Making inroads towards communism with transit co-worker
I've had discussions in recent months with my Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) train operator classmates about the bosses' racist attacks against us on the job. For some time, I was not confident my efforts were bearing fruit. My colleagues oftentimes laughed me off as just some crazy anarchist guy rambling. It felt like a hopeless endeavor. Though I still kept trying.
But recently, a classmate texted me that he was seriously interested in becoming a union representative because, “[L]ike you said, stand up for the little guy,” referencing a conversation we'd had around late January.
During the aforementioned talk, I spoke with him about how the MTA blames its workers for fare hikes during contract negotiations, and how the racist media parrots the same lies. He was amazed to discover this information.
He asked me a question later that same day: “Would you rather be the corporation going up against the little guy? Or the little guy going up against the corporation?”
“I'd rather be in a collection of little guys (and gals) teaming up against that corporation and this system,” I responded.
Though we as communists know that bosses have today's unions under their boots and use them as campaign vehicles for their stooge politicians, this worker's shift shows his rising class-consciousness.
He sees how capitalism is devastating workers at the MTA, with over 120 of us dead from Covid-19, within a two-month time span, because Transit bosses didn't give a damn about safeguarding us from the virus.
He wants to bring change, but just needs nudging in a more communist direction. Before this discussion, he may not have seen much reason for us to organize. We plan on going to union meetings when they reopen again, and I'm looking into books about the TWU Local 100's communist roots for us to read together.
I'll continue talking with him whenever I can.
Eventually, I want to give him CHALLENGE as well. But for now, baby steps. I'm taking this as a lesson well learned. NEVER give up on workers, and never assume they'll never be able to get it.
You just might be surprised.
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CHALLENGE is essential news
Around the world, workers are finding creative ways to continue to fight back amid the Covid-19 Pandemic. Progressive Labor Party knows that an important way of fighting for the working class is spreading communist ideas with CHALLENGE newspaper. In order to do this many have been encouraging people to check out www.plp.org or sending their contacts the newspaper in the mail.
Another approach used recently in NYC, the center of the pandemic, was to build a portable CHALLENGE stand and place it near a line of folks getting food as well as a protest against racist ICE incarceration. It was then possible to offer it to people “hands-free“ and many eagerly took the paper as they passed. Let’s keep creating new ways to resist and spread our important message.
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Sanitation workers on strike
I have been working in New Orleans testing folks for HIV and Covid-19 in a Federally Qualified Health Center. We serve workers like the sanitation workers who have been collecting trash without safety equipment. These front-line workers are subcontracted by People Ready and paid $10.25 an hour with no benefits or health insurance. They work long hard hours starting at 4 AM sometimes until 6 PM. As summer heats up in New Orleans their job gets even harder. Between the heat, the increase in people doing yard work—disposing of tree branches and such in the trash—there is even more to do. They are not provided with masks or gloves and work closely with others. On May 5 some “hoppers” (those who jump on and off the truck collecting trash) went on strike with these demands:

• PPE for all workers each day starting NOW
• Fix broken trucks that leak toxic hydraulic fluid on workers every day
• Provide hourly pay of $15/hour
• Provide weekly hazard pay of $150/week

The first day on strike a boss told them they were fired and some returned to work the next day. A week later they received a letter saying they weren’t fired, and they are hoping that will motivate others to join them. The company (Metro Services Group) has started bringing in prisoners on work release to scab during the strike.  Those on work release were threatened with being sent back to jail if they did not comply.  These workers are paid about half of what the sanitation workers were making – definitely forced slave labor. As of May 21, the bosses were still not meeting with them. The workers are trying to form a union—the City Waste Union— and have gained support, including solidarity with striking baristas and a large rally at City Hall on May 18.
The worker’s signs say I AM A MAN, a reprise of the slogan of the famous Memphis sanitation workers strike that brought Martin Luther King Jr to the city where he was assassinated.  I have been talking with the strikers and put support signs in my apartment windows in the gentrifying area of Bywater, New Orleans.
I will be bringing revolutionary ideas and CHALLENGE to the picket line. This fightback has inspired other workers to donate nearly $60,000 to support the strikers through a Go Fund Me page: https://tinyurl.com/y7duxffg. Workers of the world unite!
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Communism: news bosses too scared to print
The New York Times, mouthpiece of the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, proclaims itself as reporters of “All the news that’s fit to print.” But that “All” doesn’t seem to include the truth about communists.
The editorial in its April 29 issue is headlined, “Another Way the 2020s Might Be Like the 1930s.” What “way”? In alluding to current strikes by Amazon workers and others protesting the rulers’ ignoring the unsafe effects of the coronavirus, it recalls “The consequential strike wave of 1934…a year of unrest in workplaces across the country,” when workers could “look to President Franklin Roosevelt as an ally.”
It fails to mention that this “unrest” was a product of massive sit-down strikes led by communists in the auto plants and among basic industries like electrical and steel. Six of the seven members of the strike committee that organized the 1936-37 44-day Flint sit-down strike that smashed the open shop and established the auto union at General Motors were communists.
That strike sparked scores of others across the country, battling the National Guard and U.S. Army troops. It was part of a red-led movement that championed the eight-hour day. Communists organized 800,000 workers into the National Unemployment Councils which forced Roosevelt to quell the workers’ protests and establish the Unemployment Insurance and Social Security systems and the 40-hour work-week.  Somehow the Times’ editorial writer didn’t feel that this news about these communist-led movements in the 1930s was “fit to print.”
Just below that editorial was an op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman in which he labeled the coronavirus a “war,” asserting that “wars are fought and won by humans.” So who were the humans that won the Second World War? That happened, says Friedman, because “We” — meaning the U.S. — “could out-mobilize the Nazis and Japanese to win World War II.” (!)
Somehow he “forgot” that the working-class in the communist-led Soviet Union was squaring off against 80 percent of Hitler’s armies on the 2,000-mile-long Eastern Front, from the Arctic to the Crimea, smashing them at Stalingrad, which was universally viewed as the turning point of WWII. It was their heroism that greatly reduced the number of Nazi divisions that the U.S. and Britain had to face in the West, enabling them to open up the Second Front in France in 1944. This, after the Soviets had fought alone for three years.
Perhaps Friedman never read what the U.S. General Douglas MacArthur told the Associated Press on February 23, 1942: “The hopes of civilization rest upon the worthy banners of the courageous Russian Army.” Their heroic “resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a smashing counterattack which is driving the enemy back into its own land” is “the greatest military achievement of all time.”
Now THAT is “news that’s fit to print.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

The capitalist world is crumbling. Workers everywhere are witnessing this typically, insidious “boss move.” The billionaire capitalists wait and continue accumulating billions until the deaths of workers affect their profits. This is true of the transit system in New York City. Capitalism is the real disease. Workers’ power with communist revolution is the only cure.
The ruling class is enforcing fascism through surveillance and racist police terror and murder against mostly Black workers. A transit worker said, "they told us we're essential workers, now get back to work." Under capitalism workers’ labor is essential, but workers’ lives are never essential. Under communism, not only will workers’ labor and health be essential, but as we learn to run all aspects of society, all our abilities and talents will be developed to the fullest. That’s the world the Progressive Labor Party fights for!
  Only communist organizing can defeat kapitalist killers
Meanwhile, in New York City the death of predominantly Black transit workers has surpassed 100, more than the deaths of cops and firefighters combined. Many workers have been told to work without the proper PPE (personal protective equipment). These numbers are actually much higher. Many workers have posted on social media the deaths of their beloved coworkers that are not mentioned by the bosses or the Transportation Workers Union (TWU).
Progressive Labor Party members have been reaching out to coworkers to provide any help that may be needed as well as discussing on-the-job issues and the world situation. On the job we need a safe work environment for ourselves, and a safe riding environment for workers to get to their jobs. As far as the world goes, we need the working class to run it. That’s communism and that means revolution. This whole damn capitalist system has to go.
 The transit union leaders or misleaders are doing very little. They want compensation for the families of the victims of the virus, and for hazard pay. That’s it.  Governor Andrew Cuomo wants the federal government to pay for hazard pay. He’s just passing the buck to President Donald Trump. Meanwhile the transit bosses save money from the deaths of veteran workers who were hired on better pensions. They will be replaced by lower-paid workers, if they are replaced at all.
 United workers can halt means of production and
transportation
Transit is an essential part of the economy. It’s a huge concentration of workers who, with the right leadership can shut this system down like they did in NYC back in 2005, bringing the bosses to their knees. It was transit workers who initially blew the whistle on how dirty the subways are, putting pressure on the bosses and politicians to do something. But instead of shutting down transit for a complete cleaning of trains and stations, the bosses’ response was chaotic and weak. They removed the homeless from the trains from 1-5 AM every 24 hours and used underpaid contract workers to do the cleaning. There aren't enough workers to do the work, so they will clean the main stations like Times Square or Grand Central, but ignore local stations, which is pointless. The way capitalism works it will also be racist, as the stations poorly cleaned will be in Black or Latin neighborhoods. This is just another political move by the bosses, and their politicians so they can say they did something to protect the workers.
Profits created the unsanitary and unsafe conditions that caused this disease. A profit-driven health care system left us unprepared for this disease. And chaotic, capitalist competition has led to an ineffective response to this disease. The high death tolls are the product of capitalism. Capitalism is the pandemic. Capitalism is the real killer. All over the world, the working class is under the same attack by capitalist vermin.
 Crisis calls for class struggle and communism
 But there is a silver lining. The brutality of capitalism has become clearer to many workers.
In Haiti the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is leading workers to pressure the rulers to provide proper masks and sanitation. The Party in Chicago joined workers in a caravan supporting imprisoned workers, distributing masks and CHALLENGE to arm them with communist ideas. The Party from Mexico to New York City continues to fight for their students, by making sure they still have an education. All over the world workers are fighting back.
But capitalism cannot be reformed; it works only for the capitalist rulers. We need a world where workers are in charge because we are the ones who create what we need! A world that is free from racism, sexism, imperialism, and poverty. A world run by and for the working class. That world is called communism.
But this world that communists fight for will not come from the voting box. It will not come from liberal politicians. It will not come from Fascists Liberals Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders. You will not feel the Bern. The bosses must feel our feet, as we revolt and take state power. Only then will everyone have health, education, shelter and food. Only then will the next pandemic be fought because workers’ lives matter. Join the Progressive Labor Party!

Thousands of adjuncts at the City University of New York (CUNY), who fought hard for a wage increase in the last contract, are now facing imminent layoffs (see interview). CUNY students are facing the prospect of a tuition hike, additional fees, less course offerings and the possibility of overcrowded online classes. These cutbacks will be devastating to the careers and dreams of the working class students and adjuncts of New York City. NYC billionaires and their puppet politicians control CUNY. They don’t want to educate the Black, Latin, Asian and white working class students of NYC to run the world. These billionaires want students that are obedient, that can perform the many tasks that keep the capitalist profits flowing, and they want us to fight in their imperialist wars.
Rank and file members within the union have been steadily organizing both students and faculty to oppose these pre-emptive layoffs and budget cuts. With the #CutCovidNotCUNY hashtag they have produced a few short videos and held some well attended events. They have organized town halls and virtual meetings to launch a campaign of “grade striking” or withholding grades until the last minute to send a message of strength and solidarity to CUNY. This campaign, along with a campaign called “A for All”, has been an attempt to galvanize both students and faculty to draw a line in the sand and not go on with “business as usual.”
But stopping “business as usual” is not enough. A CUNY education is meant to reinforce the racist and sexist inequalities of capitalism. Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  members have been active in these reform campaigns, but we have been stressing that the entire capitalist system has to be destroyed. These attacks at CUNY are racist and sexist in nature. We need a united, multiracial working class, not only to stop layoffs and budget cuts, but also to fight for communism, a system actually run by and for the working class. We have been promoting these ideas from study groups to mass meetings and town halls. PLP professors have been explaining to students why we are participating in this grade strike, why we need to plan much larger strikes and protests in the fall, and why we ultimately need a communist revolution. We plan to make this a “summer of struggle” whether virtual or on the streets, to build a bigger base for communist ideas and joining PLP.  
At a very well attended Solidarity Town Hall meeting for Bronx CUNY campuses, over 220 people attended and discussed issues such as how to build the worker student alliance, how to fight these cuts and layoffs, how to address the racist inequities at CUNY and how to keep ourselves strong during the ongoing pandemic. We talked about how the Bronx has been so hard hit by Covid-19, pointing out that Lincoln Hospital had the highest numbers of coronavirus deaths, how the subway system is totally inadequate and still crowded during the pandemic, and that Bronx politicians have  basically abandoned the community.
Two PLP members spoke at the town hall, one pointing out that while some folks think Governor Andrew Cuomo is “doing a great job” he is the politician who closed hospitals and has helped to starve CUNY. He pointed out that militant collective action with students and faculty together is the best strategy. He also commented that the stress that adjuncts live with, not knowing if they will have employment (and health insurance) can be deadly.
Another PLP member spoke, suggesting that our demand be that the Chancellor (who earns $7,000,000 a year not including his exorbitant free rent) and the members of the Board of Trustees take salary cuts. She pointed out that there had been over 200 strikes and job actions since the pandemic, so we should be inspired and follow their lead.
The union leadership, meanwhile, has continued where they left off in the last contract campaign, prioritizing dead-end legislative tactics and demobilizing the membership. At a recent union meeting, the union president called the struggle “the fight of our lives” and then spent the next two hours explaining why we can’t break the Taylor Law (state law outlawing strikes).  It’s clear that the union leadership has no plan to save the jobs and healthcare of potentially thousands of adjuncts.
PLP members have been focused on organizing with students and other rank and file activists. We are experiencing modest success during these difficult times. We have a few weekly study groups where students discuss both communist theory and practice. In one group, students read the editorials and discussed how to apply those ideas to the struggles around them- it has a solid core of enthusiastic participants. In another group, we have discussed how students have been dealing with the pandemic as well as reading CHALLENGE articles and evaluating our participation in mass work.
This struggle will be ongoing – join the Summer of Struggle 2020. We must continue the mass virtual meetings, local caravans and protests in the street and more. We will fight hard against the attacks on our working class students and adjuncts, but always with a vision of the communist world we fight to build! Join PLP!

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Interview with adjunct

The The following is an interview with an adjunct instructor at CUNY
1. How long have you been an adjunct instructor? What kind of salary do you earn?
Since 2005, I started making $53 an hour and now after  three contracts it's  $92. It took me twelve years to have an increase of $10. It’s unfair that adjuncts have to also fight with the administration at times to get our raises - full timers automatically get their raises.
2.What are your working/teaching conditions like?
My wage from one college is not enough. I have to commute from one college to another . I have been in three  different colleges at one time, one in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx. Over the years, I  have taught at eight  colleges out of the fifteen [CUNY] colleges. I did have two semesters when I didn’t have enough classes to have health insurance (adjuncts need six  credits of teaching hours to get coverage). But, even when I have a full program, it’s not enough to earn a living wage.
We are always cramped into unventilated adjunct rooms where we have to scramble for chairs and computers. At the last campus, NYC Technical College, there was no paper for months and we had to buy our own. Adjuncts are not respected by CUNY. We are seen as second class citizens. We do the same work, but we get less respect. Actually, we are over 60 percent of the teaching faculty.
3. How well do you think the union has done in addressing the inequities?
They have maintained the two tier system.  It took me twelve years to get into the top level.  In your first year you cannot get health insurance. You must maintain two classes. We are still getting crumbs and facing difficult working conditions.  In terms of the dire living and working conditions, we must also emphasize the bloated salaries of administrations, The President receives $200,000, they don’t even play a role in the teaching and learning conditions of students.  It's outrageous I think the union is just reactive and not pro-active about these austerity cuts.
4. Do you support the “wild cat grade strike”? Why?
Yes, I think it’s a good step.  I haven’t seen enough concrete action in how you can fight the system and show them we are a force to be dealt with.  Even if its one day, it’s a big deal   It’s a way of dealing with tuition hikes and massive layoffs  This is one way of trying to force the CUNY administration’s policy of pre-emptive strikes against both adjuncts and students
5. How have you been impacted by the austerity measures/cutbacks at CUNY?
For the first time in 15 years, I have not been reappointed at any colleges in CUNY. The cut throat austerity measures mean me and potentially thousands of others will lose their positions. There are 435 adjuncts at John Jay who have already received “pink slips”. All adjuncts are now dealing with  the anxiety and uncertainty of not knowing if they will have work. We may not be killed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we are being ravaged  by the cutthroat austerity measures.
6. What do you see as the possible solutions, both immediate and long term?
Organizing. Mobilizing. Networking. Coalition building. Unions must make themselves part of the grassroots struggle. In the short term, the unions must provide a  lifeline to vulnerable adjuncts. The union should divert funds from their legislative agenda and protect the workers.
We should threaten to strike if adjuncts are not reappointed. What will put pressure on CUNY? Striking is still the strongest weapon workers have. We need to confront both the neo-liberal capitalists  and the sellout union leadership in all of our unions. I have had enough of the dictatorship of the profit system which only serves the few.  Workers like me have the capacity to lead and re-imagine a better world.

Oil is the capitalist rulers’ most vital industrial and military commodity. Since World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, it has kept tanks moving, planes bombing, and factories exploiting workers’ labor. Time and again, the bosses have gone to war for control over oil in the Middle East, from the Suez Crisis to the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars. So it’s no surprise that the recent crash in oil prices has aggravated tensions among competing imperialist powers, moving them that much closer to all-out global war.
Capitalist overproduction, geared for the capitalists’ never-ending dogfight for maximum profit, is fundamentally irrational and chaotic. Even when oil demand dropped off a cliff with the Covid-19 pandemic, companies still had to keep pumping the commodity out of the ground. In April, with buyers scarce and global storage facilities near capacity, a barrel of oil briefly had a negative price—producers had to pay buyers to take it off their hands! As of mid-May, crude oil prices were still at a 20-year low.
In the communist, borderless future that members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fight every day to secure, energy production will be centered around the needs and safety of workers. Decisions about when and where and how much to produce will be based not on profit or imperialist competition, but on what’s best for the international working class.
Split in the fascist U.S. ruling class
The economic misery enveloping the world, deepened by the crash in oil prices, has sharpened a split within the U.S. ruling class. The Small Fascists, who support and fund President Donald Trump, are aligned with domestic energy companies at mortal risk from plummeting demand. Two of these companies, Whiting Petroleum and Chesapeake Energy, have already filed for bankruptcy, and hundreds more may follow (Quartz, 4/3). Many of them produce oil by the costly “fracking” of shale deposits, and were already drowning in debt. From 2006 to 2014, 16 publicly traded shale oil companies outspent what they produced by more than $80 billion (New York Times, 4/20). “At current prices, not one of the 100 largest fracking operations in the country can turn a profit” (Quartz, 4/3).
The bosses of these companies are mobilizing Trump’s racist “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base in a desperate attempt to save their profits. The American Legislative Exchange Council (backed by the Small Fascist Koch family) and the Michigan Freedom Fund (linked to the Small Fascist DeVos family) have organized gun-toting protests at state capitols. They’re demanding an immediate reopening of local economies, even as thousands of people are infecting one another and dying of Covid-19 every day.
While the heavily armed white demonstrators with swastikas, nooses, and Confederate flags are repulsive, the other side in this fight is no friend of the working class. The liberal Big Fascists, who trace their origin to John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil monopoly, are spearheaded by multinational oil and finance capital companies. To protect their long-term profits, they are pushing for a slower emergence from the pandemic lockdown. Since deep-pocketed giants like ExxonMobil are better equipped to wait out a price squeeze than smaller domestic companies (Motley Fool, 4/27), they can pretend to care about workers’ health while they watch their competition wither and die.
In fact, the Big Fascists and their liberal politician puppets are planning for even deadlier, wider-scale wars with global rivals China and possibly Russia. Let us not be fooled. None of the bosses or their stooges—from Trump to Joe Biden and Barack Obama—care about workers’ lives. They simply have different strategies for how we should be sacrificed on the altar of capitalist profits.  
Oil crash roils geopolitics
While the historic, pandemic-driven reduction in energy demand lies at the root of the oil price crisis, the virus is not solely to blame. In early March, when the global economy was still up and running, Saudi Arabia and Russia launched a price war that flooded the market with millions of additional barrels of oil. Republican Senator Ted Cruz suggested that Saudi Arabia, a once-reliable U.S. partner, was intentionally driving U.S. shale oil producers out of business (CNBC, 3/31).
Accelerated by the isolationist and incompetent Trump, the U.S. rulers’ loss of influence in the Middle East, even with so-called allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, is a clear sign of their decline as the world’s number-one power. As China and Russia seek to fill the void, the region is becoming even more unstable. The twin crises of overproduction and the falling rate of profit, which Karl Marx showed to be inherent properties of capitalism, are intensifying imperialist competition. For the bosses, there is one sure-fire way to resolve their contradiction: a war that demolishes much of the world’s productive capacity. In other words, the bosses will gladly sacrifice the lives of millions of workers to “reset” their crisis-riddled system and start fresh.
Communists understand that capitalism can’t ever be reformed to meet the needs of our class. The profit system must be completely destroyed and replaced with one that’s run by and for the working class—a system that CAN meet our needs.
Main rivals on the rise
The two main challengers to U.S. dominance could emerge from this crisis stronger than before. U.S. sanctions against Russian oil forced Russia to diversify its economy, leaving it  “in very good shape to cope with lower [oil] prices” (Bloomberg, 3/6). China, a net importer of oil, generally fares better when prices are low. Further, the Chinese government willingly supports its national oil companies to keep them solvent.
Combined with the economic disaster of the pandemic, the latest conflict over oil could accelerate the U.S. bosses’ decline and make them all the more eager to enlist U.S. workers for World War III. On April 28, the U.S. sent the guided-missile destroyer USS Barry to sail near the Paracel Islands, a disputed archipelago in the contested South China Sea. Two days later, the U.S. flew two Air Force B-1B bombers over the South China Sea in a provocative show of force.  
Oil greases the wheels of global capitalism. As long as they remain in power, the bosses will continue to send millions of workers to fight and die to protect the rulers’ profits. They will keep on burning oil and other carbon-based fuels, the source of catastrophic climate change. For the workers of the world, there is only one alternative: communist revolution. Only when we have wiped the capitalists and their murderous system from the face of the planet will we be safe from their plunder, pandemics, depressions, and oil wars. Join PLP and help make revolution a reality!

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The Petrostates crash
The crash in oil prices is devastating the less powerful “petrostates,” nations that rely on petroleum revenue to run their economies. In Iraq, oil revenues—which make up 90 percent of budgetary income—plunged by nearly half for March, even before Covid-19 fully crushed demand. “This fiscal collapse has dire implications for the country’s struggle to stave off ISIS, for Iraq’s ability to stand up to interference by its neighbors…” (Bloomberg, 4/29). After sinking trillions of dollars and murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers in the genocidal Iraq War, the U.S. may have no more control over the region than it did before its invasion in 2003.
In fact, according to the International Monetary Fund, every country in the Middle East except Qatar requires oil to sell at a minimum of $60 per barrel. Over the past month, the average price of Brent Crude has been a hair above $20 (Bloomberg, 4/29).