LETTERS ... February 15, 2023

PLP in solidarity with transit strikers! On Friday, January 27, members of Progressive Labor Party joined transit workers in Leesburg, Virginia for a noontime rally and picket. We also contributed vegetarian food for the immigrant workers from Ethiopia and India who marched with workers from Peru, Puerto Rico and the U.S. This is what multiracial unity looks like. We shared our fliers that we have also been distributing in Maryland and DC among riders and ATU 689 workers. A worker from Ethiopia was delighted to see his photo and gave us his autograph! Others were excited to see CHALLENGE with photos linking their struggle to the health care workers striking in Chicago and New York.

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Brazil’s Lula paves way for fascism

On January 8, Brazilian supporters of ex-president Jair “Trump of the South'' Bolsonaro stormed Brasilia, their capital city. Like the Trump-inspired insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, they aimed to reverse a presidential election. After Bolsonaro lost to liberal misleader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva last October, his followers agitated en masse at several military bases. When the generals failed to join them, they mounted a short-lived occupation of Brazil’s halls of power. Twitter-nimble fascists like Trump and Bolsonaro thrive in a morass of mass ignorance, which has grown out of generations of liberal capitalist miseducation and political deception.

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Nurses strike vs sick working conditions

NYC, January 9 – Nurses in New York City struck a blow against the racist bosses at Mt. Sinai and Montefiore, two of the largest healthcare conglomerates in the city, during a recent strike. Wage increases had already been settled. This strike was against understaffing at these two hospitals in working class Black and Latin neighborhoods. Since the height of the Covid-19 crisis, nurses have been overworked, faced with death more consistently and quit en masse, with one nurse having to care for up to 20 patients in the emergency room. A rep for the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) was overheard saying, “If we hadn’t called the strike, the nurses would never have forgiven us.” The strike ended after four days with agreements that included concrete measures to enforce safer staff levels (nysna.org).

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For patients, workers strike against layoffs & cuts

CHICAGO, January 7 – Members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rallied today outside the office headquarters of Howard Brown Health (HBH) in support of workers and patients facing cuts in jobs and services. With our bullhorn, we chanted “Not one layoff!” at the busy intersection, distributing flyers and copies of CHALLENGE to HBH workers entering the building for negotiations and others passing through the neighborhood. Our actions were a continuation of support for the HBH workers, who had just completed a three-day strike in protest of the bosses’ racist and sexist layoffs of dozens of employees.

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Lessons from historic nurses strike in a time of growing fascism

WORCESTER, January 18—On March 8, 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, 800 nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts took to the streets demanding safe patient to staff ratios and safe working conditions, a capitalist nightmare for their bosses at Tenet Healthcare (the parent company for St. Vincent’s). Nurses were forced to resort to wearing garbage bags for personal protective equipment and hundreds became infected with Covid-19 (portside.org). The pandemic was exposing our broken, racist, medical system, and the nurses were refusing to accept it. Just as with the recent nurses strike in NYC (see page 3), they were strong and united and won broad multiracial community support because their demands proved their antiracist, pro-working-class commitment to patients.

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Antiracist strike against transit bosses

WASHINGTON D.C. January 16, —Almost 100 transit workers in Loudoun County, a well-to-do Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, walked out on January 11 over an insulting contract offer by Keolis, a transnational transit company contracted by Loudoun County to cut costs. Keolis has proposed a two-tier wage system for bus operators with a difference of over $13 per hour. This is a clear divide and conquer strategy, a hallmark of capitalist bosses' efforts to weaken the working class and deepen the exploitation of workers. The bosses think they can get away with such tactics because many of the workers are immigrants.

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Retiree workers demand healthcare for all

NEW YORK CITY, January 9—The city council held a meeting to debate the topic of whether to amend Administrative Code 12-126. This code provides some protection for retired city workers’ healthcare. Retired city workers are fed up with the NYC bosses trying to destroy their medical benefits. As this week has shown with the courageous strike by NYC nurses (see page 3), whose main demand has been patient staffing ratios, the bosses have no interest in preserving the health of the working class. Under capitalism, even with traditional Medicare, healthcare has little to do with keeping workers healthy and everything to do with keeping bosses in control.

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Reds vs evictions, part 7: Squire’s road to communism

The following is the final installation of our seven-part series of articles reprinted and lightly edited from the communist newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, written by famous communist Mike Gold. The series was titled, “Negro Reds of Chicago.” Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist principles as well as the linguistic shifts that occurred over decades of antiracist class struggle. Communists have a long history of fighting against racist attacks on our class. One such fight was against landlords and evictions.

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South Africa: Workers battle local bosses and rival imperialists

Thirty years after the end of apartheid rule, racist capitalism remains in power in South Africa, while rival imperialists China and the U.S.A. contend for influence in this strategic part of the world. Militant workers demand change, and some, led by the National Union Of Metalworkers Of South Africa (NUMSA) have broken up with the African National Congress (ANC) to organize independently. Like workers everywhere, they need an international communist party to battle both local and global capitalists. Bosses’ economic and political crises Facing a soaring cost of living and ANC government inaction, hundreds of thousands of workers in South Africa went on strike in November 2022, demanding big wage increases.

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The ANC “Loses Its Soul”

The 1994 election of the ANC ended racial apartheid, so how is it that workers still face “economic apartheid?” The truth is that the founding ANC document, the Freedom Charter, contained many contradictions. Two ideologies competed in the Charter: The first view, expressed by Nelson Mandela in 1956, envisioned the emergence of a ‘non-white bourgeoisie', following the dismantling of the white monopoly over productive resources. The other view, put forth by Oliver Tambo in 1983, envisioned an end to the ‘exploitative system on which apartheid is based’” (Khan, Review of African Political Economy, 2013). Tambo’s view aimed at ending capitalist exploitation, but Mandela’s simply sought to dismantle white monopoly ended up as ANC policy.

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