As U.S. bosses grow tired of lost profits after over a year of pandemic driven shut downs, we are seeing cities internationally struggle to “reopen.” Workers have been asked to return to unsafe work conditions, send their children back to schools that might not have their health as a priority, and mentally readjust to a world that has been further thrown into crisis. While these domestic duties fall on all workers, we still live in a society where women bear the brunt of these responsibilities. So we, in the Progressive Labor Party, ask our fellow sisters and brothers, what has been done fundamentally to advance the fight against sexism for the working class?
Just as the bosses have largely succeeded in turning Women’s History Month into a pro-capitalist celebration of women who have “made it”, so too is Mother’s Day a way to mask the super-exploitation of household work with gifts such as flowers. In the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) we know that only a truly antisexist communist party can lead workers in the complete overthrow of this capitalist system which makes the daily nurturing of the working-class the responsibility of women workers rather than the responsibility of our class as a whole.
Equality: humanity’s original state
Sexist inequality emerged in the past several thousand years of human history. For 10’s of thousands of years, humans were based in egalitarian, hunter-gatherer societies, and during that phase of history women were central to the major decision-making around questions of production and distribution of a community’s resources. Although women both hunted and gathered—often tying their children to their front or backsides while casting a net or raising a bow and arrow—gathering tended to be a primary women’s task. This meant women had to be botanists. They had to know which berries, grasses, seeds, could be gathered so as not to poison their communities. In Central America and Mexico, for example, women were chiefly responsible for the domestication of corn (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, p.15).
In short, women were the first farmers. Why is it important to know about that phase of history, when there was no private property or system of class-based exploitation? Because it demonstrates that maintaining the conditions of daily life was—for most of history—not only a valued, but the chiefly valued form of work.
Origins of sexism in class rule
With the origin of private property, exploitation of all working people in the ancient world entailed the super-exploitation of women. It was not until commodity production came into being that domestically categorized responsibilities became associated with the unrespected, unvalued and unpaid labor largely performed by women.
Internationally, women and children were the first significant form of private property in slave society. It was not until the beginnings of class-based societies that there emerged the need to devalue the literal “labor” that women produced by giving birth to children. Under class rule, women’s primary function became reproducing the offspring of social classes—whether slave, peasant, free artisan, noble, or elite.
Capitalism creates modern forms of sexism
Without communist revolution, working-class women are tasked with ensuring the well-being of children who will grow up to be the new workers and cannon-fodder for the capitalists of the world. Whether they join the military, end up in jail or die at the hands of killer cops, or working as educators or engineers, in textile mills or as hotel workers, our children will be destined to serve the interests of the rich unless we overthrow this racist capitalism system.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, when schools closed and children were expected to stay home, home-care responsibilities primarily fell on women workers. Whether single, partnered, or living with family, many women workers were themselves expected to work from home AND ALSO become the stand-in teachers while their children received either virtual schooling or no schooling at all. Covid-19 has been absolutely brutal for countless families around the world, and women in general, bore the brunt of that increased “social distancing” burden.
Socialism made advances against sexist oppression
Socialism in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba made a proven positive impact on the quality of life of all workers and particularly women, but they also made significant errors by relegating the fight against sexism to a women’s issue, failing to place the full force of the revolution behind the smashing of sexist inequality within their parties and in the society as a whole. In the past 100 years our class has made leaps in social progress when we took control of the state and production.
In the Soviet Union, within months of seizing power in Petrograd, Alexandra Kollontai and the Women’s Dept of 1919 was critical to the ushering in, under the leadership of the Commissariats of Education and Social Welfare, socialist programs that fundamentally overturned the capitalist notion that child-rearing is an atomized responsibility for each individual working family. In Communism and the Family (1920), Kollantai wrote:
We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children.... All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.
In China, the brutal and widely practiced feudal remnants of footbinding, concubinage and slavery were abolished overnight wherever the Red Army and the Communist Party held power during war and revolution, and across the land after 1949.
In Cuba, thousands of women were sent to the Soviet Union to study engineering beginning in the late 1960s, and as early as 1961, prostitution”a legacy of both U.S. imperialism and domestic Cuban sexism” was outlawed.
But many of the gains made in the fight against sexism under socialist regimes were taken away, like so many reforms. Even as early as the 1930s, elements of the Kollantai-led programs began to be dismantled as the rapid industrialization of the economy, which also reintroduced wage incentives, helped the Soviets prepare for the impending war with Nazi Germany. In Cuba, the Fidel Castro regime had undone its own anti-sexist efforts by inscribing into law that only mothers were allowed to leave or miss work due to sick children. In essence, this meant fathers were barred from
tending to their children without risking punishment by the state. Now we see the vicious return of sex trafficking in the former Soviet sphere (UC Boulder, 2019) and concubinage among the rotten elite of the Chinese Communist Party (BBC, 10/2013) as a terrible cost paid by the working class for the failure of these parties to defeat capitalist ideas and win a truly communist world.
Fight against sexism by fighting for communism
In order for sexism to end, workers cannot return to hunting and gathering social systems and somehow roll back the clock on all the advances made in technology, science and culture that came through class society.
The truth is just the opposite: we must move all these levels of society FORWARD through communist revolution, where the best advances of modern medicine and technology can be re-appropriated and controlled by the working-class itself. We reject a politics of representation based on “identity,” but we understand that women workers, like all members of the working class, are not just critical, they are indispensable, for leading our class in the antiracist, antisexist world that we are fighting to achieve.
It is from the practices that we implement today, while we do not yet hold state power, that the seeds for communism must be sewn. We begin by fighting sexism in the class struggle—at our jobs, community organizations, schools, military, and streets.
From leaders who hold key positions in our Party, to the collective struggles that we wage with our fellow workers, to the ways we strive for equality within our personal lives, to the way our newspaper is produced and distributed, we fight to build an egalitarian world through building an egalitarian party. Fight for communism! Join PLP!
HYATTSVILLE, MD, June 9—A few weeks ago, over 100 MetroAccess workers, an on-call service for people with disabilities, went on strike against the private contractor MV Transportation, over disputes regarding pay and working conditions. The strike was led by Black women, who organized dispatchers to temporarily close down the call system for the regional MetroAccess bus system in the Washington, D.C. region for a day. Once again proving that Black workers are key to putting this racist, sexist, rotten system out of its misery.
As workers shut down the transportation infrastructure, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends who work for the public transit system joined the picket line, leading chants on the bullhorn, distributing CHALLENGE, and building unity for future joint actions against the transit bosses in the region. Bold class struggle, rather than relying on politicians, is the way forward as we build militancy in the fight for our class and ultimately for communism, workers power!
The strike was provoked by the racist arrogance of the MV Transportation bosses who offered a ridiculous 13-cent-per-hour raise when these workers make poverty wages below $15 an hour . The use of contractors by the Metro transit system is part of a devious plan by the bosses to divide workers into “better-paid” and “lower-paid”, create animosity among workers, weaken the union and prepare to decimate our income and benefits as an economic crisis in transit looms large. We demand immediate pay equity across all divisions, whether contracted-out or not.
What will happen when the temporary stimulus payments to transit from the federal government stop? The bosses will attack! We must prepare ourselves for the battle ahead. Thanks to the bold workers at the MetroAccess call center for showing us an important step in this fight!
We invite those workers, and all workers, to join the PLP in the long fight for an egalitarian world totally run by the working class. That’s working class power. That’s communism!
I got a text from one of my students in the Social Justice Club last night that read “I was wondering if you knew where I could get the next issues of the newspaper that was handed out at the protest we attended? It was named along the lines of “communist labor party” or something like that. I remember you used to give them to a classmate and I was wondering if there’s any where I could find them whether online or if there’s some sort of mailing list.”
As I’m reading this text beaming ear to ear, I reflected on the transformation this student has gone through. In a short two years, she has gone from a somewhat introverted young woman, who fixed her hair in the mirror way too much in my opinion, into an outspoken fighter for justice. In that time she has seen a football stadium gentrify her neighborhood and the negative impact that is having on the people who have lived there for decades. She also saw a Black man suffer a slow death by the knee of a killer cop. And on top of all that, she lived through over a year of a pandemic that was allowed to ravage Black, Latin working class communities worldwide.
She is not the only one! Young people are being politicized at a rate that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. We have to be there beside them to walk with them on their journey of uncovering how to change the world. Young people will grow the Progressive Labor Party and continue to move us forward on the path to revolution.
COLOMBIA—The marking of May Day this year resonated with protests and masses of workers taking the streets. They are rejecting the proposed anti-worker tax reform that prioritizes President Ivan Duque and his capitalist masters represented by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Inter-American Development Bank. These bloodsucking financial bosses conspire to attack us workers and try to completely ruin the international working class.
The historical commemoration of May 1st was sharpened with this elevation of class struggle. The so-called labor “leaders” are unable to organize and convene the working class, which is more and more rejecting the calls to surrender and conform to the current state of capitalist dictatorship and wage slavery. In northern Bogotá, we have made a presence in these protests, due to the close proximity of our residence, even though our collective has been affected by the cuts in transportation and the dangers of Covid-19.
Our role in these marches has been to spread CHALLENGE and our flyers as well as talk with friends and protesters, showing them that the road to victory is the unity and organization of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and its international communist line. We are building the fight for workers’ power and the organizing all of society according to the needs of our class.
Our participation in these protests have been very enriching, because there is great involvement of militant youth and workers with great enthusiasm, bold leadership and many proposals for advancing revolutionary struggle. However, there still remains an acute need to politicize the masses with class consciousness and a defined revolutionary strategy, so as not to fall naively in folklore and the defense of the bourgeois constitution, nationalism and the state’s rotten "democracy.” To fight for the bosses’ ideas is to continue a vicious circle, where our class fails to become the main protagonist of these struggles.
The murderous capitalist system makes clear its criminal objectives and attacks us with police brutality, paramilitaries, mercenaries and assassins. In the recent uprising they have killed at least 54 protesters while committing over 20 cases of sexual abuse against women. There have been dozens of disappearances and cases of torturing. More than 50 people have lost their eyes and more than 1000 fighters against the tax reform have been imprisoned. These brutal bosses continue to exercise their armed state power, demonstrating their racist, fascist and sexist character against the working class.
After more than 30 days of protest and much political discussion we continue linking with the masses, supporting reform demands while emphasizing that the victories of these struggles must be political in order to be long-lasting. To help present our line, we share our revolutionary slogans, "Against the capitalist virus, communism is the vaccine” and "With or without pandemic, capitalism only gives misery!”
We struggle daily with these protesters to break the ideological blockade that capitalist culture has submerged us in. We need to be aware of who the enemy is and what their tricks and false ideals are, so as not to fall into the error of defending the bosses and their deadly profit system.
We will demonstrate that the fight of the workers knows no racist borders! Onward fellow workers, everything we do counts.
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Capitalism, a deadly disease: NYC Retirees fight attacks on medicare
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- 10 June 2021 79 hits
NEW YORK CITY—Over 100 workers demonstrated recently after it was revealed that Medicare of over 200,000 retired New York City (NYC) workers will be privatized. This new plan was struck by union misleaders and liberal Democratic Party politicians to make up a shortfall in the medical “stabilization fund” for current and retired workers. Demonstrating workers instead demanded that all workers and retirees not be moved into privatization until all retirees and workers are involved in the process. The demonstration was called by the Retiree Advocates/United Federation of Teachers, with retirees from the DC-37 Retiree Association, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) and other retiree groups joining with them to protest the privatization of our Medicare health care.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been in the thick of the fight from various unions. It was PL’ers who first exposed that the union misleaders and politicians have been secretly planning this racist scheme for over three years, and it’s PL’ers who are struggling to broaden this fight into class war to guarantee healthcare the only way we can: by smashing capitalism with communist revolution.
Capitalist racist “advantage”= death
The bosses’ plan is this: $600 billion will be saved each year by making us go through one private company to get Medicare. They will supposedly save money even though the companies who we must go through take out 12-18 percent of every dollar for administrative fees. These fees pay for their profits and tremendous executive salaries. These Medicare “Advantage” plans (originally called Medicare HMOs) will do this by restricting how retirees can get health care and where they get healthcare. Many doctors and health care providers, who accept Medicare do not accept Medicare Advantage. In addition, we believe we will ultimately have to go through gatekeepers for specialists and advanced testing and care. Denials are so frequent that over 70 percent of all the appeals are overturned. Another 5 percent were partially overturned (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, Medicare Advantage Appeal Outcomes and Audit Findings Raise Concerns About Service and Payment Denials, Sept. 2018 and Consumer Reports March 28,. 2019). Medicare Advantage plans: “deny preauthorization of services for beneficiaries, and payments to providers, in order to increase profits.” Unfortunately, these appeals take a long time and just waiting to see a specialist often results in death.
The union misleaders’ plans are racist as usual. They will increase racist inequality in that all city retired workers will have up to $1,500 in co-pays. Of the many city retirees who get pensions and Social Security that are extremely low, a disproportionate number are Black and Latin workers. This will cost one friend of PLP over 20 percent of her income.
Union misleaders and bosses: partners in crime
Why is the money needed? Under Democrats and Republicans, for decades, more and more tax breaks have been given to the rich at both the federal and state level. Democrat Andrew Cuomo proposed cuts in Medicaid during the Covid-19 crisis while the union misleaders snuck agreements into our contracts that promised to save money on healthcare by the workers paying for our last round of raises. Most of all, ALL recent U.S. presidents, including Jim Crow Joe Biden, have accelerated the build-up of the military to counter the growing power of the U.S.’s imperialist rival China.
The union misleaders have opposed single payer plans (Medicare for All) so they could tell us what great medical plans they get for us. UFT Unity caucus hack, Tom Murphy, boasted about stopping the NY State single payer plan at the last in-person retiree association meeting before Covid-19 shutdowns. Communists argue that unions must fight for all workers, not just their members. Furthermore, they should not support the capitalist medical system.
Many, many more people died during Covid-19 because they never had access to medical care before getting sick and were afraid to go get treated because they didn’t have health care. Many young Black and Latin workers died when they were admitted to hospitals because they hadn’t been given any diagnosis of conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes because of their lack of access to health care. This exposed the medical inequalities that exist under a capitalist system. We need to fight back against these racist and class-based inequalities.
State run health care systems have been and are continuing to be cut back all over the world; even in so-called liberal social democracies such as Sweden, Great Britain, and France. Hard won reforms are taken away when the capitalist class thinks people are not organized enough to fight back and when they need the money to invest elsewhere: Now they are investing in war. We must organize Progressive Labor Party to end capitalism and create a health care system that serves the entire working class. Only communist revolution can do that. Join us!
