The bosses’ media, and their two flunky parties are flooding us with glowing accounts about “low jobless” figures and rising prosperity for the working class. Yet this “prosperity” completely ignores the fact that every rise of 1.4 percent in the jobless rate leads directly to the deaths of over 30,000 workers in the following five years from stress-related ailments, suicide and homicide!
A 1976 Congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee attempted to “estimate the cost in human suffering of people being out of work (N.Y. Times, 10/31/76). Think of what that translates into from the recent Great Recession when the jobless rate reached 10 percent, seven times the 1.4 percent figure. To say nothing of the loss in wages, and homes due to the inability to make mortgage payments, incurred by the millions of unemployed. How does that figure into the alleged “prosperity”? So any time a company lays off thousands of workers, it is contributing to masses of deaths over the following five years.Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins University testified to that Congressional Committee that, “The national rate of suicide in the United States can be viewed as an economic indicator,” so closely is the link between joblessness and workers’ violent deaths due to capitalism’s constant and inevitable recessions.
The report was based on 40 years of statistics and found “a consistent relationship in the unemployment rate” that affects “all ages, both sexes, for whites and non-whites.” And none of this deals with the related effects on the families of the jobless workers, in terms of malnutrition, mental anguish and sickness. The study said that infant mortality rates show dramatic increases within one to two years of an economic recession. Brenner said “short-term general hospital admissions in the U.S. respond very sharply to adverse changes in the economy as do mental hospital admissions for an unbroken period of about 127 years in the U.S.” Death by suicide rises within the first month or two of a recession Heart disease peaks three to five years after the start of a recession.
Racism doubles the toll
And the government’s own statistics show that jobless rates for Black workers are twice the rate for white workers, and result in increased rates for Latino workers as well. So all the categories cited above fall doubly harsh on the lives of these workers.
The millions of workers sent to an early grave as a direct result of joblessness over the years of the Great Depression and the multiple recessions since then could probably rival any mass killing anywhere in the world. But, of course, added to this are those affected by the same economic downturns in the rest of the capitalist world. Capitalism is an international phenomenon.
None of the above includes workers killed on the job in industrial “accidents”—about 100,00 a year in the U.S.—because bosses refuse to spend profits on safety. Nor does it account for millions hurt or made sick (some terminally as in ”cancer alley” in northeastern New Jersey) by their working conditions.
Phony figures
Never mind that—as CHALLENGE has reported—the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) so-called U3 U.S. unemployment rate of 4.0 doesn’t count workers who have stopped looking for a job after four weeks of unemployment (which would double that 4.0 to 8.0, the BLS’s so-called U6 rate); doesn’t figure in millions of workers who take part-time jobs because full-time ones are unavailable (the so-called underemployed); doesn’t count workers removed altogether from the unemployment rolls after being jobless for six months, nor those who join the military because they can’t find a job, nor those who can’t look for a needed job because day-care for their children is out of reach; nor the first-time job seekers just graduating high school or college. Shadowstats.com, which accounts for much of this, puts the true unemployment figure at 21.3 percent.
You best believe that capitalism is a murderous system. To eliminate these horrors, only a communist revolution—abolishing bosses, profits, a divisive wage system, racism and sexism—can do the job.

As the rivalry between U.S. and Chinese capitalists intensifies, Canada is the latest country forced to choose which imperialist master’s orders to follow.

Since the December arrest in Vancouver of a top Chinese business executive, Meng Wangzhou, at the order of the U.S., tensions between China and Canada have been rising. After threatening “severe consequences,” China retaliated by arresting two Canadians for “harming national security” (code for spying) and sentencing a third to death for drug smuggling. The latest word is that the U.S. will escalate the fight by pressing Canada to extradite Meng for a criminal trial in the U.S.

Meng is chief financial officer and daughter of the founder of Huawei, the world’s largest telecom manufacturer and a big part of China’s plan to overtake the U.S. as the world leader in 21st-century technology. She was arrested on suspicion of violating U.S. sanctions by selling products to Iran. But her more serious offense may be her part in challenging U.S. control over its own backyard. Although U.S. trade still dominates the Canadian economy, China is now Canada’s second-largest trading partner, “one of Canada’s biggest buyers of agricultural products from oilseeds to softwood lumber and … a growing market for the nation’s banks, insurers and luxury-good makers” (business.financialpost.com, 12/13/18).
As Chinese imperialism extends its influence at the expense of the U.S. bosses, and world war looms on the horizon, the international working class must play its role in organizing for class war across borders. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) aims to organize millions to fulfill that historical duty.

U.S.-China Cold War

The latest dogfight is a lot bigger than Canada. Through their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, see box), China’s bosses are forging new alliances and expanding their power throughout the world, a trend that accelerated after the U.S. economic collapse of 2008. The BRI is the largest capitalist infrastructure and investment plan since the U.S. Marshall Plan after World War II. (Through economic coercion and military dependence, the Marshall Plan became the foundation for U.S. imperialism around the world.)

In an effort to curb Chinese ambitions in new technologies, the U.S. has successfully convinced some allies (Australia, New Zealand, Britain) to ban the use of Huawei products in their next-generation telecom infrastructure. Claiming that Huawei is an arm of the Chinese government, the U.S. bosses have launched an investigation into the company for violating sanctions against Iran, Cuba, and North Korea. China’s Global Times slapped back, pointing out that the U.S. never abides by international rules and arbitrarily launches unilateral sanctions and wars against other countries (Global Times, 1/18).
The new cold war between the U.S. and China is a fight between the old U.S.dominated liberal world order and China’s rising imperialist order, controlled by an openly fascist state. Despite their differences, however, both superpowers are capitalist dictatorships.  Either form of capitalist rule is deadly for the working class.
Most important, the current period is a time when the weaknesses of capitalism will be on full display—an opportunity for communists. The goal of PLP is to change the main contradiction from the bosses fighting each other to the international working class fighting the bosses to establish a communist world.

Golden Age of Chinese imperialism?

In Africa, China has pledged over $60 billion in loans in exchange for minerals, roads, airports, oil, and natural gas. In response, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton said “the United States would lavish money and greater attention on the African continent, casting it as a crucial battleground in the global economic contest between the United States and China.” The “greatest threat” Bolton said, “came not from poverty or Islamist extremism but from an expansionist China, as well as Russia” (New York Times, 12/13/18).

China and Finland have agreed to jointly build the Polar Silk Road shipping routes (Global Times, 1/15). China’s increasing activity in the Arctic region also gives them access to huge amounts of liquefied natural gas (Reuters, 1/26/18).

In Latin America, China has pledged to increase trade by $500 billion and foreign investment to $250 billion by 2025. The China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China now provide more development financing to Latin America than the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) combined.

In Europe, Chinese state-backed and private companies have been involved in deals worth at least $255 billion. Approximately 360 companies have been taken over, from airports and seaports to wind farms and stock markets and even football teams. “The available figures underestimate the true size and scope of China’s ambitions in Europe” (Bloomberg, 4/23/18).

China v. U.S. gunboat diplomacy

As China works to control access in the South China Sea with a continuing military buildup, the U.S. has responded with so-called Freedom of Navigation operations, which are really shows of military readiness. Japan, Australia, France, and Britain have participated as well.
The Council on Foreign Relations, the leading think tank for the U.S. main-wing finance capitalists, has called for the U.S. to enlist a multilateral coalition “to help deter further Chinese aggression or new claims in the South China Sea” (1/16). A hot war between China and the U.S. is growing more and more likely.

Two gangs of loan sharks

Lately the U.S. bosses’ media have cried foul over China’s “predatory loans” to developing nations. The U.S.-backed international loan sharks, the IMF and World Bank, focus more on controlling a country’s resources and spending habits. They offer lengthy grace periods for repayment. China’s loans, on the other hand, give debtor nations more autonomy in how they spend the money. They also charge above-market interest rates, with punishing clauses that force debtor nations to absorb any losses from failed projects (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018)

Since China’s bosses grabbed a port in Sri Lanka for loan delinquency, the backlash—manipulated by the U.S.—has led a number of countries to rethink their relationship with China’s BRI:

• Malaysia canceled a $20 billion railroad and a $2.3 billion natural gas pipeline project with China.
• In the Maldives, voters elected a new president, Ibrahim Solih, who ran on an anti-China campaign.
• Kenya began cracking down on officials taking Chinese bribes.
• Bangladesh canceled a plan for a Chinese state-run firm to build a $2 billion highway.

Only resolution: communist revolution

Both U.S market capitalism and Chinese state capitalism are deadly ideologies for the working class. World war is the only way capitalists can resolve their conflicts. War is the ultimate decider in choosing which imperialist order will rule the world.

As we saw in Russia in World War I, and in China after World War II, the communist-led working class has seized state power in periods of instability and global conflict. Workers must be prepared once again to take power and build a world free of exploitation. They must smash the capitalist parasites who put profits above the needs of our class. Join Progressive Labor Party!  We have a communist world to win!

LOS ANGELES, CA, January 23—Tens of thousands of education workers led a strike for six school days for the learning conditions students deserve. They called for reduced class sizes, more school personnel such as librarians, nurses, and counselors, to create “community schools” which serve the communities who have the most need, regulate charter schools, decrease testing, and pay teachers a living wage. Parents, students, and community members showed solidarity by joining picket lines, rallies and actions across Los Angeles for six working days.
As communists, we understand that class struggle is a critical aspect to winning the working class to have confidence that we can overthrow capitalism and replace it with a society that is run for and by the workers. With this in mind, we met to plan our involvement in this massive strike.
Progressive Labor Party here supported the picket lines at 10 different schools around the City. We distributed a PLP leaflet and CHALLENGE. We led militant chants and some scab confrontations. We also made dozens of new contacts with school workers and supporters. Strikers appreciated the contributions we made to the struggle.
No one crosses the picket line
At one high school where a PL’er works, a strike committee was formed to prepare for the upcoming actions. The teachers on this committee were able to get many teachers, students, parents, and friends to rally. They received support from the community. During the week, teachers worked together to come up with plans on how to prevent scabs from crossing their picket line and how to keep their unity in the struggle.
Initially, the situation was very tense. Some teachers were unsure if they were willing to trust other teacher leaders. But, things quickly changed.
Two teachers placed their cars in front of the faculty parking lot to stop scabs from entering the building. They refused to move their cars unless they knew the staff coming into the parking lot. When the school administrators and security guards realized the striking teachers were not going to back down, they called the Los Angeles Police Department. These strikers still did not back down. They received citations for illegal parking. This later turned into a fundraiser to support those who received the fine.
Class struggle builds trust and unity
After this militant action, there was a stronger sense of trust and unity among the teachers and staff. One teacher who had previously sent out an angry, anti-communist email later sent an email encouraging the staff on strike to remain unified
and work together.In another incident, a scab tried to get into the parking lot and six teachers held the gate shut while security tried to open the gate. These teachers screamed “Scab Go Home!”
Actions like these continued for three days. On day four, three out of four scabs did not show up for the rest of the week, for fear of the strikers. This was a small victory at this school because it demonstrated the power of working-class unity.
Schools out, learning still in session
Not all teachers were yet won to taking such militant action, but they still found ways to contribute by talking to the parents dropping their kids off. They explained to parents and students about the teachers strike. Out of 1,300 enrolled students, less than 100 showed up to school by the end of the week. Some students came to school but were later picked up by their parents. Instead, many parents have supported the teachers and have sent their kids to join us in the morning rally.
Dozens of teachers have come to respect the leadership of this PL’er after he’s led more militant action on the picket line. No matter how sharp the class struggle becomes, only by leading with communist politics will we be able to grow and sustain growth. This strike has given us all the opportunity to deepen relationships while also discussing our ideas with hopes of bringing one or two teachers closer to Party.  
The inherent racism of LAUSD
That is just one school, but similar fights are happening throughout the city. Education workers are talking about how Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) refusal to spend their $2 billion reserve is callous. We moved the politics to the left by calling out the racist nature of these “austerity measures.” Although the LAUSD budget is the same for all schools, clearly the conditions within schools are not the same. Wealthy neighborhoods can fundraise for the needed personnel, but poor schools in Black and Latin neighborhoods are forced to accept LAUSD’s horrible policies, which include 42 students a class and a nurse only one day out of the week.
Education workers all around the city have wanted better learning conditions for years and are now saying they are ready to hold the picket lines for as long as necessary. When workers organize and fight back together, they get a taste of the power they have when they unite and fight back. We don’t have to accept the way things are. We can fight and we can win!
Mass support for strike
In fact, after multiple marches throughout the city of over 50,000 people each, the entire city is talking about the problems of this education system. According to a survey conducted by the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at LMU, over 80 percent of Los Angeles County supports the teachers’ strike (My News LA 01/19). Indeed, support has come in from all over the world. This shows us the need the working class has for examples of fight back and mass militant action against the ruling class and their racist education system.
After six days of striking, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union presented its first contract to education workers. “The deal includes caps on class sizes, and hiring full-time nurses for every school…a librarian for every middle and high school in the district by the fall of 2020…Next year a committee will develop a plan to reduce the number of assessments by half. The pro-charter school board agreed to vote on a resolution calling on the state to cap the number of charter schools. Teachers also won a 6 percent pay raise, but that was the same increase proposed by the district before the strike” (New York Times, 1/22).
As the LA strikers prepare to go back to school, education workers in Denver, Colorado and Oakland, Calif. are preparing to vote to strike.
More fights ahead
This strike forced the hand of LAUSD to provide some of what education workers were demanding (see full analysis of strike next issue). These hard-won gains by the education workers do not come close to providing what our working-class students deserve. The gains themselves expose the limits of capitalism: this system can never fulfill our demands for optimal learning conditions. If the strikers take what they learned from this class struggle to organize for the fightback ahead, this indeed is a victory!
The strikers feel empowered in this moment. It is our job now to take the contacts we made during the strike and strengthen the communist side of these new relationships.
The Progressive Labor Party will remain on the front lines of these struggles. We know the working class, as the producer of society, holds more power than the leeches of society, the ruling class. By fighting together, we will eventually abolish capitalism and build a youth- and worker-run society, communism.

INDIA, January 9— For two days, India’s 7,421 freight trains and 59,713 passenger cars did not move to any major cities. They could not move, because in places like the capital of the southwestern state of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, workers were sitting down on the tracks. As were their working class sisters and brothers in Chennai, in neighboring Tamil Nadu. As were workers 1,500 miles (2400 km) away in eastern Assam, bordering Bangladesh and Bhutan, where one quarter of India’s oil is produced. One third of the country’s working class - 150 million workers - were on strike!
‘Stop traffic and trains!’
Buses in Mumbai and Delhi, two of the world’s ten largest cities, with a combined population of nearly 50 million workers, did not move either. In Kolkata, the third largest city in India, transit workers protested inside train stations. Meanwhile in the country’s largest industrial zones like those in Chhattisgarh, workers joined from basic industries such as coal, iron, steel, aluminum, auto, machining, chemical, cement, and power generation.
Sprawling factories in the Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai industrial belts went idle as farmers, students, teachers, service workers like bank clerks, ‘anganwaldis’ (childcare) and healthcare workers—even non-unionized workers—joined workers in the streets in response to the unions’ command to ‘rail and rasta roko: “stop traffic and trains!”
The demands
A joint committee of nationwide labor unions, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), called the strike in opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest “Labour Law” proposals to further weaken the ability of workers to unionize, to the point where labor unions will practically be illegal. Among the twelve strike demands were: stop the proposed “Labour Laws”; stop privatization of public transit; raise the minimum wage; institute price controls on the rising food costs; faster government recognition of new unions; abolish non-permanent and contract labor; and establish a social security fund for non-union workers.
Behind these demands, the conditions for this massive general strike (like the 180 million-strong strike in 2016) have been brewing at least since 1991. In 1991, India’s bosses turned to U.S. imperialism for foreign investment–which the World Bank provided–in exchange for massive restructuring of the Indian economy.
The changes brought astronomical profits for the bosses and mass misery for the workers. Dispossession brought mass internal migration, fueled by capitalist-provoked racist violence by growing Hindu-centric “Hindutva” fascist movements, guilty of massacres of Muslims and non-Hindi speakers, and racism against the “untouchable” Dalit caste. It’s no coincidence Narendra Modi’s Bharata Janatiya Party (BJP) formally embraced the Hindutva in the early 1990s.
Today, India’s working class has the worst sanitation, highest suicide rate, most malnourished children, and high rates of sexist attacks on women workers and gender-based violence. But the working class has not given up, and these strikes point our way to workers’ power.
‘The whole of Bengaluru sprung into the air…’
That’s because the strike also hurt India’s bosses in industries that weren’t even on strike. India is the world’s top exporter of information technology (IT) services, representing nearly eight per cent of India’s economy. At the center of India’s IT industry is Bengaluru (Bangalore). With 12.3 million workers, the bosses treasure it as the “Silicon Valley” of India. It is also home to some of India’s most important educational, aerospace and military research facilities.
And workers from every industry there brought it all to a grinding halt. The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), the “city’s lifeline…with a daily ridership of 45 lakh [450,000]” reported a 90 per cent reduction in service (Times of India, 1/9). Workers threw stones at the scabs still working, damaging 35 BMTC buses and twelve more state-run commuter buses, ensuring total shutdown. Even the prestigious universities that initially remained open were forced to close.
Bengaluru workers proved Marx correct once again: the working class cannot stir, cannot raise itself up without the entire capitalist system being sprung into the air.
Build PLP!
Progressive Labor Party salutes our striking sisters and brothers. The international working class needs that militant leadership now more than ever. Ultimately what our class needs most is mass international revolutionary communist leadership, which at the moment is absent among the multitude of nationalist fake leftist groups in India. Workers in India showed us again that we run the world. They showed the potential that as PLP grows around the world and links these struggles into a revolutionary communist movement of millions, the sooner we will smash these racist borders and control it.