On June 3, 1907, Premier Stolypin of the Russian Tsar’s government canceled the reforms that the regime had granted to contain the 1905 Revolution. Stung by the defeat of the armed uprising and betrayed by reformism, the Russian working class fell into several years of relative apathy. 

But the 150 or so underground cadre of the Bolshevik party kept functioning illegally. Revolutionary work never stopped, despite the repression that for months at a time blocked contact with Lenin (in exile after November 1907) or even among Bolshevik committees within Russia.

The Bolsheviks ‘’retreated in good order,’’ as Lenin said. He and the underground Bolsheviks fought off demoralized internal forces  that pushed for an alliance with the sellout Mensheviks, while thousands of others (including almost all of the intellectuals) quit the party. It was their perseverance in illegal revolutionary work, under the most dangerous and discouraging conditions, that set the stage for the dramatic Bolshevik upsurge from 1912 to 1914.

On April 4, 1912, in the Siberian gold fields, the Tsar’s troops shot down 500 workers. This atrocity sparked nationwide political strikes. A half-century later, Leopold Haimson, an anti-communist “expert” at Columbia University, acknowledged “the reception that the workers gave, as the war approached, to Bolshevik as against Menshevik appeals” (Slavic Review. 1964, p. 629). 

After 1905, the Mensheviks’ aim was to become an officially tolerated and open labor party along the lines of the German Social-Democratic Party, the largest of all the parties in the Second International. The Mensheviks led such class-collaborationist labor organizations as the bourgeoisie permitted to exist. 

Like the leaders of the AFL-CIO today, Menshevik leader Julius Martov hoped in 1909 for a more progressive Duma (parliament) to legally “protect” open labor unions. Since the Mensheviks wanted to abandon illegal revolutionary party work, the Bolsheviks called them “Liquidators” -- a label the Mensheviks accepted.

When the strike wave hit, the Mensheviks tried to hold it back. As the business journal Russian Review noted in 1913, “The Mensheviki point out the harmfulness of mere disorderly and inconsiderate striking” -- the bosses’ term for political strikes -- “but the movement continued its plunging, incalculable way.” 

The working class rallied to the one and only force that had never yielded its opposition to capitalism: the Bolsheviks. Thousands of workers joined. Even the Menshevik lzgoev admitted that Pravda’s impact on the St. Petersburg working class in 1912 and 1913 was a “most impressive sight.” 

The Mensheviks were driven from all positions of influence. In the fall of 1912 “Bolshevik candidates won in six of nine labor curiae (constituencies) in Russia, including all six of the labor curiae in the major industrial provinces” (Haimson, p. 630). They replaced Mensheviks in the Metalworkers’ Union, the workers’ insurance councils, by 1914, even in the “labor aristocracy,” the Petersburg Printers’ Union. 

By July 1914, the Bolsheviks a significant majority of the governing boards of the trade unions in St. Petersburg and Moscow. At “a meeting of the Menshevik faction in the Duma, in late January, 1914, the Georgian deputy, Chkhenkeli, observed in an equally catastrophic vein that the Mensheviks appeared to be losing all of their influence, all of their ties, among the workers” (Haimson, Slavic Review, December 1964, p. 632).
Menshevik writers themselves admitted defeat. “Menshevism caught on too late to the reviving danger of Leninism,” wrote Martov in November 1912, “and overestimated the significance of its temporary wholesale disappearance.” As Bulkin, a Menshevik mis-leader of the Metalworkers Union said after being unseated: 

Led by the Bolsheviks, the masses have chased the Liquidators, these valuable workers, out of all leading institutions … The experienced pilots of the labor movements have been replaced by ones who are inexperienced, but close in spirit to the masses . .. Bolshevism ... has found its support in the masses’ state of mind.

Unlike 1905, when the Mensheviks controlled the Soviet there, St. Petersburg (later Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again after the fall of the Soviet Union) was now the center for militancy. This was “undoubtedly in part,” concludes Haimson, “because of the Petersburg workers’ great exposure to Bolshevik propaganda and agitation,” and “a long-standing exposure to revolutionary and specifically Bolshevik indoctrination” (p. 637).

The Bolsheviks’ illegal work permitted them to continue. Police informers did succeed in penetrating their highest ranks. In July 1914, one Bolshevik Duma (parliament) delegate and three of the seven members of the Petersburg City Committee were cops. Dozens of arrests swept away leading cadres. “Yet even under these conditions the Bolshevik Party apparatus managed to survive, to retain some old and recruit some new members” (p. 637). 

Lenin fought the ever-present opportunist tendency to neglect illegal work. As quoted by a secret police report, Lenin said: 
Our victory, i.e., the victory of revolutionary Marxism, is great ... But this victory has its limits ... If we want to hold our positions and not allow the strengthening labor movement to escape the party’s sway ... we must strengthen, come what may, our underground organizations. We can give up a portion of the work in the State Duma which we have conducted so successfully to date, but it is imperative that we put to right the work outside the Duma.

In July 1914, the Bolsheviks called for a nationwide general strike. On July 9, rank-and-file Bolshevik workers insisted it was time ‘’finally and without delay to issue a call to go over to an armed uprising …” Their leaflet ended: “Our motto is -- hail the relentless struggle against the government and the capitalists! Down with capital! Comrades, get ready! Hail socialism!” A week of armed struggle ensued before the uprising was put down. 

According to the anticommunist Leopold Haimson, even if  World War I, which began two weeks later, had not further weakened the tsar’s monarchy, a Bolshevik-led socialist revolution was likely.(Slavic Review, March 1965, p. 1).
Next: The culminating upsurge of 1917.

MADISON, KY, December 5- At the December monthly meeting of the leadership of the Madison County Tenants Union (MCTU, see CHALLENGE,  6/8/2024), an unidentified fascist in a white pickup threw an explosive at the shared office space of the MCTU and the UP Initiative (a partnering non-profit serving the unhoused). The bomb blew up in the driveway. Displaced workers, members of MCTU, as well as children were outside within 15 feet of the blast that shook the building. Fortunately, no physical injuries were sustained. This wasn’t the first attack.

Earlier, the MCTU had hosted a bonfire fundraiser at the same location that was harassed by police because a well-known racist biker gang told them we were camping illegally. Since the MCTU informs the public about the new law criminalizing public camping, this swatting and the recent bombing are part of a sustained fascist attack on workers.

Attacks on homeless workers intensify 

These potentially deadly events reflect the growing trend towards fascism, which is demonstrated even more strongly by Kentucky’s recent approval of HB5, a three strikes law that criminalizes homelessness and empowers vigilante property owners by giving them immunity for attacking “trespassers” and “illegal campers.” Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members continued our solidarity with MCTU by attending the follow-up meeting, sharing CHALLENGE with our friends and explaining how the newspaper serves as a tool for different movements to share strategy and tactics. We expressed how proud we were to have inspired the nearby Lennox-Inglewood Tenant Union through our demonstrations in Kentucky against the criminalization of homelessness and corrupt, racist landlords.

Security concerns were paramount at the meeting after the bombing. We argued that amidst rising fascism, our best security lies with the masses and we should work to embed ourselves with them, especially by deepening our relationships with neighbors who were shocked by the explosion and had worried about possible casualties.

Rising fascism in Kentucky

HB5, the reactionary three strikes law, was passed by the Kentucky legislature which mostly voted along party lines with Republicans in favor and Democrats against. Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed the bill after mass pressure. Beshear said if the bill had allocated money for the increased incarceration that would have resulted from the law, he would have signed it. The legislature overrode his veto, as expected. Beshear is no friend of the working class despite his performative phony veto. He is a huge supporter of Kentucky State Police and even visited the campus of Eastern Kentucky University to celebrate the building of a huge KKKop training center, similar to the ones in Atlanta and other cities throughout the U.S.

Fascism is not limited to legislation and police repression. Kentucky landlords collaborate and conspire together to keep rents unaffordable, even though there are 94 vacant properties in this state for every single person experiencing displacement at any given point.

Capitalism, in a period of decline, intensifies racism, displacement, fascism, and death. Whether it be the lynching of displaced worker Jordan Neely on a New York City subway car, or local attacks on the displaced and multiracial working-class groups in Kentucky, fascism is manifesting itself before our eyes. Imagine—on September 27, Louisville KKKops were captured on body cam underneath an overpass, citing a pregnant woman who was going into labor with "unauthorized street camping!” Anti-camping laws coincide with an international crackdown on campuses where student encampments have protested Palestinians losing their homes and their lives, while far-right political parties are in ascendance across Europe.

Ruling class will never have solution for workers 

Bosses won’t help solve the crises our class faces. They just want to make us "disappear.” They proclaim that if we aren't making profits for them, we belong behind bars or dead. Laws favor the bosses’ profit interests in contracted-out prison labor for pennies on the hour. In a privatized world, we've seen that public spaces have been under attack. Bosses and politicians nationwide have worked in tandem to erect barriers to our class by blocking shelters, shutting down food services, building “hostile” architecture, and passing laws to outright criminalize bedding down or asking for money in public. Most often, they claim that greater charity could lead to crime, a degradation in property values, or just an overall lower quality of life. "Not in my backyard" is an idea/anxiety bred by capitalist profit incentives, divorced from and eroding any real human relationships. The same justification is used by local governments to dismantle "charity-based support." It will take a sustained, revolutionary communist struggle to topple these bosses. Defending our class from racist, fascist attacks and going on the offensive against them is the path we must take on the road to revolution.

Maya Wind’s book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (2024), is having a big impact on the campus movement against the genocide in Gaza. It charges Israeli universities with complicity in Israel’s genocidal policies. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) professors and grad students discussed the book last month with thirty members of the reading group of the Radical Caucus of the MLA (Modern Language Association). Our comrades are working in this caucus to build the Party with our co-workers. Many of them are also involved on their campuses in the movement against genocide. Some are in faculty unions, with  others involved in  defending California farmworkers from Border Patrol raids. We are trying to get to know them better personally, in spite of being separated by distance and communicating on screen; and we discuss the Party’s ideas with them as we choose books for the group. The professor who told us about the farmworker raids around Fresno suggested for our next book No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, by Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis. One of our comrades had actually taken part in that kind of action in Tijuana with the Al Otro Lado organization. This would be a good book for us. We plan to step up getting CHALLENGE to them and talking more directly and personally with them about why it’s important to build up PLP among professors and students as we come under sharper attack.  

The Israeli university: ideology and repression

We started with what the book is about. It treats Israeli universities as fully part of the war machine and the violent settling of historic Palestine by the Zionist state of Israel. It goes well beyond the idea that universities are partners in crime with the Israeli government. Maya Wind argues that the settler university is an integral part of the state structure itself. 

First, she shows how the university perpetuates the Zionist ideology—the Jewish nationalist, Jewish supremacist ideas supporting the seizure of Palestinian land and the expulsion of Palestinians by a European Jewish capitalist class. This is its function as a “tower of ivory” (a traditional phrase for the university), in every discipline from legal studies to archaeology.  

Second, she proves that the Israeli university is a major administrative and military section of the Israeli state: it functions as a “tower of steel.” A concrete symbol of this death-dealing institution is Hebrew University, “the first and leading university of the Zionist movement.” Sitting on stolen land, it dominates, from its Mount Scopus hilltop in East Jerusalem, the physical space of the occupied city like a military outpost in hostile territory, which in part it actually is (Chapter Two, “Outpost Campus”).  

Settler-Colonialism and global capitalism

Wind’s theoretical frame is settler-colonialism rather than global capitalism. She does not point out that the Israeli state is run by a capitalist class, nor does she stress Israel’s function as an outpost of U.S. imperialism. PLP calls instead for seeing Israel not simply in its obvious appearance, as the occupier of Palestine by racist settlers who believe in the political ideology of Zionism (which it is), but also in its less-obvious essence, as a profit-seeking enterprise run by a capitalist class, backed by Western imperialism since its founding as a crucial outpost of empire in a strategic region. 

Wind may well largely agree with this Marxist view of Israel. Her findings are certainly compatible with it. Moreover, what she proves empirically about universities in Israel also provides a model for universities under capitalism in the U.S. and globally—the academic-military-industrial complex. Embedding the university in the security state is the rule, not the exception, under capitalism. Wind’s detailed proof in the case of Israel can be extended to other countries.

Stop university complicity in genocide!

The book has helped fuel action at professional associations like the AHA (American Historical Association) and the January convention of the MLA. The AHA passed a resolution against the destruction of the Gazan education system, calling it “scholasticide,” or the killing of schooling (New York Times, 1/9. The MLA has arbitrarily ruled out even any discussion of a BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) resolution at its convention, and the Radical Caucus including PLP members is joining with the larger MLA for Palestine group to challenge that ban at the convention. At the AHA and MLA, we are answering the call from the bombed-out schools of Gaza, their students and teachers dead or shivering in tents: stop the genocide!

Towers of Ivory and Steel thus enters a turbulent political struggle against the conscription of scholars into the security state.  Historians have made the same analysis of U.S. universities, as in Upton Sinclair’s scathing book The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education (1923). In 1969 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), with leadership from PLP including our late comrade Ira Wechsler, occupied a “tower of steel” at Stony Brook University on Long Island, where military research was being carried on for the imperialist invasion of Vietnam. Twenty-one students went to jail for it as the capitalist state defended its academic/military branch.(https://stonybrookworker.com/issues/sbw-issue-2/1969-a-year-in-campus-activism-at-stony-brook-university). 

Fight for a communist university, from every river to every sea!

What does “Free Palestine” mean, in relation to the university? Clearly, an end to the kind of university Wind describes in the Israeli case. But what then? PLP fights for a university serving workers in a state that is a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a dictatorship against capitalists (of all races) and an empowerment of workers (of all nations) to transform the whole of society. A communist university, a red tower of sciences and arts fully a part of the workers’ state power. Every dead school under the dictatorship of capital spurs us on to achieve that vision. Maya Wind’s book will stand as a record of what it was like in all the universities of a dying global imperialism. Fight for communism, from every river to every sea!

Gang violence and chaos has taken an upturn since the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse, who along with Haitian rulers, backed and united the G9 federation of existing gangs in order to suppress working class anger and demonstrations against his rule. (Al Jazeera, 3/13/24) Gang violence generally affects areas where industries are located and places where informal activities are the main sources of income for the masses in Haiti, for example the lower part of the city, the Croix des Bossales market, Carrefour airport and the Route de l’aéroport, Cité Soleil, Bas Delmas, Croix-des-Bouquets, to name just a few places. It is in these places that the working class went every day to chache lavi (literally, look for life). Workers here eke out a living and survive on a daily basis. Therefore, each time a street is paralyzed, life is no longer possible for the majority. Factories in the Sonapi free-trade zone have been shuttered. Odd jobs on the streets (gas stations, vehicle repairs, small businesses, repairs and sales of electronics and household appliances, etc.) that were the source of income for millions of Haitians have disappeared. Many institutions that provided services and jobs, such as hospitals, were burned down. The current unemployment rate is difficult to calculate but most families now depend solely on money transfers from the diaspora.

In 2023 alone, $3.8 billion in remittances were made (Haitian Times, 1/7), and 2024 is undoubtedly… even higher. Workers in Haiti are on the brink of starvation. The annual inflation rate is 46 percent (trade.gov). In the capital, the presence of gangs makes it nearly impossible to go to the market; in the country overall, there are hardly any goods on the shelves, including needed medicines. The ports are blocked and the roads inaccessible to transportation. Workers have long depended on cheaper imported goods (98 percent), especially food (50 percent) from the Dominican Republic, which discourage local agricultural production (Dominican Today, 9/13/22).

Mass political action is difficult at this time, with day-to-day survival being the primary focus of so many. However, the Progressive Labor Party here, trying to be faithful to communist practice, continues with building ideological awareness. Our comrades and friends study communist ideas and history to prepare ourselves to debate the events in political discussion forums. We organize politically significant activities—revolutionary self-help—to build and maintain the trust of the masses. On January 1, for example, the PLP worked with our base to prepare and distribute the traditional pumpkin soup in four neighborhoods in a provincial town, as we have been doing for more than eight years. Many working-class families can no longer prepare soup as before: pumpkin (joumou) is rare and expensive, as are other ingredients and meat.