The theme for tonight’s Great October Revolution event is “commit to the working class.” the Progressive Labor Party stands on the shoulders of the great Bolshevik revolutionaries and we strive to emulate their strengths and avoid their weaknesses.

The Bolshevik Party’s commitment to the working class was strong: (1) they organized among rank-and-file soldiers to turn the guns around during the First World War to make revolution. (2 )They armed themselves and workers for insurrections following strikes to battle for political power. (3) They used their newspaper Iskra, as an organizing, propaganda, and unifying tool amongst workers. And (4) they fought against tactics that divided workers like racism, sexism, and nationalism.

The Bolsheviks understood the violent nature of the Tsarist and capitalist state. For example, after the first Russian Revolution in 1905, the Tsarist government brutally beat, tortured, jailed, and killed many thousands of revolutionaries. The Party’s membership decreased, yet their commitment to revolution and the working class sustained them all the way to eventual victory, 12 years later, in 1917.

They lived through the historical experience of imperialist wars, first, in 1905 when Russia fought and lost to Japan, and then when the First World War broke out. In these mass slaughters of workers, the Bolsheviks pushed internationalism and urged soldiers to turn the guns around to make revolution. Unlike their political enemies, the Social Democrats throughout Europe, who had voted for war credits and had sided with their own country’s imperialists. These were the liberals of that era, just like the Big Fascist liberals (the big finance capitalists and Democrats), they will pretend to be our friends, but they will always betray our interests to advance their own imperialist aims.

Learning from the Bolsheviks, the Party sent me and other young people into the military to recruit other soldiers and to learn how to use the weapons we needed for the revolution. This is vital work for the Party, and we are working to reestablish and rebuild it. Today, many Black and Latin workers facing the never-ending racist economic crisis of capitalism opt for the military as a job; we must be there with them building the Party.

For the Bolsheviks their newspaper Iskra was a collective propagandist, agitator, and organizer. It collectively promoted its communist ideas, it rallied the workers who read it, and it organized them into battle and let the workers know what other workers were doing to expand revolutionary organizing. Similarly, we in PLP are trained to read, study, write for and distribute our revolutionary newspaper CHALLENGE.

The Bolsheviks like Joseph Stalin fought racism among Armenian and Azeri workers in Baku and organized against anti-Jewish pogroms (organized massacres). They did this because these divisions were used to weaken the workers’ movement. As a young Latin man who had faced much racism in the U.S., I wanted to understand where racism came from and how to fight it. PLP instructed me in the ways of anti-racism and internationalism. We studied how racism is an essential aspect of the capitalist system as a major source of extra profits for the racist bosses. Also, we studied how nationalism was never progressive and could never lead to the liberation of the working class. As trained antiracists, we demonstrated against racist police killings on the West and South Sides of the city. We led struggles against the Klan and other fascist groups to shut them down.  

The Bolsheviks saw the importance of smashing sexism and to promote the leadership of women comrades and workers. Krupskaya, a Bolshevik leader, argued that if women were kept out of the political process, half the working-class army would be lost. Likewise, our Party fights sexism and seeks to develop women leadership in all its collectives, especially leadership collectives.

The Party has always asked its members to commit to the working class and like the Bolsheviks to embed ourselves in it.

Being embedded in and serving the working class is the best thing you can do with your life. We will have our ups and downs, our advances, and retreats, but if you are committed to the workers, they will teach you to have confidence in them. They will strengthen your resolve, maintain your revolutionary optimism, and improve your morale.

That’s why we call on all of you to commit yourselves to the working class, or to recommit yourself and to strengthen your resolve to fight the racist, fascist, capitalist state and make communist revolution to build the world we need…..COMMUNISM! And like the Bolsheviks who were small, like us, follow the path to working class victory! Long live the international working class! Long live communism! Power to the workers!