CHICAGO, August 21—As the deadliest pandemic in history continues to wreak havoc on the international working class, U.S. food bosses seized the opportunity to capitalize on our classes’ despair, churning out sugary and salty goods, while raking record profits on the backs of overworked and underpaid workers.
 The latest example is the Nabisco factory workers strike. As many workers worldwide know from direct experience, racism, sexism and exploitation are baked right into this profit system. Just as dough needs yeast to rise, capitalism needs exploitation and racist divisions to function. Communists from the international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) brought revolutionary politics to striking workers outside the Nabisco factory on the city’s southwest side. We distributed CHALLENGE newspapers, held signs, made conversation, and brought food to the multiracial group of picketers.
Our message to the striking workers is that regardless of what temporary crumbs the union can wrest from the bosses filthy bargaining table, it’s not enough. In the end, exploitation and its attendant ills- racism, sexism, long hours and ill health- are necessary for the capitalists in their quest for maximum profits.
PLP is proud to stand with striking workers in Chicago and everywhere in order to reject the sell out unions, toxic nationalism, capitalist misleaders and pitiful reforms in favor of an international communist future.
Exploitation under capitalism is how the cookie crumbles
Here at the Chicago plant, 300 workers have refused to keep enduring the grinding, racist, and deadly exploitation of the capitalist bosses. They are joining with hundreds of other Nabisco workers in other U.S. cities such as Richmond, Virginia and Portland, Oregon who are fighting back against unpredictable and long shifts, increased health insurance costs, and dangerous understaffing.
The relentless competition of their system forces the bosses to squeeze us as much as possible, at the cost of immeasurable worker suffering. During a pandemic, the company recorded profits of over $3 billion as a number of plants closed, while at others workers were forced to put in 16-hour shifts (CBS News, 8/20). Many worked six to seven days a week for several months. Now, they are being forced to give up overtime pay and concede to a two-tier healthcare system, which will reduce benefits for new workers and cut overall wages.
A number of workers view cutting wages and benefits as a betrayal, but for the bosses, these are necessary decisions based on profit. Under capitalism, all wage work is theft (see letter, page 6). This wage slavery must be abolished.
Pandemic exposes racist horrors
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has further exposed the horrors of the capitalist system. On top of the millions of mainly Black and Latin workers who have already died from a mostly preventable illness, we have seen some of the world’s wealthiest capitalists and companies collectively add $1 trillion to their total net worth since the pandemic began (Washington Post, 1/21). This sickening calculus demonstrates that bosses wealth is made possible by racism and sexism.
Horror stories of inhumane working conditions have surfaced in media reports. They paint a picture of how workers are treated amid a traumatic pandemic: from an injured Nabisco worker falling off her chair and being forced to work with a broken ankle (The Grio, 8/21), to Frito Lay workers dying of heart attacks on the factory floor (Washington Post, 7/21).
The strikers that we met on the picket line today, many of whom were Latin, Black, and women workers, shared their own personal stories of racist and sexist attacks from the bosses. They also shared their strong commitment to maintaining the strike and fighting on.
Labor fakers bake a toxic recipe
The union that officially represents the Nabisco workers, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) has some of the most reactionary politics that have come to represent the boss-led unions. They could hardly be bothered to mobilize the rank and file as the bosses shuttered plants, eliminated pensions and laid off hundreds.
They waited until the workers were on the ropes to finally call for a strike (Common Dreams, 8/20).They are also spreading the poison that is nationalism by painting Nabisco workers in Mexico as rivals who “took jobs” from workers in the U.S. Pitting workers from different countries against one another for the problems the profit system creates is a completely racist ideology that only serves the ruling capitalist class. Workers have every interest in uniting across the bosses’ artificial borders in a global fight against capitalist exploitation.
BCTGM or any other union will never call for this internationalism because they all seek to work within the confines of the capitalist system. To advance the needs of our class everywhere, we need a clean break with bosses, misleaders, and reformists. We need a mass PLP, fighting for communism and workers’ power!
Fight like Stella D’Oro, join PLP
PLP has supported and given leadership to countless strikes in our history because we understand them to be potential schools for communism. It is in the act of refusing our exploitation - withholding our labor from the bosses - building working-class unity that we grasp our own power and the vision of a worker-run society. Strikes also reveal the need for a revolutionary communist Party. We urge Nabisco workers to join us to help build the Party into a mass fighting force capable of destroying this rotten, crumbling system once and for all.
Supporting the Nabisco workers in their fight against racist and sexist attacks brings back memories of another strike that the Party supported, that of Stella D’Oro bakery workers in New York between 2009-10.
Majority immigrant and women workers maintained a two-front fight for 11 months against both bosses who wanted to close the factory and the treachery of the same BCTGM union hacks.
We don’t know how long the Nabisco strike will last, but we do know the PLP will continue to fight alongside our class to advance our struggle for a communist world where workers run things, and never need to settle for the bosses’ crumbs.

NEW YORK CITY, August 25—For the past 18  months students, faculty, and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY) have been fighting racist conditions on our campuses– conditions worsened by the Covid-19 crisis. Our administrators have used the pandemic as an excuse to implement even more racist austerity: firing almost 3,000 adjuncts, or part-time professors; leaving campus offices severely understaffed; and increasing class sizes. In their latest attack, the CUNY bosses are demanding that workers and students return to unsafe campuses even as the Covid-19 Delta variant rages across the world.
As we return to our campuses, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls all CUNY students and workers to get involved in the fight against the racist conditions on campus. Consider that the fight at CUNY must be part of a bigger battle—a revolutionary battle to rid the world of the racist capitalist system that treats the lives of workers as disposable, from the Bronx to Palestine to Haiti. We need a communist revolution.
Fight bosses, reject union hacks
During the pandemic we have encountered students and workers who are very open to the idea that only communist revolution can create a world where educating the working class is a priority. We are involved in several campus organizations that have been agitating against the campus administration and the go-slow, sell-out union misleadership. We have been influential in winning several small victories (see CUNY, page 4). At the same time, we have robust Party-led study groups where we discuss how these small reform gains will never lead to liberation for our class and that any gain we might make will be met with a racist-cutback elsewhere. For example, CUNY recently announced that they would use a portion of the more than $800 million in federal bailout funds they received to cancel a small portion of student debt. But at the same time, not only did they increase tuition and added a new $120 “Health and Wellness” fee, but they have also done nothing to reduce class size, one of the most critical factors in student success.
Fall curriculum: smash racism, CUNY bosses
This fall semester, members and friends of PLP will continue to work towards turning CUNY into a cauldron of revolutionary politics and action. We will have a teach-in on Haiti, exposing the racist abuse the workers there have suffered for centuries and the heroic efforts of workers and students there to fight back. We will have a forum on the Israeli apartheid regime and the need to reject all forms of nationalism. And we will continue to call out the racist CUNY administration for their racist attacks on our campuses.
If you’re a CUNY student or worker or you would like to be involved in advancing the struggle against CUNY’s racist administration and would like to learn about the need for communist revolution at the same time, we welcome you! Contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more information.

How I use CHALLENGE
I’m an immigrant worker from Mexico living in the United States. I have been a member of the Progressive Labor Party for some years. I joined because I learned how to fight back together with the Party. PLP is like family.
For me, it’s important to read and circulate DESAFIO-CHALLENGE. You can learn the communist analysis about what is happening in the world from Brooklyn to Mexico to Colombia. Every issue, I circulate 25 papers to my close friends and family. They ask me questions when they visit me in my home. The rest, I give to people in my laundromat or in the street.
Recently, my sons and family visited me for my birthday. When my nine year old grandson saw CHALLENGE he said, “wow! What is PLP?”
 I said, “It’s a communist Party.”
 My nine and 14 year old grandsons asked me important questions like why the rich don’t pay taxes and why do they exploit the workers. My grandson said, “I’m reading about this [exploitation] with my father and I don’t like it!”
My PLP club plans to work with young workers and students. I want to ask my family to participate in the fightback. My grandsons agreed to join our study group with their mother. Their father can’t participate because he works six days a week, 12 hours a day.                                                 
  If you are not reading CHALLENGE, I invite you to read it and join PLP.
*****
Anti-vaccination is anti-working class
Being anti-vaccination is an anti-working class position. It is also racist since Black and Latin workers are contracting and dying from Covid-19 at higher rates.Since capitalism values profits over workers’ health, there are over 130 countries that still don’t have access to the vaccine and others that only have limited access. It is important that everyone who is medically able to get the vaccine receives it promptly to help slow the spread and stop further, dangerous mutations.
Amid a pandemic, those who recognize that getting vaccinated isn’t a personal choice, but, actually, is a social responsibility to their fellow workers to keep the vulnerable from dying are serving the working class, whether it is conscious or not.  This is an early form of political commitment that mirrors the adage “from each according to political commitment and to each according to need.”
The combination of the Big Fascists’ [see Glossary], represented by President Joe Biden, continued mismanagement of the pandemic and the Small Fascists’ gutter racist and anti-science propaganda are serving to divide the working class of the United States. Teachers and nurses who don’t want to get vaccinated because it is “my body, my choice,” — thereby belittling the very real struggle women have over their own means of production — are a danger to their students and patients, as well as their families and themselves.
The history of racist and sexist medical experiments worldwide rightly sows distrust in the medical establishment and the government. However, this vaccine hesitancy ultimately will cause our Black and Latin students and their families to suffer more. The bosses have their own reasons for wanting to get us to sacrifice for the social good, like protecting their profits and building for war, but we need to fight for workers to serve their own interests.
It is not “segregation” to quarantine potential disease carriers during a global pandemic! The Small Fascists want to weaken the terms that represent the brutality of racism that our class has felt for centuries. They want to silence us by turning a rational and scientific response to a deadly disease into a personal choice under the guise of freedom. Freedom is actually the understanding of necessity, so let’s do what needs to be done and help our friends develop a scientific worldview.
*****
ALL wealth is theft, value comes from labor power
It’s great to hear in the 8/4 issue of CHALLENGE that the Newark summer project discussed political economy and how capitalism is built on the theft of workers’ wealth, but let’s be clear: the end game for the working class is not higher wages or a shorter workday. The article stated that “the labor and pay that an employee receives is not an equal transaction because most of [that worker’s] workday is free labor,” but Marx’s distinction between labor power and labor itself is missing here. Today’s capitalism is based on wage slavery, not chattel slavery, meaning we are all forced to sell our ability, not our actual bodies, to add value to the bosses’ tools in exchange for a wage. That exchange can never be fair or just; it is, by definition, an act of robbery.
Capitalist theft is reliant on one fundamental commodity above all others: workers’ labor power. In Das Kapital, Marx explained how, in capitalist markets, buyers and sellers exchange commodities of the same value by using money, another commodity, to facilitate exchange. Where does exchange value come from? The value of any commodity is equal to the amount of labor time required to produce it. Human labor-power, which is potential energy —our capacity for work–is sold to the capitalists by workers–commonly based on a set amount of time– in exchange for wages.
But wages are ALWAYS theft. Why? Our labor power changes the material that we work on. Workers therefore create value which is added to that material (provided by the capitalist). The value we add rises above the value of what we were promised for our labor-time. Bosses MUST pay us less than the value of our labor power or else they don’t profit. A waiter, an information tech specialist, a delivery person or a public transit worker, “participates” in a business where the collective output of the workers produces wealth for a specific boss or set of bosses who profit from that work. A teacher’s labor power is used to produce ideas that train the working class to stay in their place under capitalism. A soldier’s labor power is used by the capitalist class to protect its class interests in the field of war.
So why do we “agree” to sell our labor power, no matter the wage? If we don’t, we starve. Capitalism’s true freedom for the working person is the freedom to starve. The capitalist is free to decide what is done with our labor power, and in the process our class, as a whole, is enslaved into a series of jobs and tasks that ultimately serve the purpose of making the capitalist class wealthy rather than contributing to the social, political, economic and cultural progress of the human race and planet.
Even though workers no longer have our physical bodies bought and sold on the slave market (barring human trafficking), we must now reach the point in history where we use our labor power to smash this system rather than selling it to the bosses for a wage—any wage!
*****
Capitalism, a social disease
I was listening to news broadcasts about how “human induced” climate change was causing irreversible world damage and that the governors of Texas and Florida were banning masks for school children and advocating loss of pay for teachers who permit them. Then I tuned in to a radio talk show where a psychologist was describing that capitalism causes social mental diseases, describing Trump as a sociopath. The moderator asked for discussion of how capitalism relates to mental disease.
I called in and luckily got on to say, “We must realize that we are living in a capitalist world that creates people who are no longer human, because they put profits before people's lives.” I said that the discussion of the idea that capitalism causes social mental disease is correct and that a working class revolution for communist equality and collectivity was needed.
The real big lie is that capitalism masks itself as the champion of “democracy” and “human rights” to cover the fact that it is creating an environment that will accept the destruction of humanity for personal gain and privilege. This ‘what’s in it for me’ environment is destroying true world humanity.
*****

This August marks the 76th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history when the U.S. ruling class—the only rulers to ever use nuclear bombs—dropped atomic bombs on two civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This obliterated a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in a matter of seconds, injured hundreds of thousands more, and left future generations with everlasting genetic defects.
The racist U.S. rulers launched this heinous attack as a political warning to the then-socialist Soviet Union, signaling U.S. imperialism’s launching of the Cold War. Capitalists will stop at nothing when their domination is at stake. This is the natural outcome of a system rooted in the violence of exploitation. The working class instead needs to build a world based on human need. For that, we need millions worldwide to organize under an international communist party, Progressive Labor Party (PLP,) to turn the next capitalist atrocity and war into a class war for communism.
The lies and the reality
For over seven decades, U.S. rulers have tried to justify the A-bomb attacks by maintaining they were needed to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion and a million U.S. casualties. In reality, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before Hiroshima:
 • According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a board of military and civilian experts established by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
   • A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, later the U.S. National Security Adviser, “confessed that he had pulled those numbers out of the air to justify the bombings” (LA Times, 8/5/2005).
   • By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”
   • General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, considered the A-bombs “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (James Clayton, The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II).
A genocide aimed at the USSR
If overwhelming evidence shows that the genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was militarily unnecessary, and that Japan was on the verge of unconditional surrender, why did President Harry Truman order the A-bombs dropped?
The true purpose was to warn the then-socialist Soviet Union that the U.S. had a new and devastating weapon, and was ready to use it against any threat to the U.S. imperialists’ world dominance. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the beginning of the Cold War between capitalists in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Some supporting evidence:
• With the Soviet Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier, to play what Stimson referred to as a “mastercard”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson diary).
• In an implicit indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, Leo Szilard, creator of the the idea of a nuclear fission reactor said, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”
The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the U.S. ruling class will stop at nothing to preserve its state power and profit. Which means the next world war is only a matter of time (see editorial, page 2). It remains for the international working class to mete out justice to the most murderous criminals the world has ever known.