Capitalist agricultural practices have led to devastating diseases caused by global virus outbreaks that have been occurring with increasing frequency: AIDS (1981), SARS (2002), Ebola (2014), and now Covid-19. Putting profit before people has increased the number and impact of zoonotic (traced to wild animals) viruses.
As long as capitalism continues to ravish the earth, humanity will suffer from more and more of these diseases. Communism, a system that works to meet people’s needs instead of for private profits, is the only viable alternative to capitalist death and destruction.
Capitalism has brought exotic animals side by side with traditional livestock in Wuhan markets, and elsewhere. Sellers of this food cut deep into forests for their goods, and the animals they find, full of previously unknown pathogens, are brought into the cities.
At least 60 percent of new (novel) human viruses and bacteria come from these wild animals. Novel viruses are a problem because no one has immunity to them.
The return of China to capitalism after 1976 laid the basis for the exotic food markets. After communism ended there, the Chinese government took a first step towards capitalism by redistributing what had been collective farmland to individual households. These “smallholder” farmers were later replaced in the 1990s by industrial food production conglomerates. This pushed the smallholders to look for other ways to make a living, and some turned to wild animal breeding.
The so-called Spanish Flu of 1918 was spread during World War I. A war fought so that the United States, German, French and other capitalists could divide the world among themselves for colonial exploitation. This century’s deadly viruses are spread through international capitalist markets and supply chains, which bring with them international travel and exchange of goods.
When the driving force behind decision-making is profit instead of working-class necessity, there is a 100 percent chance that decision will harm the working class of the world. Even when their own research proves conditions are ripe for the spread of disease, the profit motive overrides safety. A system that knowingly puts the working-class and the world at risk does not deserve to exist.
The right conditions for disease
As capitalist food production invades most of the world, small farmers are pushed off their lands and into the cities. These cities and their surroundings become overcrowded, filled with poor workers who barely eke out a living, and have little to no health care or clean water. Combine that with deforestation, and you have viruses formerly controlled by the complexities of the tropical forest making their way to big cities in only a few days. Viruses whose impact would once have been confined to villages on the edge of the forest now spread across the world through travel and trade.
Another way capitalist agriculture creates pandemics is by growing food, both plant crops and animals, with nearly identical sets of genes. Berkshire swine, for example, “are known for fast and efficient growth, reproductive efficiency, cleanness and meat flavor and value.” These genetically similar animals allow viruses, as they mutate, to eventually “hit the jackpot” and infect the whole population. In a genetically diverse animal population, the virus would likely only infect some of the herds. The capitalists, however, base their decisions on profitability, not human disease prevention.
The capitalists also find it more profitable to keep animals confined to a small space, so they can produce more meat per acre. This facilitates greater transmission of viruses and other pathogens. Because these animals are grown for profitability, their conditions are unsanitary, which weakens their immune systems. Overcrowding helps the pathogens spread quickly through the factory farms. Global animal exports give viruses new opportunities to spread. Antibiotics are routinely fed to animals in confinement on factory farms. The widespread heavy use of antibiotics—not to treat sick animals, but as a growth “promoter”— has led to the development of bacteria resistance to multiple antibiotics.
Diseases, just a cost of business
The profiteers see the occasional disease outbreaks as part of the cost of doing business. The U.S. government, and others around the world, play diminishing roles in regulating factory farms and processing plants. Governmental support for practices that contribute to outbreaks of disease have resulted in greater numbers of people infected by foodborne outbreaks.
Capitalist agriculture, globalization, and farming methods that destroy natural barriers to pathogens all allowed Covid-19 and other deadly diseases to invade the world. Profiteers have travelled the globe, destroying anything (including millions of human lives) that gets in the way of their quest for riches, and laying the basis for new viruses that sicken and kill.
A better world is possible
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) breaks it down this way: these bloodsucking profiteers will never give up their capitalist system peacefully. An armed working class, under the leadership of PLP communists, must smash the system. We will build communism, a system that unites the working class to build a sustainable life for all of us. We fight for communism, a system free of racism, sexism, and other capitalist divisions. We will grow plants and animals to provide people with healthy, nutritious food to eat, not for profit. We will promote science and teach science to everyone, so that we can collectively remake the world the capitalists are destroying. Join us.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has a long history of fighting racism in the Bronx, Queens, and New Jersey. When Black workers are under racist attack, all workers have to stand up and fight back.
On June 21, 2020, and again on July 5, 2020, the New York Times ran a story with a short video about an attack in the summer of 1975 by some racist white residents on a group of Black teenagers as they were riding their bikes through residential Rosedale, Queens (New York City). The racists waved an American flag, chanted “Civil Rights for Whites,” and threw rocks and hurled racist insults at the Black teens that happened to be passing by. One racist was even seen on the news video saying they wanted the teens out “because they’re Black!” Much like today, this was a time when the main wing of the U.S. ruling class was trying to distance themselves from gutter racism that had served them well in previous eras.
In 1975, PLP organized quickly against this racist upsurge. We marched, demonstrated, leafletted the area, confronted, and smashed the racist group that had been formed in the New York City-Rosedale area. We still have to do more – to build our Party, to win workers and others to PL’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, internationalist line so that racist attacks by kkkiller kops and racist vigilantes can be stomped out by workers united around the world for good.
Racist ROAR
In 1975, racists in New York and New Jersey were inspired by the racist group ROAR in Boston. ROAR, which stood for “Restore Our Alienated Rights,” opposed busing to end segregation in Boston’s public schools. The letters “R.O.A.R.” were pasted on the windows of the Boston municipal building. Another ROAR leader was on the Boston School Commission, leading the fight against integrating the public schools. With ROAR leaders on the Boston City Council and a mass base following them, this strategic, gutter racist attack on Black workers was a rapid fascist movement that needed to be smashed by communist fightback.
In May 1975, ROAR held a racist convention in the large Hines auditorium in Boston. PLP members signed up and infiltrated it. We heard ROAR workshop leaders tell us “Blacks have no history.” At day’s end, we held a press conference and denounced ROAR and racism in front of TV cameras and newspaper reporters. Knowing that ROAR goons would attack as soon as they heard about it, we ended the conference after 20 minutes.
Ten minutes later, the ROAR goons arrived but found no one and nothing there.
They were stopped in the Bronx
After their convention, ROAR expanded into New York and New Jersey. The “Morris Park Association” paid for a racist ad in the Bronx Home News. It opposed busing and said that Black workers were getting favored treatment over white workers.
We in PLP organized a march of over a thousand in the Morris Park section of the Bronx. Hundreds of residents lined the streets to watch our march – there hadn’t been any communist marches in the Bronx for decades. We handed out antiracist flyers, sold CHALLENGE, and talked to many residents.
On September 8, the opening day of school, the racists tried to organize a boycott by white students of Columbus High School, where non-white students were being bussed. A multiracial PLP committee welcomed the bused students and the racist boycott flopped.
Stopped in Rosedale
That summer of ‘75, a small but noisy mob of white residents attacked the Black teens in Rosedale, Queens’ segregated area in response to a few Black families moving in. ROAR had inspired at least one bombing as well. Our response? We in PLP organized a march. We picketed the home of Jerry Scala, leader of the new ROAR chapter and few racists showed up.
Stopped in Montclair, New Jersey
ROAR expanded to a small suburb in Northern NJ and founded a small group. Montclair had started busing for school integration in the 1940s – one of the first towns in the country to do so. Still, a ROAR member ran for the school board. Northern NJ PLP leafletted against her and gutter racism. Her campaign went nowhere.
PLP played a key role in plucking racists' base building from the root before they could even grow throughout New York and New Jersey. By 1976, ROAR was on the decline in Boston too.
Today when Black workers are still being attacked by gutter racists, these historical examples remind us what antiracist fightback under PLP’s leadership looks like. Racists have to be confronted and shut down, lest their toxic ideas are able to take root. Racism, like capitalism which spawned it, thrives on exploitation and division.To smash racism, we have to fight for communism! Join a PLP chapter near you and continue the fight today.
Communists strive to serve the working class by boldly providing leadership to the working-class struggle, modestly and without the bombast of the bosses’ politicians. Cecile Rol-Tanguy, a model for all of us, died earlier this year on May 8, 2020 at the age of 101. You probably never heard of her, but her life is an inspiration in our battle against the catastrophic effects of capitalism.
Communists’ historic role has been to warn of war and fight fascism, which is capitalism at its late state. As fascism continues to rise worldwide, we look back at how our predecessors have fought fascism around World War II.
Cecile, a proud communist leader
Cecile was a leader of the French Resistance when the Nazis occupied France in the 1940s. Germany had installed the collaborationist French Vichy government under Petain to control French opposition. The Resistance played a heroic role fighting the Nazis and the French traitors. They attacked Nazis, organized and distributed propaganda, rescued Allied soldiers, sabotaged enemy weapons, and liberated Paris in August 1944.
Cecile was a communist leader of the Resistance following the example set by her father, François Le Bihan, an electrician and a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920 who was killed by Nazis at the Auschwitz death camp. She said, “I was born into an anti-fascist family, or to be more precise, a communist family” (The Washington Post, 5/13). She grew up in a home that also hosted many communist refugees and exiles from across Europe.
Cecile met her future-husband in the struggle as well. She married the communist Resistance leader, Henri Rol-Tanguy. They dedicated their lives to fighting fascist Spain and Germany. During the early stages of their relationship, he volunteered in the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Later, Henri deployed with the International Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
My strength was remaining cool
As a liaison officer, Cecile used her skills to outwit the Nazi occupation of Paris by carrying anti-fascist fliers, pistols, bullets, and grenades, and attack plans, among other supplies, in her children’s baby carriage as she maneuvered her way around the city, posing as an innocent Parisian mother. She said My strength was always in remaining cool,” in an interview (The Washington Post, 5/13).
She and her children lived with Henri’s mother barely having enough to eat. Her young baby died under these circumstances followed by her father’s capture and deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Despairing that she had nothing to lose, she threw herself into the anti-fascist struggle. “My father had been arrested, I didn’t know where my husband was, and I had lost my little girl. What could hold me back?” she said in an interview with Times of London in 2012.
A woman’s place is in the class struggle
While Henri received acclaim after the war, France hardly recognized her contributions because of her unapologetic identity as a communist (The Washington Post, 5/13). It wasn’t until 2014 and 2017 when France finally presented her with two prestigious awards. Thousands of other French women suffered from the sexist scapegoating by the French after the war. Portrayed as collaborators, they were stripped, branded, and beaten for allegedly sleeping with Nazis in exchange for safety and food. This false picture became the popular image of French women, eclipsing the courageous efforts of the women in the Resistance.
Charles de Gaulle, the anti-communist leader of the French Free Army, took power away from the Resistance armies. Dedicated to a pro-Western capitalist France, he stole all the credit for the French victory and barely recognized the communists’ critical insurrectionary role. The lesson here is that the liberal democrats historically plays an anti-communist role. They are never our friends, as their intent is to maintain capitalism.
While the French Communist Party ultimately squandered their triumph in Paris by entering a coalition government with the capitalist political parties, the French communist resistance reveals how we can organize under difficult political, economic, social, and psychological conditions for a world based on egalitarianism and workers’ power. As the world imperialist powers China and U.S. accelerate towards world war, communists and friends everywhere can seek inspiration from leaders like Cecile to fulfill our historic role as fighters against fascism. One day, we will eliminate these evils once and for all with a communist revolution.
One club’s efforts to organize during pandemic
The time spent confined due to the pandemic has been a time of action that started since the beginning of quarantine. Our club has been very active having virtual meetings and group studies with friends. We have also been participating in the meetings and activities organized by the community organization, where we are building our base. We have been a part of their campaigns to cancel rents; close the immigration jails, where our sisters and brothers are being exposed and dying of Covid-19; and approve a package for more than three billion dollars from the state government for people who have been excluded from federal aid. We have distributed many issues of CHALLENGE especially during the last two protests and we have always expounded our Party line.
In those struggles for reforms, we have militantly participated, providing leadership with our chants and with our newspaper, CHALLENGE, in which it explains to people that the only way is communist revolution, which will lead the workers to power.
I have been very excited to participate with my comrades from our club. Guided by our leader and other comrades, especially a friend from another club, who is a school teacher and has set up the Zoom meetings and participated in all of them. We have been witnesses and a part of these important days that we have lived for the development of our communist ideology. That is why at every march, in every protest and in every struggle, we have brought our line.
We should continue to be a part of this movement that prepares us for the Great Battle for the defeat of capitalism and imperialism, where we will be, in the front line of combat.
Communism is the salvation and the future of humanity. Join our struggle.
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The tide of rising fascism
The struggle against racist police terror continues to provide us with the responsibility to explain fascism and expose the liberal politicians’ role in developing fascism.
Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) called the NYPD's response to the current wave of protests "shocking and unprecedented.” "I don't think in 50 years we had the level of protest we've seen in New York City and we certainly have not seen the level of police violence directed at protesters."
Like all liberal misleaders, Mayor Bill de Blasio has backed the NYPD terrorists including "kettling" demonstrators who posed no threat whatever! Commissioner Dermot Shea, however, has decried the few reforms de Blasio has been forced to sign including a ban on chokeholds like the one that murdered Eric Garner in 2014. The mayor has made no response to Shea's criticisms implying that the cops can continue their brutal, deadly “business as usual" to intimidate multiracial protesters.
The most obvious turning of the fascist screw has been Trump’s stormtroopers. In Portland, Oregon, the Homeland Security goons in unmarked cars teargassed and arrested antiracist protesters. The President has threatened to do this to the Chicago working class as well. We must mobilize more widely and sharper than ever against this expanded fascist attack!
Another facet of fascist oppression is this oncoming tsunami of racist evictions nationwide. Clearly the police are part of the bosses' arsenal to enforce brutal, mass homelessness caused by the capitalist depression deepening by the week.
Our PL club is reaching out to all of our members and friends to prepare to mobilize fightback wherever there is a threat of eviction. Two tenant actions have already challenged housing courts in Brooklyn and the Bronx. We must join them.
Our organizing outreach is finding more of our base than in years open to the Party's analysis and considering JOINING! This is the real victory!
CHALLENGE responds: This forward thinking is very much needed in the coming period. While Small Fascist Trump may be the most obvious, the analysis here is incomplete. While it is difficult to swim against the current, communists must warn of war and fascism led by the liberals. The ruling class is divided. The Big Fascists—the main wing finance capitalists—are committed to U.S. dominance for the world’s resources and the world land war such dominance will require. Meanwhile, the domestic-oriented Small Fascists, who Trump represents, have little interest in making the sacrifices such a war will require. While Trump’s stormtroopers pose an immediate danger in this period; the liberal rulers, who are posing as the savior and alternative to this rotten system, are the principal danger. We must attack the liberals in the same breath as everyone attacks Trump. If we fail to do so, the working class will be hit hard by the high tide of fascism.
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An international Class Perspective on Tulsa
The 7/22 CHALLENGE article on the Tulsa Massacre lacked an international class perspective and viewed it as another domestic racist U.S. tragedy. The article does not mention the role of European radical immigrant workers, or the massive U.S. strike wave and Red Scare that triggered the U.S. government’s racist terror. Only the anarchists, anti-communist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Party, which sought an alliance with capitalism, are credited with any struggle against the capitalist bosses.
An international class perspective would reveal that in 1917 Russian workers made the first communist revolution and the U.S. entered imperialist World War I against Germany. In 1918 US troops were sent to put down the Russian workers’ revolution, which was part of a worldwide revolution against the capitalist world. In 1919 the U.S. Communist Party and the Communist International in the Soviet Union were formed. In the same year, the eight-hour working day was won in the U.S. where a massive strike wave swept the country triggering a Red Scare. In 1920 the U.S. Palmer Raids deported tens of thousands of immigrant workers who were radicalized in European class struggles and were accused of worker unity and union organizing. The 1921 Tulsa massacre was very probably capitalist organized racist terror to split white and Black workers (many WWI vets) and break the Red Scare strike wave.
Today’s antiracist movement should not be viewed as a U.S. racist terror struggle alone. It should be viewed but as part of an international class struggle against the worldwide system that oppresses all workers not only with racism but sexism, inequality and endless wars. Black-white unity today in the U.S. with support of this movement by millions of workers in most countries worldwide testifies to its class nature.
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The allegations that Russia paid cash bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with no response from the floundering U.S. government, is yet another sign of the decay of U.S. imperialism. Facing an out-of-control pandemic, a full-blown economic depression, and mass fightback against the racist kkkops, the U.S. ruling class is in crisis. Their institutions are in freefall. Their leadership—both Republican and Democrat—is incompetent and divided.
For the international working class and the revolutionary communist party that must lead it, the resulting chaos is both an opportunity and a danger. For the first time in many years, masses of workers are openly seeking alternatives to the bankrupt profit system. But we must also be aware that intensified state terror and inter-imperialist global war are heading our way.
Fascists big and small
After 18 years of fruitless U.S. combat in Central Asia and the Middle East, open racist President Donald Trump has pushed for a pullout from flashpoints like Afghanistan and Syria. Trump fronts for the isolationist Small Fascists, whose profits come mainly from U.S. energy and other domestic sources. Trump’s wing is fundamentally at odds with the imperialist finance capitalists, the liberal Big Fascists, who rely on dominance over cheap Middle Eastern oil. Both sides have become tired of “the forever war” in Afghanistan—a conflict, says the New York Times, the liberal bosses’ top mouthpiece, that “needs to be brought to an end” (7/7).
But we shouldn’t confuse the Big Fascists’ push for “peace” with any aversion to spilling workers’ blood. The liberal rulers want to conserve their military and political collateral for the superpower war to come. They see Trump’s failure to check rival Russia’s rise in the region as a dangerous strategic weakness. As U.S. finance capital fights to regain control in the upcoming elections and beyond, these splits within the ruling class will become only sharper and more violent.
As workers, we can have no illusions that the Big Fascists’ attacks on Trump will serve our class interests. These liberal capitalists represent the greatest danger to our class. They co-opt mass uprisings into voting and dead-end struggles for minor reforms as they build a patriotic boss-run movement for full-blown fascism and World War III.
For workers to escape this nightmare, our goal must be clear: communist revolution and the building of an egalitarian, worker-run society. The international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to organize the world’s masses, from Kabul to Moscow to Minneapolis, into an armed force of millions to crush this racist, sexist capitalist system forever.
Liberals pile on Trump in rush to war
The Big Fascists, represented mainly by Democratic Party stooges and sell-outs, wasted no time jumping on the bounty report to further discredit and discipline the rogue president. They recognize Trump for the deranged, self-serving clown that he is, completely unfit to manage the long-term interests of their U.S. empire.
Numerous past U.S. military leaders have joined the attack. John R. Allen, head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan under ex-President Barack Obama, a reliable Big Fascist front man, blasted Trump and Co. on the recent “peace” deal brokered between the arch-sexist, criminal Taliban and the battered and corrupt Afghan government:
From an administration that has… abandoned the Kurds in Syria and undercut the Palestinians, it’s hard to imagine an American strategic counterattack into Afghanistan when the Taliban inevitably violate the terms of this agreement….(Brookings, 3/5).
The Big Fascists are desperate to win back the presidency to try to “right the ship” of U.S. imperialism and prepare for war against Russia or China or both. Though they’ve yet to find the internal discipline required for the job, they’re seeking to restore some semblance of legitimacy to capitalist legal and economic institutions. Hence the liberals’ calls to address glaring racist and sexist inequalities in wealth, health, housing, jobs, and incarceration. They also realize that they need a more aggressive stance to keep their imperialist rivals from rolling over them.
Within days of the bounty scheme becoming public, prominent liberals like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded to be briefed by national intelligence officials while calling for renewed sanctions against Russia (NYT, 7/1). Joe Biden, the segregationist nitwit the Democrats plan to run against Trump, boasted that if he were elected, Russian President Vladimir Putin “would be confronted and we’ll impose serious costs on Russia” (MSN, 6/28).
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the premier Big Fascist think tank, chimed in on Twitter: “Russia is carrying out covert wars vs US troops in Afghanistan and our democracy here at home. A proportionate response would increase the costs to Russia of its military presence in Ukraine & Syria and, using sanctions & cyber, to challenge Putin at home” (6/27).
With the liberal world order and U.S. supremacy collapsing before their eyes, the Big Fascists will be forced to escalate their imperialist onslaughts—not out of strength, but out of weakness.
Russia’s covert imperialist game
A Russian covert intelligence attack against U.S. and British military forces in Afghanistan fits with Putin’s approach of “hybrid” warfare. With Russia’s military not up to the task of confronting U.S. or NATO forces head-on, its state capitalist bosses have sharpened their destabilization skills with cyberattacks, meddling in foreign elections, and arming proxy armies (RAND Corporation Report, 3/22/17).
As details of the alleged bounties surface, so too does evidence that Russia has been cultivating both the Taliban and the central Afghan government to engineer a quicker U.S. withdrawal (CNN, 7/1). A shrinking U.S. presence will leave a vacuum for the Russian bosses’ own imperialist designs on the region. After being forced out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s by the U.S.-backed mujahideen (the forerunners of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS), Russian imperialists are eager to restore their neighbor and greater Central Asia into their orbit for wider regional security, lucrative military contracts, and access to natural resource wealth (The Interpreter, 5/7).
Fight for communism!
When the contradictions of inter-imperialist rivalry eventually explode, all sets of national capitalist bosses will be eager to send countless workers to fight and die in their wars for profit. As communists, our revolutionary objective is to win millions of workers and students worldwide to join Progressive Labor Party. We must smash capitalism’s genocidal business as usual and fight for international workers’ power. We must link the struggles against racist police terror, devastating unemployment, and imperialist war into a unified revolutionary battle against this entire rotten system. PLP represents the mass working class, the one force that can wipe the profit system and all its misery from the face of the earth. Join us!
