Inspiring Workers to Study PL’s Ideas

Each week, without exception, our PLP club meets as an active study group. We’ve already discussed the political economy documents and the majority of 2011 Challenge editorials. A new member has transcribed “Towards a New Communist Movement.”  We’ve also discussed “Reform and Revolution.”
Our objective is not only to understand and discuss the Party’s ideas, but also to revise and re-edit documents to put forward revolutionary ideas clearly, in writing as well as in conversation.
We recently showed  “Road to Revolution IV” (our Party’s ideas) to a militant fighter focused on reformist and pro-socialist ideals and projects. He said he wasn’t convinced we should reject the socialist and reformist ideas and instead fight for communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
PLP aims to destroy the entire capitalist system, that much was made clear. It’s not important how intellectually equipped our opponents may be. There is no argument that can trump our Party’s politics.
We invited a worker and his family to join PLP and attend a May Day forum. In a later conversation, this worker discussed his ideas and feelings about the labor situation. Most workers are influenced by wrong ideas against their class. But through our interactions at the forum and our May Day dinner, he has expressed interest in getting involved and studying our ideas to get to know PLP better.
Red Youth

Miners’ Wildcats Resist S. African Apartheid

MARIKANA, SOUTH AFRICA, May 17 — A new strike wave is sweeping this country’s minefields as thousands at the Lonmin mine here wildcatted on May 14, reacting to the murder of one of their union organizers and to looming job cuts. Lonmin is the world’s third largest producer of platinum and was the site of last August’s police massacre of 34 striking miners. The strikers have vowed to stop all scabs and have blocked highways, while marching to the area of last year’s atrocity.

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Peugeot Strike Ends:

‘The only struggles you don’t win are the ones you don’t wage…’

AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, FRANCE, May 17 — The four-month strike of Peugeot workers against one of the richest and most powerful bosses in France ended today, unable to prevent the planned closing of the plant here, scheduled for 2014. The strikers received $1.1 million in donations, indicating enormous popular support, but were weakened by the fact that they could not widen the walkout to the rest of the company’s factories nor

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USSR, First Workers’ State — Won and Lost

When the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War that followed it, ended in 1921, the new workers’ state was facing exhuasting conditions. It was largely destroyed, 4.5 million killed by 17 invading capitalist countries, with a raging famine. Millions of homeless people wandered the land, and starvation was rampant. The worldwide typhus epidemic of 1919 had killed tens of thousands.
Seven years of war and invasion by Imperial Germany, then Poland, and all the Allied countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, and Japan, had created a culture of violence. Crime — robbery, murder, gangs — was everywhere. Armed bands from Poland raided border areas, robbed, raped, and killed, then fled back across the border. Industry and agriculture were almost at a standstill.
The Bolsheviks’ task was to build socialism with the traumatized people in this devastated country. They had no blueprint, for it had never been done. No communist theorist — neither Marx and Engels, nor Lenin, nor any other — had ever thought the first workers’ state would look anything like this.
In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks debated the best course of action to build the new society. Communists then believed that

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May Day Advances the Fight for Communist Revolution

Syria — Another Front for Imperialist War

The civil war in Syria has U.S. rulers in a quandry. They are targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad in line with their perpetual need to secure Middle East oil and gas. Only by limiting arch rival China’s access to energy for its growing economy and military can the U.S. bosses maintain their imperialist advantage.
At the same time, U.S. capitalists are concerned that a Syrian invasion could repeat their fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan — especially in light of U.S. workers’ skepticism and lack of support for the next war for profit. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a national security advisor to Jimmy Carter and other U.S. presidents, told Bloomberg Television that military involvement in Syria would risk “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”
Last August Obama warned Syria it would be crossing “a red line” and inviting U.S. intervention if it used chemical weapons. Amid recent reports that both Assad and his Syrian opposition may have used poison gas (New York Times, 5/6/13), Obama must choose between unpopular military force and a loss of credibility. A lead front-page Times article (5/5/13) said Obama was “reluctant to become entangled in another war in the Middle East, and, well aware that most Americans oppose military action, the president has deliberately not explained what his ‘red line’ actually is.”

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March vs. War-driven Closings of 61 Chicago Schools

CHICAGO, March 27 — PLP marched with teachers, students, parents and workers to stop school closings and the layoffs of 2,000 teachers. We brought a message that only communism can give our children a real future.
In late March, the Chicago School Board announced that 61 schools would be closed before the opening of the 2013-2014 school year. Most are located in black and Latino neighborhoods of the South and West sides of the city. These racist attacks will hurt black, white, Asian and Latino working-class students. When confronted about these racist closings, the Chicago school CEO stated: “It’s not racist to close schools in those neighborhoods.”

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Jewish, Arab Women vs. Israeli Racist Land Grab

AL-ARAQEEB, April 20 — A group of Jewish women and a PL’er met with the women of this “unrecognized” Bedouin village to show solidarity with their struggle against the government’s moves to uproot them and steal their land. Most outsiders talk only with the men here, but we needed to hear the village’s women as well. The meeting was initiated by the “Unrecognized Village Team” of the broad left Tarabut movement.
Last week, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” as Israel likes to present itself, demolished Al-Araqeeb for the 49th time since the summer of 2010. This vicious policy exposes Israel as a racist state that serves Israeli and U.S. capitalists, never the working-class residents of Israel-Palestine.

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Student Conference: Need Multi-Racial Unity to Stop Racist Mass Incarceration

WASHINGTON, DC, April 20 — More than two hundred people gathered at Howard University to build the fight against the racist U.S. injustice system, which jails black and Latino people far out of proportion to their numbers in the population.
Organized by the Howard University chapter of Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI), the two-day national conference gathered people from five other campus chapters. Students and friends from the community joined to learn, debate, and plan actions against the abusive, racist prison system.  Progressive Labor Party members distributed more than 200 CHALLENGEs and called on people to join the May Day march in New York.

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MAY DAY: NEW YORK

“Racist cops, you can’t hide. We charge you with Genocide!”
“Black cop, White cop, all the same. Racist terror is the name of the game.”
As PLP marched through Flatbush, Brooklyn, these chants filled the air. They expressed opinions held by many in this working-class, black neighborhood, which is not new to police murder. But every police murder leaves a fresh wound on the community, and these wounds never heal. The murder of Shantel Davis had roused the community. The recent murder of Kimani Gray pushed some into open rebellion. PLP was there on both occasions to give direction to the anger.
Our march was among the many marches we’ve had in Flatbush over the past eight months. But this march was about more than ending police brutality. It was about smashing this racist system. It was about creating a new world, a world where young people aren’t shot down in the streets, a world worth fighting for.

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