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 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)

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!

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Haiti organized a cadre school in September for 26 participants, members and friends, workers, and teachers, but mostly students from working class backgrounds. Study is an important aspect of understanding how the capitalist system works and why it cannot be reformed and must be replaced by a revolutionary communist egalitarian society.

Our goal is that study will be incorporated into class struggle on campus and beyond, and our Party will grow into a force to be reckoned with in Haiti and beyond.

In Haitian Creole, we say "Tout moun se moun" meaning that workers need a system where they will be treated as human beings--the human race. That phrase is often included in the following excerpted letters (see all letters at www.plp.org)
*

In the cadre school, we studied several texts over the course of three days: The Principles of Communism by Marx and Engels, Jailbreak and Build a Base in the Working Class by Progressive Labor Party, among others. We learned about what communism is and what capitalism is. We also learned how each system is organized, and about the position of each person in that system. We learned about how to build solidarity among our class.

The capitalist system is concerned primarily with making and keeping profit—making money. It doesn’t concern itself at all with seeing working class people as human beings—as long as workers can reproduce themselves in order to go to work another day to make more profits for the bosses, then the capitalists are satisfied.

Communism is a system where we see that production is organized for the good of the working class, so that workers can live like human beings. Each member of our class will have the right to an education that serves our class, and will have the right to free and decent health care that meets our needs.

This is the kind of world that I would like to live in, for myself, my family, my town and my class. In order to achieve the goal of communism, we need to build an organization capable of leading the fight, which unites all members of the working class, from Haiti to everywhere else in the world.
*

I was happy to participate in the cadre school where we learned a lot of thing. I learned about how the capitalist system wants me to think only about myself—that success in life means becoming part of the capitalist machine, rather than what’s good for the vast majority of society.

We looked at the world situation, for example, the war going on in Ukraine, and discussed how that war is part of the rivalry of the big capitalist countries to gain a bigger control of the world and its profits. I think we have to destroy that kind of a system, and that we need a communist revolution to do that, and a communist party to lead us. Then we can establish a communist society…to share in building that society and reaping its benefits equally, according to need. A world without racist discrimination.

But in order to arrive at that goal, we have to do the work in a way that builds the collective consciousness of workers and students, rather than the individualist consciousness that capitalism fosters. I believe that this cadre school helps us move forward in the correct direction….We here can be an example to show how to do this…
*

Ayibobo—greetings comrades. The cadre school helped us understand more about the functioning of the capitalist system.

The capitalist system is one in which we are forced to live under [unfavorable] conditions…exploitation in the factories and the fields; unemployment; racism; inferior houses, education and healthcare.

And now there are gangs that control Haiti and make daily life even more miserable for us. We shouldn’t have to live in such misery and fear every day! It’s a good thing that workers living in some neighborhoods controlled by the gangs have been fighting back. We need more of that!

But we also need to understand that the gangs are only a symptom of a decaying capitalist system and the way to get rid of the gangs is to get rid of the capitalist bosses who profit from them, once and for all.
*

What I learned from the cadre school is that everyone should be able to live like a member of the human race—decently, without racism, poverty, and the misery this system creates. In a different—communist—society we won’t look at and put a value on people based on their appearance. If we understand the importance of building solidarity within our class—both here in Haiti and elsewhere around the world, that will help us in the fight against the capitalist system.

In the capitalist system, the bourgeoisie appropriates all wealth from the labor of the working class; this is basically unfair, because if you create something, why should someone who did nothing profit from it?