The capitalists of the world are more afraid of communism than anything else. The Soviet Union was a nightmare for capitalists and their hangers-on. For 35 years the then-socialist Soviet Union proved that the working class: could rule a huge country; transform it from a ruined, peasant society into a modern industrial country; eliminate unemployment; and provide free medical care, education, retirement pensions, paid vacations – a decent standard of living for every worker.
The international communist movement, headed by the Soviets fought fiercely against sexism , racism, and every form of oppression. It was a mortal threat to capitalist rule everywhere.The largest attempt in history to destroy this, the world’s first workers’ state was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army.
Communist fighters smash facist armies
In December, 1941, 80 years ago, the communist-led Red Army of the Soviet Union stopped Adolf Hitler’s Nazi hordes cold. The Battle of Moscow stopped Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.
Hitler had always wanted a war against the then-socialist Soviet Union to stop communism. On August 11, 1939, Hitler said that “everything he undertook was directed against Russia.” The capitalist leaders of Europe encouraged him.
Germany had lost World War I because it lacked petroleum for fuel and rubber for tires. Hitler and his generals realized that Germany needed to wage a motorized war. They imported huge stockpiles and began to make synthetic petroleum and rubber from coal.
But this was not enough. So the Nazis needed to defeat the Red Army in no more than eight weeks – the kind of “lightning war,” or Blitzkrieg, that had defeated France in May-June 1940.
No capitalist country would ally with the Soviet Union. So in August 1939, when Britain and France had sabotaged the last attempt at joint action against Hitler, the Soviets signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany, in order to gain time for the inevitable German attack.
This treaty gained the Soviets 22 months to prepare for the inevitable German attack, and kept the German army 200 miles away from the Soviet border. Hitler was confident of a quick victory –and also desperately needed one. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany and her allies – over 3,700,000 strong – attacked the Soviet Union. The Red Army suffered very serious losses and retreated.
But they had defenses in depth. They killed a great many German and allied troops and fatally slowed the Blitzkrieg. Escaped soldiers and civilians formed partisan guerrilla groups in the German rear to sabotage the long German supplies lines.
Already in July 1941, Canaris, head of Hitler’s military intelligence, said the German situation was “black.” In August, the German High Command was saying Germany might lose the war. Meanwhile German troops were not prepared for winter weather – Hitler had only planned for a 2-3 month war.
The Battle  of Moscow
In early December, 1941, small German units were close to Moscow. But they never got any farther – thanks to the heroic Red Army. On December 5, at 3 a.m., the Red Army counterattacked and drove the Nazi hordes back. This was the first counterattack any army had ever made against Hitler’s forces.
The Battle of Moscow stopped Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, dooming Hitler’s attack. On December 8, Hitler abandoned the offensive. According to German General Jodl, Hitler realized on December 5, 1941, that he could no longer win the war.
The German defeat of December, 1941 – the Battle of Moscow -- had made Hitler so desperate that he had to risk war against the United States in order to draw Japan into the anti-Soviet war.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared war against the United States! But in 1939, the Red Army had defeated a Japanese invasion. This convinced the Japanese not to attack the Soviet Union, so they refused to help Hitler.
The Battle of Moscow sets the stage for Hitler’s defeat
* Shortages of fuel stopped Hitler from reinforcing German forces in North Africa, leading to Germany’s  defeat in the fall of 1942.
* The 1942 German offensive towards the Caucasus oil fields was forced on Hitler to gain essential fuel. The Red Army smashed the Nazis at Stalingrad.
* Hitler’s fascist allies, Finland and Spain, became demoralized. Spain and fascist Portugal began to collaborate with the Allies.
* On June 6, 1944, “D-Day,” the Western imperialist Allies stopped delaying and invaded France. They met stiff resistance, but defeated the German forces, 80 percent of which were far away fighting the Red Army.
Except for the Battle of Moscow, the Allies would probably never have invaded at all, but would have sought peace with their fellow anticommunist Hitler, who would have been incomparably stronger with the wealth of the Soviet Union at his command.
The Red Army killed 80 percent of all German soldiers killed in the war
The Soviet victory against the Nazi hordes proved that the capitalists could not crush the communist movement by force. But the Soviet Union and the international communist movement succumbed to capitalist ideas from within. They came to hope, and then to believe, the fatal notion that violent revolution against capitalism was not necessary, that socialism could be achieved through elections and by allying the working class with “good” liberal capitalists against the openly fascist bosses.
Nevertheless, we should be inspired by the Red Army’s victory over the Nazi army. The world’s bosses were defeated through communist dedication and leadership. We pledge to do so again.

NEWARK, NJ, September 8— Members of the Newark Firefighters Union, Newark Fire Officers Union, Newark Fraternal Order of Police, Newark Police Superior Officers Association, and a union called Newark Council 21 held a protest to oppose a vaccine mandate ordered by Newark’s nationalist liberal boss, Mayor Ras Baraka. This debacle is between different factions of the local Newark ruling class. One side is represented by liberal racist Baraka against the gutter racist, opportunistic police department unions backed by their fascist kkkops on the other side.
When Baraka ordered all emergency workers and police to be vaccinated or face termination, the misleaders of the Newark Fire Department’s firefighter and captain’s unions were quick to assume a lead role in organizing the protest, arguing that the mayor has no right to terminate them for being unvaccinated.Both factions pit Black and white workers against one another and prevent multiracial working class unity, with both factions playing different versions of identity politics.  In a gross misappropriation of the liberal slogans of the movement for women’s reproductive rights, the anti-vaxxer protest was mostly white male emergency workers and kkkops, who marched around Newark City Hall yelling “MY BODY, MY CHOICE!”
Meanwhile, communists are fighting to build a multiracial workers’ movement led by the Progressive Labor Party to expose the hypocrisy of both sides of Newark’s local ruling class. It’s time for serious class struggle around issues that matter, rather than the red herring of the bosses’ vaccine mandate!
Emergency workers: exploited by insurance finance capital
For years, Newark Fire Dept’s union leaders have taken the path of least resistance when it comes to fighting to improve conditions for firefighters. For example, a fully staffed crew that is assigned to put out a fire normally consists of one captain and four firefighters. Because liberal misleader Baraka and his administration refuse to pay overtime, firefighters have for years been forced to fight fires while understaffed. This means a crew to extinguish fires has one captain and only two firefighters. This routine short staffing was exacerbated by the sick leaves due to firefighters getting sick from COVID-19, leaving many firehouses further understaffed.
One solution would have been to pay overtime to fill the roll calls, but the Baraka administration would let firefighters work in already life-threatening conditions while understaffed rather than pay overtime. All the while, the union hacks stand back and stand by while this happens, rarely organizing any collective fightback to defend workers. Instead, the firefighter’s union joins with the police unions, as in this recent anti-vaxxer protest, creating confusion within emergency workers’ ranks over whose side their class interests lie: with the racist kkkops who kill protecting capitalism, or with the international working class?
Modern fire departments began after the 1666 Great Fire of London, which burnt down 70,000 of the city's 80,000  workers’ homes and killed unknown thousands. For the rising British capitalists, it cost insurance underwriters hundreds of millions of pounds in destruction to commercial property. Private fire departments owned by rival insurance companies spread to what became the U.S. to protect capitalist property, eventually consolidating into the system the U.S. has today. As recently as 2013, nineteen firefighters were killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona. Tragically, the town had already been evacuated— the fire overran them while they battled to protect commercial property in the empty nearby town (Tucson.com, 6/29/18).
Communism: our class, our only choice!
As far as the department leadership is concerned, they see us as ‘lazy’, ignoring the toll that working 24 hour shifts and fighting fires while wearing 100 lbs. of extra gear takes on our bodies over time. In fact, they have recently even added medical duties to firefighters without properly training or paying them. Many firefighters have internalized the bosses’ lazy worker narrative by blaming and shaming one another for not being “tough enough” to handle the workload instead of uniting to attack the bosses.
The firefighter and captain’s unions fought the added medical mandate by filing an unfair labor practice charge. After an initial ruling in the firefighter’s favor the dispute went up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the city. The unions cancelled the protest when they lost the court decision, giving up and leaving us workers out to dry instead of using our collective power as workers to take a job action.
Firefighters must begin to see that capitalism and its managerial staff of opportunist politicians and union fakers are the real enemy. They must also understand that any alliance with the police is a dead end, as the police are the security force for capitalism and mortal enemies of the working class. Instead, firefighters should ally with other workers and students in the communities they serve and deepen their ties with them, building fightback alongside them on the way to worker’s power and revolutionary communism.

Working-class leadership, the personal is political
I lost the Condo Board of Directors’ election but advanced the political struggle just a notch. I had run for a seat on the Board of Directors at the urging of my new neighbors at the old but solid building complex I settled into last spring.
It started over a grill. I had asked a ground floor neighbor if they wanted my charcoal grill (allowable under management rules). She declined because she did not want to become a target of building management again.
“Again?” I had personally felt mistreated by management when I moved in, but then spoke with many different neighbors. People shared their own struggles with management as well as those experienced by their neighbors. Everyone - “Asian, Latin, Black and white!” felt  mistreated!
During the door-to-door campaign for the Board seat, I heard that residents simply wanted respect, dignity and unity –98 percent  of the people talked about mistreatment by management, rodent and roach infestation, inadequate parking, increasing fees, and management’s refusal to support the disabled and elderly who wish to age in place.
The election itself was shady. “Someone” tore down my posters in common areas, I wasn’t given contact information that the other candidates had access to, and the balloting site’s on-line location was communicated inconsistently. The virtual meeting was difficult for anyone with poor internet connection or limited internet knowledge to participate in. The capitalists' message is clear: Keep out!
During the virtual election forum, the President of the Board, a local, Harvard-educated politician who supports real estate developers, took 90 percent  of the time to focus on herself and what ‘she’ claimed to have accomplished, apparently single-handedly, for the entire local region. She shamelessly attacked my character. The one candidate who did not have his camera on never spoke but garnered the most votes. Clearly, capitalist investors protect their investments and pay lip service to the working class.
I had focused on what residents really wanted: respect, community, health and safety. In contrast, the Board president, when pressed about the rodent infestation, blamed the residents, claiming that they wouldn’t allow exterminators into their apartments because of the Covid-19 virus. This was a blatant lie!
The issues in our buildings are complex. They are old and need expensive repairs, like much working-class housing around the world. The whole mess is another example of why we need communism!  
I plan to regroup and work with my wonderful neighbors and not abandon the struggle for livable housing now and revolution in the not so distant future!
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Building my confidence in the working class
I'm a transit worker in NYC and about a month ago the working class in Haiti underwent and are still facing difficult times, our comrades included. Our comrades said that they needed funds due to the earthquake so I went out to ask the workers at the union meeting for help and also my coworkers at the quarters. I wasn't expecting much mostly because of my own lack of confidence in the working-class. Sometimes it's a little hard to feel hopeful. But when I started asking my coworkers, I was wonderfully surprised that they were all too willing to give what they could. Some workers said, "of course man, we gotta help especially how they been treating them at the border,” in response to the racist imagery of Biden’s troops gallavanting on horse, chasing workers with whips like the slave catchers of the past. Another worker said “Yeah we gotta stick together”. Another said,"make sure I get a receipt or something. Wanna make sure it's going to the right place."
It's easy to get caught up in cynicism when faced with the everyday visciousness of capitalism. But when we reach out to our fellow workers, we are the ones being lifted up. Keep reaching. Keep fighting. Communism is alive with every worker's sacrifice.
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Call it what it is
CHALLENGE is a wonderful newspaper!!  The only newspaper that really fights for communism! But I have a criticism. On page four  of CHALLENGE (12/1) in the article from Chicago, the term “food insecure” is used twice.  This is the bosses’ euphemism for hunger and starvation. I don’t think that it should be used in CHALLENGE except to explain its hypocritical usage by the bosses. CHALLENGE doesn’t use any other bosses’ euphemisms (such as “underserved” and “disadvantaged”) and I don’t think that “food insecure” should be used either
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Over the 12 days of the climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, fossil fuel companies extracted a billion barrels of oil from the ground. As diplomats tap-danced around the climate crisis, capitalists guaranteed that even more Earth-warming carbon would clog the atmosphere. Beneath their fake show of unity and pathetically inadequate (and unenforceable) pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the bosses did what bosses do.  The COP26 conference was driven by the capitalist law of maximum profit and by the inter-imperialist rivalry heading toward global war. The only thing that unites the world’s ruling classes is their need to build racism, sexism, nationalism, and fascism to prepare for that war. Only communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party (PLP), can save a habitable planet by putting science and workers’ needs first.
Climate change and racist inequality
Though all workers are hurt by climate change, poor Black, Latin and Asian working-class areas suffer the most. An unprecedented drought in Madagascar has left more than one million people at risk of famine (U.N.,10/21). Rising sea levels in the Indian Ocean could erase the Maldive Islands within three generations (express.co.uk, 11/15/17). In the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil, dried-out rivers are wiping out crops, drinking water, and farmers’ jobs (Yale Environment 360, 11/10). In September, Hurricane Ida swept through New York City and killed 11 workers trapped in illegal basement apartments in working-class  Asian neighborhoods—victims of both climate change and their landlords’ greed.  And let's not forget Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 killed nearly 2,000 workers in New Orleans, 52 percent of them Black.
By far the worst is yet to come. By 2050, more than a billion workers could become climate refugees (theguardian.com, 9/9/20).
As the world burns, bosses jockey for profit
U.S. bosses are locked in a battle for markets and resources with their main imperialist rivals, China and Russia. There are trillions in potential profits in the shift to electric vehicles and clean energy sources like solar and wind. But there is also big money to be made today from dirty energy: coal, oil, and natural gas. From China and the U.S., the two worst emitters, to still-developing countries like India and Brazil, the capitalist rulers are slow-walking the transition to have it both ways. As a result, the 2030 pledges made in Glasgow would warm the globe by 2.7 degrees Celsius (or 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—far beyond the 1.5-degree limit set in Paris six years ago. It’s a formula for even more powerful and frequent hurricanes, more deadly floods, more lethal heat waves and wildfires—for runaway climate disaster.
The emissions reduction goals set in Glasgow, said an official with the United Nations Environment Program chair, were “generally vague and untransparent; they are hard to calculate and hold to account; many kick the can beyond 2030, when we know that we need to halve our emissions between now and 2030 to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 C.” Or as one climate policy analyst put it, COP26 “has a very big credibility gap” (Carbon Brief, 11/10).
Even as U.S. Hypocrite-in-Chief Joe Biden was pushing Saudi Arabia and Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to ease gas prices by pumping even more oil out of the ground (NPR, 10/31), he called out his imperialist counterparts, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, for failing to show up in Glasgow (BBC, 11/2). Workers should see Biden’s Russia- and China-bashing for what it is, a blatant attempt to build patriotic fervor for World War III—in other words, a deadly trap!
Big Fascists, big problems
According to a recent poll, 71 percent of young adults in the U.S. believe that climate change will harm them personally (Pew Research, September). The dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class is cynically trying to use the climate crisis to win support from workers who are desperate for real action. These liberal Big Fascists (See Glossary, p. 6) also know that fossil fuels are linked to extreme weather, massive crop damage, and the premature deaths and disability of millions of workers from heart and lung disease—all big hits to the bosses’ bottom line. Hence the $1 trillion Biden bill and the proposed $555 billion climate package in his embattled Build Back Better plan.
The Big Fascists’ problem is the disunity and lack of discipline within their own class. Small Fascist (See Glossary, p. 6) bosses like the Koch family, whose fortune was built on domestic oil, have led the charge to deny climate science and push back against regulations to limit carbon emissions. Mobilized by Donald Trump, the Small Fascists have hijacked the Republican Party, which stands unanimously opposed to Build Back Better, a mix of climate funding and some crumbs for social services. They have a staunch ally in Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a coal baron who has already gutted Biden’s proposal to clean up the electric power sector and is now threatening to torpedo Build Back Better altogether (MSNBC, 10/19).
The Big Fascists also have deep problems within their own camp. ExxonMobil, the multinational oil company and finance capital kingpin, has been exposed for mounting a climate disinformation campaign on Facebook—and then lying about it to a Congressional committee (msn.com, 11/3). “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science?” a company lobbyist admitted in an interview covertly filmed by Greenpeace. “Yes. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders" (CNN, 7/21).  
For the liberal U.S. bosses, from Biden to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal, the biggest lie of all is their shameless pose as protectors of the environment and humanity. This is the same crew that’s planning a global war that will poison the atmosphere and slaughter untold millions of workers. Talk about toxic gases!  
Only communist revolution can solve climate crisis
The hundred thousand protestors on the streets of Glasgow last week made it clear that the international working class sees through the bosses’ empty words and phony shows of compassion. Most workers know instinctively that profit-driven capitalists can never solve the climate crisis. What they are missing is communist leadership and an analysis to turn the fight against carbon emissions into a fight for a world without money or racism or sexism or imperialist war. PLP works every day—on the job, in the schools, in our communities—to build a vision of a society run by and for the working class. Join us! Save the planet by smashing capitalism!