One of the central demands of the strike was the lifting of the state of siege that has been in effect in Colombia almost continuously for the past thirty years. Under it, the police have wide powers to break up strikes and demonstrations and detain political activists or trade unionists without charge. Its provisions for incommunicado detention facilitates the use of torture against political prisoners.

The strikers also demanded the release of all political prisoners, an end to widespread layoffs in the textile and other industries, wage increases of up to 50 percent, an end to the government's austerity policies and cuts in social services, and price controls on food and other day-to-day necessities.  
 
October 29, 1956
The political revolution of the East European working class against Kremlin-sponsored bureaucratic rule scored a major advance in Poland and then broke out in full force in Hungary this week. It was a week of events completely dominated by mass meetings and direct actions of workers and students in the two countries.

In Poland, these mass actions forced the plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers Party (CP) to meet Oct. 19 through 21 and to successfully defy an ultimatum to again allow the Kremlin to handpick its leading body, the Politburo.

In Hungary, fighting still raged today in the streets of the capital city of Budapest, where last night police opened fire on mass demonstrations of students, workers, and Hungarian soldiers who were hailing the Polish events and demanding a new government in their own country. The demonstrators, say the Oct. 24 N.Y. Times, shouted slogans such as "Do not stop half way: Away with Stalinism," "Independence and Freedom," "Hurrah for the Poles."  
 
November 7, 1931
The 14th anniversary of the Bolshevik Russian Revolution is at hand; and the proletariat of the entire world cheers the first working class to achieve power over the capitalist class. The heritage of the October Revolution, precious to the toiling millions everywhere, must be preserved.

In 1848 Marx and Engels, in the immortal Communist Manifesto, exultantly cried: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism." With the Russian Revolution of November 1917, this spectre became a reality of the modern world, the first death-thrust of the unsheathed proletarian sword in the body of imperialism.

The major act of the Russian proletariat, in the program of revolution, was the seizure of political power as a class; it established state power; it set up the dictatorship of the proletariat which, as Marx proved in the Criticism of the Gotha Program, was the necessary transition measure employed by the working class in the long, hard road toward the establishment of a genuine Communist society.  
 
 
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