Imperialism and wars
PLP and friends organized against the imperialist wars in Iraq and Central Asia. Our resolutions exposed how the war in Iraq was a grab for oil profits. In the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. tried to secure a strategic geopolitical position to counter Russian and Taliban power. 

We marched militantly to the military booths at APHA meetings to oppose military recruitment for imperialist wars. We opposed booths with contraception disinformation and Nestle’s promotion of infant formula over breastfeeding.

At the 2022, People’s Public Health Conference we opposed the war in Ukraine. We contrasted the immense amount of funding the U.S. sent to Ukraine with the unmet funding needs to prevent and treat Covid-19. We advocated for soldiers and civilians to rebel and refuse to fight one another to end the war. We explained that this war was a fight between two imperialist powers competing for economic and political power that only a communist revolution against capitalism could stop. People listened with open minds about communism.

Vaccine equity
When Covid-19 hit, PLP members and colleagues joined forces with Justice Is Global and others to demand vaccines for the world. While the U.S. and European countries had vaccinated over 60 percent of their residents, poorer countries in Africa had vaccinated less than 12 percent; Haiti had even less protection. With many friends, we helped write and pass a successful resolution that attacked the trade and patent policies that prevented other countries from developing their own vaccines.

Joining forces with APHA’s International Section, we supported another resolution calling for debt cancellation and public funding of health and social services.

PLP members also attended demonstrations organized by Justice Is Global to demand that the pharmaceutical company Moderna help other countries produce Covid-19 vaccines. PLP members joined a large demonstration at Moderna’s headquarters in Boston, rallies at the White House, and a “sleepover” at the home of Biden’s Covid-19 advisor.

Liberation for workers in Palestine
A doctor in PLP joined three trips of health workers to Israel and the West Bank from 2004-2010, delivering health care and meeting with many Palestinian and Jewish political and health organizers. This doctor and another PLP member then led several trips of comrades and friends, revisiting these contacts, and recruiting a few workers from Israel to PLP.

In the U.S., a PLP member spoke at several forums to advocate for unity among workers from Israel and Palestine to establish a communist state. She emphasized that both Israel and the Occupied Territories are highly unequal capitalist societies with great internal health and wealth disparities.

Since 2014, a Party member has participated in Jewish Voice for Peace, a U.S. anti-Zionist organization, to promote JVP’s involvement in antiracist struggles in the U.S. as well as opposing U.S. support of the illegal and fascist Israeli occupation of Palestine. She also argues against uncritical support for Palestinian nationalism as opposed to building a working class antiracist alliance of Jews and Palestinians against an increasingly fascist Israeli occupation.

Immigration and Title 42
At the 2021 APHA meeting, PLP members and friends led a militant march to the ICE (Immigration and Control Enforcement) office to demand an end to Title 42 and the detention and deportation of migrants.

Title 42, implemented under Trump, allows the U.S. government to stop asylees from entering the U.S. because of a perceived health risk from Covid-19. Homeland Security returned tens of thousands of desperate people from Haiti and Latin America to countries where they faced arrest, death, and starvation. Public health and immigration organizers opposed Title 42 with demonstrations, petitions, and appeals to President Biden who deported more people than Trump.

The policy was scheduled to end in late December 2022 but has been extended.

Haiti
The Progressive Labor Party launched a summer project with medical workers and friends in Haiti. Doctors and nurses delivered supplies and medications to a large camp and campuses. We led a large rally around the hospital that was shown on Haitian TV.

After an earthquake in 2010, there was a huge outbreak of cholera brought by U.N. troops. The epidemic sickened 820,000 people, killing 10,000. In APHA, PLP worked with a nurse on a policy statement calling on the UN to pay compensation for the damage and develop a clean water system. The policy eventually passed despite the leadership’s concern about criticizing the U.N. The 2011 APHA meeting sponsored several special sessions about Haiti with the participation of local advocates.

PLP health organizers are currently raising funds for our comrades in Haiti who are providing mutual aid to workers suffering from the current upheaval while organizing study groups to involve more people to fight the exploitation from Haitian and U.S. rulers who maintain poverty and violence.

Lessons
As APHA members, we need to ensure there is action tied to these policies and recruitment to our Party. Most importantly, we need to convince our public health friends to go beyond pushing unlikely reforms and become communists to give workers the power to end war, health inequities, and wage slavery.

 

Under liberal fascist former mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and current mayor Andre Dickens, Atlanta began plans to build Cop City. This $90 million training center would include a shooting range and model neighborhood to stage raids on 85 acres of forest adjacent to historically Black communities (CNN, 9/24/22?). Workers are fighting back with street protests and erecting their own camps in the threatened forest.

On January 18, Tortuguita, a widely loved environmental organizer, in a raid on the encampments was killed (PBS, 1/29). The police killing prompted several nights of protests in downtown Atlanta and worldwide as workers questioned the police account of the murder. More than a dozen protestors have been charged with domestic terrorism. This chilling new trend is popular with liberal fascist politicians to squash worker fightback.

NEWARK, NJ, January 30—Workers across the U.S. are taking to the streets to rally against the murder of  Tyre Nichols after the release of bodycam footage showed Nichols's brutal, deadly beating by Black Memphis cops. Progressive Labor Party members (PLP) joined a rally in Newark in solidarity with Tyre Nichols and the countless names of workers slain by this murderous system. This latest murder confirms a trend of Black-led liberal fascism where we see cities with a Black democratic ruling class government are becoming the new faces of terror against our class.

Now, the workers’ anger confirms a) the shallowness of identity politics as a tool to divide us, and b) reforms don’t work.

Instead, workers need to join PLP. Smashing the racist, fascist police terror that robbed Tyre’s life is a pillar of our Party’s work.

A Black cop is still a kkkop
The protest was led by the liberal reformers in the city of Newark and had more local government officials than workers present. This can only be explained by the historical contradiction of this period–where identities are primary to the capitalist ruling class to divide and exploit workers and squash rebellion more intensely. Tyre Nichols, Carl Dorsey, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán or Tortuguita, and Keenan Anderson are victims of the liberal fascist state ruled by Black and Latin politicians and cops.

“See, us Black people are suffering everywhere,” one woman said. Monique Rodwell, mother of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers, assaulted by police in 2020 and friends of PLP replied, “it’s not just Black people; it’s poor people.” Another educator with us noted, “the protests stopped once Biden got in office. He’s the same one that introduced the 1994 Crime Bill.” This is someone that has been in our base for years and a former student of a comrade in Newark.

We were not strong enough  in numbers to provide leadership at this rally but we do plan to organize a worker-led response to the murder of Tyre and the rise of liberal fascism in the near future. When liberal fascists are forced to face the rage of the working class and manage to get away, we as communists cannot stop organizing. For every Tyre there are masses of workers killed by racist police terror around the world that don’t make the headlines. Fighting for Alex Flores, for Shantel Davis, Raymond Chaluisant we didn’t stop. And we won’t stop until masses of workers around the world see that police brutality is as vital to capitalism, as communist revolution is to workers!

Liberal fascism unleashes killer kkkop gangs
In the aftermath of the George Floyd worldwide movement led by Black workers, liberal fascist mayors and politicians misled workers with the most revolutionary potential, funneling our class’ rage into the ballot box, while also unleashing a viscious wave of racist police terror.

Black mayors from Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Newark painted Black Lives Matter slogans on the same streets where they send their killer kkkop special units to spill workers’ blood. These units–from the Jump Out Boys in Newark that killed Carl Dorsey and threatened the Rodwell Spivey family to the Executioners in Los Angeles to the Memphis Scorpion Unit that killed Tyre Nichols – are essentially a kkkop murder inc., a persistent nationwide element using corruption and intimidation tactics to cement their control over the Black and Latin working class communities they cannot profit without.

Like Newark, Memphis is a model for Big fascists to pour in their finance capital. For Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase, extracting superprofits from the guaranteed racist super-exploitation and super-neglect of a majority Black and Latin workforce is a winning formula! These parasites are the largest beneficiaries of extra payments, commonly known as a “Black Tax,” placed on such municipalities forced to take loans to close gaps in budgets unmet by taxing such low wages (Bloomberg, 09/29/22). Tennessee, the state where Memphis is located, is on par with the lowest minimum wage across the U.S. $7.25.

The answer of fascist U.S. President Jim Crow Joe Biden has been to betray workers by riding the wave of workers’ anger into office. Once elected, Biden assured finance capitalists that there would be no effort to defund the police (itself a liberal reform) under his administration.

Today, U.S. police forces represent the third largest military expenditure globally; as former New York City mayor Bloomberg called it, the NYPD is one of the world’s largest armies. Expect the Biden administration to opportunistically milk the Nichols tragedy to stoke their political momentum for the 2024 election. As we go to press, Kamala Harris–a former prosecutor who sent hundreds of workers to prison– hopes we will forget that when announcing that she will attend Tyre’s funeral.  

Fight fascism with communism
Under capitalism, there can be no justice for workers against racist killer kkkops. Their job is to serve and protect the ruling class, especially the Big Fascists–the liberal politicians and finance capitalists. For decades, these Big Fascists have wielded the lethal power of the police with near impunity to clear cities of Black and Latin workers for gentrification. At the same time, these liberal fascists push reforms to keep workers invested in the system–from voting to hiring more Black and Latin cops. Tyre Nichols brutal slaying shows that neither works. Only with organized worker fightback with international communist leadership like PLP will we finally realize communism and smash racist police terror once and for all.

On the same day that the first Black woman police chief, Cerelyn Davis, fired the five Memphis cops, the Newark police force under Black Mayor Ras Baraka’s leadership walked away scott-free for murdering another Black worker, Carl Dorsey, in 2020. Politicians at the rally praised Davis, the murderer-in-chief, for swiftly penalizing the cops that killed Tyre. When agents of the capitalist state are disciplined, our class must beware that this is not a victory but a sign of developing fascism.

However, locking a few cops up will never smash racist police terror. Only when workers recognize capitalism as the sham it is and commit to building an internationalist, communist, worker-led state will racism, sexism, and exploitation be eradicated from the face of the earth.

With capitalism in a worldwide crisis, inter-imperialist rivalry on the rise, and the bosses’ liberal democracies under siege, Peru is in bloody turmoil. Competing ruling-class factions are pushing our class to fight and die for their profits. Following the ouster of fake-left misleader President Pedro Castillo in December, mass demonstrations have erupted against his unpopular successor, Dina Boluarte. Workers have barricaded roads, blocked airports, and even forced the shutdown of the historic Inca site of Machu Picchu (Washington Post, 1/26). More than 50 workers, many of them Indigenous workers who’ve been targeted for racist oppression since the Spanish conquest of Peru in the 16th century, have been killed in clashes with the cops.

Militant, antiracist fightback against capitalist exploitation is always welcome. But when protests are channeled into support for one rotten, corrupt politician or another, they only strengthen the bosses’ hand. Our struggle must be aimed at the very core of the racist, sexist profit system. Capitalism must be smashed, root and branch. Without revolutionary communist politics and leadership, mass movements wind up funneled into dead-end reforms. Workers are left with crumbs—and even those crumbs will be taken away with the bosses’ next crisis.

The international Progressive Labor Party is fighting to build a mass revolutionary movement to destroy the capitalist profit system and create an antiracist, egalitarian world. We invite workers across South America and worldwide to join the Party for true working-class liberation.

All politicians serve the capitalist state
Peru is simmering for rebellion. Rich in natural resources, the country is one of the world’s top exporters of gold and copper (Ernst and Young, 2/21/22). It is also marked by staggering racist inequality, with one of three workers living in poverty (Foreign Policy, 1/25). With a healthcare infrastructure in a state of collapse, Peru has the world’s highest Covid-19 mortality rate (Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center). Indigenous workers in remote rural areas suffer from intense discrimination and high unemployment (Lima Easy, 5/6/21).

To win election as president in July 2021, Castillo, an Indigenous former schoolteacher, campaigned as a political “outsider” who promised sweeping reforms. He followed the playbook of other “pink tide” misleaders, from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil. Once elected Castillo railed against U.S. imperialist policies, promised a new constitution, agrarian land reforms, and wealth redistribution to the working class from levying heavy taxes on imperialist mining companies.

After Castillo was impeached and jailed on charges of rebellion and conspiracy, his number-two, Boluarte, seized the reins. She quickly changed sides to ally with Peru’s right-wing bosses. Her new best friend is one-time rival Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, the CIA-backed butcher whose regime killed thousands of civilians in the 1990s in its “dirty war” against the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement guerilla groups (Silvio Rendon, Research & Politics, January-March 2019.) Castillo and Boluarte prove once again that “lesser evil” capitalist stooges have nothing to offer the working class.

Rival imperialists scrap over spoils, workers pay the price
The extreme instability in Peru reflects sharpening, worldwide inter-imperialist competition. Like most of Latin America, the country has been pillaged by U.S. imperialists for more than 200 years. It recently served as the seat of the so-called “Lima Group,” a U.S.-led coalition that tried and failed to topple the government of oil-rich Venezuela (Pressenza, 9/13/21).

But over the last decade, China has replaced the U.S. as Peru’s top trading partner. Chinese bosses have poured billions into the country as they build ports and mines, including deals to connect Peru to its massive Belt and Road infrastructure project (Jones Day, January 2020). Far from bringing new prosperity to the region, this infusion of Chinese capital has only perpetuated worker exploitation in Peru. In 2022, workers repeatedly blocked roads leading to the Las Bambas copper mine after the Chinese firm MMG refused to share revenues with working-class communities (Reuters, 2/16/22). Perhaps not coincidentally, the incarcerated Castillo had moved Peru closer to the Chinese bosses and away from the U.S.

While we have no way to know when rising tensions between U.S. and Chinese imperialists will spill into open conflict, it’s clear that the two imperialist powers are heading toward World War III. When proxy conflicts inevitably expand into a global conflagration, the international working class will pay the highest price.

We can and will run society as a united working-class
As capitalist politicians show their callous contempt for the lives of those who vote them into office, other workers are rallying to support protestors who risk their lives in the streets. From Ferguson and Memphis to Gaza, Tehran, and Lima, workers and students have opened their homes and donated food and medical aid. Amid a crisis created by the violence and corruption and greed of the imperialist bosses, workers continue to show the courage and ability to fight for their class. The historic task before Progressive Labor Party is to transform these isolated reform battles into a worldwide fight for communism. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat can permanently end the bloody nightmare of capitalist rule. Join us!