Tenants & antiracists organize vs evictions, expose slumlords

MARYLAND, January 20—Just a week before the finance capital wing of the ruling class gathered to celebrate Jim Crow Joe Biden’s inauguration, a working-class family was set to face eviction charges.
As soon as the family received the notice, members of the Mount Rainier Organizing for Racial Equality (MORE) and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) promptly began organizing assistance for their working-class brothers and sisters. Step one was creating and distributing flyers outlining tenant’s rights explaining that only working-class unity can protect us from bosses’ criminal capitalism.

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Racist capitalism killed my patient

LOS ANGELES, January 5—On New Year’s Eve, I got news that my patient of more than five years had died of complications from Covid-19 two days ago. He called me just three days before he passed and was exhausted with speaking due to shortness of breath. The best I could do at the moment was encourage him to remain calm and stay on his oxygen. He was hospitalized at Martin Luther King Community Hospital which is currently overrun by Covid-19 cases.

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‘Soup joumou’ nourishes workers with communist ideas

HAITI, January 1—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Haiti organized its annual solidarity soup in two working-class neighborhoods in a provincial town. Many people had the opportunity to drink the cauldrons of traditional January 1 independence pumpkin soup (soup joumou) with us. The tradition celebrates the victory of the revolutionaries of Haitian independence in 1804 over racism, slavery and colonialism, and therefore against the domination and exploitation of capitalism. To share the soup of independence is therefore to say no to capitalism and yes to communism.

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No honor among thieves: Turkey grows closer to U.S. rivals, war ahead

Is the transcontinental country of Turkey an ally or a rival to U.S. imperialists? New President Joe Biden's choice for secretary of state Antony Blinken declares Turkey is acting more like a betrayer: “The idea that a strategic, so-called strategic, partner of ours would actually be in line with one of our biggest strategic competitors in Russia is not acceptable” (Daily Sabah, 1/20).

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Capitalist Individual freedom vs. Communist collective freedom

Workers pay the heaviest of prices for buying into capitalist ideas, which in every country capitalism tries convincing us are universal truths— in the U.S., schools and movies alike saturate us with ideas like “individual freedom.” But when evaluating the toll of COVID-19, the cost of these ideas is measured in the hundreds of thousands of workers dead and the millions of workers’ lives uprooted and shattered in the U.S. alone: in the belly of the beast of history’s richest and most powerful imperialist power.
And the very first mechanism by which capitalism guaranteed the lethality of the COVID-19 was the infection of the working class with capitalist ideas, starting with individualism.

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PL’ers lit MLA convention with communist ideas

NEW JERSEY, January 10— As news was rolling in of the attempted Small Fascist-led takeover of the U.S. Capitol (see page 2), the Modern Language Association (MLA) was hosting its annual convention. The Radical Caucus of the MLA, in which Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been active for many years, was preparing to confront how the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the ongoing attacks on public higher education.  The fightback among faculty and graduate students must now also confront the intensified political surveillance and ideological repression that are sure to shape teaching and learning in the humanities classrooms in the coming period.  

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Letter: Capitalist healthcare is a racist atrocity

It was interesting to hear about healthcare rationing in California and other states overwhelmed by Covid-19 infected patients. I was a respiratory therapist for over 40 years, and I recall healthcare rationing hospitals serving mostly Black & Latin communities on the south and west sides of Chicago for decades.
The main ways rationing is practiced in these working-class neighborhood hospitals is through lack of staff and supplies. In a large medical and trauma center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where most of the patients are white, there were two respiratory therapists in the emergency room (E.R.), 24 hours a day.  In one of the busiest trauma centers in Chicago, on the west side, a therapist would be assigned to cover one or two patient floors, in addition to the emergency room.

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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.  

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U.S. Bosses in Utter Disarray!

 The weakness of the liberal main wing of the U.S. ruling class was on full display as Donald Trump’s terror militia invaded the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and temporarily blocked the U.S. Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election. As armed pro-Trump racists trashed offices and congressional leaders cowered under their seats, the entire world witnessed the decay and disarray of U.S. finance capital, the ruthless imperialist gang that not so long ago sat atop the globe. 

As anyone who has marched in D.C. knows first-hand, anti-racist protesters would have been gassed, bludgeoned, and shot long before getting inside the heart of the bosses’ law-making apparatus. But in this case, the Capitol Police, a federal agency, passively watched the chaos unfold. The Trumpers had openly planned their violence for weeks on domestic terrorist websites; Trump himself incited them at a nearby rally before the attack. Yet the police presence at what the rulers call “a sacred civic space” was nearly invisible. The vicious split between finance capital and the Fortress America capitalists (the ones fronted by Trump) has disrupted and exposed the rulers’ most cherished institutions, from their killer kkkops to their dead-end electoral circus. 

For the liberal bosses, the debacle is a case of chickens coming home to roost. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, the finance capitalists used racist dog whistles to mislead white workers while blaming Black workers for the profit system’s racist inequalities. The resulting white grievance movement was seized upon by small fascists like the Koch and DeVos families, and subsequently mobilized by Trump into his personal base. 

While no one knows how this will play out, what’s clear is that we are entering volatile, unchartered territory. Will the institutional collapse spiral? Will the main wing bosses enact fascist measures to regain their grip? Will they accelerate their drive toward global war against arch-rival capitalists in China? As a class and a communist party, we must understand both the danger and opportunity of this period. The danger is that a fear of these small-time terrorists will drive some workers into the arms of the biggest terrorists of all, the state terrorist gang to be led by Biden. The opportunity is to build a mass revolutionary communist movement to destroy capitalism once and for all. Join Progressive Labor Party!

Combat capitalist contagion with communist fightback

On December 20, in suburban Indiana, Dr. Susan Moore, a Black woman, died of racism after doctors dismissed and refused to treat her Covid-19 symptoms and severe pain. Meanwhile, in South Africa, a factory is producing millions of doses of lifesaving vaccines for the U.S. and other wealthy nations in Europe, but none for the poor Black people who work and live there—and who have been hit harder by the pandemic than in any other country on the continent. With racism and exploitation as its lifeblood, this capitalist profit system infects and sickens everything it touches. Progressive Labor Party calls for workers to vaccinate our class against the contagion of capitalism with the only medicine that really works: communist revolution (see box below). Build the fight to build a need-based and collective system! Join Progressive Labor Party!

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