The Big Fascists, the international finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, is in disarray—and the working class is paying the price. With more than 350,000 workers killed by the pandemic, including more than 100,000 in the U.S. alone, the capitalist bosses are pushing forward with a chaotic “reopening” of the economy that may kill millions more. Meanwhile, capitalism has plunged into a severe international economic crisis that rivals the Great Depression of the 1930s. As imperialist rulers fight for their threatened profits on the road to fascism and World War III, hundreds of millions of workers worldwide are faced with joblessness, hunger, and a siege of preventable illness. Racist inequality has murdered untold numbers of Black and Latin workers, from Detroit to Tanzania to Ecuador.
In the U.S., many of the domestically oriented Small Fascists are going bankrupt. Their racist front man, Stooge in Chief Donald Trump, has called for an immediate reopening of worksites, churches, schools, and other public places, even though most states are failing to meet basic public health benchmarks. Trump has censored recommendations by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and ignored the watered-down guidelines that the spineless agency finally released.
The governors, both Republicans and Big Fascist Democrats, are falling in line as they send workers to their deaths. As he reopened New York City’s stock exchange, the bosses’ blood-money headquarters, Governor Andrew Cuomo called for “supercharging” the economy (New York Daily News, 5/26). He also acknowledged that the rate of positive test results in some New York communities is as high as 40 percent, and at 20 percent in New York City (cnbc.com, 5/26)—which means that not nearly enough testing is being done to control the virus’ spread. (The Trump administration’s own benchmark is 10 percent.) Case rates are rising in much of the South and Midwest. According to Imperial College London, the easing of lockdown regulations could lead to another 100,000 Covid-19 fatalities in the U.S. by July: “[T]here is strong evidence that the epidemic is not under control” (imperial.ac.uk, 5/21).
How would communists handle this pandemic differently? To begin with, we would win the population to a scientific approach to healthcare and economics. As communists, we believe in science. We know that an important aspect of revolution is smashing anti-scientific ideas. After the Chinese communist revolution of 1949, "barefoot doctors" were able to wipe out medical plagues from syphilis to schistosomiasis to drug addiction (Away with All Pests, by Joshua Horn).
Covid-19 and racism
Covid-19 has disproportionately killed Black and Latin and immigrant workers, the same people who are forced by racism and capitalism to live in overcrowded households throughout the world. Available data shows that “on average, the rate of fatalities for Black workers is 2.4 times that of white workers with Covid-19. In states including Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin and in Washington, D.C., that ratio jumps to five to seven black people dying of Covid-19 complications for every one white death” (New York Times, 5/25).
In the U.S., Black and Latin workers are also at greater risk for infection because they’re concentrated in job sectors with high exposure to the virus: cleaners, groceries, hospitals and nursing homes, slaughterhouses, and food processing plants.
As Trump rallies his swastika-badged racist base to lay siege to state capitols with automatic weapons, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is paving the way to free businesses from any liability for the workers they’re about to slaughter. Meanwhile, the Big Fascists are offering no coherent plan to keep workers eating while saving their jobs and protecting their health. From racist nitwit Joe Biden, very possibly the next president, to lifelong hack Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, the Democrats are following in the footsteps of Barack Obama and his craven bank bailouts of 2009. They’re presenting the same profit-driven, corporate-friendly, and pathetically inadequate "relief" to workers today.
With the federal bosses both incompetent and divided, workers' lives depend on small-time stooges like Cuomo or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, both of whom resisted sheltering people in place until it was too late.
The true fascists: Congressional Progressive Caucus
In April, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and her social fascist compatriots, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, introduced the Paycheck Recovery Act to have the federal government keep workers on the payroll, as bosses are doing in several European countries to make their reopenings more efficient (vox.com 4/17). They understand the necessity of a loyal and patriotic working class to fight the next global war. But Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, ever loyal to their Big Fascist corporate donor base, refused to include this provision in the Heroes Act (theintercept.com, 5/19). Instead, they are supporting an extension of unemployment benefits and another one-time stimulus check, leaving workers unemployed and at the mercy of the fractured state unemployment systems.
Republican or Democrat, liberal or right-wing or phony “socialist,” all bosses need to mislead workers away from the communist understanding that the profit system can never meet our class needs. Or that fighting racism is a class question, and that only by eliminating capitalism can we truly eliminate racism.
China on the rise
With both sections of the U.S. ruling class in disarray as they flounder in response to the pandemic and resulting economic crisis, inter-imperalist rivalry between China and the U.S. has intensified (Yahoo Finance, 5/14). Richard Haass, a Big Fascist mouthpiece as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that China should be held accountable for its role in causing the pandemic, while warning that the U.S. and China were heading toward a new Cold War (Wall Street Journal, 5/7).
Where the Small Fascists would be content with a smaller white military, the Big Fascists know they need to win more workers to believe in a multiracial U.S. that can sacrifice and go to war when needed. Most of all, they need to deceive workers into thinking they have a stake in U.S. capitalism, and into fighting for the rulers’ profits. But China is winning the Covid-19 war with a unified ruling class, a top-down government, and full-blown fascism to discipline both bosses and workers.
No matter which group of bosses comes out on top, workers will be sickened by the disease of capitalism until they rise in revolution and seize state power. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!
Los Angeles, May 23—“DA Lacey, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide”
“How do you spell racist? LAPD”
“How do you spell murderer? LAPD”
Over two consecutive days, these and other chants rang out all over a working-class neighborhood in South LA, and an upscale neighborhood of Granada Hills, where Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie (“Lackey”) Lacey lives. It was a fighting commemoration of the life and untimely death of Alex Flores, a young Latin worker who was mowed down by racist killers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in South LA six months ago.
Alex is another in a long line of working-class victims of police murder. Cops are the armed assassins of a capitalist system which must use force to control the working class, especially super-exploited Black and Latin workers. This racist terror can only be smashed with a communist revolution organized by an international working class Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
Build a base to build a mass party
In 55 years of organizing, PLP has learned that the fight for reforms, even if militant, can never by themselves lead to revolution. All the reforms in the world (body cameras on the cops; police review boards; electing Black and Latin mayors, District Attorney’s or police etc.) have not stopped continued racist murders by the cops and their minions, like those who executed Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.
Police terror is essential to capitalism because the ruling class knows that an organized working class will see through their racist lies and rebel against this exploitative system. While we must participate in reform struggles to build a base and use them as schools for communism, we must also make the growth of PLP our primary goal and barometer of success.
Fight racist killer kkkops and their henchmen
Alex was gunned down on November 19, 2019. Almost immediately, his family, together with PLP members organized daily marches to and rallies at the “Shootin” Newton Police Station. Since January, the family has organized weekly Flores Friday marches. The Justice for Alex Flores Committee, which includes PLP, Alex’s family, and others, organized an additional action this week. After a particularly militant Flores Friday, where we confronted two racist cops outside “Shootin” Newton, an integrated group of 60 antiracists travelled 25 miles to Granada Hills and marched to DA Lacey’s lair.
During Democrat Lacey’s eight year tenure as LA County DA, the LAPD, the County Sheriff’s Department and other local cops have murdered over 500 workers (Mother Jones 3/2), most of them Black and Latin, including numerous workers with mental health issues. Not one indictment has even been sought by Lackey Lacey. So it is no surprise that the Flores family has never been given an autopsy report, never received Alex’s belongings, or any of the video footage or other evidence of the cops’ criminal acts. Further proving that Black capitalists are still capitalists.
Pushing the limits of reform is revolutionary
As we were marching, one cop told us that if anyone “trespassed” we would be immediately arrested by one of the three armed sheriff’s deputies guarding Lacey’s house. We were not intimidated. One of Alex’s sisters gave an impassioned, militant speech on the sidewalk while we held signs, banners, and PLP red flags. She called out Lacey for green-lighting racist cop terror, and vowed not to stay quiet nor to stop the struggle for justice for Alex and so many other victims. She recited our demands, and then continued leading militant, anti-racist chants.
A member of PLP traced the history of police in the U.S., starting with slave-catchers in the U.S. South. He exposed the current role of the cops globally in protecting the capitalist class and their exploitation of workers in the factories, sweatshops, and maquiladoras (See CHALLENGE, 3/13) of the world. He foretold the demise of the cops and their racist masters at the hands of their future gravediggers, workers and their children. He said that only an organized, international, revolutionary, communist party can lead the overthrow of the capitalists by the working class. That party is Progressive Labor Party!
Before we left Lackey Lacey’s house, Alex’s mother and father, who could not contain their anger, built up over the last six months, spoke out. Alex’s father asked the cops protecting Lacey if they really protect the working class, or just cover for criminals who kill the working class.
Cheers for CHALLENGE Chants against killer kops.
As has happened the last several weeks at Flores Friday, our May 22nd march and rally got a tremendous reception from the South-Central LA community. We distributed over 150 issues of CHALLENGE to passing cars and pedestrians while maintaining discipline in light of Covid-19 precautions. Over and over, a cacophony of car, truck and bus horns filled the night with audible support for our campaign. When we caught two pigs from Newton Station standing outside the fire station across the street from us, we quickly organized a short march surrounding them, following them, and chanting “Killer Kops”, to give them the send-off they deserved.
Beginning with a visit by three comrades to Alex’s neighborhood the day after his murder, through hard work and patience, this campaign against racist cop terror has grown into a mass local phenomenon. We want to expand the campaign to reach other working class struggles in the neighborhood. We have started a study group to bring our communist ideas to some of those active in the campaign, which they have welcomed with open arms. Given the response to our politics so far, the future looks bright for the growth and development of PLP.
BROOKLYN, NY May 12—In response to the murder of 25-year-old Black worker Ahmaud Arbery (25) in Georgia, 20 PL’ers and antiracists organized a caravan for communism. Fists rose in solidarity along a 2.2 mile route that revisited time-honored sites of protest and rebellion against the police murders of Kyam Livingston (37), Shantel Davis (23), and Kimani Gray (16). While maintaining working-class discipline, Progressive Labor Party managed to distribute 100 CHALLENGEs and bring the message of antiracism to this neighborhood terrorized by racist police.
Black workers key
Today, as 400 years ago, Black workers are the most brutally attacked section of our class. The police, descendants of slave catchers, enforce this daily terror. That’s because racism, especially anti-Black racism, is part and parcel of capitalism. The profit system cannot function without it.
U.S. history is a chronicle of genocide, slavery, segregation, and enduring racist oppression. Black workers have less invested in this capitalist status quo. Since racism infects all relations within the profit system, they stand to hold fewer illusions about “justice” or “democracy” under the bosses’ dictatorship. The ruling class understands the revolutionary and historical role of Black workers as leaders of building an international communist movement. Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their basis for class consciousness—for class solidarity with all workers and class hatred of all capitalist rulers.
This capitalist world will not cease to terrorize and murder our class’s future leaders. Whenever and wherever they terrorize, workers must rise, under all conditions, to fight this system.
Positive neighborhood response
“If you hate this racist system then honk your horn!” “If you feel the power of the workers then honk your horn!”
These chants from a car-mounted bullhorn echoed through streets growing less deserted by the day as workers forced to earn a living outside their homes returned home from the job. Bus drivers, FedEx and other postal workers, were hailed and responded with their horns as well.
As always, Progressive Labor Party urged the working class to take pride that it is our class keeping this world running and to focus our anger on the ruling class. It’s the bosses’ thirst for profits that is driving us to early graves by the hundreds and thousands a day. We passed Brookdale Hospital where the heroic efforts of workers, mainly Black women, have kept precious brothers and sisters alive despite Governor Andrew Cuomo’s racist neglect over many years.
We contrasted his cynical call for unity since this pandemic commenced with the kind of revolutionary communist working class unity that will sweep misleaders like him and the pestilent system he fronts for into the dustbin of history. Workers can see today more clearly that our class’s work is what contributes all that is essential; it is up to communists to build the organization that the workers need to construct a society that abolishes the profit motive and the bosses’ need to use racism to divide and conquer the working class. You need a revolutionary communist party to do that.
Multiracial unity
The rulers fear nothing more than a multiracial resistance. For well over three centuries, the ruling class have used their state apparatus—their laws, their courts, their banks, their killer cops—to maintain institutionalized racism and segregate workers. False divisions based on skin tones are exploited to spread fear and distrust between workers. So when we can fight with multiracial unity, all workers stand to benefit.
Our multiracial and intergenerational group of PL’ers was joined by old friends from Kyam’s family, co-workers, new friends active in the rent-strike movement in NYC and we finished our journey in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the epicenter of liberal deBlasio’s regime of racist police enforcement of social distancing violations. Of forty summonses given for violating social distancing since the quarantine began in Brooklyn thirty five have been issued in Black neighborhoods (NYT, 5/7).
Awareness that this pandemic only intensifies the capitalist system’s vicious racism ran deep along our 2.2 mile route and fed all of our determination to keep the multiracial struggle for a communist world rolling. Profits will never solve the problems of the workers upon whose backs these problems are created in the first place. Join the fight for an antiracist world, communism.
INDIANA, May 16—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played an active role against racist incarceration during a rally and car action at Indiana State Prison (ISP).
The racist disregard of workers in prison is not new and continues to be a tool for capitalism. Mass incarceration profiteers have long used racism and sexism as their primary ways to keep incarcerated workers separated from one another. They are also used to keep the wider public from empathizing with the class struggles inside of the prisons.
The number of Covid-19 infections and deaths among prisoners continues to rise, with no illusion of concern among bosses. The only solution to ending this capitalist-caused cycle of systemic exploitation and victimization is to smash capitalism with an armed communist revolution, led by an international PLP.
Putting the line on the line with workers
The PLP collective arrived early to the rally, giving us an opportunity to talk with other workers about our connection to the prison and other struggles against capitalist violence.
We discussed how the coronavirus and the state government’s mishandling of the pandemic are affecting our base . PLP comrades shared that if society were under control of the workers under communism, operating in the best interests of the working class instead of capitalist gain, there would be a drastic reduction in the loss of lives.
Workers talked about issues their family members in the prison have been going through long before the Covid-19 crisis. . Abuse at the hands of guards in the form of food tampering, forced isolation, suspension of visits in all forms, physical abuse, and unwarranted, harassing searches all made the list.
All these result in worsening conditions for workers, specifically their physical safety as well as their mental and emotional health. This is proof that rehabilitation is far from the goal of incarceration under capitalism. Brutalization of the working class, control, and profit is the bottom line under this system.
The fight against capitalism includes all workers
When the featured speakers arrived, they gave comments about their organization’s platform and the current demands laid out for the well-being of inmates. During open comments, a former guard of the prison spoke about the shared hazardous conditions for employees and inmates.
Their point was that the risks were related, and everyone had an interest in pushing back against the refusal of prison administrators to initiate safety precautions. Some in the crowd were surprised to hear how the lives of guards were also endangered by their money-hungry bosses. The shared interests of workers, incarcerated or not, to demand change and improvement in conditions from administrators to increase the safety of all was made clear.
The speaker quit their job due to how great of a risk they all faced, and due to the clear intention of their bosses to do nothing about it. After the invited speaker read a list of reformist demands, a PL’er shouted out that there’s no negotiating with the prison bosses. The PL’er said real justice for incarcerated workers means smashing capitalism and their system of for-profit torture.
Speaking on the bullhorn, the comrade expanded the conversation by saying that workers coming together and showing opposition in events like these is important. It steels us for the fight that the whole working class must wage against this deadly system that would rather see us all caged and broken than free. Smashing the capitalist system is the only key to freedom for us all.
The comrade led the crowd in Party chants after they showed an interest in the revolutionary line she delivered. PLP distributed CHALLENGE newspaper and made contacts. When the main speaker took to the mic again, they agreed with what the PL’er had stated and added ending imperialism to their group’s list of demands.
No reformist retreats!
Mass incarceration remains a valuable weapon for the ruling class. The reasons, and many of the methods, remain unchanged in the U.S. since the era of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Black workers, newly “freed” from one form of enslavement, were thrown into another form in jails and prisons. Racism and sexism are clearly used by poverty and prison profiteers as tools of control, separating workers on both sides of the wall.
Workers in prisons are waging fights for basic humane treatment against capitalists who continue to profit from withholding it. Being a part of collectives that support that fight is an important area of mass work for our comrades to engage. Actively leading with our line will win us supporters, who will become our base, and then our comrades. It all starts with putting our line on the forefront of the struggle.
We push people past the point of asking for kinder abuse from capitalists. This is the essential difference between reform and revolution. PLP comrades must build for the latter everywhere we are present. It is through personal and political relationships that we will win others away from reform and revisionist movements, to fight directly for revolutionary communism.
MEXICO, May 27—"I no longer have faith, this is horrible...I am demanding a public apology from Smith Medical and they must assume responsibility for destroying my family...They are scoundrels," said Juan, a Tijuana worker, who was tearful, who lost his wife and 25-year-old daughter, both to coronavirus. Mother and daughter both worked in the company and did not receive adequate and timely medical attention. Despite having all the symptoms of COVID-19, the doctor at the plant told them it was a simple flu. He only prescribed pain relievers to get them back to work. Until, both worsened and died in a Social Security hospital, just over a week apart. This news was released weeks before the peak of the pandemic and shows that neither companies nor the government care about the lives of workers.
No solutions under a profit system
On March 31, the General Health Council of the Mexican government decreed a health emergency because of COVID-19. Therefore, non-essential activities in the public, social, or private sectors should have been suspended. Many businesses did not comply with that provision and the government let it be. In the state of Baja California, largely due to worker protests at some plants, some 50 companies that were not performing essential activities were successfully suspended. But, the governor and businessman Jaime Bonilla, who is a member of the ruling party Morena, reopened them on May 4 saying that they were part of the supply chain of essential products.
The Progressive Labor Party mourns the death of our working-class sisters and brothers. We also mourn the deaths of all the workers who have died from the inability of this criminal capitalist system to care for their lives and health. We honor their memories with courage to fight this murderous system and build a new society where no worker dies for the profits of a few. We fight for workers like Juan N. to regain confidence in their own class and in a future of social equality.
Unfortunately, the case of Juan N, his wife and daughter are not isolated. As of May 16, in Baja California, 519 people had died from COVID-19, of those 432 were maquiladora workers. At the national level, the State ranks second in deaths and third in infections. While the maquilas hide the outbreaks, the workers are the ones who report their health and that of their colleagues. A worker at the U.S. subsidiary Breg, Inc., which manufactures medical supplies, said she contracted the virus at the plant where she worked. Although there were positive cases within the company, the bosses did not apply any measures to prevent the workers in the factory and their families from becoming infected.
Communism is the cure
Under capitalism the lives of the workers do not matter; we have no value; we are disposable. The only thing that matters is the bosses' profits. The bosses use their state power to appropriate the wealth workers produce when they transform raw materials into merchandise.
Under a communist society led by the working class, our lives and needs will be the main social interest. Under communism, if necessary, all activity to protect the lives of workers would be stopped; social organization and the strength of the communist state would guarantee that this would be the case.
This was the case when workers in the Soviet Union and China faced and eliminated many diseases that continue to plague millions of people in the world today and others that re-emerge such as tuberculosis and leprosy.
Even in the current pandemic, there are workers organizing collectively to face the virus. Lessons from this period are nuggets for building a new communist society. We encourage all workers to read CHALLENGE and build social ties with workers on the basis of fighting for a better world.
