On November 26, in the largest protest in human history, hundreds of millions of workers in India staged a general strike against a government plan for “free market” deregulation of agriculture. For weeks, tens of thousands of poor farmers have taken to the streets. Fighters blocked national highways and trains, dodged tear gas canisters, and clashed with riot gear-clad police. They burned effigies of the prime minister, anti-Muslim racist and state terrorist Narendra Modi, who rammed through the new laws as part of a fascist drive to prepare for inter-imperialist war.
India’s agriculture system is dramatic proof of why the capitalist profit system must be smashed. Sixty percent of India’s 1.3 billion people eke out their livelihoods by farming, most of them on plots not much larger than a soccer field. The country ranks first in the world in milk production and second in rice, wheat, vegetables, and fruits, yet 190 million people are undernourished (fao.org). Pressed by debts and bankruptcies, farmers routinely resort to suicide—more than 10 per day in the western state of Maharashtra alone (ruralindiaonline.org).
By removing price supports and the guaranteed distribution of farmers’ goods, the new laws will accelerate corporate takeovers: “With these protections … cast off, there is little left to stop Big Ag companies within India from swallowing market share” (Slate, 12/9). Millions of small farmers and farmworkers may be pushed into starvation; millions more will be funneled into urban factory and service jobs, where they generate a higher return on investment for the bosses.
While the mass protests showcase the boldness and solidarity our class will need to defeat capitalism, these narrow reform demands are a deadly trap for workers.  Settling for anything less than communist revolution will only strengthen the bosses. The horrific inequalities in India make it clear that capitalism can never serve workers’ needs. Only a worker-run society can provide what our class truly needs and deserves.
Modi lines up behind U.S. rulers
Modi’s latest moves toward fascist control reflect a growing worldwide instability and sharpening inter-imperialist competition between the U.S. and China (see CHALLENGE, 12/17). As the U.S. declines as a world power, its ruling class needs India as a strategic ally against neighboring China and nearby Russia (Foreign Affairs, 11/10). India has amassed 150 nuclear warheads (armscontrol.org, August 2020), and its huge population could supply masses of troops in a conventional ground war.  
For the last five months, India and China have stationed at least 100,000 troops in a stare-down over a disputed region in the Himalayas (Foreign Affairs, 10/6). In June, after Chinese soldiers killed 30 Indian soldiers at this flashpoint, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence declared that the U.S. would “continue to stand firm with our allies in the region, like India.” More recently, India opted out of joining the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a huge slap in the face to the Chinese ruling class (Economic Times, 11/5). Relations between the world’s two most populated countries are at their lowest point in four decades (South China Morning Post, 12/9). And there’s no telling when a regional clash could be the spark that sets off World War III. On December 15, the New York Post reported that a U.S. Army command based in Alaska would train with the Indian Army in 2022—in the Himalayas.
India bosses, we charge you with genocide!
With a vastly under-reported 10 million infections and 144,000 Covid-19 deaths in India, Modi and his murderous band of bosses have grossly failed to protect workers. The working class everywhere is suffering from the disease of capitalism, and those who have the least under this system will always endure the harshest attacks. Hundreds of millions in India work and live without basic sanitation. Inferior for-profit healthcare, shoddy housing, and starvation-level wages conspire to put workers in danger. These are the real “preexisting conditions” that pave the way for transmission, infection, and death in a pandemic. Even after Covid-19 is contained, capitalism will remain to sicken us by the billions.
With its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) down by nearly a quarter, India is in an economic depression. Since March, an estimated 140 million people have lost their jobs (New York Times, 11/27). Just as Donald Trump blames immigrants as U.S. capitalism flounders, Modi has attempted to distract India’s working class from his blunders by scapegoating Muslim workers. The nation’s health ministry repeatedly blamed an Islamic group for spreading the virus, triggering a wave of racist violence. Muslim workers have been run out of their neighborhoods, assaulted with bats, and threatened with lynching (NYT, 4/12).
This racist campaign is nothing new. In August 2019, in a brazen land grab, Modi’s government canceled the “autonomous” status of the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. It flooded the region with troops, shut down the internet, and jailed opposition leaders. Next, Modi’s hyper-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) established a national registry in the eastern state of Assam, forcing workers to prove that they’d arrived in India before the mid-1970s. More than two million people, mostly Muslims, have since been stripped of their citizenship (Time, 12/20/19). These racist measures prompted mass fightback by millions of workers, who flooded the cities’ streets and battled police.
Fight for communism
India has a rich history of class struggle and revolutionary movements. Tragically, workers have been betrayed again and again by fake-“communist” parties that sell out to the bosses and help exploit the working class (see page 5). Progressive Labor Party stands with the working class of India as it fights against the blood-sucking bosses and their brutal oppression. The next step is for workers to shift their prodigious energy from organizing mass reform protests to building a society organized by and for workers—a communist society.
Under capitalism, farming, like everything else, is about making money, not feeding people. PLP believes that reforming capitalism is impossible. The workers’ need for food production—for survival—is in direct contradiction with the bosses’ need for maximum profit. Capitalists always place their narrow interests over people’s lives, whether it’s Modi, AMLO, Xi Jinping, or Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Our solution lies outside the capitalist system. We must look to one another. We need an egalitarian society without racism or sexism or inter-imperialist war, where workers will share abundance and scarcity alike. Join the PLP and fight for communism! Power to the working class!

OAKLAND, CA, December 5—Motorcycle, bike and skateboard riders led a caravan of 125 Oakland tenants in cars today, stopping traffic and chanting “Fight, fight, fight – housing is a human right!”
This “Rally on Wheels” united multiple tenants’ unions into an Oakland-wide force calling for rent cancellation and guaranteed housing for the homeless.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members sold CHALLENGE and distributed leaflets calling for communist revolution to end the racist differentials in homelessness, hunger and disease. With four vacant homes for every homeless person in Oakland, 70 percent are Black while many more are immigrants.  
Our leaflet argued that homelessness is not due to “personal defects” of the homeless but rather a result of the systematic, racist injustice of capitalism.
Workers make homes, capitalism makes homelessness
The caravan started with a short rally with workers passing out signs in English and Spanish that said, “Tenants Against Capitalism,” and “Join Tenant Unions.” Among our PLP signs was “Workers Produce Homes, Capitalism Creates Homelessness.” Speakers said that capitalism was the source of the problems, that mass action and not the electoral process was the main way of making change, and that we need a “new society.” The 5 year-old daughter of one of the Moms 4 Housing occupiers led the crowd in rousing chants and many drivers honked in support.
The workers organized the rally very well, so well that the cops were nowhere in sight. The atmosphere was very positive, and we even enlisted a local radio station to broadcast the speeches to those of us quarantined in our cars.
We stopped for rallies at four apartment buildings organized on rent strike. Multiracial groups of tenants spoke emotionally and proudly about their struggles against their landlords and capitalism.
One stop was a gutted, burned out shell of a multi-family home destroyed by an electrical fire after many complaints from the tenants. The final stop was a call-out in front of the home of an abusive property manager.  Tenants posted a flyer with his picture and denouncing his actions all over the neighborhood. Due to tenant and worker struggles Oakland has better rent control than most cities and an eviction moratorium that extends to the end of the pandemic. But housing insecurity and capitalism are still a disaster for the working class.
Most importantly, many blamed capitalism as the source of housing insecurity and the shameless profiteering of corporate landlords during the pandemic.  
They also called for the end of the “commodification of housing” – the ability of private capitalists to buy, sell and rent for profit property that should be a basic human need.
PLP members are active in the tenant organizations that came out today and have consistently brought our communist politics through leaflets and CHALLENGE to these events. These personal relationships have led some young housing organizers to join a PLP study group.  
Our goal in these groups is to build revolutionary class-consciousness and PLP. This means understanding that capitalism is the problem, and that we must name it as the system that is attacking us all over the world. While we fight for immediate needs, we are also building the strength to take out the whole system. We see developing a Party that fights for communism as a crucial step in this process.
Communism means secure and accessible housing is available to allow our humanity to flower.  Collectively, we can build a world that meets the needs of the international working class. Fight for communism!

LOS ANGELES, December 16—Housing is a necessity, but under capitalism, workers’ needs are never guaranteed. As communists, we must organize to demand the needs of our class to be met! Through that process, workers will see the limitations of these struggles and have the potential to understand the change they want can only come through communism.
This time our fight is for the home of a working class family. Los Angeles has one of the greatest unhoused populations in the entire world! These numbers are only going to explode with the looming ban on evictions set to expire at the end of January. Gentrification is making it impossible for families to stay in neighborhoods where they have lived for decades. We have positioned ourselves for this fight through work at a local high school and commitment to working in a tenant’s rights mass organization.
The overlap of the work in these two crucial places demonstrates our potential for growth. Now we must actualize it! The mass organization is planning, with the evicted family, a multi-pronged approach to fighting back. The high school(where two of the siblings who were evicted attend) along with friends has worked with staff and students to spread this campaign. We are in the very early stages, but stay tuned in the upcoming issues of CHALLENGE to hear about an eviction blockade, organized protests at the sleazy investment company, spreading the word throughout the community where the eviction occurred, and relying on the working class to collect the things this family needs.
While many different groups are involved in fighting for workers’ needs and rights, Progressive Labor Party is the only organization that offers a long-term solution. Our members will fight tooth and nail to reclaim the home stolen from this working class family, but that will not stop the next family from being evicted. Capitalism is a system that will always put profits over people. It does not deserve to exist! Let’s tear it down together! Our fight against evictions today are the necessary seeds planted for future revolution. Join us

EL SALVADOR, December 16— More than one hundred women working for Florenzi Industries are occupying the building of this business in Soyapango, in the San Salvador industrial area. These workers took  direct action, occupying their workplace since July 2020 when Florenzi closed its doors due to Covid-19.  owner, Sergio Pineda, refused to pay the workers for four months of labor, including benefits and vacation time.
On March 18 President Bukele ordered the shutdown of 152 maquilas for four months. Pineda, the capitalist and owner of Florenzi Industries, took advantage of the presidential decree to close the factory without paying about $500,000 dollars that he owes the workers. Even worse, he did not pay for the forced confinement due to the pandemic. On the contrary, he used the pandemic as an excuse to declare bankruptcy, while offering the workers compensation of an old sewing machine with an approximate value of $100.00 dollars. Of the 209 workers 97 of them accepted what they were offered, which covered only a minimum of what Pineda owes these workers. Since then, 113 workers decided to face the brutal challenges of Covid-19 and the lack of employment that forces them to go hungry and die.
These workers are experiencing capitalism’s cruel exploitation. The capitalists have stolen all the wealth created by the workers through all the years of long hours of labor, and now they are facing unemployment. The international working-class exposed to these persistent experiences, need a new social and economic system. That’s communism where all the wealth created by the working-class is used to satisfy the working-class and their families’ needs, not to enrich the parasite capitalists such as Sergio Pineda, who is part of the El Salvador government oligarchy.
Florenzi Industries is one of the 152 maquilas operating in El Salvador after the civil war. These factories are distributed in 17 free zones, free of taxation and employ 56,000 workers. The majority are women who are paid the minimum salary with little or no benefits.These brave women demanded from the legislative assembly an immediate solution to the problem. Instead the assembly ordered the labor department to resolve it, but the labor minister claimed not to have the legal tools to resolve the issue, relegating the responsibility to the courts. The workers protested asking for the immediate firing of the labor minister, Rolando Castro, accusing him of protecting the boss. During the protest the workers stopped traffic to put  pressure on the government, yet the corporate media was silent because it is part of and serves the elite capitalists. In August, men in police uniforms tried entering the Florenzi Industries building trying to get the equipment and materials without succeeding.
The workers have learned that government institutions are capitalist servants. Their fight is “against the neoliberal capitalist” where “the poor sew what the rich wear”. The historic international working-class experience has taught us that capitalism of any kind, neoliberal, national or imperialist is a dead end for the workers. Therefore, what the working-class needs is to fight for communism.
In a New York Times article about labor abuses in El Salvador in 2001, Steven Greenhouse exposed the most inhuman abuses against the workers. They included no ventilation, poor hygiene, long working hours, forced overtime, and frequent layoffs, especially targeting those who want to organize, or support a union. Under these precarious circumstances of slave wages the apparel industry in El Salvador, just in the year 2000, exported 1.6 billion dollars of production to the U.S.
From the 1.6 billion produced by the workers, less than 10 percent is for the workers while the factory owners keep more than 90 percent of what workers produce.  This is how the workers in the maquilas become victims of international capitalist exploitation.
The majority of the maquila workforce are women who are faced with labor exploitation, gender exploitation, very low salaries, the worse labor conditions, constant sexual harassment and sexual abuse, and unpaid work at home. It is no coincidence that feminist groups are unifying in the fight with the workers.
It is important to acknowledge the international working-class historic experience of women and men fighting together for communism, particularly in Russia and China. They mobilized millions of peasant and city women workers; they made gigantic and significant progress in social, labor, economic and gender equality.
The Progressive Labor Party fights for communist equality, gender equality and against the racial discrimination of the international working-class. We are in solidarity with the Florenzi industry workers.