CHICAGO, IL—“As long as we have each other, we are not alone…When my inside begins to question if this is good or bad, right or wrong, and how the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) and Mayor’s Office will respond, I am made stronger when I envision the City in grid-lock because not one bus or train is moving. If I have that vision, I know the powers that be also share the same vision.”  As more than 300 members of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 308 voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike vote, this train operator and many other workers understand that the whole damn capitalist system has to go and the working class has the power to make that happen!
 Local 308 is the rail side of public transportation, ATU Local 241 is the bus side. This vote followed both locals conducting a joint “Day of Action” on December 21, to protest a CTA contract offer that includes a 2 percent “raise,” an 18 percent increase in health insurance premiums and unlimited subcontracting of transit work. Nearly 10,000 CTA workers have been without a contract for a year.
Transit workers often face long shifts and more than 40-hour weeks. Accelerated discipline, a system that leads to rapid suspensions and firings, is stacked against workers from the word go, and “accelerates” short staffing and increased workloads.
Another worker attacked the CTA’s “evil 2-tier wage system” as part-timers “operate the same trains, flag at the same sights, do the same platform duties, but make half of what a full time employee makes.” He said that four years ago, CTA bosses thanked Locals 308 and 241 for saving them $60 million dollars a year for the life of the contract!
Prison Labor at CTA
There is another group of union members who pay full union dues, pay into the billion-dollar Retiree Health Care Trust, but have no benefits and are temporary. These are the “2nd Chance” workers, who have criminal records for non-violent offenses and make only $10 an hour. This is how this racist, capitalist system works. Give tax cuts to the rich and find more and more ways to drive workers as close to poverty as possible. The whole damn system has to go!
After the strike vote, there was a vote on the 2nd Chance program. Workers who had just called for a strike vote, voted overwhelmingly that the local union should not agree to renew this poverty-wage program with the CTA. Some members complained that 2nd Chance workers get better days off and are used to take away overtime hours. Others said that by only hiring people with criminal records for entry level maintenance jobs, their children cannot get these jobs. What we really need is union scale jobs for everyone now and revolution to get rid of this racist, capitalist system as soon as possible. No one is really getting a second chance at $10/hour. Not surprisingly both the ATU leadership and the CTA bosses want to keep the 2nd Chance Program.
Even after the defeat of Hillary Clinton in November, the union leaders remain in the hip pocket of the Democratic Party. That’s why there has not been a strike since 1979. While some workers have been won to more racist ideas, more are open to the idea of a strike, and to fighting racism. With the rash of police killings of black youth and gang-related murders due to poverty and mass unemployment among black youth, more workers are also talking about the need for revolution. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is rebuilding our national concentration in mass transit. We need to build a mass base for communist revolution among transit workers from Chicago to New York to Washington, DC. We have our work cut out for us, but this is the work that can ultimately lead millions of workers to power. Join us!

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Transit Workers Under Racist Assault

Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the CTA President Dorval R. Carter are pushing for deeper concessions while granting tax cuts and other subsidies to big business. This is the national trend in mass transit, one of the main concentrations of, and last sources of decent pay and benefits, for black workers in the US.
More than 30,000 New York transit workers in Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 are now voting on a contract that offers a 2 percent raise, but will drastically cut labor costs as thousands retire and new hires start at about two-thirds the pay, while billions are paid to the banks on interest for capital project loans. Bus drivers in Dayton, Ohio, ATU Local 1385, voted to strike only to be derailed by the ATU and TWU leadership. In December, ATU local 589 in Boston offered to negotiate wage concessions even before the contract expired. Detroit bus drivers, in ATU Local 26, signed a new contract in 2015 with starting wage of only $12/hour. And in November, the TWU ended a strike by 5,000 Philadelphia transit workers in order to get-out-the-vote for Hillary Clinton, and then accepted a contract that cut pensions.
National freight railroad workers are also in contract talks, facing similar demands from their bosses. Chicago has the highest concentration of freight railroad workers, from nearly all of the major railroads.

Recently I tried to get some Chinese language practice by making small talk with a woman worker sitting next to me on an airplane to China. Somehow, the conversation got around to the Cultural Revolution. Like many workers in China you might meet today, she immediately felt compelled to tell me how that particular ten year period, 1966-1976, was a disaster for China.
This worker’s idea of this period being a “disaster” for China comes from the capitalists who run China today. China’s educational system, like that of the U.S. and every other capitalist country, teaches the lies that the capitalists want workers to believe—and they have the gall to call themselves the “Chinese Communist Party.” China’s capitalist bosses use their state power to attack the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with a ferocity matched only by professional anticommunist academics in the U.S.
The attacks on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution serve to mask the achievements of millions of workers won to communism, who dared to defend the 1949 Chinese Revolution, when the working class seized state power. Today, despite calling themselves “communist,” the bosses hold state power in China. Our class lost power there around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and the entire world we live in is controlled by a tiny capitalist class in each country who live by the labor others do for them: the international working class.
If our class sisters and brothers are to ever smash this capitalist hell with its imperialist wars and sharpening racist and sexist attacks worldwide, the Cultural Revolution is a key piece of history to understand. Fortunately for those fighting for a worker-run, egalitarian world, that is, for real communism, there are scholars like Yiching Wu.
Masses Fought Back With Creativity and Courage
In 238 pages of The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (2014), Wu pulls together information from about 400 sources, most in Chinese and many previously unavailable, to critically examine the political trends “at the margins” of the Cultural Revolution. It is a story of vast upheaval and class war, where ordinary workers fought with courage and creativity in an effort to take China to the road of true equality, communism. This book is of particular interest to members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party, because Yiching Wu reaches many of the same conclusions that PLP published in 1971.
Now is an important moment to reexamine this history. 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and also the 50th anniversary of a exploding class war in China.
In 1967, masses of workers in the city of Shanghai expelled the fake “Communist” Party misleaders and seized control of the city, defiantly declaring it the “Shanghai Commune.” Elsewhere, groups like Shengwulian in Hunan Province, the Bohai Battle Regiment in Shandong Province, and others, organized opposition to evolving systems of exploitation inside the socialist state.
They criticized the “Communist” Party’s decision in the 1950s to set up a system of material incentives for party leaders and mangers. They argued that such a system had created conditions for the development of a new ruling class, as it had in the Soviet Union, where capitalism was fully restored by that time. This system, which ranked cadres (managers, usually Party members) and Party leaders in over 20 grades with different salaries and access to better housing, schools, private cars, medical care and even domestic servants. Groups like Shengwulian criticized what they called the “bureaucratic capitalist” class.
History Written By The Rulers
Most workers in China today, let alone workers around the world, never learn about these mass communist uprisings that shook China’s new so-called “communist” capitalist class to its core.
The standard narrative of the Cultural Revolution is that Mao Zedong and other leaders inside the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) saw that the Soviet Union’s way of building socialism after the workers took power there was leading back to capitalism. So, the top leaders launched the Cultural Revolution to keep the same thing from happening in China. Supposedly, under the ground rules of that CCP-sanctioned campaign, ordinary workers and students were encouraged to criticize those party members and managers who were “taking the capitalist road.”
This narrative paints Mao as its central hero, who, in January of 1967, determined that enough “capitalist roaders” had been removed from power. The story goes that as soon as he died, pro-capitalist elements of the CCP and within a few years, presto! China had become the capitalist country we know today.
This story completely ignores the mass rebellions and uprisings made by the working class against the government in 1967, the year that the capitalists had supposedly been chased out. The tens of millions of workers, students, peasants and former soldiers joined mass organizations like the Shanghai Commune and Shengwulian - in opposition to what they viewed as the return of full-blown capitalism.
More and more scholarship is being published that upends the dominant narrative of the Cultural Revolution.
Today’s world is under the control of competing groups of capitalists, each trying to grow their economic and political dominance (a process called “imperialism”), and world war becomes more likely every day. Creating a peaceful worker-run society without exploitation is the goal of communist revolution. The only way to prevent inter-imperialist war is to eliminate the economic system that produces imperialism, to eliminate capitalism.
Today’s communists must study the great revolutions of the past, including the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was defeated primarily because these millions of workers still held on to the idea of fighting for socialism first, and communism later—a view PLP rejected in 1982, in large part based on the experiences of the Cultural Revolution. Our literature analyzes the success and failures of the old movement elsewhere.  
PLP fights on from the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. We will not stop until communist ideas are once again mass ideas, and next time, we will take communist revolution all the way.

On December 30, 2016, Turkish investigative journalist Ahmet Sik was arrested and charged with spreading “terrorist propaganda” for a tweet. He is among 144 journalists who are currently in jail in Turkey since the failed coup against President Erdogan last July. The right-wing ruling Justice and Development Party (AK) launched a massive purge of the police, judiciary, media, schools, and universities in response to the coup attempt. Thousands of teachers, municipal workers, and journalists have lost their jobs, and dozens of newspapers and TV stations have been closed.
Sik and journalist Nedim Sener were previously jailed in 2011-2012, and Sik’s book, The Imam’s Army, about the cleric Fethullah Gulen, was banned and never printed. Gulen lives in the U.S. and has been blamed by Erdogan for the attempted coup.
Most sources claim that the media crackdown is a response to the coup attempt. However, if you pull the camera back a bit you see endless and spreading wars throughout the Middle East. These most recent wars were first launched by the US invasion of Afghanistan 16 years ago, followed three years later by the US invasion of Iraq. Both of these wars still continue, even as more countries become involved. Meanwhile attacks against journalists, and journalism are spreading.
In 2016, while doing their jobs, 30 journalists were killed in the Middle East through targeted murders or bomb attacks, though some were caught in a fire fight.
In Syria, Iraq, and Yemen most of these were freelancers under 30 years old, with little or no protective gear or safety training.
During Israel’s offensive against Gaza in 2014, Palestinian media centers were targeted and destroyed, and about a dozen Palestinian journalists were killed.
Currently in Iran journalists are being sentenced to public floggings, high fines, and prison.
As the U.S. wars spread to engulf the entire region, press freedom is high on the casualty list. The local rulers can only carry out this endless and growing battle for control of resources and labor through fascist rule. Turkey has been a major player in the war, on all sides, being used as a staging area for U.S. bombing missions and as a gateway for foreign fighters to enter Syria. The Turkish army has also ruthlessly attacked Kurdish forces, allied with the U.S., who are fighting ISIS.
These fascist attacks are also developing in the U.S., with a striking resemblance to Turkey. Under Trump, we now have lies that masquerade thinly as “alternative facts,” and the press has been labeled “the opposition party.” Six reporters were arrested on Inauguration Day, covering the J20 protests, and are facing felony charges. But this didn’t start with Trump.
Reporters, including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, were arrested, threatened, and assaulted while covering the North Dakota Pipeline protests, as well as marches and rebellions against racist police terror in New York and Ferguson, Missouri. The Obama Administration prosecuted nine cases under the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined, in an attempt to silence whistle blowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and stop government leaks to the press, all in the name of Homeland Security. “Liberal” Obama opened the door for “fascist” Trump to go further.
Fascism is the domestic method used by the rulers to prepare for and wage war. The only solution to war and fascism, both inevitable and recurring stepchildren of capitalism, is communist revolution in Turkey, the Middle East, and around the world. Only an end to capitalism will put an end to its absolute need to exploit, murder, and rob for the sake of profits. Only a working-class revolution, led by its communist party, PLP, can abolish capitalism and replace it with a worker-run system that will no longer require war, fascism, racism, sexism, and nationalism.

The following is an excerpt from Left Front, a journal put out during the early 1930s by the Chicago John Reed Club, a communist Party-led organization of radical writers and artists.
This article focuses on the CP's milit­ant  opposition  to  evictions, an  opposition  that rapidly gained for the communists  a massive work­ing-class base.
Since May Day, the holiday of the international working class, is less two months away,  readers of CHALLENGE may be interested  in taking a les­son from the boldness of the 1930s conununists in con­fronting (and returning) the violence of the police. Note the multiracial unity of workers, and the dead-end politics of the Black nationalists.
Note: any comments placed between brackets [ ] are interjections intended to refer places and events to the present day.

“The South Side Sees Red”
The funeral of two of the Negroes slain in the Au­gust 3rd Eviction Battle, Abe Grey and John O’Neil, was one of the largest and most impressive demon­ strations ever held in Chicago. Forty thousand Neg­roes marched in the funeral procession with twenty­ five thousand white  workers—and a hundred thousand more, both white and black, flanked them on the line of march! The police did all in their power to break up the parade, to route street cars between the marchers, and to intimidate the spectators. But at each police tactic the marchers closed ranks, and the procession went on. From open windows and crowded fire escapes, from every available vantage point came shouts and wild applause as the line of march broke into song—The Internationale.
Following the August 3rd massacre hundreds of Negroes   joined    the    Communist    party,    whilethousands  entered  the  Unemployed  Councils.  Butthis apparent success was in reality a serious defeat. For the Party and the Councils did not yet have the firm organizational foundation needed before large numbers of new elements could be taken in. The new members, through their low level of political develop­ment, and the opportunistic attitude of some of them, weakened the organizations, leading to the later set­backs.
The Unemployed  Councils also were to suffer later for a lack of proper direction at this crucial mo­ment. They were fighting the charities, forcing them to give relief. They were fighting evictions. But the un­employed workers were given nothing else to fight. If the struggle of the unemployed had been tied up with their former jobs, they might have been united in mutual struggles with those who still had jobs.
But for the moment the Communist movement received a tremendous stimulus. Dearborn and Fed­eral Streets, in the neighborhood of the massacre, be­came the “Red Wedding’’ of Chicago. In one block near 40th Street and Dearborn there were two Com­ munist Party units, a Women’s Club, an I.L.D. [Inter­national Labor Defense] branch, and an Unemployed Council. Posters announcing demonstrations and meetings covered every wall. The membership ofUn­ employed Council No.4 grew tobetween nine and ten thousand.  [This is where  the north end  of Robert Taylor Homes, a huge post World War II housing project. What would PLP do if we had such a poilitical base there today!] A crew of five hundred workers roamed the streets, singing Solidarity, and looking for evictions.
The period after August 3rd, 1931, was unquestiona­bly a new high point in the growth of the Communist movement on the South Side.
Police Try to Kill Movement Through Violence
For several months the Police kept their  distance.  Then,  in  January,  1932, the  Un­employed Councils called a demonstration at the Ab­raham Lincoln Center Relief Station on  Oakwood Boulevard.
A  committee had  been selected to present  demands. But the police refused to let them enter the building. The leaders had expected this and had for­ mulated a clever plan. Before the demonstration a white member of the committee, Madden, had entered the station as a client. When he heard the milit­ant songs of the crowd, he walked into the super­ visor’s office and laid the aemands on her desk. Im­mediately he was arrested.
Word of the arrest reached the comrades on the street. Their leaders... began speaking to the crowd, telling them of the arrest and announcing that they would rescue Madden unless he was released in ten minutes. While they were talking the police  with­ drew into the lobby of Lincoln Center, barricading themselves behind the six large  doors.
Jackson, watch in hand, said “Time’s up!”
The crowd surged forward. The police opened the doors just enough to swing at the workers with their clubs. One Negro took the club away from a police captain. The other workers beat the captain with his own club until he was groggy, when they pulled him through the door and into the middle of the crowd where he was soundly thrashed.
The  captain  bellowed  for  help.  Brown  Squire says then the fight started. The women and kids dashed into the alleys and dug up bricks, milk bottles and rocks, then brought them to the comrades to throw. Many workers and police were slugged. Lots of us were arrested when the riot squad got there and began shooting.
Among th comrades was Edith Miller, a white member of the Young Communist League, who was chased into a doorway, then beaten so badly that she had to be taken to the Bridewell Hospital with a frac­tured skull. A Negro with a cork leg was knocked unconscious during the melee at the door, but was re­scued by a comrade who knocked down the policeman dragging him to a patrol wagon.
[That night thirty police with machine guns ter­rorized homes of suspected Party members on the South Side. At one they apprehended four youths.]
These included “Thomas, a Negro member of the Young Communist League, who had been arrested and warned before, two Jewish comrades who hap­pened to be present, and Tony Grenot, a Negro with a light skin and curly  hair whom  they  mistook for a Jew.
Calling the Jews filthy names and shouting, “We’ll teach you to hang around with ni**ers,” they lined the four boys up with their faces against the wall and their arms stretched above their heads.
“Then,” says Joe Jackson, “They hit ’em across the back of the head with blackjacks and butted their faces against the wall. After that they smashed the furniture into kindling wood, even tearing down the partitions. Finally they Jet the women and children go and loaded sixteen men and boys into patrol wagons.
“In the Wabash  Avenue Station, that night all the police and plain clothes men in the district were called in. Then they brought the prisoners out of their cells. The officers lined up about two to three feet apart. Tony Grenot and the two white comrades were forced down the line and beaten unconscious with police clubs, while the other comrades watched. Their faces looked like bloody beef. Tony was put into the same cell with me, but by morning we had persuaded the turnkey to send him to Bridewell Hospital.”
The next day a demonstration was held at the police station to protest against the attack on the council. No one was allowed within four blocks of the station. All whites were arrested and beaten half to death [by the police]. A salesman, in the neighbor­hood on business, was among those beaten.
[The article goes on to show that this sort of police repression only strengthened the resolve of the Communist-led movement against racism. The movement expanded to address many issues beyond evictions and relief, and it built multiracial unity in many ways.]
Workers, Black and White, Fight Back
In January, the Negroes took a prominent part in the famous demonstration at the Japanese consulate, Tribune Tower—many were beaten by police or tram­pled by horses. In March an important meeting was called by the American Consolidated Trades Council, a federation of Negro unions, to lay plans for combat­ing the open Jim Crowism of construction workers on the new Jim Crow  Provident Hospital at 51st and Vincennes Avenue.
On April 27, three thousand un­employed   participated in the first Stock Yards Hunger March. On May 5, two hundred Negro and white ex-service men left on the first bonus march. Hundreds of workers went with them to 119 Street, and they were presented with truckloads of food, gathered from all parts of the city. In the National Nominating Convention of the Communist Party in May, the Negro groups took a leading part. Herbert Newton of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights opened the convention.
In June 1932, a mass picket of the Provident Hospital was held under the direction of Edward L. Doty of the American Consolidated Trades Council, in protest against the Jim Crow policy of the A. F. of L.  in  the  construction  of  this  Jim  Crow  hospital.
Again, in July, another mass picket won concessions in pay and recognition of the Negro Electrical Wrok­ers’ Union. This picketing was supported by Negro tinsmiths, lathers, plumbers and steamfitters who were not admitted by the A.F. of L.
During the spring and summer several demonstrations were held at relief stations to demand better treatment for unemployed Negroes. During one dem­onstration at Lincoln Center news was brought that a family was being evicted at 37th and  Indiana Av­enue. Five thousand Negroes began to march to the scene of the eviction. As they passed Wendell Phillips High  School some hoodlums tore a Democratic election sign from a truck. A henchman ran out of the Democratic headquarters, and began firing into the workers, shooting Madden in the shoulder. The police as usual arrested the leaders of the demon­stration: Squire, Poindexter, and James Ross. Mad­den was rushed to the hospital at 38 and Wabash Avenue. In a short time Murphy of the Red Squad ar­rived and demanded that he be alowed to take Mad­den to the Bridewell Hospital, but the doctor refused to release the patient.
The Struggle Against Nationalism
[The article-goes on to describe  a clash between communists and Garveyites (black nationalists), who competed for the attention and allegiance of workers at the open Forum in Washington Park, where hun­dreds of black workers would gather daily to discuss politics.]
At the Forum, trouble was brewing between the communists and the Garveyites. A back-to-Africa movement which, some years before, had for a short time won a tremendous following. One Sunday in Au­gust the Garveyites marched on the Forum, dressed in gaudy uniforms and led by a bellowing brass band. Three times they marched around the Forum, as Joshua did at Jericho. Then they demanded that the Forum be turned over to them.
[News then came in of an eviction being carried on at] a house owned by a woman Garveyite at 41st and St. Lawrence Avenue. The family and neighbors appealed to the Unemployed Council for aid in replac­ing the furniture. When the Council arrived, they armed resistance from Garveyites, stationed with re­volvers in the house and adjoining and backed up by the police. [Note. whose side these nationalists were on!] Afterwards it was found that hundreds of Garveyites had come in trucks and cars from Indiana for this battle.
That night 1,200 workers were mobilized at the Forum. Many wanted to go right out, then and there, and mop up the Garveyites, but the communist lead­ers knew that such a fight would result in a massacre of workers. They suggested instead a demonstration the next day at the scene of the eviction. A steering committee was elected....A few brave workers were assigned to guard the furniture during the night.
At nine the next morning a tremendous aggrega­tion of from 15,000 to 20,000 people gathered at 41 Street and St. Lawrence.... [A committee was elected on the spot; it carried the demonstration’s demands to the local relief station, where a new home-was secured for the evicted family, and the rent was paid by the relief agency.]
Victorious, the committee returned to the demonstration. Following their report, [members of the Council]  spoke,  pointing  out  the  role  of  the  Un­employed Council and explaining how mass pressure had gained this victory. Then  the  furniture  was loaded on the truck and moved to the new home.
[We can clearly see that the workers of Chicago have a long history of multiracial unity. But capitalist schools ignore this history. The school bosses don’t want youth to Jearn how to fight back from our forefathers. It’s up to PLP teachers and students to bring this history to workers and youth.]J