How I use CHALLENGE
I’m an immigrant worker from Mexico living in the United States. I have been a member of the Progressive Labor Party for some years. I joined because I learned how to fight back together with the Party. PLP is like family.
For me, it’s important to read and circulate DESAFIO-CHALLENGE. You can learn the communist analysis about what is happening in the world from Brooklyn to Mexico to Colombia. Every issue, I circulate 25 papers to my close friends and family. They ask me questions when they visit me in my home. The rest, I give to people in my laundromat or in the street.
Recently, my sons and family visited me for my birthday. When my nine year old grandson saw CHALLENGE he said, “wow! What is PLP?”
I said, “It’s a communist Party.”
My nine and 14 year old grandsons asked me important questions like why the rich don’t pay taxes and why do they exploit the workers. My grandson said, “I’m reading about this [exploitation] with my father and I don’t like it!”
My PLP club plans to work with young workers and students. I want to ask my family to participate in the fightback. My grandsons agreed to join our study group with their mother. Their father can’t participate because he works six days a week, 12 hours a day.
If you are not reading CHALLENGE, I invite you to read it and join PLP.
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Anti-vaccination is anti-working class
Being anti-vaccination is an anti-working class position. It is also racist since Black and Latin workers are contracting and dying from Covid-19 at higher rates.Since capitalism values profits over workers’ health, there are over 130 countries that still don’t have access to the vaccine and others that only have limited access. It is important that everyone who is medically able to get the vaccine receives it promptly to help slow the spread and stop further, dangerous mutations.
Amid a pandemic, those who recognize that getting vaccinated isn’t a personal choice, but, actually, is a social responsibility to their fellow workers to keep the vulnerable from dying are serving the working class, whether it is conscious or not. This is an early form of political commitment that mirrors the adage “from each according to political commitment and to each according to need.”
The combination of the Big Fascists’ [see Glossary], represented by President Joe Biden, continued mismanagement of the pandemic and the Small Fascists’ gutter racist and anti-science propaganda are serving to divide the working class of the United States. Teachers and nurses who don’t want to get vaccinated because it is “my body, my choice,” — thereby belittling the very real struggle women have over their own means of production — are a danger to their students and patients, as well as their families and themselves.
The history of racist and sexist medical experiments worldwide rightly sows distrust in the medical establishment and the government. However, this vaccine hesitancy ultimately will cause our Black and Latin students and their families to suffer more. The bosses have their own reasons for wanting to get us to sacrifice for the social good, like protecting their profits and building for war, but we need to fight for workers to serve their own interests.
It is not “segregation” to quarantine potential disease carriers during a global pandemic! The Small Fascists want to weaken the terms that represent the brutality of racism that our class has felt for centuries. They want to silence us by turning a rational and scientific response to a deadly disease into a personal choice under the guise of freedom. Freedom is actually the understanding of necessity, so let’s do what needs to be done and help our friends develop a scientific worldview.
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ALL wealth is theft, value comes from labor power
It’s great to hear in the 8/4 issue of CHALLENGE that the Newark summer project discussed political economy and how capitalism is built on the theft of workers’ wealth, but let’s be clear: the end game for the working class is not higher wages or a shorter workday. The article stated that “the labor and pay that an employee receives is not an equal transaction because most of [that worker’s] workday is free labor,” but Marx’s distinction between labor power and labor itself is missing here. Today’s capitalism is based on wage slavery, not chattel slavery, meaning we are all forced to sell our ability, not our actual bodies, to add value to the bosses’ tools in exchange for a wage. That exchange can never be fair or just; it is, by definition, an act of robbery.
Capitalist theft is reliant on one fundamental commodity above all others: workers’ labor power. In Das Kapital, Marx explained how, in capitalist markets, buyers and sellers exchange commodities of the same value by using money, another commodity, to facilitate exchange. Where does exchange value come from? The value of any commodity is equal to the amount of labor time required to produce it. Human labor-power, which is potential energy —our capacity for work–is sold to the capitalists by workers–commonly based on a set amount of time– in exchange for wages.
But wages are ALWAYS theft. Why? Our labor power changes the material that we work on. Workers therefore create value which is added to that material (provided by the capitalist). The value we add rises above the value of what we were promised for our labor-time. Bosses MUST pay us less than the value of our labor power or else they don’t profit. A waiter, an information tech specialist, a delivery person or a public transit worker, “participates” in a business where the collective output of the workers produces wealth for a specific boss or set of bosses who profit from that work. A teacher’s labor power is used to produce ideas that train the working class to stay in their place under capitalism. A soldier’s labor power is used by the capitalist class to protect its class interests in the field of war.
So why do we “agree” to sell our labor power, no matter the wage? If we don’t, we starve. Capitalism’s true freedom for the working person is the freedom to starve. The capitalist is free to decide what is done with our labor power, and in the process our class, as a whole, is enslaved into a series of jobs and tasks that ultimately serve the purpose of making the capitalist class wealthy rather than contributing to the social, political, economic and cultural progress of the human race and planet.
Even though workers no longer have our physical bodies bought and sold on the slave market (barring human trafficking), we must now reach the point in history where we use our labor power to smash this system rather than selling it to the bosses for a wage—any wage!
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Capitalism, a social disease
I was listening to news broadcasts about how “human induced” climate change was causing irreversible world damage and that the governors of Texas and Florida were banning masks for school children and advocating loss of pay for teachers who permit them. Then I tuned in to a radio talk show where a psychologist was describing that capitalism causes social mental diseases, describing Trump as a sociopath. The moderator asked for discussion of how capitalism relates to mental disease.
I called in and luckily got on to say, “We must realize that we are living in a capitalist world that creates people who are no longer human, because they put profits before people's lives.” I said that the discussion of the idea that capitalism causes social mental disease is correct and that a working class revolution for communist equality and collectivity was needed.
The real big lie is that capitalism masks itself as the champion of “democracy” and “human rights” to cover the fact that it is creating an environment that will accept the destruction of humanity for personal gain and privilege. This ‘what’s in it for me’ environment is destroying true world humanity.
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