“I spend my life in someone else’s home, shunned from family and my life. I work day and night, 24 hours at work without rest. My body aches all over, my nerves have been damaged.” These jarring words are one of the many vivid snapshots from the film “The 24 Hour Workday,” a grassroots documentary that exposes the level of hyper-exploitation suffered by women workers in the home care industry. Divorced from the film’s context, these words sound like they came from the pages of a history book about Black women workers living in bondage up until the 19th century, many of whom raised the slaveowners’ children, losing their own. After organizing with homecare workers, I think this should be rightfully called out as modern-day wage slavery. The homecare industry still retains much of the racist and sexist essence it did in the past.
Women—predominately immigrants, Black, Latin, and Asian—make up 93 percent of the labor force in the homecare industry. The homecare workers who star in the film reflect this statistic. They’re mostly immigrants from Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and China, who came here in order to escape poverty or violence, to give their families a better hope for the future.
Ironically, once they became homecare workers, many discovered they weren’t not much better off. Many reported they started neglecting their families once they began working 24-hour shifts. They described taking on such grueling work out of necessity and the scarcity of opportunities, others found themselves coerced by agencies to take on 24-hour shifts as 12- and 8-hour shifts became less available. Homecare workers call this good work, but describe the working conditions as a prison from which they can’t escape
Most of the stories we hear in the film, or in our organizing with them, have a theme of loss. Some have lost their children to violence and drugs on the streets of New York, others in Honduras. Or they miss out on important milestones in their families. Some say the long hours destroyed their marriages or relationships with their children.
Above all, the most profound loss homecare workers face is the destruction of their health. Homecare workers account for some of the highest rates of disability in the workforce, second only to construction workers. Many become patients as a result of working long hours. As is the case of one worker in the film who is barely 50, uses a walker, and now needs a homecare worker.
Throughout the film, home attendants have accurately appraised the situation, and called it out as slavery. Aside from being forced to do double, sometimes triple, the work for half the pay, many have been fired for asking for less hours.
The agency bosses make these workers agree to shady contractual agreements that hold them legally responsible if something happens to the patient on their watch.This forces them to stay awake, so their patient doesn’t die on their watch. Crooked agencies have also gone as far as intimidating undocumented homecare workers with threats of deportation.
This level of exploitation is legal, just as it was in the past.The state plantation sponsor, otherwise known as the New York State Department of Labor, has long justified this practice through the 13-hour rule (where the homecare workers are paid wages for 13 hours for 24 hours work, thus robbed of 11 hours pay), and is doing everything in its power to block home attendants from fighting back.
But while the state cries crocodile tears over this bit of thievery on the part of the homecare bosses, they continuosly pit workers against their patients, while insurance companies rake in massive profits. The bosses rationale for justifying the 13 hour rule is to save agencies from imminent “financial ruin, but these arguments sound sickeningly familiar, to the ones plantation bosses used to preserve the violence of slavery in the past.Yet this entire country was built on slavery.Truly the bosses have no interest in entirely abolishing it.
Despite these concrete examples of this partiuclarly disgusting form of wage slavery, many workers outside the campaign have objected to workers referring to it as modern day slavery. Many, parroting the bosses’ line, say it’s an exaggeration, that home attendants have a choice in the matter, and can quit.That in order for it to be slavery you need an auction block, or shackles or physical violence to keep them in bondage.
These objections are in part due to the capitalist lie that we get a fair exchange for our labor—a fair day’s wage for our work. But the truth is that we are all wage slaves.
However the bosses use insidious means to cover it up. Through their laws,courts, and cultural brainwashing, the bosses have long been appropriating our labor, robbing us of our time, families, homes, and lives. They also reinforce this with brutal impunity, using their cops, military, and other forms of terror to suppress us and keep us in line, so we won’t fight back. Nevertheless homecare workers continue to fight back. Still workers rise!
With six weeks left in his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to be indicted on charges of bribery and “breach of trust.” The embattled, U.S.-led liberal world order needs a change to sustain its control over Israel, its strategic bulwark against Iran, the pro-Iran regime in Syria, and the threat of expanding Russian influence in the oil-rich Middle East. Netanyahu’s open fascism and racism, on top of his petty corruption and divisive style, no longer serves the liberal racist bosses’ interests in the region.
The final straw may have been Netanyahu’s desperate bid to stay in power by forging an alliance with the Nazi-inspired Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power. The disciples of Meir Kahane’s outlawed, anti-Arab terrorist Kach Party, Jewish Power calls for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the state of Israel and its occupied territories, vigilante violence against Arab workers, and bans on marriages between Arabs and Jews. On top of that, Netanyahu brokered a merger between Jewish Power and two other extreme right-wing parties, Jewish Home and National Union. Netanyahu ‘‘‘splits the nation,’ said Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert in public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. ‘His are the politics of polarization and exaggeration. If he got any more polarizing he’d fall off the planet’” (New York Times, 3/1).
This presents a problem for Israel’s capitalist rulers, who need more unity among Jewish workers even as they divide Jewish and Arab workers with anti-Arab racism. The self-serving Netanyahu makes it harder for Israel’s ruling class to justify its settlement land grabs, daily atrocities against workers and children in the occupied West Bank, indiscriminate killing of protesters, and, in collaboration with Egypt’s fascist bosses, the economic strangulation of Gaza. Israeli security forces have arrested and detained hundreds of Arab children “suspected of criminal offenses, usually stone-throwing, often using unnecessary force, questioned them without a family member present, and made them sign confessions in Hebrew, which most did not understand” (Human Rights Watch, World Report 2018).
U.S. rulers divided
The Donald Trump administration continues to back Netanyahu and his openly fascist allies. After moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in December 2017, the U.S. State Department announced that the Palestinian Mission will now be housed in the Israeli embassy (NYT, 3/3). Palestinian workers see this as a step toward supporting a single Jewish state throughout Palestine-Israel, a permanent “one-state” solution designed to oppress and isolate Arab workers.
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class, representing finance capital, needs a more stable Israel to keep Russia and China from gaining a stronger foothold in the region. These bosses want to downplay calls for genocide of the Palestinian working class in favor of promoting unity against Iran.
Liberals are the main danger
“Centrist” candidates Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid have combined their campaigns into a single slate to unseat Netanyahu. Currently leading in the polls, Gantz is a war criminal (Haaretz, 2/1) who led the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Operation Protective Edge, its 2014 massacre of thousands of workers and children in Gaza. According to the United Nations, two-thirds of those killed were civilians. More than a thousand children were left permanently disabled (Defence for Children International-Palestine, April 2015). Thousands of homes were destroyed.
Gantz took a strong stand against growing numbers of Iranian troops threatening Israel in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. His rabidly nationalist Blue and White Party—named after the colors of Israel’s flag—has vowed to pursue a military solution with help from the U.S. (Jerusalem Post, 3/4). Gantz has vowed “never” to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which Israel seized after the Six Day War in 1967. He is ready to form a “unity” government with Netanyahu’s Likud party and anyone else “who is Zionist and sane” (Haaretz, 3/4).The party’s platform pledges to “deepen the processes of separation from the Palestinians, while uncompromisingly protecting the security interests of the country and the Israeli army’s freedom of action everywhere.” It also promises to “strengthen the [West Bank] settlement blocs and enable normal life anywhere Israelis live,” with no further settlement “disengagement” (Haaretz, 3/6).
In other words, Gantz is committed to legalized racism, institutional fascism, and state-sponsored terrorism against Arab workers and children. The difference between Netanyahu and Gantz is the difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton, or between Trump and Barack Obama. While they may serve different factions of their capitalist ruling class, and employ different racist or imperialist strategies, they are all murderous enemies of the international working class.
Jewish State = death of Palestinian Workers
A racist, fascist Jewish state is the ultimate outcome of identity politics and a massive loss for the international working class. The ultimate goal of identity politics is to divide the working class by ethnicity, nationality, or the mythology of “race.” It misleads workers into believing they have more in common with their identity group’s bosses than with the international working class. It is an especially dangerous trap for workers in Palestine-Israel. With the Arab population about to surpass the Jewish population in the whole of Israel and the occupied territories (Reuters, 3/26/18), the Jewish bosses will have only two ways to sustain a Jewish state: permanent apartheid, where Arab workers essentially live as powerless refugees in the land where they were born (the “centrist” solution), or mass expulsion or extermination of Arab workers (the Jewish Power solution). Last November’s demolition of 21 storefronts in the Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem may be a sign of things to come.
Only communism can free workers
Capitalism inevitably leads to war over land, workers, and limited natural resources. The rulers use racism, sexism, nationalism, and fascism to divide workers to extract maximum profits and keep us from fighting back. Workers around the world have a material basis for unity. We create all the wealth, maintain all the infrastructure, and fight all the wars. We help each other in times of crisis. All workers must unite to fight for the only “one-state” solution that can meet their needs: a communist workers’ state. Progressive Labor Party must organize now to turn the bosses’ imperialist wars into revolutionary wars for communism. Join us!
This is the first of a series of articles examining the development of mainstream phony socialists and socialism. Here we explain how this boss-approved “socialism” may in fact be best suited to the political program of liberal fascism and liberal imperialism associated with the main wing of the U.S. ruling class.
Sometimes the best way for capitalists to exercise power is to let the workers vote for “socialists.” That is what we are seeing with Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (also known by her initials AOC) in the United States today. It is also what we have seen from a whole band of “socialists” who have emerged since the 1990s in Latin America and Europe: France has had Jacques François Hollande, Bolivia still has Evo Morales, Brazil has had Lula da Silva, Mexico now has Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
For hundreds of millions of class sisters and brothers worldwide over the past 30 years, “socialist” leaders have delivered false hope, rising inequality, mounting climate disaster and growing inter-imperialist rivalry. All of these “socialists” have put the nation with their established ruling classes first, not workers. Workers in the United States ought to expect no different from democratic socialists Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. The arrival of boss-sponsored socialism in the United States is an important development in world politics but it is nothing new for the international working class. U.S. workers must not be swept away in a new fake-left enthusiasm that cloaks a drive toward fascism and war.
What is socialism? Why now?
The communist pair Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined socialism as a phase of human history that comes after a successful workers’ revolution. It abolishes exploitation of labor by a profit-driven capitalist class, but retains some class distinctions.
Twentieth century revolutionaries such as Vladmir Lenin and Mao Zedong understood socialism as a stage on the way to communism, a one-class society. Socialism is what was achieved in the Russian and the Chinese revolutions. Socialism was then reversed; communism was not reached (see Road to Revolution III at PLP. org ). With president Donald Trump pivoting in his State of the Union to declaring “socialism” a great threat and the (for now) breathless media love affair with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we can sense the shift in U.S. political life headed our way.
Bernie and AOC seek to reform capitalism, not replace it. They may in fact be best suited to the political program of liberal fascism and liberal imperialism associated with the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. This (for now) dominant bloc of U.S. capital seeks to preserve the widest possible portion of the globe as a zone of U.S. dominance. This group we contrast with the “Fortress America” wing of the U.S. ruling class who holds the outlook that a domestic political basis of white nationalism is sufficient to sustain a perhaps less expansive but still-dangerous U.S. imperialism, currently configured around and inflamed by Trump. The split within the U.S. ruling class is fought out on the terrain of working-class allegiance. Democratic socialism is the latest gambit on the part of the main wing of the U.S. ruling class to build a mass base for its developing program of war and fascism.
Liberal imperialism
Liberal imperialism is shorthand for the building up of a political culture required to withstand the rigors of a military draft that must necessarily draw on a wide cross-section of U.S. society and to wage war against a major imperialist rival. Multicultural imperialism explains the recent ruling from a Texas judge that a male-only draft is unconstitutional (NY Times 2/24), calls to bring transgender workers into the military, as well as the liberal/Democratic outcry against Trump’s announced troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan. Bernie’s 2016 trial balloon never got past the limitations of “white socialism,” his movement never gained traction among Black and immigrant workers. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s contribution will be to help correct that weakness, though her politics of patriotism are indeed the kiss of death (see box).
Liberal fascism
Waging major war requires giving more workers a country worth dying for (reform) but it also requires, at the same time, “sacrifice” from everyone, including the bosses. In fact, making a show of forcing sacrifice on the rich provides the legitimacy needed when imposing sacrifice on the workers. Trump’s temporary work-for-no-pay regime imposed during the recent government shutdown is a part of this same ruling-class campaign to build up a political culture of teaching workers to endure sacrifice. Yet recall the marginal tax rates of 90 percent and above levied on the richest bosses during World War II and the Cold War. Trump’s cynical, one-sided imposition of sacrifice is of a piece with the runaway separation of a tiny billionaire plutocracy of the Barack Obama years. Neither the Trump nor the Obama presidential style has inspired the sacrificial national unity needed to go to war. AOC’s calls for a Green New Deal are the closest thing the ruling class has to reviving the kind of a vigorous program of reform that has made the country ‘worth fighting for’ in the past.
Future articles will develop this analysis of an emergent American national socialism as a program of multicultural imperialism and liberal fascism. We call for submissions between now and May Day along the lines established above.
PLP, the communist choice
The great opportunity in today’s political situation where socialism is on people’s minds is in the class struggle—in building multiracial unity against murderous speed-up for transit workers, against fascist deportation and racist police murder, against school segregation, and more. In these fights, communists expose the limits of reform and distinguish revolutionary proletarian internationalism from the poisoned-by-patriotism brand of national socialism that the bosses have placed before our class in the U.S. and around the globe. In the shadow of war, we must expand these class struggles. We can and will lead millions to turn imperialist war into class war and push through to communist victory. Achieving communism remains the aspiration for workers in our many, growing and ultimately overwhelming millions. Fight for communism, Join PLP!
New York City, February 12—Students, parents and teachers united at a Brooklyn high school to call out the racist Department of Education (DoE) after they tried to cover up a dangerously slow response to a gas leak. For over an hour, gas leaked from a pipe in the stairwell before DOE officials evacuated the mainly Black school. Many could have died, and this dangerous fact showed the school community that the racist, capitalist education bosses really don’t care about our lives!
School administrators listened to the advice of one of the DOE’s higher-ups, to not evacuate, believing that it might be the custodians refueling snow plowers. Despite common sense and known protocol to evacuate and then investigate when there is a strong gas smell, staff and students were held inside classrooms and told to open windows when staff and students reported feeling ill.
Workers’ instincts vs reliance on the bosses
Our school community followed orders, erroneously putting faith in the racist school bosses instead of following our instinct to protect each other and evacuating immediately. Many agree that the lesson to be drawn is to not trust the bosses by blindly following orders. Staff promised that next time, they would evacuate their students regardless of what the bosses say. This racist attack, as many students and parents correctly noted, would not have occurred if the students were non working class and non-white.
To add insult to injury, when we were finally evacuated, school safety (run by the NYPD) told us not to cross the street or evacuate to a nearby school, putting us once again in harm’s way. Fortunately this time, staff smartened up and decided to take matters into their own hands. Many staff started blocking traffic themselves so that our population of approximately 1,500 students could cross to safety. One staff member was bumped by a car as he tried to stop oncoming traffic. It became very clear that workers’ instinct to protect our kids, not reliance on the bosses’ expertise was what was going to keep students safe.Despite this extremely dangerous situation, there was no sign of NYPD at the evacuation scene. One parent later pointed out how a few months ago, 11 cop cars and vans had rushed to the school to intimidate a group of about 100 parents and students peacefully protesting the removal of three respected and loved football coaches, but were nowhere to be seen when they were needed to protect our students. This was another lesson for the school community. The primary role of the police is to protect this racist, unequal system, not to protect the working class.
When the building was finally deemed safe by the fire department, the DOE stooges once again managed to turn re-entering the school into another dangerous situation. Instead of following usual protocol to reenter the building using three separate entrances to expedite the process, only one entrance was used; keeping these young people, some without coats, outside in the snow for almost an extra hour.
In keeping with a long-standing and damaging racist culture of over-policing and scanning Black youth, hundreds of students waited on the slippery steps in the snow and hail to be scanned. Two students were taken by Emergency Medical Services due to asthma/panic attacks as the situation unfolded.
Parent-student-worker unity
Students, staff, and parents outraged at the handling of this situation, organized to demand answers. The three staff union chapters met to discuss next steps, including how to act in a future situation and organizing a political response. An angry letter calling out the DOE’s racism and lack of care for students and staff was drafted, approved, and sent to the mayor and the school’s chancellor.
This was the first time in almost a decade that all three union chapters met together, which was a step towards fighting the alienation between staff that has been created with the small schools movement. There was some struggle over fighting backward anti-parent and anti-student ideas amongst campus staff. Some teachers felt parents and students would not be willing to or even capable of organizing a response. Yet these teachers were proven wrong when several parents wrote scathing letters, came up to school to question why their children’s lives were not taken seriously, and boldly spoke up at a “safety” meeting organized by the school administration.
When DOE representatives tried to blame staff’s lack of training in emergency situations for what happened, parents and teachers openly called out the DOE for trying to cover up their racist disregard for students’ safety. An alliance between parents, students, and staff is essential to defeating the racist bosses. The bosses intentionally try to divide us and when we unite, it strikes fear in the bosses.
The lesson of the day was that students, staff, and parents need to rely on each other and not the bosses to ensure our survival. We don’t need the bosses, and trusting them could prove deadly.
CHICAGO, March 1—Over 80 Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades and friends celebrated our second annual Black and Red Dinner on the city’s South Side this evening. Through a variety of different games, performances, and speeches, the multiracial, multi-generational audience was able to learn more about the vital contributions of Black communists to the struggle against racist capitalism.
But far from being just a history lesson, the event stressed the present reality of the Black working class remaining a key revolutionary force on an international level. Those sections of the working class most oppressed and exploited by capitalism have always had some of the highest stakes in seeing this rotten profit system destroyed. By emphasizing their militancy and leadership as a part of a mass PLP, the prospects for communist revolution become bright!
Revolutionary history and struggle come alive
The event kicked off with a historical scavenger hunt. Posted at various points around the room were pictures and stories of Black communist leaders and the struggles they were involved in. Participants paired up in teams in order to answer trivia questions. Following this, a young Black worker shook the audience with a fiery and creative remix of Black communist poet Langston Hughes’ Good Morning, Revolution. Later in the program we saw two talented young Black women perform their own rap verses and spoken word that challenged the widespread alienation, violence, and sexism that saturate the capitalist system.
Black PLP comrades also gave speeches about the process that led them to become communists, and specifically what it means for them to be communists in PLP. They highlighted the importance of criticism and self-criticism, multi-racial working-class unity, internationalism, and anti-racist fightback, including the need for revolutionary violence, as primary themes in the struggle for communism and workers’ power.
The event was capped off with a keynote speech by a Party high school teacher, who emphasized the PLP line of Black workers being a key revolutionary force. In front of a few dozen of her mostly Black and Latin students, she explained the process by which the racism created by the U.S. bosses during the colonial period was soon exported around the world with the rise of capitalism. But even as racist oppression and exploitation rose internationally, she highlighted the never-ending fightback of workers of color, a fightback that continues to educate and inspire to the present day.
Communism and anti-racism go hand-in-hand
The idea for a Black and Red event came from comrades’ experiences within the mass movement, where among many Black activists there can be a strong attitude of incompatibility between struggles against racism and the fight for communist revolution. The revolutionary politics of communism often get incorrectly lumped into the category of an overwhelmingly white and male ideology.
The reality couldn’t be farther from it. In the wake of the October Revolution of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party seized power from the Russian bosses and created the first workers’ state in history, the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism was applied to workers’ struggles against racism and imperialism in countries as diverse as Haiti, Mexico, Ethiopia, and South Africa. Workers from these countries and beyond were able to harness a communist class analysis and strategy to wage a more effective struggle against the bosses’ racism and exploitation.
What’s more, communist leadership in building a mass anti-racist campaign in defense of the Scottsboro boys in the 1930s, (a case in which nine Black youth were unjustly charged with the raping two white women). Black workers were at the forefront of unemployment and anti-eviction councils during the Great Depression. They were also instrumental defeating the vile Nazis and their fascist “master race” ideology during World War II. All these actions and more reinforced the fact that a struggle for communism was a struggle against racism.
To this end, many Black leaders became committed communists. Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. DuBois, Claudia Jones and many others recognized and fought for an egalitarian communist society as the only means to eradicate the scourge of racism from the earth.
The racist capitalist bosses and their bourgeois historians have worked hard to erase this history of multi-racial communist unity and struggle, precisely because it directly challenges their ability to divide workers based on race, exploit certain groups at a higher rate than others, and maintain their class power.
Communism will triumph through Black leadership
But despite the bosses’ best efforts, they won’t succeed in erasing the essential leadership of Black workers to the revolutionary communist struggle. Events like the Black and Red Dinner are important to counter their watering down of our history while educating and inspiring the current generation of a multi-racial working class movement.
W.E.B. DuBois is quoted as saying, “In the end, communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.” Then, as now, understanding and promoting the importance of Black communist leadership will bring our collective liberation all the sooner.
