New York City, June 30—Over 200  angry retired New York City workers demonstrated in over 95 degree heat in the continuing effort to stop the privatization of their Medicare health insurance (see CHALLENGE, 6/23). Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been actively building this fight for decades. It was heartening to see marchers whose average age was certainly over 70 fighting back. We may be retired but we haven’t expired!
Under capitalism, decent health care is not guaranteed to all workers. The health benefits which current and former workers in this city have fought for are being eroded and the costs for these benefits are being borne more and more by us retirees. This means higher copays for medical appointments and prescription drugs and more narrow health care choices. The cuts we face today are part of a slippery slope of cutbacks faced by workers around the world that have everything to do with the intensifying rivalry between the world’s top capitalist powers. Chinese and Russian imperialists are challenging the U.S. empire everywhere. There’s the Chinese space station and the Russian cyber attacks. There’s growing Russian influence in the Middle East and Chinese economic expansion all over Africa and Latin America. As the U.S. capitalists gear up for war, the governments that they control have less and less money for worker’s needs such as health care.
Capitalist inequality and racism has been highlighted through the  many struggles around racist police murders and the inequalities pushed front and center by the  Covid-19 crisis. Lower paid New York City workers who are disproportionately Black and Latin will be the hardest hit by the health care changes. The $1,500 maximum annual copays per person will certainly be more difficult to afford for a retired school crossing guard whose pension plus social security may be less than $10,000 than a retired city manager whose income is likely at least 10 times as much.
Starting in the financial district of New York, we marched to several union headquarters and the city’s office of labor relations on our way to city hall. This route underlined the partnership of union misleaders and city bosses in orchestrating this attack on our health care. Their partnership is based on shared support of the capitalist system. Union sellouts use their clout to steer working-class anger away from direct struggles like strikes and into the arms of politicians who are mere puppets of the capitalist state. The capitalist bosses and their politician puppets have all got to go. Workers have to go from protesting to actually running society. That means working class power - communism.
Today’s demonstration, confrontations of misleaders at union meetings, and an online petition which over 23,000 workers have signed point to the anger and struggle that are alive and kicking. Capitalism, however, which needs inequality and racism to exist, will never provide a decent life for all workers. That is why Progressive Labor Party is organizing to end capitalism and create a communist society that will serve the needs of all workers.

It is widely if not explicitly acknowledged that profit motive lies behind the evolving horror of the Miami condo collapse (see editorial, page 2). The evidence is incontrovertible: cost-cutting in both building materials and building maintenance are to blame. The apparently inescapable reach of profit-driven tragedy leaves any decent person feeling sickened and perhaps even defeated.
Readers of CHALLENGE deserve to know—what would housing be like under communism?
Building from ashes
For starters, we must be real: Following the devastation of world war and armed revolution, housing would be scarce. Revolutionary workers will inherit the wreckage that is housing under capitalism, where even in peacetime, a great portion of the population is left poorly housed or unhoused. Revolution emerging from the ashes of war will compound that  challenge.
In socialist Cuba the Urban Reform Law of 1960 abolished the collection of rent by landlords.
During Joseph Stalin's time, the main form of Soviet housing in cities was the communal apartment, known as Kommunalkas. Every unit—single, couple, or family—had a room, size varied by family, with  shared kitchens and bathrooms (see diagram). This was due to a great housing shortage at the time of the Revolution and thereafter.
But this was also a society where EVERYONE had access to a roof over their head, a kitchen and a bathroom. Abolition of homelessness was the core principle, not profit maximization. This interview captures how Soviet workers experienced communal living conditions.

A: How many years would you say you have spent in kommunalkas?
B : All my life. All my life. I was born in a kommunalka. Of course there we had a three-family apartment, and then I lived on Petr Lavrov Street, there were nine tenants, and here there are 11. So, my whole life.
A: And every time a bigger one.
B : Yes, yes, my whole life.
A: I see. And where is it better to live, in a new district in your own little apartment or despite everything?
B : Yes, I like living here very much.
A: Since the film won’t have my question, you should answer in a full sentence. Is it better to live in a kommunalka in the center of the city than in a private apartment in a new district?
B : It’s better to live in a communal apartment, a large one, in this kind of, in a historic district, a historic Petersburg district, than in a housing complex.
A: Why?
B.: There’s some kind of disconnection; life is more boring. I don’t know, it seems to me that people there are completely different. Everybody is on their own. And here we’re like one big family. If someone is in trouble, it gets shared. Or a joy, you share that too.

 Today one person will be in a bad mood, and tomorrow it will be a different person. We somehow neutralize each other, and it works out very well.
A: I see.
B : I like it. I love this apartment. I do. The bathroom has its problems, but we put up with everything. Of course, your own apartment is a good thing, but if I had to choose the lesser of two evils, then this is better.
- Barker and Grant, eds. The Russia Reader (Duke UP, 2010), pp. 617-618.

The interviewee describes the benefits of thinking of, living with, and working with the masses. These communal apartments engendered a sense of collectivity. We can see communist ideas taking shape.
Compromises with capitalism lead to demise
The accelerating compromises with capitalism of the post-Stalin era spelled the death of communism in the USSR. Nikita Krushchev was a Soviet revisionist misleader that ushered this in. This passage from the Wikipedia article "Communal Living in Russia” shows this development:

After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev's regime embarked upon a mass housing campaign, to eliminate the persistent housing shortages, and create private apartments for urban residents. This campaign was a response to popular demand for “better living conditions, single-family housing, and greater privacy;” Khrushchev believed that granting the people private apartments would give them greater enthusiasm for the communist system in place and that improving people's attitudes and living conditions would lead to a healthier and more productive workforce. However, the new apartments were built quickly, with an emphasis on quantity over quality, and in underdeveloped neighborhoods, with poor systems of public transportation, making daily life harder for workers. These apartment blocks quickly became called ‘khrushchyovka,’ a cross between Khrushchev's name and the Russian term for slums.

The lesson here is profound—even the defeat of shortage does not guarantee the victory of communism. Building private apartments instead of collective ones was a step backward for the working class. It promoted individualism and isolation. This led to dealing with problems by yourself (or letting them fester) instead of solving problems collectively. When it comes to building a communist society, we can’t cut corners.
Only the most determined and protracted battle to expand the scope of each worker’s concern so that shortage must be endured wherever workers hold power until profit-induced homelessness (or hunger or oppression) of any worker anywhere has been defeated.

PLP’s more complete analysis of how and why communists fell short of this task in the USSR, China, and Cuba are at www.plp.org

New York City, June 26—There is an opportunity for growing class consciousness in the fight against anti-gay and anti-trans sexism. The Pride events this year had slogans against “Rainbow Capitalism.” We need to take it one more step further. Yes, the Republican Party is racist and sexist, but it’s the Democratic Party that's doubled down on winning LGBTQ+ workers to support its imperialist agenda through promises of legislation.
Unless we get rid of this capitalist profit system, built off of exploitation and division, no worker can achieve liberation. Only by building an international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) dedicated to fighting for armed revolution, can we make working-class liberation a reality!
For the third year in a row, thousands of people here took to the streets with the Queer Liberation March, many in opposition of the larger Pride Parade’s embrace of corporations, politicians, and racist and sexist police. PLP members joined other workers and students to support this struggle and share our communist ideas.
We distributed over 100 leaflets and dozens of CHALLENGEs. PLP members led chants that called on all workers to “flush the system down the drain!” and spell out the racist nature of the police. In school-based Gender and Sexuality Alliances (GSAs) where we have provided leadership, we worked to ensure that such spaces are not simply supportive of students but also critical of the capitalist system that is racist and sexist to the core.
The fight in this movement is the same as all others—reject identity politics, expose the liberal racists and their imperialist agenda, and recruit fighters to the international battle for communist revolution via PLP.
Fighting racism and sexism in the movement is key
The LGBTQ+ movement is infested with racism and anti-worker ideology. However, the roots of Pride originate in rebellion against the cops. The cops who murder Black and Latin workers are the same cops that terrorize gay and trans workers. Black and Latin transgender workers still face more police harassment, terror and incarceration than other LGBTQ+ workers. Blood remains on the hands of the state for the death of Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco who died while in custody at Rikers Island as corrections officers stood by laughing.
In 1969, rebellions erupted against the police who raided the Stone wall Inn Bar and terrorized the Black and Latin transgender, gay, and lesbian patrons. This was the origin of June Pride actions. Stonewall came at a time when a huge part of the population was already out protesting and challenging capitalism. However, with the fall of the old communist movement, there was a political vacuum, which identity politics filled. Out came single-issue, identity-based organizations. We fought in the streets, challenged the cops, but the emphasis on how capitalism oppresses all workers was all gone.
That explains how today’s Pride events have become a capitalist celebration that disregards the fact that exploitation is the foundation of this profit system. All Pride events, including the Brooklyn Liberation Action for Trans Youth, which drew over a thousand protesters, play into the pockets of the liberal bosses. Actions divorced from the class struggle do not challenge capitalism; it negotiates with capitalism.
Under capitalism, the mode of production is based on the exploitative relationship of wage labor. As more people were able to live outside of a reproductive family unit, the possibilities of constructing a life, an identity, a community outside of traditional gender roles and straight sexualities grew. Today, capitalism has accommodated elements of gay, queer, and trans existence. But for any member of the working class to live full free lives, we need to abolish this dictatorship based on exploitation and profit.
Liberals = still main danger
As conservative politicians openly attack
LGBTQ+, Black, and immigrant workers, liberal politicians claim they support equality—equal
oppression, that is. Rainbow capitalism is not only about corporations profiting off LGBTQ+ workers; it is also in effect when opportunist politicians use language of “inclusivity” and “representation” to drum up support for imperialist wars and pro-boss laws (like zoning for luxury condos that helps drive homelessness).
Transgender pilots dropping bombs on workers in Iraq is not liberation!
Openly gay or lesbian politicians—like Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot in Chicago—protecting the police while attacking teachers and students is not liberation!
It is just more
 capitalist exploitation.
PLP fights for communism, a system designed to meet the needs of all workers based upon equality. The fight against racism and sexism, which includes anti-LGBTQ+ oppression, must be at the center of building a communist world. We have a long way to go in overcoming identity politics, nationalism and pro-democracy ideology. The bosses’ ideas are rampant in many Pride activities, all of which keep the working class more divided.
To smash capitalism we need a communist movement that unites workers across
socially-constructed lines of race, gender, and
sexuality. Only a movement that unites all sections of the working-class—under the leadership of those workers most familiar with the rotten nature of the system—can succeed. Read CHALLENGE and join PLP!

*****

BOX

Dividing and super-exploiting the working class
Capitalists and their politicians maximize profits and maintain their power by dividing and super-exploiting workers. Bosses want workers to blame each other for a system that has never met the needs of our class. The failures of the system are especially true for groups of workers the system super-exploits. Bosses pay less to Black, Latin, immigrant, women, gay, transgender, and other groups of workers that are terrorized by the system. Whether the agents of terror are racist cops, ICE officers, or bigoted workers convinced to turn on their class siblings, the capitalists at the top maintain control.
A 2013–15 National Health Interview Survey found that gay male workers earn 10 percent less than their heterosexual counterpart. In more than half the U.S., LGBTQ+ workers can be openly fired because of their sexuality or gender identity. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey reported, that trans people are twice as likely to be unemployed due to discrimination. It’s estimated that about seven percent of youth in the United States are LGBTQ+, while 40 percent of youth experiencing homelessness are LGBTQ+.
LGBTQ+ workers also face attacks in the realm of healthcare. In an online survey, 65 percent of doctors heard negative comments from peers targeting LGBTQ+ patients, while 35 percent witnessed discrimination toward individuals in the workplace. The rate of HIV/AIDS has recently reached staggering numbers, especially in some sections of the LGBTQ+ community. One in two Black gay men or transwomen will contract HIV in their lifetime. This is due to a sexist and racist healthcare system.

"Whose neck shall I stand on to make me feel superior, and what will I have out of it? I don't want anything lower than I am. I am low enough already. I want to rise and to push everything up with me as I go."

These are the words of Rosaura Quintero, a working-class woman, zinc miner’s wife and one of the central characters in Herbert Bieberman’s film Salt of the Earth (1954).  Based on a true story the film, which captures the valiant struggle of zinc miners on strike and the leadership of their wives, contains powerful lessons about the power of anti-sexist and anti-racist class fightback against the exploitive mining industry. However, few know the dramatic struggle that was waged to make the movie and to show it to broader audiences. That relatively unknown struggle is also the subject of  Biberman’s book Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film.
The book reveals that Salt of the Earth, finished in 1953,was made by film workers who were blacklisted during the McCarthy era witch hunt due to their pro-communist politics or affiliations. The Hollywood film industry, not content with driving these workers out of jobs, did everything it could to stop Salt of the Earth. Despite the film’s radical working-class politics and the film maker’s ties to communism, both works conceal the most important lesson for the working class: workers need communism in order to rise above the misery of capitalism as Rosaura’s quote poignantly illuminates.
The story of getting this film made is ably told by Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten sentenced to jail for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Hollywood began by refusing to give Biberman's Independent Productions Corporation (IPC) a union crew. This was done through Roy Brewer, International Representative of the stage workers union (IATSE). Brewer built his entire  career as a professional anticommunist in the labor movement (the Wikipedia article on him makes this crystal clear).
When IPC got a union crew anyway, Hollywood got Congressman Donald Jackson to denounce the filmmaking, starting an intense campaign to stop it. The lab that had developed the film refused to finish the job. In addition, armed vigilantes made their appearance, as Biberman describes:
From the other side of the ranch house a shot was fired. But it was not our guard; it was too far away. We waited. Another shot was heard coming from what seemed to be our side of the gully.
Besides describing the courageous struggle of individual miners and filmmakers at the height of McCarthyism, this book also shows how the rotten politics, infected with reformism and landslides back into capitalism, of the old Communist Party led  to the sellout of our  class struggle.
For example, the only thing Biberman and the leaders of the miners union could think to do was  call in the state police and dissolve in slobbering praise to the independent businessman who stand up to monopoly capitalism, like this:

America's chances for a democratic future were indeed good. America possessed one very meaningful attribute. It was so diverse in the composition of its human inhabitants . . . It also possessed businessmen who believed business was a way of making a living and not a cider-press to squeeze sovereignty out of a people. And it had a few businessmen who were so independently individualist that you attempted to organize them into a conspiracy at the peril of your life.

The main weakness of Salt of the Earth, both the movie and its accompanying book, is that it purposely omits the  communist message that workers will lose anything they win unless they fight for and win communism. Reformist politics will never free the working class.
Although the book is riddled with rotten politics it does not negate its good points. In addition to the inspiring struggle just to make the film, the book also explains  how the film was made, and this is perhaps the most important thing the modern communist moveщment can learn from it
The script for the movie was written by Michael Wilson, a blacklisted screenwriter. Wilson read the script to the miners, whose lives were laterportrayed in the film, and they made changes in it to make it true to themselves. For example:

Then he discussed another scene in the treatment. Just before the strike began Ramon, with part of his last pay check, knowing it was to be the last in quite a while, bought a bottle of whiskey. The men had no time to comment on the scene before the women objected. 'Our husbands are not drunkards,' they said. 'That goes out too,' said Mike. 'You see,' he said to us, ‘these are perfectly legitimate dramatic scenes and illustrations. In [a] script in which you are after a drama for its own sake, they'd be perfectly able. But we're dealing with something else.’

The miners were also given authority over the shooting of the film. What evolved was а film collective, made of professional Hollywood filmmakers and zinc miners. The collective was made up of Black, Latin, Native American and white workers. Biberman acknowledges the leadership given bу the mostly non-white miners. Speaking of Mrs. Molano, who plays Mrs. Salazar in the film, he writes:

One day, when I was rather beaten with problems, she came to me and said, “When you feel discouraged in your life afterwards, you come to us. We will always give you courage. Because we always have our backs against the walls, we have never а way to go but forward. We cannot afford to be downhearted. You will finish the picture.

In addition to the story of the struggle to make the film, the book also includes the screenplay, and stills from the movie.
When read with a critical eye—with a willingness to learn from an important struggle by communists of the past, to learn from their mistakes but also from their courage, antiracism, and perseverance—it is an inspiring story.
Herbert Biberman. “Salt of the Earth”, The Story of a Film. Illustrated edition. Harbor Electronic Publishing, 2003 (originally Beacon Press)