Under capitalism profit comes before all and at the expense of workers’ lives. During a global pandemic that has left many workers unemployed and starving, the bosses and their mouth pieces are working overtime to hide their present day agricultural atrocities.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) however, wants to remind workers that with communist revolution we will bring back the collectivization of agriculture - a practice that ensures sufficient production to feed the entire working class.
Proletariat over profits
“Collectivization, [was a] policy adopted by the Soviet government, pursued most intensively between 1929 and 1933, to transform traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union and to reduce the economic power of [land owners]...” (Britannica 12/20). Workers were asked to forgo individual property ownership and collectivize their farms.
With the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and China, agricultural collectivization meant ending massive famines that, over centuries, had killed millions of workers due to starvation.
Politics, not profit, were primary. The aim was to structure society, in this case the production of food, a basic human need, in a way that benefited all members of the working class. Many farmers who considered themselves members of what Karl Marx called the petite bourgeoisie (small business owners) needed to be won to the idea of taking leadership from politically-conscious poor peasants and put the promotion of egalitarian communism first. Maximum production can only be attained when farm workers are inspired by a commitment to help each other.
Russian reforms end legacy of famines
Famine has struck Russia hundreds of times during the past millennium. 1917 saw a serious crop failure causing an urban famine in 1917-18. In the 1920s the USSR had a series of famines: in 1920-1923 in the Volga and Ukraine, plus one in western Siberia in 1923; in the Volga and Ukraine again in 1924-25, and a serious although little-studied famine in Ukraine in 1928-1929. This history is essential in understanding the famine of 1932-1933 and the response of the Soviet government.
Soviet collectivization of agriculture was a reform — but a significant improvement, none-the-less, in the security and lives of the peasant population and therefore of the entire population. It was not undertaken to “tax” or “exploit” the peasants or to extract value from the countryside. On the contrary: during the decade 1929-1939 the Soviet government spent tens of billions of rubles on agriculture.
At the time, Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks viewed collectivization as the only way to swiftly modernize agriculture, to put an end to the wasteful and labor-consuming cultivation of individual land holdings.
As with many reform struggles, there was fightback from land-owners who were blind to the failings of capitalism. Many peasants, however, actively supported collectivization. This number increased when local organizers were sharp enough to explain that smashing a profit system that benefited only the bosses was in all workers’ interest.
When another famine occurred there was no choice but to redistribute food and resources. Mark Tauger, an agricultural historian, writes:
This evidence shows, in particular, that collectivisation allowed the mobilisation and distribution of resources, like tractors, seed aid, and food relief, to enable farmers to produce a large harvest during a serious famine, which was unprecedented in Russian history and almost so in Soviet history… this research shows that collectivisation … did in fact function as a means to modernise and aid Soviet agriculture.
Soviet collective farms remained until the end of the USSR in 1991. But like many reforms, they did not develop more egalitarian practices or an advance towards a classless society and were eventually reversed. Land owners kept private plots for individual farming. These became important sources of private income.
Without class consciousness China’s communes fail  
China too was a “land of famine,” with devastating natural disasters every few years,
compounded by feudal and capitalist governments who cared nothing for the workers’ lives. In liberated areas and after the victory of the communist revolution (1949) the Chinese Communist Party instituted land reform, which created a small peasant economy without landlord exploitation. In the mid 1950s the Rural People’s Commune movement began. Within a few years all agriculture had been collectivized into communes.
A class analysis is needed to understand the communes – why they succeeded, and why they were eventually abolished. Working class farmers were the backbone of the communes. Middle peasants – the petite bourgeoisie – those with some land, tools, animals, etc., were often ambivalent.
The basic political question was whether production and profit would win out over communist politics. At the basic level the communes (collective farms) awarded work points and points for a peasant family’s contribution of tools, animals, etc., to the collective. The goal was to move towards a more egalitarian system of production, one not based on profit. This was gradually rolled out in most communes, with the support of many peasants and, in the leadership, revolutionaries around Mao Zedong.
Reforms lead to party splits
While many party leaders claimed to view the communist movement as the best vehicle for liberating China from imperialist domination they saw the founding principle – “from each according to  his ability, to each according to his need” – as secondary, attainable only after a long historical period, if at all.
In 1958-61 there was a serious famine and reformist members (members who wanted to retain aspects of capitalism) in the Party leadership blamed the communes for not reserving enough of their production. The communes were accused of allowing over-consumption so that there was not enough food during the famine. Reformist members immediately pushed for dismantling the more egalitarian aspects of the communes and for material incentives based on production.
Poor peasants, plus the revolutionary forces around Mao, were the key force supporting the more egalitarian policies in the communes. In the end, however, they were no match for those in the Party who wanted to abolish the communes and revoke the once won reforms.
A vision of communist collectivism
The communes provided not only food but education, health care, and infrastructure work. While they could certainly have done much better if they had had the support of the Party leadership on all levels, at their peak they provided schools for what workers’ lives post revolution might look like.
As we continue to fight for communism, even during the darkest of nights, PLP remembers that it is only with worker-led, communist revolution that we will smash the chains of capitalism that are built to kill our class.
Sources: Zhun Xu, From Commune to Capitalism. How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty (2018); Grover Furr, Blood Lies Chapters 2 & 3 (2014); PLP, “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution & the Reversal of Worker's Power in China.” PL Magazine vol. 8 no. 3 Nov. 1971;. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After. A History of the People’s Republic. 3rd edition, 1999.

Friedrich Engels, the comrade in arms of Karl Marx, was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Germany. His father was a textile manufacturer, a reactionary and religious man. He forced young Engels into a commercial apprenticeship, first in his own company, then in another. Despite his reluctance, Engels mastered this profession.
In 1841-2, Engels did voluntary military service in Berlin where he could attend lectures at the university. There he made contact with liberal, anarchist and left-Hegelian circles, and studied military science. In 1842, he began work in his father’s cotton mill in Manchester, England. Engels would go after work into the working-class neighborhoods where he saw the misery of the proletariat. He got to know English labor leaders and married an Irish worker, Mary Burns.
Workers of Manchester made Engels a communist
Engels read everything that had been written about the situation of the English working class and carefully studied available official documents. Engels came to understand that it is their dire economic situation that drives workers to fight for their liberation. However, liberation from capitalism will only happen if the working class consciously sets it as its goal. At the age of 25, Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. As early as 1844, he had published Outline of a Critique of Political Economy in Franco-German Yearbooks where Marx also worked.  Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution (Lenin).
In 1848, Marx and Engels published the world-famous Manifesto of the Communist Party. In that year, as democratic revolutions broke out in Europe, both worked on the revolutionary newspaper,  Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The Prussian state persecuted the paper and its editors, and expelled Marx from Germany.
In May 1849, Engels fought on the barricades in his homeland during an uprising. In June, he fought in another uprising. After Prussian troops crushed it, he fled to Switzerland. In 1850, Engels returned to Manchester, where he worked again in the Ermen & Engels spinning mill. Meanwhile he carried out revolutionary organizing, and supported Marx financially. Both men joined the International Workers Association, the First International, which helped workers' parties, newspapers and organizations worldwide.
During this period Marx began systematic work on the materialist criticism of bourgeois political economy, culminating in the first volume of Capital in 1867. Could Marx have done this without the constant professional and scientific advice and material support from Engels? It is doubtful. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels published two more volumes of Capital and was a leader of the international socialist and communist labor movement.
Engels fought for materialism
Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view  that it is the development of the mind that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the ideas of the mind must be derived from nature, from matter. ...Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels were materialists. Regarding the world and humanity materialistically, they perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by the development of material forces, the productive forces (Lenin, Frederick Engels 1895).
Lenin fought for Engels’ elaboration of this revolutionary-materialistic point of view in his great philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. While Marx at that time worked his way further into the depths of the critique of political economy, Engels … dealt with general scientific problems and with diverse phenomena of the past and present in the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx's economic theory in works such as Anti-Dühring (analyzing highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Peasant War in Germany, and other works
There are many stories about the generous, humorous, witty host, who was a disinterested helper to countless comrades. Engels put all his strength and inheritance at the disposal of the working class. “The European proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always … placed himself after Marx. … His love for the living Marx and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless (Lenin “Fredrick Engels”).

Engels has no grave. “In accordance with Engels’s instructions his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea …” (T. Carver, The Life and Thought of Fredrich Engels)

The struggle continues to force the racist bosses to drop all charges against Black artist/organizer Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson. Mohawk was attacked and arrested in August during an anti-kkkop protest in downtown Chicago with many others, and remains on house arrest connected to “aggravated assault.” Communists from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active in trying to build this battle in the streets, courts, and our workplaces.
The fight to free Mohawk has expanded into a wider mass campaign to challenge capitalist state terror that faces antiracist fighters here in the city. A grassroots citywide defense committee has been created, and over 60 antiracists filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department after being targeted and beaten by the bosses’ attack dogs (See CHALLENGE, 12/16).
So if you’re in the Chicago area on December 29th, come support the fight by joining the rally and picket in front of Leighton Courthouse on 26th Street and California Avenue at 9:30 am CST. The capitalist bosses fear nothing more than a multiracial united working-class armed with communist politics. Let’s keep up the fight to free Mohawk, and tear down this whole racist system!

Learning to fight for students
The pandemic has provided educators with opportunities to build some working-class muscles.
I teach at a high school with a 97 percent Black and Latin immigrant population. While our Black principal prides herself in being pro-student, she leads racist attacks against students with the highest needs.
Just last week, my 14-year-old advisee McKay—a young man with special needs—ran away from home and the principal ordered us to stay out of it. “Do not get involved. That’s not your job,” she said.
This is the same principal that ordered us not to get involved when our student Malcolm, also special needs, was brutalized by the cops during a demonstration against the murder of George Floyd and others in May.
When the school bosses prioritize paperwork and liabilities over the safety of students, they are participating in the systemic pushing out and alienation of Black working-class teens, especially young men. Teachers must push the boundaries of what is “part of our job.” Supporting our students and building student-parent-educator unity is part of our job. Exposing the racist practice of expendability is part of our job.
Many people at work don’t see it that way but little actions add up. So whether it’s fighting to give students more opportunities to meet with teachers for office hours or building a student newspaper or building in antiracism and the fight against police terror into the curriculum, we are slowly but surely learning to stick our necks out for students.
 This work is inherently antiracist and through these tiny actions, we see how the system routinely fails our students and then blames them for failing. That is infuriating. And then, a teen in class yesterday said, “we don’t need cops in our schools because students feel scared and they should listen to us because it’s our experience and our life.” That is cause for optimism.
As for McKay, he is still out there in 31 degree weather. I will keep calling. If he isn’t living proof of why we need to kill capitalism, I don’t know what is.
*****
 Communism is anti-capitalist vaccine
Nine of ten people in poorer countries will not get a Covid-19 vaccine until 2022 and hundreds of millions will never get it and die because vaccine companies have intellectual property rights (IPR). Even though tax payers have mostly paid for their research, IPR allows these companies to produce only enough vaccines that rich countries have contracted to pay for. All current vaccine supply has already been bought up and will be distributed to serve profit and political needs. Six of the wealthiest nations have already refused to suspend their IPR, which would allow the world’s vaccine companies to copy and produce a timely and affordable people’s vaccine that could save the lives of billions worldwide.
It has been said that capitalists would impose IPR on the use of the sun if they could.  is the contradiction between them and communists who fight to use production for people’s needs and an end to profits, inequality and exploitation. Vaccines like all properties need to be owned and shared by all peoples if only because no country is safe until all are safe. And vaccines without masks and distancing won’t stop vaccinated people with capitalist disregard for others from spreading the disease.
Today we need people to spread the need for collective values and a communist world. It has been said that such people do not just happen, they are born in struggle. Now is the time to join Progressive Labor Party to develop the mental communist vaccine that can destroy the world’s greatest pandemic—capitalism.
*****

REDEYE

Afghanistan: How U.S. imperialist wars destroyed farmers
NYT, 12/9 — …80-year-old Jamal Khan’s…plot of land was the source of his family’s livelihood — until the American forces arrived…Armored vehicles drove into fields of knee-high corn stalks, claimed about 30 acres that were owned by about as many families and quickly cordoned off the area with barbed wire. This was how Combat Outpost Honaker-Miracle, one of roughly 1,000 military installations the United States and its coalition partners would prop up across Afghanistan….
Mr. Khan is one of countless Afghans whose land has become a casualty of the U.S.-led war and the sprawling military structure born from it…The Americans have left…but Mr. Khan does not have his land back…Not only are Afghans deprived of justice under the American-backed government, but…the U.S. military presence has added to the injustice….Although the Afghan army now occupies his land, Mr. Khan is still required to pay tax on the plot…In Northern Balkh Province, the U.S.-led coalition forces built a base next to the provincial capital’s airport. Amanullah Balkhi…says the installation occupies about 20 acres of his land….
“I have the deed, and…the courts have attested that this is my land,” he said. But the Americans still have the land and they still deny me....[At] a base in Panjwai….about 10 years ago, dozens of coalition vehicles arrived at the small village….getting to work building a new base. They didn’t carve a road…where we came and went — they carved a road for themselves through people’s lands, people’s gardens,” said Fida Muhammad a tribal elder…
“It ruined the irrigation system too….The land dried,” Mr. Muhammad said…. “Many families…went to the city for daily labor….” When a base was transferred to Afghan control….Afghan commanders…did not care about the local residents’ grievances which they saw as an issue between the farmers and the Americans.
U.S.-British WWII bombings deliberately murdered civilians
NYT Book Review, 11/24—“War” by Margaret MacMillan — The United States and Britain…bombing of Germany and Japan in World War II…deliberately aimed to terrorize civilian populations. In 1945, Americans flying over Tokyo dropped incendiary bombs, a weapon chosen deliberately because so many homes were built of wood; the raid killed as many as 100,000 civilians and left a million homeless….Maj/ Gen. Curtis LeMay…[said] the Japanese were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” MacMillan notes: “It was no oversight that mass bombings were not included in the Allied indictment of Nazi leaders at the Nuremburg trials.”
Pandemic hit Latin, Black, Asian women the hardest
NYT, 11/13 — …A gender gap in retirement security [combined with] women earn[ing] less than men and…[being] more likely to take time off from work to care for children…[means] interruptions diminish wage growth, retirement savings and Social Security benefits….Women…also outlive men [and]…face higher health care expenses in retirement.
…The pandemic recession is disproportionately damaging [to] women…experts call it a “shecession.” Latina, Black and Asian American women have been hit the hardest….Many entered the pandemic earning less, [and] have experienced higher jobless rates….and many may never become fully employed again…Losses beyond the immediate salary…compound over time in…missed wage growth, retirement savings and Social Security benefits….
…Four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force in September alone and barely half that number returned…Women earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men…[and] 49 cents on the dollar in 2015 when measuring earnings of all workers….
The structural problems that women face…translate into problems maintaining their living standards in retirement and raise their risk of falling into poverty…A larger percentage of [women’s]…retirement time is spent needing assistance with their daily living.
Slaveholder Chief InJustices of the Supreme Court
NYT (Book Review), 11/25 — [When] the enslaved Dred Scott brought his first lawsuit for freedom in Missouri, where he was held in bondage,…the Supreme Court hand[ed] down its notorious verdict in 1857. Black people, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
...In 1813, when the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall…in an appeal brought by Mina Queen, an enslaved woman, it was handing a victory to the slaveholding class — of which Marshall was decidedly a member. Marshall personally held more than 150 people in bondage.
Structures of segregation embedded in daily lives
NYT, 12/1 — “CHANGE”…the letters mark…the St. Louis Hotel & Exchange, where…enslaved people…were once sold,….lingering traces that were hidden in plain sight… “Colored” entrances to movie theaters, or walls built inside restaurants to separate non-white customers….Photographs capture the Black institutions that arose in response to racial segregation…[and] depict the sites where Black people were attacked, killed or abducted….The Ghosts of Segregation. …The small side window at Edd’s Drive-In….was actually a segregated window used in the Jim Crow era to serve Black customers
The locked black double doors aside Seattle’s Moore Theater….was once the “Colored” entrance used by non-white moviegoers to…the theater’s second balcony…Slavery is often referred to as America’s “original sin.” Its demons still haunt in the dorm of segregated housing, education, health care [and] employment…The painted sign for Clark’s Café in Huntington, Ore, which trumpeted “All White HELP,” was destroyed….The Houston Negro Hospital School of Nursing has since been demolished…
These photographs are…more about the people who once populated them….[and are] a testament to the endurance of the racial inequalities…The deaths…of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among many other Black Americans, prompted…one of the largest movements in U.S. history. And these pictures prove…the evidence of the structures of segregation — and the ideology of white supremacy — still…[are] embedded in…our day-to-day