Hitler would have been proud of how U.S. rulers conducted a series of human radiation experiments on thousands of U.S. citizens during and after World War II. Author Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files takes its name from one experiment involving the injection of plutonium on 18 patients from 1945 to 1947. Almost all were given 5 micrograms  (two with 94 micrograms) when the “tolerance dose” of plutonium was listed as 1 microgram. (All quotes  are from Welsome’s book.)
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) supervised a “vast network of national laboratories, universities and hospitals that would investigate every imaginable effect of radiation.” The government succeeded in keeping its role secret from the public as well as from the patients themselves. Hundreds of scientists  and technicians who developed the atomic bomb were exposed to radioactive substances; some like plutonium were new and had unknown health effects. After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, murdering a quarter of a million civilians, U.S. officials went to Japan to observe the effects on survivors.
In 1947 at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the prosecutors advanced the code that conducting such experiments without informing the subjects of their nature and hazards constituted a war crime. Yet “Thousands of human radiation experiments, many…without therapeutic benefit, were funded by the AEC” during 30 years of the Cold War. This included a proposal in 1949 to expose prisoners serving life sentences to 150 roentgens units of radiation to help determine how much radiation an air crew could tolerate while piloting an aircraft propelled by nuclear energy. Experiments continued for years:
Eight hundred and twenty-nine pregnant women at the Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic were given radioactive iron “cocktails” and told they “contained something nutritious that would benefit their babies”;
From 1946 to 1973, 74 boys at the Ferndale State School in Waltham, Mass., were given amounts of radioactive iron or calcium in their oatmeal by MIT scientists with the AEC’s support;
Between 2,000 to 3,000 enlisted men participated in experiments during the U.S. aboveground nuclear testing program in Nevada. Soldiers were moved as close as two miles from ground zero, a few within a mile;
From 1963 to 1971, over 100 prisoners in Oregon and Washington states “volunteered” to have their testicles exposed to as much as 600 rads of radiation;
“Operation Sunshine” sought to discover the hazards from fallout by collecting and analyzing “the body parts of more than 15,000 humans” often without permission from next of kin;
Between 1960 and 1973, the Defense Atomic Support Agency contracted with the Cincinnati General Hospital to expose over 90 cancer patients to total body irradiation.
Target Black and Poor White Women and Youth
In the Cincinnati study, the majority of patients were Black, at Vanderbilt poor white women and at Ferndale and Oregon working-class youth and prisoners. Some studies like the total body irradiation experiments “caused intense suffering and premature deaths in some patients.”
The AEC was primarily concerned that revealing the experiments might adversely affect domestic public opinion. President Eisenhower advised the AEC “to keep the public ‘confused’ about different types of radiation hazards.” (Paul Boyer, The Bombs Earl Light) A primary reason soldiers were sent into Nevada’s nuclear test zone was to show their parents back home there was nothing to fear from radioactive fallout. According to the chair of the Pentagon’s Medical Policy Council, the soldiers themselves were terrified of entering the area that had been subject to nuclear radiation. The exercise sought to “dispel a fear that is…entirely groundless” and thus mobilize the soldiers to march into a nuclear strike zone to fight a battle against an equally irradiated enemy.” (Moreno, “Undue Risks: Secret State Experiments on Humans, p. 164)
People outside the test zones got “equal treatment”: “Even though scientists were aware that fallout from the tests could pose serious hazards to nearby communities, they chose not to evacuate residents because they apparently feared such a move would harm public relations and jeopardize the test site.” A House Committee released a report on 31 human radiation experiments involving 700 people showing that they were conducted without informed consent and had been covered up for decades.
The fact that the U.S. ruling-class has conducted these barbarous fascistic experiments should leave no doubt that it will be ready to kill millions in nuclear war in order to preserve its profit system. All the more reason for a communist-led international working class to organize a revolution to wipe out capitalism forever.

U.S. bosses’ hypocrisy has been front and center since the February 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which a student murdered 17 of his former classmates and staff members with an assault weapon. This open act of terrorism has further identified splits within the ruling class, as Democrats and Republicans make a show of battling over gun control on a national stage.
Neither demands for gun control—nor, on the other side, for proposals to arm teachers—will save working-class lives. The liberal bosses’ calls for perceived safety and control (read: trust the capitalist state, consent to fascism) will never protect the working class—only we can break our own chains. Progressive Labor Party counts on you to join us and build a mass movement against the capitalist rulers’ imperialism, by far the biggest killer of working class lives.  
Violent system begets violence
The United States was built on systematic murder. It grew out of genocide for indigenous peoples and enslavement and Jim Crow for Black workers. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the ruling class supported gun ownership, freely arming members of the KKK and killer cops who continue to murder workers to this day.
Internationally, the U.S. unequivocally supports the murder of workers to maintain control of resources, people, and land. During both World Wars, the U.S. killed indiscriminately, from the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the U.S. became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons in combat. From Syria to Yemen to Afghanistan, U.S. bosses continue to murder workers to protect their control over Middle Eastern oil.
The U.S. ruling class is not for gun control; they will arm people when it suits them. They are for profit control. But while these big terrorists will kill millions without a blink to keep their profits flowing, they also understand that domestic terrorism is bad for their global brand.
Domestic terrorism hurts global credibility
Historically, demands for or against gun control in the U.S. have fallen along party lines. Republicans continue to get re-elected and line their pockets with favorable advertising and funding from the National Rifle Association (NRA). In 2016 alone, this fascist organization spent nearly $140 million on “legislative programs and public affairs,” including $30 million on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and at least $20 million on Republican Senate races (huffingtonpost.com, 11/16/17).
Meanwhile, the Democrats are seizing an opportunity to win allegiance from workers and control a growing mass movement within the limits of electoral politics. Democratic politicians are leading rally cries to slap down the NRA and pass stronger laws to restrict the sales of firearms:
Democrats have scrambled to dust off a raft of gun-control legislation that’s sat on the shelf for years: expanding background checks, allowing police and family members to ask judges to disarm gun owners who show signs of violence or instability, prohibiting gun sales to people deemed too unstable to handle their own finances, raising taxes on guns and ammo, changing the gun-buying age from 18 to 21 (Rolling Stone 3/1).
The rulers’ main wing, representing finance capital, is now calling for gun control so as to not to lose more ground to its imperialist arch-rivals, Russia and China. China’s Global Times recently shamed the U.S. in an editorial titled, “China can offer lessons to U.S. in protecting human rights” (2/22). It reads:
Washington has been pointing an accusing finger at other countries over human rights issue[s]. However, more [people in the U.S.] have been killed by gunfire in the country than [U.S.] soldiers being killed in all U.S. wars. It’s inhumane for the U.S., which boasts about its human rights record, to turn a blind eye to gun violence, [to] snub increasing calls for gun control and risk more innocent lives….The US should learn from China and genuinely protect human rights.
The U.S. ruling class has not controlled violence domestically because it does not want to. In Australia, a capitalist country where more than 17 percent of children live in poverty, the government created stricter gun laws after one mass shooting in 1996. Since then, not a single mass shooting has occurred (BBC, 10/4/17). Gun control or lack-there-of is not a mystery, it’s a conscious political decision. Infringing upon workers’ rights, in particular their right to live, is the capitalist way.
The rulers’ main wing, however, understands these flawed optics and is now striving to control—not stop—national murders in an effort to save face as an international super power and regain the trust of workers within the U.S. As the mostly white students from Parkland call for revised gun legislation, main wing Democrats are seizing an opportunity to get disaffected workers to vote in the coming midterm elections in 2018.
Reform vs. revolution, rifle edition
Gun violence in the U.S. has disproportionately affected Black and Latin workers. They are the ones brutalized most egregiously at the hands of murderous police, yet no one is calling for legislation to disarm hyper-militarized police forces.
Black youth have been calling for gun control for years. No action was taken in 2012, after racist vigilante George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in Florida. In 2014, after the murder of Michael Brown, Black working-class leaders in Ferguson organized a militant fightback, which Mass Murderer in Chief Barack Obama dismissed by saying he had “no sympathy at all for [people] destroying [their] own communities” (CNN 11/26/14).
But on February 22, to the students of Parkland, Obama tweeted: “…Marching and organizing to remake the world as it should be. We’ve been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.”
When Black and Latin workers fight to remove guns from their neighborhoods, they are rejected and reprimanded. But when white students call for reform and appeal for the assistance of opportunistic lawmakers, they are applauded.
Under capitalism, gun control is about controlling the working class, containing their protests, and attempting to lead them like sheep to trust a system that will ultimately orchestrate their own deaths. In recent months, we have seen the bosses mobilize in the Alabama election against Klansman and gun nut Roy Moore. We have seen it throughout the #MeToo movement, and now we are seeing it clearly in the chorus of calls for gun control.
But the fact remains that Black workers are the key to communist revolution, and that none of the bosses’ guns—or gun control—can stop a conscious working class.
Freedom from mass shootings is revolution
The U.S. has been built on mass murder of the working class. Conversations about arming teachers and intensified background checks are not about protection; they are about normalizing fascism in schools.  
The only freedom workers can have from mass violence and killings is to unite as a class—to form an international, multiracial, revolutionary front against the bosses.
In the hands of the masses, armed with communist class-consciousness and led by the Progressive Labor Party, organized violence can be revolutionary. One day, the international working class will bury these mass slaughterers with the very weapons we have built.

Against the deliberate evasion and enshrouding of the truth, Lerone Bennett, Jr. was among the first scholars to survey Black history and lay bare the roots of racism. This Black historian and longtime editor of Ebony magazine spent a lifetime fighting the racist rewrite of history. In his landmark The Shaping of Black America, he wrote:
In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money. ...Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, and the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy – the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen.
In “The Road Not Taken,” a groundbreaking chapter from this book, Bennett demonstrates that race and racism were created by a vulnerable and outnumbered ruling class elite facing the prospect of multiracial working class rebellion. He chronicles over a century of deliberate use of state power, both legislative and violent, to define and separate Black and white.
In “Black Power in the Old South,” from his first major work, Before the Mayflower, Bennett sketches a portrait of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, where the temporary exercise of federal power to suppress organized racism led to a brief flowering of multiracial social gatherings and political power that has yet to be seen again in the American South.
Thomas Jefferson, slave-owning grandfather
When the entire historical establishment still heeded the racist denials of Jefferson’s white descendants, Bennett was moved by an unwavering confidence in the story of Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson and of Sally Hemings, the slave the third U.S. president repeatedly raped from the time she was an adolescent.  (Over his lifetime as a wealthy Virginia plantation master, Jefferson owned more than 600 Black people.)
In his 1954 article, “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren,” Bennett points out the vicious hypocrisy of the author of the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that “all men are created equal.” As Bennett documented, Jefferson’s denial of his Black children with Hemings was cruelly and tragically unequal. (In fact, Jefferson kept those children enslaved until they came of age.)
Bennett went on to expose the stark inequities that four generations of racist U.S. “democracy” created between Jefferson’s white and Black descendants. The fact that Jefferson fathered six children by Hemings was widely accepted by mainstream historians only after DNA evidence emerged in 1998. Bennett was more than forty years ahead of his time.
Abraham Lincoln,ethnic cleanser
Bennett’s Forced into Glory, Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream is still met with disapproval from the Lincoln cult in the mainstream historical establishment. In this 662-page magnum opus, published in 2000, Bennett quotes directly from Lincoln’s papers and contemporaries to present the man as he was—a lifelong and committed racist. He portrays the rising politician in 1848, when Lincoln undertook a dogged campaign to strip free Black people of the vote and even to fund a program to deport all Black residents from Illinois. The stance that carried Lincoln to the presidency was not so much anti-slavery as anti-Black—a “White Dream” in Bennett’s words, to colonize all ex-slaves out of the U.S. after the Civil War.
Bennett’s unmasking of the white supremacist Lincoln is unlikely to be accepted by the court historians of the U.S. ruling class as long as the capitalists hold state power.  But under communism, in the anti-racist, more objective future to come, this work will be vindicated as well. Bennett’s scholarship will be part of the foundation for a new understanding of the U.S. past.  
When mainstream scholars ignore Bennett’s takedowns of icons like Jefferson and Lincoln, or his game-changing analysis of the roots of U.S. slavery, they remind us of the lies and omissions in capitalist chronicles of the communist past, as well. Ruling-class institutions cannot afford to tell the truth about the history of racism, a necessity for the profit system and all of its brutal inequalities. Nor can they tell the truth about communism, the only threat to the bosses’ class rule.
An intellectual’s legacy must be examined in historical context. Lerone Bennett, Jr. was shaped by times of massive, multiracial, anti-racist political upsurge. He saw more clearly than most what would be needed to take those movements forward to ultimate victory.
While Bennett was not a communist, the clarity and integrity of his work has inspired countless anti-racists and communists in challenging the falsehoods that prop up the capitalists’ dictatorship. He enriched our struggle and helped pave the way for new generations of worker-intellectuals to create a communist society. The Progressive Labor Party will guarantee that future revolutionaries learn the important lessons Bennett lived to teach us.

March 8 is celebrated as International Women’s Day all over the world. Many people are unaware of the working class origins of this day.
The Second International was the international organization of the socialist movement. Before the First World War, this movement contained some progressive elements. In 1910 the Second Women’s Conference of the Second International established International Women’s Day. Clara Zetkin, who later became a communist leader in Germany, proposed the following resolution:
In agreement with the class-conscious, political and trade union organizations of the proletariat...the socialist women of all countries will hold each year a Women’s Day, whose foremost purpose it must be to aid the attainment of women’s suffrage. This demand must be handled in conjunction with the entire women’s question according to socialist precepts. The Women’s Day must have an international character and is to be prepared carefully.
The date of March 8 was chosen because on that date in 1908 there was a mass demonstration of socialist-led women workers from the needle (textile) trades in New York City. The demonstration demanded the vote and mass organizing of women in the needle trades.
In 1914 in Russia Aleksandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and other Bolshevik women published Rabotnitsa, a Bolshevik journal for working-class women. The first issue was published on March 8. On March 8, 1917, a bold strike of women textile workers was supported by mas demonstrations that led to the overthrow of the Tsar.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, International Women’s Day was established as an official celebration every year in the Soviet Union.
International Women’s Day became a symbol of resistance to the oppression of women workers all over the world. On March 8, 1923, the communist-led Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) began a campaign in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU, now called Unite) and other needle trade unions to rebuild militancy and fight for unions controlled by their rank-and-file members.
On March 8, 1927, in Uzbekistan, a republic in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party (Bolshevik) began a mass campaign against the religious custom of forcing women to wear the veil (paranja or burqa). This was really a robe that covered the whole face and body. It was extremely hot and uncomfortable, and hindered a woman’s movement. The paranja symbolized the most oppressive aspects of the oppression of women. It had to go.
Finally, with the political work done, the time for action came. There was a mass burning of paranjas amid the playing of The Internationale, the communist anthem.
On that day ... tens of thousands of women, huddled in paranjas and chachvans poured like a menacing avalanche through the narrow choked streets, squares and bazaars of the ancient Central Asian cities...The vast multitude, including a number of men and children, gathered round the Lenin monument, which was likewise decked with red banners and native carpets, and the women waited breathlessly for what was to come....All the bands struck up the Internationale. ... The real proceedings began. ... They [the paranjas] were flung aloft into the quivering air, timidly at first, but then with ever wilder and more frenzied speed, these symbols of slavery that the women cast off, paranjas, chachvans and chadras. They were piled in rapidly growing heaps, drenched with paraffin, and soon the dark clouds of smoke from the burning common abjuration of a thousand year old convention, now become unbearable, flared up into the bright sky of the spring day. .. (Hewlett Johnson, The Socialist Sixth of the World)
Although we in Progressive Labor Party understand that winning the right to vote for any worker only helps to keep the capitalists in power by making them look more “democratic”, we also recognize the revolutionary side of the history of International Women’s Day.
We fight against sexism because it means the super-exploitation of women, and because it divides the working class. It is crucial to attack sexist practices, and to celebrate the vital role played by women communist leaders, as seen in our own Party. We use the name International Working Women’s Day in order to help show the interrelationship between capitalism and sexism.