“We’re not cannon fodder!” cried millions across Italy as wildcat strikes erupted in every major industry to halt the spread of the deadly coronavirus disease. Workers were protesting government and corporate attempts to force them to keep the factories open, risking their lives in unsafe factories so the bosses could jam them into cramped assembly lines to pump out profits.
The wildcatters hit producers of refrigerator and auto parts, factory bolts and vacuum cleaners, closed steel and auto plants and railways, shipyards and shipbuilding docks. While the bosses’ media debated who was responsible for the spreading fatalities, there was a complete blackout of the workers’ militant actions.
The 6,000 Fiat-Chrysler workers, who touched off the strike wave in the Pomigliano plant near Naples when they walked out at the start of the 2:00 pm shift on March 10, protesting unsafe conditions on the assembly lines producing luxury Alfa-Romeo cars for the super-rich.(La Repubblica, 3/11)
As the workers stated, “We’ll withdraw the protest only when the government and the company…stop everything and pay our time off. We can’t afford to lose more money for an unalienable right to make our collective health and safety top priority…
“The big factories are places that bring people together, from the buses to the assembly lines. It defies logic: the state closes everything, starting with the schools and bans moving around…But…the Italian government has not closed the factories; it keeps saying “stay at home” even as the assembly lines continue producing and putting staff and all their families at risk!”(isnews.it, 3/11)
Workers in at least a dozen cities stopped production, including 700 women at the Electrolux plant in Solaro and shipbuilders in Liguria after one worker tested positive for the virus, causing the strike to spread to other docks. Those at Genoa were protesting unclean equipment being used amid the fatal virus.
Wildcat walkouts caught on among London postal workers, Paris bus drivers and Fiat-Chrysler autoworkers in Canada.
To free the working class from capitalism’s killing us through these fatal diseases, we must turn these uprisings into schools for communism, the ultimate solution that will rid the world of bosses and their exploitative profit system.

April 22, 2020, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, one of the greatest revolutionaries who ever lived. He dedicated his life to the exploited and oppressed of the world: workers, peasants, women, and those especially exploited by colonialism and racism. He dedicated his life to the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of an egalitarian world without racism and sexism. As capitalism ravages the world with wars and now a ruthless pandemic let us all make a contribution to the fight for communism.
In Czarist Russia Lenin helped organize a communist party (Bolsheviks) with deep ties to the working class dedicated to armed revolution against the capitalists. During World War I the world’s imperialist powers sacrificed the lives of millions of workers as they fought to redivide and control the world. Lenin called for the workers of the world to stop fighting each other and turn their guns on their capitalist masters. Turn this imperialist war into a war for worker’s power was Lenin’s call. In 1917, led by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party (later the Russian Communist Party), the workers of Russia seized state power, thus founding the first workers’ state. The Russian Revolution was the most momentous event of the 20th century. It established socialism, not communism, and socialism maintained too many features of capitalism. But it showed that millions of workers could take power and run all of society, beating back huge elements of racism and sexism.
Lenin the revolutionary
leader and intellectual
Lenin led Soviet Russia during its first five years through the most brutal difficulties of civil war, famine, and a typhus epidemic. The Russian capitalists organized three separate armies to destroy the Russian revolution. They were aided by 13 capitalist nations that invaded Russia to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” (Winston Churchill). The capitalists were defeated and the first worker’s state survived.
Under Lenin’s leadership the Soviet Union formed the Communist International (Comintern). The Comintern trained and organized revolutionaries from the world’s colonies to fight for both national independence and then for socialism. National independence succeeded; there are no more traditional “colonies” ruled directly by imperialist countries. But national independence did not lead to communism. Nationalism is a capitalist ideology. Only internationalism serves the working class.
In his book What Is To Be Done? (1902), Lenin proposed the idea of a revolutionary party, composed both of professional revolutionaries and a broad network of local Party organizations and members – devoted to revolution, not to reforming capitalism. The struggle for such a party led to the formation of the Bolshevik Party. The Progressive Labor Party was founded on Lenin’s principles. Today we are expanding on those principles to build an international party of tens of millions fighting directly for communism.
Lenin also promoted the need to establish a nation-wide newspaper to conduct propaganda and agitation for socialism. This paper was Iskra, (Spark) and later Pravda, (Truth). PLP’s newspaper CHALLENGE is based on Lenin’s concept.
Honor Lenin fight for
communist revolution
Most socialists in the Second International were in trade unions. Lenin understood that trade unions fought for reforms under capitalism, and would never be revolutionary organizations. However, under the leadership of a revolutionary communist party, strikes could not only improve conditions for workers, but would be “schools for communism.” These struggles would demonstrate how capitalism cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers, but must be overthrown.
Lenin argued that a revolutionary communist party must be mainly clandestine, because making revolution is always illegal. Its legal activities, important while permitted by the ruling class, can never be the “be all and end all.”
In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) Lenin advanced our understanding of imperialism. It is a world system in which major capitalist countries, in service to their multi-national banks and corporations, compete to control the natural resources, markets and labor of other countries. The competition between imperialist countries – the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Japan – led to both the First and Second World Wars, which killed tens of millions of workers.
In The State and Revolution (1917) Lenin describes the role of the state (government) in society. The government of a nation serves its capitalist class. Some nations have a democratic façade to hide what is a capitalist dictatorship. Communism will mean worker’s power, a dictatorship of the proletariat over the capitalists.
The world’s workers owe Lenin an immense debt for his tireless efforts to promote communist revolution. Let’s acknowledge that debt is by working to rebuild the international communist movement today, as capitalism is destroying worker’s lives and moving to world war between the imperialist powers.
Our Party, the PLP, believes in fighting for revolution, while also immersing ourselves in the workers’ reform struggles. Here is what Lenin wrote about “reform and revolution” in 1916. These ideas are still our guideposts today!

*****

Lenin on Reform and Revolution

It would be absolutely wrong to believe that immediate struggle for socialist revolution implies that we can, or  should, abandon the fight for reforms.... We should support … every real economic and political improvement in the position of the masses.
The difference between us and the reformists … is not that we oppose reforms while they favour them ... They confine themselves to reforms and as a result stoop…to the role of “hospital orderly for capitalism”.
We tell the workers: Make it your prime duty systematically to spread the idea of immediate socialist revolution, prepare for this revolution and radically reconstruct every aspect of party activity.
The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms. But we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms … that…five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.
“Principles Involved in the War Issue,” December, 1916: V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition, and Volume 23. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964.

The deadly and destructive nature of global capitalism has been on full display in Australia. Years of drought in the country’s eastern states have sparked some of the worst wildfires in history. Since September 2019, at least 30 people have died and more than 14 million acres have burned, an area nearly the size of  West Virginia (New York Times, 1/3). Over one billion animals have perished in the carnage (ABC News, 1/8).
The blame for this devastation lies squarely with the capitalist bosses. They like to deflect responsibility by telling workers that we need to make better lifestyle choices to reverse climate change. In reality, however, it is the rulers’ profit system—and especially their dependence on fossil fuels—that is driving environmental collapse.
For the local ruling class, the Australian wildfires present an opportunity to push more fascist discipline on workers. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Chinese imperialists are leveraging the crisis to gain a competitive edge in a region with strategic importance for the next global military war.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls on the international working class to reject the bosses’ “solutions” to environmental crises that sentence millions of workers to our deaths each year. By building a mass Red Army of millions led by PLP, we can overthrow the rulers with communist revolution. By doing away with money and profits, we can create a collective society that struggles for working class safety and ecological sustainability.
Imperialist tide turns, Down Under
For decades, Australia has remained tightly bound to the U.S., the world’s top imperialist power. Shortly after World War II, the U.S. bosses created military alliances with Australia to contain the Soviet Union (still a workers’ state at the time) and the communists in China, who had just emerged victorious after years of war against various capitalist armies.
In recent years, Chinese capitalists have projected more power in the South China Sea and the greater Pacific region, home to vital marine shipping routes and billions of dollars in trade (Geopolitical Futures, 2/3). As a counter, the U.S. bosses are urgently working to strengthen ties with Australia. Since 2005, the two nations’ militaries have staged a biannual training exercise with logistics sharing, amphibious landings, and air operations (Army Technology, 7/29/19). The northern coastal city of Darwin is home to 2,500 U.S. marines. In late 2018, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence announced a joint commitment with Australia to upgrade Lombrum naval base on Manus Island in nearby Papua New Guinea, or PNG (Reuters, 11/16/18). The move came amid talk of China extending its Belt and Road Initiative and developing ports in PNG. As the U.S. Naval Institute warned:
Manus’s commanding position north of mainland Papua New Guinea would allow China to regulate sea lines of communication (SLOCs) heading toward the eastern Australian seaboard and New Zealand. The 2,100-square-kilometer island also flanks the approaches to maritime east Asia. Indeed, prominent naval thinker Milan Vego maintains that “bases flanking friendly or enemy shipping routes . . . provide great advantages in both offense and defense in wartime (usni.com, December 2018).
Although the Australian ruling class still leans toward the U.S., the Chinese bosses have steadily expanded their presence on the island continent. China is the top importer of Australian commodities, and brings billions of dollars in annual tourism revenue (Wall Street Journal, 2/9). Notably, the Australian bosses signed on as a founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a Chinese-run alternative to the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund (ACRI, 4/25/19).
As China’s growing economic influence in and around Australia leads to greater military ambitions, it could trigger a response from the U.S. and open inter-imperialist conflict in an unstable region.
Building fascism, one natural disaster at a time
The Australian ruling class had over 10 years to prepare for the latest environmental cataclysm. The Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 were some of the country’s worst ever (The Guardian, 2/6/19). But instead of tightening environmental regulations and improving fire-fighting infrastructure, the bosses claimed that broader access to technology would protect workers and wildlife (The Conversation, 2/6/19). As usual, the bosses were wrong. As usual, workers are paying for their profit-driven neglect.
Australia is the world’s largest exporter of both coal and gas, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison is the industry’s leading cheerleader. According to a German think tank analysis, the country ranks last among 57 nations for climate change policy (guardian.com, 12/10/19). As capitalist climate disasters become more frequent and intense, the bosses are using them to build fascism. “Under legislation pending in Tasmania, and expected to be copied across Australia, environmental protesters now face up to 21 years in jail for demonstrating” (NYT, 1/3). Bosses worldwide are gearing up for an environmental rebellion they see as inevitable. A new wave of fascist anti-protest laws recalls the anti-terrorism laws pushed through the U.S. Congress after 9/11.
Liberal reformism can’t save workers from climate disaster
As the bosses look to exploit environmental crises to build fascism, many workers and youth understand that climate change poses a real risk to their future. Large numbers are mobilizing within mass movements like the climate strike in September 2019, the biggest demonstration in Australia’s history, followed by the massive “Extinction Rebellion” and anti-mining protests in Melbourne (NYT, 11/6/2019). In some cases, militant students have become the face of the movement, leading the charge to call out capitalist-made unnatural disasters.
But it didn’t take long for liberal bosses and revisionists to co-opt the movement, turning the focus from Australia’s fossil fuel billionaires to a campaign to oust Morrison (CBS News, 1/10). In the absence of revolutionary communist leadership, what began as an anti-capitalist movement was quickly funneled into the dead end of reformist electoral politics.
Communist revolution will reverse climate disaster
The international working class can’t allow ourselves to get duped by fake leftists or sell-out liberals. All of these frauds support capitalism, the system that has put profit ahead of clean air and water for centuries. Removing a few corrupt politicians won’t change the course of capitalism’s daily assault on workers and the environment. Recognizing our own power is essential to understanding how workers will one day run the world. In Australia, with limited government support and no pay, thousands of volunteer firefighters have led the battles against blazes “the size of small European countries” (bbc.com, 12/24/19). Whenever a climate disaster occurs, workers are the first to step up and act selflessly to rescue others from danger—and to rebuild.
Armed with communist politics and organization, we can transform the bosses’ crises into an international movement to destroy capitalism through communist revolution. From Melbourne to San Juan and everywhere in between, rebel against capitalism and join PLP.

*****

Racism, income inequality plague workers in Australia
The bosses in Australia like to brag about their status as one of the longest-living capitalist “democracies” in the world, and how the country has gone almost three decades without a recession (Market Watch, 2/9). Wage growth for workers has slowed to a trickle, while corporate profits and executive bonuses have soared. In one year alone, between 2016 and 2017, the number of billionaires in Australia grew by 20 percent. Workers are experiencing an “income recession” as rising living costs have combined with falling wages (actu.org).
Meanwhile, racist attacks on workers, ever present in this capitalist “democracy,” have only intensified in recent years. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government has carried out a racist policy of “resettling” asylum seekers to offshore island detention centers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Awaiting legal processing, these workers often languish for years and are easy targets for sexual violence and robbery (Foreign Policy, 7/24/19).
The indigenous workers in Australia, compromising about 3 percent of the population, continue to lag behind in child mortality, literacy, and employment. On average, indigenous men die eight years younger than non-indigenous men, and youth suicide rates are four times higher (BBC, 2/12).

It was out of my Jim Crow  experiences as a young Negro woman, experiences likewise born of working-class poverty that led me to join the Young Communist League and to choose the philosophy of my life, the science of Marxism-Leninism—that philosophy that not only rejects racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them. - Claudia Jones

One of the biggest lies the capitalists have ever tried to teach generations of working class people is that Black workers did not play a critical role in communist history. This is because the bosses will ALWAYS try to perpetuate the idea that workers should remain divided by race. However, we know in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) that multiracial unity has ALWAYS been the most effective way for workers to overcome the effects of racial exploitation and oppression. Claudia Jones, a Black female leading member of the Communist Party for decades, represents the heroic efforts in fighting racism and sexism from the 1930s to 1960s, just as her politics also point toward the weaknesses embedded in the strategy of international communism many years ago. The main weakness in the old communist movement that is evident through looking at Claudia Jones is that they did not understand the need for one international party LED by women and Black and Latin workers to unite and fight directly to overthrow capitalism and establish a workers’ state.
Formation as a communist
Like thousands of other workers in the early 1900s, Jones and her family emigrated to New York City from Trinidad in the Caribbean. Jones was an avid student and started writing early on. She had dreams of college, but as a daughter of a garment worker who died too young, she started working herself at a young age. The revolutionary vision and struggle of the communist movement appealed to her, and in 1936 she joined the Young Communist League and became active in the movement to defend the Scottsboro 9, a group of Black teenagers, who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama.
A multi-racial, communist-led movement, turned the  “Scottsboro Boys” into an international cause of millions of workers  all over the world to win their freedom. But just as the communist movement was at its sharpest point of winning workers around the world to workers’ revolution, they began to retreat politically into a “popular front against fascism” and Claudia Jones became part of that larger retreat.
Leadership in the Communist Party USA & fascist McCarthyism
In 1937, Jones joined the editorial staff of the communist Daily Worker, rising by 1938 to become editor of the Weekly Review. After WWII, Jones became executive secretary of the Women’s National Commission, secretary for the Women’s Commission of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In 1953, she took over the editorship of Negro Affairs, a CPUSA journal. However, if antiracism and internationalism had been the central premise of the CP’s strategy, they would not have had the need for a separate journal to address “Negro Affairs,” because all affairs of the working class are touched by racist capitalism and superexploitation.
Despite the shortcomings of the party’s line, Jones organized women workers and gave leadership within the Communist Party USA on the ways superexploitation of women could become central to the party’s theoretical development. She is perhaps best known for her seminal essay appearing in Political Affairs, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”  in which she took to task liberals, progressives and her own party for not sufficiently recognizing the super-exploitation of Black women under capitalism and their leadership in working class struggles, writing:

The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced….Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women.

In 1948, Jones, along with several other leaders of the Communist Party USA, was charged for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. Over the next seven years, the federal government  convicted, imprisoned in Ellis Island and ultimately deported Jones—but not without an international movement launched to free her and thousands of other communist and progressive working class organizers imprisoned during the fascism of the McCarthy period.
Fighting British racism & imperialism
Following  WWII, Caribbean immigration to the United Kingdom increased and Black and Asian immigrant workers faced brutal racism upon arrival. Signs reading “No Irish, No Coloured, No Dogs” littered the streets of London businesses and apartment buildings for rent. Attacks on Black youth by white mobs and police officers were common. Working in London in the 1950’s and 60’s, Jones, a lifelong communist and self-described Marxist-Leninist, tirelessly organized several antiracist, anti-imperialist campaigns.
 Realizing the importance of celebrating working class culture, Jones founded the West Indian Gazette, a popular newspaper that built a base among Caribbean diaspora workers in Britain and back home, with a circulation of 15,000. In 1958, following the killings of Black youths and riots instigated by racist white mobs in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London, Jones and others organized a carnival in response to the violence as a means of unifying the Black Caribbean community.
Claudia Jones died in December 1964, her health gutted by the years of political persecution and incarceration in the U.S. Her legacy was immediately felt by working class communities around the world and condolences poured in, from W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Amy Ashwood Garvey to Mao Zedong, whom Jones had met on a delegation to China. Claudia Jones remains an example of how the leadership of Black workers, especially Black women, is key to the future of building a communist society. Paul Robeson expressed his admiration for Jones thusly:
“It was a great privilege to have known Claudia Jones. She was a vigorous and courageous leader of the Communist Party of the United States, and was very active in the work for the unity of white and coloured peoples and for dignity and equality, especially for the Negro people and for women.”  It is fitting that Jones is buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in London. Following her deportation, Jones wrote:

I was deported from the USA because as a Negro woman communist of West Indian descent, I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow racist discrimination against 16 million Negro Americans in the United States, in my work for redress of these grievances, for unity of Negro and white workers, for women’s rights...

As communists we should all be that thorn in the side of capitalism—so sharp as to make it bleed.