Letters: Organizing and working under Covid-19

Multiracial unity is the antidote to bosses’ racist disease

A week before workers in New York was completely swept into the pestilent tornado of Covid-19, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades and I organized a rally in Chinatown. When I invited workers from my mass work to the action some were opposed. They felt that rather than showing solidarity we are further contributing to racism. For some members in my base, having a rally in Chinatown sent a message that Covid-19 only hurts Chinese people. While their accusations were upsetting, the rally carried on at full force. We set up near one of the busiest intersections in Chinatown with signs in Mandarin and English. Though our numbers were small, we made up for it with a bold and multigenerational contingent of PL’ers of all races and crowd-rousing chants. Workers from a local bank gifted us bottles of water, and dozens of workers enthusiastically received CHALLENGE and leaflets.

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Racist bosses hang hospitality workers out to dry

CHICAGO, March 20 – The racist and sexist indifference of the capitalist bosses towards workers in the hospitality industry is making itself painfully clear as the devastation from the Covid-19 pandemic grows. Like all other industries under capitalism, it relies on the value stolen from the labor of workers employed for profits.

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Covid19: Transit workers’ blood on bosses’ hands

NEW YORK CITY, April 1—Up to now eight Metropolitan Transit Authority workers have died during the raging Covid-19 outbreak.
While their death certificates will determine the virus as cause of death, their real killers were the racist MTA New York City Transit and its inaction to protect its mostly Black and Latin workers from the disease! Given the MTA bosses callous response more will dies as the ink on this issue dries.
The deaths were avoidable. But what’s it to the bosses if a few workers die in the line of duty, so long as the profit machine keeps rolling?

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Indiana celebrates International Working Women’s Day

INDIANA, March 8 – Over 30 workers gathered in celebration of International Women’s Day (IWD) to learn about its history and various past and present anti-racist, anti-sexist women fighters. The theme for this year’s event was “One United Working Class vs. Sexism.”
The program was organized in order to collectively learn more about the fights against capitalism and sexism led by international working class women throughout history and the present. We also sought to collectivize building and strengthening our base in the area. It is important for us to continue to sharpen our line against anti-sexism and talk about waging this fight with our line as communists.

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Communism, only cure for capitalist pandemic

As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads to hundreds of thousands of workers in more than 160 countries or territories and counting, the world seems filled with uncertainty. But one thing is for sure: This crisis dramatically exposes the utter inability of capitalism to meet the needs of the international working class. In their callous negligence in mishandling Covid-19, the rulers are telling us—again—how little they value workers’ lives under the profit system.
For the capitalist bosses, Covid-19 is both a challenge to their system and an opportunity to experiment and impose more intensive fascism. For the working class and Progressive Labor Party, it is also a challenge and opportunity. We will need to learn how to operate in new ways, and it won’t be easy. But if we succeed, we can show workers how a healthier society could be run in the interests of our class. Only a communist revolution can stamp out capitalism, the deadliest pandemic of all time.

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LETTERS: ORGANIZE AGAINST RACIST RESPONSE TO COVID-19

Students confront sickly inequality
The Coronovirus has swept the world and left no one unchanged in its path.We know that those most attacked by capitalism (Black, Latin, undocumented, low wage workers), will also be hit hardest in times of crisis. My friends, coworkers, and I knew that we would need to be ready to fight for our class, the working class.

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Immigrant students refuse to test to death

CALIFORNIA, March 12—Today 60 students and their teachers walked out of their classes, assembled and marched to the main office with signs and chants. The students and teachers defied racist, and sexist administration stooges sent to stop them. The student marchers were refusing to take their state ELPAC tests on filthy and possibly Covid-19 contaminated computers that are shared daily with hundreds of students and go uncleaned for months.
The horrid conditions in the building and the administration’s disregard for the safety of the students point out once again that capitalism can never serve the needs of the working class. We need leaders and an education that serve the interests of our class. That will only come through the fight for workers power and communist revolution.

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Class nature of pandemic: Capitalism breeds, communism heals

Under capitalism, pandemics are treated like they are as natural and inevitable as bacteria and viruses. As the current Covid-19 pandemic shows, however, nature may create the viruses and the bacteria that lead to infection but it’s capitalism that creates the disasters, worsened by the very racism and sexism this system relies on.
Pandemics in particular, like capitalism and class society itself, are neither natural nor inevitable. They are creations of class society and wars of conquest. Another world is possible, a world without imperialist war and the misery of treatable diseases. The working class’s first attempts at holding state power in the Soviet Union and China were accompanied by the first attempts to eradicate pandemics and disease forever. The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party fights to inherit this legacy, learning from the mistakes of socialism to smash the disease of capitalism with communism once and for all.

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Immigrant students refuse to test to death

CALIFORNIA, March 12—Today 60 students and their teachers walked out of their classes, assembled and marched to the main office with signs and chants. The students and teachers defied racist, and sexist administration stooges sent to stop them. The student marchers were refusing to take their state ELPAC tests on filthy and possibly Covid-19 contaminated computers that are shared daily with hundreds of students and go uncleaned for months.
The horrid conditions in the building and the administration’s disregard for the safety of the students point out once again that capitalism can never serve the needs of the working class. We need leaders and an education that serve the interests of our class. That will only come through the fight for workers power and communist revolution.

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Haiti: Celebrate International Working Women’s Day

HAITI, March 20—To continue in the fight against sexism, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) organized a gathering of about 100 people here today. Workers, teachers, college and high school students and other professionals took part in a militant day in support of the fight against sexism. This mobilization, presented in the form of a conference and cultural activities, was organized under the theme “Women in the Struggle and Leadership for a Just and Equal Society.” A young woman militant fighter, supporter of PLP, hosted the conference with a comrade from the Party.

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