Multi-billion dollar sneaker company, Adidas, ended its nine-year relationship with Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) after the rap mogul made repeated anti-Jewish remarks. Ye praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis while spewing toxic anti-Jewish racism during radio interviews and on his social media accounts. Twitter and Instagram booted him from their platforms, too.

The statements about breaking ties with Ye is hypocritical at best. It also demonstrates the tactics of the Big liberal Fascists: pretend to care about racism to distract from their systemic racism and exploitation, all while sewing division in the entire working class.

Black and Latin students and workers are spot on about Ye being reprimanded by a class of wealthy capitalists. However, that class is not limited to Jewish, white, or male; all shades and spectrums of the ruling class must be attacked.

The main wing of the ruling class prioritizes amassing finance capital internationally while trying to buy workers into the illusion of fairer exploitation. Ye’s racist volatility is too dangerous for this section of the ruling class’s plans for global domination. Instead, Big Fascist bosses prefer to work with artists-turned-billionaires like Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter).

Adidas, a Nazi-loving company
Adidas cut ties with Ye not because they are any less racist but because spewing anti-Jewish racism is bad press and bad business. While the company declared “Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other hate speech” (NYT, 10/22), the founding brothers Adi and Rudolph Dassler were members of the Nazi Party. They had joined around the same time as Hitler’s ascension to power.

In 2020, at the height of George Floyd protests, Adidas workers filed a 32-page report outlining the racist culture at Adidas. "My existence at this brand is praised as diversity and inclusion, but when I look around, I see no one above or around that looks like me," said one employee (Insider, 2020).

No one makes a billion looking out for others
The Washington Post, a publication owned by Amazon’s own exploiter-in-chief Jeff Bezos, announced that he was interested in bidding on the NFL Washington Commanders with Jay-Z (Washington Post, 11/3).

In 2019, Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation struck a deal with the NFL, to launch “Inspire Change '' to allegedly combat social injustice and address the issues that Black and Latin workers faced.

In reality, it was a disgusting public-relations stunt to derail protests led by Colin Kapernick and other football players protesting the murders of Black workers and children during the national anthem. Jay-Z responded to the backlash: “we’ve moved past kneeling. It’s time to go into actionable items” (Washington Post, 11/3).

Many Black and young workers took to Twitter to express their defense of Jay-Z’s decision to cross the picket line of Chateau Marmont workers in their struggle against the racist capitalists there, alluding to some super bargaining power Jay-Z has that will surely result in some win for Black workers. Faith in a billionaire or a liberal misleader like Jay-Z is death for our class. Jay-Z is the same billionaire celebrity that sold out workers in Brooklyn to build the Barclays Center, an arena that’s displaced hundreds of workers.

This is the same billionaire sponsoring classes to teach workers in Marcy housing projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood how to invest in another failing faction of capitalism, cryptocurrency. A local resident said, ``If you want to do something, fix this place up,’” (The Guardian, 6/22).

Celebrity culture, new opiate
Karl Marx said, “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the masses.” For many workers today, celebrity culture has become that new drug.

Celebrities are pawns used by the ruling class to perpetuate capitalist ideology. In the case of Hip Hop, rappers are given deified status because their lyrical content and ‘come-up’ stories appeal to young Black and Latin audiences struggling to survive under capitalism.

Like the religious opiate, hip-hop celebrities like Ye and Jay-Z promise youth that if we just make the right moves, we too can have all the riches and pleasures. But there is a split between the Small Fascists and the Big Fascists of the ruling class, which is embodied by the difference between figures like Ye and Jay-Z.

Ye and Jay-Z embody two sides of fascism
Ye offers young people disillusioned with mainstream liberal politics a way out and into the arms of reactionary ideologies like nazism.

But the bigger threat lies with yet-to-be-cancelled celebrities like Jay-Z, and their Big Fascist bosses, who gaslight and diffuse the rightful frustrations of the working class by pretending they are fighting racism “the right way.”     

Ye's reactionary politics expose the insincerity of the Big Fascists and their celebrity stooges. Over the last 50+ years, Ye and other rappers have been a public voice for that disillusionment.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of the southern states in the U.S. in the early 2000s, Ye took advantage of LIVE television to stand in solidarity with workers against the racist neglect of former U.S. President, George W. Bush, saying to the shock of his co-host, comedian Mike Meyers, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” This kind of sharp political analysis and tendency toward going off-script did not endear Ye to the Big Fascists, who require disciplined, liberal celebrities to placate the masses, not incite them.

Many have dismissed Ye’s behavior as unchecked mental illness. That may be true, but that kind of analysis misses the political conditions that determine the form mental illness can take. Whatever personal issues plaguing the rapper, the course forward from the Katrina moment is clear: alienation drove Ye to the right, when it should have driven him left.

This is the bribe Small Fascists like Trump in America, Georgia Meloni in Italy, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil continue to offer the masses.

Those following Ye lack the political guidance of communism, which combats the alienating effects of capitalist terror and neglect with collective action, and proves that a free world is not nationalist, racist, sexist, but an egalitarian one run by and for and by the international working class.

It’s not just Kanye, Jay-Z, or Jeff Bezos...it’s CAPITALISM!
Ye’s ideas belong to the ruling class. He is worth close to a billion dollars, and nobody in possession of that much is a friend of the working class.

Neither the gutter racist, domestically-oriented Small Fascists nor the liberal, imperialism-oriented Big Fascists are acting in the interest of workers. However, PLP fights to win workers to the idea that it is the Jay-Z’s of the world that’s the bigger danger.

The ruling class has demonstrated that they dispose of celebrities like Ye when it suits them because they are trying to win us to fight for them in their brutal imperialist wars. Once upon a time, Ye was right: most Black workers know Republicans like George Bush don’t care about them; they know enslaved workers escaping to the North were not freed from extreme racism nor super exploitation, and that corporations like Adidas are racist hypocrites.

But he is also unequivocally wrong: the enemy of Black workers are not Jewish workers or any other historical scapegoat of the ruling class.

Black workers won’t go to war for a gutter racist like Trump or Bush or work until our feet bleed on a Nazi-run Adidas factory floor. Still, Black and antiracist workers are vulnerable to the rhetoric of the Bidens and Jay-Z’s of this world.

Progressive Labor Party rejects both ruthless factions of the ruling class. We have confidence that with communist ideas in hand, the working class will see through these lies and build a red army to smash capitalism and its ideological tools once and for all. Join us today!

Berkeley, CA, November, 14— Four union locals of the University of California striking workers (UAW) representing 48,000 Graduate Student and Postdoctoral workers walked out of the 10 campuses of the University of California (UC).  This is the largest student-worker strike in U.S. history as it enters their third week. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have joined picket lines in Berkeley and Davis - passing out leaflets, distributing copies of CHALLENGE. We joined about 500 workers and students who militantly marched over a mile from 1½ miles from campus to the University President’s $6.5 million mansion in a fancy Berkeley neighborhood.

In a communist society we won’t need capitalists who perpetually squeeze us for more work and less pay. We don’t need the market competition that forces our living conditions down and down. In a communist society we can work as human beings to provide for one another’s needs – not for a wage.

Over the last 50 years graduate students have taken on more and more of the undergraduate teaching responsibilities and research while being paid as part-timers. There are fewer future tenure track positions to look forward to - so workers are fighting back. This need to strike reflects the growing crisis of capitalism worldwide as inter-imperialist rivalry intensifies. The capitalists' moves toward war dictate the intensifying economic and political control of key institutions like UC.

Graduate students now teach a larger percentage of first- and second-year undergraduate classes and low-paid instructors teach many upper-level ones. Full Professors now teach one graduate course, advise doctoral students and do research.  Some beginning Academic Student Employees have a base pay of about $23,000 for what is technically a 20-hour work week but with preparation and grading it ends up being 40 hours/week or more. Then they must find time for their own studies and research. Some departments cover graduate student tuition and fees - for domestic students only - which raises compensation to $37K to $40K. They are demanding to be paid a minimum living wage of $54K with increases tied to the spiraling cost of housing.

Wages are the same statewide, but housing costs are nearly double in high rent urban areas like Berkeley and Los Angeles than in Merced. Not to mention capitalist development is happening internationally while the profit-driven system and infrastructure of the old world crumbles. This turnout on the picket lines and the support of undergraduate students and professors shows tremendous working class solidarity. This type of unity illustrates the power of the working class which could be used to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a worker-owned, worker-controlled communist society. There are demands for local transportation passes and childcare subsidies. All student workers are demanding more support for international students whose tuition/fees are triple or more than domestic students. There are 10 or more picket lines at the Berkeley campus that are being supported by workers all over the Bay Area. Garbage truck drivers have stopped pick-ups and UPS drivers stopped their deliveries.

These examples of class solidarity and fightback is a glimpse into the egalitarian world that workers can win if we continue to fight and build for it! Only communist leadership and learning can get us there!

Boston, MA, November 30–Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends attended public health conferences to present antiracist and communist messages to thousands of public health workers.

The pharmaceutical bosses and their genocidal state  once again chose to put their profit over workers’ lives in the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond, murdering millions of workers around the world. Government officials, politicians, and pharmaceutical companies have assaulted the public’s health through racist “vaccine apartheid,” denying lifesaving Covid-19 vaccines to millions around the world–specifically South Africa, while several doses were exported to Europe (New York Times 8/16/21)- refusing reproductive health services to women in the U.S., and spending billions on the war in Ukraine.

We are too used to this profiteering, money-grubbing, capitalist system. Under communism, not only vaccines for all, but health care for all would be implemented immediately. Millions of lives saved virtually immediately. But capitalism demands profits be put first. What a sick system! Join the fight for communism.

The American Public Health Association (APHA) includes 25,000 members. It proclaims to be the voice of public health but maintains strong ties to the Democratic Party, undermining this mission. For 40 years, Party members have presented talks, written policies, organized demonstrations, and succeeded in winning passage of resolutions opposing police brutality, racist research, and imperialist wars, and marched against ICE (Immigration Control Enforcement). These activities have raised the profile of PLP in APHA while creating opportunities to meet and collaborate with other members and struggle with them to become revolutionaries. At this year’s conference, we continued this activity distributing hundreds of flyers against sexism and a special APHA CHALLENGE pamphlet urging members to join PLP.

Policy on global vaccines and treatment for Covid-19
This year PLP led the campaign in the APHA to pass a policy to provide Covid-19 vaccines, tests and treatments to the world. Over a dozen Party members and colleagues developed a policy statement demanding free, universal vaccination. Currently, the drug companies that produce the vaccines in the U.S. refuse to allow other countries to have the technology to produce their own, leaving many countries unable to vaccinate more than 10 percent of their populations. This not only imposes a death sentence on people in lower income countries, but it also endangers everyone by generating new forms (variants) of Covid-19 that are highly transmissible and harmful. Limiting access to medications like Paxlovid and monoclonal antibodies also endangers the health of our class, the working class and increases the risk of “long Covid-19,” a syndrome that creates severe disabilities. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has lifted life-saving services like moratoriums on rent and mortgages that allow people to stay housed. The policy, “Intellectual Property and Profits Limit Global Vaccine Access” was passed after nine months of work with our comrades and led to opportunities to discuss communism, socialize and plan for the future.

Communists sharpen discussion at alternative public health conference  
The APHA failed to provide Covid-19 safety requirements this year, so dissident members launched the virtual People's Public Health Program. This program opened the door to many more revolutionary and antiracist presentations that were not acceptable to the APHA leadership. They are now available on YouTube.

The PLP presentation “Covid-19 Protection NOT WAR” opposed U.S./NATO and Russian  imperialism for killing workers for profit. The presentation denounced Joe Biden’s capitalist strategy of supporting the war in Ukraine with $65 billion dollars instead of supporting the global prevention and treatment of Covid-19. The speaker called on attendees to join PLP and the revolutionary fight for communism. Several attendees cheered this radical presentation and one commented: “This is a profound question.” Debates over strategies for revolution ensued.   In contrast, the APHA leadership supported U.S. war aims by screening a photo of a Ukrainian soldier with his gun in the opening session of the meeting.

Members of PanEndIt, a disability group with which PLP works presented on equitable education for students with disabilities and the fight to amend Section 504 of the 1973 Disability Act. Another PLP member described the dangerous practices promoted by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and CDC (Center for Disease Control) and the labeling of people as mentally ill when the anxiety and depression many people experience are normal reactions to capitalism. The capitalists recommend screening adults for anxiety. We say, to improve public health, destroy capitalism!

NEW YORK CITY, November 23—Since November 14, the union for the Part-Time Faculty (PTF) representing 2,600 teachers ( 87 percent of the entire faculty of the New School) has been on strike because the administration refused to meet their simple reasonable demands for higher wages and better benefits. Many full-time faculty and students quickly joined the PTFs, canceling classes and issuing statements opposing crossing picket lines (physical and digital). Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are joining these striking workers, bringing a strategic revolutionary message of the need to struggle for communism.

The City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) 30,000-strong Professional Staff Congress (PSC) that includes PLP members issued a statement of solidarity, stating that the PSC is proud to stand with them and urges all CUNY adjuncts to sign the No Scab pledge. The strike is happening just two days after 48,000 academic workers of the University of California system launched their own strike, and about one year after the second strike called by graduate student workers at Columbia University in 2021 which lasted for ten weeks before the demands by the union were met. Adjuncts are organizing broadly. PTFs at Howard University in Washington D.C. faced down the administration last year  and won gains with a strike threat.

Faculty and teachers are being driven into the ranks of the oppressed working class by capitalism’s multiple financial crises and are fighting back. Full-time faculty are being replaced by untenured, precarious and low-paid professors, while at the same time tuition and student debt has risen, all because the U.S. ruling class aims to lower spending on higher education. The only way forward for these and other workers is building a movement to overthrow the profit-hungry capitalist system which treats teachers, other workers and students like expendable garbage.

The New School was founded a century ago with a progressive, social justice mission, at least on paper. Today’s administration has abandoned even the pretense of this mission. The university’s negotiation team walked away from the bargaining table, leaving a so-called “last, best and final” offer that included a seven percent raise this year and a 2.5 percent raise in the following eight years, which could be translated into barely 1 percent raises per year for the incoming 9 years, not even a negligible improvement of the low-pay situations for PTFs given the four-year wage freeze since 2018 and today’s all-time high inflation. The same “final offer” gives the university unlimited authority to hike out-of-pocket costs for the health plans and cut 1/10 of the faculty at Mannes, its music conservatory, from the health plan altogether. The university’s offer will perpetuate and even worsen the precarious situations many PTFs are facing.

Today’s wave of faculty strikes may well be a historic moment when the intensifying  class war includes proletarianized academics en masse. Shut it down, and shut it tight! Join workers globally on the road to communist revolution.