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    Cuomo, servant of liberal imperialist bosses

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    17 April 2020 254 hits

    New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo has emerged as a national spokesperson for a rational response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But deeds matter more than demeanor. As governor, he gutted the healthcare system and delayed his response to the pandemic. His leadership has led to more deaths in New York than any other state. This was preventable and foreseeable.
    But the Wall Street finance capitalists, the imperialist corporations that have a world empire to defend, don’t care about workers’ lives. They care about building an all-class patriotic unity to confront China and other rivals. Cuomo, and politicians like him, are building a liberal nationalist unity that will serve the imperialist wing of the ruling class in the coming wars. When it comes to defending their worldwide imperialist empire the Big Fascist liberal rulers don’t trust a chaotic, self-serving Trump. They prefer someone like Cuomo. Cuomo's burgeoning national popularity is a sneak preview of how the bosses' finance capital main wing will position itself after the Trump disaster to regain control of the state and impose fascism and war on the working class.
    But lying politicians promoting this liberal fascism are not the solution. It’s the healthcare workers, transit, Amazon, service, delivery, and many others who have gone all out during this crisis. We need a system where these workers run society, not for the capitalists’ profits but for the needs of the world’s working class. That’s communism. That means a revolution where the billionaires and their puppet politicians like Cuomo are out and the working class rules the world.
    Response to pandemic: racist and late
    On March 1 a woman was the first in New York City to test positive for Covid-19, having recently arrived from Iran. The next day Cuomo promised to track everyone from the woman’s flight. It did not happen. The next day a suburban lawyer who worked in Manhattan tested positive. State officials focused their efforts on the suburb, not New York City. Not only was that not very smart, as Cuomo likes to portray himself, it was racist. The focus was on a mainly white enclave, not a mainly Black and Latin city.
    “Dr. Frieden [former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] said that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent” (NYT, 4/8).
    Stay-at-home orders were also late in New York State. Cuomo is owned by real estate and construction billionaires and even declared construction workers “essential” until forced to retreat. On March 19, Gavin Newsome issued a statewide shelter-in-place order, though California had only a small fraction of the confirmed cases in New York.
    Cuomo said, “We’re fighting the virus and we’re fighting fear and panic. The fear and panic is, if anything, worse than the virus” (The Today Show, 3/19). Maybe he was talking about the fear and panic of his developer buddies who were terrified about losing profits.
    After initially dismissing Mayor Bill De Blasio's call for a shelter-in-place for NYC, Cuomo ordered a statewide lockdown on the evening of March 22. At a time when the number of Covid-19 cases was doubling every two days or so, a delay of three or six days translates to thousands of unnecessary deaths for the sake of capitalist profit.
    Pre-pandemic: racist cuts
    In January 2011 Cuomo started as governor making racist cuts to Medicaid and school aid and used his political skills to protect the wealth of his billionaire donors. During the last 20 years New York State has lost 20,000 hospital beds. Cuomo was governor almost half that time. He personally helped negotiate the closing of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn and its sale to a real estate developer. He also held back court ordered money to inner city schools that was to reverse some of the racist inequality in state school funding. He also cut funding to localities forcing cuts in health care, housing and education (Gotham Gazette, 1/16).
    Meanwhile Cuomo has eliminated a bank tax, has cut taxes on yachts, private jets and mansions and stopped a proposed tax on non-primary apartments (public-accountability.org, 12-4-2019). Now New York faces a total racist collapse of its healthcare system. Desperately ill workers are being turned away from hospitals, many are dying in their homes, and hundreds are being buried “unclaimed” in mass graves in Potter’s field. It’s criminal, racist murder.
    More racist attacks on workers
    During the crisis, he proposed more cuts to Medicaid. He was criticized, as this would cost the state $6.7 billion in federal aid. He didn’t back down. He just delayed the cuts of $2.5 billion, including $400 million to hospitals. And he conveniently forgot about rent reform, which many workers fought for.
    But he did remember to undo aspects of recently passed bail reform. This would have “allowed people accused of crimes to keep their jobs… instead of suffering in jail … the most dangerous place in America as far as the coronavirus is concerned.
    On Wednesday… almost 180 people incarcerated at Rikers and 141 corrections staff were infected with the coronavirus” (Slate , 4/1). Cuomo’s proposal would allow judges to revoke bail even for misdemeanor.
    The cop leaders were happy. It was probable that incarceration would increase, adding to the jail population and increasing the spread of Covid-19.    
    Tax breaks for the capitalists
    But racist attacks on the working class are only half the story. Then there are massive giveaways to Cuomo’s billionaire friends. One such friend is James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden and a big Cuomo donor. MSG has not paid taxes for 37 years. Cuomo has blocked all attempts to stop this giveaway (gothamist.com, 1-22). “New York Gives Corporations More in Tax Breaks Than Any Other State” reads a headline (Gothamist, 4/10/2017). The latest scam was the attempted tax exemption for Amazon and billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. More jobs were promised, but the research says that’s false. Corporations reap billions, taxpayers pay, and no extra jobs are created (NY Post, 1/8). That’s how capitalism works. The government serves the capitalist class and either scams the working class with lying politicians or attacks the working class with racist cops. It’s not an accident that of the New York billionaires that made the Forbes Top 400 list over half are donors to Cuomo’s campaigns (public-accountability.org, 12/4/2019).
    So it goes in the capitalist USA. If you want a better world, don’t rely on politicians. Join the Progressive Labor Party and fight for an egalitarian communist world run by and for the working class.

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    Covid-19 accelerates bosses’ drive towards fascism and war

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    03 April 2020 238 hits

    Even with social distancing, we can see all too clearly the horrors created by the disease of capitalism. In a matter of weeks, Covid-19 has taken down the bosses’ economies and exposed their health care system for the racist travesty it is. The pandemic has revealed—once again—the capitalists’ criminal negligence and total incompetence. In a moment where workers are most vulnerable, they have perverted the practice of medicine into a rationed commodity. They have nothing to offer us but death panels and euthanasia.  
    Only the international working class has the capacity and humanity to rebuild a decent world out of this cataclysm. Only communism, a society run by and for workers, can meet the vital needs of our class.
    As workers fight for their lives and their families and their safety and their jobs, the capitalist rulers are speeding their plans for fascism and inter-imperialist war. More openly fascist states like China and Russia are seizing the opportunity to line up new allies and possibly supplant the U.S. as the world’s number-one superpower. Meanwhile, U.S. and European Union (EU) bosses are plagued by infighting and division. Regardless of which group of these blood-sucking monsters prevail, and no matter when the pandemic subsides, workers will still be sickened by the contagion of capitalist exploitation. Our class will still be plagued by racist and sexist inequality, by poverty and homelessness. The most deadly infection by far is the profit system itself.
    But the bosses aren’t the only ones who can advance in this period. So can the working class. Progressive Labor Party, though small and limited today, will continue to organize and grow until we are leading millions to turn the bosses’ wars into communist revolution.
    Bosses’ crumbs won’t cut it
    As the virus exposes the fragility of life under capitalism, U.S. bosses are trying to mask the horror. Frozen student loans, expanded unemployment insurance, suspended evictions, and $1,200 checks are so many crumbs to keep the rulers’ consumer economy limping along—and to stave off rebellions in the streets. Soon enough, when the worst of this latest crisis has passed, the crushing debt payments and evictions will resume. Under capitalism, the law of the land is maximum profit—no matter how many are suffering in their homes or hospital death camps.
    The rulers’ response to Covid-19 has been muddled by internal divisions, a lack of discipline, and the anarchy of their system. In the U.S., the main split is between the imperialist Big Fascists of finance capital, represented by the Democratic Party, and the isolationist Small Fascists led by the Koch family and fronted by President Donald Trump. The Big Fascists, though struggling with their own disunity, are focused on building a broad, patriotic movement for their coming war with China—and demanding “sacrifice” from capitalists and workers alike. Behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, they are pressing Trump to use the Defense Production Act to compel private-sector production of millions of respirator masks and tens of thousands of ventilators, the equipment needed to save Coronavius patients with life-threatening lung injuries.
    It’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism
    Trump reluctantly backed off his deranged plan to “get America back to work” by Easter Sunday, which would have guaranteed the slaughter of additional millions and hurt his chances for reelection in November. But he is following the Small Fascists’ playbook to limit the federal government’s role and protect “free enterprise”—the bosses’ freedom to steal all the short-term profits they can, and workers’ lives be damned. After attacking state-imposed shelter-in-place restrictions, the Koch-controlled Americans for Prosperity urged Pelosi and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell to “avoid approving measures that inappropriately usurp the roles that can be more effectively played by state and local governments, the private sector, and our communities” (americansforprosperity.org, 3/17).
    Trump has complied by refusing to centralize purchasing and distribution of medical equipment, and by allowing six states—including Florida and Texas—to defy the urgent recommendations of every honest scientist to shut down public gatherings. Untold thousands of workers will die as a result.
    But make no mistake. The Big Fascists and their political stooges, from Barack Obama to Joe Biden to Andrew Cuomo, are the mass murderers who placed workers at such grave risk in the first place.  For decades, finance capitalists worldwide have gutted the health care infrastructure, a disinvestment that accelerated after the financial crisis of 2008. These main-wing liberals have closed unprofitable hospitals, slashed Medicaid, and purposely plotted the “triaging” of critical care—to enable the state to pull the plug on workers deemed expendable. Several besieged hospitals in New York City have already “taken the unprecedented step of allowing doctors not to resuscitate people with covid-19 to avoid exposing health-care workers to the highly contagious virus” (Washington Post, 3/31).  
    U.S. and EU in retreat
    The U.S. bosses’ are no longer able to lead on the international stage. They couldn’t convince their Saudi allies to end an oil war with Russia that has devastated prices and threatened the U.S. fracking industry (CNBC, 3/25). At the recent G7 Summit, after the U.S. State Department crafted a joint statement calling Covid-19 the “Wuhan virus,” European leaders refused to sign off—a reflection of China’s growing influence.
    Meanwhile, the EU is fracturing internally. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hesitance in helping poorer European countries was slammed by French President Emmanuel Macron (Reuters, 3/27). Italy, a country that last year defied the European Union by joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative, received thousands of masks and the services of nine Chinese doctors (FP, 3/31). After getting its own pandemic aid package from China, Serbia claimed that “European Solidarity does not exist. It was a fairy tale” (Wall Street Journal, 3/18).
    China’s bosses move in
    For the last half of the 20th century, U.S. imperialism dominated the globe and controlled world events. But after defeats in Vietnam and more recently the Middle East, and now hobbled by Trump and his Fortress America disengagement, its alpha dog status is in jeopardy. China’s more unified ruling class enabled its bosses to contain Covid-19 with a brutal lockdown of 60 million workers. As a result, they’ve gotten a jump in restarting their own struggling economy.
    China has exported thousands of ventilators to Europe (South China Morning Post, 3/31). It produces half of the world’s face masks; billionaire Jack Ma sent testing kits and masks to over 50 African countries, and 50,000 testing kits to Mexico alone (El Universal, 3/31). The Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. finance capital’s leading think tank, sounded the alarm: “As Washington falters, Beijing is moving quickly and adeptly to [fill] the vacuum to position itself as the global leader in pandemic response” (3/18).
    Workers’ fightback rising
    The pandemic has both widened the inequalities of capitalism and awakened working-class consciousness. Workers are fighting back! In Italy, they effectively shut down the country with a call for a national strike of non-essential workers (Politico, 3/15). In the U.S., Instacart and Whole Foods workers have struck against deadly working conditions. Auto workers in Michigan, bus drivers in Alabama, sanitation workers in Pittsburgh, chicken factory workers in Georgia, Amazon workers in New York—all have walked off the job to protest the bosses’ callous disregard for their health and safety.
    Mutual aid organizations have spontaneously sprung up in solidarity with workers whom the bosses have left to starve or die. In Paterson, New Jersey, activists delivered meals to more than 100 older people. Tenant rent strikes are brewing. PLP members are active in these groups, which evoke the old Communist Party’s monumental mass work during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These actions give workers both confidence in our class and tangible support as the bosses’ infrastructure crumbles around us.
    There is no higher duty or privilege than serving fellow workers in need. But we must also advance politically beyond the old CP by winning masses of workers all the way to communism. In a communist society, workers will take collective responsibility for our class—out of commitment, not threats or coercion. Fight for communism! Smash the bosses! Join PLP!

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    WORKERS GO THE DISTANCE FOR FLORES AND THE FIGHTBACK

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    03 April 2020 243 hits

    LOS ANGELES, April 1—As General Motors and General Electric bosses attempt to lead our class in the domestic war efforts to build all-class unity (aka fascism) under the guise of fighting Covid-19, the family of murdered-by-police Alex Flores continues to inspire some glimmers of working-class power.
    There are constant calls from the bosses, appealing to our humanity, to donate blood to the Red Cross and give money to the numerous underfunded agencies that provide food and clothing to our class. Like World War II, the bosses aim to mobilize every aspect of society to move from donating blood and money to sacrificing “blood and treasure” in the name of U.S. imperialism and future World War III.
    Our small fight alongside the Flores family offer not only a short-term solution but provides lessons on how we should be creatively fighting back in this period of pandemics, fascism, and future wars.
    Workers collectively make a plan…
    Around the same time that U.S. President Trump invoked the fascist Stafford Act, Progressive Labor Party and antiracist organizers were intending to meet with the Flores family for a BBQ and banner-making party.  After a brief discussion with the family, the BBQ turned into an emergency planning meeting to discuss the nature of our fightback should conditions make it more difficult to meet in large groups.
    Many workers are understandably frightened by the current situation.  Nevertheless, the Flores family decided that day regardless of how the bosses try to restrict movement in the coming period, they wanted to find creative ways to continue the fight back!  
    We had a rich discussion on operating under fascist conditions, importance of public health precautions like hand hygiene and social distancing. We still didn’t know at this point what the ruling class would implement in response to the virus, so we made three levels of plans based on how limiting the situation would become.  Not only did the family want to continue the weekly protests, they agreed on expanding the struggle to weekly petitioning at neighborhood grocery stores and of course, and finishing the banner we didn’t do that day!
    And boldly carry it out
    A couple of days later, the governor of California, Gavin Newsome, followed by Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti, announced the “Safer at Home” restrictions. This meant that you were only supposed to leave the house for “essential business,” maintain six feet of distance and not be in groups larger than ten. But based on our planning, we were ready!
    Organize safety for workers’ fightback
    For the next Flores Friday march, we had a handwashing station and made a large circle spaced out to maintain adequate distance.  We asked our veteran comrades of older age and/or with other underlying health conditions to stay home. We also had a bit more discipline at the march itself with one family member and one Party member discussing the plan with the larger group and leading the march.  
    We carried a printout of the “Safer at Home” order with someone designated to interact with the police should they approach us.  We then marched in two lines staying six feet apart, seizing the southbound traffic, showing the community that we take their health seriously, but also that the fight against police terror and the larger system of capitalism cannot wait. Throughout it all, working-class support did not waver!  
    Petition at grocery stores
    Since, we have petitioned at two different grocery stores in the neighborhood.  We washed our hands and wore latex medical gloves and did our best to have brief but moving discussions with workers and asking them to sign a petition with demands for justice for Alex (getting the autopsy report and indicting racist KKKop Steven Ruiz) but also with broader demands calling for an end to racist police murders and attacks on our class.  
    Even with the lesser foot traffic from the fear around Covid-19, shoppers, grocery store workers and their security engaged as well, collecting over 150 signatures in just two visits.  One grocery store worker shared with us that her brother was killed by the police in the city of Gardena in front of his son last year. We introduced her to the sister, brother and father of Alex Flores.  She signed our petition, but also asked to be contacted.  We are hoping to unite these two families and two struggles and hopefully strengthen our one fight against this whole racist capitalist system.  
    Capitalism is the virus, communism is the cure
    Whether it be the Covid-19 or police murder, workers know that capitalism is not here to serve our class. Every day this system exposes its true nature, killing people because of lack of ventilators in a hospital or by the hand of the killer cops. The Flores family’s urgency to fight this rotten system exists in every member of our class when cultivated through the ideas of PLP.
    As the bosses ramp up fascism, we must continue to learn to push the limits they set while also operating in new ways. With the Covid-19 crisis nowhere near its end, we must be ready to adjust tactics if orders for more serious lockdowns are put in place.
    We value the health and welfare of every single worker. We cannot be reckless and put workers lives at risk. But when this health crisis subsides, capitalism will still be killing members of our class, so we can’t go into hiding at this time either. No one is safe at home if bosses run the world! Workers need communism now more than ever! Join the fight!
    As scientific communists, it’s evident that social distancing and quarantining as it relates to halting the spread of disease is important. However, we also understand that the bosses’ concerns for our collective health are only motivated by their own desire to make profit.
    Not only that, we know that if we were running society, we would greatly reduce the possibility of pandemics we will arrange society completely different, with elimination of exploitation and profit.  But if a pandemic were to develop under communism, a quarantine would not consist of weaponized technology or militarized camps, but it would be carried out with international camaraderie and compassion for our class sisters and brothers impacted around the world.

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    Bosses terrorize, workers organize

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    03 April 2020 250 hits

    It is suicidal for the working class to rely on the capitalist state to take care of us. We must do it ourselves. As the Coronavius pandemic rages across continents, the bosses’ state is designed to protect only the capitalist’s own interests. It’s plainer than ever that “national unity,” the idea that a country’s capitalists and workers share common interests, is a dangerous myth. There is no “we” here—it is only us and them, our class versus the rulers, the people who produce value against the people who own value. The bosses are unleashing their state apparatus, from local cops to the federal Centers for Disease Control, to come to the aid of their class. Big and Small Fascists across the globe are releasing unlimited resources to prop up their failing economies. They may or may not succeed. But once thing is clear: The bosses’ state can never serve workers’ needs.
    PLP is calling on all workers to take responsibility for the international working class in this urgent period. At the same time, we must respect the limits of the moment. Our challenge is to fight for the needs of our class and a communist society while still taking the precautions necessary to guard the health of our members, friends, families, and class.
    The bosses’ self-serving state
    The cost of keeping capitalism afloat drains the lion’s share of society’s resources. In caring for the most vulnerable worker, the bosses’ state is missing in action. The responsibility is left to charities, non-profits, and members of our own class.
    As we enter the eye of the pandemic, instead of ensuring that people get decent health care, enough food, and a safe place to live, the bosses are focused on business loans, tax breaks, and profits. Crumbs are passed out to the working class as the rulers’ broken health care system builds morgues.
    Do they have enough ventilators or even enough one-dollar respirator masks? No. President Donald Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo are busy blaming each other for shortages that are killing health care workers and forcing involuntary DNRs. But the fact is that every president and every governor for the last 20 years has been warned about these shortfalls. Instead of investing in adequate stockpiles for a pandemic they knew was coming, they decided to let people die instead (Intercept, 3/24).
    Do they have enough hospital beds or ICU beds? No. To preserve capitalist profits, liberal governors like Cuomo cut beds with a vengeance. In New York City, now the world’s Coronavius epicenter,  20 hospitals have been closed since 2003.
    Essentially, the bosses are giving workers two options: Stay home and lose your job and possibly die alone, or ignore the pandemic and risk your life to keep working.
    Bosses’ crisis response: fascist genocide
    As they scramble to try to save their system, the bosses are looking to abandon or kill the unprofitable segments of the working class: children, the disabled, the elderly. Trump’s buddy, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, proposed that people in their 70s and up should “take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves…” (vanityfair.com, 3/24). In other words, older people can and should be sacrificed to restore the capitalists’ profit machine and return to business as usual.
    This is the essence of fascism, the Nazis’ Third Reich formula: fostering unity with the ruling class to slaughter those groups the bosses no longer need. It’s how workers in Germany came to look the other way as concentration camps were built and became slaughterhouses. Today, Franklin Graham’s tents are going up in New York’s Central Park to warehouse the sick and dying. Tomorrow, it’s not a stretch to envision them as a prototype for U.S. death camps. The German fascists’ Final Solution wasn’t the product of Hitler’s madness. It reflected the cold and calculated needs of the German capitalists to preserve their system in an existential economic crisis.
    If we continue to go along with this genocidal agenda, eventually the whole working class will be consumed.
    Workers met with confusion and violence
    As the Coronavius rages, workers are being forced into confusing and contradictory situations.  Many are still expected to commute to work, pay their bills, and care for their families, despite the rising rate of infection and government mandates to stay home or stay socially distanced.
    Instead of taking responsibility for the failures of their system, the bosses unleash violence against our class. In New York City, the subways are crowded in working-class neighborhoods because many people have no paid sick leave and can’t feed their families if they shelter in place (New York Times, 3/30). In India, baton-wielding police are beating workers in the street who violate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 21-day lockdown (3/25, NY Post). Around the globe, stiff fines and jail time are threatened against workers who don’t comply.
    The working class is fighting back
    The positive news is that the working class is rebelling against bosses throwing us into the fire. Workers at Trader Joe’s are unionizing after being denied gloves on the job (Buzzfeed, 3/18). Instacart, Amazon, and Whole Foods workers are striking for Coronavius protections and hazard pay (USA Today, 3/30). Black sanitation workers in Pittsburg are refusing to do pick-ups without better safety protection (Vibe, 3/25).  Many of us have no choice but to work during these dangerous times, whether it’s to pay our bills or serve other workers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fight for safety protections or protest on behalf of our class.
    The capitalists chose not to prepare for a crisis they knew was coming. Now they’re giving us advice—or police-enforced orders—that presume that everyone lives in a small nuclear family in a spacious home with an ample financial safety net. “Shelter in place”  is a death sentence for those whom the profit system has already failed: the homeless, multiple families crowded into small apartments, elderly poor living alone or in unsanitary old age homes, low-wage workers in single rooms in cut-up houses, immigrants who fear deportation if they seek medical care, incarcerated workers penned up by the racist criminal injustice system. The millions of refugees and migrant workers around the world who have no homes at all are completely abandoned. For the working class, capitalism is truly hopeless.
    How communists would handle a health crisis
    A communist society serves the needs of the people. It develops its greatest resource: the power and knowledge of the international working class. Once the profit system is smashed, all resources will go toward workers’ needs.
    In a communist society, the state would protect the most vulnerable. In extreme circumstances, the healthiest people would enlist to care for the sick. Child care would be a collective task, along with distributing food and necessities—without cost.  
    We can do some of these things right now. Organize friends and neighbors to take care of those in need. Organize protests against unsafe conditions and attacks on the working class. But keep safety in mind at all times. Do everything possible remotely. If you must go out to work or to serve our class, keep a safe distance.  Otherwise stay in. Covid-19 is dangerous, and the bosses’ health care system can’t be trusted.  
    The working class can seize this opportunity to progress toward communist revolution and a workers’ state. But it will require our placing more confidence in our class and our Party, and breaking with the bosses’ state once and for all. Our choice is clear: Either face mass death under capitalism, or fight for communism.


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    Letters: Organizing and working under Covid-19

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    03 April 2020 239 hits

    Multiracial unity is the antidote to bosses’ racist disease

    A week before workers in New York was completely swept into the pestilent tornado of Covid-19, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades and I organized a rally in Chinatown. When I invited workers from my mass work to the action some were opposed. They felt that rather than showing solidarity we are further contributing to racism. For some members in my base, having a rally in Chinatown sent a message that Covid-19 only hurts Chinese people. While their accusations were upsetting, the rally carried on at full force. We set up near one of the busiest intersections in Chinatown with signs in Mandarin and English. Though our numbers were small, we made up for it with a bold and multigenerational contingent of PL’ers of all races and crowd-rousing chants. Workers from a local bank gifted us bottles of water, and dozens of workers enthusiastically received CHALLENGE and leaflets.
    The day after a rally, a few comrades and I met with some of the members in my base who disagreed, but were genuinely trying to understand the Party. There was confusion about the meaning of solidarity. Many confused it to mean superficial allyship and not working-class unity. After a long debate, comrades and I clarified that solidarity for communists means that we stand united in common struggle with the working class. And so our rally was politically necessary to show that multiracial unity is the antidote to the bosses racist divisions.
    We also explained that our choice to have the rally in Chinatown was political. We did it to one show the connection between mushrooming fascism and inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Chinese bosses. Chinese workers in the U.S are inevitably caught in the middle of the bosses’ crossfire, and so when the bosses spread their racist propaganda, it means that they’re intensifying their attacks on our entire class.
    This became even clearer in the wake of Covid-19 when the U.S bosses showed they were utterly unprepared. Our chants highlighted that there were no testing kits, no hospital beds. Cuts in care and infrastructure invariably means that Black, Latin, and Asian workers, as usual, would suffer the most. The crisis also exposed deepening exploitation: hand sanitizers were made using prison labor.
    We exposed how Big Fascist stooges like NY governor Andrew Cuomo set the stage for the conditions that will lead to the butchering of our class on an epic scale. We wanted to motivate our class to unite and fight back rather than give in to the bosses’ racist divisions.
    These discussions helped my comrades and I sharpen the contradictions in our mass organization, and although the workers we talked to were not won, good things came out of it. We were successful in getting at least one worker from my mass organization to show up to the rally, and I even won a friend, a sharp young worker in my base, to translate our flyer into mandarin.
    Organizing in the time of Covid-19 is difficult but if there is anything this experience has taught me is that even in the darkest nights there will always be sparks in the working class. You just have to keep struggling to find them.

    *****

    Health care workers need communism

    After a brief absence in the time of Covid-19, I returned to work at my community health center in the Bronx today. Despite the desperate situation workers in New York City are facing, I was uplifted by the camaraderie of my front line fellow health workers, nearly all of whom are Black and Latin women.
    Most of these dedicated women have young families at home, and yet, despite often suboptimal work conditions, they selflessly show up to serve their community. As in the rest of New York, there is a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers, yet my co-workers quickly offered to locate gear for me. I was surprised when a young doctor took me down to the supply room and insisted they give me one of her personally assigned lab coats to wear to see patients. It was particularly touching given that the clinic had never given me a lab coat to wear in my 35 years of service there.
    In the course of the day, I quickly realized that it was very difficult for workers to function and maintain the requisite ‘social distancing’ in the hallways and exam rooms. Everyone just did their best to do an optimal job and try to be safe. The clinic is just not set up to deal with a pandemic.
    An encouraging moment for me was when I delivered our paper to several regular CHALLENGE readers. The issue sparked a lively discussion about how this profit system simply cannot provide for the working class. Perhaps these desperate times will at least help us illustrate more concretely, why my co-workers need to join Progressive Labor Party and fight for a communist world. Healthcare under this capitalist system is run by profit seeking corporations. Healthcare under communism would be run by and for the working class. Join us.

    ****

    Immigrant workers organize vs. bosses racist bailout
    Some comrades have been working in an immigrant-based community organization in New York City for many years. The Coronavius pandemic and the capitalists’ racist response are causing death and panic in immigrant communities. Thirteen people have recently died at Elmhurst Hospital that serves immigrant workers and their families and is totally unequipped or staffed to deal with the magnitude of the crisis.
     Immigrant workers in the community organization are no longer working and many don’t have pay, sick days or health insurance. Undocumented workers are also excluded from the “rescue” package. It’s a choice between food and rent. Comrades have been calling our members and friends to tell them NOT to pay the April rent. Tenant groups have gotten a moratorium on evictions but not a rent freeze, which is unlikely given Cuomo’s and other politicians’ strong ties to the real estate goons. The fight will continue for many months!
    A comrade recently made a small donation to a youth team in the organization that has been responding day and night to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) arrests and detentions during this crisis.
    Two immigrant groups in New York City are mobilizing an action April 2-4 when people individually can throw signs from their windows, put up signs on windows and lamp posts, and do sidewalk art. A comrade has translated and texted this message to our friends. We have notified the leadership of the organization and the youth team.
    The spirit of collectivity, pitching in for our class in the face of intensifying racism, is an inspiring example of what has been and is communist culture and practice. The fight for revolution, for communism, is desperately needed by the international working class. Join us in this fight for communism, a system without money and profits, without borders, firmly committed to obliterating pandemics, racism and sexism.
    On to May Day, remote or not!
    *****
    Bosses get bailed out for sickening workers
    In late March the U.S. government passed a much-touted $2 trillion “rescue” package.  Less touted is that at least half of the benefits go to real estate investors, big corporations and other businesses.  Ninety-six senators voted, and all, including Bernie Sanders and every Democrat, supported the law.
    So who is actually being rescued? On page 203 of the package is a tax break for the one percent (NYT, 3/27/20). It benefits real estate investors with more than $500,000 annual income.
    This ripoff for the capitalist bosses will cost the government $170 billion over ten years, which is nearly one tenth of the $2 trillion. Among the real estate bosses who will benefit are many family members and cronies of President Trump. The law also establishes a $500 billion slush fund for capitalist corporations.
    The capitalist bosses say this ripoff is a Coronavius rescue package. But most of the benefits are for the bosses.  For workers, it will be too little, too late, and gone too soon.  Many Black, Latin, and women workers will be left out.  We are the ones suffering the most risk and worst impacts of the Coronavius pandemic.
    To safeguard workers, we need a system that actually provides for our needs and is run by the workers.  That system is called communism.
    History shows that capitalist politicians, be they Republicans, Democrats, or social democrats, will never vote to get rid of capitalism.  And even if they did, the bosses would use their armies to defend capitalism.  We need to overthrow capitalism and build a communist society.
    *****
    Cuomo, just the hero the liberal fascists need right now
    NY Governor Andrew Cuomo is no friend to the working class. He never has been and he never will be. He has attacked everything from wages, to housing, to health care and education for workers. His reassurances ring hollow to people suddenly unemployed and left to fend for themselves and their families in crowded apartments or required to risk their health to keep the supplies flowing to those who can afford them. This crisis is wreaking havoc on the working class from which millions will never recover.
    When Cuomo speaks his aim is to give permission from the state to lament the mass sacrificing of the poorest section of the working class but to trust that there is no other way. His goal is to bind his audience with him in carrying out the atrocities of capitalism. That is reminiscent of previous fascist leaders.
    “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” reflected an American journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1935 as she realized that she had misjudged Hitler. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship.
     He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys and he will stand for everything traditionally American.” (smithsonianmag.com 12/13/2016).

     

    1. Racist bosses hang hospitality workers out to dry
    2. Covid19: Transit workers’ blood on bosses’ hands
    3. Indiana celebrates International Working Women’s Day
    4. Communism, only cure for capitalist pandemic

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