Letters of September 30

Ferguson: Sick of Capitalism
 “We are sick of living in fear!” said a resident in Mike Brown’s neighborhood in Ferguson, Missouri, to a PLP comrade distributing CHALLENGE during our recent summer project there. Recently my Texas comrades and I arrived in a Ferguson immersed in struggle. The first night we engaged in a rally set up by a local group of Black rebel youth, Lost Voices. We marched to the police station, gave speeches, and led a couple chants. The next day we sold CHALLENGE in the neighborhood and did some of the most inspiring things I’ve ever been a part of.
One morning we went to a church held workshop on civil disobedience. We not only learned new tactics to defend ourselves from the police, but ALSO learned just how fed up the working class is with racist police terror. The multiracial group of workers who came to the workshops were from the community. While there was disagreement about particular passive tactics used in civil disobedience, there was widespread agreement with the need to fight back with militancy. This shows just how far the fight against racism has come. Communities of workers are now turning towards violent action, instead of the passive silent marches. The workers understood that passivity will not change racism or capitalism. The church wanted to take the workshop group to the streets and demonstrate in front of the federal building in St. Louis, but my comrades and I thought the demonstration would be more effective if they had decided to march to the Ferguson police station.  The church holds major influence over the community. This disagreement taught us a lot about our need to build political bases in community mass organizations, and build deep ties with workers in them. Over time, these ties expand the limits of what’s possible in certain situations.
Later on, we distributed CHALLENGE in Mike Brown’s neighborhood. Many residents came out to have conversations with comrades about racist police and violence.  I walked in to a conversation a fellow comrade was having with two women who knew Mike Brown. One woman started to cry, saying, “We were afraid to leave our homes, my daughter wouldn’t even come out to talk with anyone. We are afraid of being shot for nothing.”  Just like the communities in my hometown, or in Boston, Baltimore, and all over the U.S., workers are sick of being afraid, are tired of capitalist oppression, and fed up with racism. Ferguson has been an example and a learning experience for the Party and myself. Workers are poised for fightback not only in Ferguson, but all over the world. Multiracial unity is the cure to capitalism. We shouldn’t have to live in fear! We should engage in militant action among mass organizations to smash the system. United with a communist vision, we workers will eliminate the disease of the ruling class!
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Why I Quit the Israel CP
Why did I leave the Israeli “Communist” Party (Maki-Hadash) and join PLP?
The Israeli “Communist” Party, Maki-Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), is a revisionist party with no ideological basis. It is a counter-revolutionary party and is old in multiple meanings of the word. It is no place for a 17-year-old revolutionary who is only at the very beginning of his revolutionary road.
Maki-Hadash itself is undergoing an internal ideological crisis- its members fighting each other and semming that it will fall apart at any moment. Sometimes it feels that without its branch in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) it would have ceased to exist a long time ago. It proposes unity with the other bourgeois Arab parties in order to get more votes and stay in the Knesset.
Two months ago, a fascist scumbag called Yoav “The Shadow” Eliasi (a racist and nationalist two-bit rapper who in the past organized thugs to beat up leftist demonstrators) decided to create a fascist militia to “patrol” southern Tel-Aviv, in order to attack the African refugees and Arabs who live there and publicly spread racist filth. So I organized a counter-group of youth to help protect the refugees, Arabs and other non-Jewish residents from racist attacks.
To this group I recruited several people from the Anarchist group “Unity,” several independent Anarchist and Communist comrades, one Libertarian and several Maki-Hadash comrades. This enraged many Maki members so much that it was raised to the Central Committee where the subject was discussed and it was decided that I will be removed from the party because I “solicited party members to illegal activity” and gave a bad name to the party and its members. From this response you can see that this so-called “Marxist-Leninist” party is actually a revisionist counter-revolutionary party which believes in rotten parliamentary politics, rather than revolution.
Afterwards, PLP invited me to its convention in NYC. I was really impressed with the comrades in New York and I liked the activity and the ways of action. The thing I was most impressed with was the number of international comrades. I enjoyed seeing so many people of all ethnicities and languages working together, unlike in Maki where almost everyone is Ashkenasi (European Jewish).
I hope that PLP will continue to grow internationally and continue its good work. Onwards!
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Fighting Anti-Communism
The September 16 issue of CHALLENGE attacked the EU Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. It addressed how this event is designed to falsely equate communism with the horrors of fascism and also to cover up the hypocrisy of the Western capitalist rulers who appeased Hitler as long as they felt he would go east and attack the Soviet Union.  Western capitalists, like Henry Ford, did deals with Hitler backers Krupp and Farben before and during World War II, including selling the Nazis the unmarked poison gas used in the Holocaust genocide.
The article then jumps to an uncritical defense of the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union as a necessary step to buy time for the Soviet Union to prepare for the coming war with Hitlerism.  Leaving aside the questionable argument that forcing the Nazis to go across the extra 300 miles of Polish territory to attack the Soviet Union played any significant role in the Nazis; defeat, this argument ignores the many devastating negative results of the Soviet policy (before and during WW II) of making deals with world capitalist rulers.
Starting in the middle 1930s, the Soviet communist leadership abandoned any reliance on the international working class to defend the Soviet Union and instead appealed to Western capitalists in an attempt to form a “united front” against the German fascists.  
The Soviet-led Communist International (Comintern) advised Western communist parties to hold back from fighting for a workers’ revolution, and even discouraged any sharp criticism of “liberal” capitalists in the U.S. and France other than pushing for a capitalist-Soviet alliance. Later on, during WW II, the CPUSA carried these reformist politics to the extreme of opposing a Black workers’ strike against racism because it would “detract from the war effort”!
The 1939 non-aggression pact was a top-down Soviet zigzag maneuver between struggles for a united front with the Western capitalists.  The article defended that pact without analyzing the devastating impact it had on the morale of the international working class.
In Brooklyn, New York at that time, the CPUSA had as many as 20,000 members, a high percentage of them impoverished Jewish workers. Several thousand resigned after the pact was signed to protest the new friendship of the Soviets with Nazi Germany. This loss of membership was never overcome in Brooklyn and other areas where there were a large concentration of Jewish members. During this period the Soviets were uncritical of Nazism in their press and instead attacked the Western imperialist nations of France, U.S., and Great Britain.
For many years, PLP has criticized the pact as an opportunist weakness that reflected Russian nationalism within the CPSU and a mistaken policy of uniting with one set of international bosses against another.  
By arguing that the pact was crucial to defeating the Nazis, the article did a disservice to the millions of brave and resourceful communists who moved factories across the Urals and fought hand to hand at Stalingrad to defeat the fascist monsters.  Millions of Soviet communists gave their lives in that struggle, along with millions of communist-led resistance fighters in countries all around the world.  
The Soviet communist leadership was the symbol for that heroic, successful struggle, but their reformist politics led to the temporary defeat of communists and the working class all around the world.  Within ten years, capitalist forces seized state power back from the Soviet working class and communist parties (except for China) completely abandoned revolutionary struggle.
Soviet leaders relied on “Mother Russia” non-class nationalism and the development of a commandist bureaucracy within the Central Committee and Politburo. They restored the gold braid and privilege to the officer corps of the Red Army and privileges and pay differentials that undermined the role of the army as a people’s militia per Paris Commune standards. Income inequality in the Soviet Union actually increased after World War II.  
The Soviet’s leadership role during and after World War II was too often based on pragmatism and not on communist principles.  The Yalta agreement with Roosevelt and Churchill denied the opportunity for revolution by the Italian communist party, which was armed and ready for insurrection. Deals with one imperialist to oppose another always lead to disaster for revolutionary communism.
PLP has always opposed any alliances with “lesser”-evil bosses. We owe the working class a clear and sharp analysis of the dangers of those compromises, which this article did not provide.
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