The ongoing fallout from the Texas power collapse, in the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and the grim milestone of 500,000 lives lost to the coronavirus pandemic, shows the world that the rot of U.S. capitalism extends to infrastructure, liberal democracy, and health care. Devastated parents found a perfectly healthy 11-year-old boy frozen to death overnight in his bed (Houston Chronicle, 2/18). He died because the depraved power bosses value maximum profit over the most basic human needs of the working class.
For workers in and around the Gulf Coast, the bosses’ callous negligence led to massive misery and untold dozens of deaths. As many as 17 million workers lived under “boil water” orders in Texas alone. Half a million remain without water as we go to press, three weeks after a winter storm broke the state’s fragile electrical power grid (CNN, 3/1). Facing the rising global power of China, the U.S. rulers have a big problem. U.S. workers will be less than eager to fight and die for a ruling class that cannot provide drinking water or heat in brutal winters. Capitalism can’t be “regulated” into serving workers’ needs. As U.S. capitalism lurches from one unprecedented crisis to the next, we must see the bosses’ reform efforts for what they are: fascist preparations for wider war.
The Texas power disaster is above all a lesson in the anarchy and cruelty that lie at the core of capitalism. Because the bosses are driven to gain profit every step of the way, from energy resource extraction to power generation to its delivery to people’s homes, the grid is drained of the capacity to deliver electricity when and where it is most needed.
Domestic energy: backbone of small fascism
The power collapse reflects a widening split within the U.S. ruling class. The Texas energy model is essentially unregulated, a capitalist "free market" in all its glory. Independent Texas power arrangements date back over a century. They were a move by domestic energy producers to escape federal regulations and taxes that benefit multinational finance capital, the Big Fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class now fronted by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The openly racist Small Fascists, like the Republicans who run Texas, are desperate for maximum short-term profits. They have no interest in contributing more of their spoils in taxes to maintain the far-flung and floundering U.S. empire. The Big Fascists need a more reliable infrastructure and more "sacrifice"—most of all from their fellow capitalists—to prepare for war with China. That translates to more regulation and higher rates of corporate taxation. Beyond funding for war, the finance capitalist liberals know they need to provide at least a minimum standard of living to give workers a society that seems worth fighting and dying for.
Big fascism: still the main danger
After Donald Trump’s unlikely rise to the White House, a taste of presidential power has motivated the Small Fascists to stay on the offensive. Their defiance of the liberal bosses exposes the weakness of the main wing’s ability to discipline its own class. The Small Fascists kicked off 2021 with a failed coup that was cheered on by Trump, who still refuses to accept his loss to Biden at the polls. To date, they’ve had zero price to pay. At the February 28 convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump flaunted his gutter racist movement’s tenacity: “We’re not starting new parties. We have the Republican Party” (CPAC Convention, 2/28).
The liberal Big Fascists are faced with mounting challenges to stay in control in their own backyard while fending off rivals like China and Russia. At stake are the long-term needs of U.S. imperialism. Meanwhile, the underfunded U.S. infrastructure is falling down around their ears. The latest power grid failure, along with raging wildfires in California and roving blackouts across the country, is in line with a 2017 warning from the American Society of Civil Engineers. It gave the nation’s infrastructure a “D+,” meaning that conditions were “mostly below standard,” exhibiting “significant deterioration,” with a “strong risk of failure”(Council on Foreign Relations, September, 2020).
The Big Fascists’ big plans are currently stuck in neutral. Though the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, they’re struggling to enact relatively modest efforts to shore up working-class loyalty to U.S. capitalism. A $15 minimum wage, student loan forgiveness, and stimulus checks are all currently on hold. Sooner or later, the only option left for the liberal imperialists will be to move toward open fascism, both to smash their Small Fascist rivals and attempt to control an angry working class. Growing calls from House Democrats to “deplatform” Fox News for its sins of building the Trump phenomenon (politico.com, 2/22,) must be understood in this light.
In imposing their final solution—fascism—the liberal rulers are playing catch-up with more unified ruling classes, like China’s, who wield tighter control over state power and infrastructure.
Illusions about the U.S. decline lead some workers to ask “how in this country” could we have older people and children dying in bed from the cold. But this kind of atrocity is what U.S.-led capitalism has imposed internationally since it became the top superpower after World War II. It’s just a hint of the ruthlessness to come. The global war U.S. imperialism is now planning will wipe out populations. It will devastate the natural environment. It will make today’s atrocities pale by comparison.
Capitalism = profit over workers
Communism = abolition of profit
Communist revolution is the one and only force in history ever to stop the imperialists in their tracks. The towering achievements of Soviet and Chinese workers in turning imperialist war into communist revolution are still the wind in our sails. True, those achievements have been reversed by a resurgence of the profit system. The brave victory of Vietnamese workers over the U.S. imperialist war machine in the 1970s did not produce a communist Vietnam. But it once again proved the power of communist-led workers to defeat imperialism.
As to picking up the pieces to build a world where workers don’t die in their beds, we communists are supremely confident. Once we smash the dictatorship of the liberal capitalist bosses, a working-class dictatorship can fix problems that today are unsolvable. We’ll succeed where the bosses have failed because we’ll abolish profit as the driving force behind every economic and political decision.
The racist, sexist profit system gives workers terrible choices, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge. Workers can freeze to death in Texas ice storms, burn to death in California wildfires, die in secret in a New York nursing home, or be slaughtered by a rain of U.S. missiles in Syria. Only communism can abolish the murderous chaos that’s engineered by capitalism. Our liberation lies in discarding fascists both large and small, to create a world run by and for workers. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!
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Workers’ caravan hits bosses’ racist gentrification
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- 05 March 2021 100 hits
INGLEWOOD, CA, February 28— “No good landlords in a capitalist system!” This and other antiracist chants rang throughout neighborhoods here during a car caravan against racist gentrification and displacement of mainly Black and Latin residents.
Fighting for a communist world requires having confidence in, and relying on, the working class. It means developing collective planning, organization and discipline so that it becomes second nature to our members and our class. And, it means giving bold, communist, political leadership in the class struggle.
In a small way, the struggle by a local tenants’ union and a non-profit organization to reclaim a house by and for an evicted family has become a political training ground for Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and our fellow working class fighters.
Racist gentrification attacks all workers
With the building of So-Fi, a brand new football stadium, and starting construction of an arena for the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, the predominantly Black and Latin city of Inglewood has become a center of gentrification in the Los Angeles area. Since 2016, skyrocketing property values have led to huge rent increases that preceded a 2019 rent control law. Even with the law, the city administration’s complete failure to enforce housing code regulations has continued to allow blood-sucking landlords to force tenants to move and then jack up rents.
Another aspect of racist gentrification has been the appearance of small-time crooks like Trojan Capital Investments, buying up “distressed” mortgages, evicting working-class homeowners and then selling to make a bundle on their blood money investments. The need for multiracial, working class unity in this city could not be more evident.
Connecting past struggle to present
The caravan planning committee, made up mostly of young Latin members of the tenants’ union, drew enthusiasm from a community-building workshop held the prior weekend. That event highlighted the historic role of the Communist Party-led Unemployed Councils, which led the 1930s Depression-era fight against evictions, houselessness, unemployment and racism.
That presentation, given by a PLP member, displayed pictures of the conditions faced by the working class, and how our class fought back then They highlighted the similarity of those conditions to present-day hunger, houselessness, unemployment, looming evictions and police terror. The speaker also underlined the communist-led, anti-racist, multi-racial unity of those past struggles. Though that communist-led movement won some reforms, it failed to overthrow the entire capitalist system with revolution. But it’s capitalism that is the cause of the evils our class faced then and still faces now. The whole damn capitalist system has to go.
Almost 50 people in 35 cars participated in the caravan, part of an escalating campaign to force Trojan to return the house to the family at a reasonable price. We also brought the message of tenant/homeowner unity to help energize our class brothers and sisters in the fight against gentrification. The campaign organizers had previously canvassed the surrounding neighborhoods. Workers responded enthusiastically to our signs and message, taking literature, raising their fists and even joining our militant chants. The caravan ended at an apartment complex directly across from SoFi. One of the tenants at the complex spoke and exposed the lousy, mold-ridden conditions that the landlord there refuses to repair.
From the chants to the warm solidarity shown to the tenant and homeowner speakers, the energy and spirit of the young people who organized the caravan was on full display. One speaker attacked the role of local poli-tricksters in promoting racist gentrification, and vowed to keep up the fight to defeat this scourge to the working class. Another called for ridding the world of a system where housing remains a commodity. All of the speakers have been working closely with members of PLP on this campaign. They have been extremely open to our call for revolution.
Communists will lead the working class to victory
Going forward, we have great opportunities to build our Party. About 25 people at the caravan took the latest copy of CHALLENGE. The campaign to reclaim the family’s home will continue. Mass evictions, temporarily put on hold by the bosses’ phony state “moratoriums”, will inevitably raise their ugly head again.
Meanwhile, inter-imperialist rivalry between U.S. and Chinese bosses will lead to world war. These cataclysms will require a mass response from the working class, led by our Party, taking inspiration and learning from both the strengths and the weaknesses of our predecessors in the old communist Party-led movement.
The “hard knocks” experiences of the working class will validate the slogan that “the only solution is communist revolution.” Through the small struggles of today, we are training ourselves and the working class how to seize and hold power, and build a world where decent housing and everything else, which workers will collectively produce, will be shared according to need.J
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International Working Women’s Day: Only communism can eradicate sexism
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- 05 March 2021 93 hits
Under capitalism the education system is driven by individualism, identity politics, and a fractured way of learning. Once a year during International Women’s Month, students learn about women artists, scientists, politicians and millionaires. International Working Women’s Day (March 8) is a holiday originally born from the working class as an antisexist celebration of women in the class struggle.
Yet, without communist analysis or leadershipthis holiday has been reduced to celebrating our oppressors of a different gender—women who are a part of and a proponent of the ruling class and their sexist ideas.
The Black communist Angela Davis says to be radical simply means “grasping at the root” and at the root of every worker’s struggle, especially a woman’s struggle, is capitalism. In other words, a network of global bosses committing crimes against workers for the sake of ridiculous amounts of profit. To keep this profit flowing, capitalist-driven schools are designed to train the next generation to be obedient workers or join the ranks of militaries to fight overseas in imperialist wars. Under capitalism students will never learn what it means to be a revolutionary—it is only through confidence in the working class and struggle that our Party will grow.
One of the pillars of capitalism is the sexist ideology that family and household responsibilities are “women’s work.” For many women workers around the world this work is unpaid and is expected ON TOP OF the work that is required at a paying job. Women workers internationally experience the contradiction of a system that tells workers it’s designed to be equal while simultaneously robbing or hiding their labor value from them. Capitalist bosses pump sexist ideology into mass media, schooling and laws to successfully isolate mothers and women caregivers from other workers and their potential to build working-class power.
This same system perpetuates the lie that women’s power is attained by becoming a better capitalist, maybe a manager or boss or by voting for a woman politician who will somehow represent their collective interests.
Progressive Labor Party declares that in a fight for a world where sexism, racism and exploitation is completely SMASHED, workers need to unite—of all genders— to reject sexist and liberal ideas and resolve these contradictions through communism. A boss—regardless of gender—is still a boss. It is only as a united working-class that we will break our chains.
A woman's place is in the class struggle
Revolutionary women grow through struggle and the contradictions that working-class women learn become sharper when they unite with other workers around the world. For example, housekeeping for hotels and business offices is one of the hardest jobs in any industry (they have more injuries than coal miners). In 2018, to demand better working conditions, thousands of housekeepers from 26 hotels throughout Chicago went on strike for a whole year! One woman worker stated that while she worked at the Hyatt Regency, out of the 200 housekeepers there, a third were Mexican, a third were Chinese, and most of the women with the highest seniority were Black. Bosses began to divide the department by race, paying the Chinese women to clean extra rooms above the cleaning quote of $5 per room. At first the Black and Mexican women were angry toward the Chinese women but instead of turning on each other, the women organized against the bosses!
“We could win a lower room quota with an hourly raise for everyone if we stayed together” (CPUSA, 3/20). The more workers fight back, the more we learn that we need all workers - Black, Latin, Asian, indigenous and white to win.
In the 1960s, women of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican revolutionary group, sought to challenge sexist ideologies and practices within Latin American culture and demanded that their male leaders make smashing sexism a priority. Members, such as Connie Cruz and Gloria Rodriguez understood that ‘machismo’ (overly aggressive masculinity) was a result of capitalism and emphasized that to fight it, this capitalist system must be destroyed.
In 1917, Latin workers were ordered to accept toxic “baths” as they crossed the Mexican-American border. Inspectors attempted to pull women off of a trolley on their way to work but the brave fighters refused, knowing some of the workers were photographed nude or previously set on fire. 17-year old Carmelita Torres led the fight with other women domestic workers, demanding a refund of their trolley fare and convinced hundreds more women and men to protest the racist, sexist terror.
All of these women workers were catapulted into their revolutionary potential by making a decision to build a base and fight-back against their rotten living and working conditions. Their leadership shows that sustainable change cannot be done alone but manifests when workers organize with other workers who agree that ‘enough is enough.’
Women will lead an international communist revolution
Women workers should be communists because mainstream feminism often fails to consider class analysis and race. PLP is anti-sexist and recognizes that in our fight for communist revolution it is the most super-exploited members of our class that have the sharpest analysis and ability to lead. Women workers internationally who have fought racism, sexism, and capitalism are at the front lines of our fight, united with every member of our class.
The Progressive Labor Party is, and has always been committed to communist revolution and struggling with men and women to fight against deceitful bosses around racism, sexism and all forms of exploitation. PLP understands that sexism is one of the exploitative tools utilized by the bosses to divide men and women workers, and to justify assaults, verbal attacks or paying women less.
Organizing with all workers, especially Black and Latin women workers who see these contradictions the sharpest is paramount to smash this system that has us all in a wretched bind. The more hands we can turn into fists in favor of an international working class, the more we can work towards a society free of exploitation and terror. Fight for communism!
PLP and friends gathered virtually for our annual
Black and Red Celebration, giving tribute to the leadership
of Black communists. CHALLENGE readers are invited
to view the event by clicking here.
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Transit workers expose cheating CTA, deserve a worker-run system
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- 05 March 2021 103 hits
CHICAGO, February 23—Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined with Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) workers for a multiracial “Hour of Power” rally today at the 95 Street transit station to protest the sellout union leaders. These misleaders work hand in hand with the transit bosses, helping them stay in control. Transit, when run in the interest of profit, can never function to sustain the working-class necessities. PLP members call for communism, working-class power, where transit workers will not only keep move the city but also steer the world.
Commuters and drivers passing by honked their horns in support while we held signs and picketed the bus/rail terminal, denouncing the union misleaders. Workers from Locals 241 and 308 who drive the buses and the trains in Chicago are spreading the word on how they have been shut out of negotiations for a new contract with the city.
Speakers on the bullhorn demanded hazard pay, sanitized facilities and vehicles, two-person crews, more full-time jobs and job security, paid sick time for all employees, and member control of their unions. These demands are ripe for struggle class where workers and communists can push the limits of these reforms to fight the whole system.
Workers were receptive to PLP members who distributed 50 copies of CHALLENGE while helping lead chants against racism, for worker unity, and for communist revolution.
Under capitalism, especially one in decline like the U.S.’s, public transit operations are chronically underfunded to the point of physical collapse. They routinely put workers in mortal danger. Their role is to shuttle us to and from our jobs in order to make profits for this racist profit system.
Communist control of transportation means always having the proper resources and safety protocols in place to protect our class. Smashing the bosses’ state dictatorship and erecting a working-class dictatorship through an international PLP is the only route that will guarantee safe mass transit.
CTA and union attack – Workers unite, fight back
CTA is the second largest transit system in the country, and has a mostly Black workforce. Whenever there are contract negotiations, the bosses attack the workers in an effort to keep wages down and to try to turn public sentiment against them. By failing to address dangers during the pandemic, the racist CTA bosses and their union hacks are responsible for at least eight deaths and 900 workers having contracted the Covid-19 virus (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/20/20).
The union misleadership has worked for decades to alienate transit workers from meetings and contract discussions. Although boasting 3,000 members, it is rare to have 50 workers attend a general meeting. Now, in a period of virtual calls, worker input about job conditions has become even more limited.
In spite of these attempts to shut them out, workers have bravely pushed back against the racist working conditions. Many have organized meetings to address concerns, defying CTA and the union’s attempts to retaliate against them for doing so (see CHALLENGE letters, 4/16/20). PLP have supported these efforts to build multiracial, rank-and-file solidarity as the way for our class to grasp our potential power outside the limits of the bosses’ institutions.
A route to workers’ power
The power of a militant and united transit workforce can hardly be understated. If more workers were to reject both the bosses and their collaborating unions and organize on behalf of our class interest, we could shut both the rails and the roads down and bring the capitalist system to its knees. As conditions become evermore untenable and communist ideas grip our class, this level of class struggle will rise again.
But in PLP, we’re not just about shutting the profit system down; we’re about wiping it out entirely. A worker-run communist society would make our class’s needs as the determining factor of all decisions. With that, we will rebuild and expand mass transit in a way that meets our collective needs and that operates in the most environmentally healthy ways possible.
The finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class is more and more worried about their worldwide imperialist empire. Represented by President Joe Biden, they are ramping up their calls to rebuild a failing U.S. infrastructure (see editorial, page 2), but only to better prepare their country and the working class for future imperialist war.
PLP calls on workers to reject both wings of the U.S. bosses and fight for a future where our power and safety always comes first. That’s communism. Join us!
