KEARNY, NJ, January 18—A  multiracial, multi-generational crowd of antiracists and communists gathered on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention death camps, where 21 workers have died in the past year. Progressive Labor Party and friends seized the day by sharing our ideas with working-class fighters and putting communist tactics into practice.
Incarcerated workers in New Jersey have been protesting their imprisonment and fighting back against the inhumane conditions of the rulers’ for-profit jails. Members of the working class from the Congo, Haiti, Honduras, and all worldwide are being forced to live cramped on top of other workers with rats, improper medical care, and all-around neglect. Our class is also experiencing the effects of capitalism in crisis with a raging pandemic to boot. It is the fight of all workers–Black, Latin, Asian, Arab, and white to smash these cages built by both Small Fascists like Donald Trump and the multiracial coalition of Big Fascists like the U.S. President Joe Biden.
Keep communist politics primary
For the last few years, members of PLP have actively fought alongside workers from Movimiento Cosecha to smash the racist division between undocumented and documented workers. With Covid-19 hitting Black and Latin communities at an alarming rate, the struggle and fight have only intensified. In NJ, ICE death camps have the highest rate of Covid-19 in the country (NJ.com, 6/21) and deportation flights have been linked to the confirmed spread of Covid-19 in more than 11 countries (CIDRAP, 1/19). (See article, page 5).
When PLP heard the call that Anti-ICE organizers planned to protest these conditions on MLK Day, we jumped at the opportunity. The plan was to take a heavily trafficked truck route, but as soon as we arrived there were already cops dressed in riot gear. Plans to occupy a large bridge with a small number of workers made our group feel unsafe and put the optics of militancy over building working-class power. We all agreed to talk to workers involved in organizing the event to collectively and dialectically decide a new course of action.
Build confidence in the working class
We knew we were in the presence of friends when one Black worker said, “The reason ICE exists and Martin [Luther King Jr] was killed are connected–CAPITALISM.” We found some faces in the crowd of workers that we met at previous antiracist protests in the summer around the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two Black workers murdered by kkkops.
As a way to unite struggles, one PL’er chanted, “Citizen and undocumented, same enemy same fight, workers of the world unite!” After a series of speeches, one organizer said while there were fewer protesters than expected, police retaliation was still a possibility. We planned to see how far we could go along the route and keep making communist politics primary.
We marched on the sidewalks along the truck route, shared CHALLENGE with truck drivers, and shouted “worker” as a substitute for “people” in chants. Those marching paused for us to make small speeches about the relationship between racist state terror and the profit system. The bosses divide workers by super exploiting and criminalizing some sections of our class while using the threat of deportations and police to keep us in line. Of course, no worker is free until all are free. We are proud to call ourselves “workers.” The “people” in the ruling class are our exploiters who will one day be smashed by a communist revolution.  Many workers appreciated this. In response, we gave them CHALLENGE.
Not pro-worker, just nationalist
On his first day in office, Big Fascist Joe Biden signed an executive order halting “most” deportations for 100 days. The same day, antiracist fighters in Portland, Oregon were tear-gassed and terrorized by fascist pigs for hurling rocks at both ICE and U.S. Democratic Party facilities (ABC News, 1/21).
Days later, Biden instructed the U.S. Justice Department to stop contracting with private prisons but exempted ICE. Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who gave supporters of Small Fascist Trump moral support earlier in the day, before they stormed the U.S. Capitol, successfully sued the halt in deportations (Time, 1/26).  
Contrast this with Biden silence on the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala William Popp, a previous appointee of Trump, endorsed the violent repression of more than 9,000 migrants at the hands of Mexican and Guatemalan bosses' police forces (Bangkok Post, 1/23). The Biden administration said they would refuse these workers fleeing hurricane-stricken Honduras. They will only afford some concessions for the documented and undocumented workers that are already present domestically, but not the ones that are currently fleeing their homes due to U.S. bosses’ imperialist crises.
Biden doesn’t care about workers in the U.S. or internationally. His goal is to convince workers that their loyalty lies with the U.S.bosses, and not with our class brothers and sisters who risk their lives crossing their deadly borders. Biden will use nationalism disguised as multiculturalism to build a war-ready nation to fight U.S.’s imperialist rivals China and Russia. PLP says turn this imperialist war into a class war to smash all borders.
 Hate nationalism? You might be a communist
When workers refuse to identify with any of the bosses’ nations and make the choice to unite around our class’s common interests, we are showing other workers what it takes to build communism. PLP is an international, communist party that’s committed to fighting racism, sexism, and exploitation in our neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. The class struggle may reveal a communist inside all of us! Join PLP to join the fight!

We have heard a lot about mutated viruses and whether they are more contagious or more deadly than the original Covid-19 virus from Wuhan. Covid-19 has been multiplying countless times around the world. Capitalism has been unable to control the pandemic and the resultant infinite viral replications that are occurring are resulting in more dangerous mutants. As CHALLENGE has pointed out (See Page 8, February 3, 2021), the chaotic nature of capitalism in crisis combined with massive inequality has resulted in the uncontrolled spread of the virus in most countries.
What is a mutated virus?
Genetic information is stored in two types of molecules, Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA which is a double-stranded nucleic acid, and Ribonucleic acid or RNA which is a single-stranded nucleic acid. Frederick Engels wrote in the Dialectics Of Nature, “Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies….” The DNA molecule consists of two strands that wind around each other like a twisted ladder. The DNA and RNA molecules contain the codes for the proteins that are the building blocks of all life.
Viruses have none of the metabolic machinery needed to produce the proteins needed to replicate. Covid-19 is a virus that contains RNA. It is an RNA virus. Covid-19 only reproduces when it is in a cell that is capable of allowing the viral RNA to take over the cell’s metabolic machinery and produce the proteins needed to replicate. Sometimes, when the RNA is being replicated, an inexact replica is made and the resultant viral particle does not survive. Most of the time replicating errors or mutations are harmful to the virus. Rarely the mutation results in a viral particle that is more efficient at traveling from one person to another or at penetrating a cell or causing more severe disease or resistance to a vaccine.
Healthcare for profit limits the fight against Covid-19
It is more likely that these mutations will be identified if the viruses being isolated from people have their RNA sequenced. In the U.S. this has been done for about 0.3 percent of viral isolates (Forbes, 1/8). In other countries, the viral sequencing has been more thorough, but not nearly enough to keep up with the rate of mutations. A big factor limiting sequencing is that capitalism struggles to organize science or health care if it isn’t highly profitable. The lack of coordination and organization has characterized the global response of capitalism to the pandemic in general and sequencing in particular.
Describing the sequencing problems in the state, California Public Radio said “The lab network remains fragmented, and there isn’t substantial collaboration facilitated by the state, …[for example] the state’s new diagnostic laboratory in Valencia is not equipped for genomic sequencing, [and] has limited ability to send samples to outside labs for this work” (capradio.org 2/1).
As the virus has mutated, capitalist chaos limiting sequencing around the globe is becoming a factor, along with things like racist dilapidated health care systems and massive inequality, that has allowed the virus to continue to spread.
Our class, the working class, has suffered horribly because of the callous disregard of the capitalist rulers. Only when the working class seizes power will we be able to create a society where our health is the primary concern of the healthcare system. Capitalism will not put the health of the working class above their profits. It must be smashed.

The anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration camp on January 27, 1945, shows how the communists defeated fascism.  
May 1945 was the end of one of the most horrendous capitalist systems the world has suffered. The fascist Nazi government of Germany led by Adolph Hitler was defeated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin. Today there are many anticommunist lies about World War II, the Nazi period, and especially about the role of the then-socialist Soviet Union in smashing the fascist German forces. As we commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, let’s refute some of those lies.
Liberals and conservatives lie about World War II
The capitalist media never stops rewriting history. In the Public Broadcasting System’s series “The Messengers,” one of the episodes begins with someone saying: “My biggest mistake was to believe that the Red Army won World War II” (PBS, 1995). The Red Army did win World War II. Nine out of 10 German casualties were at the hands of the Red Army.
The liberal PBS is not alone in lying about WWII. In 1995 the “historian” of the U.S. House of Representatives, Christina Jeffrey, was fired when it was publicized that in 1986 she had criticized a school curriculum on the Holocaust by complaining that the perspectives of the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were not included in it (New York Times, 1/11/95).
The truth about the Nazis
In 1933, Hitler took power with the support of most of the German bosses. He began what he thought was going to be the “Thousand-Year Reich [empire]”. He ordered the building of the Dachau, Oranienburg, and Buchenwald concentration camps. These were the first of what was to become 900 big and small concentration camps that existed until the end of the war. One of Hitler’s first decrees introduced the concept of Schutzhaft – preventive imprisonment of “enemies of the state.” First, last, and always, these were mainly communists.
Hitler was very specific about the role of these camps. “Brutality inspires respect … The masses need someone to inspire fear and make them tremble and submissive … I don’t want concentration camps to become family housing. Terror is the most efficient political instrument  ... Those who are discontent and disobey us will think twice before confronting us if they know what is waiting for them in the concentration camps.”
The Red Army liberated Auschwitz
Twelve years later, the Third Reich’s “thousand-year” reign of terror was cut short by the communist movement. Around 3 p.m. on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops of the First Ukrainian Front of the advancing Red Army, led by Marshal Ivan S. Konev, saw a sign that read: “Arbeit Macht Frei” – “Work Makes You Free” – on the top of the main gate of Auschwitz. The Nazis called these death camps  “labor camps.”
These troops saw with their own eyes what up to then was only a suspicion based on messages smuggled out from the concentration camps: the incarceration and systematic elimination of Jewish and Romani workers, and political “deviates” (read: pro-communists). It was all part of the plan created by the top leadership of the Third Reich, which murdered millions (El Mundo, 1/8/95).
The Red Army troops found 7,000 prisoners. These prisoners were left behind by the Nazis because they were too weak to move (and, despite the efforts by the Red Army to save them, many died). A few days earlier, knowing the Red Army was getting closer to Auschwitz, Hitler ordered the camp closed. On January 18, the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel-elite Nazi squadron)–Hitler’s killer-troops—led the “March of Death” of 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners to Buchenwald, another death camp. Thousands of prisoners died on this march.
But the United States had delayed entering World War II for at least a year. They were hoping the Nazis and the Soviet Union would weaken each other. So the 42nd and 45th Divisions of the U.S. Army did not get to the Buchenwald concentration camp until April 11, just a few weeks before the Red Army liberated Berlin and ended the war. But the 5,000 prisoners that remained at Buchenwald had organized a rebellion and had killed most of the SS guards. The same thing happened at Dachau when at 9 a.m. on April 29, dozens of prisoners stopped the SS men from eliminating all the inmates by fighting them. It was not until nine hours later, at 6 p.m., that the 42nd and 45th Divisions entered Dachau and joined the fight, which lasted until the early morning of April 30. 30,000 survived the order, issued by Heinrich Himmler, chief of Hitler’s SS, to kill all the prisoners. But it was the rebelling prisoners that saved these lives. Many more would have been saved if the U. S. had not delayed entering the war.
The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis
Today the capitalist regimes in Poland, Ukraine, Finland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, deny that the populations of these lands were “liberated” at all (though Jewish organizations continue to insist that the Red Army were indeed liberators). Everything is being done to excuse the Polish, British, French, and U.S. capitalist rulers, who sabotaged all efforts to stop Hitler. Instead, these capitalist rulers urged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union and put a stop to the communist movement, and the socialist Soviet Union, which did everything possible to stop the Nazis and whose troops ultimately beat the fascist scum.

Phillip Lawrence Batton, a member of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) for more than half a century, who advanced the working class as a thinker, teacher, singer, and self-taught linguist, died on January 22 after fighting off a series of illnesses.
Phil was born in 1939 in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a segregated steel mill town just outside of Pittsburgh. He grew up in the shadow of where his father worked for most of his life. But were it not  for his talent for football, he might have followed his father to work at U.S. Steel Clairton Coke Works. An athletic and fearless sophomore halfback on Clairton’s varsity football team, Phil incurred a serious head and neck injury that left him temporarily paralyzed. He recovered, and though his left side was atrophied, he never lost the graceful swagger to his stride and gestures.
Phil’s accident made him eligible for a free college education, and he seized the opportunity. The first person in his family to attend college, he graduated from California State Teachers College. Having taught himself Spanish as a teenager, Phil became fluent after living with a family in Mexico City in the summer of his junior year. Armed with his degree, Phil applied for teaching jobs at local schools, only to be rebuffed by racist administrators who’d ask, “What position did you come to apply for—janitor?”  
In 1963, Phil moved to New York City and East 100th Street. His roommate was Harvey Mason, who became a lifelong friend and comrade. Soon Phil became a Spanish teacher at JHS 117 and Harbor JHS for the Performing Arts in East Harlem—El Barrio. There Phil was radicalized by City College students who’d joined Progressive Labor Movement, a newly formed communist organization that took the lead in breaking the travel ban to Cuba, fighting back against police terror, and organizing anti-imperialist resistance to the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, after PLM grew into Progressive Labor Party, Phil joined and became a club leader in the New York teacher work.
Phil made another huge contribution as a member of the PLP Singers, who created two memorable albums of anti-racist and communist songs in the early 1970s: “Power to the Working Class” and “A World to Win.” Phil’s rich bass-baritone voice anchored the group’s harmonies. His solos on songs like “Clifford Glover” and “They Shall Rule the Earth” were sweet and strong and lyrical, with unforgettable moments of understated emotion. He was always willing to rehearse and perform and spread the ideas of PLP through music.  
Though an unpretentious man of few words, Phil could sing or say or write them in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, or Chinese, all of which he’d learned on his own. He translated numerous articles into Spanish for CHALLENGE and other PLP publications. His astute critical analysis lives on in publication.
Phil continued to teach at JHS 117 until he retired and moved to Iowa City, Iowa, to study for a master’s degree in anthropology. Then he returned to New York to teach medical Spanish at physicians’ assistant certification programs at Bronx Lebanon Hospital and Harlem Hospital. Phil traveled several times to Brazil and once to Costa Rica. A person of boundless curiosity, someone who never stopped learning, he loved studying computer science, aviation, anthropology, Marxism-Leninism, and African and African-American history. He even built his own telescope to photograph the surface of the moon with his daughters. Phil’s love of music and film had a big impact on all of his children, but especially his eldest daughter, Rachel, who became a film and television producer.
Phil enjoyed a full social life and cherished his family and friends. His quiet charisma and jovial disposition made every room he entered a more wonderful place to be. He’d use his knowledge to spark conversation and inspire others, but never to dismiss or demean. He shared relationships with workers from all walks of life. He truly believed we are all equal.
Phil was married in 1970 to Barbara Watanabe, a fellow teacher and political organizer. They divorced in 2008, following a long separation, but remained close friends. He is survived by Barbara and their three daughters: Rachel Watanabe-Batton, Diana Emiko Batton-Fitzgerald, and Jennifer Tomiko Beaugris, his two sons-in-law, and three grandchildren.
After traversing the world near and far, Phil’s illnesses of late confined him to a Bronx nursing home. But his working-class spirit, his sense of who he was, remained strong to the end. On the last day of his life, Phil was comforted by the songs he’d recorded with the PLP Singers all those years before.