Elizabeth Catlett, a Black artist and teacher, drew inspiration from the working-class struggles of her family and neighbors and from the long history of multiracial struggles for civil rights and egalitarianism. She urged all Black artists to contribute to the fight against racism through their subject matter, to shun segregated exhibitions, and to make art that would reach a broad audience. In a 1961 speech to the National Congress of Negro Artists in Washington, D.C., in the spirt of the communist principle, “from the masses, to the masses,” Catlett said: “If we are to reach the mass of Negro people with our art, we must learn from them; then let us seek inspiration in the Negro people – a principal and never-ending source.”
Catlett’s own art consisted of semi-abstract figural sculptures, large and small, and prints, either linotypes or lithographs. Her  sculptures, carved from wood or stone or cast in bronze, deemphasize details to indicate monumental heads, powerful bodies, and, on occasion, clenched fists.  In one moving political work, Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968), a female figure lifts her head and raises her fist in the international gesture of solidarity.  Some of Catlett’s large sculpture pieces can be found in public spaces, like Olmec Bather at the National Polytechnical Institute in Mexico City or People of Atlanta in Atlanta’s City Hall.   
In her prints, Catlett created powerful images of Black people and also workers in Mexico, where she lived for many years. Sharecropper (1970) depicts a white-haired Black woman with strongly chiseled features and a straw hat, looking up and over her shoulder.  The color linotype Malcolm X Speaks for Us (1969) reflects Catlett’s identification with the civil rights struggles of the times. Other subjects include Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Frederick Douglass, and Phillis Wheatley, the African-born poet who was enslaved in Boston and died in poverty at the age of 31.
A Passionate Teacher
Catlett was born in Washington in 1915, in the heart of Jim Crow racism, the daughter of a public school teacher and a truant officer. Her father died before she was born. Catlett planned to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh for an art degree, but her scholarship was revoked when the administration discovered she was Black. She wound up studying design and painting at Howard, the historically Black university, with financial help from her mother until a scholarship came through. After earning her Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa, she taught briefly at a college in Texas and then directed the art department at Dillard University, the leading Black college in New Orleans. Teaching would be her lifelong passion.
In 1941, the year she married fellow artist Charles White, Catlett’s career took off with a first prize at the American Negro Exposition for her sculpture, Mother and Child. The couple moved to New York, where Catlett studied with Ossip Zadkine, a Russian-born French émigré, who urged her to adopt a more modernist, simplified style, and to approach art from a “humanistic international viewpoint.”
 Later she explained that her approach was to begin with her personal experiences in the U.S. and then “be projected towards international understanding, as our blues and spirituals do. They are our experience[s], but they are understood and felt everywhere”  (Romare Bearden and Henry Henderson, A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present, 1993).  
After a teaching stint at Hampton Institute in Virginia, Catlett made a political leap upon returning to New York, where she joined the George Washington Carver School, a left-leaning community art center, run on a shoestring, that filled the vacuum after the government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) art centers folded in the early 1940s.
For two years she taught sculpture and dressmaking. Like so many organizations fighting racist segregation in that era, the Washington Carver School folded under pressure from anti-communists. But working with the poor, proud, and struggling people of Harlem made a lasting impression on Catlett.
Collectivity and Struggle in Mexico
In 1946, Catlett and White moved to Mexico, where she embarked on “Negro Women,” a series of 15 linocuts.  She took up printmaking with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a collective of communist and progressive artists, and studied the work of the great Mexican muralists: Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco. After divorcing White, Catlett married painter and printmaker Francisco Mora and settled into life in Mexico.  She raised three sons and thrived in working collectively with other artists.  As she’d recall, “I learned that art is not something that people learn to do individually, that who does it is not important, but its use and its effects on people are what is most important.” Later Catlett joined the faculty of the Escuela Nacionale de Bellas Artes, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), where she became head of the sculpture department until her retirement in 1976.
Always attuned to workers’ struggles, Catlett moved within communist artistic and literary circles in Mexico City.  In 1949, as she later told a member of Progressive Labor Party, she joined with striking railroad workers and their communist supporters. Subsequently she found herself harassed by the Mexican government, which hunted U.S. expatriates considered by the F.B.I. to be “subversives.” One night, when one of her sons was ill and her husband was out giving a concert, Mexican officials barged into her home and took her in for questioning.  She spent two nights in detention before her release.  
After Catlett became a Mexican citizen in the early 1960s, the U.S. government refused to issue her a visa to re-enter the U.S., a ban that wasn’t lifted until 1971, for her major exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Nevertheless, she was a continued presence in the U.S. through her art, her participation in exhibitions, and her large following. Through her death in 2012, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Catlett never faltered  in her opposition to segregation, her fightback against racism, and her championing of working-class women and men.

As this goes to press (December 30, 2020), wealthy countries and individuals are paying their way to get their hands on scarce supplies of the new Covid-19 vaccines. In the US, health workers and long term care facility residents and workers are the designated first recipients, while most workers will have to wait months for their turn. In poor countries, the wait could be years. Global inequities of Covid-19 infections and vaccine access expose the racist and oppressive conditions of capitalism, and offer revolutionaries opportunities to up the class struggle.

The Progressive Labor Party hails the development of vaccines and urges workers to take the shots. The research to develop the mRNA type of vaccines began almost two decades ago when other viral diseases (swine flu and MERS) swept areas of the world. They are not the result of speedy experiments. Unfortunately, the profit motive and racist medical care underlying capitalism heighten our fears and mistrust even when scientists get it right.

 
In a nutshell, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines mimic a part of the covering of the Covid-19 virus called the spike and prompt the immune system to create antibodies, particles that are ready to fight the virus, if an actual infection occurs. There is no virus in the vaccine. The vaccines protect over 95% of the people getting them compared to people who did not get them.

Judging from the long history of vaccines, it is very unlikely that there are any long term ill effects. No medication is 100 percent safe, but with 81.2 million cases and over 1.77 million confirmed deaths worldwide (and over 325,000 deaths in the US), the benefits far outweigh the risks. Because capitalists are so anxious to make the economy profitable, they want the vaccines to work as safely as possible.

Racism Kills All Workers- Some A Lot More Than Others

The causes of many viral pandemics are due to capitalism’s drive to maximize profits at the expense of safe agricultural and forestry practices.

Covid-19 infections and deaths attack Black, Latin, Asian, undocumented, imprisoned, Indigenous, and poor people in general at much higher rates than others because of differences in health, jobs and housing that increase the risk of exposure and spread. In addition, increased stress due to racism and poverty, and hunger weaken our immune systems. Poor people of all backgrounds have more limited health care, allowing medical conditions, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease to develop and increase the risk of death from Covid-19.

The history of racist health experiments justifiably builds mistrust in science. Black and brown people have been used to test medications without receiving the benefits of their participation, which is often coerced by force or bribes (incentives). Procedures and medications have been tested on Black workers in the U.S. from slavery to recent times, as in the well-known Tuskegee experiments. Vaccines and treatments have been tested in Africa and other non-white areas. The CIA used people posing as immunizers in Pakistan to ensnare Bin Laden that led to increased mistrust and even the murder of vaccinators. White workers are also hurt when racist stereotypes of Black and immigrant people taking handouts from government programs have deterred some from accepting programs such as Medicaid and Obamacare.

These factors lead to reluctance to take the vaccine. This refusal endangers those who opt out and the community at large. Scientists predict that anywhere from 70-90% of the people need the shots to produce herd immunity, meaning that the virus cannot find enough people to infect.

Equitable Distribution of the Vaccines

The vaccines should be distributed to those at highest risk of contracting and dying from Covid-19. Black and brown workers in all groups are more severely impacted and so prioritizing them is part of the fight against racism. The most endangered groups include workers who:
* work in long term care facilities and the residents of these facilities.
*care for Covid-19 patients, including nurses, doctors, other providers, housekeeping, dietary staff, respiratory therapists, occupational and physical therapists, and home health aides.
*are considered essential and irreplaceable, such as workers in meat packing plants and grocery stores, Amazon warehouse workers, transportation workers, agricultural workers.
*are incarcerated in prisons and detention centers where the epidemic is raging.
*elderly people and those with underlying health conditions, who have higher rates of deaths from Covid-19.

Capitalism Is the Real Virus - Killing Capitalism Can Prevent Viral Diseases

We can avoid these viral diseases. Epidemiologists who study the spread and causes of disease have warned governments about the “coming plague” for decades. They charge the huge agribusinesses, such as Tyson’s Food, Smithfield, and other destroyers of natural habitats for spreading animal diseases to humans. The industrial scale production of meat and poultry involves crowding of genetically similar animals, which allows virulent viruses to flourish. As lands are deforested to enlarge farms, mines and living areas, people come in contact with viruses  that were previously limited to the forest. Genetically modified crops reduce the process of natural selection.

Rob Wallace, a virus hunter and epidemiologist, blames Covid-19 on the profit driven system that mandates competition, the accumulation of wealth, and trade agreements that have no consumer, environmental, or occupational protections. With global trade routes and rapid transportation across large geographic areas, infectious people and products travel quickly and widely. In the U.S. public health infrastructure has been decimated, with 700 positions cut at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hospitals closed, and not-in-time medical equipment; there was no system in place to handle the pandemic.

As long as the capitalists have enough people healthy enough to work, they don’t give a damn about us. When they need our labor, they adopt interventions like vaccines to keep the economy profitable. When pandemics rage, they are also desperate to protect themselves.

Global Access to Vaccines

Another way of illustrating the inequities of capitalism is seeing how the Covid-19 vaccines will be distributed throughout the world.  Under the auspices of the World Health Organization, a program called COVAX pools resources in order to help poorer countries gain access to the vaccines.  They have acquired only enough doses to vaccinate one out of ten people by the end of 2021. Nearly three billion people, living mostly in Africa and the southern hemisphere may not get access to a Covid-19 vaccine for years.
Rich nations represent 14% of the world’s population but have bought 53% of the developing vaccines (BBC News, 12/9/20). The richer countries are hoarding the vaccines and pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer and Moderna, have made sure their intellectual property rights are protected through international agreements. This limits the ability of production facilities in India and Africa to produce vaccines. It’s no surprise that corporations put their pursuit of profits above anything else, including the health of the world’s workers.

The rivalry between China and the US has been intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic. It has sped up efforts to disentangle the two economies and accelerated mutual distrust and antagonism. China has sent medical supplies to African nations and will send millions of vaccines to curry favor for markets and resources. The US does not have the capacity to compete. “European and American influence is on the decline in Africa, and China’s medical diplomacy will only further accelerate it” (Al Jazeera Opinion Piece, Vaccine diplomacy and the US-China rivalry in Africa, 11/7/2020).

In a recent Pew Research survey, 73% of Americans view China negatively, while Chinese media has portrayed the US as a diminishing and hostile power (Wharton-What Lies Ahead? 4/16/20). The downward spiral of this inter-imperialist struggle will mean a higher likelihood of war, which will kill millions more workers.  

Fighting Back with Reforms and Communism

Workers must demand equitable access to vaccines globally. We can address people’s fears with honesty, acknowledging ongoing medical racism and inequities. We must also offer social support, encourage masks and social distancing, and organize mutual aid. We can mobilize  massive numbers of neighbors, as Kerala, India did, to provide resources and check-ins on people. China mobilized millions during the 1950s to remove disease-spreading snails.

We can demand that governments release all prisoners from jails, prisons and detention centers and provide safe support once released; house the homeless immediately, stop evictions, and halt rents and back payments. We can demand that Native Americans have access to vaccinations and the medical staff to get the job done.We can educate people through outreach programs that trusted community members lead, making sure people get the vaccines, apply for health insurance, attend appointments, and receive food.

We can strike and protest when vaccines are diverted from the most vulnerable people to politicians and the wealthy. Medical residents who treat Covid-19 patients walked off the job when hospital administrators working at home received vaccines ahead of them.

Pfizer and Big Pharma will design their distribution to maximize their profits in the United States and worldwide but couldn’t develop these vaccines without the millions of hard working laboratory staff, scientists, clinicians, public health workers, and trial participants who are truly fighting for the health of the working class and trying to control this virus.

Ultimately, accommodating ourselves to capitalism is a loser. A communist society would have the ability to prevent pandemics and prioritize care for sick people. While the Soviet Union was socialist, the government mandated vaccines for an infectious disease by taking vaccines to the neighborhoods and prevented a widespread outbreak. China’s socialist government eradicated syphilis by giving jobs to sex workers, legalizing divorce, and providing medical care.

Without the profit motive and a wage system where people could buy their way to health, workers could reconfigure the economy. The causes of many viral pandemics are due to capitalism’s drive to maximize profits at the expense of safe agricultural and forestry practices. It could develop new ways to produce food, guarantee occupational safety, and give workers the power to decide what and how to produce. Under communism, workers’ interests will be the primary consideration in determining policies.  Workers would determine the best practices in order to ensure the best outcomes without endangering millions of people for the sake of private gain.

For now, taking the vaccines to protect oneself AND others is an excellent way to practice communist values of community and social responsibility.

FAQs:
Q. FDA insisted that these companies wait at least two months after the 2nd dose to look for adverse events. Is that enough time?
A. Short answer: yes for serious adverse events like Guillain- Barre or transverse myelitis.
Q. What kind of reactions should I expect?
A. Bad reactions, if any, are to be expected early and the only ones seen have been very rare allergies,which are treatable. Once you get the shot, injection site reactions are common. Generalized malaise, fatigue, redness, soreness and fever are more common after the second dose, but most people just have soreness in their arms.
Q. How long will immunity last?
A. Unknown at this time.
Q.Can people still get infected and transmit the virus?
A. Unknown. “Sterilization immunity” will be under study by the University of Washington as the vaccines are rolled out.
Q. How many people need to be vaccinated to get the pandemic under control?
A. Not clear. If you have a vaccine that is 90% effective and the Ro is 2 (Ro is the number of people the average infected person infects), then you would need to vaccinate 55-60% of the population. But that assumes 90% effectiveness against a significant amount of shedding which is still under investigation. Different models show a need to vaccinate up to 90% of the population.
Q. Is the vaccine safe for everyone?
A. Studies of pregnant and breast-feeding women, children, and those with compromised immune systems are not yet complete.

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On November 26, in the largest protest in human history, hundreds of millions of workers in India staged a general strike against a government plan for “free market” deregulation of agriculture. For weeks, tens of thousands of poor farmers have taken to the streets. Fighters blocked national highways and trains, dodged tear gas canisters, and clashed with riot gear-clad police. They burned effigies of the prime minister, anti-Muslim racist and state terrorist Narendra Modi, who rammed through the new laws as part of a fascist drive to prepare for inter-imperialist war.
India’s agriculture system is dramatic proof of why the capitalist profit system must be smashed. Sixty percent of India’s 1.3 billion people eke out their livelihoods by farming, most of them on plots not much larger than a soccer field. The country ranks first in the world in milk production and second in rice, wheat, vegetables, and fruits, yet 190 million people are undernourished (fao.org). Pressed by debts and bankruptcies, farmers routinely resort to suicide—more than 10 per day in the western state of Maharashtra alone (ruralindiaonline.org).
By removing price supports and the guaranteed distribution of farmers’ goods, the new laws will accelerate corporate takeovers: “With these protections … cast off, there is little left to stop Big Ag companies within India from swallowing market share” (Slate, 12/9). Millions of small farmers and farmworkers may be pushed into starvation; millions more will be funneled into urban factory and service jobs, where they generate a higher return on investment for the bosses.
While the mass protests showcase the boldness and solidarity our class will need to defeat capitalism, these narrow reform demands are a deadly trap for workers.  Settling for anything less than communist revolution will only strengthen the bosses. The horrific inequalities in India make it clear that capitalism can never serve workers’ needs. Only a worker-run society can provide what our class truly needs and deserves.
Modi lines up behind U.S. rulers
Modi’s latest moves toward fascist control reflect a growing worldwide instability and sharpening inter-imperialist competition between the U.S. and China (see CHALLENGE, 12/17). As the U.S. declines as a world power, its ruling class needs India as a strategic ally against neighboring China and nearby Russia (Foreign Affairs, 11/10). India has amassed 150 nuclear warheads (armscontrol.org, August 2020), and its huge population could supply masses of troops in a conventional ground war.  
For the last five months, India and China have stationed at least 100,000 troops in a stare-down over a disputed region in the Himalayas (Foreign Affairs, 10/6). In June, after Chinese soldiers killed 30 Indian soldiers at this flashpoint, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence declared that the U.S. would “continue to stand firm with our allies in the region, like India.” More recently, India opted out of joining the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a huge slap in the face to the Chinese ruling class (Economic Times, 11/5). Relations between the world’s two most populated countries are at their lowest point in four decades (South China Morning Post, 12/9). And there’s no telling when a regional clash could be the spark that sets off World War III. On December 15, the New York Post reported that a U.S. Army command based in Alaska would train with the Indian Army in 2022—in the Himalayas.
India bosses, we charge you with genocide!
With a vastly under-reported 10 million infections and 144,000 Covid-19 deaths in India, Modi and his murderous band of bosses have grossly failed to protect workers. The working class everywhere is suffering from the disease of capitalism, and those who have the least under this system will always endure the harshest attacks. Hundreds of millions in India work and live without basic sanitation. Inferior for-profit healthcare, shoddy housing, and starvation-level wages conspire to put workers in danger. These are the real “preexisting conditions” that pave the way for transmission, infection, and death in a pandemic. Even after Covid-19 is contained, capitalism will remain to sicken us by the billions.
With its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) down by nearly a quarter, India is in an economic depression. Since March, an estimated 140 million people have lost their jobs (New York Times, 11/27). Just as Donald Trump blames immigrants as U.S. capitalism flounders, Modi has attempted to distract India’s working class from his blunders by scapegoating Muslim workers. The nation’s health ministry repeatedly blamed an Islamic group for spreading the virus, triggering a wave of racist violence. Muslim workers have been run out of their neighborhoods, assaulted with bats, and threatened with lynching (NYT, 4/12).
This racist campaign is nothing new. In August 2019, in a brazen land grab, Modi’s government canceled the “autonomous” status of the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. It flooded the region with troops, shut down the internet, and jailed opposition leaders. Next, Modi’s hyper-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) established a national registry in the eastern state of Assam, forcing workers to prove that they’d arrived in India before the mid-1970s. More than two million people, mostly Muslims, have since been stripped of their citizenship (Time, 12/20/19). These racist measures prompted mass fightback by millions of workers, who flooded the cities’ streets and battled police.
Fight for communism
India has a rich history of class struggle and revolutionary movements. Tragically, workers have been betrayed again and again by fake-“communist” parties that sell out to the bosses and help exploit the working class (see page 5). Progressive Labor Party stands with the working class of India as it fights against the blood-sucking bosses and their brutal oppression. The next step is for workers to shift their prodigious energy from organizing mass reform protests to building a society organized by and for workers—a communist society.
Under capitalism, farming, like everything else, is about making money, not feeding people. PLP believes that reforming capitalism is impossible. The workers’ need for food production—for survival—is in direct contradiction with the bosses’ need for maximum profit. Capitalists always place their narrow interests over people’s lives, whether it’s Modi, AMLO, Xi Jinping, or Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Our solution lies outside the capitalist system. We must look to one another. We need an egalitarian society without racism or sexism or inter-imperialist war, where workers will share abundance and scarcity alike. Join the PLP and fight for communism! Power to the working class!