Few novels are written by workers about workers. Timothy Sheard’s Lenny Moss mystery series is a welcome change. In Sheard’s latest novel one foot in the grave, working-class heroes fight the zika virus and expose the bosses’ malice in the class struggle.  
The series
The series is written by a retired emergency room nurse who bases his detective, Lenny Moss, on a real life janitor and union steward in a Philadelphia hospital. These books contain all the elements of a good mystery: suspense, developed characters, believable plots. Each mystery takes place within a larger medical framework. Lenny realizes early on in the series that when major crimes arise, he has to notify the police. He and Detective Williams learn to trust and respect each other’s skills.
Lenny Moss is an older white worker. Although cynical, he goes to bat for all the workers, nurses, doctors and techs in the hospital even though they are not in his union. His union only covers janitors, housekeeping, laundry and cafeteria workers.  He is well liked and respected by the other hospital workers. As a fighter, the administrators hate him. Solving crimes is a collective effort by a multiracial crew of workers. Though recognized as the leader, he knows he needs all of his friends to resolve the crime. His best friends in the hospital are Moose, who works in dietary, and his wife Birdie, who works in the sewing room in the basement of the hospital. Both are Black. Lenny’s wife, Patience, is an X-ray tech at the hospital. She is Black and has two children from another marriage.
In One Foot in the Grave, the crime centers on Roy Reading, an EMT. He was thrown out of medical school for how he treated a comatose female patient. The person responsible for his being tossed out is Dr. Austin. When Roy finds out Dr. Austin works at Jefferson Hospital, he plots to poison her. Roy is very skillful. Detecting why Dr. Austin becomes so ill and who did it, falls on Lenny. Being cynical, Lenny suspects foul play.
Depicts the grind
This mystery novel contains both medical drama and funny anecdotes. The other unique quality of the series is that it depicts the crushing grind of capitalism. Sheard’s mystery novels always have several threads set around medical issues. In this novel, hospital workers are scrambling to contain the zika virus which has broken out in Philadelphia. There are so many zika patients, a triage tent is located outside the Emergency Room entrance. Nurses have to determine if an incoming emergency patient has been bitten by a mosquito. If they have bites, they have to be put in isolation rooms by themselves. Without more isolation rooms, workers and doctors use ingenuity. Doubling up zika patients in one room is a solution. Staff shortages and reduced supplies complicate the situation. Nurses battle privacy concerns. Nurses are forced to wear GPS tracking devices around their necks at all times on duty. Dispatchers monitor their every move and sound, even in the restroom! The novel illustrates the rising use of technology to monitor workers and quell fightback.
Workers organize
Pregnant and women of childbearing age fear getting the Zika virus while attending patients because of the lack of proper safety precautions, such as face masks and gowns. Workers, even those in a union, who miss a day or two of work can be fired. Another thread illuminates the hard struggle to unionize nurses. Nurses could be fired for organizing on the job. The dispatching monitors play a prominent role in this thread. Nurses try to muffle their monitors and meet in the basement so dispatchers can’t hear them.
Find out how it all works out in this thrilling pro-working class detective novel! The only thing missing is an organizing solution outside of the hamster wheel of reformism.

Beneath its surface unity, the 70th anniversary summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in London exposed the tensions and divisions between the U.S. bosses and the European capitalists. While the U.S. rulers openly view NATO as a tool to protect and advance their imperialist interests, the European rulers historically relied on it as a line of defense against the Soviet Union (and now Russia), and to protect them in the next world war.
The interests of the capitalist rulers are not only opposed to those of the working class, but are usually secured at our expense. As the rulers grab for their maximum profits, workers suffer from racism, sexism, wage exploitation, and imperialist war. The bosses’ relentless competition and their brutal oppression of workers will continue until nations are abolished under communism.
Big & Small Fascists clash over NATO
The splits between the two wings of the U.S. ruling class were obvious at the NATO summit.  Both the Big Fascists (finance capital imperialists) and the Small Fascists (bosses who make most of their money from domestic business) are complaining that the U.S. bears an unfair share of NATO’s financial burden.  With U.S. President Donald Trump leading the charge, the Small Fascists have gone a step further, calling into question the usefulness of the post-World War II alliance (National Public Radio, 12/3/19). The Cato Institute, funded heavily by the Kochs, the Small Fascists’ first family, argues that Russia is no longer a threat to U.S. interests, and that NATO is therefore obsolete (Cato Institute, 12/5/19).  
To try to maintain their international dominance, the Big Fascists need to keep their multinational alliances in place. The New York Times, the Big Fascist’s leading mouthpiece, calls NATO the “most successful military alliance in history” and indispensable for U.S. national security (NYT, 7/8/18). At the moment, despite Trump’s calls for retrenchment, the Big Fascists are winning this fight; the Pentagon recently committed an additional 20,000 troops to European defense (Foreign Affairs, 12/3/19).  
The European ruling classes have their own splits, making them less reliable as U.S. allies. A three-year conflict over Brexit has paralyzed the British ruling class. The divisions in Germany’s ruling coalition are growing more open and intense. France is facing massive strikes over pension cuts. Italy is in chaos, and its most popular party is the fascist League. In March, it became the first major European nation to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Other European powers may soon be moving in the same direction.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the U.S. retreat from Syria has left a political vacuum that Russia is looking to fill. Turkey used the partial withdrawal to attack its Kurdish rivals, provoking alarm among NATO members. France’s Emmanuel Macron has criticized Trump’s lack of leadership and is trying to rein Turkey in (NYT, 12/2/19). In response, Trump cut short his stay in London. Germany is doing its best to keep the peace within NATO, which Europe needs to counteract Russia and potentially China (NYT, 12/2/19).  
Whatever their differences, all imperialist bosses continue to attack the working class by diverting resources into war preparations and away from healthcare, food, and education.  Leaked documents show that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has pledged to Trump to increase NATO spending while privatizing sections of Britain’s National Health Service, which has already faced severe budget cuts under Conservative Party governments (Independent, 12/13/19). In Greece, the second-highest contributing member in percentage of gross domestic product (NATO, 6/25/19), workers suffered austerity measures that cut government services across the board. Though NATO claims nuclear disarmament to be one of its goals, three members—the U.S., Britain, and France—have amassed nuclear weapons, and five others, including Turkey, “share” U.S. bombs (Stratfor, 6/27/19). Workers will pay the price of any nuclear war, just as they did in the genocidal U.S. atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.       
As the bosses intensify their attacks against our class, workers around the world are taking to the streets in protest. In Britain, there were massive demonstrations against Trump, NATO, and healthcare cuts. In 2017 and 2018, thousands in Brussels confronted NATO with demands to lower military spending (AP News, 7/7/18). These fightbacks are crucial. First, they give workers more confidence by showing them they are not alone. Second, they create opportunities to spread communist ideas.
At the same time, we shouldn’t overestimate the revolutionary content of this resistance. All of the European fightbacks are being misled by one section of the ruling class or another. All of them could set the stage for full-blown fascism. Workers’ anger is not enough. Without communist organizing, our class will be defenseless against the coming fascist crackdown and inter-imperialist war. The international working class must smash the capitalist system and turn World War III into a revolution for communism.

**

In 1949, four years after the end of World War II, NATO was founded by the United States, Canada, and ten countries in Western Europe as a political and military alliance to block expansion by the Soviet Union. Electoral victories by communist parties in Italy and Czechoslovakia, along with Soviet control of East Germany, intensified the U.S. rulers’ fears that they could lose the Cold War and their place as the world’s leading imperialist superpower.
Although the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the U.S.-dominated NATO still aims to counter any threats to the now-29-member alliance, primarily from Russia and China. NATO currently has troops in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, Somalia, the Mediterranean Sea, and air space over Montenegro, Albania, Slovenia, and the Baltic region (NATO, 4/25/19). While NATO claims to defend “democratic values,” it has demonstrated over and again that it is nothing more than a tool of U.S. and Western imperialism.   

From Europe to South America and from Asia to Africa, the profit system is in crisis. The inherent callousness of capitalism is catching up to the bosses. As we review 2019, recent events between bosses and workers across the world demonstrate how the system is further moving towards fascism. Inter-imperialist rivalry between fascist factions give the communist international working class a chance at burning the whole thing to the ground and smashing the system for good.
Big Fascists vs. Small Fascists
This year, PLP stressed the use of Big Fascist and Small Fascist to raise the consciousness of workers: to deeply analyze the results of competing factions within the ruling class. The main-wing finance capitalists, or Big Fascists, representing the big banks and multinational oil companies, are committed to maintaining U.S. control over the oil-rich Middle East. The main-wing bosses realize they’re not nearly prepared for an all-out war with growing superpowers China and Russia. First, they’ll need to force unity and discipline upon their own class, hence the looming impeachment of current, openly racist and unhinged president Donald Trump. The main wing will need, for their war purposes, to build a rainbow coalition of a mass patriotic, multiracial, fascist movement within the working class.
As of late, they are pushing environmentalist moves like the Green New Deal, led by new liberal misleaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and war-mongering wolf like Elizabeth Warren to crush their domestic rival bosses. Meanwhile, the big auto bosses have opened up their own front against Trump and his Small Fascist backers, including the Koch Brothers, whose empire relies on oil within the U.S. borders.
We’ve also seen French President Emmanuel Macron proclaim that we must “save the Amazon,” followed by lame-duck German Chancellor Angela Markel calling for a renewed effort to fight climate change. Meanwhile, France remains Europe’s second largest consumer of energy after Germany.
It all falls down
The old liberal world order, dominated by the U.S. ruling class since World War II, is under siege. The question of who is a ride-or-die ally of the U.S. is getting harder to answer. As the Empire falls, its allies—from France, Italy, and Germany to Saudi Arabia—are hedging their bets.
Russian President Vladimir Putin followed up on missile system sales to Iran and Turkey by offering a similar deal to Saudi Arabia (Reuters, 9/16/19). In June, Putin declared that Iran would not be alone if attacked. Clearly, the Russian bosses are also willing to play both sides and ready to capitalize on U.S. weakness.
In September, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned Abqaiq and Khurais oil processing plants were attacked, disrupting five percent of global oil production and pushing rival imperialists closer to World War III. The latest conflicts in the Middle East demonstrates the deteriorating influence of a fractured U.S. ruling class. Under President Donald Trump, who fronts the priorities of more isolationist domestically oriented bosses, the U.S. has undermined the G-7 by opting out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, imposing tariffs on allies and enemies alike, attacking Germany’s trade surplus, and attempting to restore Russia’s membership despite its annexation of Crimea.
Chinese imperialism rising
Chinese imperialism has grown immensely in the last several decades as they’ve made strides in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. China’s checkbook diplomacy has opened rifts within the broader European Union. After receiving massive Chinese investment, Greece and Hungary defied the U.S. bosses and watered down an EU statement on Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. In addition, Italy, a G-7 member, endorsed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s gigantic global infrastructure project. Even more ominous, Germany, the EU’s largest economy, now has more trade with China than with the U.S. As China continues to rise at the U.S. bosses’ expense, the threat of a global military conflict looms.
Cyber fascism is also on the rise in China as things as big as artificial intelligence and as small as various phone apps like “Study the Great Nation” are pushing ruling-class ideas. Additionally, China’s building a social credit system that will not only track your financial status but also calculate your “honesty” and “patriotism.” Fresh out of a Black Mirror episode, workers’ scores will determine if they can get on an airplane, use a high-speed train, or be allowed to purchase “luxury items” (South China Morning Post, 3/26/19).
Similar to the U.S. “Big Brother” methods, China’s bosses have installed surveillance cameras, monitored online discussions, and sent thousands of undercover cops to spy and keep a close watch of families of Uigurs to prevent any rebellion. More recently, China’s bosses have deployed facial recognition software to racially profile the Uighurs and track their movements. This “automated racism” (NYT, 4/14/19) has also been extended to other parts of China. Furthermore, Google is under attack for pulling out of a contract to work with the U.S. military while continuing to partner with China in developing artificial intelligence research.
It’s even clearer that the U.S. bosses’ powers are waning, as seen through the failure of Juan Guaido’s staged presidency takeover in Venezuela. The coup backed by U.S. bosses was not received well by Venezuelan oil bosses as they rather planned to welcome two more Russian imperialist planes with supplies to support the government of president Nicolas Maduro.
No matter the region, capitalist bosses are only loyal to the capitalist moves that benefit themselves. It’s best that the international working class takes note and chooses our working-class brothers and sisters over individualism and capitalist exploitation.
A strike wave!
Many workers and students are pivoting toward anti-capitalism and criticizing liberalism and pink tides more sharply as a wave of strikes has struck the globe. Wherever they are, workers are fighting back.
Starting the year off in France, a multiracial movement of high school students put forward some of the most antiracist and class-conscious ideas in the movement.
In Haiti, anger at ruling class thievery has sparked the sharpest and most sustained anti-government demonstrations in years.
In China, thousands of “mass incidents” with Chinese workers, educators and students are erupting each year, especially on college campuses and small towns outside the city.
Education workers have protested against racist working conditions, without hesitation against newly elected liberal mayor, Lori Lightfoot.
Young people are striking for climate change with school walkouts in Europe, Chile, India, Kenya, South Africa, New Zealand and dozens more.
Across the Midwest and South, nearly 50, 000 General Motors workers went on strike and members of the United Auto Workers are pushing for international class solidarity at Labor Parades and meetings.Transit workers in D.C. and youth in NYC are fighting back against working conditions, police brutality and skyrocketing transit fees.
Protesters in Newark and New York City are lead-infested water, new jails, gentrification, and the ongoing housing crisis.
Workers fought the growing fascist conditions against undocumented youth and workers, including tracking system of licenses and the bondage of cages.
PLP pushes forward
There will be more strikes to come. The world under capitalism is a vicious cycle of blood sucking politicians, fightback from workers, following more parasitic politicians looking to benefit off of the work of working-class fighters.
In 2020, politicians of all colors of the political rainbow will be ready to march out in the streets and among workers just to get likes and votes. Though it is a dark night of class struggle, still workers will fight back and reveal the truth underneath the cloak.
Progressive Labor Party is here to arm strikers with communist ideas and build an international Party for workers’ power. Comrades in Chicago, Haiti, Colombia, NY, NJ, Baltimore, Texas and Mexico continue to build a working-class base fighting in the class struggle. This year, we’ve held communist schools and projects in Colombia, Mexico, Texas, Pakistan, and more.
In a climate of intimidation and fear, antiracists and communists still work to create an atmosphere of fightback. Throughout each of these strikes and protests is a thread of learning how to practice communism in action.
It is the job of communists to help build a fighting and growing Party that includes workers from all reform struggles. Reforms do not lead to revolution. We implore workers to continue calling out the fascists, Big and Small, as PL’ers spread revolutionary communist ideas and leadership. If we don’t, the working-class will be funneled into dead-end political options: passivity, electoral politics, cynicism, and increasing fascism.
In 2020, we’re looking forward to continuing the fight, joining in struggles for a better world for workers and putting communist ideas in action with our summer projects and leadership efforts. Let’s turn the bosses’ imperialists wars into an international class war for communism.

BALTIMORE, December 8- With huge banners, a group of anti-racist workers and members of the Progressive Labor Party crashed Baltimore’s phony liberal mayor’s holiday parade demanding enforcement of the new law banning gag orders for victims of police brutality. Gag orders prohibit hundreds of victimized families from saying even a single word about what happened, once they sign a financial settlement with the City. However, the gag orders don’t stop the cops and the media from saying whatever they want.
The bosses’ democracy is nothing more than the dictatorship of the capitalist class. They use their state violence to keep themselves in power. This violence includes the 1,100 or so police killings each year in the U.S., with Black workers two-and-a-half times more likely to be killed. It also includes 679 interventions from 1943 to 1990 by federal troops and the National Guard, involving over 681,835 troops. Those military interventions, just like today, have included attacks on workers’ strikes, on uprisings against racism, on student protests, and on prison rebellions.
It has taken two years of struggle, and a victory in court by Ashley Overbey – one of the hundreds of victims of racist violence by Baltimore cops – to compel the Baltimore City Council to pass a new law ending gag orders. After police lies about Ashley’s case were published locally, repeated attacks were made on her character in blog posts. Ashley finally responded, stating publically the truth about what had been done to her. Consequently about half of her settlement money was stripped away by the City. Her court case reversed this. Starting in 2020 gag orders will finally outlawed in Baltimore. The mayor, however, has said he will refuse to enforce the ban.
But, even though the capitalists control the government, sometimes a particular law causes a problem for them. Then they don’t hesitate to break their own laws. That’s what tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt – one of the richest capitalists in U.S. history – meant when he roared, “What do I care about the law? Ain’t I got the power?” That’s also what Baltimore Mayor Jack Young meant when he arrogantly stated that he will not enforce the ban on gag orders.
When the mayor drove by organizers we boldly stepped into the street, holding the banners next to the mayor’s car. That sparked more boldness as several organizers led us to proudly stretch our banners across the entire width of the street, marching right in front of Mayor Jack Young’s car. Very loudly, so the thousands of parade watchers lining the sidewalks could clearly hear, we sang, “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more!” We also chanted, “Enforced silence condones police violence!”
The mayor’s community relations flunky repeatedly told us to get out of the march. We ignored him. Later Baltimore’s police chief, Michael Harrison, walked purposefully next to the mayor’s car. Undoubtedly, they were discussing whether to use their kkkops to throw us out of the parade. They apparently decided that wouldn’t look good, and the mayor was forced to endure our bold protest. In fact, when his car stopped in front of the reviewing stand, our loud chanting and singing apparently shut down part of his intended speech.
Although two-thirds of Baltimore’s population is Black, the parade was held in Hampden, a nearly all-white section of the city. The crowds watching the parade were about 95 percent white. It was particularly impressive, when folks – reading our anti-racist banners, and listening to our chants – broke out into enthusiastic cheers and applause!
For days Facebook and Reddit were abuzz with highly spirited comments about our action. Some focused on the Progressive Labor Party banner about the police murder of Tyrone West. That banner says “PUT KILLER COPS IN CELL BLOCKS” and “SMASH RACISM & CAPITALISM.”
Here is a sampling of the social media posts:
“I had to admire the chutzpah of the people marching in the Hampden Christmas parade to protest police violence. They were shout-singing ‘Hit the Road Jack,’ and Mayor Jack was in the yellow car right behind them.”
“The capitalist model, at its core, empowers wealth inequality and disenfranchisement of many. I’m curious …how opposing capitalism is irrelevant.”
“Y’ALL DID THAT THING! Nothing but mad respect for you.”
“I love this!! I love you All for doing this!!”
When fighting against racism and capitalism boldness is vital. As communist Frederick Engels said: “Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, … rally those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse, … force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy …, de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace!” which means, boldness, boldness, and more boldness! This is true in the fight against police brutality, against racism, and against capitalism.
It’s also important to understand that the capitalists control state power. Electoral politics cannot defeat capitalism. Electoral politics cannot take us to working class power and communism. After all, revolution is not on the ballot.