The following articles cover some topics discussed at the International Working Women’s Day celebration. To view, click here
March 28 – Dozens of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends gathered virtually today for a bilingual panel celebrating the International Working Women’s Day  and communist anti-sexism. Across at least four countries, workers shared personal experiences, reflected on historical movements, and discussed political theory as key pillars in advancing the fight against capitalism’s sexist culture and exploitation.
Sexism is one of the most powerful tools in the bosses’ arsenal to divide and attack our class. Due to their experience against capitalism’s sexist and racist attacks, we have throughout our history fought to have women workers—particularly Black, Latin, and Asian women workers—give communist leadership in the Party and in the class struggle.
The fight against sexism necessitates workers of all races, genders, ages, and backgrounds unite in an international struggle to eradicate it materially and ideologically through revolution.
Events like this panel are essential in growing our revolutionary unity and struggle. We learn to reject the bosses’ poisonous ideas within the mass movement and embrace the Party as the weapon through which we will create an antisexist, antiracist world.
Abolish the foundation of sexism: class society
The sexist organization of advanced capitalist society has had a profoundly negative impact on the way workers and others think about themselves in relation to the social system. On the one hand, housework and childcare were necessary for the reproduction of the workforce; that is, it is relevant to take care of the daily needs of workers and raise the next generation of workers.
But these activities do not produce surplus value for the bosses, so, in capitalist terms, they are not "productive labor", since capitalists consider "productive" only labor that produces profit for them. As such, their essential nature to our survival is constantly degraded under this system.
Under a communist society, having abolished production based on profit, the entire working class together would work to share labor inside and outside of the home. The distinctions between domestic work and all other labor will be eliminated and will be performed collectively. The responsibility to provide the needs of our class will be the responsibility of all workers.
In sharp contrast to dehumanizing capitalist culture, workers would use media such as movies, music, and art, along with meetings and other activities to promote antisexist imagery that stresses equality among all workers.
A powerful struggle will continue after we smash the bosses and seize state power to win the entire working class away from sexist ideologies and practices.
Capitalist identity politics fail workers
Maintaining aspects of sexism in a society where we are trying to destroy capitalism would be like maintaining racial segregation, or separate nations, or wages. It would mean keeping elements of capitalism, which would create the basis for its restoration. So, it is important that we understand the particularities of sexism in today's capitalist society. Fighting against these particularities, our movement creates the foundation to destroy sexism once we take power.
Theories of identity politics are bourgeois political debates, the possibility of struggle is bourgeois. Identity politics reproduces the appearance of an alienated individual under capitalism; hence its struggle takes the form of equality of oppression between groups or individuals.
Identity politics is the classic nationalism wrapped in a new bow. We will fight for a classless, collective society that allows us to express ourselves freely in all our multifaceted activities.
An antisexist world worth fighting for
The necessity to overthrow this sexist, racist capitalist system becomes more urgent by the minute. Throughout the pandemic, it is women workers who have been among the hardest hit within our class.
According to the bosses’ own statistics, official women’s unemployment in the U.S. stood at 6.3 percent, rising to 8.4 percent for Black women workers, 9.1 percent for Latin, and 11.4 percent for women workers with disabilities (ABC 7, 1/20).
In Latin American countries, domestic violence against women workers has skyrocketed, increasing by 94 percent in Colombia in the first months of lockdown (nautilus.com).
In contrast to feminism, we don’t just want a select few women to advance to get a “seat at the table” and become exploiters and apologists of an inherently sexist system. We want to smash the “table” entirely, and liberate the entire international working class through revolution.
International, multiracial, and anti-sexist panels and events are a representation of the egalitarian communist world we are fighting for. Onward to revolution with PLP!

As of March 30, over 60 countries had not received a single dose of vaccine, and many are not on track to be fully vaccinated before 2024 (New York Times, 3/30). Even as thousands of workers die daily from coronavirus, capitalism sees the vaccine as another vehicle for racist profits and a weapon in inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Chinese imperialists.
In wealthy countries, vaccine apartheid is apparent. The U.S. has vaccinated white people  at 2.5 times the rate for Latin and 2 times that of Black workers (KFF.org, 3/17). Israel has fully vaccinated over 50 percent of the Jewish population and is denying vaccines to the 4.5 million Palestinians under its military occupation. Capitalism will always see the lives of the working class as expendable. We must fight for communist revolution to build a society that serves the needs of the working class.
Vaccines for profit let workers die
UNICEF estimates that the world has the capacity to produce up to 20 billion doses of vaccine, and half of this capacity is in poorer countries. However, new vaccines are protected by patent laws that prevent manufacturing of the available vaccines without the permission of the pharmaceutical companies that own the patents (The Conversation, 2/18). Although there is worldwide pressure to suspend these intellectual property barriers, five wealthy countries, including the U.S. and Britain, have refused to do so. They are determined to guarantee the profits of big pharma, despite the fact that vaccine makers received about $20 billion dollars in public support.
“Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far. Under current projections, many of the rest [of the countries] will have to wait years” (NY Times, 3/21). Pfizer is demanding unprecedented liability protection from foreign countries in order to sell them vaccines, demanding it not be held responsible for rare adverse effects or for its own acts of negligence, fraud or malice. They are requiring that South American bosses put up huge assets, such as federal bank reserves, embassy buildings and military bases, as insurance against the cost of any future legal cases.
Although nine countries have been forced to agree to this sort of deal, five—Uruguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Cuba—have yet to receive a single dose of a foreign vaccine (nakedcapitalism.com, 3/21).
Vaccines become the new blood money
China’s bosses are winning the vaccine war as they have become the main sources of vaccines to Africa, Asia and South America, increasing their ever-growing imperialist influence in these areas. They are forcing the smaller capitalists to do their bidding along the way. The Brazilian ruling class was forced to accept the Chinese bosses Huawei as their 5G developer in order to get vaccines and the working class in Paraguay has been denied the vaccine even as deaths rise because the Paraguayan bosses are in bed with the Taiwanese capitalists.
China is extorting poor countries as workers die, while the U.S. ruling class is battling itself over how to respond. Torn between outright greed and giving up some of their profits to keep up with the Chinese imperialists, the U.S. ruling class has mostly been paralyzed. Though, in a horrifically racist use of the vaccine, Joe Biden offered 1.5 million doses to the Mexican ruling class in exchange for the Mexican bosses sending troops to the border with Guatemala to stop workers from Central America headed to the U.S. (NY Times, 3/18). The perversion of the vaccine being used to pay for troops to attack workers risking their lives to get poverty wage jobs in the U.S. is a damning example of the utter inability of capitalism to serve the needs of our class.
In a communist world, vaccines would be produced, manufactured and distributed collaboratively by the world’s scientists and factories. There would also be far fewer pandemics if production and mining were designed to prevent infection by wild viruses. Workers’ health would be a priority, so that we would also be better able to survive those infectious illnesses that do occur. Only such a revolutionary transition of society with the death of the profit motive can truly protect the working class.

Under capitalism workers’ lives are expendable. Under communism profits will cease to exist and the collective health of workers will be guarenteed.In Bessemer, Alabama 5,800 Amazon warehouse workers are voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). This union drive, among a largely Black workforce, has gotten the attention of the U.S. labor movement and the Democratic Party. The campaign has been publicly endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Stacey Abrams, actor Danny Glover, along with the National Football League and Major League Baseball Players Associations. Even President Joe Biden spoke about the advantage unions provide “for Black and Brown workers.” What is going on?
Amazon hired hundreds of thousands of workers during the pandemic lockdown and grossed a record $386 billion in sales, netting more than $22 billion in profit. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos got much richer during the pandemic while Amazon workers worked in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. Many were infected with Covid-19. Amazon has rewarded them by taking back the $2 wage increase with unlimited unpaid time off that workers received during the height of the pandemic.
Crumbs for workers, preparation for world war
Some billionaires and their politician flunkies want to cover up the obscene exploitation, racism and inequality of capitalism. These finance capital imperialists have ruled much of the world since World War II, but now Chinese and Russian imperialists are challenging their liberal world order. As they prepare for world war these Big Fascists, led by the Democratic Party, need a working class that has some minimum belief in U.S. capitalism. And they need the Big Tech billionaires to fall in line and get ready to pay up. President Joe Biden is already planning on raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires. War against China and Russia won’t be cheap.
So to win some working-class support, some capitalists want to give us $15 an hour, or a union at Amazon, or a stimulus check, or some controls on the racist cops. These are crumbs and they won’t last. Capitalism will never work for the working class. It has to go. As we fight to support the Amazon workers, let’s organize for workers to run the world. That’s the communist future that we need.
Amazon workers take the lead
The Amazon campaign has become a flashpoint in the struggle of low-wage workers, Black and Latin workers in particular, following the fast-food “Fight for $15” campaign. Following the mass antiracist uprising this past summer, the union drive has been linked to the fight against racism in Alabama, with its bloody racist history.
Amazon has defeated previous unionizing efforts and is waging an all-out effort here. It says its starting wage of $15 an hour is more than double the Alabama minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.  Amazon has posted anti-union messages throughout the warehouse, including in bathroom stalls, and uses social media to attack the union. Amazon even asked county officials to change the timing of the traffic light outside the warehouse so that union organizers would have less time to approach workers leaving the plant (NPR, 3/12).
Amazon workers outside of Alabama have also been fighting back, signing petitions for PPE and improved health and safety; striking and taking job actions for more water stations, the rehiring of fired workers and paid time off.  New York City, where Amazon workers deliver 2.5 million packages a day, has seen workers fighting back in the Queens and Staten Island warehouses.
Democratic Party uses unions to control Big Tech
Bezos and his billionaire Big Tech cousins at Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are all heavy contributors to Biden and the Democrats, much more than to the Republicans (Observer.com, 11/2/20). Amazon bought ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications supporting legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. But many in the Democratic Party see the need to reign in and regulate Big Tech more closely. Unionization is one way of regulating them. In addition, fresh from the victories in Georgia that helped elect ‘Jim Crow’ Joe Biden and two Democratic Senators, the Dems are using the unions as a battering ram to win Black workers to take the South away from the violently racist pro-Trump forces.
Communism means workers’ power
The Progressive Labor Party’s strategy for leading the working class to power has always rested on the foundation that Black workers are the key leadership force for revolution. This has led us to focus on organizing in the auto industry, healthcare, and mass transit. Amazon, with more than one million workers in the U.S., is now the single largest concentration of young Black and Latin workers. PLP needs to be there, as much for what our ideas can bring as for what we can learn and the leadership that Amazon workers can give to our movement.
Let us make this a Red Amazon Summer by introducing hundreds of Amazon workers to revolutionary communist ideas of PLP.

ISTANBUL, Turkey – On February 15, 2,300 municipal workers in the city district of Kadıköy boldly went on strike against the poverty wages offered by the local bosses. These essential workers, who have carried on throughout the pandemic, are being “rewarded” with miserable pay, strike-breakers, and a sellout of their fight.
When workers in different parts of the world seek to increase their militancy and sharpen the contradictions of the class struggle, we find ourselves attacked not only by the capitalist bosses and politicians but also by the fake-left trade union misleaders.
Striking workers in Istanbul and everywhere else need and deserve the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) as the only force that can crush the bosses and their profit system and build a worker-run world.
Workers fight back, bosses sabotage the struggle
To mark the beginning of the strike, masses of workers gathered in front of the Kadiköy municipal building in the cold February air to confront the bosses over stalled union contract negotiations. Many workers aired their grievances and put forward reform demands.
A striking worker said that their demands included a wage hike, improved schedules and more of a say in decision-making. He said, "We are garbage collectors for about 360 days in a 365-day year. But when it comes to bargaining, we become ‘cleaner brothers and sisters’" (Spectre, 3/4). He said that some workers were fired for not saying “Hello” when a supervisor greeted them.  
An office worker felt empowered by the strike and said that almost all workers were participating. She said that they want a free nursery for working mothers and a day off for March 8, International Working Women's Day. But she said the main demand was for a wage increase that keeps up with inflation.
Despite growing worker enthusiasm and support, the strike was abruptly called off just two days later by the central leadership of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK*) General Service Union (Genel-Is) after a secret meeting with the bosses. Hundreds demonstrated in front of the municipal building saying, "We don't recognize any agreement that was signed without us” (Evrensel Daily).
The bosses falsely claimed that they offered a 38 percent wage hike, and many people began to question why the workers were rejecting such a “generous offer.” At the same time, the social-democratic Republican People Party (CHP) politicians sent scabs to help defeat the strike.
Still, many students and workers showed solidarity with the workers as they continued to hold rallies. Public workers in Maltepe, Ataşehir, and Kartal also threatened to strike. In Maltepe, workers had called a strike for February 22, but the union’s central leadership called it off when the Istanbul municipality sent scabs to cross the picket lines.
All of these municipalities that have attacked the workers are controlled by the CHP, the main “opposition” party to the Erdogan government (AKP). Like their U.S. labor and Democratic Party counterparts, they share much of AKP’s anti-worker neoliberal policies. They are the “loyal opposition,” loyal to the racist profit system and the bosses’ dictatorship. A boss is a boss is a boss. We need to crush them all!
Battle lines sharpening—fight for communist revolution
The class struggle and ruling class splits within Turkey are connected to the bosses’ disagreements on how to best manage the country’s growing international clout. Under the Erdogan regime, Turkey has been trying to become more of a regional power in the Middle East, sending troops into Syria and buying advanced weapons from Russia despite being a member of NATO and long-time ally of U.S. imperialism.
They were the first to point the finger at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman in the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in 2018, but this was not coming from any place of compassion for human life. Like all capitalist bosses, the Turkish ruling class are opportunistic thieves who make and break alliances as it suits their profit needs. As imperialist battle lines are sharpening, they are trying to play off both sides of conflicts between superpowers like the U.S. and China in order to advance their own interests (see CHALLENGE, 1/21).
We need a future that neither sacrifices workers up to a deadly pandemic or as fodder for imperialist war. We need true workers’ power. From Istanbul to Soweto, from New York to Bogota, we need communist revolution to build a world that meets the needs of the international working class. PLP is fighting to be the Party that will lead us there.