadership hurt the workers who keep the city's trains and buses running.

As with just about any "contract" under capitalism, this one is a racist slap in the face to NYCTA's mainly Black and Latin workers. It provides pathetic, below inflation wage increases, does nothing to improve the challenging time off process for some departments, forces employees to work even more hours, and joins up with the bosses' for profit Medicare Advantage scheme. With imperialist war with China and Russia impending overseas, the MTA must satisfy its Wall Street debt owners off the backs of both its ridership and workers.  Local 100 is all too happy to oblige them in that goal with this pathetic offering.

NYC subway workers, 170 plus of whom died from Covid-19 moving essential workers while the racist MTA bosses disallowed us Personal Protective Equipment due to fears of "public perception," must realize that there will never be a "fair” or just contract under a system that places profit over the working class. The only way for transit workers to get what they and all workers deserve is to join together to smash capitalism and fight for a communist revolution, on and off the rails!

Paying off debt on workers’ backs
Local 100 “leaders'' are performing their class role, working hand in hand with the MTA bosses, to repay the system’s $48 billion in debt to Wall Street bankers. Decades of neglect by the city’s bosses left the subway system in a decrepit state in the 1980s (Gothamist, 6/21). During this period, MTA leadership for the first time approached profiteering banks, all too eager to lend financial handouts. This ballooning debt has continually been used to finance new station expansions, train cars, buses and track, to be repaid through increased tolls, taxes and fares. Or in other words, by the working class!

Today, the amount the MTA will pay on this debt will represent 40 percent of its entire toll and fare revenue, a number that was less than four percent in 1984.

This means the bosses' banks have written blank checks to maintain the trains and buses in a barely good state of repair. And workers are perennially forced to endure the racist service cuts that come with this crushing debt. Those cuts are set to become even worse after ridership tanked during the pandemic, as the MTA admitted to its lenders in April (Gothamist, 6/21).

Now, with another racist fare hike on the horizon (New York Times, 5/22), which would bring in more money to finance bosses’ pockets and barely the system itself, Local 100 cannot avoid the contradiction inherent in every union today: it must partner in tandem with management to produce an agreement that harms both MTA workers and the ridership!

Forcing workers to toil more
The tentative agreement expands on an employee availability clause, introduced in a previous contract, to force employees to work an additional five days. Once this goal is reached, “the parties will implement gainsharing of any additional improvement,” according to the language. This means that the union will share these profits with the MTA bosses.

Employees who work in the Rapid Transit Operations (RTO) division, that includes train operators and conductors, already have to compete against their coworkers using an automated phone system 20 days in advance, just to receive a day off. Many times, these day-off requests are denied.

Many in RTO use their sick days–which are always granted immediately–as a workaround.  Management is directly responsible for many MTA workers being out, imposing harsh disciplinary suspensions and medically restricting them and making them go through hoops to return. Many workers were also out sick during the pandemic’s worst days (Spectrum News, 3/24/20).

But of course, this clause makes no mention of those factors. And as long as the trains run, why would the bosses care about the well being of those operating them? A common demand that we have repeatedly expressed to the union in years past was for more “mental” health days. Many of our trips lack sufficient recovery time and the environment we work in can be mentally challenging at times. With the agreement,  Local 100 not only is attacking the workers it represents, but the working class as a whole, as they will deal with a more tired operating workforce.

Contract privatizes Medicare for healthcare bosses’ pockets
The union is also joining city efforts to strip workers of government Medicare for the racist Medicare Advantage (MA) plan (see CHALLENGE, 6/10/21). The agreement,  if ratified, would eliminate the traditional option and force MTA retirees to choose one of two MA plans. In response to a backlash, union bosses have released statements claiming that the two plans will not result in diminished service and will be better than regular Medicare. But we know that Medicare Advantage places control in the hands of for profit private insurance companies that are known to deny care in several instances (New York Times, 4/28). The switch would also save the MTA money, as the government subsidizes Advantage plans more than the traditional one.

Flyers promoting the contract have said that it has no givebacks, but this effort to sell out mostly Black and Latin retirees (which was included in the document of the MTA’s proposals given to the TWU in May) clearly proves they’re lying to the membership!

Fighting back
Even with the strong likelihood that most departments will ratify the contract, as has been the case historically, many of our coworkers have denounced it on online Facebook groups and in our crew rooms. This is an opportunity to use that working class anger towards something even better than a better contract. Progressive Labor Party members in transit have been active in discussing the contract with coworkers, pushing them to vote no in higher numbers than usual, especially in the RTO department. These conversations also allow us to bring up the Party as the only way to win in the end.

The MTA workers who transport four of the city’s eight million residents daily are in a unique position to strike a blow against the bosses who generate billions in profit from our labor and tell us we need to give back more concessions, when we gave the ultimate concession during the pandemic’s darkest days: our lives!

But the union leadership will always strangle that  that potential, which is why we must fight for a workers’ world.

HAITI, July 2—Since January 2023, the two-year “Humanitarian Parole” program has offered Haitians, Venezuelans, Cubans and Salvadorans the possibility of entering the U.S. without going through the traditional “illegal” channels. This program, which in reality aims to reduce the number of migrants crossing the U.S. borders, has been praised by many Haitian workers and others who only dream of fleeing a country plagued by gang terror, economic misery, and political instability. Even children only talk about traveling. But the reality is that U.S. imperialism prefers to camouflage the problems that we are facing more than to really come to our rescue. In the capitalist world, solidarity is not an option: the big fish have no mercy for the little ones—the countries of the global north have no compassion for the countries of the global south. Their only aim is to squeeze profits off the cheap labor of migrants.

“I can't wait, I can't wait any longer for my approval to come,” admits a young graduate in legal sciences who is doing his second year of internship as a lawyer. He draws up a list of others like himself who have sponsors in the U.S. and have already applied to the program. He adds that many of these applicants, who have been waiting six months in limbo, are in danger of developing mental disorders from the stress, in particular depression. They are living on the edge, fearful of the insecurity created by the gangs and the rampant inflation that increasingly impoverishes them and their families. And there are others who can not find sponsors because the conditions set by Biden & Co. are very difficult for sponsoring friends and family members.

Those who do manage to leave come from all sections of society: workers (employed and unemployed), professionals, public and private executives, teachers and students. “Our country is pushing us out; we are not needed here,” said one person interviewed for this article. “It’s like we are in a pressure cooker, and the chief chef has opened the valve to let some steam out. This won’t solve the problems that the Haitian masses are facing because of the profit system.”

This is the march to Canaan, the Promised Land. Some people say it is a forced exodus even believing that the U.S. has hidden interests. Many know that what waits for them on the other side is not the gold in the streets but rather more racism, unemployment or low-wage jobs, underserved schools and hospitals, crowded and overpriced housing. So many deplore the program, but the contradiction is that it is hard to resist the urge to take advantage of it. They hope they will be able to fade into the population after the two-year “parole” ends.

U.S. Imperialists Can’t Find Other Countries to Intervene/Invade Haiti
For several months now, the “international community,” that is the imperialists and their local lackeys, have been dithering on finding a solution to the crisis in Haiti. None of the countries in the region is willing to give in to U.S. demands to field an invasionary force to restore some semblance of stability. The U.S. bosses’ decline in influence in the region is evident. Even Canada, a long-time imperialist player in Haiti, is hedging; the best they could come up with is setting up an office in the neighboring Dominican Republic to monitor the situation. The Dominican government rejected that idea, and both countries issued a toothless statement regarding their commitment to stability in Haiti.

The politicians in the Haitian bourgeoisie continue to act as if they are wearing blinders. Most working class people understand that these politicians are not their friends but are looking out for their own personal interests, looking for any opportunity for some sort of power grab. The local bourgeoisie crawls on hands and knees, in search of favor from the imperialist powers and multinational organizations.

The only solution is to stand up and fight back
You can feel the level of insecurity and fear in the masses. So when a Progressive Labor Party comrade says that she is not going to look for a sponsor to leave, that she is willing to “fight back against the capitalist system that has created this mess,” she is often met with skepticism. But using patience and all the tools of historical and dialectical materialism that she has learned in PLP cadre schools and study groups, she can say that the workers of Haiti have fought for their liberation in the past and will do so again. Capitalism and imperialism have built-in contradictions that make life a misery for one, very large class of human beings who produce all value in society. That we have not just a few Polish soldiers (who deserted Napoleon’s army during the Haitian Revolution and fought on the side of the enslaved workers), but will fight for the solidarity and unity of the entire international working class. We will build a new revolutionary communist movement that fights resolutely in the interests of our class.

This young comrade can make the difference in our ability to organize workers for communism and an egalitarian society! We have taken modest steps, engaging with our local populations in fighting against “food insecurity”—hunger through collective kitchens; organizing to provide masks and public sanitation kiosks against the Covid-19 pandemic; working together with our neighbors to rebuild homes and infrastructure after the 2021 earthquake in our area. These are all struggles that our Party initiated along with our friends to combat the local bosses who neglect the needs of workers and line their own pockets with ‘international aid.”

We can do better and we can do more. There are many more like her who would like to maintain their conviction and their composure in such troubling social, economic and political situations. In the current chaos, the ideological foresight of the members of the PLP is revolutionary. Raising class consciousness through struggle and political education is a necessity for the growth of our Party. This will be our goal this summer in our cadre school.

Long live our struggle, long live PLP. Onwards to the final victory!

The murder of Nahel M. on June 27th by a traffic cop in Nanterre, France set off a nationwide rebellion against racist police murders. Even after the cop who shot Nahel was arrested, people’s anger and cynicism about the system continued to explode. This multiracial rebellion, led by teenage Black and North African workers, spread to more than 200 cities and towns across France. They responded with violence as the police attacked the young rebels in the streets and arrested more than 3000 people over five nights of demonstrations. The rebellion in France is inspiring as it shows the potential power of the working class. At the same time, like so many uprisings before, without an organized communist party and a political vision of fighting for a workers led society it ends as quickly as it began and leaves many people cynical about fighting back.

Nahel was shot by the police at point blank range. Initially the police lied and said he had tried to run them down, but video exposed their lies and showed them murdering Nahel by shooting him through the driver side window as the car started to drive away.

At first French President Emmanuel Macron tried to ignore the rebellion. He was recorded attending  a concert on the second night. But the clashes between young people, angered at the ongoing racism of French capitalism and the police, spread beyond the working-class areas and thousands of people marched in the center of Paris. Macron, who visited police barracks to support his racist killers, looked to the police and the more fascist elements in the country to put down the rebellion.

The rebellion exposed, once again the extreme racism of capitalism. Nanterre is a working-class suburb that has a large number of people of North African descent as well as Black workers. Youth unemployment in Nanterre is at 23 percent (CNN, 7/1) and in France more than 20 percent of teenagers live below the poverty line. Many of them live in suburbs like Nanterre. Instead of the French bosses creating jobs for young people, the area is heavily policed. Across France the police have used identity check powers to harass and terrorize the working class. Young men perceived as Black or North African are 20 times as likely to be stopped by the police than the rest of the population (Guardian, 6/30).

As the demonstrations have died down the French ruling class has organized pro-government rallies across the country. These “restore order” rallies have been led by the most openly racist elements in France, including the fascist Marie Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) which is calling for more prisons and to have people that are arrested for any reason to be evicted from public housing. The working class can’t rely on the bosses to fix capitalism. Instead of making things better the bosses respond with more racism.

These rebellions have shown once again that the working class has the power to shut down and overthrow capitalism. It has also shown that this will only happen by the building of a revolutionary communist movement that can fight to take power through communist revolution.