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.

BROOKLYN, October 1—Progressive Labor Party and friends of a local community organization decried liberal fascist Mayor Erick Adams’s new ordinance to evict migrant families.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, after a rainstorm paralyzed the whole city of NYC (see page 4), we marched the streets of Bushwick near a shelter, chanting slogans both in English and Spanish in this integrated neighborhood.

We chanted slogans such as, “workers united will never be defeated” and “immigrants yes and evictions no.”
Our communist politics were well received by workers, and many took both the CHALLENGE and leaflets, and some young people briefly joined the march and chanted with us. This shows that no matter the condition, no matter the location, there are antiracists everywhere.

Once at the shelter, we gave speeches and chanted in front of the shelter, calling out the savage capitalist system as the cause, which needs to be destroyed and replaced by communism.
We got harassed by security. Some of the migrants were a little scared to show their faces on the window because of the harassment they go through by the cops.

We had also learned that a big portion of the migrants had already been evicted the night before and had been kicked out in the streets in the pouring rain that Governor Kathy Hohcul called “life-threatening.” Mayor Adams has been seeking to suspend the “right to shelter” law at a time when the City has the most needs to house people. These politicians’ decisions—Republicans and Democrats—are driven by profit needs, not workers’ needs.

This putrid racism displayed today is what capitalism has to offer to families already terrorized by the profit system (see page 2). A system that literally puts families into the streets in the middle of storms and floods deserve to be drowned. Smash all borders! See more next issue!

As the UAW strike against Ford, GM and Stellantis enters its third week, it has “expanded” to 20 percent of the membership on the picket lines and 80 percent still working, including at the most profitable truck plants that produce the Dodge Ram, Ford F-150, and Chevy Silverado. The 38 Parts Distribution Centers that got called out on strike only service the dealerships and have no effect on production. They also added only about 6,000 workers to the total on strike.

Trying to give cover to the UAW leadership and bolster his sagging presidential campaign, Joe Biden spent about two minutes on a GM picket line while his labor secretary is assigned to Michigan to make sure the strike doesn’t spread. But PLP has been out to the picket lines, too, talking with Ford truck and assembly workers in Michigan and Chicago and to Stellantis parts depot workers in New York, offering support, international solidarity, and talking about the need for communist revolution.

Biden calls himself “the most pro-union president ever,” yet he was one of the architects of the 2008 bailout that saw the auto bosses make $250 billion in profits over the past decade while auto workers saw their real wages drop by 20 percent. Biden recently forced a national contract on railroad workers that they had overwhelmingly rejected and is trying to ensure a loyal industrial workforce as the rulers escalate their proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and prepare for a possible conflict with China.

While the UAW leadership and corporate media have the workers focused on wages and restoring past concessions, all of which are important, the main underlying issue is the transition to Electric Vehicles (EVs), which is already underway, and where U.S. bosses find themselves trailing behind Tesla and China, the #1 producer of EVs in the world. A Hyundai EV factory will soon be operating in Georgia.

The UAW already represents less than half of the US auto industry. The transition from gasoline engines to EVs will cost thousands of jobs as current facilities that produce engines, mufflers, catalytic converters, fuel injectors and other components will be retooled or shut down. Many workers will not be around to see the benefits of whatever wage hike is ultimately settled on. One of the main goals of the UAW is to get the auto bosses to agree to have the new battery and EV factories, many of them joint ventures with smaller companies, covered by the national labor contract. If they don’t get it, they will ultimately represent a smaller and smaller share of the industry.  

Scientific and technological changes in production are nothing new, especially in the auto industry. Many Detroit workers and families remember in the 1990s, when GM built the Hamtramck Assembly plant and Chrysler built the new Jefferson Assembly and together they closed more than 13 factories as automation and robotics cost tens of thousands of jobs and reshaped the industry. Similar struggles are underway about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The problem isn’t science or technology, it’s who controls it and who runs society. These advances can serve the profits of the billionaires or the needs of all workers. Once we eliminate the bosses and their system with communist revolution, science and technology can serve the masses. We need a lot more than a wage hike. We need to abolish wage slavery!