Letters of February 24

Where Bosses Fail, Workers Lead
A common question or doubt made towards a communist future goes like, “How can we expect workers to run society, without some group of people working exclusively as management, and receiving more to do so?” In the middle of an especially challenging shift in the hospital, I observed a powerful lesson we can use to respond to that question.
I work nights as a nurse, and my unit is almost always busy. Nurses at my hospital are not represented by a union. And though unions are hardly a guarantee to create safe or acceptable working conditions, non-union work places allows the bosses to run operations at a bare minimum and not expect any major repercussions. The nurses and auxiliary staff are forced to take on more and more patients as admissions come, which compromises patient safety and burns us workers out.
A common issue that we encounter on my unit is a lack of nurse assistants. Nurse assistants perform basic but important care tasks, such as taking vital signs, cleaning patients up, and answering call lights. If they’re not staffed for each shift, the registered and licensed nurses pick up these tasks instead, in addition to their typical workload.
The management on my unit is constantly assuring us that they’re going to hire more of these assistants for nights, but months have passed with us being regularly understaffed. Far from demonstrating any managerial expertise, the bosses show their complete failure to plan for the needs of our class. And it goes beyond the character of just a few managers; under capitalism it is essential that a hospital or a business maximize profit and cut costs, over securing human needs.
This particular shift was very exhausting and unsafe. There was just one nurse assistant scheduled for the 12-hour shift, and the whole staff barely sat down all night, moving from room to room. There was a strong potential for us to give into the stress, and begin fighting among ourselves. But it never happened. What I witnessed instead was us workers– women, men, Black, Asian, Latin and white – cooperating, communicating and offering help as we skipped breaks and did what we needed to do to care for our patients. Workers on the front line, not expecting anything extra for their efforts; just working together to make our lives easier and safer.
This is just one of countless examples of workers doing what needs to be done, despite the miserable social and economic conditions created by the capitalist class. Our responsibility as a communist Party is to shine a light on these demonstrations of working-class solidarity, and use it as living proof that we don’t need a parasitic group of “elites” to organize society. More often than not, workers know what they need to work and live. We just need to constantly struggle to show that the future that we all deserve can only be guaranteed under a communist society.
Republicrats Push, Protect Racism
Many believe that electing more Democrats and Black and Latin politicians will make things better, that social programs will improve, and racism and sexism will decrease. Looking at Maryland, a democrat state through and through, we can see this is false.
Out of the past eight governors of Maryland, 6 were Democrats. Two-thirds of the State Senate and House of Delegates are Democrats. The racial demographics of the government match the demographics of the state: 30 percent of representatives are Black, as are Marylanders. The same trend occurs within county governments, too.
Yet CHALLENGE (2/10) exposed Maryland’s intense racism. The Maryland Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights provides the strongest legal protection for police out of any state. Moreover, Maryland has a large number of Black kkkops, and Black workers are still targeted and terrorized. In fact, 78 percent of the victims that Black kkkops shoot are Black (Jacobin).
No matter what party or race, it is clear whom politicians and police serve: the capitalist class. Black and Democratic politicians have no interest in protecting the working class—Black, Latin, Asian, or white—from police terror. The bosses who need racist police terror to protect private property and keep workers, especially Black workers, in line and scared to fight back. That is how they can keep making profits off our backs.
Let’s not get conned by the next so-called left-wing, Black, Latin, or woman candidate. History shows that none of these make a difference in outcome for the working class. We must instead join PLP and fight for communist revolution!
Communists Led the Creation of Weekends Off
Sometimes we may overlook how mass communist-led working-class action has affected the lives of millions of workers. I particularly liked the CHALLENGE editorial (2/10) about Flint—“Capitalism Toxic for Working Class” — when it referred to the historic battle of Flint autoworkers in the Great Sit-Down Strike of 1936-1937. Incidentally, six of the seven members of the Flint Sit-Down Committee who led the strike were communists.
This Flint battle was part of the communist-led struggles for unemployment insurance—organizing 800,000 workers into the National Unemployment Councils, union recognition for four million workers into the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), and the 40-hour work-week. Actually it was the communists who produced something which tens of millions now take for granted: weekends off.
Before the 40-hour week, the overwhelming majority of workers endured six- and seven-day workweeks, and, for a great many, 10- and 12-hour days. The 40-hour week—mostly based on five eight-hour days—meant two days off. It also forced the bosses to pay time-and-a-half for overtime, even double-time for some.
The bosses and their president Franklin Roosevelt did not “grant” this out of the goodness of their hearts. Roosevelt was out to save the capitalist system, which was mired in the Great Depression with its revolutionary potential for the working class. Unfortunately the Communist Party, whose members led this massive movement, did not point the working class in the direction of communist revolution. It was partly influenced by the international communist leadership that incorrectly championed a united front with so-called “progressive capitalists.”
Of course, as capitalists do with all working-class reform victories, they chip away to wipe out the results of such victories, so today there are tens of millions who work more than 40 hours a week, more than five days, and are cheated out of overtime pay through various subterfuges. This is especially true for the racist practices directed at millions of undocumented immigrant workers. And with the connivance of pro-boss union misleaders, they have reduced the trade union movement to a shell of its former self, virtually wiping out the millions who had joined the CIO and avoiding strikes like the plague.
Capitalism by its nature has always operated in this way, grudgingly giving in to mass working-class action and then using its state power, its mis-direction into the election circus and its buying off of misleaders of these formerly militant movements to take back what the workers have won.
That is why the Progressive Labor Party is correct in our drive to organize millions into a mass revolutionary communist party to overthrow this brutal profit system and establish a worker-run communist society, eliminating bosses and profits altogether.