WASHINGTON, DC, March 11 – Following an October overnight protest at the home of Jeffrey Zients, Counselor to  President Joe Biden, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined a protest this week calling out Zients Joe Biden’s new blood soaked Covid-Czar.  The march, organized by Justice is Global, Public Health Awakened, and R2H (Right to Health),  denounced the COVAX program, the disastrous U.S. led global vaccine distribution and development initiative. With 18.2 million Covid-19 related deaths worldwide as a result of the vaccine apartheid  (Washington Post, 3/14) and only 12 percent in many of small capitalist countries having been vaccinated( ourworldindata.org).
As we marched against Zients, Biden, and capitalist disregard overall, we took aim at the entire system of U.S. imperialism and its racist sexist healthcare system. As long as the fate of the world rests in the hands of imperialist butchers and profit hungry bosses, misery and death will continue to rain down on workers across the globe. Smashing capitalism is not just a moral imperative; it’s a life and death battle. Now more than ever we need communism, a system that is run by working people for the benefit of all. Under communism the core values of health and science care will put human life and progress at the forefront, and will be available to all. Money and the profit incentive will be eradicated along with preventable deaths from treatable illnesses.
A PL’er addressed the rally by linking the racist vaccination policy failures to capitalism and rising imperialism. She pointed out that the U.S. oligarch Bill Gates, in keeping with capitalism’s profits-only goal, fought to keep the profits flowing to the drug companies by limiting the Covid-19 vaccine supply and refusing to make the mRNA vaccine recipe available to the world.
Several additional people joined us at the rally and were introduced to PLP with our revolutionary newspaper, CHALLENGE. PLP members have been working with these organizations as well as the American Public Health Association to build international solidarity and raise revolutionary politics (see CHALLENGE, 11/17/21 and CHALLENGE Letters, 3/2).
Some demonstrators and members of these organizations have illusions that we can pressure politicians into serving the working class. In reality, these cronies, Democrats and Republicans alike, are controlled by the U.S. financial oligarchs and pharmaceutical corporations and will never seek to do right by our class.
Never-the-less we fight back. We are still planning to attack the pharmaceutical companies directly with a rally in Boston at Moderna headquarters in late April.
We continue to demand that the TRIPS Agreement waiver and technology transfer (a waiver that would temporarily waive intellectual property rights protections for technologies needed to prevent, contain, or treat Covid-19, including vaccines) be approved so that there can be worldwide capacity to respond to epidemics without companies like Moderna and Pfizer amassing huge profits by selling vaccines only to rich countries.
Other speakers described the risk of new Covid variants without widespread vaccinations. One worker movingly read an organizer’s account of the impact of Covid-19 on her life as a disabled person who has lost friends because they disagree with her safety requests (masks and vaccination). Others described the struggles of health workers, the fights to keep schools safe, and international lives lost without vaccinations. The pandemic has been so politicized that public health for everyone, already a pipe-dream under capitalism, has been compromised.
At the rally, a large prescription poster calling for firing Jeffrey Zients and replacing him with a public health expert was erected next to a giant report card giving him an F for public safety but an A+ for supporting corporate interests!
Several cardboard bottles called for PUBLIC HEALTH not PROFIT. The rally ended with a two-minute die-in complete with gravestones to commemorate two-years since the Covid-19 pandemic struck the U.S.
As similar protests were held simultaneously in many cities and towns in the U.S. and internationally, we as PLP members take a moment to remind ourselves and our comrades that under capitalism there is no just healthcare or equitable care for the working class. It is only under communism, where medicine and its supporting systems are built to put the patient not profit first will we ever truly know health. Fight for communism, power to the working class!

At the beginning of February, the Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) convened a meeting of left-wing organizations called the "Resistance Conference" to promote social protest. Many groups expressed disenchantment with the Fourth Transformation policies of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and argued for the need to resume struggle and resistance.
Two comrades from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) attended the meeting where we handed out a few dozen CHALLENGE leaflets detailing why capitalist reforms are a dead end for our class. The content of those leaflets is reproduced below. The plan is to continue to participate in future meetings:

The liberal fourth transformation (4T slogan of the Mexican government) managed to renew the hope of some reformists that capitalism could be reformed to serve the interests of the masses. However, in just three years, this government showed its true anti-working class nature and subservience to the interests of big capital. The patronage structure set up in the 4T social programs has paved the way for the government’s imperialist megaprojects: the Interoceanic Corridor, the Mayan Train, the Dos Bocas Refinery and the new Mexico City Airport.
A combination of cronyism, cooptation, assassination of social leaders and militarization disguised as the National Guard on top of an economic crisis exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic has allowed bankers to reap record profits of 162 billion pesos (La Jornada, 2/3). For example, the profits of the county’s largest mining company, Grupo México, soared 70 percent in 2021 reaching 3,868 million dollars (La Jornada, 2/2). In the last couple of months, the capital of the mega-rich in Mexico grew six times more than the country's economy. The fortunes of these millionaires increased 27.3 percent (La Jornada, 11/30/21).
With all this, the AMLO government has managed to demobilize workers and to dismantle the opposition into supporting its megaprojects. For example, the re-election and legitimization of Ricardo Aldana, the corrupt union leader of the Mexican oil workers (PEMEX), serves to maintain control over the workers and reveals the anti-worker, pro-capitalist essence of the 4T.
During the last three years, in Mexico, conditions for the working class have worsened. In Latin America, one in four people lost their job and to date they have not recovered it. Employment fell from 76 percent to 62 percent, with an increase in informal work from 48 percent to 53 percent. At the beginning of the pandemic, 12 percent of households had been without food for at least a month. This proportion doubled in a year and a half of the health crisis and was accompanied by lower incomes and deteriorated working conditions (La Day, 12/30/21).
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the inability of the capitalist system to meet the needs of the working class. The profit-based health system continues to be overwhelmed by the number of patients. The capitalists focus on saving their companies over the lives of workers. The imperialists prioritize competition and their global geopolitical interests over the solidarity and collaboration between countries necessary to confront the health crisis. This individualistic, racist and sexist approach has had lethal consequences for our families and has allowed the virus to mutate causing more  outbreaks all over the world.
The effects of Covid-19 were felt more intensely by working women, who are twice as likely to lose their jobs as men. In the first months of the pandemic, 38 percent of working women lost their jobs, and this doubled for mothers, reaching 40 percent unemployment. Likewise, during all these months, the unpaid workload increased, since taking care of the sick and children was added to domestic work.
In Mexico, 94 percent of those who died from Covid-19 were women who tended to their homes, pensioners, and workers (https://covid19comision.unam.mx/?p=89342), which reflects the sexism of the capitalist system and the need to prioritize industrial production over the lives of workers. Many of the deaths were concentrated in industrialized regions (especially in the border area with the U.S.). The maquila workshops never closed and some operated clandestinely without medical or job security. A recent study has shown that workers with lower incomes have a five-fold higher risk of death (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S 2667193X 21001113? via %3Dihub), demonstrating the inequality that the capitalist system promotes and maintains.
The sectors of society (mainly the working class) that have historically resisted the onslaught of capital must resume resistance actions to confront the capitalists, including the liberals of the 4T. We need to unify as a class through a non-electoral revolutionary party (Progressive Labor Party) to seize power from capital and build a communist society.

VALPARAISO, March 11—Today’s inauguration of another liberal misleader, Chilean president Gabriel Boric, represents a major blow to class consciousness and the struggle for working-class power in the region. The victory of communism will never come through the ballot box, only by the seizure of state power through violent revolution under leadership of the mass and international Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
The 36-year-old former student leader, the first “leftist” millennial elected as President, Boric secured office by riding a recent wave of mass fightback against cost of living hikes, wage inequality, and anti-indigenous racism. But like so many liberal capitalist politicians, Boric is already primed to deceive the working class. Boric joins the stock of played out pink-tide democratic socialists in Latin America who pacify workers with shiny promises of change, but trap workers in the hamster wheel of capitalist reforms. The greatest danger liberals like Boric pose is fascism. A country battered by crisis, Boric will need to exert fascist control of the economy in order to discipline workers, while courting rival imperialists U.S. and China, and enriching the local capitalists.
All politicians under this system—from Boric to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from Joe Biden to Vladimir Putin—serve the interests of preserving one faction of capitalist rule or another. Our task as communists and anti-capitalist fighters is to cut through the hype and false promises of the bosses everywhere, and win millions of others to the winning alternative of building PLP and international revolution.
Identity politics, the kiss of death
It’s easy to see how a case could be made for Boric, considering he’s taking the helm from former billionaire president Sebastian Piñera, and beat out another candidate during the election whose father was a card-carrying Nazi and Pinochet sympathizer (Guardian, 12/8/21). Boric  is making history by stacking his cabinet with a record number of women politicians as well as members of Chile’s sellout “Communist” Party (Americas Quarterly, 1/21).
But all that glitters is not gold. Within the same cabinet, Boric was quick to appease international capitalist interests by appointing Mario Marcel as finance minister (Reuters, 1/21). Marcel was head of Chile's central bank during the administration of Piñera in 2019, the year of mass protests in response to rising transit costs and stagnant wages. During this period, Chile was “one of the most unequal countries in Latin America” (Al Jazeera, 10/30/19).
The development of a new national constitution, the compromise made with the Chilean ruling class in response to the protests of 2019, now will take shape under Boric’s watch. The new constitution is already being hailed as a major advance from the previous one written under the rule of fascist military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
But the reform promises of a greater social safety net and gender parity are already on shaky ground. Two years of pandemic capitalism exacerbated a profit crunch and Boric will compromise with bosses of all stripes (Deccan Herald, 12/21/21).
Chile caught in U.S.-China rivalry
To try and pull Chilean capitalism out of its crisis, Boric and company look to exploit the country’s vast mineral wealth. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer and is home to some of the largest lithium deposits on the planet (S&P Global, 12/21/21). The scramble to mine these metals, valuable for commodities from computers to electric vehicles, is attracting more attention from the world’s top imperialist powers.
Already, Boric’s compromise with imperialist fracking, hiking mining taxes and ramping up resource extraction show his willingness to sell workers out to capital. Expect more super-exploitation of miners and dispossession of indigenous workers who are living in the crosshairs of the resource-rich Atacama Desert
(Washington Post, 6/21/19).
Still considering Chile much in the U.S. sphere of influence, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden was quick to congratulate Boric on his election victory while even sending a delegation to attend the inauguration. U.S.-based company Albemarle is already running one of the largest lithium extraction operations in the country while still seeking to expand (CSIS, 8/17/21). Meanwhile, Chinese imperialist influence on the South American continent has grown at least tenfold over the last decade and a Chinese mining firm just outbid Albemarle for a new lithium contract in Chile (Asia Financial, 1/22).
Certain to play the greatest cost for this growing imperialist showdown is the environment and workers that Boric claims to be eager to defend. Mining is easily one of the most deadly industries for the working class, claiming thousands of workers’ lives every year to ensure the bosses’ profits. No doubt still fresh in the memory of many workers in Chile is the Copiapó mining accident in 2010 in which 33 miners were trapped underground for 69 days.
Boric’s claims to want to nationalize mining in the country are nothing more than a ploy to throw some crumbs at the working class while the bosses are primed to make a boon in profits, a la Hugo Chavez/Nicolas Maduro with oil in Venezuela. Any social contract with our exploiters is murder for our class!
Only one path to workers’ power
There are no doubt workers still alive in Chile who saw the rise and fall of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Voted into power, Allende and his government made the fatal error of a “peaceful” path of opposing capitalism, only to pay the price when the U.S. imperialists backed Pinochet to overthrow him and establish a fascist regime that murdered thousands of workers across decades.
Let’s not repeat the same mistakes. Let the militant fightback from workers in Chile in 2019 be reignited and become one of the many battles for communist revolution!

This is part of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to re-establish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. But, in defending the Republic, they were defending capitalists. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists.
In the Progressive Labor Party we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership is essential. Our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership. The following continues that story:
Salaria Kea was born in 1913 in Georgia. Her father was a worker in a sanitarium that was overcrowded and understaffed. When he was killed by a deranged patient, her mother moved the family to Akron, OH. There Salaria got her first taste of the power of collective action and fightback. First her older brothers raised her and worked so that she could get an education. One started working at the age of nine. When she wanted to play basketball but was rejected at Akron Central High, her brothers went to the school board with her. She got transferred to West H.S. and got on the team: “That was her first realization that one does not accept and submit to unfair practices. One resists and fights” (see sources at the end).
Thus began a lifetime of helping the working class as a nurse and fighting against racism. It took her from protests at Harlem Hospital to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War against fascism to joining the Communist Party in 1935. Ultimately the Communist Party became a reformist party and gave up the fight for workers’ power and communism. But, Salaria never gave up the fight against racism and to improve conditions for the working class. It is now our task in the Progressive Labor Party to fight to end the horrors of capitalism once and for all with communist revolution.
Fighting segregation, and winning!
Aiming to be a nurse, she was rejected by nursing schools in Ohio and moved to New York City. While training at Harlem Hospital, she and others helped end segregated seating in the cafeteria.
One day Salaria entered the dining room with a group of her fellow students. They found only one vacant table so seated themselves there. The waitress refused to serve them saying that this table was reserved for white social workers … At once the five students rose, gathered up the ends of the cloth and dumped the table over.
They demanded an end to racial segregation in the staff dining room and the appointment of one Black dietitian (all five were white). These demands were won!    
That summer [1934] infantile diarrhea spread through the hospital. Daily from three to five babies died. People in the street began … referring to the hospital as the “Death House” … Discontent finally crystallized in organized protest. A picket line was thrown around the hospital demanding an investigation into the deaths of so many babies, … These demands were met. … Salaria learned that the individual is only as secure as the group.
Making connections: From Harlem to Ethiopia to Spain
Salaria became active with other progressive nurses. She began to understand the connections between racism at Harlem Hospital, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War against fascism. She joined the Communist Party. The Red Cross in Spain rejected her application, so she went to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade organized mainly by the Communist Party. She was the first Black American woman there.
First she worked at the former Spanish King’s summer palace, now turned over to cows and goats while the Spanish peasants lived in hovels. She helped organize to make the dilapidated halls clean and safe for the peasants to move in.
This was Salaria’s first concrete example of discrimination where race was not a factor. Here it was peasantry versus nobility. The peasants had previously accepted the belief that nothing could be done about it [their conditions]. Like the Harlem nurses the peasants were now learning that something could be done … One resisted, one fought, … There was nothing inviolable about the old prejudices.
Behind the battle lines, conditions were poor, ignorance everywhere.
Two years of war and all Spain’s trees have been burned for fuel. One morning in a cold rain they brought in a young French soldier. A leg had to be amputated immediately. There was no time to warm him – and no fuel …
Pack his bed with hot water bottles,” the doctor ordered. Collectively the nurses puffed at little oil stoves which refused to take fire with dilute kerosene. It seemed horrible to watch this young chap die when so simple a thing as hot water could save him …
Salaria glanced at the clock, noted it was approaching lunchtime and soup should be boiling. Nimbly she gathered up hot water bottles, ran down the stairs and, unnoticed, into the kitchen. With a big pitcher she filled the three hot water bottles with steaming soup. The patient recovered.
Wounded, then back to the struggle
Transferred to the front lines, Salaria treated the wounded while helping to fight off German dive-bombers with a machine gun. In March, 1938,
… her hospital unit suffered a particularly heavy bombardment … Suddenly the signal was given “Cover! In the trenches!” Lying flat, face buried in the earth floor of the trench she heard a tremendous explosion. Some time later she was uncovered and dug out from under six feet of rock, shell and earth.
Wounded, she was furloughed back to New York. During three months of convalescing she traveled around the country raising money for medical aid and food for the Spanish people. During World War II racism prevented Salaria from joining the Army Nurse Corps until near the war’s end.
Salaria Kea devoted her life to the working class. As capitalism ravages the world’s workers and imperialist rivalries bring us ever closer to world war, let’s fight for a world run by and for workers like Salaria. That’s communism!

Sources
Emily Robins Sharpe, “Salaria Kea’s Spanish Memoirs” The Volunteer, December 2011
Mark O’Sullivan, “What Do We Know About Salaria Kea’s Irish Husband?” The Volunteer, May 2021.