MYANMAR—Of the 700,000 garment workers in Myanmar 90 percent are women. They are striking against the exploitation by the  garment industry bosses and also leading the uprising against the military dictatorship that is ruling the country. They should not be pleading with the garment industry capitalists and their politician flunkies for a better deal. There is no better deal under capitalism. Capitalism means profits for the bosses and exploitation for workers. These women leaders should fight for communism, working class power, where they help lead all of society.
A major problem for the rank-and-file locals is the role of the national union leadership, which urges workers to plead to the H&M and Zara bosses to come to their aid. The garment workers must depend on their own actions, not on the bosses, who are the source of, and profit from, their exploitation. Unfortunately, no communist leadership has emerged from which the goal would be to overthrow the system of capitalism that plunges workers into abject poverty, enforced by the bosses’ cops and military. The trade union leaders do not and cannot have the aim to turn the anti-government protests into a class war against the profit system and for communist revolution.
These brave women fighters can lead a communist world
Often seen at the very front, wearing a mask and white helmet, was Ma Moe Sandar Myint, a 37-year-old mother of three and sewing machine operator. She is the rank-and-file leader of one of the largest union locals, is responsible for organizing more than 20 marches, and is among those calling for a general strike to paralyze the economy in a fight for their rights.
Ma Tin Wei, 26, a garment worker for five years who makes men’s jackets for the Italian brand OVS, organized a strike on her factory floor after the coup. She warned that, “If there were rights violations before in factories, then under a military regime there is no question things will be even worse for garment workers with low-wage jobs. This is a fight I must take on…even if it means risking arrest or death. It’s for me, my family, my union colleagues and all the people of Myanmar” (All quotes are from New York Times, 3/12).
Mai Ei Phyu, who leads 500 workers at a factory that makes jackets for Adidas, was hiding from the police looking for her. She said she was proud of the leadership role of young women  garment workers. “We were important,” she declared, “because we started the protests and came out on the streets early and set a good example for other people across the country. People are proud of us. I do what I do now for my son and daughter and the next generation.”
Myint moved to a safe house after the cops raided her own home on February 6. Leading protests by day and hiding at night, she has not seen her family since.
Harsher conditions under pandemic pressures
The number of people making less than $1.90 a day has more than tripled, to 63 percent of the population since the pandemic began. After a year of Covid-19-induced shutdowns, layoffs, pay cuts and union crackdowns, tens of thousands of garment workers have taken to the streets, many of the youth arming themselves.
Most women garment workers come from smaller cities or rural villages and have moved to the larger city of Yangon. They labor 66-hour workweeks ― 11-hour days, six days a week ― and most live in dormitories, sending part of their wages back home to their families. In such “housing,” they are vulnerable targets for the military.
Myanmar’s garment industry is vital to the economy, comprising 31 percent of all exports in 2018, worth $4.6 billion. Many Western companies such as H&M and Adidas have become important markets for the industry’s bosses. The uprising’s effects were cited by H&M’s manager in Myanmar as causing “practical difficulties and an unpredictable situation limiting our ability to operate in the country.”
The military has been a bulwark for the garment bosses against the strikers, using tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets and live rounds, and killing hundreds at rallies nationwide.
The spirit that could lead to such an outcome flows from the kind of determination expressed by Moe Sandar Myint, “The more I see the suffering, the more I want to fight, even at the risk of death. This might end with my blood being spilled, but I won’t stop now!”

As the Joe Biden administration jails thousands of immigrant children and plans to warehouse tens of thousands more in tent camps and army bases, the liberal bosses’ hypocrisy and blatant inhumanity is on full display. Last fall, millions of voters were misled into voting for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The candidates vowed to stop Donald Trump’s vicious war on immigrants and shed crocodile tears for the “kids in cages”—but that was then. As hundreds of thousands of workers flee capitalist-inspired violence and poverty in Central America, Biden’s Homeland Security chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, vowed to charge more of them with felonies—for the “crime” of crossing the bosses’ borders (Washington Times, 4/6). Mayorkas hailed the “noble mission” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a notorious nest of white nationalists, card-carrying Nazis, child abusers, and sexual predators (vice.com, 1/6/20; Los Angeles Times, 10/1/20). Then he promised to fill “gaps” in Trump’s pathetic border wall (New York Post, 4/6).
The next time anyone tells you that Democratic Party liberals are “lesser evils” next to gutter racists like Trump, don’t believe them. Evil, yes—lesser, no! All capitalist politicians—from Biden to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) —are loyal, first and last, to a profit system that feeds on racism, sexism, and inter-imperialist war.
Hidden behind the “border crisis” headlines is another story with vast implications for the working class. Finance capital, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, is trying desperately to maintain control over their imperialist “backyard,” Latin America and the Caribbean. But as they jockey for position in advance of the next global conflict, the U.S. bosses’ chief rivals, China and Russia, have other ideas.
Borders exist to divide up profits among different groups of capitalists. But the bosses themselves cross these artificial lines all the time to plunder resources, exploit sweatshop labor, and dodge restrictions on poisoning the environment. They also use borders as essential tools to divide the working class and build patriotism for war.
Under communism, borders will be relics of the past. The workers of the world have one and the same class interest: to smash the bosses with communist revolution, and to create a society run by and for the people who create all value: the international working class.
Liberals are still the main danger
When it came to criminalizing immigrants, Trump followed squarely in the footsteps of Democrats Bill Clinton and Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama. As a U.S. senator during Clinton’s regime and then as Obama’s vice president, Biden actively supported his predecessors’ racist policies. Even so, the “socialist” Ocasio-Cortez continues to defend “lesser-evil” Biden: “What is happening here is not the same as what happened during the Trump administration where they took babies out of the arms of mothers and deported their families and permanently traumatized these children” (thehill.com, 4/1). In other words, AOC is okay with the traumatization of children as long as her fellow Democrats are running the show.
In March, U.S. border kkkops apprehended more than 171,000 migrant workers and children trying to cross the border from Mexico, the highest monthly total in 20  years (Reuters, 4/2). That mind-numbing number is a product of sheer desperation. As Mexican journalist Leon Krauze wrote, “People from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador don’t migrate in search of a better life. They are looking for a shot at survival” (Washington Post, 3/24).
The Biden administration needs to push back on migration from Mexico and Central America because their concentration camps are overflowing. After four years of Trump, there’s a backlog of 1.3 million pending asylum cases (Washington Post, 3/31). “Temporary shelters” include the Fairplex in Pomona, California, the site of an internment camp for Japanese workers during World War II (Daily Bulletin, August, 2016). In announcing the Fairplex opening, Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor under Obama and now chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, seemed proud to be incarcerating children who’d fled mass devastation from summer hurricanes, fascist cops, murderous drug cartels, and starvation caused by 200 years of U.S. domination (Los Angeles Times, 4/9; see box).
Jim Crow Joe and Top Cop Kamala are pushing the utterly racist lie that the recent surge of migration is mainly the result of a failure by Mexico and Guatemala to secure their borders. Biden is conveniently silent about the U.S.-engineered coup in Honduras in 2009, when he and Obama were in charge—or about the horrific violence that ensued and forced workers to flee to the U.S. In Biden’s latest budget draft, he is asking for an insulting $861 million—less than $20 per person--to “fix” the problems in Central America. He wants half again as much, around $1.2 billion, for high-tech border security (New York Times, 4/9).
Covid-19 vaccine imperialism
As the U.S. empire continues to falter, capitalist bosses in Latin America have welcomed a rising tide of Chinese and Russian influence. As Argentina’s powerful Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner mused: “Who would have guessed that…the only vaccines we’d receive are Russian and Chinese?” Victor Jeifets, a professor at the School of International Relations at St. Petersburg State University, boasted: “If you’re in trouble [Russia] is here to help you…We have the ability, we have the technology. The same goes for China” (Christian Science Monitor, 4/2).
China’s merchandise trade with Latin America has soared from $17 billion in 2002 to $315 billion in 2019. “Reuters reports that, if Mexico were removed from calculations, China is now Latin America’s biggest trading partner” (Newsweek, 3/29). Nineteen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean will be using a new $3 billion container port in Freeport in the Bahamas, part of China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project (Newsweek, 3/29). Biden has countered by forcing Mexico, the country with the world’s third-highest Covid-19 death toll, to send troops to stop immigrants at the Guatemala border in exchange for a measly 2.5 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine (NYT, 3/18; CHALLENGE, 4/2).
Capitalism, no matter which national flavor it comes packaged in, will never be able to solve the problems of war, mass migration, economic instability, or public health disaster. Why not? Because the capitalist system itself lies at the root of all these ills. A communist revolution will unleash the enormous power and creativity of the world’s working class to meet and overcome all challenges to humanity. The aim of Progressive Labor Party is to organize millions to make that revolution by smashing the racist, fascist warmakers who now hold our class in bondage.

*****

SIDEBAR:

U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean and Latin America
With the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, U.S. rulers told European rivals to stay out of “their” hemisphere.
U.S. bosses have a long and sordid history of military intervention, installation of puppet governments, and economic extortion. The seizure of Panama to build and guard the Panama Canal, the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, the multiple invasions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the 1980s backing of fascist death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua--these are just a few examples of the blood on these criminals’ hands.
The U.S. has been policing and destabilizing Latin America and the Caribbean for almost 200 years. Immigration from these countries is in no small part due to the devastation that has followed. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a “good” imperialist. Bosses from Russia and China are governed by the same laws of capitalism as those in the U.S. They are all driven to exploit resources and labor and to expand their markets. Workers should never betray our class interests by allying with any imperialist.

CHICAGO, April 13—Antiracist mass struggle is heating up across the city in the wake of the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) racist murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) called for communist revolution as the solution to racist state terror that is essential to capitalism.
Adam was a student and resident of Little Village, a west side neighborhood that is home to mainly Latin workers. On March 29, allegedly responding to gunfire, the racist attack dogs of CPD chased Adam and another young person into an alley near a school where they cornered Adam and shot him in the chest.
It was when the morgue called to identify Adam’s body two days later that Elizabeth Toledo was made aware of her son’s death. In a sick throwback to the dashboard camera cover-up of Black teen LaQuan McDonald’s racist murder in 2014, CPD and the city bosses, fronted by racist, liberal wolf in sheep’s clothing Mayor Lori Lightfoot, have held off on the release of the killer kkkop’s body-cam footage. They know they are sitting on a ticking time bomb of working class rage.
PLP calls on our working class sisters and brothers to keep rebelling against this racist capitalist system that killed Adam just as it kills countless other workers and youth every day. We invite workers everywhere to take the next step: joining our mass international Party in order to crush capitalism and its endless misery, inequality, and war.
Take the streets for Adam
A few days after Adam’s murder, on April 5, close to 200 protesters, mostly young people, gathered for a community vigil in Little Village in his honor. Many workers and friends of Adam took to the mic, voicing their disgust for the racist murder of a child by the KKK-in-blue.
A PL’er took the opportunity to share communist politics, exposing the role of the police under capitalism for being assassins and terrorists in a rousing bullhorn speech. We ran out of CHALLENGE newspapers and 200 bilingual leaflets, which explained that only communist revolution can rid society of killer racist cops, and build a world where children and all workers flourish, achieving our full potential.
Many agreed that no one is safe under this bloody capitalist dictatorship. As history has shown, we cannot depend on the courts for justice. As long as capitalism exists, the cops will always be used as tools for social control and repression, especially to attack Black and Latin workers.
A couple of “community groups” funded by the police tried to take over the leadership of this struggle. These non-profit groups are used to try and keep a lid on workers’ anger, and to mislead workers into dead-end movements like electoral politics. It’s the Party’s role to expose these misleaders and build unity with the rank and file against our common class enemies and their agents.
A young Latin worker, who called out the non-profits, approached a PL’er and said he had taught him at an after-school program when he was 12  years old. This shows how important our relationships are, and what we do really counts! We plan to follow up with him.
After the more pacifist vigil, community members upped the ante with a bold march through the neighborhood. Residents pumped their fists in the air as we shouted militant chants like “CPD, KKK! How many kids did you kill today?!” The kkkops trying to corral the march were quickly shouted down and forced to retreat. We ended blocking a busy intersection, where working-class Black and Latin youth made anti-racist speeches and openly attacked both liberal misleaders like Lightfoot as well as the police and the capitalist state.
Caravan held back by nationalism, identity politics
A few days later, on April 9, dozens of young workers and students gathered in North Lawndale, another west side neighborhood that is home to majority Black workers. It is the same neighborhood where workers rebelled after CPD murdered 15-year old Black teen Steven Rosenthal in 2018. After a spirited rally in which PL’ers and other workers condemned this racist system, there was a car procession through mainly working-class neighborhoods, ending up downtown.
While downtown, protesters got out of their cars and blocked another intersection. Some protesters called for Black, Latin and Asian unity as a response to racism. Others carried nationalist Black and Mexican flags. These nationalist politics stem from the identity politics pushed in many boss-led or boss-influenced organizations. These ideas will not liberate the working class or end racist police murder.
Identity politics calls for workers to rally around more Black and Latin leaders—to manage the bosses’ state. But in Chicago, a very segregated, racist city, we have a Black mayor and a Black police chief, and racist police killings have not stopped.
As communists, we build the fight for international, multiracial working-class unity as the antidote to the bosses’ racist divisions and state violence. Capitalism needs racism, nationalism, and sexism in order to exist—as workers we need to reject all of these with egalitarian communist politics!
Workers deserve a communist world
The murder of Adam Toledo is connected to the racist murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Daunte Wright. It is connected to the mounting death toll of the pandemic, and the endless drone attacks against workers in other countries. All are the deadly reality of capitalism.
The justice we seek cannot and will not be found as long as capitalism exists! Let’s build the communist world we all need and deserve!

*****

SIDEBAR

Why do kkkops kill?
Legalized killings and mass imprisonment are age-old capitalist tools to control the working class. The first modern police force in what is now the United States, beginning in South Carolina in 1704, was the slave patrol. These forces hunted down and punished runaway and “defiant” enslaved workers; they were a form of organized terror to deter revolts that might threaten plantation profits.
To this day, state-sanctioned racist terror against Black workers and youth is an indispensable weapon for the capitalist class. Anti-Black racism is at the foundation of the racist treatment and division of all workers. Therefore, it is in the principled interest of all workers to unite against the capitalist state.
Under capitalism, the “state”—including all levels of government, the so-called justice system, the police, the military, the schools, and the media—is an instrument of ruling-class oppression and violence against the working class. Past communist leader Vladimir Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, “The state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.”
We didn’t negotiate the end of slavery and we won’t negotiate our way out of capitalism. From slave patrols to the kkkops, the bosses’ state is the sworn enemy of the working class. Smash the capitalist state!

The world under capitalism is failing and there are two emerging options—the bosses’ option is fascism. Fascism through increased surveillance and police, war over profits and power, destruction of health and education systems, and other crimes against us. Covid-19 has laid bare the lethal racist inequalities of the profit system. From the United States to Africa, from Latin America to South Asia, workers everywhere are suffering unnatural deaths from the disease of capitalism. The choice between capitalist decay and an international communist future has never been clearer.
Why communism? In our vision, the working class will determine the future of society. It will destroy the capitalist world and its brutal exploitation. It will smash a system that drives us into chronic unemployment and poverty. It will smash the racism and sexism that drag down all workers. It will eliminate the racist cops who break our strikes and kill our Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant sisters and brothers. And it will put an end to the imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.
A Communist World
Here is our vision for a communist world:
• A society run by workers and for workers. The working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need.
• Abolition of the exploitative wage system and the money that runs it. We have no need for the blood-sucking bosses who steal the value of our labor through wage slavery.
• Multiracial unity with women and men workers and an end to the racism and sexism that divides the working class. Racism and sexism is rooted in capitalism; the bosses use them to steal trillions in super-profits worldwide.
• Elimination of all national borders, artificial lines drawn by the bosses to make even more profits from workers called “foreigners.” Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor—and to war with other imperialists in competition for more profit. Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag.
This is the world PLP has fought for from our start, more than 50 years ago. We will continue to fight until our class prevails. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.
Our vision for communism can be realized only with millions of workers and youth, with people just like you. Our fight is sparked by class anger against the bloody bosses, kkkops, and all those who serve capitalism. But what sustains our communist movement is our working-class love—for industrial and domestic workers, for soldiers and students. United as one class, freed from exploitation and artificial borders, the working class can build a new world from the ashes of the old.
May Day is your chance to join Progressive Labor Party. Take the leap. And when you do, you will be joining hands with billions of fighters past, present, and future—with a historic movement of working-class struggle. The future belongs to us, but only if we dare to fight for it. The fight for communism can’t stop, won’t stop because workers can, workers did, workers will continue to fight back!
Long live communism! Power to the workers!