Progressive Labor Party was established in 1965, just one year before the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. 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 demonstrated the power of the collective. They taught us the importance of leadership 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 road to revisionism and the return of full-blown capitalism.
The first three parts of this first-person account told the story of a Chinese village factory and its workers—how their lives were changed by the Cultural Revolution and changed again by the CR’s reversal. Part Four illustrates the widening inequalities as Chinese society has continued to deteriorate since the Cultural Revolution was defeated.

Guan Dunxiao, another who bought a share of the village factory, became the most successful entrepreneur in our county. In 1987, he paid close to one million yuan in taxes. As the county’s biggest taxpayer, he was invited to join the Communist Party and became deputy chairman of the county’s political consultation conference. Most of the workers from the original factory left him.
Guan Dunxiao helped his younger brother, Guan Dunjia, who was only a teenager when I worked at the factory, take over the county’s bus operation. This eventually earned him twenty million yuan a year.
Guan Dunyan, the manager before me, left the factory as soon as Deng Xiaoping began to privatize collective assets. He sold things on the markets and used the money to buy land when the price was very low. He now lives off the land he bought in the early days and rented to others to build factories.
Altogether, there are now a dozen people in the village with assets over one hundred million yuan. One-third of the villagers are millionaires; another third live comfortably; the rest are struggling to survive.
Among the losers, a few stand out. Fu Xisan, the man who advised me not to go college, died in his fifties of liver cancer three months after the village factory was privatized. He put more than ten years of his life into the factory and was devastated by what happened there. Many people thought he died of anger. When I went to see his family on my winter break, his widow said sadly, “The village has really changed since you left.”
Wang Siyong, one of my earlier colleagues in the factory, fared badly as well. He was two years older than I, and we’d played together as boys. We worked on the same eighth production team. After the factory was privatized, Wang left to set up his own enterprise. But his operation failed. On top of that, his brother-in-law, who’d been working for him, ran away with a lot of money. Wang was buried in debt. He sold the family house and everything he owned to pay his creditors. He died in his early forties, leaving behind a wife and two daughters to fend for themselves without him.
Liu Enxun was the factory electrician in the early years. After privatization, he went to work for Guan Dunxiao. But his wife fell seriously ill, and for years Liu spent all his income on her medical treatments. Eventually his wife died. Whenever I met him, he would tell me he was the poorest man in the village and relied on government relief money to get enough to eat.
Liu’s younger brother, Liu Qixun lived in similar poverty and had a tragic life. His only son was killed by a traffic accident at the age of 15. His distraught wife left him to live in another place. Just one year older than me, he had aged beyond his years.
Wang Xuejin, the secret weapon, had his share of sadness as well. His oldest son, Wang Daying, was a highly intelligent person and a talented painter and musician. He could listen to a new song once and play it back on his erhu, the two-stringed Chinese fiddle. But he was socially awkward and found it difficult to get up in the morning. When we worked in the fields together, I would wake him up every morning. After I went to work in the factory, somebody else did the same. But once the collective was broken up, nobody bothered to wake him anymore.
In the end, his wife divorced him and left the village with their son. Wang Daying became depressed and in 1998 he hanged himself. For Wang Xuejin, it was a great tragedy in his old age to bury his beloved son.
Fu Xisan was the first person to die prematurely of disease in fifteen years in my village. But several others soon followed him. Wang Fangjun died in 1980, in his 40s; his half-brother Lu Sihai, in 1982, in his 30s; Guan Dunxie in 1983, in his 50s; Liu Chengrui in 1985, in his 40s. All of these men were from my old production team. Other teams in the village suffered similar losses.
Why were all these people dying young? Once the collective was broke up, it marked the end of free medical care and free education in the village. Our sense of community was gone, and everybody was struggling to get ahead. The stress of competition took its toll on the people. The disintegration of our village is a microcosm of how China fell apart after the defeat of the GPCR.

Millions of workers worldwide celebrated May Day 2014, the international working-class holiday rooted in the earliest fights for communism more than a century ago. The Progressive Labor Party is carrying forward this tradition in more than twenty countries on five continents. Despite the bosses’ efforts to bury this tradition in a wave of nationalism and imperialism, millions of 2014 May Day marchers advanced their anti-capitalist demands. They showed the potential of the working class to organize for communist revolution.
War Is ‘Good’ — For the Bosses
Meanwhile, the bosses are urgently proclaiming that war is good. On April 25, the ultra-imperialist Washington Post printed an op-ed piece headlined, “In the Long Run, Wars Make Us Safer and Richer.” Through ten thousand years of conflict, the piece read, “humanity has created larger, more organized societies that have greatly reduced the risk that their members will die violently. These better organized societies also have created the conditions for higher living standards and economic growth. War has not only made us safer, but richer, too.”
But who is “us”? The group enriching itself through war is the tiny, profiteering capitalist class, not the billions now struggling to survive on one to two dollars a day. And who is safer? Not the tens of millions who died in World War I. Not the more than 100 million who died in World War II. Not the tens of millions more slaughtered in the imperialists’ proxy wars since 1945.
Rulers Go Nuclear?
The ruling class’s war mongering is most apparent in the spiking tension between Washington and Moscow in Ukraine and beyond. Pro-Russian forces are widening the combat zone against the U.S.-backed government in Kiev. U.S. troops are positioned to defend what may be Putin’s next targets in the Baltic region — and to set a “trip wire” for a potential nuclear war, Barack Obama’s high-stakes revival of NATO’s mid-20th-century Cold War doctrine (see CHALLENGE, 4/7).
During the Cold War (1947-1991), the U.S. stationed hundreds of thousands of troops at the edge of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Europe. Any conflict could have been used to justify massive U.S. retaliation. Today Obama is taking a similar tack against the Russian imperialists among the U.S. rulers’ leading rivals for profits. On April 26, Lithuania President Dalia Grybauskaite rehearsed the trip-wire scenario by greeting 150 U.S. paratroopers: “The numbers are not important. If just one of our guests is harmed, this would mean an open confrontation, not with Lithuania but with the United States of America” (Reuters, 4/26/14).
On May 2, according to the New York Times, “46 people died as a result of street battles between pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine groups....in Odessa, far west of the country’s restive eastern region.” As the leading mouthpiece for the U.S. ruling class, the Times worried that this violence was “a measure of how far events have spiraled out of the authorities’ control.” CNN (5/4/14) chimed in, “This unrest raises the prospect of Russia becoming even more involved, whether that involves taking over all or parts of the region peacefully as it did with Crimea or as part of a full-scale military conflict.”
Losing influence in the Ukraine — a conduit for Russia’s oil and gas pipeline to the west — terrifies U.S. bosses. So does Putin’s threat to “liberate” ethnic Russians by taking over other former Soviet bloc countries. Unlike Ukraine, these nations now belong to U.S.-led NATO, making the stakes even higher (For the origin and role of NATO, see CHALLENGE, 4/7.)
Oil War Heating Up
U.S. and Russian capitalists are also squaring off in the Middle East. According to a May 1 article published by the BBC, “Iraq: A Proxy Battleground in a Regional War,”  “sectarian” killings have tripled over the past year. The BBC attributed this escalation to a struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for supremacy in the Gulf: “Shia officials openly accuse Saudi Arabia of financing Sunni extremists in the region, whereas Iraqi Sunnis often accuse the government of Nouri al-Maliki of power-grabbing to help Iran advance its regional agenda.”
But this is only the surface of the story. Behind Saudi royals and Iranian ayatollahs is the competition between
ExxonMobil and Russia’s Lukoil to dominate Iraqi oil supplies. Exxon’s transactions with Saudi Arabia represent the biggest deals in the history of capitalism. So it is no surprise that the all-time biggest arms sale, now under way, links Washington and the Saudi rulers. On the other hand, “Iran’s current leaders are feeling increasingly comfortable with President Vladimir V. Putin’s anti-American and anti-Western stances,” as reflected in a recent Russia-Iran $10-billion energy deal (NYT, 4/29/14).
Iraq’s warring sect leaders, bankrolled by Saudis and Iranians, have their own oil-fueled agendas, from jobs patronage to revenue sharing. But the imperialist forces backing them are locked in a larger fight for a much bigger prize.
In mid-March, Russian oil giant Lukoil celebrated the start up of the West Qurna-2. The Iraqi oilfield...was quite likely the world’s biggest untapped field, with recoverable oil reserves believed to be in the neighborhood of 20 billion barrels” (Forbes, 5/3/14).
The Victims: Five Million Iraqis
Russia’s oil barons have made this critical inroad without firing a shot in either U.S.-led war on Iraq. But Maliki’s coziness with Iran and Russia is driving Exxon — for whose benefit four U.S. presidents displaced or killed five million Iraqis — to destabilize his regime. To the consternation of both Maliki and Putin, Exxon is defying Baghdad’s dictates by drilling and exporting crude from Iraq’s renegade Kurdish region.
As U.S. rulers seek continued control of Middle East oil to keep rival imperialists in check, they are also accelerating their campaign to guarantee domestic energy supplies against the growing probability of trans-oceanic wars. The imperialist Brookings Institution think tank praises the U.S. energy industry’s foresight “as it consumes more home-produced oil and turns to sources of supply from its own backyards, notably from Canada, Venezuela and Mexico. Brazilian supplies, which are estimated to be among the world’s largest, could dramatically reinforce this trend” (“Fueling a New Disorder? The New Geopolitical and Security Consequences of Energy,” Brookings, March 2014).
In addition, “the federal government will build its first gasoline storage reserves in the New York Harbor area and in New England. Together, the reserves will hold about a million barrels of gasoline.... the fuel is intended to be held back in case another disaster cripples regional fuel supplies.” This is code for the contingency of a global inter-imperialist conflict.
Workers’ Trump Card: Fight for Communism
The bosses’ crucial obstacle is the refusal of the international working class to serve as cannon fodder in the rulers’ next bloodbath. Today, workers in Ukraine and Russia are of central importance. But our resistance must include workers on every continent, workers who are already fighting back against the ravages of capitalism. Class struggle is raging worldwide, from workers in China striking against their Nike exploiters, to garment workers in Bangladesh fighting the bosses’ deathtraps, to workers in France, Spain and Greece opposing international capitalism’s imposition of austerity programs, to students and workers in Haiti refusing to accept the fascism inflicted on them by U.S. rulers and their local lackeys, to the slum dwellers in Brazil defending their homes in battles with the cops, to students, teachers and workers in U.S. cities standing up to the racist attacks in their schools and workplaces — all this indicates the working class will not accept the ruling class’s assault lying down and will continue to rebel against the latter’s onslaught.
The inter-imperialist conflict must be transformed into a class war against the bosses’ system. Capitalism must be overthrown and replaced with a communist society — of, by and for the working class.
Indispensable to that goal is the leadership and growth of the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party. As communists, we must dedicate ourselves to lead the world’s workers to bury the profit system, the cause of all the problems suffered by our class. Join us!

NEW YORK CITY, May 5 — Workers here are under attack. Masses of city employees are slaving away under expired union contracts. The principle of “No contract, No work” — meaning if workers hadn’t won their demands when their contract expired, they would strike — now seems like ancient history. Gone is the militant, communist leadership that once steered NYC unions towards challenging capitalists’ constant drive to maximize profits off our backs. Instead we have union mis-leaders telling workers for years to hold on for a new, “better” mayor. Recent events have shown that putting faith in union hacks and politicians will get us nowhere!
On April 17, transit workers found they were among the first to be sold out. A deal struck between Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 mis-leaders and NY State Governor Cuomo “The Cutter” raises the cost of workers’ health insurance, lengthens wage-progression to five years (up from three) and only grants pay raises that are really cuts because they’re below inflation. It provides the bosses and their lackeys years of “labor peace” with a five-year contract (also up from three).
This is a racist contract which attacks a mainly black, Latino, Asian and immigrant workforce, and is especially bad for those newly hired who are even more predominately from those groups. Since it will take even longer to get to top pay, the contract will encourage hire-and-fire attacks (especially in already unstable jobs like bus drivers). However, this racist sellout will affect all new transit workers, will further divide the new from the old and thereby weaken all.
While Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) unions bargain with the State, the amount that 38,000 TWU Local 100 members earn sets a pattern in the city for all workers, especially other MTA workers who are in Amalgamated Transit Union locals. This is clear from the April 30 deal announced by Bill “Cutbacks” deBlasio and the United Federation of Teachers. The sexist teachers’ contract, which attacks a mainly female workforce, allows for nearly the exact same pay raises that fail to match inflation and represents a longer-than-usual contract.
To be clear, gross totals of inflation for 2012 and 2013 were 3 percent, while pay raises were only 2 percent. New York workers are well aware of this, especially thanks to the Rent Guidelines Board, which has jacked up rents 5.25-7.25 percent in those years!
The cuts in real pay and benefits in store for the rest of the city’s workers could be even worse. Much of this stems from the fact that while the bosses steal trillions of dollars from public and private sector workers’ labor, they spend these monies on imperialist wars. Capitalist politicians are professional liars when in comes to blaming one another for lack of funding for schools, transit and healthcare that workers need.
As workers we need the PLP to grow, to become strong enough to lead workers, students and soldiers away from not only the bosses’ politicians but also from the treadmill of reforms. While it’s good to fight to make workers lives better now, capitalism operates to take away what meager gains we win through higher taxes, mass racist unemployment, two-tier wage systems and outright wage-cuts. That’s why learning to fight the bosses is even more important, so we can ultimately overthrow the capitalist class and take power for ourselves. A communist system could meet all workers’ needs, destroy racism and sexism, homelessness, imperialist war and wage slavery.

NEW YORK CITY, May 5  — The UCLA Civil Rights Project just named New York as the state with the most segregated school system in the U.S., with New York City leading the way.
Racist disparities between students of the same age show us each day how unequal our society is. An Annenberg Foundation report of September 2012 found that in black and Latino neighborhoods only 10% of students graduate “college ready.”
The current contract proposal for NYC teachers is — like those before it — a contract ON the mainly black and Latino youth of the NYC school system. The offer of $5,000 to teach in “hard-to-staff” (read black and Latino) schools is a capitulation to racist segregation, to the notion that separate can be made more equal. Teachers must reject this contract because separate can never be made equal.
This contract ought to be rejected also because it contains increased avenues for the Department of Education  and principals to sow division among teachers by offering merit pay. If this contract passes, a small number of teachers will be anointed as ones with the responsibility for coming up with new and sustaining effective teaching practices.
Teachers must reject this contract because our union refuses to fight for a reduction in class size. Yes, it is true the raises are paltry and don’t even keep up with inflation. However, that is not the reason to vote this contract down. We should vote no because we need to send a strong message that we stand in solidarity with the interests of our students. The 2012 teachers strike in Chicago had mass support because the teachers were demanding better conditions for everyone in the schools, not just money for themselves. This kind of working-class solidarity is necessary but not sufficient to bring about the changes we need, which can only be satisfied by communist revolution.
We ought to use this contract vote to truly examine our priorities as educators. Good teachers do not show up to work every day merely for the money, but because we care about equality for the students.
Capitalism wreaks havoc on the lives of our students and it is a never-ending struggle to teach well. The only way out is to band together with students and their families to fight the bosses’ racist, segregated school system. In this fight we tie ourselves to a long tradition of struggle, a tradition that has given birth to revolutionaries committed to the fight for communism. From each day on the job, to local strikes to general strikes to insurrection to the seizure of power, the banner of the struggle for an education our students deserve is emblazoned with the slogan: FIGHT TO LEARN, LEARN TO FIGHT.