KKKops doing what they’re hired to do: attack workers
The Guardian, 1/6 –U.S. law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, making it the deadliest year on record for police violence...Police across the country killed an average of more than three people a day, or nearly 100 people every month last year according to Mapping Police Violence. The racial disparities have also persisted: Black people were 24% of those killed last year, while making up only 13% of the population. From 2013 to 2022, Black residents were three times more likely to be killed by U.S. police than white people. The inequality is particularly severe in some cities, including Minneapolis where police have killed Black residents at a rate 28 times higher than white residents, and Chicago, where the rate was 25 times higher.
Capitalist healthcare = exploiting workers
Medscape, 1/10–Most of the 30 volunteers who work at the 130-bed, for-profit East Cooper Medical Center spend their days assisting surgical patients — the scope of their duties extending far beyond those of candy stripers, baby cuddlers, and gift shop clerks. In fact, one-third of the volunteers at the Tenet Healthcare-owned hospital are retired nurses who check people in for surgery or escort patients to a preoperative room, said Jan Ledbetter, president of the hospital’s nonprofit Volunteer Services Organization...“They’re kept extremely busy,” Ledbetter said. “We need to have four of those volunteers a day.”
The U.S. health system benefits from potentially more than $5 billion in free volunteer labor annually, a KHN analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Independent Sector found. Yet some labor experts argue that using hospital volunteers, particularly at for-profit institutions, provides an opportunity for facilities to run afoul of federal rules, create exploitative arrangements, and deprive employees of paid work amid a larger fight for fair wages. “The rules are pretty clear, and yet it happens all the time,” said Marcia McCormick, a lawyer who co-directs the Wefel Center for Employment Law at Saint Louis University.
Imperialists fight over Taiwan
CNN, 1/9–A Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026 would result in thousands of casualties among Chinese, United States, Taiwanese and Japanese forces, and it would be unlikely to result in a victory for Beijing, according to a prominent independent Washington think tank, which conducted war game simulations of a possible conflict that is preoccupying military and political leaders in Asia and Washington. A war over Taiwan could leave a victorious U.S. military in as crippled a state as the Chinese forces it defeated. At the end of the conflict, at least two U.S. aircraft carriers would lie at the bottom of the Pacific and China’s modern navy, which is the largest in the world, would be in “shambles.”
“The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of service members. Such losses would damage the U.S. global position for many years…China also suffers heavily. Its navy is in shambles, the core of its amphibious forces is broken, and tens of thousands of soldiers are prisoners of war,” it said.
Egyptian workers cut back on meat, medicine and clothing to meet IMF demands
Wall Street Journal, 1/12–Egypt plans to cut spending after the International Monetary Fund extended hundreds of millions of dollars in an economic bailout package, as the country struggles to pay off debts accumulated from a decades long building boom. It will need to sell off $2 billion in public sector assets and borrow more than $1 billion each from the World Bank and China Development Bank to help close the gap, according to the IMF.
Across the country, families have been cutting back on meat, medicine and clothing. Bread, rice and cooking oil have been among the items missing from store shelves, after demand for cheap items soared. Authorities have been reluctant to announce any formal cutbacks to a food subsidy program that helps tens of millions of Egyptians access cheap rice, oil and sugar, although the government has become more stringent on who can receive ration cards.
Down with slumlords and kkkops, up up with community ties
PLers continue to base build with the Rodwell Spivey family as they grapple with another capitalist-borne crisis —an electrical fire to their home. The Rodwell Spivey brothers were harassed, stopped, and frisked by undercover Newark police officers in June 2021 and faced continued harassment for up to two years. Inspired by their ferocious fightback against police terror, PL stood with the brothers and family and continues to stand by their side. As their family felt like they were just starting to get their lives back on track, ready to celebrate Christmas together, a vicious slumlord left the family in their home without heat for days.
Like many workers, they thought a quick and harmless fix would be plugging in a space heater. Unbeknownst to them, the slumlord left them in a trap of a home with improper electrical wiring that led to a fire to a floor of their home, setting new furniture ablaze and leaving a six-month-old and teenage girl without many of their clothes. After the fire, members of PLP visited and called the family as soon as we heard the news. We also crowdfunded donations amongst our group, and a stylish friend of the Party donated clothes to the teenage girl, Justin Rodwell’s daughter, who’s interested in fashion.
The Rodwell Spivey brothers are still awaiting a court date for municipal court after local bosses detained Justin for over a year in Essex County Jail. Although the charges have been lowered, workers have to face the brunt of this system in a number of ways daily, and it sometimes feels like we can never catch a break. The slumlord, who manipulates workers for profit, fixed some of the electrical in their home but is hardly doing anything to fix the extensive damage to the property.
When I suggested that the family report this slumlord to code enforcement, they shared that they knew a woman who reported a slumlord and was forced to vacate her property with nowhere else to live. This was a reminder that workers cannot count on reforms. Even reforms that seem to work for some, most typically stable workers, leave mostly others out in the cold once the verdict is done.
The Rodwell Spivey family is now making do with what they can, just as workers do and always have and just as communists do and always have, we are standing by their side and practicing ways we can not just make this system easier to deal with but be smashed for good. As capitalism crumbles, more workers will be left with piecemeal reforms and our own crises to solve. We must keep pushing and showing how communism is the only solution.
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DSA fights for piece-meal reforms
The North Jersey Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) recently held a forum in Jersey City concerning the right for counsel for tenants. The event started with a panel of tenants, many transplants from New York City that moved to Jersey City for more space and cheaper rent and were met with decaying housing conditions in a new building.
When their landlords refused to fix water leaking into their homes and shoddy elevators, the workers in the building banded together. They said one of the best things about the housing horror is that they were able to build community with their neighbors. They ended off the tenants’ panel by encouraging other workers to build tenants’ associations in their homes and shared they’d even help show people how to do it.
After seeing what the world would be like if workers fought for and built better housing conditions, DSA followed the discussion with a panel about their right-to-counsel reform idea. Basically, what right to counsel means is if you are threatened with eviction by your landlord, DSA is touting that you should get a free lawyer at the bare minimum.
One comrade pointed out the contradiction in DSA’s plan: they want workers to get behind protesting for community developers to fund this program. Not only that but DSA leaders imagine that this right to counsel could be central in City Hall of Jersey City. A comrade, a nonprofit worker, pointed out on the open mic that public and private dollars seldom coexist and that the plan doesn’t seem tangible.
DSA leaders’ response was that developers would fund it if we made them fund it! Besides, this plan is a stretch of the imagination, it continues to allow evictions and illegal rent increases to be maintained. If profit motives exist, profit will always be put over people.
The only way every worker will have a place to live is if we destroy profit, exploitation, and the whole capitalist system! Sell-out groups like DSA deter us from making this world possible.
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Need to explain material basis for racism
The January 4th issue has a lead article: John Hopkins Police Terror is Essential to Capitalism. It is a well written article documenting the history of racism on the John Hopkins campus and the role of campus security in fueling racism and attacking legitimate uprisings by students and workers at John Hopkins in fighting racism and injustice on the campus.
What I found lacking in the article was the material basis for racism in capitalist society. That is the underlying foundation for racism in the workplace and in communities in which we live. We as communists have a duty to educate and organize our class by developing communist consciousness. The material basis of racism which we have documented in Racism, A Fighter's Manual and other Progressive Labor Party (PLP) documents is the super-exploitation of Black and immigrant labor that allows Wall Street to steal trillions of extra profit through underpaying Black, Latin, and immigrant workers in excess of the exploitation of the rest of the working class.
A system of racist job classifications which channel workers of color into lower paying jobs, unsafe working conditions still predominate throughout the labor force. This super-exploitation transcends national boundaries and can be found in Europe, the Global South, Asia, the U.S., and wherever capitalism shows its face. This is the foundation of racism that generates its own racist culture globally to justify systemic exploitation. Racist police terror is not merely built on prejudice but the systemic racism of the profit system.Smash racist capitalism. Build PLP.
*****
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Führers Biden & Adams: Workers face liberal fascism, need communist revolution
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- 05 January 2023 355 hits
The recent wave of racist attacks on immigrant and homeless workers is exposing the U.S. bosses’ drive toward liberal fascism. As the world economy shrinks (imf.org, 7/22), the international crisis of capitalism is nearing a breaking point. As the U.S. loses ground to imperialist arch-rival China, and the war in Ukraine brings tensions with Russia to a boil, U.S. rulers will be forced to ditch their mask of liberal democracy and its charade of “human rights.” They will have no choice. To protect their profits and prepare for World War III, the liberal finance capital bosses must crush their capitalist competition—the openly racist, “America First” isolationists fronted by the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. At the same time, these liberal fascists know they need to build a mass patriotic movement, even as tens of millions are denied the most basic human needs: healthcare, housing, adequate nutrition. To stop workers from rebelling as capitalist society falls down around our ears, the liberal bosses are taking a page from the Nazi playbook. They are working to divide the working class by scapegoating groups they deem expendable.
On the Texas border, liberal President Joe Biden is breaking the bosses’ own rules for asylum and leaving migrating workers and children in the cold. In New York City, liberal Mayor Eric Adams has declared that homeless people can be detained and forced into hospitals that lack enough beds or staffing, even if they pose no threat to themselves or others (npr.org, 11/30/22). Trusting the Democratic Party liberal fascists as “lesser evils” will continue to devastate the international working class. We must see these murderous misleaders for what they are, an even greater danger than Trump and the Republicans. The liberals are more deceiving and, at least for now, more powerful in wielding state terror.
Our class is in a life-and-death struggle, and we cannot be fooled: There are no good capitalists! Our only future lies in communist revolution, in a society run to meet workers’ needs.
Homeless workers: a scapegoat for a system in crisis
The most liberal city in the U.S. is also a world leader for inequality. In New York, out-of-control housing prices combined with starvation wages and a gutted public health system have driven the number of homeless people to the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s (npr.org, 5/13/22). There are 65,000 people in the city’s overcrowded, chaotic shelter system, and thousands more living on the streets (NYC Coalition for the Homeless). Racism is a core component of the homeless crisis; 89 percent of this population is Black or Latin.
Meanwhile, thousands of offices in New York sit empty. Instead of converting these spaces into homes for those without them, the bosses provoke fear of the homeless by screaming about crime and erratic behavior by people with mental illness (nyclu.org, 12/30/22). Adams is siccing his mad dog kkkops to sweep people off the streets and forcibly take them into custody. This is a “solution” driven by the needs of the real estate and tourism bosses.
There is no homeless crime wave in New York — no crime wave at all, in fact. The city’s murder rate is roughly the same as it was in 2009, a small fraction of the numbers in the 1980s (Bloomberg.com, 7/29/22). But you would never know that from listening to ex-cop Adams, or to the bosses’ media.
Migrant workers punished for capitalism’s crimes
Liberal darling Joe Biden entered the White House vowing a “fair and humane” approach to immigration that would “reassert America’s commitment to asylum seekers and refugees.” Two years later, Biden’s “decision to continue–and even expand–some of Trump’s harshest policies has left many migration and human rights advocates disappointed” (The New Humanitarian, 1/22/22). Atrocities on the U.S.-Mexican border mount by the day. In 2021, Biden’s horse-mounted Border Patrol Gestapo beat back Haitian migrants by whipping them with their reins. More recently, in border cities in Texas and Mexico, thousands of migrants have no option but to live on the streets (npr.org, 12/23/22). Biden administration officials have privately pushed to keep enforcing Title 42, an old public health law that Trump cynically used to expel workers seeking asylum without granting them a hearing (New York Times, 12/20/22).
Fascism is the liberals’ final solution
The Nazi death camps, the German fascists’ “final solution,” followed the brutal logic of capitalism in crisis. When the bosses’ profit system starts breaking down, they become desperate to keep it afloat — at any and all costs. It’s the crisis of capitalism that’s driving the rise in homelessness and the epidemic of mental health problems. It’s the crisis of capitalism that’s forcing millions around the world to flee their homes in the face of war and deadly poverty. The liberal rulers can’t reform their way out of these disasters; it’s the necessities of their system that create them in the first place.
Biden and Adams are reformist stooges on the payroll of the finance capitalists, the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class. These liberal politicians use the fear of Trump to scare the working class into looking the other way as migrant workers and the homeless are terrorized. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fake-left Squad railed against Trump for ripping children from their parents’ arms and putting them in cages in Texas. Now these great progressives sit on their hands as their liberal fascist masters do the same as Trump and worse. If we let them get away with these outrages today, tomorrow they’ll be targeting the rest of our class.
Only communist revolution can defeat the bosses
The revolutions led by communists in Russia and China proved that society can be led by and for the working class. The capitalist bosses can stay in power only if the working class allows it. Of late we’ve seen promising sparks of rebellion. Tens of millions marched after the murder of George Floyd. Black and white miners in Alabama broke through the bosses’ racism to go on strike together. In Colombia, thousands rose up in a general strike against a tax reform to impoverish the working class and prop up the rulers’ failing system.
These inspirational battles and many more show the power of our class. They also reveal our main weakness. In each case, workers stopped fighting and retreated into lesser evilism. When workers stay wedded to the bosses’ rotten ideas, when they lack confidence that our clas s can run society, they are sunk by their own defeatism. When workers swallow the liberal bosses’ soft words and crocodile tears, they become complicit in genocide.
Some say that capitalism is always bad. They say that people are always being bombed or jailed or put on the streets to die, and that the world is essentially no different than it was twenty or fifty years ago. But that is a defeatist position. It’s built upon the lie that nothing ever really changes—and that, by extension, nothing can ever change. By contrast, a communist analysis of history points to moments when capitalism falls into periods of extreme crisis. When our class faces greater dangers from rising fascism. When we have a greater opportunity to advance the historic struggle for communism. Progressive Labor Party believes we have entered such a moment of reckoning. Will we drift along with the liberal fascist tide, or will we break our chains and fight for communist revolution? There is no in between. Join us!
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KCC: ANTIRACIST STUDENTS’ DEFIANCE EXPOSES LIBERAL FASCIST DANGER
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- 05 January 2023 364 hits
BROOKLYN, NY, January 3—After weeks of discussing the politics and history of sit-ins and occupations, more than 20 students marched to the administrative building today to occupy the office of the “Director of Student Engagement and Community Standards.” The attempted occupation was in protest of the ongoing racist charges made by the campus and signed by this director against four Kingsborough Community College (KCC) students. When we surrounded the office we discovered it had closed as KCC’s administrators were working remotely, but this disappointment was only temporary. As the semester ended, antiracists and members of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) celebrated a semester of fightback, and recruited more students into our growing club!
Throughout our past two study groups, continuing attacks from the campus administration have sharpened the discussions into capitalist dictatorship and state power (see CHALLENGE, 12/14/22). Students, staff, faculty, and PLP members are fighting against the KCC administration, campus police, and NYPD because a student was tackled by campus police after being harassed by a racist student using the n-word (see CHALLENGE, 11/30/22). Since our last article, the NYPD has failed to appear at the trial of a student charged with disorderly conduct. At the same time, KCC has brought academic charges against four students, including the student who was tackled and the Black student who was called the n-word.
With our core of Black, Latin, Asian, and white student emerging communist leadership one of our key readings has been Vladimir Lenin’s speech, “The State.” A new young comrade condensed and edited it for readability. The political leadership of our study group has had a direct impact on the sharpening struggle as the KCC administration attempts to drown the struggle in lies, liberalism, and one of the liberal racist’s favorite weapons, “civil discourse.”
Questions our study group have grappled with are over reform and revolution, and where change comes from: Does change come from young, reform-minded politicians? Or does it come from the masses? Or a mix of both? Why do we need a Party?
“Civil discourse”= liberal fascism
Within the student government (SGA), procedures, paperwork, and “rules of order” exist and are enforced strictly. Any deviation from these rules can discredit any students petitioning for change or the SGA’s position itself. KCC President Claudia V. Schrader and the administration doubled down on emphasizing “public order” and “civility,” holding campus-wide virtual town hall meetings to discuss the antiracist students’ perceived disrespect for civil discourse. Of course they only allowed supporters of the racist administration to speak. Meanwhile, the campus police make up new rules to harass antiracist students in the Common Ground club daily.
“Civility” and “public order” are forms of discipline that the capitalist class’ liberal lap dogs are attempting to impose on our students — what communists identify as early stages of fascism. SGA, the University Student Senate (USS), University Faculty Senate, and College Council enforce decisions made by the ruling class-controlled CUNY Board of Trustees and executed by servants like Schrader. SGA and USS condition students into adopting bourgeois manners of struggle — like having patience in the face of racist injustice, not speaking out during meetings, accepting and resigning to bureaucracy, and using “proper” language. For example, SGA members were instructed by the administration not to use the word “tackle” when filling out paperwork on the student tackled by racist campus police, as it was “too provocative.”
Liberals have been and are the main danger
Our study group reflected on these political disagreements, which led to sharp tactical disagreements in the struggle. One student summarized the disagreement as between “Malcolm X vs. Martin Luther King, Jr,” characterizing the disagreement as one group of students favoring breaking the college’s rules and others wanting to follow the rules. The reality is that the bosses want the students to be divided and pointedly attack militant antiracists.
At our next Party study group, along with Lenin, we read a selection of MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. PLP criticizes elements of MLK’s religious-based pacifism, especially his reliance on support from liberal Democrats and the capitalist controlled media. Often MLK’s insisted on a less violent way of fighting back; he was much more insistent on working within the system, focusing on reform struggles. This reformist leadership weakens the fight to destroy racism once and for all. Our Pary’s analysis is that only a mass working-class communist revolution can end capitalism, racism, and imperialism.
In the Letters from Birmingham Jail MLK clearly states that we live in an inherently racist society and racist rules and laws must be broken. He warns that those who claim to agree with the goals of protest but are more interested in “public order” than justice —liberals— are potentially a greater obstacle to progress than open racists like the KKK.
Elections: heads they win, tails we lose!
KCC’s administration soon resolved these debates for us by holding a sham election. SGA officers typically serve a full-year term once elected. One SGA officer resisted campus police requests for student life to turn over our antiracist club’s membership lists (after the campus police claimed they felt harassed!). The officer also resisted the administration’s pressure on the student government to dissolve our club. After the administration tried unsuccessfully to convince the other SGA officers to impeach this militant antiracist officer, a surprise second election was announced three days before the last weeks of the semester, with most students not knowing.
The antiracist SGA officer only learned about the election the moment it happened. Out of 7,259 eligible students, thirteen students came and voted for the administration’s favored candidate— and the antiracist SGA member was voted out of office.
In many ways, KCC mirrors capitalist society at large: the bosses use democracy to maintain the illusion of a neutral state apparatus and deny the reality of their violent racist capitalist dictatorship. The bosses picked this fight, and it’s a fight they’re gonna get! We welcome our new comrades, and fight on to May Day.
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Forty years of communist struggle in public health
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- 05 January 2023 372 hits
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been organizing in the American Public Health Association (APHA) for over 40 years in order to expose how capitalism and racism decimate health and health care in the U.S., especially for Black and poor workers. We have drawn inspiration from early communists in struggles for public health, exemplified by “red 48er” Rudolph Virchow who in 1848 showed that the deaths in the typhus epidemic in Germany were related to poverty and living conditions and then joined the Revolution of 1848 against the German aristocracy. In that spirit, we have put forward the need for a communist revolution while presenting CHALLENGE, holding annual PLP-led breakfasts or forums, writing and distributing annual analyses of capitalism and health, and participating in many sections and caucuses. Together with our friends, we have led yearly demonstrations inside and outside the conference and successfully put forward resolutions against racism, fascism, and war. Today we fight the Covid-19 epidemic and point out how it has the same root causes as HIV/AIDS (see CHALLENGE, 12/14/22). Highlights of these years of struggle point the way towards building a communist-led mass movement to topple capitalism and ensure better working-class health through communism!
1979 - Protesting closing of New York City hospitals
At the APHA conference in New York City in 1979, the opening session was dramatically interrupted: “Hey Hey, ho ho, Racist Koch has got to go!” rang out as PLP members charged the stage with banners and threw eggs at Mayor Ed Koch who had been invited to open the conference. He had the audacity to welcome public health workers to New York City while closing city hospitals that served Black and Latin communities, who themselves had been fighting back for months. Three comrades including a doctor were arrested but people on the streets cheered us and donated to the Party. Racist closures of city hospitals in NYC and many other underserved areas have continued throughout the years leading to the mass death and overcrowding that was seen during the AIDS epidemic and now with Covid-19. The capitalist policies of cutting back and kicking people out of hospital beds mean record profits for insurers and death for the working class. At APHA, PLP members have frequently presented examples of how rationing in services devalues and kills workers, a concept Friedrich Engels termed “social murder.”
Attacking eugenics then and now
Racist ideology and policies undermine health care and have a long history of academic justification. Since the days of chattel slavery, the U.S. ruling class has labeled Black workers as inferior and Black rebels as diseased. “Drapetomania’’ was the supposed illness that led enslaved Africans to escape from the American South. In the early 20th century, U.S. ruling-class scientists developed the racist pseudoscience of eugenics, on which the Nazis later based their racist mass murders. Again in the 1990s, biological determinism reappeared in the U.S. in the form of the Violence Initiative, which tried to argue that crime comes from abnormalities in the brains of Black boys. Columbia University and the National Institute of Mental Health began doing spinal taps while studying young Black boys whose brothers were in jail to prove this false notion. PLP leaped into action and demanded that the APHA call for an end to racist research. The campaigns within and outside the APHA forced a debate on the issue at a major session attended by thousands. A PLP member joined renowned Marxist biologist Richard Lewontin on the panel in not only exposing the so-called science as nonsense but also clarifying capitalism’s need to pretend that social problems are due to the biological defects of its most oppressed members (see CHALLENGE, 8/5/2021). Today’s medical emphasis on mental health needs under the stressors of Covid-19 similarly tries to obscure the capitalist determinants of anxiety, depression, and opioid use. In a worker-led, communist society, the needs of our class would be put first and treating the health of workers would be done in a holistic way.
Stomping out racism and sexism
The “War on Drugs”was an attack on Black workers in the U.S. that took a particularly vicious turn with the emergence of Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (CRACK) that appeared in Washington DC in 2000. It targeted Black women who were substance users. Founded by Barbara Harris and backed by right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, CRACK offered women using drugs $200 if they chose sterilization or long-acting contraception. Volunteers rode in police cars to locate women in Black neighborhoods saying, “Don’t let a pregnancy interfere with your drug habit.” CRACK promoted racist eugenics by limiting the reproduction of poor women and contributed to the media’s image of “crack babies” as being hopelessly damaged – another myth weaponized against Black workers. In Washington, DC, PLP participated in a broad coalition of public health activists in reproductive rights, women’s health, anti-racism, and harm reduction. The coalition held forums reaching over 150 people in the city, demanded Metro remove racist CRACK ads from buses (they didn’t), launched a petition campaign, and drove CRACK out of town. At the APHA, PLP members drafted a resolution against CRACK, leading the APHA’s Executive Director to compare CRACK to Hitler on national TV. CRACK retaliated with a lawsuit. The APHA members overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning CRACK and its ideology due to PLP’s work. This legacy of fascist ideology in modern dress was defeated by multiracial unity and political education with both community members and public health professionals.
NO to racist police violence
Communists in PLP have helped lead many of the struggles on the street against racist police. Demands for justice for the police murders of Tyrone West in Baltimore, Shantel Davis in New York City, Archie Elliot in the DC area, and Alex Flores in Los Angeles have been years-long struggles. Communists in APHA brought this struggle into the public health arena in 2015 and in 2017 by introducing a policy proposal “Law Enforcement Violence Is a Public Health Issue.” After three years of debate and protests, this resolution finally passed at the annual meeting despite the opposition of APHA leaders who are pro-capitalist supporters of the bosses’ Democratic Party. The published resolution has helped in the campaigns against racist police murders and has helped our public health friends understand the role of the capitalist state. Public health workers often work within the criminal legal system and some did not want to hurt their relationships with the police. But now more workers understand through these struggles of communist workers challenging police terror that capitalism and the police are enemies of public health and are more willing to speak out.
We have followed this victory with a policy on prison abolition and protests against ICE attacks on immigrants. Keeping up the pressure within public health continues through our work in APHA and other public health advocacy groups.
Fighting racism vital to workers' health
Communists know that there is only one human race and that racism is used to separate workers from bonding together to destroy capitalism. When we study racism in public health, we see that racist policies and practices make Black and Latin workers less healthy. For example, lived experiences of racism cause many infant and pregnancy related deaths and more high blood pressure. PLP has contributed to this understanding in work with other antiracist researchers leading to major publications and the widely distributed video “Unnatural Causes” by California Newsreel. Thus we continue to expose the capitalist misuse of genetics to attack Black, Native American, and Latin workers and to argue that our job as medical and public health workers is to build a militant multiracial force. Like Marx and Engels, Progressive Labor Party calls on workers to build a party and fight for a communist revolution. Antiracist class struggle is essential for the health of all. The mass movements against racism in the U.S. improved healthcare services and made kidney dialysis, Medicare, and Medicaid possible for millions of workers of all races. But we must take the struggle all the way to revolution for a society that values the health of the public and not the profits of the ruling class.
These highlights only scratch the surface of decades of communist struggle in this mass organization. Public health comrades also fight around international issues in the APHA, so stay tuned for future articles on how our collective is addressing imperialism, war and global vaccine justice.