Is the transcontinental country of Turkey an ally or a rival to U.S. imperialists? New President Joe Biden's choice for secretary of state Antony Blinken declares Turkey is acting more like a betrayer: “The idea that a strategic, so-called strategic, partner of ours would actually be in line with one of our biggest strategic competitors in Russia is not acceptable” (Daily Sabah, 1/20).
Turkey—cozying up with Russia and China and destabilizing its solid alliance with the U.S.-aligned world order—is a house of cards. Any of these capitalist players can incite war.
We have no stake in the bosses’ bloody games for profit and power. From Istanbul to Hong Kong to New York, our liberation lies in building a mass, international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and transforming the bosses’ profit wars into class wars for communist revolution.
Inter-imperialist rivalry is the name of the game
The U.S. bosses’-led liberal world order is in utter disarray (see page 2). To understand the driving force of world events, we must grasp the inter-imperialist rivalry which is becoming sharper. This means bosses who cut the world into spheres of influence are preparing for war with each other. Their struggle is intensifying, especially as U.S. imperialist influence around the world is stumbling.
As the biggest imperialists prepare their fight, they maneuver to gain advantage over their rivals. They fight to control as many second-tier countries as possible. But the bosses of these second-tier capitalist states have ambitions of their own. That’s what’s  happening with Turkey.
Regardless of how the bosses’ alliances shift over time, the result is that under capitalism workers will always lose.
Relationship with the West unravels
Turkey has been a member of NATO (the transatlantic alliance led by U.S. bosses) since 1952. Since the Cold War, its NATO base in Incirlik has played a key role in containing the USSR (and now Russia) and helping U.S. forces launch their murderous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the Middle East. Turkey is deeply integrated into NATO’s military structure. It hosts the standing headquarters for NATO’s land forces in the city of Izmir.
When U.S. rulers tried to destabilize the Middle East with the Arab Spring, Turkey lost by backing the losing side, the Muslim Brotherhood. This isolated Turkey from the region, especially from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
The Syrian civil war was a direct result of the Arab Spring. The U.S. was incapable of achieving its objective of toppling Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, who was backed by Iran and Russia. Worse for Turkey, the U.S. allied with its enemy the YPG (Kurdish forces which Turkey categorizes as a terrorist organization). The Turkish and U.S. bosses’ relationship has only continued to unravel.
Erdogan cuts deals with Russia
These developments encouraged an attempted military coup against Turkish President Recep Erdogan in 2016. Erdogan had been in power since 2003 and had been consolidating his control while transforming Turkey into a quasi-religious fascistic state. The coup was an opportunistic attempt by the military to be the ultimate power broker in Turkey, a role that they were accustomed to.
Erdogan survived and blamed the West. It also became fed up with the unfulfilled promises of EU membership. So, Turkey, in crisis and isolated, warmed up relations with Russia.
Erdogan’s first call and foreign visit after the coup was Russia. Since then, Turkey and Russia have brokered the peace talks in Syria (Reuters, 12/16/16). Russia lifted most of the sanctions it had imposed on Turkey. They met seven times that year culminating with the sale of a Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system to Turkey (CNN, 7/13/19).
Liberal Order sanctions Turkey
This dealing with Russia has its contradictions. Russian and Turkish troops still face one another not only in Syria, but on opposite sides of the Libyan civil war, and the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Turkey also has refused to recognize Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula (ABC News, 10/16/20).
Turkey continues to anger the EU by sending a research ship escorted by gunboats to prospect for gas in waters internationally recognized as part of the exclusive economic zones of EU members Greece and Cyprus (BBC, 10/12/20). It has weaponized refugees by busing hundreds to the Greek border and pushing them to cross in a bid to pressure the EU and Greece.
Last month, the U.S. Congress passed a law mandating the President to impose sanctions on Turkey for buying those Russian missiles (WSJ, 12/10/20). The EU is also debating sanctions against Turkey for its incursion into its maritime zone. These imperialists are sending a clear signal to Turkey to play by their rules. Joe Biden, representing the Big Fascists, is “willing to work with "opposition leadership" in [Turkey] to topple Erdoğan in Turkey's 2023 elections” (Daily Sabah, 1/20).
U.S. at risk of losing Turkey to China?
Although China and Turkey have long been at odds over China’s racist state terror against Uighur workers, in recent years the relationship has thawed. Since 2016, they have signed at least ten bilateral agreements, and China is now only second to Russia in trade with Turkey. While the U.S. bosses have railed against Chinese tech giant Huawei as a security threat, market share of the company in Turkey has only grown (Foreign Policy, 9/16/20). Militarily and economically, the U.S. bosses are losing serious ground.
Considering everything, this hornet’s nest “risks bringing Turkey and the United States into a military confrontation, unheard of in their 70-year long alliance” (Brookings, 2/14/18). Biden’s job, as dictated by the Big Fascists, is to prepare for eventual war against the U.S.’s rivals, China and Russia.
No honor among imperialist thieves
Communists know that the world’s ruling capitalist classes are mass-murdering fascists and racists. They are only interested in maintaining their power and control over the world’s resources and workers. They have no principles. They only use religion, patriotism, nationalism, identity politics, and sexism to divide and confuse workers to kill each other for their profits.
As such, their wheeling and dealing is all opportunistic and self-serving. They have no loyalty to each other. When the bosses talk peace, workers should prepare for war. We are the wild card in the rulers’ games. These capitalist rulers are highly dynamic human actors interested in maximum profits. We need to understand their motives to prepare ourselves for battle.
This battle we’re building right now must have no borders. Reject all bosses and their ideologies—turn imperialist war into class war and communist revolution with PLP!

Workers pay the heaviest of prices for buying into capitalist ideas, which in every country capitalism tries convincing us are universal truths— in the U.S., schools and movies alike saturate us with ideas like “individual freedom.” But when evaluating the toll of COVID-19, the cost of these ideas is measured in the hundreds of thousands of workers dead and the millions of workers’ lives uprooted and shattered in the U.S. alone: in the belly of the beast of history’s richest and most powerful imperialist power.
And the very first mechanism by which capitalism guaranteed the lethality of the COVID-19 was the infection of the working class with capitalist ideas, starting with individualism.
To be sure, the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party recommends the COVID-19 vaccine, universal mask wearing, physical distancing, and self-isolation when necessary – to protect ourselves and everyone around us. These are common sense mandates. In many countries workers willingly obey these public health mandates and lockdown orders for that reason.
Yet the U.S. leads in the share of people who defy such public health measures. Many refuse to accept these mandates because they regard them as infringements on “individual freedom,” even though this individualism directly harms others. Misled by politicians like Trump and Christian fascist preachers who promote superstition over science, around more than 25 percent of all U.S. workers —rising to 33 percent of Black and 34 percent of Latin workers— believe the pandemic is “probably or definitely” a hoax (Pew Research, 7/24/20), dismissing the one-third of one million deaths and counting. Far too many of our working class sisters and brothers are incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.
Mimicking Trump’s irresponsibility, many state governors and politicians aligned with the Small Fascist, domestic-oriented “Fortress America” capitalist wing tell people to do what they want. Many small-time capitalists are on the brink of failure, squeezed by monopolies like Amazon on one hand and falling profits on the other.
But it’s not just Trump – it’s capitalism. Such blatant “me-first” disregard for the well-being of others didn’t begin with Trump or any particular faction of the capitalist class. It flows from the entire history and ideology of capitalism, from its early competitive days to today’s monopoly capitalist stage, imperialism.
Politics are primary
Capitalism consists of a relatively tiny class of capitalists at the top: the owners of production and wealth. These capitalists control the lives of the rest of society beneath them—the working class, in countries the world over—control that they exercise through their state power, represented for them by self-serving politicians. And these politicians are (usually!) protected by the bosses’ police and military.
These politicians are a key part of capitalist state power, along with the entire monopoly-owned mass media and educational institutions, who are all represented on think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations. Capitalist state power is supported by and enhances individualism alongside racism, sexism and nationalism to weaken working class-conscious interests like equality, collectivity, internationalism and solidarity.
Communist collectivity vs capitalist individualism
Communist-led workers in China won a revolution and established socialism in 1949. For the period of time that the heroic struggles of workers in China were led by communists, many millions of workers became conditioned with a collective working class consciousness that opposed capitalist individualism.
These movements ultimately failed and came under the leadership of pro-capitalist, fake communists. The old communist movement, for so many achievements and advances, kept many capitalist ideas. They wrongly believed that the international working class could not be won directly to communism, and PLP has analyzed the lessons of these failures elsewhere.
Even so, remnants of that collectivity and solidarity persist. Russia and China have long ago betrayed revolutionary struggle and become fascist states today. And yet China’s success in containing COVID-19 would’ve been impossible were it not for masses of workers selflessly volunteering.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health conducted a study on the “volunteerism” in China (Miao et al, 8/7/20). As the pandemic rose, 85,699 middle-aged worker volunteers interpreted and carried out public health mandates, as public services facing decades of China’s capitalist cutbacks became overwhelmed. Volunteers formed grassroots networks connecting hard-hit cities like Hangzhou, Wenzhou and Taizhou with smaller cities, towns and villages, from running public services to organizing logistics for food and medicine deliveries, to performing invaluable sanitation duties.
Zero praise is due for the fascist “Communist” Party of China or their response to the pandemic; workers in China organized despite their fascist capitalist government, and the bosses found themselves tailing the masses. Tellingly, the survey found that 85.8 percent of these worker volunteers volunteered “on their own initiative,” whereas 10.8 percent stated they were officially mobilized. Tragically, without a mass revolutionary communist party like PLP, these selfless worker volunteers saved lives, but also strengthened the hand of Chinese imperialism.
These volunteers’ parents and grandparents would remember the 1960s when China was led by real communists. Communists organized and channeled working class consciousness to eradicate the disease schistosomiasis, caused by snail-borne parasites that the Centers for Disease Control lists today as both an indication of extreme poverty, and the deadliest of all tropical diseases. Communists mobilized millions collectively, and is documented in Joshua S. Horn’s must-read book, Away With All Pests.
Forward to communism
“Personal choice” and “individual freedom,” are illusions of capitalist ideology, stand in opposition to working class liberation, and under capitalism lead to death-dealing pandemics for which capitalist ideas also have no solutions. Capitalist individualism only tightens our chains. The international working class’ historic task is therefore smashing capitalism and capitalist ideas through communist revolution and communist ideology.
Communism is a new concept of freedom—mass freedom. Where the condition for the free development of each is the free development of all, empowerment of the majority through abolition of the capitalist state, and organization of a working class dictatorship. This collective rule requires mutual responsibility, based on an objective and scientific appraisal of the needs of the global working class. Such an outcome is only possible through a mass organization of millions into PLP and encouraging the full participation of all workers in deliberating, planning, and implementing ideas.
Under communism, the collective power of the working class can be mobilized to solve any problem history and nature presents, from pandemics to crop failures to climate change. Liberating the creative power of each and every worker through communism and dialectical materialism will ensure the survival and progress of all. Join us and join the fight for freedom: to smash the ideological chains of individualism, racism and sexism with communist revolution.

NEW JERSEY, January 10— As news was rolling in of the attempted Small Fascist-led takeover of the U.S. Capitol (see page 2), the Modern Language Association (MLA) was hosting its annual convention. The Radical Caucus of the MLA, in which Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been active for many years, was preparing to confront how the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the ongoing attacks on public higher education.  The fightback among faculty and graduate students must now also confront the intensified political surveillance and ideological repression that are sure to shape teaching and learning in the humanities classrooms in the coming period.  
Attack on faculty = attack on students
The crisis in higher education has been brewing for at least three decades. All the following attacks hurt students the most. Almost 75 percent of all courses are now taught by graduate workers and non-tenure track faculty.  While administrators and athletic coaches rake in huge salaries, these teachers’ pay is pitiful, usually without benefits or job security; some adjuncts are on food stamps and homeless, living in their cars.  Thousands of adjuncts have been laid off because of pandemic-related cutbacks. Many full-time faculty have been forced to increase their workloads, spend many extra hours mastering online teaching, and in some instances take pay cuts. These attacks the faculty—adjunct and non-adjunct—attacks the quality of education for students.
Students who attend most institutions of public higher education—mainly working-class, immigrant, and/or Black or Latin—are shoved into bigger classrooms, often without rigorous instruction, and face costly, delayed graduation dates due to fewer classes being offered. Many colleges have turned into dystopian diploma mills, robbing students of quality education.
Organize with workers on campus
At the 2021 MLA convention, held online, the Radical Caucus organized two panels—one on “The Post-Pandemic University,” one on “Climate Activist Pedagogies”—and held a well-attended meeting where anti-capitalist and pro-communist politics were prominent. There was frank discussion of the intimidation—and anger—experienced by teachers whose zoomed classrooms are subject to surveillance at any time.  
Proposals were made to step up political work among graduate students, most of whom anticipate never getting a tenure-track job, as well as to organize antiracist campaigns uniting faculty with nonacademic campus employees, from janitors to food service workers.
Class consciousness vs. phony liberalism
Given the crisis in ruling-class legitimacy flowing from the failed Capitol invasion, the Radical Caucus must also step up the struggle on the ideological front.  Most academics who devote their lives to the study of culture and literature do so out of humanistic impulses; they want to see a better world and are not trying to get rich.
But liberal ideas, which disempower effective fights against the capitalists, reign supreme. Marxist analysis of the grounding of consciousness in class-based social relations is often dismissed as “class reductionism.” Identity politics—which posit that race, gender, and sexuality define what is essential in human experience—dominate most intellectual inquiry and attempts at campus organizing.
We can anticipate that liberal multiculturalism, the principal ideology embraced by the dominant sector of the U.S. ruling class, will now be promoted still more aggressively as the supreme expression of patriotism. The bosses turn the working class’s instinct of antiracism and antisexism into tools for oppression. The Radical Caucus plans to sponsor a series of mini-conferences where certain keywords popular in liberal academic lingo—such as “intersectionality,” “racial capitalism,” “white fragility,” and “racial privilege”—will be subjected to vigorous critique. All these terms distort the reality of class relations and make identities primary over class struggle.
This ideological offensive is especially important now as campus administrations are increasingly institutionalizing these concepts in the wake of the recent multiracial Black Lives Matter mass movements against racism.
PLP has a long history of working within the MLA Radical Caucus. We have consistently sponsored panels on working-class, antiracist, and antisexist literature.  Starting in the 1980s, we have given strong class-conscious leadership to campaigns against academic racism, imperialist war, sweatshop labor, welfare cutbacks, anti-Muslim racism, and attacks on undocumented immigrants. We were the first force within the MLA to advocate on behalf of graduate student unionization and support for adjunct faculty.  Largely because of our successes in getting resolutions through the Delegate Assembly, the MLA Executive Council changed the Constitution, so that it is now nearly impossible to bring forward rank-and-file resolutions and get them ratified by the membership.
To be self-critical: this barrier to the passage of resolutions led Party members in the last few years to be more passive in our MLA activity. But the current pandemic, intensification of class contradictions, and crisis in class rule have jolted us back into a renewed awareness of the need for militant Communist-led organizing among academics in the humanities. CHALLENGE readers, stay tuned for more from the red fighters in the MLA’s Radical Caucus.

It was interesting to hear about healthcare rationing in California and other states overwhelmed by Covid-19 infected patients. I was a respiratory therapist for over 40 years, and I recall healthcare rationing hospitals serving mostly Black & Latin communities on the south and west sides of Chicago for decades.
The main ways rationing is practiced in these working-class neighborhood hospitals is through lack of staff and supplies. In a large medical and trauma center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where most of the patients are white, there were two respiratory therapists in the emergency room (E.R.), 24 hours a day.  In one of the busiest trauma centers in Chicago, on the west side, a therapist would be assigned to cover one or two patient floors, in addition to the emergency room.
Many times, we were busy giving care on the patient floors, when we would have to stop and scurry to the emergency room for a trauma emergency. The patients on the regular floors were short-changed in their care, because we would be unable to be in two places at the same time. On many occasions, treatments could not be given because we were occupied attending to patients in the E.R. Still, in other instances, patients in the E.R. would be waiting for treatment while we attended to patients on the regular floors or other seriously ill patients in the E.R.
Lack of equipment was also a common problem. Many times I had to look for necessary equipment, like a flowmeter, used to deliver oxygen, or other equipment and supplies to set-up a ventilator used to help patients breathe.
The short staffing was not restricted to patient floors and the E.R.  I’ll never forget the night I had to take care of 11  patients who were all on ventilators in the intensive care unit. We had to keep track of our productivity during the 12-hour shift. On that night my productivity was over 20  hours, and this form of speed-up was not unusual.  They stopped requiring us to track our productivity when it was obvious that all too often, we did more than 12 hours worth of work, and it became the basis for  complaints.
The hospital’s deliberate short staffing and lack of equipment serving mostly Black and Latin communities is racist health care. It leads to unsafe working conditions and substandard care or rationing. On the west side of Chicago, life expectancy is 69 years, while six miles away downtown, life expectancy is 85 years. This gap is a result of capitalist oppression of all workers, but especially of Black & Latin workers. Capitalists worship money and profits above workers’ health, and systemic racism is their number one weapon to keep workers divided and keep society unequal.
We fought back with a petition that over 60  people signed, demanding more staff and better equipment. We were forced to use devices that were obsolete (spare parts were not being made for some breathing machines). The hospital bosses started a witch hunt to find the organizers of the petition. Instead being intimidated, many workers spoke up about the racist working conditions. We got more staff and new equipment, but like most reform victories under this system, it didn’t last long.  When workers left, they would not be replaced, and the equipment was not maintained by management.
Rotten healthcare is bad for patients and hospital workers. The Covid-19 pandemic further  exposes capitalism’s public health failures and gross racist inequities. Black workers make up 30 percent of the population in Chicago, but 72 percent of the reported Covid-19 cases.  Black workers are seven times more likely to contract and die from the virus than other workers living in the same city. Structural and systemic racism kills.
We must fight back and build the Progressive Labor Party, because only communism can ensure a healthy future for our class.