BALTIMORE, April 6—The West Wednesday weekly protests in Baltimore against police terror are not derailed by Covid-19. Named in honor of Tyrone West, the rallies have moved from the streets to the screens, streaming to Facebook Live. This shows the creative and resilient spirit of the working class in the face of crisis. The struggle also shows the growing anti-racist movement open to communist ideas.
Nationwide protest on Facebook
People on Facebook have created “Watch Parties,” with more than 200 people watching the most recent West Wednesday including people from far away.
Stevante Clark from Sacramento, California talked about the ongoing struggle to win accountability for the police murder of his 23-year-old brother, Stephon, who was murdered in his grandmother’s back yard by cops Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet in 2018.
Those cops first claimed they thought Stephon was holding a crowbar. In their re-telling, it morphed into a gun, then a cell phone. The truth: Stephon was killed for nothing less than racism!
Also joining in was David Harrison, cousin of Willie McCoy, who was executed by six cops shortly after he fell asleep in his car while waiting in a drive-thru lane at a Taco Bell in Vallejo, California in February of 2019. Workers who couldn’t wake up Willie called 911 for a wellness check. Instead of medics, seven cops arrived only to execute Willie: another example of deadly systemic racism.
Tawanda Jones was the host. She is the sister of unarmed Tyrone West, a young Black worker beaten to death by up to 15 kkkops in July of 2013.
She contrasted the ruthless killing of Willie McCoy to the soft handling of white supremacist Dylann Roof who, once in police custody, was given a cheeseburger and a bullet-proof vest, right after he murdered nine Black parishioners in cold blood in Charleston.
West Wednesday Live also discussed COVID-19. A member of Progressive Labor Party explained that the government is enforcing quarantines, but none of them are saying, “Call out the capitalists bosses who allowed us to get here.” How could they when the government serves the capitalists.
Capitalism here in the U.S. has less hospital beds—and we’re the richest nation in the world - per person than in 11  other countries, including] South Korea, China, and Italy.”
She talked about how New York closed 20 hospitals that mostly served Black and Latin working class neighborhoods in the past 20 years, based on what’s profitable for the rich, not what’s needed to preserve life.
Capitalism driven by logic of profit
Thirteen years ago in the wake of near-pandemics (SARS, bird flu, swine flu), the U.S. government had launched a project for 70,000 additional ventilators.  However, “because of corporations putting money over mankind,” those ventilators never got manufactured.
A company, which had contracted with the federal government to build smaller, more mobile, less costly ventilators, actually did produce three working prototypes, but that company got bought by a larger company that was already producing and selling ventilators at higher prices (NYT, 3/29).
Like all capitalists, those profit-driven business owners were focused on maintaining the highest possible profits and, not wanting to undercut sales of their more expensive machines, intentionally sidelined and buried the project that would have created an emergency stockpile of 70,000 life-saving ventilators. The result is the racist and criminal loss of lives and disproportionately these are the most exploited, Black, Latin workers.(NYT, 4/8)
Michigan has kept track—in 70 percent of the cases—of the racial background of people who have gotten sick with COVID-19. While Black folks make up just 14 percent of the state’s population, they have accounted for more than 33 percent of the cases, and 40 percent of the deaths.
The PLP speaker then said, “The real enemy is capitalism. It ain’t Donald Trump. It ain’t the corona. It’s capitalism...We can defeat the corona, but we should also dismantle and destroy this sick system because it’s really killing us!”
How to serve the working class
Another speaker was a fighter, here in Baltimore, who talked about how people with low incomes, when picking up food distributed free at sites run by the City, often have to wait in lines without a reliable capability for physical distancing, forcing low-income families to be at higher risk for getting Covid-19.
So he has organized a food pantry where contributing volunteers stock and drive the food directly to the homes of families in need.  
We expect online West Wednesday to grow, and to include more and more of the fighters against racism and against police brutality, in Baltimore, and from all over!

CHALLENGE readers from the Midwest, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit and also NYC and LA joined in mourning the untimely death of Harry Mcallister on April 19, 2020. Harry died of the coronavirus and was on a respirator in Minneapolis. It is especially tragic that he died of the capitalist scourge of Covid-19; it is capitalism that Harry fought against his entire life.
We salute him as we remember his activities in the International Committee Against Racism (INCAR), Minneapolis Chapter, from the ‘70s through ‘90s. INCAR was then a mass organization of the Progressive Labor Party. Together we rallied, marched, had panels, and partied. Harry was a great dancer. Harry was in the action when the temperature was sub-zero and we protested the University’s involvement in South Africa’s Apartheid and we stood on the picket line at Hormel’s meat packing plant supporting the P-9 workers.
Harry’s international historic knowledge was immense. When we produced a South Africa Apartheid pamphlet, we didn’t need Google, because he knew every notable person and date of every country in Africa. Rest in power, Harry!

April 28 is the 75th anniversary of the execution of Benito Mussolini, the fascist Italian dictator, by communist partisans. As World War II ended the Italian communists rid the world of one fascist, but they allowed capitalism to continue just with a ‘democratic’ façade. It’s not just Mussolini or Donald Trump or Joe Biden, we have to get rid of the whole damn capitalist system, to paraphrase some of the young Black rebels who fought against racist police murder in Ferguson, Missouri. Let’s rebuild a communist movement that will finally put the working class in power all over the world and put all the capitalists and their racist system in the rash heap of history!
At first a socialist, Mussolini was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for supporting Italian participation in imperialist World War I. When the war ended, Italy appeared ripe for a communist revolution. But the young Italian Communist Party (PCI), though large, was not prepared. It was not a tightly organized, democratic centralist party like the Russian Bolsheviks had formed under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. And it was geared more toward reformist politics than violent revolution.
Italian capitalists install fascist, imperialist Mussolini
Meanwhile Italian capitalists rushed to support Mussolini, who formed a nationalist dictatorship. His fascist party outlawed strikes and any independent labor movement, and killed or imprisoned communists. Communist leader Antonio Gramsci was arrested and spent the rest of his life in prison. Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship arrested, tortured, and executed opponents. His uniformed thugs, the “Blackshirts,” roamed the streets, beating and killing.
Unopposed by the imperialist Allies, Mussolini directed the brutal colonization of Libya, ultimately killing one third of its population. After 1936, he directed the imperialist conquest of Ethiopia, Somalia (then called Italian Somaliland), and Eritrea – again unopposed by the Western imperialists, who loved him for his anticommunism. The New York Times reporter in Italy, Arnaldo Cortesi, openly supported Mussolini’s policies.
Along with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler of Germany, Mussolini sent huge numbers of soldiers, military equipment, and airplanes to support fascist Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Republic was strongly supported by Stalin and the Soviet Union, which the Allies feared. The Allies blockaded the Spanish Republic, thus guaranteeing that the fascist Franco would win.
Mussolini allies with Hitler
In June 1940, Mussolini sided with Hitler in the Second World War. Fascist Italian troops occupied Greece, Albania, parts of France and Northern Africa. When Hitler invaded the then-socialist Soviet Union (USSR) on June 22, 1941, Mussolini sent troops to fight against the USSR alongside the German army. After some initial victories, the Italian army was decimated at the Battle of Stalingrad, December 1942-February 1943.
In July 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism overthrew Mussolini and the Italian King appointed a new leader. The new capitalist government tried to side with the Allies. Meanwhile Mussolini was rescued by a German commando raid and taken to Northern Italy, where he was made head of a puppet Italian state.
Communists lead resistance to fascism; kill Mussolini
The communists refused to support the new capitalist government formed by the King. They intensified their guerrilla war against both German and Italian fascist troops. Communist fighting units had political commissars, who promoted communist political consciousness among the volunteers. Many were organizing workers in the cities, while others fought in the countryside. Throughout World War II the Italian Communist Party led the underground opposition to fascism. The communist “Garibaldi Brigades” were the most numerous anti- fascist fighters and also suffered the most casualties in the anti-fascist war.
On April 25, 1945, the heavily communist National Liberation Committee of Northern Italy ordered a general insurrection in all territories still occupied by the Nazi fascists. They directed all partisan forces in Northern Italy to attack fascists and Germans, and demand their surrender. The watchword was “Surrender or Die!” Mussolini and dozens of other fascist leaders fled, heading for neutral Switzerland.
Mussolini and 52 fascist leaders were arrested on April 27. Communist-led partisans shot Mussolini the next day. His body and that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, were driven to Milan and hanged by the heels in a local square, the Piazzale Loreto, along with the bodies of other fascist leaders.
Reformist politics allow capitalists to maintain power
The partisans had wanted to seize power in Italy before the Allied troops arrived to put capitalist figures back into power. However, this proved impossible with the huge American army present. In May, 1945, the Allies and the capitalist Italian government ordered the partisans to disarm. But only about 60 percent of the weapons were turned in. Many communists did not trust the new government, and kept weapons and other military equipment. Throughout the 1950s, many partisans expected a return to guerrilla warfare in the mountains against the capitalist Italian State.
But the PCI adopted the sellout “peaceful co-existence” line, expecting to gain “socialism through the ballot box.” This rotten policy, ordered by the revisionist (phony communist) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, led to defeat after defeat.
Fight for communism
We in the Progressive Labor Party salute and respect the great achievements, victories, and sacrifices of our forebears in the Italian communist movement. We are also determined not to repeat their mistakes – especially, the error of trusting the capitalists. Communist revolution is the only way to working-class power.

Covid-19 has laid bare the lethal racist inequalities of the profit system. From the United States to Africa, from Latin America to South Asia, workers everywhere are suffering unnatural deaths from the disease of capitalism. The choice between capitalist decay and an international communist future has never been clearer.
Viruses are a product of nature, but the disaster of Covid-19 is anything but natural. Capitalism depends on the superexploitation of Black, Latin, and undocumented workers as its lifeblood. Those of us who have the least under this system will always endure the harshest attacks. The latest pandemic has made this fact of capitalist life only more obvious.
From refugee camps to tent cities to underfunded housing projects, hundreds of millions work and live without the basics of sanitation or healthcare. We expect that Covid-19 will ultimately pass, but capitalism will remain to sicken us by the billions. Racist inequality is instrumental in cultivating the conditions for spreading disease. Inferior for-profit healthcare, shoddy housing, starvation-level wages—all conspire to put workers, and especially Black and Latin families, in danger.
The capitalist rulers have infected the world with their anarchy, greed, and cold-blooded disregard for human life. The only vaccine is communist revolution! Progressive Labor Party seeks to eradicate the bosses’ contagion for all time. Though small, we still have the power to organize workers to fight for pro-communist ideas and practices through mass organizations. In this challenging, difficult period, we still have the capacity to inspire revolutionary optimism (see page 1 through 6). The health and well-being of our class depends on it.
U.S. capitalism kkkills
Jim Crow racism murders our class—through higher unemployment, police terror, deportations, decrepit housing, food deserts, second-class healthcare, homelessness, and slum living conditions. Capitalist inequalities, poverty, and segregation kill nearly 900,000 workers per year (American Journal of Public Health, August 2011). These are the preexisting conditions, fostered by Democrats and Republicans alike, that pave the way for transmission, infection, and death in a pandemic.
Disproportionate numbers of people dying—in hospitals or at home—are working-class Black, Latin, and undocumented workers. While Black workers make up only 30 percent of Chicago’s population, they total a stark 70 percent of deaths by Covid-19. “Counties that are majority-black have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority” (Washington Post, 4/7). The bosses’ solution? U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, one of a handful of Black sellouts in the Donald Trump administration, scolded Black, Latin, and other workers to “step up” and “avoid alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs” for “your abuela, your Big Mama” (The Root, 4/10). Such racist trash! These shameless hypocrites jumped at their first chance to blame the victims.  
This wouldn’t be the first time that Black workers were left to fend for themselves. During the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed 25 million people worldwide in its first 25 weeks, the racist system refused to report Black workers’ illnesses or even dig their graves. The racist pseudoscience of the day claimed that the lining of Black workers’ noses “made them more resistant to microorganisms” (Washington Post, 4/11). Black and Latin workers were forced to carry the disease to their jobs and on public transportation and back to their families. A century later, little has changed.
Workers are now faced with impossible choices: infections at our workplaces; nightmares that await us at slaughterhouse hospitals; hunger and lonely deaths at our homes. More than 16 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment between March 15 and April 4 (Business Insider, 4/13). Whether or not Black workers are masked for our collective protection, the racist cops have found a new reason to target them in stores, streets, and train stations (New York Times, 4/14).
New York City is the global pandemic epicenter, with an official death toll exceeding 10,000. But that hasn’t stopped liberal racist Governor Andrew Cuomo—who cost thousands of those lives by delaying stay-at-home measures (see page 5)—from congratulating himself for achieving a “possible plateau” (Reuters, 4/7). In reality, any slowing of the official infection rate may reflect a rising threshold for hospital admissions, the widespread unavailability of testing, and workers’ reluctance to trust the Nazi bosses’ rationed health care. The actual caseload may still be on an upward trajectory and out of control.
Yet, we fight. Workers in Chicago are leading the way (see pages 1 and 3).
Still, it is a lot worse for us in Haiti, Brazil, Zambia, or India.
Africa: anarchy of production
The entire nation of South Sudan has four ventilators. This racist system revolves around profit and competition, and the wealthiest imperialist nations are winning. “Scientists in Africa and Latin America have been told by manufacturers that orders for vital testing kits cannot be filled for months, because the supply...is going to America or Europe. [There are] steep price increases, from testing kits to masks” (NYT, 4/9). Racist borders and nationalist ideas have never been more deadly.
In Kenya and Mozambique, police beat, whipped, humiliated, and even killed workers, including a 13-year-old boy, in attempts to enforce lockdowns (Foreign Policy, 4/2). In a panicked stampede for food, two women died on a distribution line (Citizen Digital, 4/11).
African migrant workers in China are targets of eviction, street harassment, and refusal of service (Quartz, 3/11). Anti-Black racism is a global disease.
Whether we are fighting the sickness of capitalism or a coronavirus, our principle is the same: An injury to one is an injury to all. It is in the interest of the whole working class for treatment and supplies to be channeled to the most vulnerable areas. But under the profit system, only the wealthy and connected are guaranteed to be tested and to receive timely care.
Yet, we must fight back. Now more than ever, we need the leadership of Black workers.
Latin America: cardboard coffins and refugees
In Ecuador, where bodies are being left in the street or deposited in cardboard coffins (Guardian, 4/5), desperate conditions are a harbinger for Latin America and the Caribbean: an austerity budget, dependence on a failing U.S. economy, a skeletal healthcare system, gross income inequalities. The situation is even worse for malnourished and devastated Venezuelan immigrants, on the run from the atrocity of Trump’s sanctions.  
In the Corridor of Violence (Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala), “These violent cartels and their private armies, which in many places exercise more power than national governments, may now fall into anarchic and murderous competition over dwindling resources” (Wall Street Journal, 4/6). Our class will soon see a wave of Covid-19 refugees. It will be up to us to respond with international solidarity.
As of April 13, more than 300 workers in Mexico have officially died due to Covid-19, though testing is so limited that the real count may be five times as many or more (U.S. News & World Report, 4/13). In Mexico City alone, two million street vendor workers are abandoned to fend for themselves. As the virus was spreading, liberal president López Obrador showed his loyalty to the bosses’ and their businesses by advising workers to “live life as usual” (Guardian, 3/25). Yet, we must fight back. Workers in Haiti and Mexico are leading the way (see page 4 and 5).
South Asia: criminal neglect of public health
For at least a quarter of the world’s population, some two2 billion people, physical distancing is a sick joke. In South Asia, there is one nurse for every 10,000 workers. The health infrastructure, however decrepit, is concentrated in cities, yet 66 percent of the region’s population lives in rural areas (World Bank).
In India, bosses imposed a lockdown of 1.3 billion people, the largest in history. But they cannot prevent the coming cataclysm created by their blatant neglect of workers’ health. They’ve invested in only 40,000 ventilators, or about 6 percent as many per capita as in the U.S. (Aljazeera.com, 4/2). In a country where caste-based and anti-Muslim violence is routine, there’s no escaping racism for Muslim and Dalit workers. Meanwhile, fascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that Covid-19 was not a health emergency while spreading the myth that “the virus was going to be vaporized by the ‘reverberations’ of mass clapping” (Foreign Policy, 4/10).
In Bangladesh, over 90 percent of workers are in the informal sector. Most families' ability to eat depends on these workers’ now evaporated daily wages. Scarce water sources are shared across densely packed households, an ideal environment for a virus.
In Afghanistan, government-distributed hand sanitizers in hospitals “have zero alcohol content.” The imperialist-run World Health Organization gave the country 1,500 testing kits, “but only two laboratories…[have] machines that can process the test samples” (The Intercept, 4/2).
Covid-19 will result in worldwide genocide of Black and brown workers. Of all the plagues of capitalism, racism is the most fatal.
Yet, we must fight back.  
Kill capitalism or be killed
Capitalism means the racist genocide of our class: rising fascism, liberal misleaders disguised as saviors, and inter-imperialist wars for limited resources (see box). The bosses will respond to this crisis the only way they know: with murderous nationalist competition.
The other choice—for workers, the only choice—is communism. Wherever we are, we must battle the disease of the profit system. Whenever we fight back, we contribute to our international mission of equality everywhere.
Capitalism cannot protect the working class from disease and inequality. Workers need a society run by workers for the health of all, not the profits and power of a few. Only communism, organized by a mass working class led by Progressive Labor Party, could humanely contain a pandemic and ensure survival for the greatest possible number of workers. The international working class needs to build a border-free world. We need a society predicated on science to protect our class, the environment, and the planet that sustains us. Only then will humanity flourish.
Getting rid of capitalism is a matter of life or death! Which side are you on? Join the PLP and fight for workers’ power!