Letters of February 3

No vaccine for the virus of capitalism
I read this article “Fighting Covid-19 with vaccines and communism” in the Dec 28, 2020 issue of CHALLENGE and discussed it with Progressive Labor Party healthcare workers in Chicago. I thought it was a good article but wanted to add some additional points.  
Public health issues require a comprehensive response. The vaccine is just one piece of a larger response, but it is being promoted as the only solution to the pandemic. This isn’t by accident.  This framing of the vaccine as the only savior is purposeful to absolve the ruling class of responsibility. The government would rather frame the solution as a vaccine because it desperately wants to avoid getting to the root of the issue.  
The inadequate public health infrastructure, poverty, racism, and capitalism all play a role in the pandemic. Workers will continue to be vulnerable to another pandemic if these issues aren’t tackled. As the vaccine rolls out, the government and the bosses’ media will praise the scientists but will also expand their praise to include capitalism. They’ll try to claim that the free market has brought us the vaccine and saved us all. However, it was always capitalism that pushed the spread of Covid-19 by forcing people to work, gutting public services, and providing no safe alternatives to workers.  
The state wants to limit the response to the pandemic to the narrowest terms possible.  It wants to avoid giving people a stimulus, increasing spending on social services, mortgage/rent freezes, letting people out of prison, housing the homeless, etc.  By only focusing on the vaccine, they get to avoid any responsibility in addressing these other issues. The effects of Covid-19 have touched every aspect of our lives and will continue to do so. Workers have lost jobs, been kicked out of their homes, and found themselves in a much more precarious situation because of the pandemic. A vaccine won’t make up for lost time. Workers who have to bear the brunt of this pandemic may spend years trying to lift themselves back up even though they bear no responsibility for the inadequacies of the state. We should all be happy that there is a vaccine coming, but we can’t let it become the sole focus of addressing the pandemic.  
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Working-class women gave leadership alongside Marx & Engels
I would like to add a few points to the recent article in CHALLENGE on Friedrich Engels' bicentennial.
Mary Burns, Engels' companion for 20  years until her death, was an Irish factory worker in Manchester who helped Engels research his 1845 book, The Condition of The Working Class in England, a brilliant expose of the terrible working and living conditions of the city’s many factory workers. (Because of awful pollution and high infant mortality, the life expectancy for people born in Manchester was half that of those born in the nearby countryside.)
It’s true, as the article says, that Engels did considerable reading for the book, but Mary Burns was his essential link to the lives of workers and their families, especially to Irish workers, who were the most exploited workers in England. It’s doubtful that Engels’ book would have been as powerful as it was without his being able to tour the working class slums and talk with people who lived there, with Mary as his guide.
Mary Burns died at the age of 41, probably of stomach cancer. Engels then lived for the next 15 years with Mary’s sister, Lizzie, who he married on her deathbed. Engels said of Lizzie:
My wife was a real child of the Irish proletariat and her passionate devotion to the class in which she was born was worth much more to me – and helped me more in times of stress – than all the elegance of an educated, artistic middle-class bluestocking.
All the women in the families of Marx and Engels were politically active: Marx's wife Jenny and his three daughters Eleanor, Jenny, and Laura. Eleanor Marx, for instance, translated her father’s books, co-wrote a book on the Paris Commune, and became a leader of the Socialist League.
A couple of years ago, the movie The Young Karl Marx came out. I watched it with a couple of friends who knew a lot about that history. We thought it was a very good movie. It covered the period from a little before Marx and Engels met until the completion of The Communist Manifesto. It shows their relationships with their loved ones and friends and their intense involvement in the working class struggles of the period. It has high production values and very good acting. I thought the film was accurate, politically instructive and fun! I highly recommend
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Christmas a capitalist invention
Christmas is a religious holiday in which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25. It comes from the Latin nativitas, nativa les, which means birth. In 1903, the academic F. G Kitton, stated in a writing that Charles Dickens was the one who really invented Christmas in 1843, and that he attracted the aristocracy and the middle class to that holiday.
Originally, the day is about pagan festivals that commemorated the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. But in general after several generations it has become a culture for almost everyone meaning abundance, prosperity, fraternity, and solidarity.
In reality this is far from the truth. On the contrary, because capitalism is in crisis, the poorest workers cannot afford their ornaments, lights, gifts and tree. Although billions can barely eat for some years the Christmas fervor has grown stronger, and as early as November in many homes the ritual begins. The media at the service of the capitalists are in charge of rooting on this phenomenon and incite the workers to consume, and thereby the racist capitalist system has been able to profit by billions of dollars every year.
And it is that in the absence of class consciousness and a method of dialectical analysis that allows for analyzing phenomena, the working class will continue to be easy prey for any lie disguised as truth like this one.
It is up to the PLP to make every effort to clarify the truth of this phenomenon, extending dialectical materialism to our fellow workers as a tool of analysis so that we better understand this farce.