No vaccine for the virus of capitalism
I read this article “Fighting Covid-19 with vaccines and communism” in the Dec 28, 2020 issue of CHALLENGE and discussed it with Progressive Labor Party healthcare workers in Chicago. I thought it was a good article but wanted to add some additional points.  
Public health issues require a comprehensive response. The vaccine is just one piece of a larger response, but it is being promoted as the only solution to the pandemic. This isn’t by accident.  This framing of the vaccine as the only savior is purposeful to absolve the ruling class of responsibility. The government would rather frame the solution as a vaccine because it desperately wants to avoid getting to the root of the issue.  
The inadequate public health infrastructure, poverty, racism, and capitalism all play a role in the pandemic. Workers will continue to be vulnerable to another pandemic if these issues aren’t tackled. As the vaccine rolls out, the government and the bosses’ media will praise the scientists but will also expand their praise to include capitalism. They’ll try to claim that the free market has brought us the vaccine and saved us all. However, it was always capitalism that pushed the spread of Covid-19 by forcing people to work, gutting public services, and providing no safe alternatives to workers.  
The state wants to limit the response to the pandemic to the narrowest terms possible.  It wants to avoid giving people a stimulus, increasing spending on social services, mortgage/rent freezes, letting people out of prison, housing the homeless, etc.  By only focusing on the vaccine, they get to avoid any responsibility in addressing these other issues. The effects of Covid-19 have touched every aspect of our lives and will continue to do so. Workers have lost jobs, been kicked out of their homes, and found themselves in a much more precarious situation because of the pandemic. A vaccine won’t make up for lost time. Workers who have to bear the brunt of this pandemic may spend years trying to lift themselves back up even though they bear no responsibility for the inadequacies of the state. We should all be happy that there is a vaccine coming, but we can’t let it become the sole focus of addressing the pandemic.  
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Working-class women gave leadership alongside Marx & Engels
I would like to add a few points to the recent article in CHALLENGE on Friedrich Engels' bicentennial.
Mary Burns, Engels' companion for 20  years until her death, was an Irish factory worker in Manchester who helped Engels research his 1845 book, The Condition of The Working Class in England, a brilliant expose of the terrible working and living conditions of the city’s many factory workers. (Because of awful pollution and high infant mortality, the life expectancy for people born in Manchester was half that of those born in the nearby countryside.)
It’s true, as the article says, that Engels did considerable reading for the book, but Mary Burns was his essential link to the lives of workers and their families, especially to Irish workers, who were the most exploited workers in England. It’s doubtful that Engels’ book would have been as powerful as it was without his being able to tour the working class slums and talk with people who lived there, with Mary as his guide.
Mary Burns died at the age of 41, probably of stomach cancer. Engels then lived for the next 15 years with Mary’s sister, Lizzie, who he married on her deathbed. Engels said of Lizzie:
My wife was a real child of the Irish proletariat and her passionate devotion to the class in which she was born was worth much more to me – and helped me more in times of stress – than all the elegance of an educated, artistic middle-class bluestocking.
All the women in the families of Marx and Engels were politically active: Marx's wife Jenny and his three daughters Eleanor, Jenny, and Laura. Eleanor Marx, for instance, translated her father’s books, co-wrote a book on the Paris Commune, and became a leader of the Socialist League.
A couple of years ago, the movie The Young Karl Marx came out. I watched it with a couple of friends who knew a lot about that history. We thought it was a very good movie. It covered the period from a little before Marx and Engels met until the completion of The Communist Manifesto. It shows their relationships with their loved ones and friends and their intense involvement in the working class struggles of the period. It has high production values and very good acting. I thought the film was accurate, politically instructive and fun! I highly recommend
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Christmas a capitalist invention
Christmas is a religious holiday in which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25. It comes from the Latin nativitas, nativa les, which means birth. In 1903, the academic F. G Kitton, stated in a writing that Charles Dickens was the one who really invented Christmas in 1843, and that he attracted the aristocracy and the middle class to that holiday.
Originally, the day is about pagan festivals that commemorated the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. But in general after several generations it has become a culture for almost everyone meaning abundance, prosperity, fraternity, and solidarity.
In reality this is far from the truth. On the contrary, because capitalism is in crisis, the poorest workers cannot afford their ornaments, lights, gifts and tree. Although billions can barely eat for some years the Christmas fervor has grown stronger, and as early as November in many homes the ritual begins. The media at the service of the capitalists are in charge of rooting on this phenomenon and incite the workers to consume, and thereby the racist capitalist system has been able to profit by billions of dollars every year.
And it is that in the absence of class consciousness and a method of dialectical analysis that allows for analyzing phenomena, the working class will continue to be easy prey for any lie disguised as truth like this one.
It is up to the PLP to make every effort to clarify the truth of this phenomenon, extending dialectical materialism to our fellow workers as a tool of analysis so that we better understand this farce.

 The weakness of the liberal main wing of the U.S. ruling class was on full display as Donald Trump’s terror militia invaded the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and temporarily blocked the U.S. Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election. As armed pro-Trump racists trashed offices and congressional leaders cowered under their seats, the entire world witnessed the decay and disarray of U.S. finance capital, the ruthless imperialist gang that not so long ago sat atop the globe. 

As anyone who has marched in D.C. knows first-hand, anti-racist protesters would have been gassed, bludgeoned, and shot long before getting inside the heart of the bosses’ law-making apparatus. But in this case, the Capitol Police, a federal agency, passively watched the chaos unfold. The Trumpers had openly planned their violence for weeks on domestic terrorist websites; Trump himself incited them at a nearby rally before the attack. Yet the police presence at what the rulers call “a sacred civic space” was nearly invisible. The vicious split between finance capital and the Fortress America capitalists (the ones fronted by Trump) has disrupted and exposed the rulers’ most cherished institutions, from their killer kkkops to their dead-end electoral circus. 

For the liberal bosses, the debacle is a case of chickens coming home to roost. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, the finance capitalists used racist dog whistles to mislead white workers while blaming Black workers for the profit system’s racist inequalities. The resulting white grievance movement was seized upon by small fascists like the Koch and DeVos families, and subsequently mobilized by Trump into his personal base. 

While no one knows how this will play out, what’s clear is that we are entering volatile, unchartered territory. Will the institutional collapse spiral? Will the main wing bosses enact fascist measures to regain their grip? Will they accelerate their drive toward global war against arch-rival capitalists in China? As a class and a communist party, we must understand both the danger and opportunity of this period. The danger is that a fear of these small-time terrorists will drive some workers into the arms of the biggest terrorists of all, the state terrorist gang to be led by Biden. The opportunity is to build a mass revolutionary communist movement to destroy capitalism once and for all. Join Progressive Labor Party!

On December 20, in suburban Indiana, Dr. Susan Moore, a Black woman, died of racism after doctors dismissed and refused to treat her Covid-19 symptoms and severe pain. Meanwhile, in South Africa, a factory is producing millions of doses of lifesaving vaccines for the U.S. and other wealthy nations in Europe, but none for the poor Black people who work and live there—and who have been hit harder by the pandemic than in any other country on the continent. With racism and exploitation as its lifeblood, this capitalist profit system infects and sickens everything it touches. Progressive Labor Party calls for workers to vaccinate our class against the contagion of capitalism with the only medicine that really works: communist revolution (see box below). Build the fight to build a need-based and collective system! Join Progressive Labor Party!
Capitali$t healthcare: pay or die
Because big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer are driven by their need for maximum profit, they won’t suspend “intellectual property rights” to their vaccine. As a result, “most people in low-income countries will be waiting until 2024 for Covid-19 vaccinations if high-income countries keep engaging in what some are calling “vaccinationalism” (Duke Global Health Institute, 11/9/20).
After centuries of looting workers in Africa, Asia, and South America, the imperialist countries have cleared the shelves. “Over half (51%) of the doses reserved will go to high-income countries, despite the fact those countries only represent 14% of the world’s population” (Forbes, 12/15/20).
In falling-in-a-frenzy powers like the U.S., vaccines have been trapped in a muck of anti-scientific skepticism, money-mad competition, and individualism. The bosses’ allergy to science reflects broader capitalist decay. Finance capital, the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class, is using the vaccine to attempt to buy back workers’ trust in its failing institutions—a must as they prepare for global war against China and perhaps Russia.
Medical apartheid, global scale
The international working class is justifiably mistrustful of medical science. There is a long racist history of Black, Latin, and Asian workers being forced or coerced into dangerous mistreatment. White workers are also hurt because racism weakens the health of the entire working class:
•    Jamaica, 1760s: British doctor John Quier experimented with smallpox inoculations (a precursor to vaccines) on 850 enslaved people, including pregnant women and sick infants.
•    Alabama, U.S., 1830s: Enslaver J. Marion Sims, “father of gynecology,” operated on enslaved women without anesthesia. He shared the racist belief that Black people didn’t experience pain like white people, a myth that infects doctors to this day (The Washington Post, 7/11/2020)—as Susan Moore attested before they killed her.
•    Namibia, 1900s: In line with his call to ban “mixed marriages,” Eugen Fischer sterilized the descendants of European-born fathers and Black mothers. He later joined the German Nazi party and performed medical atrocities in the fascist death camps.
•    Alabama, U.S., 1930-1970s: In the infamous Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis, 600 Black men were left to sicken and die, even after a cure was found.
•    Puerto Rico and Massachusetts, 1950s:During a period of eugenicist legislation and forced sterilization, two Harvard professors tested a birth control pill in the slums of Puerto Rico and asylums in Massachusetts. Women’s uteruses were sliced to “understand the drug’s effect on ovulation” (The Crimson, 9/28/17).
•    Côte d’Ivoire and Thailand, 1990s: HIV treatment was withheld from men, women, and newborns.
•    India, 2005-2017: Nearly 5,000 mainly low-caste workers died in drug trials and research (The National, 9/17/18).
Covid-19 has once again exposed medical racism. It’s no accident that deaths are highest among Black, Latin, Asian, indigenous, undocumented, imprisoned, indigenous, and poor workers. They are the most vulnerable to exposure and infection from racist inequalities in healthcare, jobs, housing, and food quality. Because of capitalism, they are the most likely to have underlying conditions like diabetes and heart disease.
Ruling-class chaos breeds skepticism
Under outgoing Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump, anti-scientists seized control of nearly every corner of U.S. policy, from the environment to public health. But the main wing finance capitalists also bear responsibility for many workers’ lack of confidence in the new vaccines. Chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci initially cautioned against wearing masks—an outright lie to cover for the bosses’ shortage of protective equipment—before calling for their mass use. Before endorsing the vaccine, President-elect Joe Biden initially sounded warnings against it as politically motivated and rushed to benefit Trump (NYT, 9/16/20).
The latest polls say that more than a quarter of the U.S. population remains hesitant to get the vaccine. Skepticism is highest among Republicans at 42 percent, followed by Black adults at 35 percent (KFF.org), though these numbers may be decreasing as more people get vaccinated. From the data we have so far (see box below), it seems clear that the vaccine is safe and effective—if only because the capitalist bosses need a healthy working class to stem their economy’s hemorrhaging of billions of dollars. Ultimately, the U.S. empire is at stake.
Collectivity over individualism, science over subjectivity
The Kaiser Family Foundation poll also monitored workers’ attitudes toward collectivity. Half of those questioned believe that getting vaccinated is “part of everyone’s responsibility to protect the health of others.” But the other half believe it is “a personal choice.” This is the virus of individualism, the mythology of capitalist “freedom” that acts against workers’ own interests. The collective comes first. Our decisions must be based on the needs of the entire working class.
For communists and their friends and comrades, it is necessary to educate ourselves on how vaccines work and why they are crucial to the well-being of our class. Just as we approach strikes and reform struggles as schools for communism, we must fight for the health of our working-class brothers and sisters while exposing the rulers’ racism and profiteering.
As long as we live in a capitalist system, pandemics are inevitable. But herd immunity is a step toward communism. Workers must be healthy and fit to battle against the racist and sexist atrocities to come. We must fight for a communist revolution that will make workers’ collective health primary.

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The mRNA Covid-19 vaccine explained

The Progressive Labor Party hails the development of vaccines and urges workers to take what is demonstrating to be a safe and effective shot against Covid-19.
Unfortunately, the racist, profit-driven capitalist medical system heightens our fears and mistrust even when scientists get it right. In fact, research on mRNA (short for messenger RNA) vaccines began in the early 1990s. Scientists have tested these vaccines in both animals and people for SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and rabies (Harvard Health Publishing, 12/10/2020). The Covid-19 vaccine is not the result of speedy experiments.
In a nutshell, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines mimic a part of the surface of the Covid-19 virus called the spike. A harmless fragment of viral spike proteins primes our immune system to attack and ward off the disease in the event of exposure. There is no virus in the vaccine. Together, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines tested nearly 30,000 people. They’ve demonstrated 95 percent efficacy in preventing Covid-19, with virtually no serious side effects aside from a few cases of rare and treatable allergies. For a video explaining how the vaccine works, go to www.tinyurl.com/asapsciencecovid    
The subjects in clinical trials have been mainly white men; only 5 percent are Black (Healthline, 8/9/20). In fact, community outreach groups have reached out to Black volunteers to make the study more inclusive and representative of the population. Fighting for equitable research is part of the antiracist fight.
Since Covid-19 has had a disproportionate impact on Black and Latin workers, from death rates to unemployment, they should have priority for vaccination. Fighting for equitable distribution is also part of the antiracist fight.
Judging from the long history of vaccines, long-term ill effects are unlikely. Local reactions at the injection site are common. Fatigue and fever are more common after the second dose. Most people experience sore arms and little or nothing more.
No medication is 100 percent safe. But with 82 million Covid-19 cases and over 1.8 million confirmed deaths worldwide (Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 12/30/20), the vaccines’ benefits far outweigh their risks.

INGLEWOOD, CA, December 30—Only a system as ruthless as capitalism would put a family out on the street in the middle of a raging pandemic. With the ICU beds at zero percent availability, LA is a dangerous place to contract Covid-19 right now, yet that is exactly what happened to one of the family members because of this eviction. Through the class struggle, fighters are learning the profit system cannot and will not provide for our class. Only we can do that through communist revolution.
Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  have united with a working-class family to reclaim their home from a blood-thirsty mortgage company attempting to make a quick buck off of racist gentrification. PL’ers are fighting tooth and nail to hold on to 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.
In the 55 years PLP has existed, many inspiring struggles have been waged, some won and some lost. Regardless of the reform outcome, we see glimmers of hope of the communist future we are fighting for! This struggle  is no different.
Here to stay
When three young women boldly defied eviction orders under threat of arrest and brutality by the police, we can see the seeds of what we are building. On Friday, December 18, these women leaders, one as young as 17, confidently walked up the front steps, entered their home, and turned on all the lights—their commitment to fight back written on their t-shirts – “HERE TO STAY!”
In the background, they were heralded with cheers from those assembled at the house in support. Campaign participants posted signs of protest around the house, put up Christmas lights, and brought in food and other necessities for the family.
The mother of the family who we are working with bought the family home in 2006 with two mortgages, one very large, the other much smaller.  This immigrant family found ways to piece together money and never missed a mortgage payment for 14 years. In 2012, the mother was scammed into believing that she no longer had to make payments on the smaller mortgage.
Then  in 2016, Trojan Capital Investment, LLC (Trojan) purchased the smaller mortgage and immediately sent her a “default” notice.  It was no coincidence that the notice was sent soon after the announcement that the SoFi football stadium would be built in Inglewood just a few miles away from the family’s home.
The working-class connection
On November 30, the mother and her three teenage children, two of whom attend the school where one of our PLP comrades teaches, were evicted from their home by the LA Sheriff and Inglewood Police Department (IPD).  The mother contacted a non-profit community organization that she had worked with. The non-profit in turn contacted a local tenants’ union that two PLP members have been working in for the last two years. The non-profit, together with tenants’ union members, immediately began a campaign to save the house for the family.
The eviction came just as Governor Gavin Newsom was issuing a “safer-at-home” advisory because of a huge increase in Covid-19 cases. Los Angeles County already has the second largest homeless population in the U.S. and the crisis has only worsened during this pandemic. The 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count showed 66,436 people in LA county experienced homelessness, which is a 12.7 percent rise from last year (Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, 6/12/2020).
Our regular involvement in mass organizations and in our schools has created an opportunity for our Party to be a part of this struggle, which represents a broader struggle against the horrors of racist, anti-working class gentrification and homelessness. This fightback is a testament to PLP’s commitment to building a mass Party and fighting among the masses in the workplace, schools, and community organizations.  
Working class fights back against eviction
The immediate goal of the reform campaign is to get Trojan to negotiate the return of the family’s home. There have been many positive aspects to the campaign so far.  The tenants’ union has many young workers who have an understanding of the racist, sexist, and murderous aspects of the capitalist system.
Several members have gone “all in” on the fight back, doing multiple shifts to guard the house 24/7 from the IPD, taking the lead on canvassing in the neighborhood to get support from workers, and planning political education activities involving the family and supporters.
The tenant’s union has brought to bear its experience fighting racist gentrification at an apartment complex located across the street from SoFi, where tenants’ rents have skyrocketed. The commonality in the two struggles shows that working-class renters and homeowners have the same class interests.
Other PLP members have also actively participated in the campaign. We highlighted the dual role of the cops—they are racist terrorists who intimidate and murder our sisters and brothers while simulatenously work as thugs for businesses like Trojan, which add workers to the homeless population in order to cash in on their investments. In other words, the police serve and protect the profit system.
When the united working class exercises its political power through the might of one international Party, we can eliminate the profit motive for racism, homelessness, gentrification, and killer cops. No reform can ever accomplish that—only comunist revolution can.