CHICAGO, October 7—The ongoing strike of close to 50,000 General Motors (GM) workers, now entering its fourth week, demonstrates the resilience and determination of the working class. They have braved the elements to maintain pickets for 24 hours a day, while earning just a fraction of their standard pay from the union strike fund. Workers from various different industries and unions, including steel and logistics workers, have demonstrated solidarity in both word and deed.
The GM strike also clearly revealed who the enemies and friends of autoworkers are. The United Automobile Workers union is a broker for labor, negotiating the workers’ exploitation rates. The union’s nationalism has led to ruining the lives of workers—from Canada and the U.S. to Mexico and worldwide. Workers can only rely on other workers. The highest manifestation of that solidarity and organization flows through an international communist organization: Progressive Labor Party.
Drive for maximum profit
However, the strike also brings to light many of the limits and contradictions of waging a nationally based labor struggle against an international business like GM. During the last decades of the past century, the auto bosses in the U.S. closed down many of their domestic plants, searching for cheaper labor costs in countries such as Mexico and India, as a means to better compete against the auto bosses in other countries. The sellout union leadership disarmed their rank and file membership for years to facilitate this de-industrialization. As it stands today, only 28 percent of GM’s total workforce is within the U.S. (Market Watch, 9/24).
Hardly a week after the strike began and GM bosses countered the U.S. strike by laying off over 1,000 autoworkers in Canada, followed by another 6,000 layoffs in Silao, Mexico (CNBC, 10/1). The GM bosses were able to counter the work stoppage not only by tapping into their billions of dollars in past profits stolen from workers’ labor,
but also by exploiting the lack of class solidarity of workers in the same industry but living in different countries.
Auto union is a lemon
The UAW is a defunct institution that serves the system, not the workers. It is up to the autoworkers to organize across the bosses’ racist borders to coordinate a unified struggle so that any advance for workers in one region wouldn’t come at the expense of workers in another part of the world. But given their longstanding history of nationalism, the union misleaders will never do that.
Road to revolution
Therefore, it’s on us as the international working class to unify our struggles, reject the bosses’ borders, and nationalism, and really hit the capitalists where it hurts. Even better yet, we will win more workers through an international solidarity movement into the revolutionary PLP, and build a communist revolution that crushes the bosses with their system of profits and unemployment. We will organize an egalitarian society where the working class is in the driver’s seat.

BOSTON,October 9—For the last nine years, Progressive Labor Party and its allies have been fighting for a nurse in every Boston public school. Led by a core group, many nurses, with support from other union members, fought for this demand and we finally won. It is a sad commentary on this capitalist society that it took nine years to win such a basic necessity. It is also a testament to the heroic workers who persevered in this struggle. Now we need a further commitment to get rid of this capitalist system once and for all. We need a revolution for communism where the working class organizes health care for everyone.
For safety, a nurse must be present in a school to cover emergencies. But also 1/3 of our students have chronic health conditions, such as asthma and  diabetes, that must be managed by a school nurse daily or as-needed. School nurses also provide a safe place for children worried about abusive situations, homelessness, fear of deportation raids, hunger, and difficult family situations.
Students in working class neighborhoods, primarily Black and Latin, have more chronic health problems, more homelessness, and need MORE support from a school nurse to help them stay healthy and improve their learning experiences. So in effect, a nurse in every school is an anti-racist struggle to equalize health care. Even though inequality will always persist as long as we have capitalism, we must have confidence in the working class to fight to control all aspects of society. That’s working class power – communism.
When the struggle began, if a nurse was sick and couldn’t find a substitute, another nurse would have to leave their school and cover at the absent nurse’s school. And, a number of nurses were already covering two schools!  We first fought for more substitute nurses and, through the union contract, we won six “float”  nurses. To win this struggle, we spoke often at union membership meetings, at open school committee meetings, and at Boston City Council hearings.  Nurses also reached out to parents of children in their schools to speak out against unsafe conditions.  We asked all nurses to document unsafe conditions in their school, modifying a survey provided by the Massachusetts Nursing Association. The  nurses covering two schools were the main responders about stressful and unsafe staffing situations. We used the survey to involve more nurses in the struggle. Nurses who were voted into union-leadership roles used their positions to serve both the nurses and the students (as a communist would), not to build our careers (as capitalist ideology would dictate).
 These days the job of a school nurse is much more complex and time-consuming. We manage diabetics, life-threatening allergies, daily medications, mental health issues, children who formerly would be hospitalized but now depend on a school nurse to maintain their health, and more.
After our  long struggle, the union leadership agreed to make a-nurse-in-every-school the #1 contract demand, and it is now part of the Boston Teachers’ Union contract! Under communism there will be no shortage of nurses and all workers needs will be met. We won this battle. Let’s keep fighting for a better world – communism! Dare to struggle, dare to win!

The premise of the Netflix original series Stranger Things began simply enough: a boy goes missing near a top-secret government laboratory. An adventure ensues as the teenage protaganists go on the hunt for answers, witnessing strange things along the way: supernatural forces, a top secret government experiment, and a girl with telekinetic powers.
The latest season is a celebration of retro consumerism and anti-communism. The storyline, set in the 1980s American Midwest, tells the tale that the greatest evil the working class has to face during an era of Reagonomics, Cold War imperialism, and rampant racism are Soviet Russians. Yet CHALLENGE recognizes that this storyline is a distorted version of history, far from the truth.
This current period, where U.S. imperialism is in decline and world war with China and Russia looms, a nostalgic look when the U.S. Empire still ranked supreme is helpful to the ruling class. The liberal ruling-class media loves to use anti-communism as a tool to build U.S. nationalism and anti-Russian ideas that can be used for war.
The Russian villain trope
Today’s public anti-Russian paranoia since the 2016 presidential election prepares society for a real conflict between these two imperialist powers. Seen through this lens, a show like Stranger Things is part of that war effort. The show is set at a time when anti-Soviet propaganda was as American as apple pie, a campaign spearheaded by the Democratic Party and its liberal media outlets. This  season mimics the anti-communist hysteria of the ‘80s, as seen in movies like Red Dawn (1984). The main difference between then and now is the relative decline of U.S. power.
The new season begins with capitalist USSR hitman Grigori and a room full of scientists, one that goes unnamed and another named Alexei, who goes on to become a class traitor and is seen peering into a glass with a machine behind it. Three men have been electrocuted by the Russians’ inadequate technology. The head scientist utters in Russian, “Comrade General, we are close. You can see our progress. We just need more ti—” his statement is cut off by Grigori who proceeds to lift the pitiful scientist by his neck and choke him.
The Russian men are downright evil towards the workers. That is NOT how communists roll. To top it off, the choice of using communist lingo among villains mocks the history. While the Soviet Union had already reversed into capitalism, it’s convenient for the capitalist media to build U.S. patriotism through anti-communist packaging.
The camera pans from the lab to the mountains of what’s assumed to be Russia. The head general and Grigori walk towards their private helicopter above a snowy, gray castle mounted with a waving communist flag. THIS is the headquarters of evil—far from the American suburbs filled with green pastures and segregated pools.  
A dangerous nostalgia for 1980s America
Stranger Things reflects a time when racist free-market economics was at its peak: “A free-market economic system can be both impossibly damaging to small businesses (see: the new arrival of the Starcourt Mall in Hawkins) and a preferable alternative to the authoritarian communism of America’s 1980s enemies” (The Atlantic, 7/4). This damage is evidenced by signs around town that read “Save Downtown, no to Mall.” One character, pitches a story about the displacement of small stores to the executives of their local newspaper but the all-male newsroom mocks her.
Beneath the center of impulse shopping, over-consuming and wage slavery the scene poses a greater threat—the Russian conspiracy. The danger of this message is that it misleads people to believe that Russia is exclusively linked with communism, and communism with terrorism.
Class betrayals
Another layer of this anti-communism is exhibited through Murray the Russian translator and Alexei. The journalist and the translator take Alexei hostage. These two become the best of friends as Alexei transforms and sells his loyalty to the Americans through 7/11 slushees, carnival games, and fast food. The joys of American consumerism can turn a cold-hearted Russian soft and move him in the “RIGHT” direction.
Erica, 10-year-old sister to protagonist Lucas doesn’t need to be turned since she already values U.S. capitalism. When characters ask Erica to spy on the Russians by climbing through an air duct, she mentions what she loves most about America—the free market system and makes her own demands for a lifetime supply of “U.S.S. butterscotch” ice cream. The only Black girl in the season is inexplicably pro-capitalist and anti-communist. Funny how the most exploited and oppressed under capitalism—Black woman workers—are portrayed as the biggest supporters of their own demise.
Who’s the monster?
The illusion of a nostalgic 1980s U.S. that Stranger Things sells must be broken. Without a proper criticism within the story, Stranger Things amounts to a cultural celebration of the U.S. as the ultimate anti-communist settlement and furthers that sentiment with its capitalistic pursuits.
Weeks after the series premiere, Baskin Robbins released a Stranger Things ice cream flavor campaign for the U.S.S. Butterscotch. How do we go from aliens and nostalgia-based fiction to capitalistic promotion? Let the ruling class tell it and the ‘threat’ is always external, never the system itself but in this case, it’s the Soviet Union, an otherworldly evil.
This connects to today’s present news as the ruling class, liberal politicians, and businesses are described as necessary evils while the real evil that’s promoted are the communists, and immigrants, here to only inflict violence against patriotic Americans and their values. Like most anti-communist propaganda, the evils that they attribute to communism are already alive inside capitalism. What Stranger Things is projecting as  the Soviet nightmare, is simply a reflection of the U.S.’s own capitalist culture.
Stranger Things started off as a show about monsters, but fails to call the real one out. As you watch the show, be critical of this propaganda and push back for the whole international working class.

Quito, Ecuador, October 9–Workers’ anger and frustration exploded in Ecuador, paralyzing the country from Quito, the capital city, to the Pacific coast, storming and occupying the parliment  building and sending President Lenin Moreno into hiding. These protests come after Moreno unveiled plans to impose austerity measures that threaten to plunge workers further into the abyss of poverty and capitalist exploitation. These massive protests across Ecuador demonstrate what the bosses fear most: workers, when organized and angry, have the power to bring the capitalist system to a screeching halt. However, absent communist politics and leadership, which Progressive Labor Party (PLP) strives to bring to these and all workers’ struggles around the world, workers will be trapped in a revolving door of dead-end reforms that bring with them more economic crises and swindles from liberal politicians.
Workers halt business as usual
The unpopular measure, a $4.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which many refer to as “el Paquetazo” or “Big Package,” includes a demand to end fuel subsidies. Gas prices have already soared to US$2.39 per liter from US$1.85, with diesel prices seeing a whopping 123 percent increase. The measures would also bring additional attacks on workers ranging from one days’ work without pay for all public employees, to staggering price increases for basic necessities such as food and clothing (Reuters 10/4).
The agreement sparked protests, which began with strikes from transportation workers. The protests spread like wildfire across the country, mobilizing thousands of indigenous groups and students and bringing business as usual to a standstill.
Workers violently clashed with cops, set tires and state property ablaze, staged work stoppages and suspended schools and municipal services. Workers are calling for a resumption of the subsidies and the end of the Moreno government. The police, whose job is to protect the bosses and their system, responded by attacking protestors, resulting in 477 arrests and one death (Telesur, 10/6).
Splits in Ecuador’s ruling class
The developments reflect the splits within Ecuador’s ruling class. When Rafael Correa, the previous president, came to power, he was able to pacify workers with limited reforms funded by oil revenue. Like the situation in Venezuela, when oil prices crashed in 2008, the illusions that the fake leftists like Correa and Chavez had built a workers’ paradise came crashing down – with help from U.S. foreign policy which sought to remove them. Unlike Maduro, who followed Chavez and moved to tie Venezuela’s economy closer to Chinese imperialists, Moreno’s response to the crisis has been to move closer to the U.S. This past May, he signed onto the Pacific Alliance, which Correa refused to join, locking arms with other faithful U.S. allies such as Colombia, Peru, and Mexico (Reuters 5/19). Meanwhile Maduro and Correa are calling for Moreno’s ouster.
Reject Ecuadorian Nationalism
Ultimately Ecuador’s ruling class is one of many pawns in the arena of inter-imperialist rivalry between U.S. and China, both of whom sought to buy allegiance from disparate sections of the Ecuadorean ruling class (and ruling classes throughout Latin America) through investments. Between 2005 and 2013, China accounted for 57 percent of all foreign investment in Ecuador (NYT, 7/15). As we have seen in neighboring Venezuela and in countries worldwide, choosing sides in the battle between rival capitalists, be they small-time local bosses or imperialist powers, is a deadly mistake for workers. Neither Moreno nor Correa, Maduro nor Guaidó (the U.S. puppet in Venezuela) represent a real, lasting solution for workers.
Turn reform into revolution
We salute these workers who bravely challenge the exploitation and oppression that capitalism has wrought upon them. Their militancy
and willingness to battle against the police and army is an inspiration to workers everywhere. Yet, these battles are for reforms—to return the country to a Correa-style social democracy. But we must realize that the shaky ground on which these reforms are built. When the economy crashes, as it always does under capitalism, the reforms vanish. We have seen it over and over again.
PLP seeks to take the fighting spirit so valiantly on display in Ecuador (and among auto workers in the U.S., and youth against climate change, and more), and combine it with communist politics and leadership. This is the key to the liberation of the workers of the world. Join us!