As communists, we know that the collective labor of billions of workers around the world is what creates all value, and is essential for any functioning society. As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on and leaves trails of dead workers in its wake, many workers are becoming acutely aware of how important one another’s work really is in order to preserve life, even under a system as destructive and unequal as capitalism.
One of the capitalist industries right now that has millions of workers thinking about and criticizing the system’s rigid and sexist division of labor are the healthcare systems. In major cities across the U.S. and beyond, as Black and Latin workers suffer disproportionate rates of death as a result of Covid-19 . Many hospital, nursing home, and clinic workers—mostly Black, Latin, and immigrant women—are waging bold struggles to save and protect as many lives as possible. As they do so, many are pressuring the bosses to provide the necessary resources to do so.
Comrades from the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) who work in the healthcare industry are fighting too in order to give political and organizational leadership to our working-class sisters and brothers during this crisis. Our goal is to win as many workers as possible to our vision of a communist society that smashes racism worldwide, breaks down capitalism’s rigid division of labor, and prioritizes the health of our class above all else.
Workers must unite, fight racism and elitism for the health of the masses
The work of health care workers during the pandemic has shown what the working class is capable of. The unity of custodians, nursing assistants, nurses, physician assistants, and doctors risking their lives to take care of countless sick and dying people shows the working class at its finest.
If the division between the “professionals” and the “non professional” workers can be overcome, healthcare workers constitute an incredible force in an industry which employs over 11 percent  of the U.S. working class. Black workers are the most militant workers in this industry and continue to take the lead struggle after struggle.
The elitist divisions between professional (nurses and doctors) and nonprofessional workers is a major stumbling block and the most potent weapon the bosses have in combating the militancy of healthcare workers. Most of the doctors are now salaried employees and the possibility of starting a private practice is increasingly small. They do not own their means of production. Wages are relatively high because of the cost of reproducing their labor power and they have artificially maintained a racist and sexist guild structure.
Custodians, nursing assistants, and increasingly nurses are disproportionately Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant workers. This multiracial character of workers is fertile ground for struggling against racism and sexism and building multiracial working-class unity around a revolutionary communist perspective.
Mobilize for communist revolution
Working-class fighters, including many PLP comrades, have been hosting regular conferences in order to build a strategy to win during the current period. After much discussion, we have built a plan that can help us build our mass, fighting, communist Party on multiple fronts.
Through social media and other outlets, we have begun to compile and share research with other workers that exposes the disgustingly racist nature of the capitalist profit system. Specifically, how Black, Latin, immigrant and incarcerated workers are suffering and dying at shocking rates as a result of Covid-19. We have explained that these deadly inequalities are ingrained in capitalism, which needs to divide the working class by race, nation, and gender to reap maximum profits.
In cities like Chicago, we have begun to lead struggles in hospitals, pressuring the bosses to provide lifesaving protective gear, better staffing, and hazard pay for workers across the board. We are building upon relationships that we have forged in struggle with many co-workers over the years from many different job categories. Consistently we have actively worked to overcome racist, sexist and elitist divisions in our workplaces and build a more egalitarian communist vision of how healthcare should function. We have developed scientifically-based guidelines for our comrades and other fighters to follow when participating in rallies, including appropriate physical distancing and protective gear.
Finally, many of us have also participated in car rallies and shared information with peers to challenge the deadly racist outbreaks of Covid-19 in major jails across the country. We are building upon long-term struggles for decarceration in various public health organizations as key struggles to overcome further unnecessary illness and death of workers.
Away with all capitalist pests
Following the example of communists in the Soviet Union and China after their socialist revolutions, we can draw a lot of inspiration and knowledge on the advances that can be made for the health of the masses. This is especially when labor is collectively organized and shared, and essentials like hospitals and medicine are no longer about profit. We are proud and excited to win more workers to that vision and to fight for a communist world where racist capitalist pandemics are a relic of the past.

WESTVILLE, INDIANA, April 28—An impromptu call to action via a Facebook event led to about 80 cars circling the Westville Correctional Facility today. Antiracists decorated their cars with demands for better living conditions and medical care for imprisoned workers. Brazen disregard and torment from the prison’s guards has resulted in 92 percent of imprisoned workers  testing positive for Covid-19 and one death (Chicago Tribune, 4/22). This deadly system does not deserve to exist.
These conditions only serve as another example as to why this terroristic capitalist system has not and will never serve the working class. While the organizers of the protest laughed and made friends with racist kkkops, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) displayed revolutionary messages such as “capitalism kills” and “a better world is possible”  and connected with workers who have loved ones inside the prison.
Capitalist inequality makes workers sick
Prisons offer no opportunity for social distancing and the racist guards who run the prisons know this. Imprisoned workers have been reporting to their families on the outside that they do not have any access to personal protective equipment (PPE) nor has there been any attempt to sanitize the prison. Even worse, we spoke to a mother outside of the prison who received a report from her incarcerated son that the guards are intentionally disciplining members of our class by placing them in areas with a high concentration of imprisoned workers with Covid-19. We cannot continue to allow this system to dehumanize and murder our class.
Liberals will never liberate us
While the action was a crucial show of solidarity with incarcerated workers, the organizers of the action made sure to tow the capitalist line. When we arrived, we were given a prayer sheet that included a “thank you” to law enforcement for “putting their lives on the line” while they threaten the lives of our working class brothers and sisters. Others even gave kkkops peace signs in a show of solidarity. Such passive tactics spread illusions about what’s possible under capitalism. No matter how we paint it, law enforcement enforces the racist laws that serve capitalism. They are no friends of the working class.
PLP pushed the limits by honking our horns and being as loud as possible so that imprisoned workers could hear us. Imprisoned workers were holding bedsheets out of their cell windows with “SOS” written across. We must make ourselves heard to those who are being most downtrodden by this system. Despite being asked to stop honking our horns, we continued to push the limits. Our class depends on our collective liberation to survive and that means that we continue to fight back against liberal concessions.
Mass incarceration traumatizes children
Some cars in the caravan were not participating; they were parked on the side of the road with signs in support of it. We decided we would pull over to talk to these workers with physical distance between us. We were able to get them our website and social media information and talk to them about the conditions inside of the prison. Two women had sons inside the prison and were terrified for their lives. One woman’s son has cancer and the last time she spoke to him, he told her that they were not giving him his medication. She told us she has not spoken to her son in a week. Every time she calls, they hang up on her. She informed us that despite water contamination, imprisoned workers have not been given bottled water. What’s worse, she has a five-month-old grandchild who has never met her father. Now, with his life in danger, it is possible that he will never meet her. The conditions capitalism creates for working class families are traumatizing.
It is up to our class to make a better world for us and our children. Only a communist world created by and for the working class with PLP leadership will cure this virus that is capitalism. Join us!

CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO, April 29—Throughout Northern Mexico workers organized, protested, demanded safety, and refused to continue producing profits for U.S. companies as their class brothers and sisters died. As Covid-19 continues to spread internationally, capitalism has forced bosses to choose between making money and workers’ lives. But in an effort to take back control of their health and safety some of the most super-exploited workers have ignited a wave of protests.
Since sweeping shutdowns were instituted in March stores, factories, and businesses have been closing and either furloughing workers, or where doable ordering work-from-home stipulations. At thousands of Maquiladoras, foreign-owned factories along the Mexican-U.S. border, however, workers continue to churn out electronics, medical supplies, and car parts huddled next to one another with no safety precautions (LATimes 4/20).
As fatal Covid-19 outbreaks began to erupt workers said no to being sacrificed for bosses’ profits. Just this week rallying cries from workers resulted in 14 maquiladoras being shut down for violating health restrictions. “The Labor Ministry closed down the factories in Juarez, Chihuahua City, Cuauhtémoc, and Parral (Border Report 4/21).” And weeks earlier nearly 130 maquiladoras in Tijuana were deemed as “non-essential” and ordered to cease operation (Border Report 4/10).
Maquiladoras were created in 1994 after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed. And then saw a boom in the 2000s under the administration of Vicente Fox, when the United States and Canada signed a free trade deal called Plan Puebla Panama or PPP [Private Plans for Profit] which created a road of duty-free factories at the border between Mexico and the U.S.
Because finished products are for export-only this road of cheap labor benefits U.S. companies looking for unregulated slave-labor. The Mexican labor department has no jurisdiction over working conditions in these factories leaving already vulnerable and super-exploited workers even more at risk (CorpWatch 9/02). (See letter, page 6)
Although some of the factories have been shut down many are not and workers are forced to continue to be exposed to inhumane conditions: working without the respective sanitary conditions, quarantined with little to no pay. At minimum workers have been given disinfectant gel, gloves, masks, and have their temperatures checked upon arrival. But these bare minimum attempts are all in the name of production not health.
“Mexico has 7,497 confirmed coronavirus cases and 650 deaths, including 138 in states along the northern border. The real numbers are almost certainly much higher, because Mexico has conducted fewer than 50,000 tests, compared with 3.2 million in the U.S. Top health officials have acknowledged there may be more than 56,000 infections (LATimes 4/20).”
The irony of the situation is that many of these maquiladora workers are producing medical equipment that could save their lives, just to see them shipped to the U.S. “Baja California is home to a large number of factories that produce medical supplies — a business deemed essential by Mexican authorities. Several major suppliers in Tijuana have helped make Mexico the top source of medical equipment to the United States (LATimes 4/20).”
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is fighting for communist revolution and stands with the workers who demanded better working conditions and factory shut-downs until they could be provided. But we also understand that capitalism has left these workers with a double-edged sword, die working or die unemployed.
Workers' lives are paramount and under communism we would ensure that when a pandemic of this nature hits that all workers would be able to safely isolate, without fear of losing shelter, food, and basic human needs. Under capitalism, that is not the case, as we have seen with Covid-19; profits trump workers’ lives anytime.
The reason these companies won’t stop production is because their priority is profit. You can’t stop production in the capitalist system, it has to keep going even if workers’ lives are at risk. The only thing these companies care about is maintaining the means of production in the name of profit by any means necessary.
But under a communist society, run by an international working class we will protect and fight for each other’s safety and health. Join PLP!

HAITI, April 28—In a small town, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is actively organizing among workers  to do what the local government is unable or unwilling to do in order to protect ourselves from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic that is hitting the working class . It is a good example of how we would rely on workers under communism to share both abundance and privation. Of course, we are in the stage of sharing privation now because we live under the most racist, exploitative system the world has ever seen. This is how we are responding to the crisis.
We are creating groups in various neighborhoods to discuss and plan actions that respond to the needs of the local working class, in view of their strengths and weaknesses. With these neighborhood groups, our plan is to realize the following:
·Sew fabric masks with tailors and home sewers to be distributed locally.
·Set up hand-washing stations in various well-trafficked areas, to be financed through donations.
·Organize surveillance brigades at the entrance to neighborhoods who will be armed with information about how to protect ourselves from the virus.
·Organize a public awareness campaign about the existence and risks associated with coronavirus (so many people are not aware, and the rumor mill is in full operation!)
· In areas where there is medical personnel, we will work with them.
· Work with the local population to set up food banks in the most hard-hit areas.
· Set up a medical bank with vitamins, etc. to help those most in need of a nutritional boost.
·Organize regular cleaning of public markets and other spaces susceptible to contamination.  
At the moment, there are two neighborhoods in town and two rural communities that are involved. With donations from many individuals and one community organization, there are now 15 public hand-washing stations stocked with soap and disinfectant.
There will be a May Day march on May 1 in Port-au-Prince calling for better working conditions, treatment centers for and protection from coronavirus, lower prices for food and gasoline. We are trying to organize a sound truck to spread the revolutionary messages and raise the idea that the capitalist conditions led to this coronavirus pandemic. We will also call for communist revolution as the only solution.
The day before, there will be a sit-in at the General Hospital (only public hospital in the capital serving millions of workers) demanding better working conditions and wages for hospital workers, as well as the above. Onward to May Day!