This is part six 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.
This movement was the most advanced political movement at the time. 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, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists. This ended up not working but the struggles they led inspire us today both in practice and in the political lessons learned.
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 and their leadership is essential. Our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership. The following continues that story:

 Mack Coad was born in 1894 in Blackstock, South Carolina to a Black working class family. As a young adult, he worked as a railroad firefighter and crane operator. He lost his railroad position at the onset of the Great Depression. In 1929, after attending a meeting of a Communist led unemployed group, Coad joined the Communist Party. Because of his leadership capabilities, Coad was selected to be a student at the Lenin School in the Soviet Union. In 1931, after his return to the United States, Coad was assigned as a union organizer in the South. He worked with steelworkers in Birmingham and was an organizer of the Alabama Sharecropper's Union.
When local farmers asked the Communist Party to send organizers to help them build a union,the Party sent several people, among them Mack Coad, who at the time was working as a steelworker.
In March 1931, he was sent to Tallapoosa County, Alabama, to organize the Communist-led Share Croppers' Union (SCU). In the abandoned houses of rural Alabama, Coad discovered local militants who were quite comfortable combining communist and folk cultures. These grass-roots leaders had established a tradition of singing before and after gatherings, which grew out of the rural church services after which they had patterned their meetings. In addition to adopting standards such as the ‘Internationale’ and ‘Solidarity Forever,’ rural Black workers in and around the Party transformed popular spirituals into political songs with new messages. ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and the ever-popular ‘Give Me That Old-Time Religion’ were stock musical forms used to create new Party songs. In the latter, the verse was changed to ‘Give Me That Old Communist Spirit,’ and Party members closed each stanza with ‘It was good enough for Lenin, and it's good enough for me.’
The Black and white sharecroppers involved in organizing the union were under constant threat of attack from the police who organized local racists to attack the union. At one point Coad was part of a group defending the home of a Black leader of the movement and as the racists closed in, workers in the union decided to get Coad out of the area, secretly getting him to Atlanta. Coad played an important role in Southern U.S. communist history in the 1930s as he worked in Chattanooga, Birmingham, and was involved in a 1934 attempt to organize a Memphis Communist Party unit. The Communist Party called Coad “our best southern organizer.” Coad was also active in Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina. In Chattanooga, he was jailed at least twice for organizing unemployment demonstrations and running for judge.
Coad went to fight in Spain in October 1937, where he proved himself an exemplary communist and soldier. He was severely wounded in the right eye in an attack near Gandesa on August 1, 1938, during the Ebro Offensive and spent the rest of the war in the hospital. In an interview in the Daily Worker of February 11, 1939, Coad recalled that he volunteered ‘to help wake the Negro up on the international field.’ Coad died in May 1967, still working as a coal miner at the age of 69.
Mack Coad was a leader of the international communist movement that grew out of battles like the struggle against racism in the South and the fight against fascism in Europe. Coad, like millions of workers worldwide, built the old communist movement while leading the class struggle. They put building the Party in the midst of the struggle for reforms into practice and helped shape our movement and set examples that led to the formation of Progressive Labor Party and the building of a communist movement with Black workers in the lead.

Sources: Lisa A Kirschenbaum: International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suscpicion. Harry Haywood: Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Robin D.G. Kelley: Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.

Nazis Out of Boston! Power to the workers!

Right here in liberal Massachusetts the racist Small Fascist (see glossary) movement, fronted by Trump and engineered by billionaire domestic capitalists like Charles Koch and Kelcy Lee Warren, is trying to gain a toehold of strength. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in New England are priming ourselves to join with other antiracists to crush them in the cradle. Though this racist movement, sprouting in New England, is an immediate threat we must not lose sight of the great danger that Big Fascist liberals pose for the working class.  
Make no mistake, Small Fascists are small fry compared to the Big Fascists, the politically liberal, finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. The Big Fascists pose the greatest danger. From arming Saudi and Israeli terror bosses carrying out nonstop lethal bombing campaigns, to arming Ukranian Nazi battalions, the Big Fascists are the main sponsors of global imperialist terror. Their crumbling empire and decaying liberal order make them especially dangerous for the international working class in this period.
In late January, claiming “white genocide” a neo-Nazi organization, the Nationalist Social Club, (NSC) gathered at Brigham and Women’s Hospital protesting the cardiologists' decision to deny a heart transplant to a white man who refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine. This fascist group also passed out a flier attacking two antiracist doctors who have been fighting systemic racist practices regarding cardiology patients at the hospital. Specifically, the antiracist doctors are trying to correct the pattern of Black cardiac patients typically being admitted to general medicine while white cardiac patients are admitted to the cardiology service which usually results in better care and better outcomes.
Another anti-vaxxer group was also protesting the decision to deny a cardiac patient a heart transplant claiming that it is discriminatory to those who refuse the vaccine. Both groups are using hot-button issues of racism and vaccine mandates to divide the working class and prop up their racist Small Fascist movement.
PLP distributed CHALLENGE and passed out a leaflet calling workers to smash these nazis and to support the fight against racist medical practices. We got a positive response from hundreds of hospital workers as they streamed in and out of the hospital. Many stopped to talk to us while we leafletted and distributed copies of CHALLENGE.
The NSC has made other bold appearances in New England. They tried to shut down the reading of The Communist Manifesto at a library in Providence, Rhode Island, and appeared at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston. The anti-vaxxers disrupted a Boston Teachers Union conference, protesting the union’s position on the vaccine.
Nurses and teachers later spoke out against their reported racist and insulting verbiage against educators. Their actions and the union's response prompted important discussions about racism in the schools. The fascists also protested the mask mandates inside a Boston Public Library Children's Reading Room and vandalized a bust of Maya Angelou. The Boston Public Librarians union held a rally protesting this, which we attended and distributed our literature.  
All over the U.S. and now in Boston, the Small Fascist movement has been building local electoral and other campaigns to mobilize for white nationalism, racism, and anti-communism, appealing to the racist fears of white workers being crushed by the declining standard of living.
PLP in New England has vowed to confront the white supremacists and fascists whenever they raise their ugly heads as we continue to organize opposition to ongoing racist practices in the hospitals and schools where we work.
At the same time, we must not forget that the Big Fascist liberals, who still dominate the U.S. politically and economically, are doing everything in their power to drain the revolutionary potential of antiracist class conscious movements, co-opting and injecting them with  their toxic identity and electoral politics. Big Fascist politicians such as New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot dupe Black, Latin and Asian workers into falling in line with the oppressors they can identify with. Big Fascist movements threaten to win workers to multicultural U.S. nationalism, and its deadly logic of sacrificing workers for the survival of U.S. imperialism.
So, while we fight the Small Fascists in Massachusetts, PLP is especially committed to ideologically defeating Big Fascist misleaders in the unions, nonprofits, and schools as well as defeating Big Fascist representatives in liberal cities.Thus, PLP believes that to truly snuff out the fascist threat we must organize workers around the world to smash all fascists both big and small.

*****

Students connect Alabama to Amazon
  We are college professors who teach at the City University of New York (CUNY) and have been active in building rank and file strike committees on our respective campuses. Last month we held a successful student forum with over 30 students to discuss the historic strikes at CUNY and the need to continue building this movement on our campuses. A few days after the victory at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island we held a “brown bag lunch” on zoom to discuss how we can build the worker-student alliance at CUNY.
  This informal discussion was exciting and timely as we heard from workers who had recently led some job actions at Amazon warehouses, a student and professor who traveled to Alabama this winter as part of a solidarity trip supporting the miners’ strike, and a labor historian. The Amazon workers were bold and inspiring as they described how they shut down the warehouse they work at. The CUNY folks who traveled to Alabama shared their stories of fight back and inspiration, walking the picket lines with Black and white coal miners as well as helping out with Christmas festivities. Our friend who is a labor historian pointed out that one lesson of the Amazon strike is the need to build fightback from “the bottom up” and not to rely on politicians or union “leaders” to organize for us. He also made the point that while we work for wages under capitalism, ultimately there is a better way to organize society, based on the collective needs of the working class and not profit.
  We will continue to find ways to build the worker student alliance at CUNY!

 BALTIMORE—In recognition of her 200th birthday, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a forum honoring Harriet Tubman’s dedication to freeing Black workers from the vicious grip of slavery, sometimes literally. The rescue story of Charles Nalle, a Black man that Harriet Tubman helped flee from slavery, serves as a powerful example of fighting racist capitalism and wage slavery with multiracial unity. Black women workers have historically exposed the growing contradictions between exploitation and profit, and continue giving frontline leadership in multiracial class struggles that provides a pathway for all workers to  fight for communism.
One key antiracist struggle that’s interconnected with the history of slavery is police terror against Black and Latin workers. To smash racism, bold fighters like Harriet Tubman are models for revolutionary antiracist fightback and for building a multiracial movement for communism. In this area, we have been building a base around an ongoing West Wednesday struggle, stemming from the murder of Tyrone West by Baltimore Police in 2013. Since then PLP has co-led Wednesday night meetings, titled ‘West Wednesdays’ calling out  the kkkops deadly  enforcement of racist class divisions through their racist murder campaigns. Five antiracist fighters involved in the ongoing struggle attended our latest presentation.
One of the most resounding lessons we can learn from Harriet Tubman is the need for boldness. She took many bold actions in the fight against slavery. We will need many similar bold actions in our fight to destroy capitalism. The slave owners and their system had to be violently destroyed, so today capitalists and their imperialist wars will also have to be violently destroyed. One such bold action that’s not well known took place in the North, after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. That national law provided for the seizure and return of enslaved people who had heroically managed to escape, and were living in supposedly “free” states. Here is that true story, which was shared during the forum.
Multiracial fighters liberate Charles
In 1860, Harriet Tubman was traveling throughout central New York State, giving lectures and raising funds. In April, she visited her cousin in Troy, New York, pausing there on her way to an anti-slavery meeting in Boston. Unexpectedly, she found herself in the center of one of the most dramatic rescues ever to occur in central New York.
A formerly enslaved worker, twenty-eight year old Charles Nalle, had been arrested while working to save money for bringing his family there from Pennsylvania, and to get his wife, a free Black woman, out of jail in D.C. where she had been arrested on suspicion of aiding Nalle’s escape from Virginia. Mr. Nalle was going to be turned over to an agent of Blucher Hansbrough—Nalle’s former enslaver—with no hearing and no trial.
As soon as Nalle’s arrest became known, the information was rapidly shared through Troy’s Black community and among white abolitionists. Immediately, people gathered outside the U.S. commissioner’s office, where Nalle was being held.
Tubman happened to be nearby, and joined the crowd that was preparing to rescue Nalle:
She climbed the stairs to where Charles was being held. When the authorities tried to remove Charles from the building to begin to take him away, Harriet Tubman leaned out of a window and alerted the mob below that Charles would be coming down the stairs and that the mob should try to get him away from the authorities. Harriet then held on to Charles as he was pushed and pulled down the stairs. She held on to him even as parts of his clothes were torn off. Local abolitionists Peter Baltimore, Martin Townsend and others also led the charge to rescue Nalle alongside Harriet Tubman (Hart Cluett museum, 2/19/ 21).  
In the fight, Nalle and Tubman were dragged and beaten, as the crowd tried to pry Nalle loose from the cops. Pistols were drawn and one officer threatened to kill a rescuer whom he had grabbed from the crowd. Instantly a knife was drawn under the policeman’s throat, and the pistol was dropped. As the Troy Daily Times reported, “Twenty times the prisoner was taken from the officers, and twenty times they recovered him.” The crowd carried Tubman and Nalle to the Hudson River. Nalle was put in a boat and taken across.
But that wasn’t the denouement. Charles was re-arrested in Watervliet. Then Tubman and a crowd of [300] African Americans and whites together also crossed the river and stormed the building where he was being held for the second time and, through gunfire, liberated him. Ultimately, money was raised to buy his freedom for $650. That was in effect his fourth liberation (The Zinn Education Project).
The boldness, persistence, and multiracial nature of this rescue is admirable.
How have you fought racism?
Participants at the PLP forum were asked “What is your boldest action, or a bold action you are aware of, that was taken in the struggle against racism, or in other class struggles?” Many shared their experiences.
Despite the success of this forum, there is room to grow in leading these types of discussions. There should have been more effort to connect the fight against slavery to the current fight for revolution to defeat capitalism and to create communism.
The life and leadership of Harriet Tubman is still relevant to our current struggle for revolution and, with enough struggle, we can make wage slavery a relic of the past, like Harriet Tubman and fellow abolitionists did with the institution of chattel slavery. When workers are a part of the working class struggle, it changes the lives of all workers - for the better. And if the contradictions of wage theft and racism are not already exposed, communists must be the ones to expose these contradictions and smash racist wage theft. For most effective results – be bold and do it with multiracial unity under the leadership of PLP. Workers today must finish what Tubman started with Black workers leading the way to unleash the true revolutionary potential of our class, transforming antiracist rage and spontaneous rebellions against the police into a class conscious, organized movement to smash the capitalist system and wage slavery once and for all.

The latest crisis bulletin from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a stark reminder that the capitalist bosses stand ready to sacrifice millions of workers’ lives to preserve their profit system. The IPCC now projects global temperatures to rise even higher than the deadly target of 1.5 degrees Celsius agreed upon by the bosses at the 2015 Paris Accords (Guardian, 4/6). Extreme weather-linked disasters—wildfires, floods, droughts, hurricanes—are certain to get worse. Barring a fundamental change of course, one of three plant and animal species may be extinct by 2050 (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). None of these trends are “natural” or inevitable. All are the products of capitalism and the bosses who rule us—the parasites who must be destroyed for the good of the international working class.
Following the ruthless logic of capitalism, the top imperialist powers—the United States, Russia, and China—are doubling down on life-destroying fossil fuels as they intensify their competition over energy supplies, markets, and distribution routes. The world’s latest blood-soaked conflicts, from Ukraine to Yemen to Ethiopia, reflect the raging volatility and high stakes of these imperialist struggles. The rulers are hurtling down a path toward world war and nuclear destruction—the ultimate “climate change.”
Under capitalism, all current and future scenarios spell death for workers, from endless proxy wars to mass starvation. Only the working class, armed with its mass communist Progressive Labor Party and international Red Army, has the power to end this misery. Through communist revolution, we will turn the guns around on the imperialist butchers and build an egalitarian society on a habitable Earth.
Bloody oil war in Ukraine
The imperialist bloodbath in Ukraine is a clear result of the necessity of oil and natural gas to the bosses’ system. The pitched battle that has already killed thousands of workers and displaced millions more is directly connected to Ukraine’s importance as a hub for pipelines that channel Russian energy throughout Europe. The struggle to dominate Ukraine has nothing to do with the capitalists’ phony framework of “democracy versus authoritarianism.” In reality, it’s a brutal power struggle over energy supremacy.
Capitalist nations across Europe are so dependent on Russian gas to power their economies that it continues to flow through Ukrainian pipelines seven weeks after the start of the invasion. Despite desperate efforts by the U.S. imperialists and their NATO allies to sanction Russia into submission and isolate President Vladimir Putin on the international stage, the Russian bosses have so far weathered the storm. The value of the ruble recently bounced back to pre-war levels (CBS News, 4/8). Even with the U.S. and Europe threatening to end their dependence on Russian fossil fuels (a mostly empty threat to date), President Vladimir Putin and his gang of billionaires have found opportunistic buyers in India and China for billions of barrels of crude oil (oilprice.com, 4/9).
In the wake of their humiliating collapse in Afghanistan, the U.S. imperialists have shot themselves in the foot yet again in Ukraine. If anything, U.S. sanctions have drawn Russian and Chinese imperialists into a tighter alignment against their shared enemy in the West. After Russia was cut off from global financial systems, China bought Russian oil and coal in their own currency, the yuan, instead of the once-standard U.S. dollar, a direct challenge to U.S. economic dominance and control (Markets Insider, 4/7).
Big Fascists’ desperation = more volatility
U.S. President Joe Biden and the finance capital Big Fascist wing of the U.S. oligarch ruling class are desperate to deflect blame for skyrocketing fuel costs to save face among voters and maintain their slim edge over their Small Fascist rivals, the “America First” wing now centered in the Republican Party. In this fight-to-the-death internal rivalry, “climate justice” will take a back seat every time. So it was no surprise when Biden announced a plan to release a million barrels of oil per day over the next six months from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The U.S. then convinced over 30 allied capitalist nations in the International Energy Agency to release millions more (NPR, 4/6).
But even as the Big Fascist imperialists struggle to contain gas prices and show some unity in their ranks, their growing weakness is glaring. Beyond their inability to prevent rival Russia from grabbing more of Ukraine, or to stop their European “allies” from forking over more than $1 billion a day for Russian gas and oil (Los Angeles Times, 3/7), the U.S. bosses have watched their once-firm influence over the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula slip away. Biden tapped into the Strategic Reserve after failing to convince the capitalist bosses in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to produce significantly more oil. They reluctantly agreed to a modest increase—and only after the U.S. bosses promised more Patriot missiles for the Saudis’ continued slaughter of workers in Yemen (WSJ, 3/21).
While the shock to the global oil market has meant a bonanza in profits for Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-run oil company, there are political reasons for the Saudi rulers’ hesitancy. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has not forgotten Biden’s attacks on his regime after its brutal 2018 murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. What’s more, the Saudi bosses have drawn closer to President Vladimir Putin since Russia joined its oil cartel OPEC-Plus in 2016 (Energy Intelligence, 2/28).
As the U.S. empire grows more isolated, so too will its desperation. As China and Russia strengthen their relationship and once-reliable allies cut deals at the U.S. expense, the Big Fascists will be pushed to take more aggressive measures to regain lost ground—with workers paying the price.
Communism will end crises of capitalism
From Chernobyl to Washington, DC, from Somalia to Iraq, workers suffer from the imperialist drive for profits. But in all of these places and more, we see our class fighting back. We must keep fighting for our common class interests as we build the PLP. We need an international communist revolution to stop the capitalist bosses and their oil wars from spilling our blood.
Only a communist society can create an ecologically sustainable future. Only a communist world will eliminate production based on profit and replace it with a system based on workers’ needs. The working class has the capacity to smash the lethal fossil fuel industry at the point of production and to end the carnage of imperialist war for all time. To fight back against the bosses’ nationalism, racism, and sexism, we need communist internationalism to raise working-class consciousness and build for revolution. Our fightback, based on political education, collective actions, and the international growth of our revolutionary communist PLP, will lead us to victory. Join us!