For over 60 years, members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have marched, rallied, walked picket lines, and donated food and money to striking industrial workers to help intensify the class struggle. This year marks a huge number of striking workers across the country. PLP believes that strikes can be schools for communism and can build antiracist class consciousness. Strikes often reveal the true colors of union bosses like Sean O’Brien (President of the Teamsters) and liberal politicians like Joe Biden who claim to be on the side of the working class but really serve the bosses’ interests.

In August, 340,000 UPS workers were ready to strike. O’Brien set up “practice” picket line schools across the country. He spouted fiery words to encourage UPS workers to strike. But days before the strike was to happen, he announced a tentative contract with UPS claiming it was the best contract in UPS history. This announcement dashed the hopes of many UPS workers and other workers wanting to pressure the bosses to give up some of their profits.

What the workers told us
PL’ers spoke to many UPS workers on practice picket lines and elsewhere. They told us that there had been two contracts to vote on: a Master and a Supplemental that varied by geographical region. For example, Virginia and Maryland fall under the Atlantic region. Not all supplementals contained the same provisions. The Western and Central have big bumps in pensions as opposed to the Atlantic. The New England supplemental gave part-timers a way to become full time—by working at least 30 days for eight hours during a 60 day period. Local 705 in the Chicago area had negotiated a provision that for every four new full time jobs, three will go to a part timer and one to  a full timer. This could be a real game changer.

The Atlantic supplement does not have that provision. Angry workers questioned union leaders during meetings as to why such a fractured negotiation had happened. Some part-timers have worked there for 24 years!

Part-timers bear the worst schedules with no regular hours. They may be on the schedule to work from 4pm to 8pm, but have to call in every day to see if they have to come in earlier, say 10:30 am or noon. If part-timers have a child or an elderly family member to care for, their partner, spouse or significant other takes most of the responsibility for care taking, doctor appointments and sick days.

There are “full-time combo” jobs that in theory they can apply for, but even with twenty-four years seniority, they cannot jump over a full-time person with a year’s seniority for the position.
The standard lunch hour has been reduced from an hour to thirty minutes. A worker needs to request an hour lunch break two days in advance!

At one UPS distribution station in Virginia, the union leaders recommended that the rank and file vote Yes on the Master and No the supplemental. Many workers voted No on both agreements, but nationally the contract was approved.

What is to be done?
PL’ers will continue to help UPS workers understand the nature of capitalism. Bosses will always place profits ahead of workers’ needs. Union bosses and liberal politicians get perks under capitalism and do not want to change the system. Voting for politicians is a dead end. Reading CHALLENGE, discussing these ideas with their coworkers and joining Progressive Labor Party to fight for communism is the best way forward on the road to workers’ power!

In Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, Ben Macintyre describes the evolution of this remarkable woman, Ursula Kuczynski, from an incipient revolutionary into a career as one of the most successful Soviet spies before, during, and after World War II.

“Agent Sonya” - a heroic communist
Kuczynski was a professional spy who ran agents and networks against the fascists in her own country, in Japanese-occupied China, in Poland, Switzerland, and then, during the Cold War period, in Great Britain. She eventually became a Red Army colonel and, among her other espionage successes, ran Klaus Fuchs, the German physicist who enabled the Soviet Union (USSR) to get the atomic bomb, thus breaking the United States imperialist’s monopoly on atomic weaponry.

Kuczynski was a lifelong fighter against fascism and she looked forward for a communist future. But she did not see that socialism was not the road to that communist future. That road means relying on the workers of the world to fight directly for communism. As we learn from the  heroic struggles and also the mistakes of the communists that came before us, the Progressive Labor Party is organizing to rebuild a worldwide communist movement. The imperialist powers are organizing for world war to redivide the world. We must organize to turn that war between imperialists into a class war for workers power. That’s communism.

Capitalist crisis between world wars
After World War I the capitalist world was in crisis everywhere. Fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and Asia. The Great Depression of the 1930’s destroyed the lives of tens of millions of workers in the United States and in Europe. The Soviet Union was a beacon of hope but it was recovering from World War I and a civil war.
A wide gulf existed between the ultra-rich and everyone else. The Weimar Republic (Germany from 1919-1933) was characterized by mass unemployment, economic insecurity, and savage political conflict. In one year alone, 1918-1919, roughly 900,000 Germans died of hunger. In 1920, the Nazi Party was founded. A year later Adolf Hitler became its leader. On January 1, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party. German communists were fighting fascists in the streets. Luxemburg  and Liebknecht were captured and assassinated by right-wing German army officers.

In July, 1921 the Chinese Communist Party was organized in Shanghai. In 1927 a leader of the Nationalist Party of China, the Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-shek, broke with the communists. In one day, on April 12, 1927, KMT military forces allied with local criminal gangs, killed 5,000- 10,000 students and workers loyal to the communists.

The capitalist world after World War I, from Europe to Japan, was dominated by militarists, fascist heads of state, and their financial backers, all of whom espoused various forms of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, jingoism, militarism, and imperial conquest.

But the communist movement was also growing. In the middle of World War I the Bolsheviks (communists) led the working class to power in what soon became the Soviet Union, the largest country in the world. They wanted to create an anti-racist society based on equality rather than on private property and profit. During the 1920s and early 1930s revolutionary communist movements in Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and China were battling the fascists for state power. The Comintern (Communist International) and the Soviet Union gave material and ideological support to these struggles.

Ursula joins the German Communist Party
Ursula Kuczynski entered this political and social cauldron. When she was sixteen she was beaten by the police in Berlin during a May Day demonstration, learning a lesson she would never forget: politics is at bottom a power struggle, most often decided by mortal combat. She joined the German Communist Party in 1924 at age 17.

During and after the Second World War she became a spy for the Soviet Union. Often suspected, she was never caught. In 1943 the Director of Soviet intelligence said this about her: “If we had five Sonyas in England, the war would be over sooner.” She died in Germany on July 7, 2000, age ninety-three. Her son, Peter, summed up his mother’s long life this way: “There were two important things to her, her children and the communist cause.”

Join the fight for communism now
Ursula Kuczynski was also called Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton, Mrs. Burton, and Ursula Hamburger, but her most enduring name, her spy name, was Sonya. The book Agent Sonya is fascinating because it contextualizes how from the 1920s to her death nearly eighty years later, a young woman born into a rich family became a radical communist and never relinquished her commitment to fighting fascism and trying to bring a communist world into being. In February, 1950, she chose to live in socialist East Germany rather than England. She believed, however deeply flawed it was, East Germany was a more humane place than capitalist West Germany, where thanks to the Western Allies Nazi murderers remained in power.

But socialism, with unequal wages and private property, is just a minor inconvenience as it will always revert back to capitalism. Today Progressive Labor Party fights directly for communism where the working class rules all aspects of society to benefit workers everywhere. Join us.

Sources:
Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy. (Crown, 2020)

Flooding from extremely heavy rain in New York City on September 29th shut down the city. It knocked out the subway system, flooded tens of thousands of homes and buildings and submerged cars trapped on highways. The rainfall, equivalent to more than a month worth of rain falling in three hours (CNN 9/30), exposed the failure of capitalism to manage even the most basic functions of society. Short term profits required by the needs of the real estate developers have left basic infrastructure in the center of U.S. capitalism woefully insufficient and there is no path for the situation to be fixed under capitalism. The massive changes needed to solve flooding in New York require an upheaval to the way society is organized that can only come through revolution and the building of a communist society.

Storms are getting worse as capitalism continues to wreak havoc on the environment. As society literally swerves between floods and fires the real estate developers at the top of the food chain in NYC are continuing to build, build, build. By owning the services of the politicians through donations to the Mayor on down, the permits are approved for taller and taller skyscrapers that are popping up all over the city.

Climate change runs into anarchy of capitalist development
Capitalism needs to seek profits. NYC was once a manufacturing center with million industrial workers at its peak in 1947 (NY Times 3/22/81). Today there are 58,000 manufacturing jobs in the city (Bureau of Labor Statistics). As U.S. capitalism lost its manufacturing power the capitalists needed to find new sources of profit. New York led the way with the development of retail and real estate. As small buildings and undeveloped lots are replaced by towers as high as 90 stories, the developers don't build sufficient infrastructure to accommodate all the new people moving in.

New construction should typically be built with accompanying infrastructure that can handle a 100-year rainstorm. This means a storm that would have a one percent chance of happening in any given year. New buildings in the city are being built with infrastructure that is designed for a five-year storm, meaning a storm that has a 20 percent chance of happening in any year (theverge.com 9/29).

A second cause of increased flooding is that new development is taking away areas where rainwater can seep directly into the ground. As empty lots and undeveloped land are built on there are fewer and fewer places that are unpaved. This forces increased amounts of rainwater into the sewers. NYC sewers were built to handle 1.75 inches of rain an hour. More than that and they back up into the streets and basements and even toilets in basement apartments. Last weekend had rainfall of about 2.5 inches an hour for a sustained period. In NYC a hundred-year storm is classified as 3.5 inches an hour, double what the sewers can currently handle (NY Times 9/29). Black, Latin and Asian workers bear the brunt of the flooding as thousands of basement apartments are the last refuge for low wage workers in a city with off the chart rents.

The capitalists won’t fix this
Decades upon decades of development would now have to be undone to properly deal with the flooding in NYC. This is not something the bosses even think about as the cost of fixing the problem under capitalism would devastate their profits. Instead, they are following a gradualist approach of installing tree pits on sidewalks that are designed to drain rainwater. These tiny, performative measures are being over-run by the continuation of development and climate change making heavy storms more frequent.

Capitalism is failing again and again. The education, health care and infrastructure are all broken. Workers power through communist revolution is the only solution.

In Part One of this five-part series, we looked at impacts of climate change over the past year.  CHALLENGE considered the September 17 climate march and analyzed its weaknesses. Part Two considers how the continued use of fossil fuels under capitalism puts the survival of humanity at risk.
The amount of carbon dioxide (the main gas generated by the burning of fossil fuels or wood) has been rising since the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s. Over the past 70 years, the Earth’s temperature has risen steadily each decade (see graph). Small changes in the average global temperature can have major impacts.

Despite pledges by the world’s capitalists to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the summer of  2023  was the hottest on record. In 2015, capitalist bosses from nearly two hundred countries signed the Paris Agreement, which targeted a limit for global warming by 2100 of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius, and the latest climate models project that we’ll pass 1.5 degrees by the mid-2030s (new.stanford.edu, 1/30). Even if all the big-emitting nations (led by China and the U.S.) fulfilled their short-term emissions cut commitments, temperatures will rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius (climateactiontracker.org). The consequences? A “new normal” of devastating weather events, from mega-hurricanes and killer floods to raging wildfires and drought.  As United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutterres said, “We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing” (theguardian.com, 11/7/22). More recently he added, “Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope with, with extreme weather events hitting every corner of the planet”(theguardian.com, 9/7).

Workers protest, bosses burn more oil
A wave of mass demonstrations is demanding an end to the expansion of fossil fuel and a phase-out of existing gas, oil, and coal installations.  At present, however, financing of fossil fuel exploration, development, and use continues to rise. In the United States, consumption of energy derived from fossil fuels increased by more than 2 percent in 2022. Britain has reopened coal mines in the name of “energy security” after the war in Ukraine disrupted energy markets. On September 27, it approved an enormous oil and gas project in the North Sea, “ignoring warnings from scientists and the United Nations that countries must stop developing new fossil fuel resources if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change” (Associated Press, 9/27).  After U.S. President Joe Biden promised to block further oil exploration in Alaska during his 2020 campaign, his administration approved the massive Willow oil project.

Left to the capitalists, the odds of shutting down the carbon economy in time–and sustaining a liveable planet–are slim and none. In the U.S., Biden and the liberal Democrats–representing the Big Fascists of finance capital–are controlled by the “supermajor” energy companies and the multinational banks that finance them and reap huge profits in return. Meanwhile, the Small Fascists fronting the Republican Party are bought and paid for by domestic energy companies, notably Koch Industries and coal-mining giant Peabody Energy. In schools, children are taught the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide but are assured that we can stop it by recycling or buying electric vehicles or installing solar panels and heat pumps for our homes. The underlying message is to blame individual workers for climate change and to hide the truth: that global warming is the product of the anarchy of capitalism and its drive for maximum short-term profit. Only a communist society run by and for the international working class can balance workers’ need for energy with the need to preserve a healthy and habitable world.

Workers want change, bosses want profits
One recent example of the capitalist bosses’ bad faith is their decision to hold the next United Nations climate summit this December in Dubai, in the oil-soaked United Arab Emirates. The conference president will be Sultan al-Jaber, the CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, which is committed to exploit fossil fuels through the year 2100 and most likely beyond.

The October 4 CHALLENGE noted that the Climate Week demonstration drew more than 75,000 marchers, including significant numbers of Black and Latin workers and youth  and members of labor unions. Some welcomed the demand of  “System Change, Not Climate Change.” The march was bracketed by sit-ins at banks and museums that take money from fossil fuel companies, as courageous workers put their bodies in entryways to draw attention to the catastrophe now unfolding before our eyes. This year alone,  devastating wildfires have consumed forests from Canada and the U.S. to Spain and Brazil. The fires poison the air hundreds, even thousands of miles away. As forests dry out and rain patterns shift, climate change has increased the likelihood of these fires by 50 percent.

Millions of workers and students are fighting back against climate change and Big Oil. Fridays for Future is a youth-led international organization in 7,500 cities across the globe, from Sweden and Belgium to  Peru, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Sierra Leone. Extinction Rebellion, based in Britain, calls for civil disobedience to push governments to act. While many participants in these liberal-led reform groups sincerely want to see ”system change,” most do not yet approach the crisis from a class perspective.

The only climate solution is communist revolution
We must win workers to the understanding that the only climate solution is communist revolution, and that only a revolutionary communist party–Progressive Labor Party–can smash capitalism and its rotten, climate-poisoning ideas. It’s not enough to appeal to governments for stricter environmental regulations or to pressure banks to stop financing fossil fuel companies. Communists challenge the basic premises of capitalism: the need for money, the exploitation of labor, the extraction of commodities in the interests of inter-imperialist rivalry.

Many of the participants at the September 17 march would be receptive to this message if given a chance. It’s up to us to share it with them, to develop personal ties and build a base within these mass organizations.

PLP aims to lead the international working class to smash capitalism and replace it with a worker-run society. In future articles in this series, we will challenge the notion that solar and wind power alone can replace fossil fuels and consider the possibilities to advance the clean energy transition with nuclear energy while also limiting growth.