Ruth was born in 1935 and grew up in the South Bronx, one of four daughters of a furrier and a garment worker. Ruth was close with her three sisters, Millie, Florence and Dottie growing up. As a kid and teenager she was known as a ferocious handball player, often playing and beating older boys and young men.
Her parents, like many of the families she knew, were involved in the old communist movement. Ruth became politically active in her late teens and was particularly influenced by her oldest sister Millie and brother-in-law Leon who were active in the movement.
After high school Ruth worked several jobs, including in a plant that made circuit boards where she eventually was asked to become an organizer for the union. Around that time she became a member of the Young Communist League and then the Communist Party. She met her husband-to-be Bert at a YCL party.
Ruth and Bert stayed in the CP through the McCarthy years, often having FBI agents come to the house and harass them on the street. By 1960 they felt that the Soviet Union had lost its way and was no longer leading the movement towards a communist future.
When they heard about a meeting to discuss a new direction in the communist movement they went and eventually became part of the group that established the Progressive Labor Movement and then the Progressive Labor Party. She became active in this new communist movement, including helping to organize the trip in 1963 that broke the government’s travel ban to Cuba.
While doing this, Ruth had two children, worked and went to school in the evenings to get a teaching degree from Hunter College. As a teacher Ruth worked in an elementary school in the housing projects near her and Bert’s apartment on 106th street.
In 1968, the teachers’ union launched a racist walkout against parental control of schools. Ruth and other teachers in and around the PLP joined with Black and Latin parents to cross the racist picket lines, breaking into the schools and setting up freedom schools with anti-racist teachers and volunteers. This including sending her own kids across the lines in the face of the worst kinds of gutter racism.
Throughout her long teaching career Ruth was always an anti-racist fighter for those students the system didn’t want to teach. Working in the heavily tracked schools in her neighborhood and in Harlem, as part of a group of PL teachers in upper Manhattan, she always chose the classes the school deemed the bottom of their grade and fought like hell to have the school care about those kids.
She was removed from schools several times for standing up to the administration, including organizing a boycott of a racist competency test the Board of Education was giving that was increasing the dropout rate of Black and Latin students.
After retiring Ruth continued her political activity, helping produce CHALLENGE newspaper, organizing Kids against Racism to introduce her grandchildren and others elementary school kids to the ideas of PLP, and trying to bring communist ideas into the struggle against Israeli fascism.
Most of all, Ruth was a fighter for the working class who never lost confidence that even with all the ups and downs of the communist movement, victory will come.

March 8 was International Women’s Day (IWD), symbolized by the 1908 New York City march of 15,000 women demanding better pay and shorter hours. In 1910, the Socialist Second International held the first International Women’s Conference and established International Women’s Day. It has since celebrated many women’s struggles — including the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the women’s march to the municipal Duma (council) in Czarist Russia in early 1917, which helped spark the Bolshevik Revolution.
Internationally, workers will commemorate this month and day to honor the struggle against the special oppression of working-class women — sexism — and the capitalist system that promotes it, although the bosses and their media will use it to pay lip-service. We must recognize that this special oppression is an integral and necessary part of capitalism, which must be fought every day, not just on International Women’s Day or during Women’s History Month.
To Smash Capitalism, Smash Sexism
Exploitation of women hasn’t always existed nor have conditions become better; it has simply changed in form. In primitive communal society men and women’s labor was valued equally. In early class society, women were primarily unpaid domestic workers. As capitalism’s needs shifted during industrialization, super-exploitation of women in factories began. The ruling class uses the special oppression of women — like racism and nationalism — as a tool to oppress the entire working class.
There are many ruling-class ideologies that claim to be anti-sexist, such as feminism, which blames men for sexism and wants women workers to unite with their female bosses. The bosses misdirect many women workers’ anger against the ruling class and towards men, a divide-and-conquer strategy. For men, instead of fighting sexism and revolting against the bosses, they’re taught to take their anger out on women.
Unpaid and Waged Labor of Women = Double Profits for Bosses
Today, women are super-exploited globally, attacked by the U.S. racist destruction of welfare (especially Black and Latin women); paid $2 a day in China’s vast manufacturing economy and in Mexico’s maquiladoras. Women already make up more than half of the super-exploited sub-contracted manufacturing jobs in the U.S., while remaining the principal childcare givers. Women are still paid 70 to 80 cents to every dollar male workers for similar work, keeping all workers’ wages lower. The majority of women workers receive no wages for their work. Unpaid labor  — cleaning, shopping, cooking, and child-rearing — is essential to producing the generation of workers, the labor power that creates profits for the bosses. Because this work is done in the home and is seen as “natural” for women, it is not seen as profitable for the capitalists. This divide between paid and unpaid labor is central to class society.
In addition to being super-exploited, women arespecially oppressed. They subjected to mass rapes in the Congo’s wars for diamonds and resources; targets of blatant sexism of religious fundamentalists; and murdered, raped and forced into prostitution in the U.S.-led imperialist war in Iraq. In India, a woman is raped every twenty minutes.
Capitalist culture — music, poetry, movies, television — is more profitable because it perpetuates capitalist sexist gender roles that help maintain the system. “Successful” women in entertainment like singer Rihanna and singer Shakira promote near-nudity and sexual availability as qualities of powerful women. In Rihanna’s video for her song “Hard,” she wears a Kevlar and an open shirt with tape covering her breasts, straddling tanks, and ordering soldiers to fire their weapons in the desert, presumably the Middle East. The idea is that imperialist war and women-controlled sexism are something to be proud of.
The special oppression of women divides the working class, and dehumanizes women, and men. Economic exploitation makes women a commodity, leading to degrading them as sexual objects and prostitutes, victims of physical violence, rape and enslavement worldwide. We must ensure more woman — especially as soldiers and workers — take the lead in the effort to destroy the system that created and maintains sexism, racism, and its exploitation of all workers.
As communists, we fight in our everyday efforts to rid the world of capitalism. Women are at the forefront of these struggles against healthcare cuts, against capitalist education, and racist police murders.
Only by Black, Latin, Asian and white women and men workers uniting can the entire working class end the oppression of capitalism. Communism is the only system that values women as equals and allows all workers to reach their full potential. JOIN US!

Four days after his confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama’s new Secretary of War Ashton Carter traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan, and “opened up the possibility of slowing the withdrawal of the last American troops in the country to help keep the Taliban at bay”  (New York Times, 2/22/15). His speech was yet another signal that the U.S. capitalist class is accelerating toward the next round of slaughter over oil and gas in Afghanistan and Iraq. The bosses’ urgency to defend ExxonMobil’s profits in Central Asia points to a sharpening rivalry with the capitalists of Russia and China, who are vying to control the same region. A new infusion of ground troops seems inevitable. Once again, the U.S. rulers will send workers to do the fighting and dying—especially immigrant youth who have few other options in an economy with permanent, massive unemployment.
Nearly a century ago, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Vladimir Lenin analyzed the bloodbath of World War I as the unavoidable outcome of capitalist competition over resources. The Russian communists organized workers and soldiers and ended World War I with revolution; Chinese communists did the same in World War II. Today, as inter-imperialist rivalry intensifies, Progressive Labor Party is organizing the working class in 27 countries to turn the next global conflict over profits into a war for revolution, to smash racism and imperialism and to abolish the entire capitalist system with communism!
Bosses Ratchet Up War Plans
U.S. rulers knew what they were getting in Carter, a seasoned military hard-liner who pushed for a preemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear capability as far back as 1994, during the Bill Clinton administration, even as he noted it could lead to war and a “horrific” loss of life (Politico, 12/2/14). In his recent nomination hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he advocated lethal military aid to Ukraine against Russia’s proxy separatists, a military solution for a “lasting defeat” of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the indefinite maintenance of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, and the recognition of Iran as a mortal threat to U.S. interests.
Carter’s Kabul speech borrows almost word-for-word from a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan think tank closely tied to ExxonMobil, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Council on Foreign Relations—the heart of the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. “Transition in Afghanistan: Losing the Forgotten War?” rejects Obama’s previous withdrawal timeline and calls for keeping as many soldiers in Afghanistan for as long as they are needed. Written by Anthony Cordesman, one of the leading ruling-class analysts on the intersection of military and energy policy, it warns:
The allocation of only some 11,000 US troops at the beginning of 2015, cutting that number in half by the end of 2015, and then removing all... by the end of 2016 – except for a small office of military cooperation – presents serious risks, and should – at a minimum – be cut on a conditions-based level rather than to a fixed schedule.
The latest escalation in Afghanistan also reflects the U.S. bosses’ aim to weaken Chinese and Iranian influence in the region. The Asian Development Bank, the prime sponsor of the long-stalled Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, is controlled by Japan, the U.S. and the European Union. The Diplomat, a Japanese policy magazine affiliated with the CSIS, voiced concern that the TAPI delay has already strengthened Chinese influence at U.S. expense in Turkmenistan, and risks pushing Pakistan further into the orbit of Russia and Iran:

China has turned Turkmenistan into something approaching a client state, with Ashgabat planning on transiting 65 billion cubic meters [of gas] to Beijing by 2020.. ..TAPI would create a viable alternative to the proposed Iran-Pakistan pipeline... [and] Pakistan can find a way to meet some of its energy needs without providing Tehran with an economic windfall (The Diplomat, 11/20/14).

Both Pakistan and Turkmenistan are vital to U.S. imperialist control of Central Asia, which the capitalists see as the center of the world’s “grand chessboard” — a game where workers are pawns to be sacrificed as needed. Of late, the U.S. has been losing ground. Turkmenistan’s regime has rebuffed demands by ExxonMobil and Chevron for exploration and property rights in TAPI gas fields. Pakistan has been under threat of U.S. sanctions since 2010 for partnering with Iran on a rival pipeline, already under construction. U.S. rulers need a stronger troop presence in Afghanistan to give them more leverage to protect their profit interests in the region.
Mosul: Flashpoint of the Next Oil War
As Ashton Carter beat the war drums in Afghanistan, the Pentagon announced plans for a near-term U.S.-led invasion to retake the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State — an attack by big terrorists against smaller ones. Top U.S. military brass are weighing whether they “will need to deploy teams of American ground forces to...advise Iraqi troops on the battlefield” (NYT, 2/22/15).
Accordingly, the Brookings Institution, bankrolled by the same capitalists as the CSIS, claims there is growing U.S. popular support for war against ISIS. In “The American People to Its Leaders: Ground Troops Against ISIS and a Stronger National Defense” (2/20/15), it reported:

According to today’s CBS Poll, the American people...favor the use of American ground forces to combat ISIS. As recently as last September, only 39% favored that course, while 55% were opposed. Today, 57% favor ground forces; only 39% remain opposed….. Last fall, fully 64% of the people already believed that ground troops would be necessary...ISIS’s horrible torture and execution of innocent civilians...has increased Americans’ sense of urgency about confronting this threat.

The bosses’ hope is that these poll numbers will translate into a surge of working-class youth enlistment in the U.S. military in order to fortify the “ground forces,” a euphemism for cannon fodder. U.S. rulers cannot afford to cede Mosul to a small-time capitalist gang like ISIS, which is using the city as a base to attack Exxon’s operations in northern Iraq and, by extension, the broader U.S. strategy to enlist Turkey as an ally in a possible World War III. “ISIS militants have attacked Peshmerga [Kurdish/ northern Iraqi] forces... north of Mosul, with the aim of seizing equipment and machinery belonging to U.S. oil company ExxonMobil. Peshmerga forces have been guarding Exxon’s equipment since the company pulled its team from the area in June” (Iraq Business News, 2/12/15). The prize, for both ISIS and the U.S. and its corrupt Iraqi partners, is the area with the richest source of oil profits in Iraq.
The Only Solution is Communist Revolution
The working class across the Middle East and Central Asia has a proud history of fighting back for workers’ power, a history the world’s capitalist bosses would like to bury. After the Russian revolution of 1917, Turkmenistan, a Soviet Republic, immediately outlawed racism and declared women and men equal, with universal education and healthcare. Iraq’s Communist Party, which at its height united one million Sunni and Shia, organized the country’s railroads, oil industry, and dockworkers while leading massive strikes and uprisings during the 1940s. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, masses of workers backed the socialist PDPA government when it came under siege by U.S.-backed mujahideen terrorists, the forerunners of ISIS. But the weaknesses of the old communist movement — including nationalism and the preservation of wages and inequality — led to its own defeat.
The road to communist revolution is to organize anti-racist battles, using CHALLENGE to share news and analysis of workers’ struggles around the world, and ultimately to build our own mass Red Army and liberate our class. We need a movement of millions of working class leaders. Join us!

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Bosses Foment Racism

The troops needed by the U.S. ruling class come from working class youth. The capitalist class is working overtime to build nationalism to support their future wars by enticing immigrants and undocumented workers into joining the military. At the same time, they are escalating anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism. The executions of three students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is a call for workers to unite in solidarity with their Muslim working class sisters and brothers.
PLP calls on every club and every CHALLENGE reader to organize demonstrations, job and campus actions against the racist Chapel Hill massacre and to help build our international movement. Send letters and articles to CHALLENGE, describing what you have done and how you and your collective plan to build for May Day.

CHICAGO, February 7 — PLP medical workers club organized a “Racism, Police Violence, and Health Teach-In,” with two public health student organizations at a major university. This teach-in was built on the growing antiracist momentum against police terror. It was developed for participants to draw connections between racism and public health, capitalism and police violence, and to strategize on how to build the antiracist struggle among the masses. The teach-in provided an opportunity to fight anti-communist attacks and sharpen our relationships with friends.
To kick the event off, a panel of five speakers gave a short speech, based on their experience on the subject matter. The panelists came from a diverse professional background, ranging from a public health student, to a history professor, to a leftist reverend. A local PLP leader was also on the panel. He spoke about not only his multiple trips to Ferguson, but also called for communist revolution as the means to end racist police and state violence.
Multiracial Unity and Organized Violence Are Necessary
Following the panel, over 100 participants broke into workshops to discuss tactics, strategies, and reform. Some of the topics discussed in these sessions included: identifying the pros and cons of both identity politics and multiracial unity to fight racism; identifying alternatives to relying on electoral politics and politicians; and making healthcare more accessible and comprehensive to the working-class in an era of increasing racist privatization and soaring costs.
Identity politics offer white, male workers only the only potential to ally with the oppressed groups. It is based on the belief that white workers benefit off the exploitation of Black, immigrant, and women workers. Such an individualist outlook fractures our class and prohibits real solidarity. An attack on one member of our class is an attack, and an indicator of greater attacks, on all of the working class. We should focus our effort on uniting against the cause of racism: bosses’ profits.
PL’ers participated in the workshops and raised the need for violence by the working class. While many agreed, some were anti-communist. One individual spoke specifically to the PL panelist afterwards, and condemned the use of violence as a political tactic. A majority of the panel explained that acts of violence are endlessly being committed against our class and that organizing to fight back is, at the very least, self-defense. PLP rejects all acts of individual terror. But, a mass movement to defeat capitalism requires a mass army. Legal slavery in the U.S. was defeated through violence, and wage slavery will be buried with organized violence as well. The participant was so upset, she walked out.
Communism Is “Unprofessional?”
A few of the organizers considered it “unprofessional” to openly call for communism and revolutionary violence at a university-sponsored event. To hide one’s politics because “people aren’t ready to hear that” is utter disrespect. Communism is the best way to organize society — no cops, no profits, no bosses, no racism, no sexism — and we will say so!
People who say it doesn’t “look good” to talk about communism are the same people who criminalize our kids for what they wear. Politics of respectability pays respect to the bosses and all their anti-working-class ideologies. This attack provided PL’ers an opportunity to strengthen our relationships by clarifying the difference between fighting for reform, and fighting for revolution. Those who we strengthened our ties with are the ones who can be won closer to communism by fighting racism at its source: capitalism. Diluting politics so as to not offend anyone is a tactic for the phony leftists and organized liberals.
By and large, the event was deemed a success by organizers and participants. We look forward to advancing communist politics with our new friends as well as the masses in the #BlackLivesMatter movement in order to offer the real solution to racism.