May Day: San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO, May 1 — PLP here planned two events to celebrate May Day: a Backyard BBQ and a contingent in the May 1 Oakland Sin Fronteras (No Borders) Coalition.
Workers Struggles Have No Borders
As we marched alongside our sisters and brothers to celebrate May Day we chanted in Spanish and English “Obreras unidos jamas seran vencidos,”  “The workers united can never be defeated” and “Fight for Communism, Power to the workers,” Primero de Mayo, Communista  y Proletario.”

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Mass Strikes Hit China’s Nike Exploiters

DONGGUAN, CHINA, April 30 — On April 15, one of the largest strikes in this country’s private sector saw 45,000 workers, mostly women, shut down Yue Yuen, the world’s largest manufacturer of sneakers and footwear. The company produces 300 million pairs for Nike, Adidas, Puma, New Balance, Reebok and Timberland, among others. Yue Yuen, a $5.6 billion conglomerate, employs 423,000 workers.

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China’s Capitalist Roaders Wreck Proletarian Cultural Revolution

In 1966, at the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Progressive Labor Party was one year old. Our Chinese comrades influenced our political line and inspired our work. They showed us the critical importance of breaking with revisionism — the fake-leftist ideology, put forward by “capitalist roaders,” that actually serves the bosses. They taught us about the power of the collective and of leadership that comes from the masses, and the need to rely on workers over elite experts and technocrats. The Chinese comrades’ experience also underlined the danger of keeping remnants of capitalism — like money and wages — in a worker-run state, and how these elements pave the way for the return of full-blown capitalism.
The first two parts of this first-person account of the Cultural Revolution told the story of a village factory and the author’s evolution from high school student to factory manager. He left his village in 1978 to attend a teachers college. By the following year, he would find it much changed.     
‘I Missed the Village Life’
In July the college closed for summer vacation, and I came back home. The train stopped at Qingdao, but there was no bus to my hometown. I went to the Qingdao steel factory, where my former colleagues were assembling the cranes. Guan Dunyan, my predecessor as factory manager, was excited to see me, and asked one of the workers to carry me back home on his bike. It was Huang Jianguo, the worker who’d designed the tractor cabs.

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May Day Means: Challenge Bosses’ Nuclear War Plans

We are marching today to honor the great holiday of the international working class: May Day. We are uniting to build a worldwide movement, led by the Progressive Labor Party, to destroy capitalism and erect a communist society run by and for workers. PLP groups in more than twenty countries are dedicated to challenging the rival imperialist powers as they battle for control over the earth’s resources — especially oil and gas — and to exploit our class. We workers produce everything of value; the bosses steal the value of our labor for their profits, the lifeblood of capitalism.
Inevitably, the leading imperialists — and especially the rulers of the United States, Russia and China — will settle their intensifying competition in a major war, just as they did in World Wars I and II. They will use the world’s workers as cannon fodder to kill the opposing bosses’ workers. They desperately need our class to choose one nationalist side over another.
But we have no stake in these devastating fights over profits. We oppose all bosses. We must turn their imperialist wars into a class war for our interests. We need to organize a revolution to bury capitalism once and for all.

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March on May Day for Communist Revolution

We salute the comrades fighting back —
Against racist background checks at DC Metro where they successfully fought for a bus driver who’d been fired after returning to work after a year-long struggle with cancer;
In Haiti, where in the universities they continue the fight against the vicious attacks facing the working class;At CUNY, against warmonger

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Worker-Student Alliance Defies Racist Police State

CHICAGO, April 21 — Using fascist police-state tactics, president Wayne Watson is attempting to stifle the growing outrage of students and faculty at Chicago State University (CSU). As a multiracial worker-student alliance, we are learning to fight back. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) strives to turn this struggle into a school for communism. Several students expressed interest in boarding the May Day bus to Brooklyn, NY.

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A Small Group Can Stir Up a Large Protest

TEXAS, April 22 — Every year one city hosts a large Cesar Chavez march. Chavez was a reformist who led a very large movement for the rights of migrant laborers in the United Farmworkers Union in the 1960s-70s. And during an election season like this year’s, the march swells with liberal misleaders. This year PL members in our area made a plan to coordinate several activities in order to counter the Chavez Committee’s “vote-for-lesser-of-two-evils” line.

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Harlem: Students March vs. Columbia U.’s Racist Expansion

NEW YORK CITY, April 11 —  Twenty-five Columbia University students met up with fighters from Harlem’S St. Mary’s Church to picket the University’s fake employment office near 125 St. Loud chants rang out and speeches were made by students and community residents. Then we marched to the church a few blocks away and ate a delicious supper. More discussion ensued, and students were transfixed by a superstorm Sandy survivor who, a year and a half later, is still living in a shelter, without adequate financial support. Capitalism and its racist state apparatus can and will never serve the needs of workers!

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Haiti: As Fascism Deepens, PL’ers Advance Communist Outlook

PORT-AU-PRINCE, April 14 — The human tragedy of the global economic crisis continues to smash workers’ daily lives here, but PLP communists and the working masses are building strength by resisting the regime’s moves towards more fascist social control, with the open agreement of the U.S. Embassy. We need revolutionary imagination to arrive at the only worthwhile response: overthrow capitalism and take power for the workers.

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Cultural Revolution: Collectivity Uplifts the Individual

Part I of this first-hand account of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR, 1966-1976) covered the origins of a village metal shop that made products to improve conditions for fishermen, tractor drivers, and textile workers. It also opened the story of an industrial breakthrough by a collective led by a worker with little formal education.
This memoir shows the need for further advances in the international revolutionary movement. Wages and profits must be eliminated, along with the special oppression of women. Above all, we must create a worker-run society based on one unwavering principle: From each according to commitment, to each according to need.
The defeat of the GPCR and the reversal of the Chinese revolution signaled the end of the old communist movement. These setbacks plunged the international working class into the Dark Night we have struggled through for more than two generations.
But Dark Night will have its end. World War I gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution. World War II gave birth to the Chinese Revolution. The Progressive Labor Party, organizing across all borders, plans to make the next imperialist war the last one, with worldwide communist revolution.

In the summer of 1973, shortly after graduating from high school, I was one of fourteen young people hired temporarily for the contract for the two huge ventilation blowers. Based on Wang Xuejin’s innovative idea, our first job was to make an underground blacksmith furnace. Then we made a frame to hold a big ring of thick sheet metal, with a horizontal bar over the top. By pushing the bar, we could turn the ring around.
Opposite the furnace, Wang made a huge cast-iron mold with just the right curve. After heating part of the ring, we turned the horizontal bar to move the metal plate being shaped back and forth to the mold. Two workers struck the heated metal with large wooden hammers. Then we repeated the process. Along with Wang and two other senior technicians, the young temporary workers worked in three shifts, around the clock. We were able to complete the two horn-shaped parts in a matter of weeks.

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