CHICAGO, November 22 — On any given Saturday night in the trauma unit at Mount Sinai Hospital on Chicago’s West Side, many Black and Latin men are admitted with multiple gunshot wounds. For this comrade and his co-workers, it happens so regularly that it seems almost routine. But there’s nothing acceptable about the street violence—an outgrowth of the daily economic violence of capitalism—that brutalizes members of our class. Equally unacceptable are the proposed “solutions” by the city’s ruling class, from more killer cops on the street to stricter gun legislation to longer prison sentences.
Murderous Care Black Workers
About 30 years ago, when a trauma care network was first established in Chicago, a number of Level 1 trauma centers were created on the city’s North and West sides and nearby suburbs. But only two served the South Side, where the majority of the population is Black: the Michael Reese Hospital and the University of Chicago Medical Center. In 1988, two years after opening it, the obscenely wealthy, Rockefeller-created University of Chicago closed its adult trauma center, citing large financial losses. Today it accepts only patients 15 and younger. Michael Reese Hospital’s trauma center closed in 1991.
The city’s failure to maintain a Level 1 trauma center on the South Side is racist to the core. Most Black victims of major trauma must be transported up to ten miles to a hospital with adequate facilities. According to the American Journal of Public Health, people shot more than five miles from the nearest trauma center are 23 percent more likely to die in transit. Of the two thousand-plus gunshot wound victims in Chicago in 2015 to date, more than 800 fall outside that five-mile radius (Chicago Tribune, 9/11/15).
Racist Liberals Attack; Workers Fight Back
For those who view Democrats as the “lesser evil,” the liberal leaders’ approach to health care in Chicago is instructive. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley did little or nothing during his 22 years in office to re-open a trauma center on the South Side. Current Mayor Rahm Emanuel led the charge to close half the city’s mental health clinics in 2012. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle appears ready to approve the closing of pediatric inpatient services at Stroger Hospital, which serves mostly Black and immigrant workers and their families (see CHALLENGE, 11/11/15).
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is building a $500 million presidential library near the University of Chicago.
Finally after years of pressure from working-class activists, the University of Chicago is partnering with Sinai Health Systems to create a trauma center within Holy Cross Hospital in the city’s Southwest side. But workers must put this “victory” into context. It will do nothing to fight the poverty, desperation and violence created by the capitalist profit system.
Instead of worker-on-worker violence, the international working class needs worker-on-capitalist violence with a mass working-class Red army. We need an army to fight back against the racist Chicago Police Department for the murder of Laquan McDonald. We need to turn the guns around in the escalating imperialist bloodbath in Syria—and aim them at the capitalist bosses on all sides.
Only a communist society will make workers’ health a priority. Only communism can eradicate all the traumas of capitalism—for good.
CHICAGO, November 10 — Communists from the Progressive Labor Party joined the 12,000 attendees at the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual convention in early November, and raised revolutionary politics through a rally, literature distribution, discussion groups, and more.
We kicked off with mass leafleting and selling CHALLENGE at the Opening Session. Our message: Capitalism is the enemy of public health – fighting racism is the key to social change and public health. Our leaflet also documented many struggles we are engaged in. Other organizing tools included a flyer about price gouging by drug companies.
PLP organized fighters for our annual Troublemakers Breakfast to discuss public health politics and plan actions for APHA. Over 30 people participated, including students. Our discussion covered a wide range, including about the cutbacks in healthcare that involve the threatened closure of the pediatrics program at Stroger Hospital. Others raised the issues of the excessive prices of HIV and Hepatitis C drugs, and the fight against cholera in Haiti. We also examined student debt, the apartheid state of Israel-Palestine, and the high murder rates of transgender (particularly Black transgender) people. The group vowed to coordinate local and national public health struggles in the coming year.
U.S. Police Terror and Israeli Apartheid
In the session organized by the Black Caucus of Health Workers, young black students and professionals from the University of Illinois at presented talks on police violence. Treating racist police murder as part of a long-term public health crisis, speakers revealed that the number of people killed by kkkops— about 1,150 a year — is about seven times as high as the number of people lynched (160 a year) in the peak years of 1880s and 1890s.Without the recent courage and militancy of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebels, there would be a much smaller movement against racist state violence, and less of an impetus for an important session like this one.
In the session on Palestinian health justice, a PLP member presented a paper proposing a single secular communist state in Israel-Palestine and exposing the unequal class societies that prevail in both Israel and Palestine. The audience applauded. This begs the question: why can’t all borders be eliminated? It is not possible to have communism without making a worldwide revolution and having the international working class run society under one Party.
The Palestinian work group plans to invite every section of the convention to submit resolutions next year to force APHA to take a position against Zionism. Years ago, the APHA leadership had lied and promised to organize a fact-finding mission to pacify these fighters. Meanwhile, Israeli forces invaded towns and hospitals killing health workers and patients, arresting and shooting kids throwing stones, and more. For a world to make public health its top priority, we must cut out the root cause: this capitalist disease responsible for state terror and racist inequality.
Rally in the Exhibit Hall
A dozen people chanted “patients, not patents” in condemnation of racist drug company practices. We protested pharmaceutical booths for their outrageous drug prices, especially for Hepatitis C treatments. Hepatitis C affects over 3 million U.S. residents and 80-160 million people worldwide and is disproportionately prevalent among the poor. Companies like Gilead are charging $80,000 for the course of treatment. This is a racist attack on our class! With the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, drug companies will be allowed to set higher prices and maintain monopoly patents for longer periods of time, further killing the working class by restraining access to drugs. While APHA security followed us and issued warnings, vendors and visitors took our literature and thanked us for providing some antiracist excitement around an important issue.
Reformism, Camara Jones Style
Incoming president, Camara Jones, instituted a campaign to make racism the major focus of APHA (about time!) APHA, like many professional organizations, tries to reform capitalism and secure a seat at the table of policy makers. We want to burn down the table and create a system based on equity where there is no profit, racism, or any other forms of oppression.
Even as the ruling class works to place liberals like Jones in charge of key mass organizations such as the APHA, her presidency is an opportunity for PLP to continue to fight for multiracial unity and militancy in the struggle for public health equity. Our aim is to do what Camara Jones never will —build a base for communist revolution among public health workers. The opening is there; as the president of the Black Caucus of Health Workers said, “we need revolution, not resolutions.” By the end of the convention, over 2,250 communist literature were distributed, including a four-page document outlining the need for communist revolution.
Join your local public health struggles and come to Denver in November 2016 for the next APHA meeting. Join the Progressive Labor Party if you see no justice under capitalism.
(Click here for leaflet on Paris Terorist Attack)
Immediately following the Paris attacks, the mass media has ramped up anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism, using them as an excuse for intensified border control and calls for war. These racist responses to a horrendous attack on the working class of Paris are exactly what the ruling class wants (whether they are French, U.S. or Saudi bosses). What we really need is working class unity against all these bosses and their warmongering.
The best way to stand in solidarity with our Parisian sisters and brothers against this most recent carnage is to stand against imperialist war on our jobs, schools and universities. These recent attacks in Paris reflect the continued chaos created by the US and French led oil war in Iraq and Syria.
Same Enemy, Same Fight!
From Paris to Damascus, Baghdad to Brooklyn the workers of the world have no good side in this dogfight for oil profits in the Middle East. Only under the international communist red flag of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) can we turn these racist wars and fascist anti-immigrant policies into a class war and fight for communism: a world without borders, wars for profit, racism or sexism.
With all their rhetoric about creating an Islamic state, ISIS (which is composed primarily of former military of the old Saddam regime and funded by both oil profits sold on the black market and small-time Saudi bosses), has actual dreams of maintaining control of key oil and gas fields in direct competition to the US and French bosses.
Since September, 2015 the French bosses have deployed their only aircraft carrier, and just this past week have expanded their bombing campaign from Iraq into Syria, carrying out over 1,300 sorties and 271 airstrikes murdering thousands of workers “without mercy.”
Workers of the World Unite!
Workers need to unite internationally against all imperialists. Communist revolution is the only solution to the problems of capitalism but we need millions of committed workers to make that happen. Communism means no bosses’ borders creating fake divisions for our class. We will share all of the world’s resources for the benefit of our whole class!
Smash Anti-Muslim racism!
Join the international Progressive Labor Party in the fight for Communism!
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2016 Election U.S. Bosses Seek Unity for Next War
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- 15 November 2015 312 hits
The capitalist class that runs the United States appears to be tentatively settling on its two presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio. The 2016 U.S. presidential election is more than the media-driven circus it appears to be—for the bosses, the stakes are high. While U.S. imperialism still dominates the world, its relative power is in decline. It faces growing challenges from the capitalist bosses running China and Russia and upstart regional imperialists like ISIS.
Elections in any capitalist country, from the U.S. to Malaysia, are used to discipline the bosses’ ranks, to centralize power in times of crisis, and to deceive the international working class into backing the rulers’ agenda. Above all, the mission is to protect and expand the capitalists’ profits.
Rubio and Clinton: Birds of a Feather
For the dominant wing of U.S. financiers and industrialists, including JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil, the 2016 election is a means to guarantee the future use of military force to maintain control of the energy-rich Middle East—and gear up for a broader conflict with Russia or China or both. For the moment, at least, the bosses are leaning toward Rubio as the Republican nominee: “Marco Rubio will take the mantle of ‘establishment’ or ‘business’ candidate from Jeb Bush” (Fortune, 11/1/15). On the Democratic side, the warmakers’ current choice is Hillary Clinton. A reliable servant of U.S. imperialism as Barack Obama’s former secretary of state, Clinton engineered the mass slaughter of workers in Libya in 2011. The liberal Democrat “insurgent,” Bernie Sanders, is in fact a pro-imperialist tool of the same establishment that now favors Rubio (see CHALLENGE, 8/12/15). His job is to lure disillusioned young people into the charade of electoral “democracy” before he steps aside for Clinton or some other capitalist shill acceptable to the bosses.
While no one can predict the outcome in 2016 with any certainty, one thing is certain: The next U.S. president will serve the needs of U.S. imperialism, just like Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and those who came before them.
Fascism: Capitalism in Crisis
The main U.S. bosses are also using these elections to reassert their dominance over more domestically oriented capitalists like billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. In contrast to the ExxonMobil wing of the ruling class, with its trillions invested in the oil wealth of the Middle East, the Koch brothers’ assets are concentrated in refineries in Minnesota and Texas. Where the ExxonMobil faction has defended the crude it pumps in Iraq at the cost of three million workers’ lives and counting, the Kochs and their Tea Party allies oppose the corporate tax hikes a major ground invasion would require. The Koch network plans to raise close to $900 million in 2016 to elect Republicans who will “push for deregulation, tax cuts and smaller government” (New York Times, 1/26/15). Koch backer Chris Rufer, a California tomato processor, said the network’s “central goal…is to stop the centralization of power” (The Hill, 10/21/15).
“Centralization of power” is code for fascism, a form of capitalism in crisis, when the bosses can no longer rule in the usual way. The finance capital wing is putting the Koch faction on notice that it needs to fall in line, contribute its share of cash to finance the coming imperialist wars, and help coerce the working class to fight them. For the international working class, fascism means more open racist and sexist terror by the state apparatus—the cops, courts, and prisons. U.S. workers will be forced into a military draft amid mass racist unemployment. Workers outside the U.S. will face a sagging imperialist power that will be only more desperate – and brutal – to stay on top.
U.S. Bosses Prepping for Fascism
Rubio’s break with the Koch faction made the dominant U.S. imperialists happy. On October 30, the big bosses’ New York Times celebrated with a front-page article: “Paul Singer, Influential Billionaire, Throws Support to Marco Rubio for President.” Singer’s pro-Rubio manifesto read in part:
There are enormous power vacuums [worldwide] in one hot spot after another...Senator Rubio grasps this reality in his bones...His instincts are excellent, and he knows the terrain and the risks. He will stand with our allies and stand up to our adversaries.
Just who is Paul Singer? He heads Elliott Management, a Wall Street “vulture” hedge fund known for buying up defaulted loans in countries like Peru and the Republic of Congo, “rejecting any attempts at restructuring, then firing up lawsuits to claim full repayments plus more” (Wall Street Journal, 6/25/14). A significant contributor to both the Koch network and the past Republican presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, Elliott is ideally placed to help unite the ruling class behind a willing servant like Rubio.
As Russia deepens its military involvement in Syria and China colonizes the South China Sea, the U.S. bosses’ problems are deepening by the day. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, an influential pro-imperialist think tank, writes that Syria is “an example of how we might want to send or have to send 10, 20, 30,000 forces to one mission or another …there are security stakes around the world that still could necessitate more than just drones and Special Forces” (NPR, 11/1/15).
The bosses know they cannot win over workers to fight in the next profit-driven bloodbath without getting their own house in order and bringing the Koch brothers to heel.
No War But Class War!
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is against all imperialist war. We stand for revolutionary class war! PLP is organizing in more than two dozen countries to build a mass international Party to fight for communism. We reject the bosses’ election circus. We say: Don’t vote, organize! Organize anti-racist struggles on the job, on the campuses and in the bosses’ militaries. Only PLP represents the working class. Only a mass international PLP can smash imperialism for all time. Join us!
NEW YORK CITY, October 27—Forty students, joined by church and community groups and members of Progressive Labor Party, rallied to protest the exploitation of campus workers at Columbia University, a wealthy ruling-class school with a long history of attacking the working class.
Student Worker Solidarity has been organizing for three years at Columbia, which pays students about $9 an hour while hoarding a $9.6 billion endowment and lavishing its president, Lee Bollinger, with a salary of more than $3 million a year (businessinsider.com, 12/16/14). At today’s demonstration, students told of how they earn so little that they cannot afford both food and books. One student noted that vital positions—like sexual violence hotline counselors—are not paid at all.
Only a system based on wage slavery would force workers to pay for the bare necessities of life. Under communism, work will be organized according to the needs of society and the commitment of the individual. There will be no money or wages. Incentives will be political, not material. We will work to serve our class.
Today’s demonstration culminated in a march into the office of the provost, the university’s number two official, with the group chanting loudly all the way. After the provost failed to respond to their demonstration on October 13, as one student put it, the protesters had “no choice but to escalate” the class war.
Under the profit system, all businesses—from fast-food chains to hospitals to colleges—attack workers on a daily basis. As an elite educational institution, Columbia helps develop next-generation leaders for U.S. capitalism as the rulers move toward broader war and rising fascism. That’s an important job, and Columbia will crush anyone who gets in its way. In recent years, Columbia students have sided with community residents against police sweeps of adjacent, mostly Black and Latin public housing projects. They have exposed the university’s racist designs to displace long-time neighborhood residents in campus expansion schemes.
Reform Struggles, Revolutionary Ideas
Fifty years ago, when PLP was founded, it undertook a strategy to inject revolutionary content into student anti-war and anti-racist movements. A worker-student alliance was born. PLP’s early growth among students was rooted in the conviction that capitalism was the real enemy, and that only a revolutionary party could lead workers to a communist world that will liberate us all.
During the Vietnam War, anti-imperialist campaigns at Columbia and other campuses, along with PLP summer projects, inspired students to take jobs in factories and transit. This Party-led movement produced committed revolutionaries who dedicated their entire lives to overthrowing the whole rotten capitalist system.
Students in Student Worker Solidarity are becoming accomplished organizers as they recognize the need to unite with workers. The next step is to deepen our understanding of the limits of capitalism, a system than can never provide a decent standard of living for most workers. In fact, as international competition for markets and resources intensify, and inter-imperialist conflicts inevitably follow, cuts in wages and services will only get worse. Ultimately, capitalism has got to go! And that means joining PLP to create a world of work without the exploitation of wage slavery.
