Len Ragozin, a long-time supporter of the fight for communism, died on May 13 at the age of 92. Len absorbed his working-class consciousness from the women in his family. His mother lived through the Russian Revolution in 1917, immigrated to the U.S., and was renowned in the family for translating for Stalin during a return trip to Russia. His Aunt Rachel was a founding member of the U.S. Communist Party.
Len grew up in an environment where his family argued politics around the dinner table and the communist contingent did more than hold their own.
From an early age, he identified with the interests of the working class. Even as a child, as Len liked to say, he was “against the fat cats.”
After graduating from Harvard, Len got involved in the union organizing movement in Memphis, Tennessee, where he took a factory job.
After getting fired for organizing, he found another factory job and got fired once more. This cycle continued until the Korean War broke out and Len was drafted.In the military, Len kept organizing. He talked with other soldiers about the war and why the U.S. “fat cats” sending them to fight the Chinese communist army cared only about their profits.
He gained a reputation on base as someone who wasn’t scared to tell the truth. The military responded with several threatening letters. But after seeing that Len wasn’t going to shut up, they discharged him and sent Len home.
Upon returning to New York, Len got a job at Newsweek magazine as a researcher. Two FBI agents came to his office and asked him to name names of any communists he knew in college. He refused, even as they threatened to get him fired. Len held firm and sent them packing.
Len met Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in the early days of the Party when our founding chairperson, Milt Rosen, was teaching a class at the Free University of New York. Len had a photographic memory and had read virtually everything written by Marx and Lenin. In the early 1970s, before a large crowd in Greenwich Village, Len debated a fake Marxist who was being promoted by the liberal press. He systematically took apart every argument the revisionist made while referencing Marx and Lenin—citing not just the original documents, but also the page numbers!
Len went on to become a long-time supporter of PLP, volunteering to help with CHALLENGE, writing articles and contributing ideas from his many years of experience in the class struggle. He always took great interest and joy in reports on the Party’s organizing activities on the job, in the schools, and in the neighborhoods. Throughout his life, Len Ragozin was a staunch supporter of the working class.
On May 12 our comrade, Sandy Spier, lost her 10 month fight with a brutally aggressive colon cancer.
Sandy joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) some fifty years ago while living in Minnesota. At the time, PLP was organizing to fight against the imperialist Vietnam War. We were also spearheading the fight against academic racism. At a time when Black workers were leading a strike wave across the U.S. and rebellions in the inner cities and were at the forefront of the fight within the military against the war, a group of academic prostitutes came up with theories that Black workers were destined to be violent and stay poor because of genetics. PL led the charge disproving these racist ideas. We were also trying to build alliances between the struggles of workers and students. The friends she made in Minnesota remained her friends for years. People throughout the Midwest remember her coming to marches and summer projects.
About 20 years ago she moved to New York City where she has been active ever since. After a couple of years, she began working at Downstate Medical Center. She became active in the union, United University Professionals, and was known for advancing ideas of anti-racism, multi-racial unity, and supporting other workers, both in the U.S. and around the world. She was ever a voice for more militant fight back. She helped organize a demonstration outside Downstate on the first day of Desert Storm. More recently, when Downstate was threatened with closure, she spearheaded a large demonstration outside the hospital with the help of Occupy Wall Street which the union joined. That rally set the tone for future demonstrations.
Meanwhile, whenever there was a demonstration against a racist murder by cop, or in support of striking workers, or against attacks on immigrants, or in support of workers in other countries, struggling against their terrible conditions, Sandy was there.
Sandy also loved music. She always rode the May Day buses armed with song sheets to get people singing. She sang for a few years in a choral group in Brooklyn. She organized a holiday party every year that brought together her friends from work, church, and other activities .She bought a home in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania and in her time up there she got involved with folks fighting back. She traveled the world, searching out her relatives in Norway. As late as February, 2020 she and a friend took a snowmobile trip up into the wilds of Norway and she got to see the northern lights from within the Arctic circle.
From Minnesota to Flatbush to Jim Thorpe, on the job, in her neighborhoods with family, Sandy built and maintained ties with scores of people.
She never missed a May Day march, whether in Chicago, Washington, D.C. or Flatbush. This year May Day was less than two weeks before she died. One of her comrades called her on his cell and let her hear and see our 2021 May Day march.
There is a song that PLP has adapted from a version sung by Italian partisans fighting the Nazis in World War II called “Bella Ciao” (Beautiful Goodbye). “I go out in the morning to fight the oppressor. Bella Ciao. If I die in combat, Bella Ciao. Take my gun into your hands.” Bella ciao, Sandy. We will remember your quiet good humor, your ready laugh and your unwavering dedication to the fight of the world’s working class for a communist future. With you in our hearts, we will continue the struggle.
Three comrades remember Laszlo Berkovits
October 2, 1946 – April 19, 2021
At CCNY and in Central Europe
In 1968, at City College of New York, I was giving out Progressive LaborParty (PLP) leaflets inviting people to a demonstration against the U.S. war on Vietnam. A student read the leaflet and approached me. His name was Laszlo Berkovits and he was Hungarian. I thought he might be an anti-communist Hungarian refugee. The slide rule hanging from his belt indicated he was a math, science, or engineering major. Most leftist students were liberal arts majors. But no, Laszlo said he had studied Marxism in high school in Hungary. He thought it was a scientific analysis of capitalism and agreed with the leaflet. He started participating in our anti-war activities, joined the Students for a Democratic Society chapter, read CHALLENGE, and soon joined PLP.
In January 1969 Laszlo and Edna met while washing dishes at a birthday party. They married in 1970 and were together until April of this year, when ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) claimed Laszlo far too soon. They loved their 2 children and 3 wonderful grandchildren, and they extended their love to sons-in-law. Laszlo, a master soup chef, cooked soups for the family every Friday evening.
My wife and I travelled through Central Europe with Laszlo and Edna in 2012. We visited several Jewish cemeteries where Laszlo’s relatives were buried — those who had not been murdered by the Nazis. Laszlo had a deep-seated hatred of fascism. In Budapest, we had dinner with about 10 of Laszlo’s high school friends. It was obvious that they loved and respected him. At Laszlo’s hometown, Salgótarján, we had dinner with another 10 of his high school friends; one subscribed to CHALLENGE.
People everywhere counted him among their best friends. He loved people, took an interest in them and their families, and their problems. As a communist, he looked for the best in people. He believed that working people could unite to overthrow capitalism and rid the world of racism, sexism and the other horrors it generates.
We often sing Bella Ciao at PLP events. When we sing, “Soy comunista toda la vida,” I see Laszlo, truly “a communist all his life.”
At New York University Hospital and in New Jersey
Laszlo’s kind personality was not in contradiction to his fighting spirit and staunch antiracism. In 1979, while working at NYU Hospital, Laszlo and two comrades mounted a campaign against harassment and regular searches of the predominantly Black and Latin workers by hospital security guards. Threats of disciplinary action did not stop Laszlo and others. They even led workers to loudly picket a hospital administrator’s home.
When Laszlo and his comrades were disciplined by the hospital bosses, they filed grievances, which were dismissed by the administration and by an “impartial” arbitrator. They then hired a militant labor lawyer.
After a long battle at the National Labor Relations Board and a federal court, and supported by rank-and-file actions, NYU was forced to rescind all the disciplinary actions, and issue back pay.
Laszlo and his family moved from the Bronx to Teaneck, NJ in 1982. The Party there joined with parents and launched campaigns against racism in the schools and against racist police terror. As these battles continued, Laszlo and Edna encouraged their children to become active antiracists.
Laszlo had a sharp internationalist perspective. He understood that the fall of the old communist movement had given new life to world capitalism. He worked with other comrades to analyze the rise of imperialist China and why imperialist rivalry between China and the U.S. would inevitably lead to war.
More class struggle in New Jersey
When Laszlo and Edna moved to Teaneck, they helped us develop a PLP collective with two other families. In joyful cooperation we helped each other raise our children with communist values. In 1982 we organized support for the township’s striking teachers, who were thrown in jail for their efforts.
Edna and Laszlo became active in the Bergen Society for Ethical Culture, which in the mid 1980s had declared sanctuary for refugees and asylum seekers. They supported expanding this fight and joined in the Society’s effort to work for climate justice. Laszlo was also a regular participant in many of the Society’s forums and gatherings. Only two weeks before his death, Laszlo spoke about David Bohm and Ilya Prigogine, scientists whose works have contributed to our understanding of the communist philosophy of dialectical materialism.
Farewell dear comrade. Farewell dear friend. Who you were and what you have done will live vividly within each of us and will continue to help shape an emerging communist world as long as the working class lives.
On the occasion of the 77th anniversary of D-Day, the U.S.-British invasion of Nazi-occupied Western Europe on June 6, 1944, we’ll hear lies telling us how the U.S. won the Second World War. The decisive role of the Soviet Red Army and working class will be deliberately underplayed or ignored altogether to avoid recognizing the fact that it was the communist-led Soviet Union, under the leadership of Josef Stalin—not the U.S.—that defeated Hitler’s Nazi armies.
As Benjamin Schwarz, national editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote in the New York Times, “Military historians have always known that the main scene of the Nazis’ downfall was the Eastern Front, which claimed 80 percent of all German military casualties in the war….The four-year conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army remains the largest and possibly most ferocious ever fought,….arguably the single most important chapter in modern military history.”
During the entire war, more than 70 percent of the active fascist troops in Europe were fighting the Red Army. The British were engaging only four German divisions in North Africa. When the Allies landed in western France on the Normandy beaches, they faced only three German divisions. The main reason was that more than 100 divisions from all over Europe had to be rushed to the East where the Red Army was moving 40 miles a day westward, crushing the fascist forces. More than a million Nazi troops were destroyed just by Soviet partisan units behind enemy lines, more than all the U.S. and British forces had destroyed during the entire war.
Over 25 million Soviet workers and soldiers died fighting Hitler’s armies. The U.S. lost 400,000 all told, in Europe and the Pacific.
In the winter of 1941, when the Nazis approached Moscow, 25 miles from the Kremlin, the entire population rose up in defense. Men joined the militia units at the front. Women and youth spent weeks out in the bitter cold, digging anti-tank ditches. Then the Soviet forces counter-attacked, pushing the enemy more than 100 miles from the city. This was the first large-scale defeat suffered by the Nazis. It was the beginning of their annihilation, six months after they had invaded. The New York Times military editor, Hanson Baldwin, along with scores of Western “experts,” had predicted the Soviets would be defeated in six weeks.
The turning point came in the battle of Stalingrad, in the winter of 1942-43, which virtually all capitalist historians have called the turning point of World War II. Soviet defenders fought battles house-to-house. Women and men voluntarily remained at their machines making tanks for the battlefield just outside their factories while bombs fell all around them. Stalingrad stands as a shining example of the communist spirit. The Soviets surrounded and destroyed three fascist armies, causing 1.5 million Nazi casualties. After Stalingrad, the battlefield moved in only one direction — westward toward Germany.
From 1941 to the spring of 1944, U.S.-British strategy was to wait until the Nazis and Soviets were fatigued fighting each other and then enter the war to get quick victories. They had delayed opening a second front in France for two years, until mid-1944, when it became apparent that if they didn’t the Soviets would be able to liberate all of Europe from the Nazi yoke. The Second Front was opened to stop the communist advance beyond Berlin.
In A War to Be Won (Harvard, 2009) by historians Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, they called the Soviets’ brilliant use of encirclement and what they called “deep battle” — extremely far-reaching advances behind the enemy’s lines — the most innovative and devastating display of “operational art” in World War II. Col. David Glantz, of the U.S. War College, marveled that close to one-half of wartime Soviet operations involving hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers are simply “missing from history,” either neglected or covered up.
So when the imperialists praise the U.S “victors” in World War II, the workers of the world should salute the true heroes who defeated the Nazi armies, the communist-led Red Army and working class of the Soviet Union.
As bodies wash up on the banks of the Ganges river, mass cremation pyres light the sky, and Covid-19 patients die by the thousands for lack of simple oxygen, we need look no further than India to see the sickness of capitalism. Though India is the world’s leading maker of Covid-19 vaccines, less than three percent of its population is fully vaccinated. With 17 percent of the world’s population, the country “accounts for half of Covid-19 cases and 30 percent of deaths worldwide” (reuters.com, 5/12). As inter-imperialist rivals U.S. and China seesaw between vaccine nationalism and vaccine geopolitics, the profit system’s callous indifference to workers’ lives has been exposed as rarely before.
Whether they’re running so-called liberal “democracies” in the U.S., Europe, and India, or more openly fascist states like China and Russia, the capitalist rulers are showing their willingness to sacrifice millions of workers in their drive for maximum profits. Only with communist revolution, and by organizing society under the leadership of the international working class, can national borders be smashed—and the capitalist bosses along with them! Only then will life-saving oxygen, vaccines, and technical know-how be shared for our collective benefit. Only then can we have a truly healthy world.
Modi’s Covid massacre
As the pandemic’s current wave spreads from India’s overwhelmed cities to its countryside, where medical resources are almost nonexistent, the situation is getting steadily worse. On May 12 alone, Covid-19 deaths in India “swelled by a record 4,205 while infections rose 348,421 … carrying the tally past 23 million, health ministry data showed. Experts believe the actual numbers could be five to 10 times higher, however” (reuters.com, 5/12).
While India’s bosses blame the country’s plight on a lack of supplies from the U.S. and the European Union, this Covid-19 disaster is rooted in capitalism, the brutal racism of India’s centuries-old caste system (intensified and codified under British imperialist rule), and a blatant disregard for workers’ lives. Pre-pandemic, public health spending stood at a dismal one percent of gross domestic product (Bloomberg News, 4/22).
Covid-19’s latest rampage in India is due in large part to the desperation and hubris of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the anti-Muslim racist who in January declared victory over the coronavirus. Facing rising opposition from within the Indian ruling class, Modi took a page from Donald Trump and Jim Crow Joe Biden and prioritized election campaigning over workers’ well-being. He encouraged religious ceremonies and sporting events that drew millions of closely packed people, most of them unmasked. In a few short months, India went from reporting 10,000 new cases per day to 400,000 (CNBC, 5/3), a number widely believed to be a huge undercount.
We can’t breathe
Though India supplied much of the world with oxygen over the first year of the pandemic (Economic Times, 4/21), it can’t supply its own hospitals for lack of infrastructure, from roads and train systems to essential storage capacity. Patients are being told to bring their own oxygen cylinders with them to the hospital (NPR, 5/5).
From Minnesota and New York City to New Delhi and Mumbai, hundreds of thousands of workers cannot breathe under the bosses’ brutal knees. Like human labor, the most basic and abundant elements of life—oxygen and water—are commodified by the imperialists in their vicious competition for maximum profit. And like every process under capitalism, vaccine distribution is defined by racist inequalities. To date, 83 percent of the world’s vaccinations have been given in the wealthiest countries—and only 0.2 percent in the poorest ones. In the U.S., nearly half of all adults have received at least one shot. In Africa, only 1.3 percent have any protection (New York Times, 5/6).
U.S. bosses outflanked by China
The deep split in the U.S. ruling class has hampered efforts by the main-wing finance capitalists to use vaccine diplomacy to reassert the U.S. onto the world stage after Trump’s “America First” isolationism struck a chord with tens of millions of U.S. voters. With the 2022 midterm elections just a year and a half away, President Joe Biden only recently—and over the strenuous objections of the big pharmaceutical companies—waived intellectual property protections on vaccine patents, allowing the recipes to be shared with India and Africa (NYT, 5/8).
But without substantial help with vaccine production, quality control, and distribution, the waiver will be meaningless. As one legal expert noted, “We’re not talking about any immediate help for India or Latin America or other countries going through an enormous spread of the virus.” While U.S. officials are negotiating the text of the waiver, “the virus will be mutating” (statnews.com, 5/6).
Meanwhile, the more unified Chinese ruling class is filling the void. By the end of April, China had already sent 800 oxygen concentrators to India and was set to send 10,000 more (The Guardian, 4/29). China’s bosses recently scored a big win when the World Health Organization (WHO) approved the Chinese-owned SinoPharm vaccine for inclusion in WHO’s global initiative to vaccinate low-income countries (NYT, 5/7).
China is using its wealth “to broaden its global political influence” as part of its new “Health Silk Road,” a core component of its imperialist Belt and Road Initiative. (Foreign Affairs, 3/11). A year ago, the U.S. thought it had won a victory over China’s bosses when a former Indian health minister was elected to chair WHO’s executive board. The board “promptly supported calls to investigate the origins of the coronavirus,” which was widely seen as an attack on China (NYT, 12/24). But when the report was released in March, it failed to call out China’s early suppression of critical data on the pandemic, a measure of the Chinese rulers’ rising global influence (NYT, 4/7).
China and India are longtime regional competitors with an ongoing history of bloody border clashes. China recently moved to redirect rivers to generate vast amounts of power at India’s environmental expense. Even so, China’s vaccine diplomacy could expand its regional influence and possibly disrupt—or at least complicate—the U.S.-India alliance.
Fight for communism!
The Covid-19 pandemic has put a magnifying glass on the crimes of capitalism. It has never been clearer that the profit system stands for racism, sexism, disease, and needless death—and for a future of fascism and war.
Under communism, a system with no money, profits would never drive decisions on public health. Vaccines and medical and production expertise would be shared equally by all workers of the world. So while the bosses use oxygen, water, and vaccines as pieces in their inter-imperialist chess game, Progressive Labor Party fights for a communist world. We fight for a world where exploitation is abolished and decisions are made by and for the international working class—the class that creates all value. Join us!
