This is part seven of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, which resulted in only fortifying the bosses’ system and laid the basis for the corruption of the old communist movement.
In the Progressive Labor Party, we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers’ leadership is essential. That is the only way our class can destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism. The following is a story of one such leader, Vaughn Costine Love.

Vaughn Costine Love was born in Dayton, TN in 1907. After three years of college on a football scholarship, he was injured and moved to New York.
Moving to New York led Love on a path toward political struggle. There he became involved with the Federal Theater Project, the International Labor Defense, which provided legal defense for Black struggles in the South, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, the Southern Labor Committee, and the International Workers Order.  
All of these groups were antiracist organizations with many Communist Party (CP) members. These struggles led to Love joining the Communist Party in 1934.
About this period, Love said:

From the time I was a child there was a movement on the part of Black Americans for full recognition of their rights, for full opportunity to advance themselves … When I came to New York in 1929 I found large numbers of Blacks searching for opportunities in art, music, and many other fields.

Love later recalled:

When Hitler came along with his Nuremberg laws, we knew that this meant death to us of the darker races. Anti-fascism had a very wide appeal.

When civil war broke out in Spain, Love remembered,

We didn't know too much about the
Spaniards, but we knew that they were fighting against fascism, and that fascism was the enemy of all black aspirations.
From Barcelona Love and others went to Albacete and formed the first squads of the George Washington Battalion.
We thought, “We have to get to the front and kill these Fascists!” But the most revolutionary of all were the seamen; they had just come from a strike. Most of the kids had some background in Marxist education or in the trade union movement. My background in the movement in Harlem gave me a certain outlook. I was through with the system. I knew it didn’t work, and I was thinking in terms of changing society – to change the world.

In Spain, Love was assigned to the first company of the Washington Battalion and served as his section's political leader. He fought through the Brunete campaign and remained with the first company after the Lincoln and Washington battalions were merged.
Once, in Spain, Love encountered a Spanish peasant. Unfamiliar with Black people, the peasant tried to wipe the dirt off Love’s face. When Love explained that he was a Negro from North America, the peasant hugged him and exclaimed, “Oh, los esclavos! Si! Si!"
About this Love later said: "they knew there was Black slavery in America, 'los esclavos,' and that they were only one little step away from us, los esclavos."
After Brunete, Love was sent to Officers Training School and then rejoined the Lincoln-Washington Battalion, where he assumed leadership of a section of his former unit, Company One. On January 5, 1938, four days after the XVth Brigade entered the lines at Teruel, Love was wounded in action. He was still hospitalized at the time of the Retreats in March and April 1938 and his hospital group was among the last to cross the bridge at Tortosa before the bridge was destroyed in the face of the advancing Nationalists.
After the Retreats Love rejoined the decimated Lincoln-Washington Battalion as a section leader and helped train the young Spanish conscripts who were brought in to bring the unit up to strength.
During the Ebro Offensive (July – November, 1938), Love was again wounded. After a short hospitalization, he returned to the Battalion and was appointed Chief of the Headquarters Section. Love remained with the Battalion through the fighting in the Sierra Cabals and until the Internationals were withdrawn on September 24, 1938. His final rank was Acting Lieutenant.
Wounded three times, Love said proudly:

Every individual soldier had the personal integrity and ability to do whatever had to be done. We never had a good meal and we had the worst conditions. But we had the solidarity of all the progressive forces.

In the United States Love resumed his work with the Communist Party. When the United States entered World War II, he joined the Army. He said: “It wasn’t a different war; we were fighting the same enemy.”
The Abraham Lincoln Battalion volunteered as a group to fight fascism in World War II. “Of course, it was an interracial outfit,” Love said later, “and the government turned it down.”

When they refused our volunteer unit, each one of us, Black and white volunteered for the Jim Crow army individually.

 Love served in the Quartermaster Corps, advancing to the rank of Sergeant. He was wounded in France and repatriated.
After the war, Love married and lived in New York balancing political activities with earning a living. Like many other communists, he was persecuted by the U.S. government. He later said: “A Lincoln vet was considered a hard-core subversive.”

The ruling class in this country has never forgiven the world communist movement for the leading role it played, for having the foresight and understanding to bring things into focus and lead them in the right direction at the right time.

He died on October 27, 1990. He was a communist till the end.

Sources: ALBA volunteers database; Brandt,  Joe Black Americans in the Spanish People’s War Against Fascism 1936-1939; Collum, Berch, eds,
African Americans in the Spanish Civil War.

It does not end. The victims of one mass shooting aren’t even buried and we are faced with another.  The shootings over the last three weeks have been too much to bear. Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, Philadelphia. It has been a devastating time. An unbearable time. Yet as hard as it is to think about, we have to take on the task.
Our future and the futures of our children are being shaped at this moment. We must engage in the struggle because, as we mourn the deaths of the children and workers and innocent people, the rulers’ propaganda machine is trying to shift the blame away from the bosses and onto the working class. All while desperately trying to salvage the murderers in blue, the police who proved once again to be useless when it comes to helping the working class.
U.S. capitalism was forged in genocide and blood of Indigenous people and enslavement of Black workers. The violence we witnessed in Uvalde, Buffalo,and Philadelphia, are all reflections of a violent system spiraling into deadly decay. Individuals, motivated by the racist, anti-working class and individualist ideology, kill members of our class.
 The bosses’ laws and their racist cops will never bring security to the working class. Our security, our safety, our future lies in relying on our class to smash the capitalist system that is breeding this hatred, and in its place building a society that values the working class: communism.
Rampant anti-working-class ideology
In Buffalo an 18 year-old, fueled by extreme racism and looking to kill Black people murdered 10 of our brothers and sisters in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood. In Uvalde, another teenager, deranged with hatred, walked into a school and killed 19 children and two teachers. In Tulsa, a mentally ill patient took out his anger at the healthcare system that couldn’t treat his pain by killing the surgeon and three others in the hospital. Most recently in Philadelphia, unknown people, without any concern for others, started a shootout following a dispute. In the middle of a massive crowd, outside bars and restaurants, they killed three and wounded 14 others, almost all of whom were bystanders. The bosses point their bloody fingers at the just individuals or guns or call for more background checks. But in all the cases, the driving force was capitalism, a system where workers' lives are routinely cheapened and discarded for the sake of profit.
While the media plays the photos of the children of Uvalde who were robbed of their lives, workers are murdered by capitalism daily. In the U.S. there are over 17 million children officially below the poverty line, a 41 percent increase since last year when the child tax credit was ended (Center on Poverty and Social Policy, 2/17). The bosses’ schools fail to educate our children, and the health care system fails to give us the care we need. Covid-19  exposed the complete disregard the bosses have for the working class as the poorest and the elderly, the most vulnerable of the working class, were killed by exposure to the disease to keep the economy open, while the wealthy sheltered in safety. We live in a society where our class has been made invisible and left to die. In a society that makes the working-class expendable, killing workers through attacks motivated by racism, mental illness and individualism becomes inevitable.
Bosses shifting blame to the working class
Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, Philadelphia. The bosses might as well have pulled those triggers themselves. Those shooters were filled with the bosses’ contempt for the lives of the working class. Now the ruling class' response is to attack our class. The news carries the message that we must scrutinize our children to see if they are killers. We must watch our neighbors and blame each other for these terrible murders. That is how the bosses are turning us against our own class, the working class.
Will they shut down the gun industry that makes billions in profits? Not in a million years. What they will do is pass laws that attack the working class even more. They will turn teachers and social workers into cops charged with reporting children to the police. It will not be the children of the ruling class, safe in their immaculate private academies who will be under scrutiny. It will be the Black and Latin and white working-class children who will come under more pressure at school.
The homeless and mentally ill will be further treated as criminals and more will be killed by the police. The schools and streets will be filled with ever more murderous cops and we will be urged to trust the bosses state and their laws to keep us safe. Yet, we know how flooding cops in schools and communities only results in racist attacks, greater divisions amongst our class and despair. The bosses’ system has only hatred and contempt for the working class. They have no desire to keep us safe. They are only interested in keeping us passive and fearful of each other.
Police will never make us safe
While Salvador Ramos stood in a classroom and killed 19 children, 19 cops stood in the hallway for 47 minutes and did nothing (Yahoonews.com, 6/1).  All the weapons showered onto the police in recent years, all the Kevlar vests and battering rams and assault rifles and armored personnel carriers are not there to keep us safe. How do we know? We saw it play out in Uvalde. The police don’t stop mass shootings. They do the opposite. With each murder committed by the cops, our class is inundated with justifications and articles and news stories about rising crime. The police exist to serve and protect the wealthy, the ruling class, and the bosses. We, the working class, are their targets; we are not the people they are protecting.
The only thing that we can do to keep the working class safe is build a revolutionary movement that bolsters  the working class and fights for communism. We must overcome the fear of each other and turn our anger and our pain into building a movement that throws off the bosses’ leadership and deadly ideology of racism and individualism. We must turn our anger and our pain into fighting for workers' power, into building confidence in the working class, and into the fight for communist revolution!

As workers struggle with isolation, depression, and anxiety magnified by the bosses’ disregard during Covid-19, students and workers at the City University of New York (CUNY) have demanded better mental health services. The student-led CUNY Rising Alliance demands, among other things, more counselors and advisors.  Problems like illness, death, and job loss shared by so many working-class youth have created a collective trauma that is endemic to the structural racism, poverty, and fractured social system these students—and their class sisters and brothers worldwide—were already facing. In other words, students are suffering from capitalism. The best therapy for our mental health is building connection in the midst of class struggle.
Capitalist Education: A Collective Trauma for All Youth
The stress is apparent when students struggle to show up or participate. And these are the students who have managed to enroll. All the trauma talk can sometimes feel like a competition to see “who has it the worst.” Then there are those who say, “just get over it.” Both reactions are symptoms of individualism that makes our collective trauma so much more damaging. During the pandemic, while educators were encouraged to “check in” with students, the overwhelming expectation from the capitalist education system was to go to “business as usual,” essentially ignoring the horrid conditions such as poor internet access, insufficient computer supply, and crowded living conditions that working-class youth had to endure. Trauma is a product of a violent system based on exploitation and profit. As long as capitalism exists, we will continue to feel alienated.
Capitalist conditions create trauma
 For decades, doctors and psychologists resisted the idea that war caused trauma, but too many soldiers returning from World War II were unable to integrate back into their lives. The diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was finally accepted by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1980. Since then, there’s been a growing recognition that war was not the only cause of PTSD—our capitalist-created living conditions also contribute to trauma. The CDC has supported research that shows long-term health consequences for anyone with four or more “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs), and 61 percent of U.S. adults have experienced at least one ACE. These advances help us understand mental illness as not an individual problem,  but one that has a social basis. This is apparent in the idea of collective trauma. When an event disrupts the foundations of society, a collective trauma occurs that impacts all in the affected community, albeit individuals will impact individuals vary. The Covid-19 pandemic—along with climate change, nuclear war, racist police terror, and attack on reproductive health—have created a disruption that reveals the many ways capitalism creates trauma. Of course, capitalism in and of itself is a trauma-inducing system, and a profit system in decay only exacerbates mental illness. That’s because an unhealthy system creates unhealthy behaviors.
Trust Our Class: let’s struggle for communism
The ruling class offers false solutions that further isolate and pacify our class through just individual practices. One of the capitalist myths that keeps us trapped is the idea that if we work hard enough, we can achieve happiness. That happiness is impossible, and it’s worsened by leading us to blame ourselves and give into the individualism that isolates us from the very people we need for the creation of a better world. It is in the effort to create a better world together that can also make our lives better now: in our efforts to solve the immediate problems and our progress toward bringing about a communist revolution.
This collective trauma demands a collective solution. By struggling together, we can overcome the isolation that breeds suffering.  We need to get better at inviting those around us to share difficult emotions. We need to create space for talking about pain, anger, and hopelessness because we often think we are protecting one another by not naming these bouts of darkness, yet it is in naming them that we can begin to see we are not alone in these feelings and find our way back to the collective.
More therapists might help CUNY students, but if they are left to struggle alone in a world that threatens their very existence, one therapist for one hour can’t compete with a trauma that’s 24/7. PLP is fighting alongside students and countless others worldwide to remind all working-class youth that a communist world is a goal we can all believe in and build—together!

Communist ideas have no borders
I am writing to you to share a reflection about an exchange that took place in the south of Mexico. Communist workers from the Progressive Labor Party who live there hosted a political event with others visiting from central Mexico and New Jersey. We are fortifying our political base with workers who are learning about our ideas and how we put them in practice in different parts of the world. Equally as important, our event gave these workers who are being exposed to PLP an opportunity to put to the test and reaffirm the difference our analysis makes in guarding the future of the international working class.
As an education worker of less than three years, and who was recently fired, seeing the determination of communist teachers in that part of the world to not give up after kidnappings, and other threats to stop fighting back on behalf of the working class raised my morale.
It was incredible to see the level of courage and confidence from the comrade that my comrade from Jersey and I stayed with had, both in bringing together us visiting comrades and the workers in his base, as well as his three children. It was powerful to see the confidence in the same political analysis being shared by comrades from different parts of the world. We mainly focused on, and workers were most interested in, discussing the following 5 points:
We believe that we need to fight for communism as one Party across the world, because our force as a working class crosses all borders, and therefore requires a united struggle.
Intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry is the common force by which all working class attacks are extended. Our class must fight to turn this into international working class consciousness and unity.
The liberal fascists, born out of the divisions within national capitalist classes and competition between capitalists from different nations, are the most dangerous obstacle to workers winning themselves to fighting for communism and smashing capitalism.
Multiracial unity and fighting racism has been important in forging new communist fighters.
Long term base building is key to maintaining political morale and building confidence in the working class for communist politics.
I am trying to use this inspiration and all the wisdom learned from education workers in the south of Mexico, to turn the attack against me as a communist teacher in New Jersey into an opportunity to struggle with other workers and youth in my community to expose the limits of this horrible system in being unable to create the conditions our kids and us workers need to reach our fullest potential.
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Azovstal: workers must steel themselves vs. nationalism
News of the recent battle for Mariupol between Russian and Ukrainian forces is filled with irony. Much of the battle was fought over the Azovstal steel works, a massive industrial complex built by Soviet workers and later turned over to Ukrainian capitalists who became part of that nation’s ruling class. Communists can learn from this disaster.
Azovstal opened in 1933 during the second five-year plan in the Soviet Union (USSR). The plant was modern, large, and included 12,000 homes, schools, movie theaters, a hospital and maternity clinic, as well as two parks. In 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Mariupol. In 1943, after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and expulsion of Nazi forces, the factory was repaired and again put to the task of producing steel for Soviet citizens.
When the Russian army attempted to seize Mariupol this year, their soldiers found stiff resistance from a group of Ukrainian fascists called the Azov Battalion. These fascists are officially integrated into the Ukrainian military, despite their ideology of carrying on the traditions of Ukrainian nationalists from World War II who collaborated and fought alongside the German Nazis. That the Azov Battalion exists today and is part of the Ukrainian military speaks to the cynicism of nationalism. Nationalism and fascism are natural extensions of each other.
The war we see in Ukraine today reflects mistakes of the past communist movement in the USSR. The Soviet leadership in the 1930s attempted to build unity among workers by building nationalism among the workers of different regions.
The Ukrainian nationalism, Russian nationalism, and other pro-nationalist sentiments we see today in the former USSR states are, at least partly, a result of this failed strategy. The very unity the Soviets hoped to build has turned into its opposite. Now Russian and Ukrainian workers are killing each other instead of fighting together to kill the capitalists who order them into battle.
The Progressive Labor Party is now leading the way for workers to achieve the unity the Soviets strove for, but ultimately, lost. Fighting for internationalism, instead of nationalism, will help us greatly in that struggle.

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