VALPARAISO, March 11—Today’s inauguration of another liberal misleader, Chilean president Gabriel Boric, represents a major blow to class consciousness and the struggle for working-class power in the region. The victory of communism will never come through the ballot box, only by the seizure of state power through violent revolution under leadership of the mass and international Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
The 36-year-old former student leader, the first “leftist” millennial elected as President, Boric secured office by riding a recent wave of mass fightback against cost of living hikes, wage inequality, and anti-indigenous racism. But like so many liberal capitalist politicians, Boric is already primed to deceive the working class. Boric joins the stock of played out pink-tide democratic socialists in Latin America who pacify workers with shiny promises of change, but trap workers in the hamster wheel of capitalist reforms. The greatest danger liberals like Boric pose is fascism. A country battered by crisis, Boric will need to exert fascist control of the economy in order to discipline workers, while courting rival imperialists U.S. and China, and enriching the local capitalists.
All politicians under this system—from Boric to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from Joe Biden to Vladimir Putin—serve the interests of preserving one faction of capitalist rule or another. Our task as communists and anti-capitalist fighters is to cut through the hype and false promises of the bosses everywhere, and win millions of others to the winning alternative of building PLP and international revolution.
Identity politics, the kiss of death
It’s easy to see how a case could be made for Boric, considering he’s taking the helm from former billionaire president Sebastian Piñera, and beat out another candidate during the election whose father was a card-carrying Nazi and Pinochet sympathizer (Guardian, 12/8/21). Boric  is making history by stacking his cabinet with a record number of women politicians as well as members of Chile’s sellout “Communist” Party (Americas Quarterly, 1/21).
But all that glitters is not gold. Within the same cabinet, Boric was quick to appease international capitalist interests by appointing Mario Marcel as finance minister (Reuters, 1/21). Marcel was head of Chile's central bank during the administration of Piñera in 2019, the year of mass protests in response to rising transit costs and stagnant wages. During this period, Chile was “one of the most unequal countries in Latin America” (Al Jazeera, 10/30/19).
The development of a new national constitution, the compromise made with the Chilean ruling class in response to the protests of 2019, now will take shape under Boric’s watch. The new constitution is already being hailed as a major advance from the previous one written under the rule of fascist military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
But the reform promises of a greater social safety net and gender parity are already on shaky ground. Two years of pandemic capitalism exacerbated a profit crunch and Boric will compromise with bosses of all stripes (Deccan Herald, 12/21/21).
Chile caught in U.S.-China rivalry
To try and pull Chilean capitalism out of its crisis, Boric and company look to exploit the country’s vast mineral wealth. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer and is home to some of the largest lithium deposits on the planet (S&P Global, 12/21/21). The scramble to mine these metals, valuable for commodities from computers to electric vehicles, is attracting more attention from the world’s top imperialist powers.
Already, Boric’s compromise with imperialist fracking, hiking mining taxes and ramping up resource extraction show his willingness to sell workers out to capital. Expect more super-exploitation of miners and dispossession of indigenous workers who are living in the crosshairs of the resource-rich Atacama Desert
(Washington Post, 6/21/19).
Still considering Chile much in the U.S. sphere of influence, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden was quick to congratulate Boric on his election victory while even sending a delegation to attend the inauguration. U.S.-based company Albemarle is already running one of the largest lithium extraction operations in the country while still seeking to expand (CSIS, 8/17/21). Meanwhile, Chinese imperialist influence on the South American continent has grown at least tenfold over the last decade and a Chinese mining firm just outbid Albemarle for a new lithium contract in Chile (Asia Financial, 1/22).
Certain to play the greatest cost for this growing imperialist showdown is the environment and workers that Boric claims to be eager to defend. Mining is easily one of the most deadly industries for the working class, claiming thousands of workers’ lives every year to ensure the bosses’ profits. No doubt still fresh in the memory of many workers in Chile is the Copiapó mining accident in 2010 in which 33 miners were trapped underground for 69 days.
Boric’s claims to want to nationalize mining in the country are nothing more than a ploy to throw some crumbs at the working class while the bosses are primed to make a boon in profits, a la Hugo Chavez/Nicolas Maduro with oil in Venezuela. Any social contract with our exploiters is murder for our class!
Only one path to workers’ power
There are no doubt workers still alive in Chile who saw the rise and fall of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Voted into power, Allende and his government made the fatal error of a “peaceful” path of opposing capitalism, only to pay the price when the U.S. imperialists backed Pinochet to overthrow him and establish a fascist regime that murdered thousands of workers across decades.
Let’s not repeat the same mistakes. Let the militant fightback from workers in Chile in 2019 be reignited and become one of the many battles for communist revolution!

This is part of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to re-establish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. But, in defending the Republic, they were defending capitalists. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists.
In the Progressive Labor Party we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership is essential. Our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership. The following continues that story:
Salaria Kea was born in 1913 in Georgia. Her father was a worker in a sanitarium that was overcrowded and understaffed. When he was killed by a deranged patient, her mother moved the family to Akron, OH. There Salaria got her first taste of the power of collective action and fightback. First her older brothers raised her and worked so that she could get an education. One started working at the age of nine. When she wanted to play basketball but was rejected at Akron Central High, her brothers went to the school board with her. She got transferred to West H.S. and got on the team: “That was her first realization that one does not accept and submit to unfair practices. One resists and fights” (see sources at the end).
Thus began a lifetime of helping the working class as a nurse and fighting against racism. It took her from protests at Harlem Hospital to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War against fascism to joining the Communist Party in 1935. Ultimately the Communist Party became a reformist party and gave up the fight for workers’ power and communism. But, Salaria never gave up the fight against racism and to improve conditions for the working class. It is now our task in the Progressive Labor Party to fight to end the horrors of capitalism once and for all with communist revolution.
Fighting segregation, and winning!
Aiming to be a nurse, she was rejected by nursing schools in Ohio and moved to New York City. While training at Harlem Hospital, she and others helped end segregated seating in the cafeteria.
One day Salaria entered the dining room with a group of her fellow students. They found only one vacant table so seated themselves there. The waitress refused to serve them saying that this table was reserved for white social workers … At once the five students rose, gathered up the ends of the cloth and dumped the table over.
They demanded an end to racial segregation in the staff dining room and the appointment of one Black dietitian (all five were white). These demands were won!    
That summer [1934] infantile diarrhea spread through the hospital. Daily from three to five babies died. People in the street began … referring to the hospital as the “Death House” … Discontent finally crystallized in organized protest. A picket line was thrown around the hospital demanding an investigation into the deaths of so many babies, … These demands were met. … Salaria learned that the individual is only as secure as the group.
Making connections: From Harlem to Ethiopia to Spain
Salaria became active with other progressive nurses. She began to understand the connections between racism at Harlem Hospital, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War against fascism. She joined the Communist Party. The Red Cross in Spain rejected her application, so she went to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade organized mainly by the Communist Party. She was the first Black American woman there.
First she worked at the former Spanish King’s summer palace, now turned over to cows and goats while the Spanish peasants lived in hovels. She helped organize to make the dilapidated halls clean and safe for the peasants to move in.
This was Salaria’s first concrete example of discrimination where race was not a factor. Here it was peasantry versus nobility. The peasants had previously accepted the belief that nothing could be done about it [their conditions]. Like the Harlem nurses the peasants were now learning that something could be done … One resisted, one fought, … There was nothing inviolable about the old prejudices.
Behind the battle lines, conditions were poor, ignorance everywhere.
Two years of war and all Spain’s trees have been burned for fuel. One morning in a cold rain they brought in a young French soldier. A leg had to be amputated immediately. There was no time to warm him – and no fuel …
Pack his bed with hot water bottles,” the doctor ordered. Collectively the nurses puffed at little oil stoves which refused to take fire with dilute kerosene. It seemed horrible to watch this young chap die when so simple a thing as hot water could save him …
Salaria glanced at the clock, noted it was approaching lunchtime and soup should be boiling. Nimbly she gathered up hot water bottles, ran down the stairs and, unnoticed, into the kitchen. With a big pitcher she filled the three hot water bottles with steaming soup. The patient recovered.
Wounded, then back to the struggle
Transferred to the front lines, Salaria treated the wounded while helping to fight off German dive-bombers with a machine gun. In March, 1938,
… her hospital unit suffered a particularly heavy bombardment … Suddenly the signal was given “Cover! In the trenches!” Lying flat, face buried in the earth floor of the trench she heard a tremendous explosion. Some time later she was uncovered and dug out from under six feet of rock, shell and earth.
Wounded, she was furloughed back to New York. During three months of convalescing she traveled around the country raising money for medical aid and food for the Spanish people. During World War II racism prevented Salaria from joining the Army Nurse Corps until near the war’s end.
Salaria Kea devoted her life to the working class. As capitalism ravages the world’s workers and imperialist rivalries bring us ever closer to world war, let’s fight for a world run by and for workers like Salaria. That’s communism!

Sources
Emily Robins Sharpe, “Salaria Kea’s Spanish Memoirs” The Volunteer, December 2011
Mark O’Sullivan, “What Do We Know About Salaria Kea’s Irish Husband?” The Volunteer, May 2021.

From Rome to Russia: Bella Ciao
We are two members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) currently living in Rome, Italy.  The crisis in Ukraine (see editorial on page 2) has sparked many protests. The U.S. and European news media want workers to think that everyone in the so-called West is on board with NATO, U.S. imperialism, and Ukrainian nationalism. But across all the banners of the 50,000 demonstrators at the March 6 protest, we only saw two Ukrainian flags.
At the rally no one was buying into the position that Uncle Sam and the European bosses were the good guys, charging-in to save “democracy.” The loudest and most frequent chants called for an end to the war and for Italy to get out of NATO. The spirit of proletarian internationalism reverberated throughout much of the crowd.
As PLP members, we want to connect with some of the leftist groups present at the demonstration. Our goal is to see if we can find common ground for revolutionary, communist theory and practice. There are many workers around the world who are sick and tired of being sick and tired of racism, capitalism, sexism, and imperialism.  We need to find our like-minded comrades in other regions and countries, discuss our points of agreement and difference, and find ways to organize for the communist future urgently needed by the workers of the world.
Red mama raising little Red
I’ve been a stay-at-home mama for the past two years. Though there are struggles, as with anything else, it has truly been a rewarding and life-changing experience for me. I feel lucky to witness my little one’s (LO) development and to spend time getting to know this little human.
My LO is speaking a lot for their age and loves to sing. Music is an important part of our daily rituals; it’s a great source of joy and a wonderful tool for teaching language.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been practicing songs for a recording with a comrade. My LO has caught on and has been requesting to sing songs with lyrics such as, “We are the mighty working class,” “All that it takes for evil to win is for good people to do nothing,” and “Workers always save the day!” While I know that my LO does not fully understand all that they are saying, I’m happy that they are adding phrases like “working class” to their growing vocabulary. These early impressions on a child’s life are significant!
We attended an anti-imperialism/anti-war protest a few weeks ago regarding Ukraine. Days later, my LO and I were chanting: Me: “Racism means”… LO: “We got to fight back!”
It may seem small, but I’m reminded that everything we do counts! Our children are watching us. As the comrade says in the song, The Mighty, “when you feel the most like hiding, we should know how much is riding on what each of us do!”
Here’s to hopes of raising a future working class leader and fighter!
*****
Struggle continues in this game, set, match
So I play tennis with a very nice guy who happens to be Russian but he grew up in Kiev, Ukraine. As I got to know him, I realized that he was a liberal guy who hated Trump and Putin both. But he also made derogatory comments about Stalin and about the former Soviet Union.
When the war in Ukraine started he was very much against Putin but I decided to push back a little and criticize the role of U.S. imperialism and the role of NATO. He would have none of that. It was all Putin’s fault. I mentioned that in between the two wars that the U.S. launched against Iraq, President Bill Clinton’s administration enforced a no fly zone over a large part of Iraq. They bombed Iraqi jets and installations. According to a United Nations (UN) report,I explained, 500,000 women and children were killed by this U.S. bombing. He would have none of this. No way, he said. It did not happen. The U.S. did not do any such thing and anyway, both wars in Iraq were carried out by the two Bush presidents. Clinton had nothing to do with either war.
We argued for a bit and then I said, “Google it.” I didn’t think he would but I made sure that I did. I wanted to bring him the proof. Lo and behold, the proof was not so easy to find. And as far as the New York Times was concerned, the bombing never happened. I had to do several different Google searches and look way past the first four to five pages and even then the so-called legitimate sources like the New York Times had very little. But it turns out I was also somewhat wrong. UNICEF (UN agency) said it was a combination of U.S. bombing and also sanctions, and the number of deaths they listed was one million children. I’m thinking to myself, what a great job of censorship is done by the liberal Big Fascist (see Glossary, page 6) media. How hypocritical of them to accuse the Russian and Chinese fascists of censorship.
When we next spoke my friend had indeed Googled the Iraq wars and came up with entirely different information, mainly relating to deaths of Iraqi soldiers.
 I explained to him my struggle with liberal U.S. censorship. He was not convinced. So we bet a bottle of wine about who was right, but he insisted that I had to find proof for my argument in the New York Times. The struggle continues.
*****
50 years later racism rotten as ever
This past month marked 50 years since, as a young member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Friends of Progressive Labor Party, I and some comrades in Iowa organized to confront a racist professor. Richard Herrnstein (who later wrote The Bell Curve with Charles Murray) was coming to the University of Iowa to speak. SDS had been kicked off campus the year before for sitting in to stop the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) from recruiting students during the height of the war in Vietnam.
Over 500 people came to “discuss” with Herrnstein his theories about IQ (intelligence quotient). His position was that higher IQ people are on the top of the heap in the capitalist system. He said they deserve to be there because the U.S. is a “meritocracy.” IQ is NOT genetically based as Herrnstein (and other pseudoscientists) would have us believe. More money, family connections, and better schools are what counts in this system. IQ is socially determined. Herrnstein attempted to justify the racist capitalist system based on the pseudoscience of IQ and its use. Most people who came that day were having none of it. Herrnstein never showed up to give his talk. Comrades from Chicago came and took over the stage to make it a forum about fighting racism under capitalism.
Looking back, I was kicked out of the university, but have no regrets. It was an important struggle that continues 50 years later in other forms. Under capitalism, if any progress against racism is made, it is taken away later. Such is the case now with the level of racism at a high, moving closer to Jim Crow levels. Since then, we have had some success in smashing the nazis in the 70s and 80s. We have stood up against racist police murders. But, like whack-a-mole, this system keeps popping back up.
We have a new generation of comrades that are leading the struggle to smash the bosses once and for all. My hope is that learning from past revolutions and our own experiences in struggle over the last several decades will help direct us toward an egalitarian communist society in which racism is a crime.
*****
The deadly hypocrisy of NATO
Millions worldwide can see through U.S. imperialism and NATO’s hypocrisy in their cynical opposition to Russian imperialism’s invasion of the Ukraine. What is less front and center is the state of life for the working class in Afghanistan.  Since the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces life there has been one of starvation.
A devastating 20-year, racist “war on terror” has produced a situation so dire that the United Nations has declared that the Afghani people are set to “plunge into universal poverty” with 97 percent of its population of nearly 40 million falling below the global poverty line (The New Yorker, 1/05). According to UNICEF, more than 23 million Afghanis suffer from acute hunger (ABC News, 2/09), with one million children at risk of dying from starvation (New York Times, 9/13/21). It has become so desperate that many Afghanis have been left to sell their organs for food (New York Times, 2/06). A mother of three, Aziza, told reporters at Al Jazeera that in the face of hunger “If I don’t sell my kidney, I will be forced to sell my one-year-old daughter,” so she is choosing her kidney (Al Jazerra, 2/28).
NATO’s imperialist alliance brought brutal conditions to Afghanistan. After catastrophically handing power over to the right-wing Taliban, these same Western powers have economically embargoed the starving Afghani people (New York Times, 2/20). In fact, imperialist-in-chief, Joe Biden, is planning on looting 3.5 billion dollars from the frozen funds of Afghanistan’s central bank during this humanitarian disaster (New York Times, 2/13).
 While the U.S.-led fascists demand a new cold war to counter Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine, they continue to orchestrate a campaign of brutal silence as millions of our class brothers and sisters perish at their hands in Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and Afghanistan. The working-class must refuse nationalism and imperialism. Only an organized working-class lead by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party can seize state power to end imperialist genocide once and for all. To repeat Lenin, the international working-class must turn imperialist war into class war. Fight for communism, join PLP!
*****

I Will Marry When I Want (1970) dramatizes the problems facing the working class and peasants in post-colonial Africa, and shows how these problems are essentially the same throughout the world. The play takes on the issues of sexism, religious idealism, and capitalist land ownership and makes the effort to demonstrate that factory-peasant unity in class struggle is the only form of true empowerment for the masses. While the play falls short of demonstrating that nationalism is the most tricky and difficult to overcome in the capitalist ideology of our time, members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) can find it useful in reinforcing the fact that only full-scale communist revolution can end the struggles for our class.
Ngugi, the playwright, was imprisoned without trial in Kenya in the late 1970s because he was using this play in exactly this way (he now lives in exile in the U.S.). Because we are bombarded daily with capitalist, fascist, and defeatist art, we ought to be more than eager to read, study, and discuss the literature that is the product of the communist movement.
Kiguunda (Kigu-unda) and his wife Wangeci (Wangesi) are poor farmers, who are troubled when they think that their rich neighbor, and Kiguunda’s boss, Kioi, wants his son, John, to marry their daughter, Gathoni. Kiguunda remembers the days when he fought the British imperialists in the Mau Mau rebellion (1950-56), and the better life this period seemed to promise. He is suspicious of the rich exploiters. However, Kiguunda thinks Kioi’s interest in his family is their chance for material comfort, and so they do as he wants. When Kioi betrays them, grabbing their land to boot, they understand that capitalism holds nothing for misery, and revolution is the answer.
Kioi, and his wife Jezebel, represent the small class of African capitalists who have become the new ruling class of Kenya after independence from colonialism in 1962. They are rich from buying up land, as well as from being the “watchdogs,” as they call themselves, for capitalists from the imperialist countries who continue to exploit Kenya for cheap labor and resources. They steal Kiguunda’s farm to resell it to foreign investors as a site for a pesticide plant.
Gicaamba and his wife, Njooki, former Mau Mau, are factory workers. They are class-conscious and warn Kiguunda and Wangeci never to trust the rich. They tell Kiguunda that class struggle is the only solution. In the end, the farmer – now landless – and the worker unite to call for revolution, similar to, and yet different from, the Mau Mau rebellion of their youth, for this time it will be for the workers and the poor.
Tie fight vs imperialism with sexism
Gicaamba, the worker, stresses the importance of combining the fight for equality with the fight against sexist oppression. He recalls the sexism of the traditional African societies as well as during colonial times and the present. He discusses the contribution of women to the household and the anti-imperialist struggle against the British:

Gathoni is not to blame …
We the parents have not put much effort in the education of our girls.
Even before colonialism,
We oppressed women.
Giving ourselves numerous justifications …
Do you think it was only the men
Who fought for Kenya’s independence?
How many women died in the forests? (104-105)

Without equality between men and women, the workers’ and farmers’ struggles cannot win.

The role of religion
The role of religions as an oppressive ideology against the poor is a major issue in the play. Kiguunda and Wangeci are proud of their traditional wedding, but deeply suspicious of the religiosity of Kioi. Kioi and Jezebel want Kiguunda and Wangeci to join their Christian church, which they do despite their misgivings. Religion is clearly depicted as an ideological tool of the exploiters, whether the British imperialists in the recent past or the African exploiters of the present.
Kiguunda remembers the anti-imperialist Mau Mau rebellion as a time of national unity. (Another play co-authored by Ngugi, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, exposes how shallow this unity was). Gicaamba makes it clear that the African rich have replaced the imperialists as the new exploiters, every bit as bad as the old ones. Kioi provides an African cover that allows the old imperialist powers to continue to exploit Kenyan workers.
Although the play does a wonderful job of critiquing idealism, sexism and individualism, the  playwright does not have the political understanding of the limitations of nationalism as a tool in overturning capitalist inequality. While many anti-colonialists of the post-WWII period felt that nationalism could be “good” if it represented the interests of poor, marginalized workers who are discriminated against by corrupt capitalists, in no situation did this actually succeed. In each case, including Kenya, the so-called revolutionaries became the new national capitalist forces.
The issue of nationalism vs class-consciousness is muddy. In places, nationalism is portrayed as positive in a way which contradicts the sharply anti-nationalist line set forward elsewhere in the play. This political weakness in the play could lead to very fruitful discussion. Religion, sexism and nationalism are barriers for workers everywhere. The play could also be assigned by teachers, and used by students for reports and papers, as a forum in which to raise revolutionary, antiracist, antisexist ideas.