As the Covid-19 pandemic nears a harrowing winter, with deaths surging to record levels around the globe, the profit system is killing masses of people by the day. Worldwide, thanks to capitalist inaction, incompetence, misleadership, and greed, more than 55 million workers have been sickened and over 1.3 million have died—official numbers that are surely huge undercounts. In Belgium, nurses and doctors were ordered to keep working after testing positive, as long as they weren’t coughing in patients’ faces (nbcnews.com, 11/2). In Mexico, where the fake-left president dismisses masks and under two  percent of the population has been tested, intensive care units are overrun (aljazeera.com, 11/15). Latin America, said The Lancet, the top British medical journal, is facing a humanitarian crisis borne out of political instability, corruption, social unrest, fragile health systems, and perhaps most importantly, longstanding and pervasive inequality…. (11/7).
In other words, the working class is suffering from capitalism, the deadliest plague in human history. Exhibit A is the United States, the planet’s wealthiest nation and the runaway leader in Covid carnage. In mid-November, the U.S. logged a million new cases in six days. Hospitals are once again scrounging for medical-grade masks. It can take hours to get tested and precious days to get the results. Rural patients are dying while waiting for space in jammed urban hospitals (USA Today, 11/15). In El Paso, county inmates were enlisted to move an overflow of bodies to mobile morgue units (Texas Tribune, 11/15). By treating us as commodities, capitalism devalues human life as a matter of course, through war and exploitation and the rationing of healthcare. For the bosses, the pandemic is a crisis only insofar as it threatens their revenues. Workers, as per usual, are expendable.
We Are Who We Need!
According to a gold-standard statistical model from the University of Washington, we can expect 80,000 more women, men, and children in the U.S. to die of Covid by January 1, and nearly 200,000 more by March 1. By December, fatalities are projected to reach 3,000 per day (cnn.com, 11/18), more than the 9/11 death toll. And because of racist inequalities in healthcare, housing, and employment, Black workers continue to die at greater than twice the rate of white workers (COVID Tracking Project).
As inter-imperialist competition drives a divided, weakened U.S. ruling class toward fascism and World War III, the pandemic has exposed the bosses as the monsters and frauds they are, utterly unfit to run society. Only the international working class, led by a vanguard mass communist party, can protect our lives and our health. Only a communist revolution can smash the rotten capitalist state and meet our needs. But to get there, workers must reject the rabbit hole of reformism, the illusion of electoral democracy, and the lethal deceit of lesser-evil liberal politicians. Our most dangerous class enemies are the president- and vice president-elect, Jim Crow Joe Biden and Top Cop Kamala Harris.
It’s All About the Money, Honey
In a November 11 interview with Yahoo Finance, Michael Osterholm, the eminent Minnesota epidemiologist on Biden’s blue-ribbon pandemic advisory panel, spoke out of turn. Osterholm posed a simple way to crush Covid case numbers and save tens of thousands of lives: a strict four-to-six-week national lockdown. By borrowing at historically low interest rates, the federal government could cover lost wages for individual workers … losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments…Then we could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year(abc.com, 11/12).
This was only common sense. As daily infections approach the 200,000 mark, contact tracing is impractical. (If a typical person has 50 contacts, that’s 10 million traces per day.) In a degraded capitalist culture, appeals to “individual responsibility” won’t cut it—not when millions of cynical workers follow the bare-faced lead of Sociopath in Chief Donald Trump, and millions more give in to pandemic fatigue. For now, the one way to quell the virus is by keeping most people home.
But the next day, Vivek Murthy, the panel co-chair, made clear that a national lockdown was off the table. With caseloads rising in all 50 states and spiking across most of them, Murthy said: The way we should be thinking about this is more like a series of restrictions that we dial up or down depending on how bad the spread is taking place in a specific region (abc.com, 11/13). The upshot is that Biden will pass the buck to state and local governments and their random crazy quilt of mandates—not so different from Trump’s approach.
Murthy is an internist who served as Barack Obama’s surgeon general. He has no formal training in epidemiology. But he understands that the president-elect can’t afford to offend the Big Fascist liberal bosses who put Biden where he is today. A lockdown would be bad for business, at least in the short run. Giving workers what we need would be a drain on finance capital. It’s why New York City has closed the city’s schools before shuttering bars and restaurants. Under capitalism, money talks—first, last, always.
Vaccine politics
Hours after Pfizer released promising data from a Phase three  trial, CEO Albert Bourla sold $5.6 million in company stock (Wall Street Journal, 11/11). Though the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may indeed be game-changers, capitalist medicines are like sausage; the more you learn about how they’re made, the less appealing they get. After months of cowardly kowtowing to Trump, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) —the vaccine approval agency—has lost credibility. At least seven states plan to add their own expert vetting. The people of this country don’t trust this federal government, said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the hospital closure king who killed thousands by forcing positive cases back into nursing homes.
Even the best medicines won’t work if they don’t get delivered to those who need them. As big pharma is showered with billions of federal dollars, state and local public health departments are starved of needed resources to distribute and track two doses on an enormous scale. Whenever there’s scarcity under capitalism, racism determines who gets left behind. A Maine official acknowledged that “insufficient funding” would slow the rate of vaccination, particularly among disadvantaged populations that are harder to reach” (NYT, 11/14). Internationally, a criminal lag in access to older vaccines—for polio, tuberculosis, and measles—bodes ill for the Covid crisis: The historical norm is that a vaccine of this sort is quickly given to those privileged to live in the world’s richest nations, while the rest of the world’s population often suffers for several decades before deadly diseases are eradicated—if they ever are”(Foreign Policy, 11/12). The poorest countries have next to no public health infrastructure, making it more likely that substandard and falsified vaccines will appear on the market.
Polls suggest that a third or more of the U.S. population may be reluctant to get inoculated, a deadly obstacle to herd immunity. Between the anti-vaxxer disinformation machine and workers’ reasonable doubts about the FDA and Centers for Disease Control, there’s little trust in capitalist medicine these days. It all adds up to a very dark winter, as Biden has warned. But we know that spring will come when Progressive Labor Party leads the international working class to the cure for what ails us: fight for  communism, where decent healthcare will be available to the entire working class. Join us!

November 18—This year the American Public Health Association(APHA) held its annual meeting virtually under the theme Preventing Violence, with racist structural violence perpetrated by the capitalist class a key focus of the program.In past years, this topic would have focused on neighborhood violence, gun control, and “violence interrupter” programs. This year, a culmination of years of communist organizing and sharpening mass fightback against racism succeeded in bringing antiracist politics to greater masses of healthcare workers.
Healthcare workers in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have long been members of the APHA and struggled to sharpen the fight against racism among its membership of more than 25,000 healthcare workers. The shift in the APHA’s focus, with racism now identified by the APHA as a social determinant of health, helped bring  police and prison violence front and center as public health crises.
PLP members and many friends advanced the fight even further against capitalism this year through a virtual program of our own on October 28, calling for communist revolution. Violent revolution against the ruling class was presented as the alternative to state sanctioned violence against the working class.
Capitalism = violence against the working class
The programs connected  the “Preventing Violence” theme to  capitalism’s inherent structural violence including a racist lack of housing, food, jobs and education. “Gun control” laws touted by many in the Democratic Party were identified as being used to disarm Black workers while police violence and murder of Black, Latin and indigenous workers continues unabated. A preponderance of Covid-19 cases and deaths among Black and Latin workers and incarcerated persons comprised yet another example.
Progressive Labor Party carried out two major initiatives at APHA this year: fighting mass racist incarceration and hosting an open PLP-led panel on how communism can smash racism and capitalism.
Smash mass racist incarceration
Several members of PLP and many friends took an active part in pushing forward against mass incarceration. Readers of CHALLENGE may remember the consistent pressure we put on the APHA to support this policy: “Law Enforcement Violence is a Public Health Issue” which passed in 2018 after a three-year struggle.  This year after the uprisings around the country and the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, a resolution to work towards abolition of prisons passed. Over 90 percent of the governing council voted in favor of “Advancing Public Health Interventions to Address the Harms of the Carceral System". Although  it passed overwhelmingly, there were early efforts to prevent bringing it up at all. First the reviewers said it had too many references! When many of us wrote to protest such a stupid reason and added even more data, they agreed to let it go forward. When 40 people wanted to speak to the resolution in the hearings, they placed it on the CONSENT calendar. One approved amendment called for “safely” discharging prisoners.  Many voted to leave it out because it weakens the action step on releasing prisoners, so we will be dealing with this over the coming year.   
This resolution argues for the abolition of prisons and other forms of surveillance, such as probation and ankle monitors. When the “progressive” San Francisco State’s Attorney, Chesa Boudin, (son of fake-leftist and terrorist Weathermen “revolutionaries”) spoke in the Medical Care Section, one of the resolution authors challenged him on the increased usage of  ankle monitors in San Francisco. Boudin blamed it on the judges. He did not even raise the role of police and prisons to repress and control workers, particularly Black workers.
The abolition of punishment and a restorative justice approach will require a revolution against the capitalist state that requires racist policing and mass incarceration for its survival. A vague “human rights” agenda is not adequate to the task of fighting capitalism and racism, and PLP must guarantee that class struggle including demands to “put killer cops in cell blocks” is understood as just and necessary.  
Communism: the only solution to heal the working class
PLP’s second initiative was a virtual panel for potential public health revolutionaries and friends. A 90-minute presentation and discussion on “Racism and Capitalism: Is Communism the Solution?” attracted an audience of at least 125 participants on Facebook and Zoom platforms. This approach gave PLP members in our public health group an opportunity to be more visible to more workers than in our previous APHA efforts, and the event was recorded for further distribution (see box).  
The program highlighted fightbacks  against police murder and racist evictions, and calls for the need for a violent revolution against the capitalist class internationally and shared our vision of communism — a society without wages or class divisions, racism or sexism. Multiracial unity in building the class struggle was emphasized as critical to workers’ success. Racism hurts Black workers most severely, especially women, and weakens the working class by dividing us and allows the ruling class to pay lower wages and spend fewer resources on all of us. One speaker addressed the liberal and misguided politics of white privilege, noting “It is not a privilege to be white under capitalism.”
In the setting of the APHA conference on violence, the understanding of the structural violence of capitalism and  a militant  working-class revolution for communism was accessible and warmly received by  the audience. Questions from the audience gave us a chance to discuss the errors and great advances made in previous revolutions and to encourage the fight for the future of the international working class. We have reached out to more of our co-workers and students and have expanded our networks and study groups and we will continue to improve our work in this way.

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Help build the fightback:
1.    Join a Progressive Labor Study group
2.  Use resolutions in struggles and programs: www.endingpoliceviolence.com
3. Share the virtual program which can be accessed on Facebook: Racism and Capitalism: Is Communism the Solution? Or  click on discussion at https://tinyurl.com/y3v7z5pv.
4. Read and contribute to blog by APHA members: www.multiracialunity.org

 NEW YORK CITY, November 14–With the blessing of New York’s racist-in-chief Andrew Cuomo, City University of New York (CUNY) administrators have used the Covid-19  pandemic, as the pretense to launch an all-out racist attack that will hurt students the most.
Covid-19 crisis has killed more CUNY workers than at any other university system (Higher Ed, 6/23). What’s more, almost 3,000 part-time faculty lost their positions at the start of the fall semester. A hiring freeze has left administrative offices severely understaffed, as workers left, got sick and/or died.
Class sizes have ballooned, with some online classes hosting 80-100 students. Research suggests that effective online classes should have no more than 12 students (Forbes, 6/28).
Most recently, CUNY has indicated that this spring they will impose a 20 percent operating budget cut and decided unilaterally to indefinitely postpone the 2 percent pay increase for faculty and staff that is part of the current contract.
The racism of these attacks is undeniable. Nearly 50 percent of students at senior colleges and 67.3 percent at community colleges are Black and Latin. Due to the inherent racism of a capitalist system that breeds off of profit and competition, any cuts to CUNY will affect Black and Latin students more adversely.  
It won’t end until we make it end
The students and workers at CUNY are coming to the realization that this unrelenting wave of attacks will never end unless we make it end. There is a growing militancy within the entire CUNY community. Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have struggled to heighten this awakening—making the case that what is happening at CUNY is just a symptom of the capitalist disease and that we can never have education that serves the working class until rid ourselves of this disease. We say this as we fight side-by-side every day with our coworkers, students and classmates.
The struggle within the faculty and staff union has picked up as more and more workers understand, not only that the attacks from CUNY won’t end, but also that the union has not led the kind of militant struggle that is necessary to defeat them. PL members are present in a number of union committees, pushing for greater militancy, antiracism and the need for a worker-student alliance.
As the possibility of a strike develops, we will strengthen ties and more boldly share our politics of replacing capitalism and its educational apparatus with communism.
Students lead the way
Most importantly, students have led the way as the CUNY struggle continues to unfold. They have provided leadership at events held throughout the past few semesters, including a forum and speak-out on the murder of Breonna Taylor, the need for a strike at CUNY, elections and multiple demonstrations against adjunct layoffs and increased class size.
Some of these students are in Party-led study groups, which have been a steady occurrence during the pandemic, discussing and learning about communist ideas and the need for communist revolution.
The situation at CUNY is both disturbing and inspiring. The racist bosses, attempting as they always do to solve their financial crisis on the backs of workers and students, will continue their attacks. This spring looks especially grim, and even greater layoffs and cuts to services are almost certain.
Where there is oppression, however, there is always resistance, and so there is reason to be optimistic. Militancy among workers and students is growing as the contradictions of capitalism become more apparent every day. We communists are right there, struggling with ourselves to more boldly share our vision of a capitalism-free future and with our classmates and coworkers to join the fight.

Ethiopia, once considered a linchpin for the U.S. imperialists in the Horn of Africa, is on the brink of civil war between two fighting factions: the rival Tigray People's Liberation Front and the Prime Minister Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed administration.
This conflict has the potential to draw in imperialists of all stripes because control over the Horn of Africa is critical to controlling oil routes, the capitalists’ lifeblood. The working class in Ethiopia and everywhere have nothing to gain from these ethnic divisions.
Bosses in the Tigray region (the ethnic group makes up six percent of the population) proceeded with regional elections after the central government had canceled elections nationwide suppoedly due to the pandemic. This set off a military fight. There have been rocket attacks on airports, jet fighters and infantry sent into Tigray by the central government and reports of brutal massacres of civilians. Workers’ access to the internet, phones, and electricity has been shut down as well. Over 550 have already died and countless others still stand to be displaced. Nearly 30,000 have already fled to Sudan. We must turn our guns on all these bosses and fight for communism, where workers run society.
A land mine for proxy wars
A conflict in Ethiopia could draw in the whole region and then some. These include regional imperialists like Saudi Arabia and Turkey but also the main imperialist superpowers, the U.S. and China. The competing interests can be a landmine for an eventual world war—something no imperialist is yet ready but all preparing for.
Eritrea, former enemy of war, is on the side of Abiy administration. Egypt, a competitor, can “could exploit current circumstances to sow further divisions…Somalia’s fragile government has long been underwritten by Ethiopian security…Finally, the United Arab Emirates has interests in both Ethiopia and Eritrea, and enjoys good relations with Abiy and Isaias — as well as Egypt and Sudan’s military brass” (Brookings, 11/16).
The U.S. ruling class’s internal weaknesses paralyze them from acting on their profit-driven needs. “The United States, meanwhile, has long deemed Ethiopia an important ally in a volatile region, and might have been an ideal intermediary. But the Trump administration’s wayward policies — including its unbalanced support for Egypt in the...Nile water negotiations — have left Washington with little clout at a moment of extraordinary peril” ((Brookings, 11/16).
Chinese imperialists wasted no time; they have poured money into Ethiopia, accounting for about 60 percent of foreign investment last year (Xinhua, 1/29). Recently, the Chinese bosses also established their first overseas military base in the neighboring country of Djibouti (see CHALLENGE, 12/9/16).
Under the president-elect Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. imperialists will try to reclaim some of their influence in the region to counter their Chinese rivals. At stake is the chokepoint at the strait of Bab el-Mandeb.
Crisis opens the door to anti-worker violence
Local rulers of different ethnic groups have once again channeled the anger and distress of the working class from one region into violence against workers of other ethnic groups.
What is missing in this unstable mix is the leadership of communists and the building of a mass revolutionary party. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) can and must fill that void, uniting all workers and bringing internationalist politics and class struggle against this capitalist carnage. We must build that leadership for millions of workers and students and break free of the bosses’ global power struggles in the name of imperialist war.
The deadly consequences for the working class of this capitalist system are apparent and sharpening worldwide. We also see the mass fightback of workers and students who are standing up to the chaos and misery. PLP proudly salutes the example set by our class sisters and brothers and invites them to join our international struggle for a communist world without bosses or borders.