One hundred and five 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.

THE WORKING CLASS SEIZED STATE POWER UNDER THE COMMUNIST LEADERSHIP OF THE BOLSHEVIKS

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 Bolshevik Revolution
The Bolshevik Revolution brought the Soviet Union 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 had 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. As Soviet defenders retreated, they 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 learned
Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks suffered from many political weaknesses, which led to the return of capitalism to the Soviet Union. 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 entire wage system 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.

The Progressive Labor Party 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.

BROOKLYN, NY, October 8–Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) hosted a study group of over 20 teachers and students from different countries to discuss the role of grading in a capitalist system. The discussion opened up with a report back from communist teachers who were involved in a rally earlier that day to garner support for Raymond Chaluisant, an 18-year old Latin teen who was murdered by the kkkops in the Bronx in July (see  last issue).

This day of action and study marks PLP’s effort to win more teachers and students to the idea that capitalism uses divisions to keep workers and youth from uniting together and fighting back with communist revolution. In this study group, we put this idea into practice by fighting the division between students and teachers and between speakers of two different languages. At today’s study group, the leadership of a teacher in bringing nine students raised the stakes of what is possible to achieve that communist future. Students asked if they could bring friends to the next study group.

Grades conceal the horrors of capitalism
We asked students to take leadership in the study group by starting out the discussion with reflections about their lifelong relationship to grades. Teachers were challenged to engage students with vocabulary such as capitalism, exploitation, racism, and class consciousness to help them link their expertise regarding grades with revolutionary ideas.

Specifically we discussed an article “Grades Are Capitalism in Action. Let’s Get Them Out of Our Schools,” which argues that grades do not aid learning; instead, it perpetuates capitalism by spreading the lie of meritocracy. The school system prepares the next generation of workers for an inherently unequal system by teaching them that some deserve more than others based on productivity levels. Not only does this give capitalists more productive workers, it also makes workers blame themselves, rather than the system, for what they have, or don’t have in adulthood.

These ideas could be heard in some conversations: Some students reported feeling that their classmates–their future fellow workers–were sometimes their biggest obstacle in achieving better grades. These students, just like teachers, can be made to feel resentment toward each other rather than joining forces against their true enemy, the bosses.

There were also clear examples of class consciousness and solidarity amongst the students, as they also spoke about unfair grading practices they felt were keeping all students down and also making students feel depressed. They also spoke of racism and other forms of discrimination affecting students in schools.

Teachers shared that grading hinders, rather than aids, their ability to teach: Time that could otherwise be used providing useful feedback with students is instead spent mechanically giving students a letter or number that lacks context, an explanation, or productive feedback.

Ultimately, grades give students practice in having their labor exploited by the bosses. They are used to sort students—into As, Bs, Cs, or Fs—and to determine which group of bosses will exploit which students when they join the workforce.

Grades, Big Fascists, and World War III
World War III is on the horizon and understanding what role the working-class students play is crucial. The U.S. ruling class is facing serious consequences if unable to fend off its imperialist Russian rival in Ukraine, and the Russian ruling class is showing no signs of backing down.

Meanwhile, regardless of the grades they receive in school, millions of youth around the world are being won to share the Ukrainian flag, the Russian flag, or the flag of their nationality. Many students with “bad” grades see joining the military as the only possible alternative to a future of suffering within the working class.

Meanwhile, their classmates who get the “best” grades are won to either fight for their national bosses or become the professional workers who ask their fellow workers to be the cannon fodder in an imminent world war instead.

While Big Fascists (the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class that is dependent on its imperialist empire) amp up for World War III, Small Fascist Republicans are fighting to make students’ education more of an individual family’s choice, because they have little interest in maintaining the Big Fascists’ expensive project of controlling students through a united public school system. By Small Fascists, we mean the more domestically oriented bosses whose interests are less tied to controlling the flow of foreign oil and hence are less willing to make sacrifices (heavy taxes) for a boots-on-the-ground war against rivals Russia and China. 

Meanwhile, Big Fascists are co-opting working-class impulses for multiracial unity to provide “equal opportunity” for testing for all students. These tests produce grades which are turned on, turned off, and recalibrated based on the needs of these misleaders to pacify the families they say they serve. This is necessary when the capitalist system dives into the types of crises, such as a pandemic, that make parents and students reveal how useless capitalist education is.

For students and teachers, silently accepting grades means accepting the type of self-blame necessary for Big Fascist bosses to implement wider fascism. Fascism is a capitalist system in decay where they can no longer maintain a liberal democracy and instead resort to more direct control and state terror. This includes disciplining their own ranks and building more nationalism and allegiance for the lesser-evil bosses to “save” workers from the Small Fascists.

In order to succeed, the Big Fascists need the open support of a necessary portion of the working class. When students and teachers alike are taught to blame students for their “bad” grades without understanding the system’s role in creating that reality, they are supporting the bosses’ potential for greater fascism in the future.

Healthy communist struggle and evaluation
In a communist education system, there would be no need for grades. Education and training itself would be the priority, not the division of students into a racist hierarchy for the bosses’ profit interests.

Workers from all industries would have more time to focus on the youth, build their confidence, and create a safe environment where theories can be tested in the real world and evaluated. The lifetime process of fighting to learn, and learning to fight for the needs of the international working class would be our system of education. Join us!

Washington, DC, October 19—Over 100 protestors rallied in defiance of a possible U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined this action, making contacts with fighters and bringing revolutionary communist politics to many participants by distributing CHALLENGE widely and pushing political leadership condemning inter-imperialist rivalry. A U.S. invasion of Haiti is bad for workers in Haiti and bad for workers internationally - PLP says smash racist borders!

There is economic and political disarray that has led to hunger, deaths in the street and even the return of cholera. The unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry and 18 members of his cabinet—firmly supported by the Joe Biden White House—have called for international military forces to intervene in Haiti to bring “order” to a society in upheaval. Henry had recently cut fuel subsidies, doubling the price of gasoline, which is now in short supply.  The government has also called on the U.S. to send money, weapons, and police trainers to prop up the government and money. The U.S. is open to this. In addition, the Haitian government has called on the United Nations to intervene militarily.

But history shows us there is no such thing as "humanitarian intervention" in the world imperialist system. U.S. and UN troops  occupied and intervened for over 100 years in Haiti, only causing ever greater impoverishment, barbaric violence, dictatorship, fascist repression, and super-exploitation of the working class. The last time the UN invaded, they left a trail of blood. The 13-year U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) brought cholera to Haiti, which killed 10,000 people and sickened more than 850,000 (AP News, 10/18). The MINUSTAH also raped and sexually exploited women as well as children (Al Jazeera, 10/6/17). THIS is what they mean by “order” and “stability.”

We can see other examples of the U.S. empire’s global trail of destruction in Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and more. Thus another U.S. invasion is a clear and present danger that will plunge the workers in Haiti deeper into the capitalist abyss. Nevertheless, as the CHALLENGE, 10/12 article chronicled, workers in Haiti are militantly fighting back: “Workers and students, fed up with their daily conditions, have blocked the streets in various neighborhoods, attacked politicians, and broken into and liberated goods from some businesses that have exploited them.”

Oust Henry and his  U.S. gangsters
On October 17, thousands of workers across Haiti flooded the streets in every state and district holding banners rejecting imperialist intervention, calling for the ouster of Henry (AP News, 10/19). We stand with workers in Haiti in the struggle against the monstrosity that is U.S. imperialism for workers domestically and internationally.

Workers are right to demand Henry’s resignation, and we need to go beyond fighting for better reforms or to remove one imperialist puppet or another. As long as the twin evils of capitalism and imperialism exist, workers will be trapped in a vicious cycle of protesting to elect new champions of exploitation and misery to do the bidding of the Haitian rulers and their imperialist partners.

The international working class has the power to put an end to the merry-go-round of death by smashing the profit-grubbing and blood thirsty imperialist system that kills and exploits our class siblings around the world. WE DON’T NEED TO VOTE FOR THE BEST CAPITALIST SERVANT!

The working class must reject the bosses' deadly democracy and poisonous nationalist ideology, and organize in the mass movements. We need to build class conscious, antisexist, antiracist fightback led by Black workers and working women around the world. We need to consolidate the energy and lessons we learn in every battle against the capitalist imperialist rulers into a powerful revolutionary fighting force capable of turning the imperialist bosses' next global crisis into a class war for communism.

NEW YORK CITY, October 12—Hundreds of retired New York City workers rallied outside of city hall today in a continuing struggle to prevent reductions in their health benefits. Retirees have been fighting for over a year against a plan to force them into privatized medical insurance, the Medicare Advantage plan, rather than traditional medicare coverage with city paid secondary insurance. The original plan was for premiums of $191.00 monthly per person to be charged for those who wanted to opt out of the Medicare Advantage plan. This racist plan meant that low income retirees (disproportionately Black and Latin) would be unable to afford to opt out. Angry retirees understood that Medicare Advantage plans rip off the medicare program in order to insure maximum profits. This was found to be the case by the U.S. inspector general (NYT, 10/8). Retirees also feared that needed tests and treatments would be denied or delayed by profit seeking private insurance companies, again found to be the case in a federal audit (NYT,  4/28). Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have pointed out that capitalist medicine is dangerous for us all, be it government or private run systems. In a communist run system, medical care would be determined by need, not cost or profit. In the heat of battle, we need to build the PLP so that the alternative of communist run health care becomes real.

PL'ers involved in this struggle have pointed out how “friends'' in the city government, led by the Democratic Party (first by Mayor De Blasio and now by Mayor Adams), have teamed up with the main city worker union leaders, the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC) to put retirees into a Medicare (dis)Advantage plan. As the old saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies!

Earlier this year, a court ruling allowed the city’s new Medicare Advantage plan to begin but denied the city the right to charge premiums to those who wanted to stay with traditional Medicare and a city sponsored secondary insurance they now enjoy. That decision is now being appealed by the city and MLC. Meanwhile the city and MLC have hatched a plan to change the local law upon which the court case was decided.

When PL’ers chant  “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan, all are part of the bosses’ plan” we are pointing out how the ruling class uses both state power and their allies to attack the working class. In this struggle, we have seen how the bosses have used their state apparatus and their allies in the unions to attack retirees.

Today's demonstration focused on the plan to change local administrative code 12-126, to undermine the court’s finding earlier this year. We are pointing out to current workers that this change could mean the ending of premium free health coverage for them as well as worsening the health coverage for retirees. Retirees once again are appealing to local politicians in the New York City council to block this change. Relying on the goodness of politicians is a dubious plan at best. It is leading us into the arms of the ruling class. Capitalism rules by many means. Sometimes with an open iron fist. More often by getting workers to follow the leadership of enemies of the working class who lead mass movements like the unions and the Democratic and Republican political parties.

PL’ers stand with our sisters and brothers in fighting back. While doing so, we unmask our class enemies wherever they are and whoever they may be.