Hundreds of workers and community members at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center have signed a petition “Beds not Body Bags” protesting racist Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plan to consolidate three hospitals (Kingsbrook, Brookdale and Interfaith). This would eliminate over 200 hospital beds as we move into a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. These hospitals are located in and serve the heavily Black neighborhoods of Flatbush, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Cuomo serves the billionaire capitalists of Wall Street and New York real estate; racism is the lifeblood of  capitalism.
Over the last 20 years over 20,000 hospital beds have been cut in New York State.  Cuomo closed Long Island College Hospital Center, pared down Brookdale Hospital, and closed many services at Downstate Medical Center. Many workers were laid off, mostly women and Black, Latin and Asian workers. In the end, Brooklyn has 2.2 hospital beds per 1000 people while Manhattan has 6.4 beds per 1000 people.
Covid-19 a disaster in Brooklyn after years of cuts
The lack of infrastructure in medical care caused by the continual cuts led to thousands of unnecessary deaths in the outer boroughs of NYC even before Covid-19. The pandemic starkly exposed the racist nature of these cuts. You can put a bunch of beds in the hospital cafeteria, but you can’t staff them quickly. Skeleton teams  of nurses, doctors, technical, and housekeeping staff could not keep the hospitals safe for patients or workers. Covid patients lying in hallways, shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), medications and bodies piling up in refrigerated trucks (and sometimes unrefrigerated trucks) were the order of the day. During the height of the pandemic in the spring, the hospitals being downsized were seeing  500 Covid patients a day. The years of cuts absolutely contributed to higher numbers of deaths in Brooklyn, especially of Black and Latin workers.
Capitalist inequality can’t be voted out
This goes way beyond racist Donald Trump. It implicates the whole capitalist class, and both Democratic and Republican politicians, as racist agents of genocide. Liberal politicians like Joe Biden and Cuomo get the cuts done. And they get away with it because they claim to be more pro-the-little-guy, more antiracist than the conservatives. The main finance wing of the ruling class needs this because they need more resources for maintaining their imperialist world empire (this means wars).  And union leaders are part of this liberal cover for the racist inequalities of capitalist health care. Instead of taking on liberal capitalist politicians like Cuomo, most union leadership tells people to vote for them on November 3rd. In Progressive Labor Party we say don’t vote, revolt. . Lead walkouts, rallies, marches, and strikes against racist health care. Unite hospital workers with our communities. But make no mistake. Capitalism will not, cannot provide decent health care for workers, especially Black and Latin workers. We need a revolution to get rid of it.
These cuts have prompted major fightback by hospital workers in Brooklyn in particular, but also nationally with strikes in Chicago and massive marches and rallies in the affected neighborhoods.  Over the years, Progressive Labor Party has joined and at times led marches and protests at Brookdale and Downstate. We will unite with all workers to help smash the racist system of capitalism that values profit over human life. Only an egalitarian communist revolution can create a society of equality and solidarity that can transform the capitalist world into a world where the international working class is empowered to run society. The rebellions against racist police terror all over the world this past summer show our class is ready to fight. Now we need you to join our Party (see www.plp.org) and help us fight not only for “beds not body bags” but also for communism.

NEW JERSEY, October 21— “Workers created unions to fight, not be in bed with the bosses. You run this union like a country club!” Class struggle has been heating up at Essex County College (ECC) with faculty and members of the Progressive Labor Party indicting their local racist local union misleaders at a local meeting recently against racist cutbacks and layoffs on staff and services amidst the pandemic.
PL’ers and friends have been in the thick of organizing fightback and student and staff unity, and the fight is only just beginning to fight back against these conditions and build a mass revolutionary communist PLP that can smash this entire system!
Cutbacks are racist attacks on students
ECC is a community college in Newark with currently around 5,000 working class students, with the majority of the students, faculty and staff Black, Latin, immigrant and women. Every cut and layoff is a racist and sexist attack on this student population, who depend on the staff and services being cut. Meanwhile, while the cuts were being announced, ECC received eight million dollars in federal Covid-19 relief.
Over the summer, ECC students and faculty organized 300 students and workers to sign a petition demanding to know where this money had disappeared to and presented it at an online Board of Trustees meeting. The students were not only prevented from speaking because of a rule requiring all comments be submitted 24 hours in advance, their petition was openly laughed at by several of the Trustees.
Furthermore, and conveniently for the bosses, the person who could best answer the students’ questions—ECC President Andrew Munroe— had just resigned to assume presidency of a college right across the Hudson River: at the City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College in neighboring New York City.   
Sharpening fascism and ‘shared sacrifice’
Fascist attacks on the working class in Newark have been sharpening for decades. ECC’s new president, Augustine Boakye, is connected to both Newark’s local real estate bosses and Democrat Mayor Ras Baraka through organizations like the Greater Newark Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.
The GNCVB and Big Fascist-tied investment banks Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and insurance giant Prudential have poured hundreds of millions of dollars to attract property developers and companies like Amazon while driving out working class Black residents (NYT, 11/26/19; PR Newswire, 9/26/19).
ECC’s Board of Trustees is composed of former politicians and lawyers from firms who have helped lead these attacks. ECC’s union chapter looks and acts like a capitalist country club: led by an all-white group of racist men whose chapter chair is paid more than the ECC president. The chapter is part of the National Educators’ Association (NEA), the largest union in the U.S. with over two million members. Along with their counterpart the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the union is close allies of the Big Fascist-aligned Democratic Party.
These fascist union misleaders have joined with the ECC Trustees and NJ Governor Murphy in calling for “shared sacrifice” through five per cent pay cuts, which will force faculty deeper into poverty and searching for additional jobs, all of which worsen student learning conditions.
Fightback grows
ECC students, faculty and PLP have waged years-long battles against both the ECC administration and these union misleaders. As a sign of our growing strength, after two years of struggle we scored an important victory in getting a racist, sexist administrator fired. With PLP leadership, faculty continue to expose the ECC union misleaders utter collaboration with the bosses, and more and more faculty who have never been “political” before are stepping up to join us.

During a recent faculty town hall following the Trustees meeting, PL’ers and friends received support for calls to unify with workers in other departments under attack, including a mail clerk who was recently laid off. This semester we are also organizing with our students who reported to faculty that ECC Enrollment Services has been utterly unresponsive to them due to the cuts. We are currently planning campus demonstrations with them, and using CHALLENGE to connect these struggles with the racist attacks on workers in Newark, and that it’s these same bosses driving our entire class to more fascism and imperialist wars.
Liberalism, identity politics main danger
Both ECC and Newark are led by Black misleaders—Ras Baraka, a liberal Democrat, was the target of PLP demonstration this summer. Workers are told to trust that these bosses somehow “identify” with Black workers’ struggles because of their race and/or gender—yet they are forcing the most brutal cuts! Communist leadership of worker fight-back is more necessary than ever in the face of liberal fascist and gutter fascist attacks on us.  As more workers see through their lies—the bosses won’t stand a chance!

Over the past couple of weeks, the U.S. news cycle has been dominated by the upcoming Presidential election. The most recent Presidential and Vice Presidential debates are coming on the heels of an incredible summer of struggle, which has left many workers taking stock in local politicians and governing institutions. At the forefront for many workers is Kamala Harris who is being paraded as a progressive choice simply because she is Black and Asian. She is another example of the bosses using identity politics to pacify the working class into voting and co-signing their own demise (see editorial).
The ruling class needs workers to believe in their institutions. As cynicism builds and splits in the ruling class continue to deepen, both the Big Fascists and Small Fascists are preparing to do anything to reclaim U.S. dominance. What they have planned is truly despicable and will result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of worker’s lives – just look at the over 200,000 U.S. workers who have died during the butchering of the Covid-19 crisis. In order to tamper a worker-led uprising, the ruling class (both wings) need workers to vote-in their leaders to ensure that when they usher in rising fascism they can say, this is the future we chose for ourselves.
The only identity is worker
In the hands of the bosses, identity politics are used to weaken and divide workers across race lines. At his address at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march Martin Luther King Jr. said:
If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.
King points out that race as an identity has always been used to fissure the working class to keep them from rising up. In modern times, Jim Crow segregation has either been proudly celebrated by Donald Trump’s racists base or shrouded in euphemisms by liberal fascists like Harris and her running-mate Jim Crow Joe An idea that the liberal fascists continue to push on workers is “Safe Spaces.” A constructed idea where people of the same race are encouraged to segregate and gather, promoting an identity other than that of WORKER.
No safes spaces under capitalism
Under capitalism, however, there are no safe spaces for workers. By dividing workers, like King points out, bosses sow mistrust and strife between people. But PLP knows that multiracial, multigenerational, and anti-sexist fight back is the REAL and only safe space for the working class.
As displayed this summer, workers are sick and tired of being told how to take back the streets they built. Workers are sick of being told that protest and fight back is too disruptive. Workers are sick of being pitted against one another.
But the ruling class, particularly the liberal fascists will do anything to keep us in line and party to their for-profit plans, with voting their number one tactic.
Revolt, don’t vote
While reform struggles will never break the chains of the working class, they do provide us with schools for communism. Black workers are key to revolution, and their leadership on the streets is instrumental in building working class confidence.
We are still in a dark night and many of us will struggle at home, at our work places, and with our friends and family over the idea that voting will not liberate the working class. Individualism, cynicism, despair, and fear of Trump’s gutter racism are plaguing workers today. But our potential is stronger than ever.
Don’t be fooled or blinded by identity politics and top kkkop candidates.
You are a worker. I am a worker. WE are the working class and united we can smash this racist capitalist system.
Don’t vote, revolt!

Bronx actions against racist terror
In the last month our Antiracist Coalition has been on the move. Almost 40 strong, we marched on the 50th Precinct, decrying their indifference to nooses and semi-automatic assault rifles found in and near Van Cortlandt Park, as well as their brutal assaults against a young Black suspect. We also demanded that no more cops be sent as first responders to calls for people in mental crisis. This provoked a huge "Blue Lives Matter" mobilization in the park days later.  We were noticed!
We were invited to speak at a Climate Justice rally at Manhattan College and detailed how centuries of capitalist agribusiness have exacerbated climate catastrophes and pandemics.
These horrors deliver racist oppression upon front-line workers who are affected worst and who are giving strong leadership in the fightback against capitalist terror, like at Standing Rock. The participants were mainly students and some faculty. Two indicated that they would like to do consistent organizing with us.
Finally, we helped to organize a vigil for justice for Breonna Taylor at a Riverdale traffic circle. Streams of rush hour travelers honked their horns in support! We met two Professional Staff Congress union members who want to work with us as well.
We fight. We grow!
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Belarus solidarity
I wanted to take the opportunity to express solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of workers and students who have been continually taking to the streets in Belarus over the past two months. They are risking arrest, torture, and even death in their protests against the corrupt and reactionary government of Alexander Lukashenko.
But even as I applaud their boldness, I’m forced to think about  how capitalism tries to force the working-class everywhere to pick sides in these “lose-lose” fights, and how we can best support them as an international communist party.
Obviously they have every reason to reject a boss like Lukashenko, an authoritarian relic of failed Soviet revisionism, who is propped up with energy subsidies by the militarist Russian bosses. But on the other hand, we definitely wouldn’t support pro-U.S./pro-E.U. opposition leaders like Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Their end game if they were to be put in power would be an infusion of capitalist reforms that would only continue and likely worsen attacks like income inequality and unemployment.
The cynical U.S. and E.U. capitalist bosses only care about the “human rights” of workers in Belarus so far as the geographical location of the country is significant for their imperialist goals. Similar to how they support  (one could argue unsuccessfully) regime change in Venezuela against Nicolas Maduro, their interests only lie in countering the influence of their imperialist rivals Russia and China, as they continue marching towards global conflict.
The best path forward for workers in Belarus and everywhere is to acknowledge the power we have as an international class, from Minsk to Hong Kong to Kenosha, and reject all these bosses completely. Organized into a mass international Progressive Labor Party, we can convert their upcoming world war into a class war where workers take state power and build an egalitarian communist society.  
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Capitalism & science
I have a point to add to the CHALLENGE (10/21) article The history of philosophy is written in blood about dialectical materialism.  The two trends of materialism and idealism exist together in struggle all the time. The ideas of the new society come from the class struggle within the old society. The article points out the threat to the rule of the church from the ideas of Copernicus. The Roman Catholic Church understood the earth revolves around the sun. Copernicus was an official in the Catholic Church. The reason he was not persecuted was that he wrote it in Latin, which was not widely read, for use by the Church. Galileo became a threat when he wrote in Italian, which was an everyday language that would take the ideas outside the church’s control.
Within the incorrect theory of the sun revolving around the earth, there existed many accepted materialist ideas, such as the earth was round and navigation by stars. The practice and struggle between the Church and the rising capitalist class opened the door to the theory that the sun is the center of the universe, which had been around for many centuries. It was liberated with the rise of the early capitalists, who replaced the Church as the ruling class and could utilize and build on the more advanced ideas as opposed to suppressing them.
Today the mechanical materialism of capitalism is holding science back, much as the church did in the 1600’s. Capitalism is suppressing advanced ideas that debunk race and intelligence and thus threaten the bosses’ power. Communist revolution, based on dialectical materialism, will both liberate existing knowledge and open the door for a deeper understanding based on more struggle and practice.
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Book shows how liberals are biggest racist danger
The War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton does not present a class analysis, but has valuable information by showing how liberal politicians fostered mass incarceration.
People often credit President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) , with passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and  launching federal initiatives which were supposed to launch the “War on Poverty.” This is racist fiction. The next year Johnson sent to Congress the Voting Rights Act. But, just one week before that - on March 8, 1965, he presented to Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) following an urban, rebellious summer against racist police terror months prior.
America's “justice system” of prisons, jails and police has  always promoted racist terror, but this act offered a response to the “threat” the Kerner Commission would, in 1968, designate as the continuing violent rebellions that came on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement.
The LEAA undercut many Great Society programs that history texts heed as LBJ’s liberal legacy. Still today, political pundits cite liberal leaders as reasons why we should vote.
The capstone of Johnson’s Great Society was the Safe Streets Act of 1968, which invested $400 million  into the War on Crime. By 1973 this funding grew to $850 million! By 1980, Ronald Regan made this initiative far more punitive. The ruling class was able to do this given legislative proposals from Nixon and Ford which further federalized police militarization. Liberal Jimmy Carter also extended surveillance and the U.S. Border Patrol while in office.
By the beginning of the Johnson Administration, there were 184,901 mostly Black and Latin  workers in state and federal prisons. By the end of Regan’s “War on Drugs” that number grew to 436,008.  
Liberal reformer LBJ bolstered these racist policies. Republicans did not create the expansion of our fascist “justice” criminal system - it was a product of liberal welfare programs. I would also include Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration's Executive Order 9066 that unapologetically interned some 120,000 Japanese into internment/concentration camps with about 2,000 who died of diseases like TB.  
In 1942, 23-year-old Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to these racist hellholes. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued that the order violated the Fifth Amendment. He lost the case to FDR’s liberal Supreme Court!
Without a historically materialist understanding, a Joe Biden vote seems like a way to fight racism. The reality is much more bleak.
A meaningful discussion and struggle with our friends is essential for organizing to fight against capitalism. A for-profit system - a system that  relies on racist and sexist oppression and divisions and a fascist “justice” criminal system against the entire working class.
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