Beds, not body bags— communism, not capitalism

Hundreds of workers and community members at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center have signed a petition “Beds not Body Bags” protesting racist Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plan to consolidate three hospitals (Kingsbrook, Brookdale and Interfaith). This would eliminate over 200 hospital beds as we move into a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. These hospitals are located in and serve the heavily Black neighborhoods of Flatbush, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Cuomo serves the billionaire capitalists of Wall Street and New York real estate; racism is the lifeblood of  capitalism.

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NJ students, faculty fight Covid-19 cuts to colleges

NEW JERSEY, October 21— “Workers created unions to fight, not be in bed with the bosses. You run this union like a country club!” Class struggle has been heating up at Essex County College (ECC) with faculty and members of the Progressive Labor Party indicting their local racist local union misleaders at a local meeting recently against racist cutbacks and layoffs on staff and services amidst the pandemic.
PL’ers and friends have been in the thick of organizing fightback and student and staff unity, and the fight is only just beginning to fight back against these conditions and build a mass revolutionary communist PLP that can smash this entire system!

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Identity politics, the bosses’ tool

Over the past couple of weeks, the U.S. news cycle has been dominated by the upcoming Presidential election. The most recent Presidential and Vice Presidential debates are coming on the heels of an incredible summer of struggle, which has left many workers taking stock in local politicians and governing institutions. At the forefront for many workers is Kamala Harris who is being paraded as a progressive choice simply because she is Black and Asian. She is another example of the bosses using identity politics to pacify the working class into voting and co-signing their own demise

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Letters of November 4

Bronx actions against racist terror
In the last month our Antiracist Coalition has been on the move. Almost 40 strong, we marched on the 50th Precinct, decrying their indifference to nooses and semi-automatic assault rifles found in and near Van Cortlandt Park, as well as their brutal assaults against a young Black suspect. We also demanded that no more cops be sent as first responders to calls for people in mental crisis. This provoked a huge "Blue Lives Matter" mobilization in the park days later.  We were noticed!

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Antiracists protest Mayor de Blasio's attack against homeless workers

New York City, October 18— “Mayor de Blasio, you have committed a crime, a major injustice against Black and Brown people, in particular to the men at the Lucerne Hotel…You are a racist, and even worse than that guy in the White House!”

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Reject Big & Small Fascists, Rebel against dictatorship in disarray

The U.S. ruling class is in chaos. As the presidential election campaign kicks into final gear, the splits among the capitalists are getting sharper by the day.  The debate between Klan hero Donald Trump and mass incarcerator Joe Biden degenerated into an incoherent shouting match between two lifelong racist liars. After Trump and more than a dozen of his closest advisors tested positive for Covid-19, the Superspreader in Chief was left to shamble around a mostly deserted White House, jacked up on steroids and contradicting himself from one minute to the next. In the face of full-blown fascist China’s disciplined, sword-rattling challenge to U.S. dominance, the rupture between the Big Fascists (led by multinational finance capital like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs) and the Small Fascists (organized around domestic energy firms and short-term profits) has reached a breaking point.

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Parents & teachers sound the alarm on racist metal detectors

BROOKLYN, October 1—“You are Scholars, Not Suspects!” That is the message the mainly Black and Latin students received as they entered their school building for the first day of school from a multiracial group of 40 parents and teachers. We met dozens of students as they lined up to walk through metal detectors on their first day back in a school building after more than six months. Racist metal detectors are the welcome back that thousands of mainly Black and Latin students have been given by the racist NYC Department of Education (DoE),  and City bosses who refuse to make any real antiracist changes even as they spew their empty promises of “equity.” As one chant said, “How do you spell RACIST? D-O-E!”

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CUNY crisis: Shut this racist system down!

South Bronx, October 9–The crisis at the City University of New York (CUNY) is sharpening, as the capitalist trustees and politicians pursue their plans of implementing budget cuts, packing virtual classes with as many as a hundred students and laying off thousands of part-time instructors and college workers. CUNY administrators have increased class sizes, launching a racist attack on students’ education. This is a racist attack because the students at CUNY are disproportionately Black and Latin. But racism divides and hurts all working class students. So several student clubs and some union members from two Bronx CUNY campuses took to the streets and held a militant, multiracial march against racist cutbacks.

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Colombia: capitalist crisis deepens, workers rebel vs. police

COLOMBIA, Sept 24—After two cops murdered Javier Ordoñez, thousands took to the streets, leading to clashes with the state-sponsored thugs. As crisis in Colombia deepens, the working class needs to reject working within the system and embrace building outside the system: communism.
These demonstrations demand a restructuring of the police, the resignation of the Minister of Defense, Carlos Holmes Trujillo, and the end of political assassinations of social leaders. Demands also include a solution to unemployment, and the annulment of Decree 1174, which is the “most aggressive labor and pension reform in the last 30 years.”

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Good Riddance! Ginsburg’s racist record and individualism exposes her Big Fascist backers

The naked partisan brawl over their hallowed Supreme Court seat is another reflection of the bosses' inability to govern "in the old way"–of their turn toward fascism.  It wasn't so long ago that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and arch-racist "intellectual" Antonin Scalia were besties who went to the opera together. It was like Joe Biden's warm and collaborative relationships with Jim Crow senators James Eastland and Strom Thurmond ("one of my closest friends," Biden once said). Whatever their disagreements, they were on the same team. But given the sharpening contradictions of capitalism, that era is gone.

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