In hospitals and clinics across the city of Chicago, health care workers are fighting back against the capitalist bosses’ racist and sexist attacks on our lives. They are boldly challenging capitalism’s persistent need to prioritize profit over the needs of the working class.
The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed at least 3,000 lives in Chicago. Because of racist inequalities rooted in capitalism, it has been especially devastating to Black and Latin workers, who have made up at least 75 percent of the reported deaths (chicago.gov). Many of these Black and Latin working-class families are also disproportionately affected by gun violence and youth suicides, both of which have seen a drastic uptick this year (Chicago Sun Times, 7/25).
But instead of expanding access and the quality of care, the racist bosses take the opposite approach. They have accepted millions of dollars in handouts from the CARES Act while they threaten to close hospitals, cut back on services for workers who are unemployed or low-income, and impose wage freezes while denying protective gear for those on the front lines.
This deadly assault will continue to be the reality as long as we allow capitalism to exist. Relying on liberal politicians and union misleaders to lead our fightback will only prolong our misery, as these hacks only serve the system’s needs.
More than ever, workers everywhere need to build the struggle to violently overthrow this racist profit system and replace it with a communist society that eliminates money, wages, and social classes. Under communism, we will collectively organize hospitals, clinics and public health based on workers’ needs. To fight for our collective health, we need to join and build the international Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
Workers of the world, unite
Throughout the majority of 2020, there have been a number of battles that have flared up at local health care facilities, which have mobilized thousands of workers. Some of the notable struggles include:
·  Workers at Mount Sinai Hospital on the city’s west side protesting the bosses’ refusal to extend pandemic hazard pay to all employees, as well as a failure to make necessary infrastructure improvements to update failing equipment
Nurses, doctors and supporters fighting to prevent the closing of the Provident Hospital emergency room for an entire month during the Covid-19 surge
Health care workers across the city uniting to march through the Medical District in the wake of the racist kkkop murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, demanding a response from the bosses regarding chronic racist health inequalities
·Hundreds of nurses at Amita St Joseph’s Hospital in Joliet going on strike for over two weeks to protest against racist and sexist harassment by the bosses, who threatened to cut sick pay and freeze wages for new hires
Rallies and car caravans of hundreds to protest the proposed closure of Mercy Hospital in the Bronzeville neighborhood, the city’s oldest hospital which serves mostly Black workers
A strike of thousands of workers at the University of Illinois Hospital (UIH), including nurses, aides, clerical and maintenance workers to demand better staffing, higher pay, and improved safety measures
Members of PLP have enthusiastically supported and even provided leadership to some of these anti-racist fights. We have distributed hundreds of flyers and issues of CHALLENGE newspaper to workers hungry for revolutionary politics.
In every struggle in which we have been involved, we have stressed the racist and sexist nature of how the bosses attack and divide us. We have pushed for our co-workers and friends to see themselves as a united fight against all of capitalism’s attacks, and to organize for communist revolution as the antidote to this poisonous system.
Health care for profit is deadly
Health care systems under capitalism will always be organized as a business to maximize the bosses’ profits. The destructive nature of the pandemic has shone a spotlight on just how inadequate, unequal, and racist the bosses’ infrastructure really is.
Despite many hospitals being part of wealthy systems with assets in the billions, hospitals across the country have been closing at a rate of 30 per year (Bloomberg Business, 8/21/18). The majority of these closures occur in working-class urban and rural areas and have negatively impacted millions of Black, Latin and Asian workers, who increasingly find themselves living in “health care deserts” and are forced to travel longer distances to receive care. In Chicago, life expectancy for neighborhoods on the south and west sides can average thirty years less than wealthier downtown neighborhoods (NBC Chicago, 6/10/19)!
The loss of over half a million hospital beds in the U.S. since 1975 all but guaranteed that when a pandemic hit, capacity would be quickly overrun (Truthout, 3/31). As is the case in all industries under capitalism, from transit to education, the scramble for making short-term profits outweighed any long-term consideration of workers’ safety or development.
On a local level, liberal bosses in Chicago have used decreasing tax revenue as an excuse to cut services and jobs to the publicly-funded Cook County Health System (Chicago Tribune, 8/28). This conveniently overlooks the fact that “progressive” Mayor Lori Lightfoot was willing to fork over $1 billion in tax money to developers just a year ago to build a new luxury neighborhood (WTTW, 9/4/19).
Beware the labor fakers
Many of the struggles against the hospital bosses have been organized by the unions, including Illinois Nurses Association (INA) and SEIU. As communists, we fight to organize within mass worker organizations and understand that strikes can be effective schools for class consciousness and communist politics. However, we must always be on guard to understand and challenge the ways that these liberal capitalist reformers sell out workers and steer the struggle into dead ends.
The INA, who are helping lead the ongoing strike at the University of Illinois Hospital, undoubtedly set the nurses in Joliet up to fail in their struggle (see CHALLENGE, 8/5). Along with SEIU, they are limiting the scope of the struggle to focus on negotiating a new contract. Workers “winning” a new contract isn’t anything to be excited about; the majority of the time the bosses won’t even honor the conditions! Labor contracts only dictate the terms of our exploitation.

NEW YORK CITY, September 13—The power of the recent antiracist rebellions has spread to the mostly white, Upper West Side (UWS) of Manhattan, emerging in a fight over homelessness, racism and inequality. Antiracists are fighting against the displacement of homeless workers from overcrowded shelters into empty hotels so they can physically distance during the Covid-19 crisis, which has emptied the hotels in the first place.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends on the UWS have been involved in this fight from the beginning, involving our co-workers, union members and friends from other organizations, while making new friends.
Homelessness is an integral part of the racist, capitalist, profit system. Hospitals and schools are understaffed, but homeless workers can’t find jobs. There is no profit to be made.
Roads, bridges and mass transit need massive upgrades, but there is no money, as the billionaire capitalists are getting richer. And many homeless workers are working, but can’t make enough to pay the exorbitant rents.
 We are struggling with our friends and neighbors to see it’s not just Donald Trump to blame for this racist system; we need a communist revolution to get rid of this racist capitalist nightmare  once and for all.
Racists organize against the homeless
At the end of July, the NYC Department of Human Services (DHS) moved 270 homeless men into the Lucerne Hotel on Amsterdam Ave. There are about 700 homeless workers in four UWS hotels, and thousands more in 60 hotels around the city.
Following this decision, a racist movement, spearheaded by former Mayor and Trump-lackey Rudy Ghouliani and his former deputy Randy Mastro, organized UWS for Safer Streets (SS) to have the men evicted from the Lucerne.

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Racist homelessness by the numbers

• Approximately 57 percent of heads of household in shelters are Black, 32 percent are Latin.
• In May 2020, there were 13,523 homeless families with 20,044 homeless children in the New York City shelter system. Families make up more than two-thirds of the homeless shelter population.
• During the 2019 fiscal year, 132,660 different homeless people slept in the City shelter system, including over 44,300 children.
• The number of homeless people sleeping in shelters is now 61 percent higher than it was 10  years ago. The number of homeless single adults is 133 percent higher than it was 10  years ago.
• The primary cause of homelessness, especially among families, is lack of affordable housing. That’s a symptom of capitalism.  
• Every night, thousands of unsheltered,         unhoused people sleep on the streets, in the subway and in other public spaces.
• Studies show that the large majority of homeless people are living with mental illness or other severe health problems. (coalitionforthehomeless.org).

The “debate” over the Social Security’s (SS) “crisis” is a cover for a trillion-dollar looting of the SS Trust Fund, pulled off for over 52 years by every Democratic and Republican president who has occupied the White House — Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, Nixon, Reagan, the two Bushes, and now Trump. It’s a crisis, not of SS but one of U.S. capitalism, mired in a multi-trillion debt resulting from illegally spending the workers’ SS surpluses to finance U.S. imperialism’s wars against Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. It mirrors a general law of the profit system: shift the bosses’ financial burdens onto the backs of the working class.
Back in 1968, when the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was in high gear, the Johnson administration’s war expenditures were spinning the Federal budget into bottomless debt. Since the SS Trust Fund was running a surplus — its income from payroll taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks was exceeding the pensions paid out to retirees — the Johnson gang used a shrewd maneuver to “balance the budget”: “fold” this SS surplus into a newly labeled “Unified Federal Budget.” This violated the bosses’ law banning use of SS Trust Fund money for purposes other than SS.
By this sleight-of-hand, Johnson could announce a federal government “surplus,” masking the deficit in federal spending generated by the enormous expenses of the Vietnam War. To avoid the appearance of stealing the SS Trust Fund’s surplus, the government gave the SS Trust Fund U.S. Treasury notes equal to it’s “loan” from the Fund, promising to pay back the loan with interest. This meant that the SS surpluses — now part of this Unified Federal Budget — could be used to pay for all federal government costs, “for everything from jet fighters to thumb tacks” (NY Times, 1/21/90), especially for the proliferating “forever” wars. These wars resulted in mounting federal deficits, laying the basis for an enormous debt to pay back the trillions “loaned” from the SS Fund: “Over the second and third decades of the 21st century, Congress will have to appropriate a total of $5 trillion for Social Security,” NY Times, 1/31/95), a crisis indeed, composed of SS surpluses paid into the SS Fund by — and stolen from — the working class.
This U.S. bosses’ deficit crisis is part of the general crisis of capitalism. They will always try to solve that crisis on the backs of workers, who produce all the value in society. Such “solutions” will continue until the working class, led by its revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, rises up to destroy the ruling class’s state power and establishes a society in which retired workers will be provided for by the social value produced by our entire class. Bosses, profits and imperialist wars will be buried forever.
In the 1980s, the Reagan gang executed a neat maneuver to shift still more of the tax burden onto the working class. It raised the payroll taxes into Social Security 23 percent while lowering the top income tax rate benefiting the rich from 70 percent down to 28 percent, and lowering corporate income taxes by 23 percent. Presumably workers and bosses each pay 7.65 percent of their payrolls into the Social Security Trust Fund. However, the bosses’ share comes out of their profit from the workers’ labors, so actually workers are really saddled with the entire 15.3 percent. The combination of these increases on workers and decreases on the bosses meant, “The burden of taxation was shifted from the income tax to the Social Security tax….[so 75 percent] of all Americans now pay more in Social Security taxes than they do in income taxes….[Therefore] the expenses of government are financed more by a tax on the poor and the middle class and less by a tax on the wealthy” (NY Times, 1/21/90). Thus, the Social Security surpluses stolen by the bosses in the Unified Federal Budget [see main article] wreaked still further havoc on the working class.

Just as the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were distorted so that their advocacy of violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat was ignored by social democrats who advocated a peaceful transition to socialism through a combination of reform demands and elections, so too have bourgeois educational theorists around the world ignored and sidestepped the communist message contained in Paolo Freire’s book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  
The word pedagogy means the theory and practice of education. It literally means to walk around teaching people, and it comes from the practice of the Greek philosopher Socrates who walked around the city of Athens gathering students around him and questioning the legitimacy of the government by use of the dialectical method of questioning. Socrates was forced by the Athenian ruling class to commit suicide, which he did rather than renounce the truths that he and his students had discovered.
Marx famously proclaimed that the purpose of philosophy is not merely to understand the world but to change it. It logically follows that the purpose of education is not merely to understand the world but to change the world by means of revealing the oppressive nature of capitalism, then taking action by mass revolutionary violence led by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to establish the dictatorship of the working class.
This is the program which is also supported by Paolo Freire, but which has been ignored by his bourgeois academic “interpreters.” To gain a further understanding of Freire’s educational theories, which were first proposed a little over 50  years ago, let us first examine Paolo Freire’s life and the historical times in which he lived and practiced education of workers and peasants.
Dialectical and historical
materialism in Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paolo Freire was born into a “middle-class” family in Brazil in the 1930’s but his family lost everything during the great crisis of capitalism that enveloped the world at that time, and which led to the rise of fascism. His family moved into the most neglected and working-class neighborhood  in Recife, Brazil, where Freire experienced the extremes of poverty, hunger and oppression first-hand. His playmates were other working-class children.  He managed to obtain an education in the bourgeois sense, but he never forgot the lessons that experience taught him about  the violence of capitalism against workers.  Coming of intellectual age in the 1950’s Freire was influenced by the writings of Marx, Engels and Vladimir Lenin. He was also influenced by the writings of the existentialist philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Simone De Beauvoir and Erich Fromm who were capitalist critics acceptable to the bosses. In 1964 Freire was imprisoned by the fascist government of Brazil, and ultimately went into exile in the U.S.
Freire’s writings can be used in a reformist way, or in a revolutionary way, and a reading of his book shows that his main intent was revolutionary, communist, and in support of a mass movement to overthrow capitalist oppression, as we shall now discuss.
The revolutionary aspect of Freire’s theory of education
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed does not explicitly call for the organization of a vanguard revolutionary communist party to violently overthrow capitalism and establish the dictatorship of the working class. But the book, over the course of four chapters does, in fact, advocate these Marxist-Leninist precepts. Further, Freire cites by name, usually in footnotes, the revolutionaries from whom he derives these educational theories. He quotes from Marx, Engles, Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse Tung whenever he makes a critical main point in a theory. He endorses base building, the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the workers, and the need for what he describes as “revolutionary leaders.”
Freire advocates a dialogue, a dialectical conversation, between revolutionary leaders and the masses. This must be a discussion among comrades, where there is a dual aspect involved. The teacher is a student of the people, and the people are students of the teacher. Teachers/Revolutionary Leaders and students reciprocally learn and teach. Freire is critical of the bourgeois “banking” concept of education in which students passively memorize and repeat back to the teacher what the teacher authority tells them. Naturally, it is somewhat clear that in the public and private schools of any capitalist country that information is conveyed laden with a poisonous dose of ruling class ideology. Thus, Freire warned teachers, at that time many of whom were volunteers in literacy programs in Latin America, that teaching workers  to read was not enough.
The students had to be taught to think for themselves by means of mastering critical thinking which Freire expressly states is to master the philosophy of dialectical materialism. The combination of learning to read with dialectical materialism, then putting this combination into practice to overthrow the oppressor is the core of Freire’s educational philosophy.  Further, by emphasizing that revolutionary leaders and workers are comrades, Freire offers a method to avoid revisionism by empowering millions to understand and apply dialectical materialism to the experience of class oppression. This jibes with the Progressive Labor Party’s theory of the need for a mass party of millions of workers internationally to make revolution.
Bourgeois academicians, anarchists, and phony liberals talk about how great the book is and how it influenced them, but, in the end, they are all opportunists and apologists for capitalism. Not one calls for communist revolution, which is the real intent of the book.
When Jean Paul Sartre renounced existentialism, the philosophy he had developed over 40  years (and advocated communism), the bosses stopped teaching it. New ruling-class theories such as structuralism, semiotics, identity politics, and so forth came into vogue. Freire’s theories are far to the left of these, but the fact that Freire’s advocacy of communism is subtle means that he can easily be misinterpreted and used by the intellectual lackeys of the bosses in fake attacks on the status quo. Nevertheless, because Freire has a class analysis and advocates dialectical materialism, he can still be useful in ideological struggles in a university setting by PLP members in discussions with students and teachers who are seeking the truth in good faith.

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Existentialism: a dead-end
capitalist ideology
Many of the existentialists that influenced Freire had been part of the anti-fascist, underground movement, especially in France. However, primarily due to their own individualism they did not join the communist parties of their countries, but rather viewed themselves as friendly critics of communism. The existentialists, who influenced Freire, were viewed by the bosses as dangerous on one level because of their critique of bourgeois ideology, but ultimately as a “safer” third route  between communism and capitalism, because the alienated middle class intellectuals to whom they appealed would not necessarily join an organized communist party because of their individualist response to capitalist culture and its lies.
However, just as many of the Bohemian students in 1848 and 1871 in France became ardent revolutionaries and joined left wing parties and groups, so too by the revolutionary year of 1968, many Bohemian students around the world, decided to join communist parties, such as the PLP, and to participate in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the U.S., and in the French Worker Student Revolt of 1968.
Jean Paul Sartre, the primary philosopher of SDS, went from being a university teacher in the 1930’s, to an underground activist in the 1940’s, to a pro-communist critic in the 1950’s, to a street vendor of a Maoist newspaper in 1968. At the end of his life Sartre pronounced that existentialism was ultimately a dead end, and that only communist revolution could liberate society. Interestingly, Sartre sent a letter of support for the PLP during the Harlem rebellion. Yet, it is not believed that Sartre ever joined a communist party. And it is not known whether or not Freire ever joined a communist party.