More than 50 years after it was formed in the era of the Vietnam War, the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA) is alive and kicking as new U.S. imperialist wars begin to boil against Russia and China.  Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been a leading force in the RC since the 1980s, our presence showing the importance of a long-term approach to work in a mass organization. At the January 2022 (mostly online) MLA Convention, once again PL brought to the MLA Radical Caucus both the “hard line” of revolutionary communism and the “flexible tactics” of building a communist base among liberal professors.
“Keywords” for communist struggle
PL’ers and friends played important roles in many sessions, analyzing how capitalism shapes the conditions under which teachers of literature think and work. In a session honoring Richard Ohmann, a staunch Marxist who helped found the RC, we emphasized how his work as a scholar and organizer made him part of the “red line of history.” In a session on “Antiracism and the Future of the Profession,” a PLP member urged the teaching of literary texts and contexts that open up “the communist horizon.
The “New Keywords for Our Struggle '' session featured a PL’er who critically and terminally diagnosed the term “white privilege” as capitalist propaganda antithetical to antiracism. Invoking the revolutionary class-conscious poetry of Langston Hughes, the PL’er concluded that only communist revolution can end “systemic racism.” Another panelist analyzed “solidarity” as a continuing goal of multiracial fightback rather than a taken-for-granted liberal value.
Communist politics spreading, tactics evolving
In the session “The Languages of War, Genocide and Climate Collapse” several PLP comrades urged from the panel and the floor that we see these urgent fights as “communism or barbarism.” Our friends who spoke there were also fired up with that urgency, and we are following up with them about joining the Party as the concrete expression of their anticapitalist politics. Two professors we’d never met before asked to know more about PLP’s political line (analysis) and history.
In the past, the RC concentrated mainly on bringing antiracist, antisexist, and pro-working class resolutions before the Delegate Assembly. New developments have changed our tactics. Covid-era restrictions on group gatherings; reactionary changes in the MLA Constitution making it near-impossible to raise and pass political resolutions; the proletarianization of faculty; the resurgence of anti-capitalist activism among young people—these changes have led the RC to broaden its focus.
Younger faculty and adjuncts step forward!
The highly spirited RC meeting at the end of the convention, attended by 33 people, developed this altered approach to organizing all year rather than only at the annual convention. The RC Steering Committee has been expanded to include younger teachers, mostly adjuncts. Inspired by a young elementary school teacher who spoke about the need for the RC to be “really radical,” we discussed an agenda for 2022 to move us from thought into action.  This will involve bringing faculty into students’and workers’ struggles; unionization among academic and nonacademic campusworkers; benefits for adjunct faculty; more study groups interrogating the“keywords” of current social justice movements; involvement in campaigns tomake the bosses pay for Covid-19 safeguards; the urgency of attacking climatecollapse and sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry.  
The challenge facing communists in the RC is to bring to these reform-level struggles over theory and practice an understanding of the need to join a communist party and fight to abolish capitalism. A world without borders; without racist and sexist hierarchies; without toxic individualism and alienation. While some literary works contain glimpses of this better world, it is our writing, teaching and organizing task in the MLA to bring literary people into the Party, PLP, which can make it a reality.

Covid-19 under capitalism will continue to spread. The world is now approaching the mark of two full years  of the Covid-19 pandemic. The thirst for profit and the competition between different capitalist factions and countries has left large segments of the world population susceptible to the coronavirus infection. Many hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people, and now with the Omicron variant millions of vaccinated people, too, are getting Covid-19.
This unchecked spread of the virus is deadly for our class-the working class. As long as it can continue to infect people, variants will arise. We have to look out for our class by keeping each other safe. The bosses of the ruling class are preaching individualism and encouraging us to engage in activities they know will spread the virus and likely lead to more variants. As workers, we can socialize and meet and march in ways that still guard against the spread of the coronavirus and its variants. We can fight for the safest conditions possible where we work or go to school and we can build a movement led by the working-class to fight to get rid of this system once and for all with communist revolution.
Capitalism spreads the virus
These variants are a result of multiplication of billions of viruses with subsequent mutations in RNA as these viruses replicate. Every time the virus infects a new person it makes billions of copies of itself. We should not be surprised to see wave after wave of variants as long as the SARS-CoV-2 virus has room to multiply. This happens because as a virus multiplies, changes in the viral RNA occur spontaneously. If some of these variants become more contagious, they become dominant and may be able to evade the immunity induced by vaccines.
“Mutations occur when viruses are in an immunocompromised host and when they can infect many people. In the first case, the immunocompromised person’s immune system is unable to rid the body of the virus, or to do so quickly. That gives the virus more time to infect more cells and produce more copies of itself, potentially producing more mutations. It is similar when many people in a population are infected. The virus may have less time in a single host before the immune system reacts but has more opportunities to mutate in more bodies….Mutations could also bestow the ability to become more transmissible, making it easier for the virus to infect others, or more severe, meaning it’s more likely those infected will require hospital care or die” (Global News, 4/28/21).
The current situation is a textbook case of a variant generator, “the chance a vaccine-resistant strain will emerge is highest in a scenario that combines three conditions: First, a large portion of a population is vaccinated, but not everyone. Second, there's a lot of virus circulating. And third, no measures are in place to curb potential viral transmission from vaccinated people” (Business Insider, 8/1/21).
The bosses know; they don’t care
The ruling-class knows the dangers of the activities they continue to promote. “The threat of Covid-19 means you should avoid eating and drinking in public if you can. More interactions between potentially infected people will give the virus more pathways to spread and potentially mutate” (WSJ, 1/17).
As long as the ruling-class is in power they will put their needs for profit and desire to keep themselves in power over the needs of the working-class and the suffering will continue. As workers,  we have to look out for each other and fight to make the needs of our class primary.

BURIN, WEST BANK, PALESTINE, January 21– A group of 30 Jewish fighters, mostly over the age of 70, as well as two members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), showed antiracist solidarity with the Palestenian working class in the village of Burin. They helped plant new olive trees where old ones have been uprooted.
Immediately, a group of settlers, armed with clubs and a firebomb, attacked, all in the name of zionism. All forms of nationalism is a deadend ideaology for our class; we need Jewish-Muslim unity against racism.
The small Palestinian village of Burin, near Nablus, for several years has suffered many attacks by settlers from the nearby highly illegal Israeli far-right settlement, "Givat Ronen." - The settlers brutalize the locals and destroy their property and livelihood, including uprooting olive trees - a major crop raised by the Burin's hard-working residents.
The Israeli military, ever-present in the West Bank, never protects the villagers - but quickly protects the settlers if the villagers try to defend themselves.
This type of nationalist racism is not new to the international working class. Just as we see across capitalist borders around the world, bosses will claim rights to land in the name of profit even if it means turning a blind eye to this robbery or executing our class sisters and brothers. Only with communism, when we smash nations and borders will we be free of racist violence and murder.
Israel STILL guilty of racism
The entire event was recorded on video and was quickly on the news. While in racist Israel, attacks on Palestinian villagers usually go unnoticed, an attack on elderly Israeli peace activists does enter the news.
This caused a major political uproar in Israel, as even many Israeli liberals felt anger over the cowardly and savage attack. Many called on the government to remove the illegal "Givat Ronen" settlement, which overlooks Burin, and to arrest the settler thugs. Nothing has been done so far.
The Israeli police force, which has recently been exposed for spying on political dissidents, and regularly spies on Palestinians, could have easily located and arrested the fascist thugs. However, apart from an online outcry (rather than actions) from certain politicians, Israel's liberal "Government of Change" has done nothing to deal with these criminals and their - once again - highly illegal  settlement.
Liberals and cops will never defeat fascists, as liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same rotten coin, and as cops often are fascists themselves or at minimum complicit in protecting fascist controls. The only way forward is revolution by building an international communist party – PLP!
A good starting point would be to invite younger antiracists to political events, to train against fascist pogroms.
In the long run, we must build a revolutionary movement to smash capitalism and fascism with the only alternative: communism.

In the very readable The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (2021), author Chanda Prescod-Weinstein gives a wonderful introduction to the great questions of how the universe works. How does time work? Why are there so many different quarks that make up matter? What can dark matter be that prevents spiral galaxies from collapsing on themselves?
The book is an even greater history and analysis on the insidious effects that racism and sexism have on science under capitalism. The author’s mother is from the Caribbean, her father Jewish, and the author grew up in East Los Angeles. Following education at Harvard, she faced teachers and students along the way who openly declared her mentally incapable of majoring in particle physics. In a field dominated by white men from bourgeois and petty bourgeois backgrounds, Chanda, a non-white working-class woman, was told she could never be equal - a dismissal so many workers face under a capitalist education system that deems intellect as solely for a select few. Under communism, education will be rid of its elitist chains and knowledge will come from and be for the working-class.
Science is political
Physics is not “pure science” untouched by capitalism, but an embodiment of the individualist, racist and sexist social relations of capitalism. Under capitalism, the field of physics itself has long been stripped of its halo and ceased asking “the big questions” about the nature of the universe that Chanda honors with reverent awe. Under capitalism, physicists are reduced to wage-laborers of military research, developing ever more lethal weapons like drones and hyper-sonic missiles to massacre other workers in looming imperialist wars for profit. Irrespective of an individual scientist’s intentions, the sciences today serve only the imperialist system that the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is organizing internationally to smash.
Chanda is relentless in exposing the racist and sexist practices that have rippled through the history of scientific discovery. She constantly exposes the rapacious capitalist imperialist system that has ravaged the lives of workers, especially Black, Latin, and women workers, all over the world. She makes several sharp points like: “If Black people are invisible, how come the police are so good at shooting our friends and family…The starting point might be to avoid looking at the differences between people, and instead focus on the system that implies extreme differences.”
Chanda punctuates her analyses with her love and thirst for studying the wonders of the universe. And it is amazing and dazzling! The observable universe has no center! Space and time are inseparable from one another, and “spacetime” itself is curved! However, the joy of these advances is lessened by how many workers are shut out from learning about the world. “We lose people because too often there aren’t enough victories and moments of joy and fun for those of us who are from communities that history kicked to the cotton fields, trails of tears, unsafe street corners, prisons, and death at the hands of state actors and vigilantes. It is hard to see the wonders of the universe through the social crud.”
Political struggle is scientific
Chanda correctly blames the structural racism within capitalism for the poverty that oppresses so many Black people, refugees, single mothers, children and trans workers. Chanda states we should be able “to see the night sky and be inspired by the universe as it really is. It should be a human right, not a luxury for the chosen few.” She also writes, “People need to know that we live in a universe that is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us.”
Chanda says in her professional life she is afraid of what would happen if she really spoke her mind. That is why we need a Party like PLP, that unites the working-class. You cannot beat the bosses individually. The Disordered Cosmos lucidly attacks the capitalist system all the way through, so it was a disappointment to see on the last page her call for “peace” three times in the last paragraph as her final stand.
Chanda, and all workers, must subscribe to CHALLENGE and organize our efforts scientifically using dialectical materialism (see page 3) to demolish capitalism and set up a communist system in which everyone can strive to reach their full potential. The Disordered Cosmos is a good introduction for workers to the “big questions” of both political struggle and the nature of the universe itself, and a rich text for Party study groups on dialectical materialism.