Every so often, some tiny grains of truth that appear in the bosses’ liberal media actually contradict the distortions, unwarranted assumptions and outright lies we usually read there. Such is the case with two recent articles that, taken together, validate Progressive Labor Party’s line that: 1) racism is to capitalism as garbage is to rats; and 2) it is in the economic interest of all workers, including white workers, to fight racism.
The first is an analysis of recent studies that examine the Black-white wage gap over the last 70 years (NY Times, 6/25). Most studies of this phenomenon look only at wages of those who are actually working, and conclude that Black workers have made significant progress during that period. The author of the Times article, David Leonhardt, points out that comparing only wage workers in this analysis is insufficient because a large and growing percentage of students and unemployed workers, who are disproportionately Black, have either stopped looking for work completely or are incarcerated. In analyzing comparative wages in that way, a recent study calculated that the ratio of Black median wages to white median wages—about half—is exactly the same as it was in 1950. Leonhardt calls this result “remarkable” only because of his undying faith that progressive change for Black workers can come through reforming the capitalist system.
What is also “remarkable” is the fact that average real wages for all workers are more or less at the same level they were in 1973 (pewresearch.org, 8/7/18). This is without taking into account the downward push on wages that will no doubt be caused by the mass unemployment of the current economic crisis. Meanwhile, despite the fact that productivity of labor during those last 47 years has more than doubled, almost all of the value generated by that increase in productivity has gone to the capitalist class, and very little of it to the working class.       
There has been much written about the Racial Wealth Gap (RWG), which shows that the average net worth of all white households is six and one half times the average net worth of all Black households. The RWG is clearly a result of the racism that is endemic to the capitalist system. It is also a reflection of the super-profits that capitalists have, historically, reaped from the labor of Black workers. The RWG has been used to support arguments by promoters of “White Skin Privilege” (WSP) ideology that white workers need to acknowledge their “privilege” and agree to a plan to redistribute their wealth (see, for example, “Race, The Power of an Illusion, Background Readings”, PBS).
But there has been little analysis of the main source of that gap. A recent article, “The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Upper Classes'' (People Policy Project, Matt Bruenig, 6/29), unmasks the WSP argument on the Gap. By breaking down ownership by deciles of wealth, starting with the richest 10 percent of households, and looking at each 10 percent of the remaining households, down to the poorest 10 percent, Bruenig shows that roughly 75 percent of total wealth is owned by the richest 10 percent of both white households and Black households. Bruenig continues: “[w]hat this means is that the overall racial wealth disparity is being driven almost entirely by the [gap] between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of Black people.”
Bruenig’s analysis of the effect of equalizing the RWG for the poorest 50 percent of households is even more striking. Doing so would still leave a total of 97 percent of the gap intact! As Bruening says “it is not that hard to get two groups who own relatively little to own the same amount of relatively little. But such measures would not make much of a dent in the overall [RWG].”
But Bruenig’s analysis still does not tell the whole story. Wealth under capitalism is extremely concentrated. For example, the top 1 percent of all households own 40 percent of the total wealth in the U.S., with about half of that amount owned by the top .1 percent (Saez and Zucman). The bosses’ media fails to talk about the exploitative relationship between the working class and the ruling class.
To eradicate inequality, trash capitalism
What does all of this mean for the working class? Black and white workers have a common interest in uniting to fight the capitalist class that is stealing most of the wealth that our class, and only our class, creates. The bosses have a tremendous stake in promoting racism, both because of the extra (super) profits generated by lower wages for Black, Latin, immigrant and female workers and because the racist ideology that infects our class allows the bosses to keep playing this same game of divide and conquer. Fighting racism in all of its many forms must be a bedrock principle for workers to make any progress in our struggle to rid ourselves of capitalist exploitation.
The wealth produced by the international working class today is sufficient to feed, clothe, house, provide recreation for and otherwise meet the needs of all workers across the globe. PLP aims to build a multi-racial workers’ movement to smash racism and capitalism. A communist revolution to seize power and take down the exploiters would allow us to share “the fruits of our labor that we have sweated for.”

KENOSHA, WISCONSIN, August 26—When police fired seven shots into Jacob Blake in the back while his three children watched, workers and youth in Kenosha erupted in rebellion. As they should.
U.S. capitalism’s defenders, the police, have once again proven themselves to be a terrorist force that must be abolished. To do so, the rebels need communist politics and revolution.
Some antiracists, including Progressive Labor Party, have learned from the protests that rumbled in every U.S. city following the recent police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. One such lesson is that nothing scares the rulers more than multiracial unity and Black leadership from the working class. As CHALLENGE goes to press, PLP is bringing solidarity to the bold Kenosha fighters (see next issue).
Jacob Blake’s Kenosha
Seven-and-a-half year veteran cop Rusten Sheskey shot Jacob. The other bad cop that aided in this attempted murder was Luke Courtier, a cop known for posting, “It was a good shot” about the 2014 police murder-by-14-shots of Dontre Hamilton, a Black man with schizophrenia. The racist kkkops paralyzed Jacob from the waist down after one of the seven bullets severed his spinal cord, shattered some of his vertebrae, and damaged his stomach, kidneys, and liver. The racist trauma these police caused to Jacob, his family, and children is unforgivable.
Jacob’s family has a pro-working class history; his grandfather was a pastor who fought for fair housing in the 1960s and 1970s. When they moved to Kenosha, it was to start over. Kenosha was an auto-manufacturing center for a century until the capitalist crisis led workers to lose their livelihoods. As of 2019, nearly 20 percent of workers live in official poverty. Police chief Daniel Miskinis’s goons are known for drawing guns for something as small as a routine traffic stop. Routine systemic racism and the decay of U.S. capitalism seem to be on full display in this city.
Two repulsive ruling class responses
The Small Fascist Republicans are openly appealing to racist police terror and Klan-type vigilantism, an ideology that led a white 17-year-old, Kyle Howard Rittenhouse, to shoot and kill protesters in Kenosha with a rifle. A country that alienates Black, Latin, and immigrant workers has little chance in galvanizing those same people to defend U.S. imperialism against rivals like China (see page 4). This is the motivation behind the Big Fascists’ response.
The Big Fascists, the main finance capitalists of the ruling class, wasted no time in co-opting protests and sending out their apologists. Opportunist Al Sharpton spoke with Jacob’s father, who will now speak at Sharpton's March on Washington commemoration on Friday. Liberal Joe Biden, hoping to be elected president in two months, said the police shots “pierce the soul of our nation.” This is the same man who wrote the bipartisan 1994 Crime Bill that intensified the war on Black and Latin workers. This is just one of several laws that Biden helped write and sponsor (Vox, 6/20) that led to the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration. As a new senator, he had also worked with segregationist politicians to attack the integration efforts via school busing. So much for liberals being the lesser evil.  
The state is violent
The bosses’ media condemn what they called “a riot.” Meanwhile, anyone with eyes has been witnessing the systematic violence of the Klan-in-blue. As youth and workers risked their health and lives in a pandemic to protest racist police murder, the bosses doubled down with more fascist terror.
The Democratic mayor, John Antaramian, installed a curfew and called on 125 soldiers from the National Guard, the military reserve force, to defend private property and the government. The police terrorized protesters with teargas and rubber bullets. This terror is not reformable; the origins of police go back to the hunters of enslaved Black people fighting for their freedom in the South and the terrorists to “dangerous” European immigrant workers in the North. Their role has not changed.
The truth is that the biggest instrument of violence, worldwide, is the bosses’ state: their government, military forces, cops, courts, schools, and media. The capitalists murder millions every year through imperialist war, mass unemployment, deplorable health care, unaffordable housing, and the profit-driven poisoning of our air, water, and food. U.S. capitalism in particular was born out of the most violent looting of all: millions of workers and children from Africa were stolen and enslaved.
Rage led protesters to damage the symbols of daily oppression under capitalism: a kkkop car, courthouse, and commercial buildings. Of course, individual and spontaneous violence won’t get workers what we need. Real and lasting change requires something more: organized mass violence to seize state power and make a new society run by and for the working class. You need an international communist party for that.
Black leadership with multiracial unity
The rebellions have proved yet again that Black workers are key to any real change and revolution. Our experience positions us to suffer the most under capitalism while having nothing to lose but our chains. The instincts of rebels are calling on the hundreds of years of revolts and fightbacks against slavery, racism, and imperialism.
The potential of the working class, when realized, has the power to build a new society from the ashes of this dying one. For that, we need all workers—Black, Latin, Asian, indigenous, immigrant, white—to reject every aspect of this inherently unequal system and its traps of electoral politics. Join PLP’s movement for a lifetime of antiracism as we pave the path to communist revolution.

As Colombia’s “Democratic Center” ruling party and its liberal opposition intensify their capitalist dogfight to control the paltry $250 million (U.S.) from the World Bank to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of workers and their families have been left infected, jobless, and hungry. The masses lack access to the most basic medical services to detect and treat the coronavirus.  Nor are they getting the economic aid supposedly set aside for sickened workers. Instead, the money is stolen by organized crime organizations that terrorize the country with deadly violence against workers.
To protect the bosses’ profits, the government led by President Ivan Duque has ordered the reopening of production to stimulate the rulers’ economy. Meanwhile, the liberal and fake-left opposition backs the five-month, ineffective nationwide quarantine, demanding that people stay home while ignoring a growing wave of starvation. As workers hang red distress flags and rags from their windows, the government does nothing to solve “the food crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic” (Revista Semana, 4/13).
Against this panorama of corruption, neglect, brutality, and bald-faced lies, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is fighting alongside the working class in Colombia. We are constantly looking for ways to attack racism and sexism, hunger and slave labor, individualism and reformism—to eradicate the pandemic of capitalism. As the inter-imperialist rivalry for markets, natural resources, and cheap labor intensifies, the worldwide Covid-19 crisis is also an opportunity for the international working class to advance its struggle to organize a mass revolutionary communist movement, smash the bosses’ system, and establish an egalitarian society run by and for workers.
Vaccine, imperialism and cardboard coffins
According to official statistics, the pandemic has killed more than 18,000 people in Colombia, with more than 10,000 new cases reported each day (worldometers.info). Given the extreme shortage of testing, the real death toll is doubtless much higher. Funeral homes are so overwhelmed that a team of Colombian designers developed a cardboard hospital bed that converts into a coffin (guardian.com, 5/27). Many of the dead are migrant workers, who are even more vulnerable to the pandemic after losing their jobs. They are evicted and end up living in the streets, with no physical distancing, adequate nourishment, electricity, medicine, or even drinkable water.
 Despite the collapse of the country’s healthcare system, the U.S.-leaning government has rejected a Cuban medical mission, healthcare supplies from China, and the possibility of a future vaccine from Russia.  As the race to create a vaccine and control its distribution has created a new inter-imperialist battleground between the U.S., Britain, China, and Russia, deadly nationalism is moving the world closer to the next global conflict. As always under capitalism, there will be winners and losers. Poorer, super-exploited workers from poorer countries in Latin America and Africa will likely be left to fend for themselves. Since public health is a global proposition, and viruses know no borders, as Bollyky & Bown noted in The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism (2020), the competition “is not only morally and ethically reprehensible, but also contrary to every country’s economic, strategic, and health interests.” As long as capitalist science is an instrument for profit, the biggest losers in this race will be the workers of the world.
Liberals unleash killer cops
 The Colombian bosses’ knives are out—for each other as well as for the working class. On August 4, ex-President Alvaro Uribe, the Democratic Center party founder, was placed under house arrest for bribing witnesses in a case involving fascist paramilitary death squads (npr.org, 8/5). Uribe’s former right-wing allies, who defend the racist politics of U.S. President Donald Trump, are pushing the renewed militarization that recently killed more than 30 people in rural Colombia (El Tiempo). The latest atrocities echo the 50-year, U.S.-backed, anti-communist massacre of more than 220,000 people, most of them civilians (National Center for Historical Memory).
The opposition liberals, who call themselves the new “political center,” favor reformist environmentalism, empty rhetoric on human rights, and the European-style social democracy promoted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. They’ve shown their true colors in the capital city of Bogota, where Mayor Claudia Lopez, the open lesbian liberal who may be the second most powerful politician in the country, campaigned to put more killer cops on the streets (bbc.com, 10/28/19). Lopez has unleashed the paramilitary ESMAD, the notoriously lethal “riot” police, to attack hundreds of workers and students rebelling against the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic.
As in the U.S. and elsewhere, the most dangerous enemies of the working class are the Big Fascist liberals, with their phony promises to create a more just and equal society—an impossibility in a capitalist system driven by maximum profit. In Colombia, the liberals’ alliance with reformist environmentalists, feminists, and LGBTQ+ groups serves to discourage and mislead workers from fighting for communism—the only solution to their misery under capitalism. The fake left, represented by the central unions and parties like the MOIR (Independent and Revolutionary Workers Movement), are aligned with the capitalist bosses in China and Russia. Their focus is not to fight capitalism but to gain more influence—and a license to steal—within the government.
A world to win
In Colombia, in our collectives and in daily struggles with industrial workers, farmers, and students, we talk about the bosses’ traps to deceive us and dissuade us from fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat. We are organizing in the streets, the factories, and the homes to achieve the violent overthrow of the rotten capitalist system. Though the challenges are many, we have a world to win. Fight for communism! Join PLP!

After the experience last spring, students, parents, and teachers know that remote learning is a degraded and degrading replacement for in-person instruction. Students learn less. At the same time, the stubborn push by both wings of the U.S. ruling class to reopen schools is driven by their reckless drive for profits and need for social control. In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers, a union born in racism and anti-communism (see CHALLENGE, 3/27/14) has begun strike preparations while making no provisions to care for student instruction or counseling. It’s clear that the remote vs. in-person debate is a racist, lose-lose proposition for the working class.
Capitalist schooling trains us to treat the working class as expendable. We are taught that it is inevitable that some workers and youth will be homeless, unemployed, or incarcerated. Education workers are habituated to accept some dropouts, suspensions, and failure as unavoidable. As much as capitalist schools teach expendability, they also strive to teach patriotism and build loyalty to U.S. imperialism. If millions of youth are left without the grip of social control while the facade of stability crumbles around us, imperialists will have a harder time winning workers to fight a war with China.
That’s why we fight for communism, where no worker or child will be treated as expendable because we will eliminate the profit motive that drives all aspects of this society.
A divided U.S. ruling class is united in contempt for workers’ lives
We can see the capitalists’ “doctrine of worker expendability” in full view within both wings of the divided U.S. ruling class. For Trump and his gang of domestically-oriented bosses, orders to “reopen the schools now!” means more short-term profits, maintaining credibility with an anti-science base, and advancing their openly racist, nationalist “America-First” re-election campaign, all while adding fuel to the flame for fascist ideas like “the survival of the fittest.”
The stakes to reopen the schools and economy are much higher for the dominant, imperialist wing of the ruling class, represented in New York City by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor  Bill de Blasio. Despite crumbling infrastructure, the imperialist wing bosses are scrambling to reopen schools in finance-capital’s home base of New York in hopes of restoring a sense of legitimacy to U.S. capitalism, both globally and domestically. They will need to win workers to fight yet another imperialist war.
A “lost generation” disillusioned and unfit for this task will hinder their ability to wage such a war. Liberals’ phony, silver-tongued appeals to workers that “we are all in this together” and empty assurances that “we are ready” show that the liberal wing is the main danger to the working class. They are just as ready as ever to have workers die from both Covid-19 and World War III for their long-term profits.
The blatant disregard for workers’ lives shown by both wings of the U.S. ruling class is a hallmark of rising fascism. Capitalists of any stripe are workers’ enemies.
Dangers of remote learning
Opening schools with few safety resources and protocols will prove deadly to workers and students, but remote learning has its own dangers—especially for those that cannot afford to have an adult in the home every day. Not to mention the added trauma for students in temporary housing or shelters! Real collaboration, social interaction, and hands-on learning are nonexistent. We cannot simply reflexively accept the disastrous and racist choice to have young minds rot at home.
Remote learning runs the risk of piling on another layer of normalized neglect to the already-callous and racist culture of capitalist schooling. Black, Latin, and immigrant working-class students face the brunt of this attack, whether it is due to limited, inconsistent or lack of computer and Internet access, the need to work to support their families, or in a home with no quiet space to do schoolwork. So too do students with special needs and language needs. Assuming students have the personal organization and technological skills to learn remotely, this extensive screen time is linked to altered sleep cycles and affects students’ physical and mental health (Johns Hopkins Newsletter, 4/20). Not to mention how profoundly isolating the experience is for developing minds and bodies.
Lives are not expendable, and neither are minds.
Reopening school
Capitalists hold state power, for now. They will reopen their schools, sooner or later. Vaccination, once safe and effective, will reduce but not eliminate risk. There is no possibility of returning to “safe schools.” Poor ventilation, budget cuts and massive layoffs that hurt working-class schools hardest, inadequate disinfection, and insufficient physical distancing and PPE measures all mean no safe schools. The families who need schools the most will send their kids in first,and love their kids no less than anyone else. More than learning, schools provide health services, lunch, physical therapy, language, counseling and other related services. Calling to keep schools closed “until they’re safe” without recognizing this reality, and without genuine planning for student needs, undermines the cause of building working-class solidarity.
Despite examples of parent-teacher-student unity during this current crisis, there remains a possibility that the working class—students, parents, and teachers—could emerge from this crisis even more fractured. This potential for  division may be the greatest danger of all. Education workers must fight back alongside their students against the bosses’ system, which has set our class up to fail in what will certainly be a tougher school year. Every rotten aspect of capitalist schools reinforces the same lesson for us: a system that can’t educate and care for its youth does not deserve to exist, and we must learn together what it will take to smash it. Join Progressive Labor Party!
No ‘lost generations’ for communists
Communists and many anti-racist education workers refuse to accept that Covid-19 will result in a “lost generation.” We know that the working class is full of fighters, and that whether remote or in-person, education workers and students must use the sharp study of math, science, history and language to explore how Covid-19 reveals the racist poison of capitalism and the need for a new, communist society. In the event of a strike, we must organize outdoor “Freedom Schools” where we relate schoolwork to survival of this pandemic. We must conduct home visits for absent students. Parents and students must be invited to picket lines where
education workers can teach students while parents work or run essential errands. As during the recent anti-police rebellions, life’s greatest lessons are learned in the class struggle. Each connection between workers is one seed of a communist future, when tended by a growing Progressive Labor Party.
Every worker can contribute to the fight for a better world. Both coronavirus and recent international anti-racist uprisings have led many youth to criticize and reject this political and economic system. These shifts in consciousness present an exciting opportunity, and we must ensure that the alienation felt by so many students is turned into class struggle, rather than nihilism and cynicism. We know that students can learn more from a single protest against police brutality than in a whole year of capitalist history curriculum. A better world is possible, and we need the power of the entire working class to create it!