Workers pay the heaviest of prices for buying into capitalist ideas, which in every country capitalism tries convincing us are universal truths— in the U.S., schools and movies alike saturate us with ideas like “individual freedom.” But when evaluating the toll of COVID-19, the cost of these ideas is measured in the hundreds of thousands of workers dead and the millions of workers’ lives uprooted and shattered in the U.S. alone: in the belly of the beast of history’s richest and most powerful imperialist power.
And the very first mechanism by which capitalism guaranteed the lethality of the COVID-19 was the infection of the working class with capitalist ideas, starting with individualism.
To be sure, the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party recommends the COVID-19 vaccine, universal mask wearing, physical distancing, and self-isolation when necessary – to protect ourselves and everyone around us. These are common sense mandates. In many countries workers willingly obey these public health mandates and lockdown orders for that reason.
Yet the U.S. leads in the share of people who defy such public health measures. Many refuse to accept these mandates because they regard them as infringements on “individual freedom,” even though this individualism directly harms others. Misled by politicians like Trump and Christian fascist preachers who promote superstition over science, around more than 25 percent of all U.S. workers —rising to 33 percent of Black and 34 percent of Latin workers— believe the pandemic is “probably or definitely” a hoax (Pew Research, 7/24/20), dismissing the one-third of one million deaths and counting. Far too many of our working class sisters and brothers are incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.
Mimicking Trump’s irresponsibility, many state governors and politicians aligned with the Small Fascist, domestic-oriented “Fortress America” capitalist wing tell people to do what they want. Many small-time capitalists are on the brink of failure, squeezed by monopolies like Amazon on one hand and falling profits on the other.
But it’s not just Trump – it’s capitalism. Such blatant “me-first” disregard for the well-being of others didn’t begin with Trump or any particular faction of the capitalist class. It flows from the entire history and ideology of capitalism, from its early competitive days to today’s monopoly capitalist stage, imperialism.
Politics are primary
Capitalism consists of a relatively tiny class of capitalists at the top: the owners of production and wealth. These capitalists control the lives of the rest of society beneath them—the working class, in countries the world over—control that they exercise through their state power, represented for them by self-serving politicians. And these politicians are (usually!) protected by the bosses’ police and military.
These politicians are a key part of capitalist state power, along with the entire monopoly-owned mass media and educational institutions, who are all represented on think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations. Capitalist state power is supported by and enhances individualism alongside racism, sexism and nationalism to weaken working class-conscious interests like equality, collectivity, internationalism and solidarity.
Communist collectivity vs capitalist individualism
Communist-led workers in China won a revolution and established socialism in 1949. For the period of time that the heroic struggles of workers in China were led by communists, many millions of workers became conditioned with a collective working class consciousness that opposed capitalist individualism.
These movements ultimately failed and came under the leadership of pro-capitalist, fake communists. The old communist movement, for so many achievements and advances, kept many capitalist ideas. They wrongly believed that the international working class could not be won directly to communism, and PLP has analyzed the lessons of these failures elsewhere.
Even so, remnants of that collectivity and solidarity persist. Russia and China have long ago betrayed revolutionary struggle and become fascist states today. And yet China’s success in containing COVID-19 would’ve been impossible were it not for masses of workers selflessly volunteering.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health conducted a study on the “volunteerism” in China (Miao et al, 8/7/20). As the pandemic rose, 85,699 middle-aged worker volunteers interpreted and carried out public health mandates, as public services facing decades of China’s capitalist cutbacks became overwhelmed. Volunteers formed grassroots networks connecting hard-hit cities like Hangzhou, Wenzhou and Taizhou with smaller cities, towns and villages, from running public services to organizing logistics for food and medicine deliveries, to performing invaluable sanitation duties.
Zero praise is due for the fascist “Communist” Party of China or their response to the pandemic; workers in China organized despite their fascist capitalist government, and the bosses found themselves tailing the masses. Tellingly, the survey found that 85.8 percent of these worker volunteers volunteered “on their own initiative,” whereas 10.8 percent stated they were officially mobilized. Tragically, without a mass revolutionary communist party like PLP, these selfless worker volunteers saved lives, but also strengthened the hand of Chinese imperialism.
These volunteers’ parents and grandparents would remember the 1960s when China was led by real communists. Communists organized and channeled working class consciousness to eradicate the disease schistosomiasis, caused by snail-borne parasites that the Centers for Disease Control lists today as both an indication of extreme poverty, and the deadliest of all tropical diseases. Communists mobilized millions collectively, and is documented in Joshua S. Horn’s must-read book, Away With All Pests.
Forward to communism
“Personal choice” and “individual freedom,” are illusions of capitalist ideology, stand in opposition to working class liberation, and under capitalism lead to death-dealing pandemics for which capitalist ideas also have no solutions. Capitalist individualism only tightens our chains. The international working class’ historic task is therefore smashing capitalism and capitalist ideas through communist revolution and communist ideology.
Communism is a new concept of freedom—mass freedom. Where the condition for the free development of each is the free development of all, empowerment of the majority through abolition of the capitalist state, and organization of a working class dictatorship. This collective rule requires mutual responsibility, based on an objective and scientific appraisal of the needs of the global working class. Such an outcome is only possible through a mass organization of millions into PLP and encouraging the full participation of all workers in deliberating, planning, and implementing ideas.
Under communism, the collective power of the working class can be mobilized to solve any problem history and nature presents, from pandemics to crop failures to climate change. Liberating the creative power of each and every worker through communism and dialectical materialism will ensure the survival and progress of all. Join us and join the fight for freedom: to smash the ideological chains of individualism, racism and sexism with communist revolution.

NEW JERSEY, January 10— As news was rolling in of the attempted Small Fascist-led takeover of the U.S. Capitol (see page 2), the Modern Language Association (MLA) was hosting its annual convention. The Radical Caucus of the MLA, in which Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been active for many years, was preparing to confront how the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the ongoing attacks on public higher education.  The fightback among faculty and graduate students must now also confront the intensified political surveillance and ideological repression that are sure to shape teaching and learning in the humanities classrooms in the coming period.  
Attack on faculty = attack on students
The crisis in higher education has been brewing for at least three decades. All the following attacks hurt students the most. Almost 75 percent of all courses are now taught by graduate workers and non-tenure track faculty.  While administrators and athletic coaches rake in huge salaries, these teachers’ pay is pitiful, usually without benefits or job security; some adjuncts are on food stamps and homeless, living in their cars.  Thousands of adjuncts have been laid off because of pandemic-related cutbacks. Many full-time faculty have been forced to increase their workloads, spend many extra hours mastering online teaching, and in some instances take pay cuts. These attacks the faculty—adjunct and non-adjunct—attacks the quality of education for students.
Students who attend most institutions of public higher education—mainly working-class, immigrant, and/or Black or Latin—are shoved into bigger classrooms, often without rigorous instruction, and face costly, delayed graduation dates due to fewer classes being offered. Many colleges have turned into dystopian diploma mills, robbing students of quality education.
Organize with workers on campus
At the 2021 MLA convention, held online, the Radical Caucus organized two panels—one on “The Post-Pandemic University,” one on “Climate Activist Pedagogies”—and held a well-attended meeting where anti-capitalist and pro-communist politics were prominent. There was frank discussion of the intimidation—and anger—experienced by teachers whose zoomed classrooms are subject to surveillance at any time.  
Proposals were made to step up political work among graduate students, most of whom anticipate never getting a tenure-track job, as well as to organize antiracist campaigns uniting faculty with nonacademic campus employees, from janitors to food service workers.
Class consciousness vs. phony liberalism
Given the crisis in ruling-class legitimacy flowing from the failed Capitol invasion, the Radical Caucus must also step up the struggle on the ideological front.  Most academics who devote their lives to the study of culture and literature do so out of humanistic impulses; they want to see a better world and are not trying to get rich.
But liberal ideas, which disempower effective fights against the capitalists, reign supreme. Marxist analysis of the grounding of consciousness in class-based social relations is often dismissed as “class reductionism.” Identity politics—which posit that race, gender, and sexuality define what is essential in human experience—dominate most intellectual inquiry and attempts at campus organizing.
We can anticipate that liberal multiculturalism, the principal ideology embraced by the dominant sector of the U.S. ruling class, will now be promoted still more aggressively as the supreme expression of patriotism. The bosses turn the working class’s instinct of antiracism and antisexism into tools for oppression. The Radical Caucus plans to sponsor a series of mini-conferences where certain keywords popular in liberal academic lingo—such as “intersectionality,” “racial capitalism,” “white fragility,” and “racial privilege”—will be subjected to vigorous critique. All these terms distort the reality of class relations and make identities primary over class struggle.
This ideological offensive is especially important now as campus administrations are increasingly institutionalizing these concepts in the wake of the recent multiracial Black Lives Matter mass movements against racism.
PLP has a long history of working within the MLA Radical Caucus. We have consistently sponsored panels on working-class, antiracist, and antisexist literature.  Starting in the 1980s, we have given strong class-conscious leadership to campaigns against academic racism, imperialist war, sweatshop labor, welfare cutbacks, anti-Muslim racism, and attacks on undocumented immigrants. We were the first force within the MLA to advocate on behalf of graduate student unionization and support for adjunct faculty.  Largely because of our successes in getting resolutions through the Delegate Assembly, the MLA Executive Council changed the Constitution, so that it is now nearly impossible to bring forward rank-and-file resolutions and get them ratified by the membership.
To be self-critical: this barrier to the passage of resolutions led Party members in the last few years to be more passive in our MLA activity. But the current pandemic, intensification of class contradictions, and crisis in class rule have jolted us back into a renewed awareness of the need for militant Communist-led organizing among academics in the humanities. CHALLENGE readers, stay tuned for more from the red fighters in the MLA’s Radical Caucus.

It was interesting to hear about healthcare rationing in California and other states overwhelmed by Covid-19 infected patients. I was a respiratory therapist for over 40 years, and I recall healthcare rationing hospitals serving mostly Black & Latin communities on the south and west sides of Chicago for decades.
The main ways rationing is practiced in these working-class neighborhood hospitals is through lack of staff and supplies. In a large medical and trauma center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where most of the patients are white, there were two respiratory therapists in the emergency room (E.R.), 24 hours a day.  In one of the busiest trauma centers in Chicago, on the west side, a therapist would be assigned to cover one or two patient floors, in addition to the emergency room.
Many times, we were busy giving care on the patient floors, when we would have to stop and scurry to the emergency room for a trauma emergency. The patients on the regular floors were short-changed in their care, because we would be unable to be in two places at the same time. On many occasions, treatments could not be given because we were occupied attending to patients in the E.R. Still, in other instances, patients in the E.R. would be waiting for treatment while we attended to patients on the regular floors or other seriously ill patients in the E.R.
Lack of equipment was also a common problem. Many times I had to look for necessary equipment, like a flowmeter, used to deliver oxygen, or other equipment and supplies to set-up a ventilator used to help patients breathe.
The short staffing was not restricted to patient floors and the E.R.  I’ll never forget the night I had to take care of 11  patients who were all on ventilators in the intensive care unit. We had to keep track of our productivity during the 12-hour shift. On that night my productivity was over 20  hours, and this form of speed-up was not unusual.  They stopped requiring us to track our productivity when it was obvious that all too often, we did more than 12 hours worth of work, and it became the basis for  complaints.
The hospital’s deliberate short staffing and lack of equipment serving mostly Black and Latin communities is racist health care. It leads to unsafe working conditions and substandard care or rationing. On the west side of Chicago, life expectancy is 69 years, while six miles away downtown, life expectancy is 85 years. This gap is a result of capitalist oppression of all workers, but especially of Black & Latin workers. Capitalists worship money and profits above workers’ health, and systemic racism is their number one weapon to keep workers divided and keep society unequal.
We fought back with a petition that over 60  people signed, demanding more staff and better equipment. We were forced to use devices that were obsolete (spare parts were not being made for some breathing machines). The hospital bosses started a witch hunt to find the organizers of the petition. Instead being intimidated, many workers spoke up about the racist working conditions. We got more staff and new equipment, but like most reform victories under this system, it didn’t last long.  When workers left, they would not be replaced, and the equipment was not maintained by management.
Rotten healthcare is bad for patients and hospital workers. The Covid-19 pandemic further  exposes capitalism’s public health failures and gross racist inequities. Black workers make up 30 percent of the population in Chicago, but 72 percent of the reported Covid-19 cases.  Black workers are seven times more likely to contract and die from the virus than other workers living in the same city. Structural and systemic racism kills.
We must fight back and build the Progressive Labor Party, because only communism can ensure a healthy future for our class.

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.