CHICAGO, November 14– Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades have joined a working-class struggle against the racist closure of a local Aldi’s supermarket in Garfield Park. During a global pandemic that has further strained food access across the country, this disgusting and racist assault against mostly Black workers shows that the bosses will happily let our class suffer.
 Workers in the neighborhood and PLP, however, have banded together to ensure there is immediate action taken to care for our class brothers and sisters. We are also maintaining a long-term outlook that only a communist revolution will rid us of these capitalist cruelties.
Food deserts plague Black workers
Closing this store,  the only source of fresh food in the area,  creates yet another “food desert,” a location lacking healthy eating options. It also exacerbates medical problems such as high blood pressure and diabetes among workers in the neighborhood. According to some estimates, at least half a million workers in Chicago – the majority of whom are Black – currently live within areas considered food deserts (Chicago Sun-Times, 11/9).
But as the global worker fightbacks currently happening  show (see page 3), workers aren’t going down so quietly! Shortly after the closure, some non-profit groups and health advocacy organizations protested at the Aldi headquarters during which they rightfully blasted the attack.
Local workers and organizations  have also organized free distribution of fresh produce every Saturday in the parking lot for workers in the neighborhood. These actions should be applauded and they display that even in the darkest night confidence in the working class can never be overstated. These actions have presented a strong opening for an infusion of communist politics and leadership to ensure food insecurity forever becomes history for all workers.
When bosses starve us, workers provide
The closing of the Aldi store in Garfield Park came as a shock to practically everybody. It was literally open one day and closed the next. A PLP member who works in a nearby neighborhood got wind of the fightback and quickly advocated for our participation in the struggle. He volunteered at the produce distribution where he was able to make conversation with several workers as well as pass out some copies of CHALLENGE.
The following day, in our study-action group, we made a collective commitment to assist in the food distribution while connecting the struggle to other fights going on currently in the city, from Covid-19 breakouts in schools, to closing hospitals, to racist deportations and police terror. It’s essential to see all of these assaults as part and parcel of capitalism’s need to divide and exploit the working class.
Pandemic’s effects on hunger
It is no coincidence that this attack comes during a pandemic that has destroyed food stability worldwide. Almost 15 percent of U.S. households and 18 percent with children reported food insecurity early in the pandemic (Nutrition Journal, 8/31/20).  Nearly four in 10 Black and Latin homes with children have struggled to feed their families during the Covid-19 rampage. The percentages of families considered food insecure have surged among workers, already having surpassed the 2008-09 Great Recession numbers (Politico, 7/6/20).
The pandemic also caused a spike in global hunger, with 2.3 billion people now lacking year round access to adequate food (U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, 9/12). Just as the liberal rulers convened to stake out their hollow plans to tackle climate change in the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference this past week, at least four countries—including Yemen, Madagascar, South Sudan, and Ethiopia—are already experiencing famine-like conditions, with both Covid-19 and climate change compounding things, especially for Yemen (OXFAM, 8/4/20, see editorial). The ruling class not only enables this suffering, but tremendously profits from it (CBS News, 3/31).
Plant the seeds of communist revolution
Time and time again, we see the bosses and their capitalist system horrifically fail our class, but as workers we always step up to look out and provide for one another. With every capitalist-caused climate disaster or health epidemic, the selfless and inherently communist character of the working class rises to the forefront in solidarity.
But as noble as these actions may be, alone they will never bring about the world we need and deserve. In order to establish a world that puts the well-being of the international working class above all else, it’s necessary to violently seize state power from the bosses through revolution. The capitalists waste millions of tons of food every year while workers starve, only because they can’t make a profit off it, just like Aldi. Under communism, we will draw from science and the examples of past revolutions in Russia and China that collectivized food production and distribution in order to end malnutrition and starvation.
No capitalist-funded non-profit group will ever advocate for this! As we fight to feed ourselves today, let’s keep planting the seeds of a communist world that will one day ensure that no worker goes without.

Under capitalism, workers are a commodity whose only value is determined by the bosses, based on their ability to create wealth for capitalists. As a worker becomes seemingly less “profitable” to the ruling class their value dwindles in the eyes of capitalism, leaving many older workers unsupported. But Progressive Labor Party (PLP) “retirees” are fighting back! In the face of an insurance merger that is hanging working class folks out to dry, we are loudly calling out this racist, capitalist, for profit system and demanding healthcare the communist way: to each according to need!
In many parts of the world, working people get medical treatments only if they can pay for them. Older workers who no longer produce wealth for the bosses are left to die in poverty. Retired New York City (NYC) workers are currently facing these facts of capitalist exploitation as a new health insurance plan is in the works, promoted by the city and union bosses.
The new plan  “promises”  “cost savings” for the same or better care. Retirees are up in arms. They fear the exact opposite: higher costs and worsening care. Moreover, lower income retirees, mainly Black, Latin and women workers will  be the most severely affected. That’s capitalism. Profits for the capitalists off the backs of “savings” from the workers, with a large dose of racism. The whole capitalist system has to go.
The Municipal Labor Council, a coalition of city worker unions, and the city’s political bosses are contracting our health insurance coverage to a private, for profit, insurance company. This will mean higher premiums for those of us who want to continue with our current insurance. For those of us who accept the new plan there is the potential reduction of care and fewer choices of health care providers. Meanwhile, profits will be guaranteed to the new insurance monolith, a merger of Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Emblem Health.
Retirees are not giving in without a fight. When we found out about the deal that the Municipal Labor Council (MLC) and New York City were planning, all hell broke out. Retired PLP members, active in retiree groups, were part of the struggle from the beginning. Campaigns began to inform retirees of what was happening behind closed doors.
First, angry seniors circulated an online petition to stop the MLC from continuing its bargaining with the city. Over 27,000 signed on. Demonstrations were held at City Hall and at union headquarters. Politicians’ offices and union officials were bombarded by angry phone calls. A court case was filed to stop the change of medical coverage. Currently, there is a temporary order stopping the new coverage changeover. Thousands of those affected participated in online meetings to discuss the changes because we couldn’t meet in person.
All these actions reflected both the fighting spirit that persists  in these older workers but also the ideological hold that bosses’ ideas have on us. Some of us think that the union misleaders will win in court or that these hacks will convince New York’s liberal politicians to pass some laws helping city workers. But we already have up to six retirement “Tiers” for city workers. Each Tier has been worse than the previous one. Now the City is trying to do the same with our health insurance. Liberal politicians or union functionaries are agents of the racist, finance capitalist bosses who run New York City.
Communists on the other hand present a way forward for our class that will get us off the treadmill of constant struggle to survive this racist exploitative system. As we organize and fight back, we advance communist ideas by circulating, CHALLENGE, building study groups and recruiting to Progressive Labor Party. Building the communist movement is the main way we can guarantee the health of our class and it is a struggle that we continue to commit to year after year. Only under communism does a health care system put the health of the working class first and there are absolutely no profits to be made! Fight for communism!

Biden’s reforms build for war
The House of Representatives, spearheaded by Democrats, servants of the liberal old money wing of U.S. imperialists, voted to include an immigration provision in Jim Crow Joe Biden’s  Build Back Better bill. Aside from the fact that the Congressional parliamentarian may exclude the provision, the debate in the Senate, whether the bill passes or not, will further intensify fear, repression, racist scapegoating and exploitation of immigrant workers. What does it all mean?
So-called Plan C will temporarily infuse the capitalist economy with “in chains” low wage workers to fill momentary job shortages, guarantee huge profits for businesses and aid in the liberal strategy to control inflation. The “immigration reform” will position young workers to serve as cannon fodder in the next war. Horrendous fascist conditions at the border will intensify. The provision in the bill is a big fascist attack on the working class, leaving immigrant workers vulnerable to deportation at the end of five to ten years.
The crumbs thrown by these liberal wolves in sheep’s clothing are sweet, but are certainly  poisoned. Comrades participating in pro-immigrant groups, community groups, unions, schools, etc. need to step up the fight for amnesty as we fight inside the movement facing endless reforms to benefit the capitalists. It’s hard to do but we must do it as we sharpen the struggle to unite the working class, men, women, Black, Latin, Asian, white, immigrant, and workers of different backgrounds and sexual orientation. We must redouble our confidence in the working class as we fight against illusions in the bosses’ reforms and for the necessity to be in the protracted struggle for communist revolution and workers’ power.
*****

Party parents organize vaccination drive
Communists have the outlook of both organizing against capitalism and building ties in the working class. Many have written about building connections on the job, in unions, and at schools. Parents can also build these ties within the communities of their children by fighting against racism and making the personal political.
Recently Chicago Public Schools (CPS) had a “Vaccine Awareness Day” and school was closed so elementary age children could get vaccinated. But while several private schools on the North Side arranged to have mass vaccination events at their schools for children and parents, almost no Chicago public schools had similar events planned.
In fact, the Chicago Department of Health and Board of Education claimed that school vaccination events hadn’t worked in other places and purposely made no effort to create these opportunities.
However, one school that serves 80 percent working-class students and many Spanish-speaking students went ahead anyway under the leadership of a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) parent. We organized a pharmacy to come that day and vaccinate both children and adults. To answer questions and increase knowledge and confidence in the vaccine, we held a Q&A event with a bilingual physician during the week before the event. The day of the event, we brought banners, balloons, snacks, and even got news coverage.
Having this in the neighborhood worked out well—127 people were vaccinated including some neighbors whose children did not attend the public school. Meanwhile at a rich private school, 600 people were vaccinated in one day.
The disparity in Covid-19-related deaths has been well documented now and it appears that CPS and the Chicago Department of Health are more than happy to let that continue. PLP is organizing to change these racist decisions and to build multiracial community power so workers and parents can be in charge the next time and get everyone the care they need.

 We have seen this historically and we continue to see this at racist borders today: concentration camps and genocide are an integral part of the political economy of the capitalist system, and every capitalist imperialist power. From the extermination campaigns against indigenous workers who lived in what is now North America to the U.S. encampment of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II, these bloody stains on the U.S. are buried, obscured, and even warped into tortured apologies by the bosses’ media. Today, as the U.S. bosses imprison thousands upon thousands of refugees from Haiti and Latin America in camps, it’s not enough that we learn and gain awareness of these atrocities against the working class. We must fight back.
It’s up to workers to arm ourselves with the rich and militant history of workers’ fightback. Over a half century ago, author Yuri Suhl did just that, and wrote a history of fightback and rebellion within one of the darkest periods of working class history. For communists, Suhl’s They Fought Back serves as a manual containing lessons for how workers, staring down the face of brutal oppression, can join fists and fight back.
Fascist capitalism can be defeated
In 1967, Yuri Suhl compiled accounts of resistance to Nazism during World War II. His purpose was to dispel the myth that Jewish workers in Europe were passive and never fought back against the Nazi fascists. Most of the accounts are of lesser-known events and resistance leaders. These are honest, and although written from a nationalist perspective, Suhl and the authors highlight communist and rank-and-file leadership.
The account by Alexander Pechersky, a Red Army commander who led a revolt at the Sobibor death camp, is worth retelling. It shows how even in the most desperate situation, with confidence in the working class and a strong political base, the fascists can be taken, even from within their strongholds.
The Sobibor camp in eastern Poland was the final destination for Jewish deportees from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France, Austria, and later the Soviet Union. The Nazis murdered them at the rate of 15,000 a day. Those who remained labored from five in the morning to eight pm, barely surviving on bread and moldy barley. Typhus was rampant, and the Nazi guards immediately executed those who contracted it. The guards systematically beat the workers with whips and forced them to count their own lashes. For the rest, the children, the old and most women, there was no work, only death.  
Red Army Lieutenant Pechersky arrived at Sobibor in September, 1943, from Minsk, the first transport from the Soviet Union. He and 80 other men were spared from the ovens; the others were never seen again. Initially he suffered severe depression and nightmares, but quickly moved past that to begin escape plans and base building.  
The Nazis conducted massive executions in retaliation for attempted escapes. Pechersky reasoned that everyone must escape and relied on the workers there to make that escape possible. He allied himself with two young workers, one of whose father was a communist, who helped him to organize political discussions in the barracks, which he describes:
For those who did not understand Russian, Shloime translated into Yiddish. They translated for each other into German and Dutch ... The barracks dwellers sat on the lower bunks together with the "Easterners" (that's how we who came from the Soviet Union were called by the camp inmates). They were hungry, exhausted from hard labor, their bodies bruised from the whippings; they were doomed to death. However, it sufficed to have a brief rest, a few peaceful moments, and one's spirit rose again. Especially here, in the company of women, backs straightened out, eyes sparkled, laughter was heard, and wherever you turned, a lively discussion was in progress. And what were they discussing here? They talked about the war and its prospects; about countries and cities; about science and technology; about the theater; music, and literature; about the contradictions in human nature and about the future of humanity; here they sang, cried, and kissed; here the feelings of love and jealousy came into play; all the emotions that set the human heart aglow and quickened its pulse beat found expression here. (pp. 20, 22)
Most striking was Pechersky’s lack of cynicism. He had every "objective" reason for feeling despair, and yet he did not. Despite everything, many imprisoned workers continued to believe Hitler's lie that their lives would be saved, and this gave rise to defeatist ideas borne of fear. While capitalism exists there will always be some workers who feel this way, a lesson for us to always keep in mind.
Pechersky’s List
In the 1990s, a blockbuster Hollywood film, Schindler’s List, glorified a Nazi officer and capitalist who felt sympathy for his Jewish prisoners being sent to slaughter. Working within the Nazi system through bribes, he made a list of those to save by working in factories he ran, with the helpless Jewish prisoners having little agency in their future. In stark contrast to this passivity, at Sobibor,  “Pechersky’s list” included thirteen leading Nazi officers assassinated in advance with axes and knives secretly made by the Red Army and Jewish prisoners. They also determined that any imprisoned workers who betrayed them would be killed. Before and during this revolt, carefully planned tunnels were dug, guns were taken from the dead Nazis, and telephone lines cut.
During the revolt in October 1943, all 600 inmates made a break for freedom. About 400 succeeded in breaking out of the camp, but about half of these were killed by landmines. Pursued by aircraft, the SS (Nazi soldiers), police, and thousands of troops, some were killed. Polish fascists killed yet more – these were the anticommunist Armija Krajowa, the “national army” of the anticommunist and anti-Semitic Polish “government in exile” in London, who are “heroes” in today’s capitalist Poland. Still, some managed to elude their pursuers, and Pechersky's group of 60 men and women succeeded in making contact with Soviet “partisans,” or communist guerillas.
Before the revolt, in one of Alexander Pechersky's barracks discussions, he was peppered with questions about liberation and the state of the war. One person asked, “If there are so many partisans, why don't they attack our camp?" Pechersky replied, "The partisans have their tasks. No one can do our work for us." The workers were excited by that idea and embraced it. Their collective self-reliance was the other prong of the winning strategy. They realized — as the working class must again today — it is up to us to make change.
Auschwitz rebels betrayed by U.S., British capitalists
In contrast to Sobibor, there was also an escape from Auschwitz. The escapees made their way to the Vatican, contacting the British foreign minister and President Roosevelt to try to convince them to bomb the crematoriums and railroad transport lines. All refused. U.S. Asst. Secretary for War John J. McCoy told the World Jewish Congress:
    ... After a study it became apparent that such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources [Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Why-wasnt-Auschwitz-bombed-717594].
Those death camps functioned with direct Allied knowledge and complicity. Those agents of capital were not interested in saving the lives of the Jewish workers, communists, trade unionists, and others who were in the camps. The Auschwitz rebels’ strategy of relying on the bosses for help, waiting and negotiating, cost more lives.
Lessons from Sobibor
When workers rely on themselves, they can win their objectives, but when they rely on the agents of the bourgeoisie, labor union fakers and rotten politicians of every party, they are doomed. This is a key lesson for the international working class in this period of the development of fascism as a worldwide system.
As fascism further develops in the U.S. as they face off against imperialist rivals China and Russia, the camps housing refugees today may serve as prisons for all workers and others who rebel, and we must learn from our class’ experiences at Sobibor.
Nazism was defeated by mustering every ounce of working-class heroism during those six years of world war. But although Nazism was defeated, capitalism was not. The imperialists that united with the Soviet Union only until they could defeat their rival imperialists, the German Nazis and Italian fascists, went on to install fascist regimes to murder and terrorize workers across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. They still do. More workers have been murdered by the fascist regimes installed and bankrolled by these imperialists than were murdered by the German Nazis, Italian fascists, and their allies during World War II. Many of the refugees braving the horrific journey to the U.S. and EU borders today are fleeing these fascist regimes, and it is the duty of today’s communists in the Progressive Labor Party to learn from the past —the victories and mistakes—and finish the job.
World-wide, there are millions of workers who have no intention of being herded into death camps. But the bastard bosses and their two-bit chumps will never be defeated unless we organize now, with the spirit of those fighters at Sobibor, to smash all camps and this entire capitalist system for communist revolution.