One hundred fifty years ago this week, in 1871, armed workers ran the French bosses out of Paris and established the Paris Commune. France was a world superpower. Germany had a growing industrial base and its own super-power ambitions. "We, the members of the International Working Men's Association, know of no frontiers," declared the communists. But competition between French and German capitalists led to war in 1870. The French army was soon routed.
The Parisian masses, though sympathetic to communism, were still swayed by nationalism. They demanded arms to defend the city from the besieging German army. The bourgeois government organized most adult males into its National Guard. However, these Guard units, made up of the working class, organized their own leadership committees in each district and a workers' Central Committee to unite them.
On March 17, 1871, the government gave in to the German army and fled to suburban Versailles. When troops returned the next day to fetch arms they had left behind, angry workers confronted them. The troops refused orders to shoot into the crowd. They handed their weapons to the workers.
The next day, March 18, 1871, the Central Committee of the National Guard took over City Hall and ran up the Red Flag of workers' revolution. For the first time in the history of class society, the working class had taken power.
Building equality
The Central Committee called for new elections. "The men who will serve you best are those whom you choose from amongst yourselves," it urged the workers. Red flags were everywhere.
The Commune kept the bourgeois form of elections, but the victorious workers did not simply take over the bourgeois state machine. They smashed it and began to build something brand new: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The masses were the real masters of the Commune. Twenty thousand activists attended small club meetings daily to offer criticisms and make suggestions. Elected officials considered all proposals and usually acted on them. Officials who disregarded the masses were subject to immediate recall.
The workers' government disbanded the bourgeois Guard units. It suspended all decrees of the old government. Workers pulled down the Victory Column, symbol of French imperialism. They elected a Hungarian-German communist to their governing body, declaring that the Commune represented workers everywhere.
The workers' government wiped out state support of religion and took over church property. It capped officials' salaries so that none made more than a worker's wage. It took away bosses' rights to fine workers. It took over workshops that had been closed because of the economic depression and turned them over to workers' cooperatives.
This working-class dictatorship was the necessary prerequisite to abolishing the wage-slavery of capitalism. The Commune held power for ten short weeks. It proved for all time that the working class can, must, and will rule society.
Why did the workers lose in 1871?
The French bourgeoisie used tax money taken from the workers' sweat to pay off the German government to release French prisoners of war. In May, after a bloody civil war in the streets, these soldiers re-took Paris for the bosses. The communist movement was quick to draw some lessons from this heroic and historic struggle. Other lessons we only recognized a century later.
 Workers need to smash the bosses' state. But the Commune did not go far enough. It was lenient with counter-revolutionaries and renegades. It allowed the French bourgeoisie to regroup, instead of organizing a Red Army to hunt it down. The bourgeoisie was not lenient at all after it crushed the Commune, murdering 100,000 workers (including children). The Commune was not able to link up with Communes in Lyons, Marseilles, and other cities. The working class dictatorship needs to arm and organize the masses, but it also needs a Red Army.
The Commune organized workers into political clubs, but not into a communist party. There was plenty of democracy (discussion of policy) but not much centralism (united action). The political form of bourgeois democracy undermined the working-class goals of the Commune.
The Commune did not move quickly enough to abolish capitalism. Had it expropriated the Bank of France, the French bourgeoisie would have had a much harder time raising a counter-revolutionary army.
The Commune recognized the need for equality among workers and revolutionary cadre. But we can see now that equalizing wages was no substitute for abolishing the wage system altogether.
As we march for communism on May Day this year and every year, the Progressive Labor Party will carry forward the spirit of the Paris Commune.
For more on the Paris Commune and the lessons communists drew from it, read Karl Marx's book, The Civil War In France; Frederick Engels, The Great Lessons of the Paris Commune.

CHICAGO, March 13 – A multiracial group of nearly a dozen workers met in a community garden today to create plans to fight the risks posed by both the pandemic and the racist bosses.
The garden is located across the street from a public school that serves mainly Latin working-class families. Members from the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have worked for years to build relationships with parents and students from this neighborhood.
Collectively, we have helped build the fight for better learning conditions and more resources for the Black and Latin working-class youth who are attacked hardest under capitalism. Most recently, we were active in the fight to force Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to push back school reopenings until more worker and student safety concerns could be met (See CHALLENGE, 2/17 and  3/3).
More students and education workers have started to filter back into the schools.  But that hasn’t prevented us from fighting for our collective interests and safety. On the heels of the liberal bosses passing out the crumbs for economic “relief” (see editorial on page 2), it’s essential that we fight now for that money to be spent to benefit workers and students and not to line the pockets of the parasitic capitalists.
Ultimately, it is only a worker-run, communist society that can guarantee that essentials like education, housing, and medicine can be freely and equitably available to everyone in our class. PLP is committed to build this fight as we continue building our international Party for communist revolution and the destruction of capitalism.
Organize! Expand the struggle
Our group assembled in the garden by late morning. Over donated food and water, each worker shared out some of their experiences navigating the recent challenges of pandemic capitalism.
Many shared their frustrations with the bosses’ racist and bungled vaccine rollout, which turns an essential public health need into a lottery that excludes many Black, elderly, and undocumented workers. Others highlighted their anger about spotty internet access and inferior rental laptops during remote learning sessions. Still others pointed out the school lacks both clean drinking water and a library.
PLP members consistently put forward communist politics and multiracial working-class unity as the way to fight back against the bosses’ disregard for working-class life that we experience. Everyone present agreed that the struggle would only be able to move forward with increased commitment from parents to pressure CPS.
To this end, we made a plan to meet more consistently among ourselves to build our struggle. We made a list of ten demands to bring to the next local school council meeting, including opening the schools up as vaccination spaces for education workers and community members, economic aid for working-class families, and improving ventilation and pipes in the building.
Liberal bosses are the main danger
As part of U.S. President Joe Biden’s new economic stimulus, CPS is set to receive $1.8 billion, which breaks down to about $5,200 additional spending per student in Chicago (Chalkbeat, 3/10). Without workers organizing around demands such as ours, many correctly recognize that the bosses could just as easily hand most of that money over to cover the district’s debt with the bloodsucking bankers. Already, CPS’s credit rating got a small boost as a result of the bill passing (Crain’s, 3/11).
Many of the city’s liberal politicians like to point the finger at the banks for the debt crisis, conveniently forgetting that many of them have clear connections to finance capitalism. The slick liberal bosses in major U.S. cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, who like to cry crocodile tears over the racial educational gaps present under the profit system, are the very ones that have closed down schools in Black and Latin neighborhoods and made students walk through metal detectors for decades. That’s why in PLP we call these Big Fascist bosses the larger threat to the working class.
These Big Fascists are desperate to get students back into classrooms as part of their push to indoctrinate young minds with capitalist ideas to try and prepare them for more discipline and eventually imperialist war. Any plans from the bosses to “educate” working-class youth are a disaster for workers. Nothing short of international communist revolution led by a mass PLP will transform education from an ideologically toxic commodity into a liberating force in the service of the working class.
The Party is the weapon
Working-class organizing from the ground up—like our work here—is an inspiring development. We are committed to continue struggling alongside our fellow workers to insist that our collective demands are met.
Creating a culture of solidarity and struggle can arm our class with the skills and confidence that workers can and will run society, without racism, sexism, or profits. PLP is the weapon to win the egalitarian communist world we need. Join us!

BOSTON, MA, February 6— Some 65 people demonstrated at the State House in Boston to demand, "Reopen the Juston Root case, appoint an independent investigator!". One year after cops killed Juston in cold blood, no cops have been prosecuted. That’s capitalism, a racist system where the cops protect the billionaire ruling class and intimidate and divide the working class. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) says we need a whole different system where workers run everything - that’s communism.
Family members of Juston and of Terence Coleman, another victim of police murder, spoke. They delivered a petition of 11,500 signatures to the Massachusetts Attorney General's office, demanding the case be reopened. Juston's sister said that if this could happen to her brother, it could happen to anyone. No one of us is safe from police violence, until this racist, sexist, profiteering system is totally eliminated. Let working people run everything..
On February 7, 2020, Juston Root, during a mental health crisis, was at Brigham & Women's Hospital to meet a mental health therapist. A hospital security guard called the Boston cops on Juston, and they shot him once. Juston, bleeding, trying to escape, jumped in his car and drove down Route 9 towards a shopping center in Brookline, where he crashed his car and fell on the ground. Six cops followed. As Juston lay bleeding, they drove away an EMT trying to help him, kicked him, and then fired 31 bullets into Juston, killing him.
Racism hurts all workers
Juston, who was white, was a victim of a racist police murder. Why do we say it was racist? The disproportionate targeting of Black and Latin communities for heavy policing continues to provide the excuse for militarizing the police and shielding them with legal protections. This then, also endangers white workers. The life of a beautiful young man was worth nothing to these racist killer cops. After the killing, one of the cops was heard to say, "I killed that [epithet]!"
On March 6, PLP members joined another demonstration called by Mass Action Against Police Brutality to demand that kKiller cop Derek Chauvin be convicted of murder, and to reopen all the cases of police murder in Boston. The families of Burrell Ramsey-White, Ross Batista, Juston Root, and Terrence Coleman, both Black and white, spoke at the rally demanding that their loved one’s cases be reopened.
The PLP leaflet and CHALLENGE newspaper, promoting multi-racial unity, and our revolutionary communist signs were warmly received. The divisive poison of identity politics was noticeably absent. We will try to work more closely with this organization and the victims' families. We will help fight against these racist cop murders now, as we fight for a future where racism and all capitalist exploitation is ended once and for all. That’s communism!
Racism hurts everyone in the working class. We need to unite to fight to destroy this stinking capitalist system of exploitation and oppression and fascist police murderers!

The ongoing fallout from the Texas power collapse, in the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and the grim milestone of 500,000 lives lost to the coronavirus pandemic, shows the world that the rot of U.S. capitalism extends to infrastructure, liberal democracy, and health care. Devastated parents found a perfectly healthy 11-year-old boy frozen to death overnight in his bed (Houston Chronicle, 2/18). He died because the depraved power bosses value maximum profit over the most basic human needs of the working class.
For workers in and around the Gulf Coast, the bosses’ callous negligence led to massive misery and untold dozens of deaths. As many as 17 million workers lived under “boil water” orders in Texas alone. Half a million remain without water as we go to press, three weeks after a winter storm broke the state’s fragile electrical power grid (CNN, 3/1). Facing the rising global power of China, the U.S. rulers have a big problem. U.S. workers will be less than eager to fight and die for a ruling class that cannot provide drinking water or heat in brutal winters. Capitalism can’t be “regulated” into serving workers’ needs. As U.S. capitalism lurches from one unprecedented crisis to the next, we must see the bosses’ reform efforts for what they are: fascist preparations for wider war.
The Texas power disaster is above all a lesson in the anarchy and cruelty that lie at the core of capitalism. Because the bosses are driven to gain profit every step of the way, from energy resource extraction to power generation to its delivery to people’s homes, the grid is drained of the capacity to deliver electricity when and where it is most needed.  
Domestic energy: backbone of small fascism
The power collapse reflects a widening split within the U.S. ruling class. The Texas energy model is essentially unregulated, a capitalist "free market" in all its glory. Independent Texas power arrangements date back over a century. They were a move by domestic energy producers to escape federal regulations and taxes that benefit multinational finance capital, the Big Fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class now fronted by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The openly racist Small Fascists, like the Republicans who run Texas, are desperate for maximum short-term profits. They have no interest in contributing more of their spoils in taxes to maintain the far-flung and floundering U.S. empire. The Big Fascists need a more reliable infrastructure and more "sacrifice"—most of all from their fellow capitalists—to prepare for war with China. That translates to more regulation and higher rates of corporate taxation. Beyond funding for war, the finance capitalist liberals know they need to provide at least a minimum standard of living to give workers a society that seems worth fighting and dying for.
Big fascism: still the main danger
After Donald Trump’s unlikely rise to the White House, a taste of presidential power has motivated the Small Fascists to stay on the offensive. Their defiance of the liberal bosses exposes the weakness of the main wing’s ability to discipline its own class. The Small Fascists kicked off 2021 with a failed coup that was cheered on by Trump, who still refuses to accept his loss to Biden at the polls. To date, they’ve had zero price to pay. At the February 28 convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump flaunted his gutter racist movement’s tenacity: “We’re not starting new parties.  We have the Republican Party” (CPAC Convention, 2/28).
The liberal Big Fascists are faced with mounting challenges to stay in control in their own backyard while fending off rivals like China and Russia. At stake are the long-term needs of U.S. imperialism. Meanwhile, the underfunded U.S. infrastructure is falling down around their ears. The latest power grid failure, along with raging wildfires in California and roving blackouts across the country, is in line with a 2017 warning from the  American Society of Civil Engineers. It gave the nation’s infrastructure a “D+,” meaning that conditions were “mostly below standard,” exhibiting “significant deterioration,” with a “strong risk of failure”(Council on Foreign Relations, September, 2020).
The Big Fascists’ big plans are currently stuck in neutral. Though the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, they’re struggling to enact relatively modest efforts to shore up working-class loyalty to U.S. capitalism. A $15 minimum wage, student loan forgiveness, and stimulus checks are all currently on hold. Sooner or later, the only option left for the liberal imperialists will be to move toward open fascism, both to smash their Small Fascist rivals and attempt to control an angry working class. Growing calls from House Democrats to “deplatform” Fox News for its sins of building the Trump phenomenon (politico.com, 2/22,) must be understood in this light.
In imposing their final solution—fascism—the liberal rulers are playing catch-up with more unified ruling classes, like China’s, who wield tighter control over state power and infrastructure.  
Illusions about the U.S. decline lead some workers to ask “how in this country” could we have older people and children dying in bed from the cold. But this kind of atrocity is what U.S.-led capitalism has imposed internationally since it became the top superpower after World War II. It’s just a hint of the ruthlessness to come. The global war U.S. imperialism is now planning will wipe out populations. It will devastate the natural environment. It will make today’s atrocities pale by comparison.  
Capitalism = profit over workers
Communism = abolition of profit
Communist revolution is the one and only force in history ever to stop the imperialists in their tracks.  The towering achievements of Soviet and Chinese workers in turning imperialist war into communist revolution are still the wind in our sails.  True, those achievements have been reversed by a resurgence of the profit system. The brave victory of Vietnamese workers over the U.S. imperialist war machine in the 1970s did not produce a communist Vietnam. But it once again proved the power of communist-led workers to defeat imperialism.  
As to picking up the pieces to build a world where workers don’t die in their beds, we communists are supremely confident. Once we smash the dictatorship of the liberal capitalist bosses, a working-class dictatorship can fix problems that today are unsolvable. We’ll succeed where the bosses have failed because we’ll abolish profit as the driving force behind every economic and political decision.  
The racist, sexist profit system gives workers terrible choices, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge. Workers can freeze to death in Texas ice storms, burn to death in California wildfires, die in secret in a New York nursing home, or be slaughtered by a rain of U.S. missiles in Syria.  Only communism can abolish the murderous chaos that’s engineered by capitalism. Our liberation lies in discarding fascists both large and small, to create a world run by and for workers. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!