In 1966, at the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Progressive Labor Party was one year old. 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 taught us about the power of the collective and of leadership that comes 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 way for the return of full-blown capitalism.
The first two parts of this first-person account of the Cultural Revolution told the story of a village factory and the author’s evolution from high school student to factory manager. He left his village in 1978 to attend a teachers college. By the following year, he would find it much changed.     
‘I Missed the Village Life’
In July the college closed for summer vacation, and I came back home. The train stopped at Qingdao, but there was no bus to my hometown. I went to the Qingdao steel factory, where my former colleagues were assembling the cranes. Guan Dunyan, my predecessor as factory manager, was excited to see me, and asked one of the workers to carry me back home on his bike. It was Huang Jianguo, the worker who’d designed the tractor cabs.
On the way to the village, Huang objected to the accent I’d acquired at college — I hadn’t even been aware of it. He warned me to change back, which proved not to be difficult. Once I was back with my friends in the village, I spoke like them again.
I visited Wang Xuejin and we talked about conditions in the factory and my successor, Guan Dunxiao. The son of a former landlord, Guan was also one of the two first high school graduates in the village. I also visited Zhao Licheng, the party leader who’d insisted that I run for factory manager and made sure I was honored as standard bearer four years in a row. He said that he really missed me. I missed him as well — I missed village life.
After the summer, back in college, I heard that Deng Xiaoping’s government was breaking up the collectives. Farmers would be given a piece of land to farm on their own. Collective assets, including the factories, would be broken up as well to give people more incentive to work hard. I immediately realized this was a terrible mistake.
‘Defend the Collective’
By late January, 1979, when I came back to the village for winter break, the collective land was already broken into individual lots. Anyone who refused to carry out this policy — including all seventeen of the Party’s county secretaries in Yantai Prefecture — was summarily removed from office by Deng’s government. The new leaders, appointed by the central government, forced the breakup of the collective down the people’s throats.
Zhang Fugui — model farmer, party secretary of Xia Dingjia village, and a member of Shandong Provincial Party Committee — yelled through the village loudspeaker that as long as he was alive, collective assets in the village would be defended and the collective would stay intact. But he was removed from office and taken away from his village. He was taken by surprise by the comeback of the capitalist roaders.
Millions of people like Zhang were purged from the Party, and many wound up in prison for twenty years or life. The struggle between the two camps inside the Chinese Communist Party was not a mere difference of opinion — it was a struggle of life and death. Deng Xiaoping was ruthless, like Jiang Jieshi’s brutal regime during the civil war.
In my village, land was laid to waste because farming did not make enough money. The collective had farmed because people needed to be fed, and combined the income of the farming section with that of the collective-owned industry. Now that the factory workers were given individual pieces of land, they had no time to take care of it because of their factory work. Meanwhile, the farmers now needed to make more money and looked for side employment. As a result, they failed to take care of their plots.
The village factory was privatized as well. Zhao Licheng bought equipment from the village and took some people with him to set up his own factory. Guan Dunxiao did the same.
What held the village factory together was the spirit of equality among the workers under collectivization. With collective ownership, everybody benefited when the factory did well and everybody suffered when it did poorly. This was no longer true after the factory was privatized. The private owners wanted to increase their profits, which meant they paid workers less and compelled them to work longer hours. Class conflicts emerged that led to resentment and disintegration.
Wang Xuejin, the village factory’s secret weapon in the early days, was convinced to work for Zhao in the beginning. Zhao offered to pay him 5,000 yuan a year, a lot of money at the time — nearly ten times more than the average wage. Wang was happy with this arrangement, and worked very hard. But at the end of the year, he discovered that Zhao cleared more than 100,000 yuan in profits from the operation. Under collectivization they’d earned the same number of work points. Now their lives were very different.
Wang complained to Zhao by citing an old saying from Confucius: that people were unhappy not because they were poor, but because others made more than they did. In response, Zhao promised to increase Wang’s salary for the following year and also to buy him a new apartment. Wang made a couple thousand more yuan the next year, and another few thousand the year after. But he was no longer happy. And the other workers from the original factory left to set up their own operations, leaving Zhao to hire workers from other areas.

Part Four of this memoir will examine widening inequality in the author’s village as Chinese society falls apart after the defeat of the Cultural Revolution.

We are marching today to honor the great holiday of the international working class: May Day. We are uniting to build a worldwide movement, led by the Progressive Labor Party, to destroy capitalism and erect a communist society run by and for workers. PLP groups in more than twenty countries are dedicated to challenging the rival imperialist powers as they battle for control over the earth’s resources — especially oil and gas — and to exploit our class. We workers produce everything of value; the bosses steal the value of our labor for their profits, the lifeblood of capitalism.
Inevitably, the leading imperialists — and especially the rulers of the United States, Russia and China — will settle their intensifying competition in a major war, just as they did in World Wars I and II. They will use the world’s workers as cannon fodder to kill the opposing bosses’ workers. They desperately need our class to choose one nationalist side over another.
But we have no stake in these devastating fights over profits. We oppose all bosses. We must turn their imperialist wars into a class war for our interests. We need to organize a revolution to bury capitalism once and for all.
U.S. Oligarchs vs. Russian Oligarchs
As of the moment, the leading edge of this inter-imperialist rivalry pits the bosses of ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, represented by warrior-in-chief Barack Obama, against Russian bosses led by Vladimir Putin — dictator against dictator, oligarchs against oligarchs. To counter Putin’s goal of an empire built from the former republics of the Soviet Union, Obama is following a potentially catastrophic New Cold War policy endorsed by the most powerful U.S. capitalists. (See box on the old Cold War.)
Obama’s New Cold War combines economic pressure (bolstered by growing U.S. energy leverage from recent discoveries of oil and gas) with a sharp reminder of the U.S.’s nuclear superiority and its readiness to use it. For our class, the stakes couldn’t be higher. During the first Cold War, U.S. rulers slaughtered three million workers and farmers to contain Soviet (and later Chinese) influence in Vietnam. In standoffs like the Cuban missile crisis, U.S.-Soviet military brinksmanship imperiled the lives of hundreds of millions more.
On April 16, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank, wrote, “The strategy needed to resist Putin’s efforts to expand Russia’s influence beyond its borders — and to induce change within them — resembles nothing so much as the ‘containment’ doctrine that guided Western policy for the four decades of the Cold War” (CFR website). The CFR was founded by heavyweights of U.S. finance and industry: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil and Chevron. David Rockefeller, longtime leader of the finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, is honorary chairman.
For these arch-imperialists’ benefit, Haass asked Obama to impose “stronger sanctions” targeting Russian financial institutions, and to weaken Russia’s energy stranglehold on Ukraine and much of Western Europe” by exporting U.S. oil and gas. He also ominously demanded that Obama “increase...America’s presence in select NATO countries.” (See box on NATO on page 4.)
The next day, the CFR clarified Haass’s deadly message with an article, “NATO After Crimea,” by Pentagon advisor and liberal Brookings Institution fellow Michael O’Hanlon. It called for 3,000 to 7,000 GIs to be stationed in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania to create “a trip wire along the border with Russia.” Under official NATO doctrine, the term “trip wire” has nuclear significance. Translation: If Soviet troops crossed NATO borders, U.S. rulers would retaliate with atomic bombs on Russian cities.
Only U.S. Rulers Used A-Bomb
The “trip wire” scenario relies on the Big Lie that paints conventionally armed Russian invaders as the nuclear initiators. “You made us do it,” the U.S. will retort. But “trip wire” is actually a euphemism for Washington’s dreaded first-strike stance — the use of nuclear weapons to destroy the enemy’s capacity to respond. (U.S. bosses are the only ones ever to use the atomic bomb.) The “trip wire” strategy ruled NATO planning from 1957 to 1968, when the U.S.-dominated alliance had more bombs than the Soviet bloc but fewer troops and tanks near likely battle zones. U.S. warlords perceive a similar imbalance today. So they are dusting off NATO document MC 14/2.
The document’s history is outlined in a 1975 Defense Department report to Congress: “The so-called ‘trip-wire’ response [was] stated in Military Committee Document 14/2 during the period of unquestioned United States nuclear superiority. MC14/2 emphasized deterrence through the threat of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons in lieu of large conventional [U.S.-led] forces.”  
The MC 14/2’s original trip-wire ultimatum, now being revived by Obama and the imperialist liberal media, was laid out as follows:

The principal elements of the deterrent are adequate nuclear and other ready forces and the manifest determination to retaliate against any aggressor with all the forces at our disposal, including nuclear weapons, which the defense of NATO would require.
 

U.S. Sends Ground Troops
On April 16, just before Haass and O’Hanlon made their pitches for nuclear gunboat diplomacy, the Washington Post, an outlet closely linked to war-bent U.S. liberal bosses, printed an Op Ed article by imperialist flunky James Jeffrey. Jeffrey served MobilExxon as U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012 and then was hired by the energy company directly. He has strong-armed Exxon’s stated right to pump oil simultaneously from bitterly conflicted regions of the country, even though these actions destabilize the fragile nation (Reuters, 2/8/13). In the Post piece, Jeffrey welcomed a renewed “trip wire” prospect of facing down Russia with nuclear threats — and even retaking territory Putin has seized. He wrote:

Examples of effective ground force “tripwires” date to the U.S. brigade in Berlin during the Cold War. The best way to send Putin a tough message and possibly deflect a Russian campaign against more vulnerable NATO states is to back up our commitment to the sanctity of NATO territory with ground troops, the only military deployment that can make such commitments unequivocal.

To its credit, the administration has dispatched fighter aircraft to Poland and the Baltic states to reinforce NATO fighter patrols and exercises. But these deployments, as with ships temporarily in the Black Sea, have inherent weaknesses as political signals. They cannot hold terrain — the ultimate arbiter of any military calculus — and can be easily withdrawn if trouble brews. Troops, even limited in number, send a much more powerful message. More difficult to rapidly withdraw, once deployed, they can make the point that the United States is serious about defending NATO’s eastern borders.
The big capitalists welcome Barack Obama’s recent efforts in the Ukraine crisis, as evidenced by the bosses’ top liberal mouthpiece: “Even as the crisis in Ukraine continues to defy easy resolution, President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment” (New York Times, 4/20/14). A half century ago, U.S. capitalists’ “containment” policy explicitly threatened nuclear war. It does so again today.
The U.S. rulers’ problem is that they aren’t close to the military mobilization they need for a decisive confrontation of rivals Russia and China. The U.S. working class stands opposed to war, especially after Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. workers are beset by mass racist unemployment, inadequate and costly healthcare, racist attacks by the bosses’ cops, increasing poverty, and mass racist incarceration, especially of black and Latino workers and youth. Putin and his capitalist cronies face a similar obstacle, with Russian workers increasingly disenchanted as the country’s economy gets squeezed in the fight over Ukraine.
Destroying capitalism, the system that causes these problems, is the only answer for workers in the U.S., Russia and worldwide. Achieving that goal means building a revolutionary party to lead and guide the working class with communist ideas. That’s what the Progressive Labor Party is all about. Join PLP and fight to bury the bosses and their racist, sexist, war-driven system.

***

Cold War Was Pretty Hot

The old Cold War began in 1946, immediately following World War II, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been allies. U.S. rulers realized that the then-socialist Soviet Union, led by the Bolshevik Party, wasn’t merely the main force that defeated Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The USSR also inspired tens of millions of workers in Asia, Africa and Latin America to try to free themselves from the colonial imperialists of the U.S., Britain and France. By 1949, the Chinese Communist Party had led a revolution and emancipated hundreds of millions of workers and peasants.
U.S. rulers turned to a policy of “containment” to hem in the Soviet Union and smash anti-colonial liberation movements backed by the Soviets. Thus emerged the Cold War. It was “cold” in the sense that neither side seemed ready to employ the newly destructive atomic bomb to destroy one another, despite the willingness of the U.S. ruling class to use it to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when it alone had the bomb, and murder a quarter-million workers in 1945.
Even so, the Cold War was never a peaceful time. Innumerable “small” wars erupted. In 1950, U.S. rulers fought the Soviet Union and China in the three-year Korean War. U.S. bosses invaded or helped overthrow governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Chile, among many others. But a turning point came in Vietnam, when U.S. forces were driven out in defeat.
By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had reverted to full-blown capitalism. The seeds of this regression were contained in the retention of features of the profit system, especially a wage system that created tiers of privilege in the working class. Eventually, a new class system developed in the USSR. Support for anti-colonial national liberation movements degenerated into an imperialist operation for Soviet expansionism. From that point on, the Cold War became an imperialist rivalry between the rulers of the U.S. and the USSR. It ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, due mainly to internal weaknesses.

We salute the comrades fighting back —
Against racist background checks at DC Metro where they successfully fought for a bus driver who’d been fired after returning to work after a year-long struggle with cancer;
In Haiti, where in the universities they continue the fight against the vicious attacks facing the working class;At CUNY, against warmonger David Petraeus, who was invited to lecture and ultimately convince and recruit working-class students to fight and die for U.S. imperialism. On his first day of work, students chased Petraeus, screaming at him as he walked toward the subway;In Mexico, where teachers once again took to the streets of Oaxaca and Mexico City last summer in a massive months-long strike. In the midst of this sharp struggle, PLP has won fellow workers to the necessity of going beyond reform to revolution;In Newark, where the education struggle has intensified as students, workers and parents took their fight to the streets with two big demonstrations over the past month against the racist cutbacks against mainly black and Latino students.
These fightbacks are the bright spots we look to because here, the Progressive Labor Party is active!  Here, workers and youth are being won to the long term and only answer to the attacks of capitalism — communist revolution.
Looking beyond our field of influence, it’s been another year of mass upheavals since last May Day, this time in Venezuela and Ukraine, but the politics of those fights are at best dead-end roads and at worst pathways to fascism.
Many workers- and youth involved in mass struggles across the globe are won over to nationalism and even forms of fascism. Others are striving toward a more egalitarian future, but without communist leadership they are limited to the vocabulary and concepts of the ruling class — “freedom,” “justice,” “dignity.” The ruling class speaks of freedom because they need to be free to throw workers out of work and send us off to war. They speak of justice because their courts operate according to laws written to protect the rich, laws that set racist killer cops free time and again. For the working class freedom and justice take on another meaning:   
Freedom to attend schools where students develop lifelong interests and abilities, where workers aren’t separated by imaginary borders and the bosses’ racism.
Justice for the Davis and Livingston families whose sister and daughter were taken from them by racist police murder.
Dignity?  There is nothing dignified about a ruling class who has plunged the globe into war, world war, environmental collapse, whose culture reeks of sexism and racism, who squander the one most precious thing — human potential — with a recklessness that is astonishing even to the most clear-eyed and determined communists among us. No, if there is any repository of dignity left in this world it resides deep in the working class, among the poor, between two who share when there is not enough to feed one, between a teacher who stays late at work helping a teenager learn to read and to question and the youngster who is brave enough to confront and correct the damage the bosses’ schools have done.
We need that teacher and that student to understand that capitalism kills every form of freedom, justice and dignity they might want to build a life around. These ideals can only be fulfilled under communism.
When I was a teenager, I knew something was wrong with the world, I just couldn’t put my finger on the cause and unfortunately I had a deep sense that there was nothing I could do about it. My friends and I faced the same issues many of my students face today: parents who worked their asses off at dead-end jobs to keep food in the fridge;, prison-like conditions in our school, where assuming the position was the only thing we were guaranteed to have learned upon graduating; and the incorrect idea that if we just worked hard enough we could make it…but we knew that wasn’t true. We knew that wasn’t true because no one worked harder than our mothers and they certainly didn’t “make it.”
In 11th grade, I met PLP and things began to make sense. I realized that capitalism couldn’t be fixed because it wasn’t broken. It works for whom it was made to work for, the bosses. Most important, I learned and finally understood that there was an alternative to capitalism. And though it’s a long-term struggle, communism is the only system that can serve the working class. I was given an opportunity to fight for that world, and that’s what I want to offer to you today.
One International Working Class, One World, One Party
Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. While capitalism needs unemployment, communism needs everyone to contribute and share in society’s benefits and burdens. Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian and indigenous workers, and to divide the entire working class. Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women — sexism — and divisive gender roles created by the class society. Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one Party. Only communism means dignity for the workers and not a return to the same old conditions under a new set of rulers. Join us!
Progressive Labor Party fights directly for communism because history teaches us that socialism leads back to capitalism, that reform does not lead to revolution. We know that cutting deals with the bosses, voting for the “lesser evil,” settling for crumbs when we bake the bread, settling for homelessness when we build the homes, leads back to capitalism.
To get to communism, we need to do more than to know the bosses’ fatal weaknesses; we need to act on them! We must seize the time, every day. Each flaw — their splits, their need for racism, their need for war, their economic collapse — each one is a fracture that presents itself to us to enter, expose, widen, and ultimately smash! We have a world to win and nothing to lose but our chains!
Communism will be won, comrades. It will be won because the working class will always fight back for a more egalitarian world. Bitter anger against the ruling classes and their corrupt political bosses, bitter anger at the ever-diminishing opportunities for a decent life under their system will continue to bubble up. The job is ours alone; we must earn the right to provide leadership in these mass struggles, to spread the message that only one path leads to the fulfillment of the goals for which so many of our class brothers and sisters continue to lay their lives on the line for real freedom, real justice, and real dignity — communism.
Today’s struggles where the Party is active and winning our class to the fight for communism are the seed bed for tomorrow’s participation in large-scale mass struggles, and our aim will be the same. Only communism means emancipation for the workers. Our activity today among the hundreds and the thousands is our training to lead the millions tomorrow. Make no mistake: our goal is to lead millions, and history says we can do it. We are proud of our communist past — it strengthens us. No matter the twists and turns, the setbacks and advances ahead. Mass struggle will continue to be sparked, the Party will continue to win new members to the fight for communism, and when the two come together — when PLP can shape mass struggle into class struggle for communism — the bosses are doomed. They are doomed!  May Day is our annual re-commitment to and celebration of this future doom of the bosses and their system. What a great day! Fight for communism!

CHICAGO, April 21 — Using fascist police-state tactics, president Wayne Watson is attempting to stifle the growing outrage of students and faculty at Chicago State University (CSU). As a multiracial worker-student alliance, we are learning to fight back. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) strives to turn this struggle into a school for communism. Several students expressed interest in boarding the May Day bus to Brooklyn, NY.
Racist Administration
The struggle against Watson and interim provost Angela Henderson took a qualitative leap forward with the arrest of Willie Preston on March 7. After being expelled for speaking against the racist administration, he returned to campus to speak at the public Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting. He now faces charges of trespassing and violating an order of protection. Racist Henderson acquired an order of protection by referring to Willie as a domestic terrorist and invoking the racist stereotype of the violent black man.
Willie became Watson’s enemy because he, along with his fellow students and faculty, is exposing the misuse of student activity fees, the corruption of the Student Government Association (SGA) elections, the racist treatment of students at the bookstore, and the need to restore childcare on campus. These attacks are happening on campuses across the U.S. and are symptomatic of the bosses’ plan for our class in time of global crisis: more cutbacks, war, and use of the state to suppress working-class rebellions.
It’s Not Just the BOT; It’s Capitalism
So spring break started with students and faculty raising bail money and phoning the campus police station in support of Willie. (Illinois State Police are the CSU campus security.) We went to Willie’s first court appearance. At a nearby restaurant, a committee was organized to continue the fight against Watson’s attacks. Faculty members added their grievances, which include Watson’s attempts to squelch the dissident CSU Faculty Voice blog, hiring of cronies and paying them exorbitant salaries. PLP pointed out the racist nature of Watson’s attacks. Although black himself, he and the mostly black BOT willingly carry out the racist policies of Governor Quinn and the state legislature. Mass imprisonment of black men is the New Jim Crow and Watson, Henderson, and the BOT are breeding that same racism in CSU.
PLP exposed the bosses as exploiters of all workers, making super-profits from black, Latino, and immigrant workers. The bosses divide the working class with racism to stop us from uniting, and at CSU, it’s not any different. Capitalism rewards Watson and Henderson for trying to control and terrorize working-class students. This is a sign of a system fearful of the potential power of multiracial unity. We must wage a struggle to turn this fightback at CSU into a revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism and to replace it with communism, a society without racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality.
Biggest Threat to Bosses:Multiracial Unity
The anticommunist administration revoked PLP’s reservation for a “Repression at CSU” forum on April 9, locking the auditorium, and posting a police guard. More than 80 people attended the forum, which somehow ended up sharing space in a nearby lecture hall with a history class, which then joined us.  Challenge was distributed widely. Students described how the SGA kept those who fought back off the ballot. Willie shared his struggle via Skype. An anonymous statement was read from a student who had been physically threatened for speaking out.
The SGA president, a Watson clone, appealed to racism saying: “the organizers of this forum don’t look like you.” This mimics Watson’s attempts to characterize the current fightback as being fomented by “white communist professors.” These lies expose Watson’s and the BOT’s fear of the multiracial unity of the organizing committee, the worker-student alliance, and the unity of the communist organization PLP with students and faculty. Two students sought out PLP after the forum to sign up for May Day.
Sexist Shutdown of Daycare
On April 15, our committee joined a campus rally to demand “Daycare Now” at CSU. In 2009, the campus daycare program was closed. Five years later and there is still no childcare! It’s worth noting the demographics of CSU. Of its nearly 4,400 students, 72 percent are women, 99 percent apply for need-based financial aid, 86 percent are black, 6 percent are Latino, and 69 percent are single parents. The average age of students is 31. So when the University shuts down daycare, it is attacking mostly black women workers.
The morning of the rally, the administration announced a new daycare center is being “planned” for June of 2016. Despite being prevented by the cops from using a bullhorn, students testified loudly how the bloated administration budgets and salaries could pay for daycare now. Obviously childcare for these working-class students’ children is not in the interest of the administration!
Our struggle at CSU demonstrates the use of the bosses’ police and legal system to suppress any antiracist and antisexist fightback. The university is a locus of ruling-class ideologies and attacks. But it is also a site of fightback and potential for a communist base. Several students signed up to learn about PLP and the May Day bus to Brooklyn. We have been meeting with and recruiting these students to May Day, with some success. One student is trying to recruit classmates. We are now hoping to march as a CSU contingent in Brooklyn!