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    LETTERS ... January 4, 2023

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    15 December 2022 290 hits

    Imperialism is making us sick
    On December 1, World Aids Day, I went to a rally at the White House to join with other health organizers demanding the Biden Administration extend the public health emergency on Covid-19 and take executive action to boost global vaccine manufacturing. These demands were combined with a call for increased funding for HIV/AIDS as the “two pandemics collide.”

    The fight for  Covid-19 prevention and care is similar to the long, militant struggles in the U.S. and South Africa for global access to HIV medication.  Covid-19 and HIV continue to be major health problems despite being downplayed by the Biden administration, which instead is funding war in Ukraine.

    I shared fliers and CHALLENGE newspapers with 10 of the 25 folks present. I shared our work in the American Public Health Association (APHA) to get policy for global vaccine development and to build the struggle to embrace a revolutionary solution—communism. Two organizers from ACT UP from New York agreed that we should be fighting against imperialist war and thanked me for bringing this up. For an excellent Progressive Labor Party (PLP) presentation linking health and imperialist war go to: https://youtu.be/fzJ9ENoRjLs .

    Health Gap reports that 690,000 die yearly from HIV and 38 million are living with HIV and 25 percent still do not have access to treatment. Thus, rally organizers demanded a  $750 million increase for international AIDS work to PEPFAR in 2023 and 2024 to address HIV, Monkey Pox, and Long Covid. (PEPFAR is the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that began in 2003). Also, consistent with PLP’s work on global vaccination justice, the rally called for $100 million to fund the South African mRNA hub.

    Speakers from ACT UP PHILLY,  Health Gap and others gave dynamic antiracist speeches,  denounced the failure of the U.S.  to provide health care for all,  and demanded that Biden extend the public health emergency to keep 15 million U.S. residents under Medicaid.

    Hatred for the profit-gouging pharmaceutical industry was palpable. But there was no call to end the funding for imperialist wars.

    Communists can join and give leadership to  these health care struggles while raising communist ideas. I talked with several of the 25 protesters and urged them to call out imperialism as much as they attack the drug companies. Imperialism is hurting workers through continued illness and war. Time to stand together for health and communism!

    In ‘class’ struggle: building working-class unity
    I teach at a nearly all Black Caribbean high school. When a student used the n word in class, I shut down my lesson. “We don’t do that here…next class, we will explore the power of words,” I told my 9th graders.

    With the support of  comrades and our study group, I created a lesson that places the n word in its historical context: the violent system of slavery. As a comrade put it, “it’s on the lips of lynchers,” enslavers, and the Klan. That word is a weapon of the bosses to treat a section of our class as subhuman and divide us. Using it evokes and normalizes anti-Black violence. No one should participate in the degradation of our class siblings.

    The lesson began with journaling about hurtful words said to us. “I’ll go first,” I said. “I was told I was too dark…a terrorist, to go back to your country.”

    After sharing our personal experiences, I presented my claim: “we can’t separate words from their history. Hurtful language leads to hurtful actions. Using dehumanizing words spreads the message that some are less than.”

    I gave students three pieces of evidence to break down and discuss. At the end, I asked if anyone would reconsider using this word. Many said yes, while others still believed the word can be reclaimed.

    One student wrote, “I can try to lessen it…because it can dehumanize some people.”

    Next time someone uses a slur, say, “That word is about accepting a part of our class as less than. We are constantly sent the message that we are worthless. I want you to be one of the sides of history that uplifts, not degrades, us.”

    Does this mean I won’t ever hear slurs? No, but it gives me a basis to show students and teachers are on the same side.

    Now, how does this connect to building communism? Winning students to a class-conscious outlook is non negotiable. In this lesson, they were introduced to the words, working class and ruling class (something we will return to in future lessons).

    Capitalist education teaches us to view our co-workers and classmates as enemies. One student wrote, “I agree with the lesson 100 percent. It made me realize what white people said to downgrade our ancestors.”

    We had a conversation differentiating between enslavers and poor white people. Without showing how language, like people, belongs to a certain class, it’s easy to fall into the trap of blaming those around us, instead of the system, for hateful language. It’s the ruling class that teaches us we are worthless, and that’s a system we ultimately have to smash. Of course, we don’t fight with just words. More struggle ahead!

    Exploitation is the bedrock of capitalism
    A CHALLENGE article (11/16/22) called racism “the bedrock of capitalism.” However, the bedrock of capitalism is exploitation. Racism, sexism, etc. divide our class to prevent resistance to our common oppression by exploitation. Racism enables exploitation, not the reverse.

    Housing segregation leads to school segregation, discrimination in jobs and income, and different quality lives for Black and white workers.

    Greater oppression is dealt to Black workers, in police brutality and killings, evictions, poverty, jobs, unemployment, housing, lower life expectancy, greater newborn and maternal mortality, incarceration, more deaths from Covid, etc.

    So while white workers experience lesser oppression, on average, this is no “privilege.” White workers suffer greater numbers, but lower proportions, of all forms of oppression. U.S. whites average lower life expectancies than Asian or Lation but higher than Native or African Americans.

    Exploitation explains the oppression of our entire class, and the enabling divisions victimize both white and Black.

    Liberal antiracism fosters the lie that whites are privileged, that all white workers oppress all Blacks workers The 2019 NYT “1619 Project” pushed this lie, enabling the rightwing to target “critical race theory.” Both sides promote division, disabling a multiracial working-class movement against racism and exploitation, the true bedrock of capitalism.PLP has rightly focused on fighting racism, mainly because of its role in shoring up exploitation —the oppression of all workers. Fighting exploitation means in the workplace, not just neighborhoods, schools, and churches—wherever workers congregate.

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    EDITORIAL ... Midterms Mask Liberal Fascist Agenda

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    01 December 2022 369 hits

    In capitalist societies, elections like the recent U.S. midterms serve two critical purposes for the bosses. First, they resolve disagreements within the ruling class before the need to resort to violence. Second, they help to mask the true nature of the profit system—a capitalist dictatorship—and to keep workers tied to that system with the illusion that they can decide how it works.

    The fallout from the November 8 elections reveals that ruling-class disputes—both within the U.S. and among the globe’s imperialist rivals—are becoming less and less controllable. The insurrection in Washington in January 2021 was a sign of things to come. As the U.S. economy deteriorates, as bosses in China continue to rise and authorities in Russia destabilize Europe, the U.S. bosses soon may be unable to rule in the old way. In a desperate attempt to save their failing system, they’ll need to turn to more open fascism as they move toward world war.

    Over 100 million workers felt compelled to cast their votes in this capitalist dogfight, a near-historic midterm turnout. The rotten myth of liberal democracy remains a stubbornly powerful force. In reality, workers have no stake in the capitalists’ fight. All bosses routinely unleash racist terror on workers in the U.S. and worldwide. All are willing to sacrifice millions of our working-class sisters and brothers in wars to keep their profits and power. While the bosses and their media use lies and scare tactics to win votes for one side or another, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been organizing workers for over 50 years so that we can dump every one of these fascist capitalists, fake leftist or right wing , and run society for the needs of our class.  

    U.S. rulers: both factions in disarray
    The election results exposed the volatility swirling around the U.S. ruling class. The bosses’ media were predicting a landslide victory for the Small Fascists, the domestically oriented capitalists who are fronted by Donald Trump and seek to organize mainly dissatisfied white workers. But while Republicans regained a majority of the House of Representatives, their margin was far narrower than projected. After catering to the erratic Trump for the last six years, the Small Fascists are in disarray. This time around, his endorsed candidates lost most of their high-profile elections (CNBC, 11/9). Rupert Murdoch, the Small Fascist owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, labeled Trump the Republicans’ “Biggest Loser” (WSJ, 11/9). Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a more disciplined racist and sexist, easily won reelection. Though DeSantis spouts the same garbage as Trump, he seems more reliably committed to sustaining the illusion of “free and fair” elections.

    Meanwhile, the Big Fascists of finance capital, mostly Democrats who aim to organize the multiracial working class to fight for U.S. imperialism, retained their slim control of the U.S. Senate. But a closer look reveals that their position is far from secure. In House races nationwide, Republicans outpolled Democrats by more than three million votes (Cook, 11/9). The Democrats lost support among Black and Latin voters (CNN, 11/9). Their Racist-in-Chief, Joe Biden, is 80 years old and without a clear-cut successor for the presidential election in 2024.

    China and Russia: more advanced fascism

    By contrast to the disunity and dysfunction of the U.S. ruling class, China President Xi Jinping deals ruthlessly with renegade bosses or workers who step out of line. He routinely expels members of China’s fake “Communist” Party.  In 2021, three of the largest Chinese tech companies were investigated for “graft.” After Alibaba chairman Jack Ma took issue with the state’s criticized financial regulations, he was temporarily blocked from putting his company on the Chinese stock market (Washington Post, August 2021).

    In Russia, critics of Vladimir Putin tend to end up in jail or dead. In August, when Lukoil chairman and Ukraine war critic Ravil Maganov reportedly fell from a hospital window, he became the eighth Russian energy executive to die ‘mysteriously’ this year (CNBC, 9/2). Both Xi and Putin understand that they must impose rigid discipline on the ruling class to maintain fascist control over the working class.

    “Protecting democracy”= building fascism
    In the U.S., as the Big Fascists prepare for World War III against their imperialist arch-rivals, they are doing what they can to convince a broad section of the working class to join a mass patriotic movement. After failing to guarantee women’s right to abortion, they used the Supreme Court’s sexist decision to overturn Roe v. Wade to convince angry workers to vote for Democrats. Moreover, the Big Fascists unleashed the FBI to investigate the 2021 attack on the Capitol and the Jan. 6 Committee to charge at least 955 people in one of the most documented crimes in history (Insider, 11/22). This same legal beast will also be used on progressive fighters against capitalism.

    Not only that, their pleas to “save democracy” from Trump and the Small Fascists drew millions to the voting booths in November, resulting in the second highest midterm turnout among 18-to-29-year-olds over the last 30 years (The Hill, 11/9). Always ready to hide their racism behind identity politics, they are bragging about the record number of Muslim candidates elected (Guardian, 11/26). These maneuvers represent a deadly trap for workers!

    The Big Fascist liberals aren’t the lesser of two evils—they’re the greater  evil. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Jim Crow Joe Biden, Democrats are the architects of racist mass deportations and racist mass incarceration. They’ve deployed racist drone bombings across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Behind their crocodile tears and phony shows of compassion, they are callous mass murderers.

    There is no lesser evil; fight for communism!
    For the international working class and the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, the chaos engulfing the U.S. ruling class is both a great danger and an enormous opportunity. The bosses will continue to fight among themselves and ensnare millions of workers who are won to support one side or the other. But we also have the opportunity to show that capitalism offers us nothing but death and destruction—and that workers have a communist alternative. It’s an opportunity to point out that voting for one lying, racist politician or another every two or four years has nothing to do with real political power.

    Workers will gain real power only when they smash the profit system and control every aspect of society, as they did after the two great revolutions of the 20 century. In the Soviet Union and China, politics was part of everyday life. Workers made historic advances in healthcare and education without ever going to the polls. They created a new society without campaign slogans or political stooges and parasites. Unfortunately, the Soviet and Chinese communist parties kept facets of capitalism, a mistake that ultimately led to the reversal of their tremendous gains on behalf of the working class. PLP celebrates the history of communist achievements, recognizes past mistakes, and organizes for a communist revolution that will sweep away capitalism and its illusions of democracy. Join us!

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    THE FIGHT CONTINUES: KCC students fight racist attacks

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    01 December 2022 406 hits

    BROOKLYN, NY—“What if PLP takes power and not everyone wants to live without money right away?” “If communism outlaws racism, how are laws enforced under communism?”

    These were some questions our multiracial Progressive Labor Party (PLP) student study group’s new comrades and attendees asked and discussed following our march against the racist KCC (Kingsborough Community College) campus police, administration, and the NYPD (New York Police Department). PLP and students are fighting them to drop the charges against Adrian, a student tackled by campus police, after being harassed by a racist student using the n-word (see CHALLENGE, 11/30).

    Since then, the students have received a crash course in racist capitalism’s state power. Since our last article, instead of dismissing and dropping charges against the student tackled by campus police, KCC is pursuing allegations made by the racist student and charging two student leaders with violating CUNY’s (City University of New York) “Henderson Rules of Public Order,” threatening penalties up to suspension or expulsion. This is another example in a long line of liberal and reform institutions siding with racism instead of the working class.

    For the capitalists, militant antiracist fightback is the true “crime.” As punishment, for three weeks students have faced combined attacks, from daily campus police harassment, to the lying of president Claudia V. Schrader, and confusing disinformation from the various campus administrative offices.

    This pattern of racist harassment shows why this fight is about more than dropping Adrian’s charges. If we lose this struggle, campus police will feel free to harass, assault and beat up ANY student they want.

    Despite these attacks —or because of them— the antiracist club Common Ground has seen over 100 students express interest. Leadership of a core of militant, Black, Asian and immigrant women and men leadership is emerging. This growth under sharpening external attack has sharpened internal debates, and members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have encouraged making time for addressing important questions. Rich exchanges that began over tactics and strategy have widened into debates over reform versus revolution, with the ultimate question of confidence in the international working class at the heart of it all.

    No more racist harassment!
    As friends and students began joining us in greater numbers and gathering daily in the cafeteria, the campus police decided to brazenly harass those fighting back. On November 9, a half dozen campus police surrounded a group of club members and their friends, one of whom was bouncing a green foam ball while sitting (see “Exhibit A”) and was told “this is not a playground,” and “the ball constitutes a public safety threat.” To everyone’s shock, campus officers then declared that all students who do not have class at the moment must exit campus immediately. The students sat defiantly and remained.

    The following week, students were sitting and enjoying music through a speaker when another half dozen campus officers surrounded them, telling them “playing any music is banned on campus.” This time, the students stood up together and confronted the police shoulder to shoulder. The campus police then repeated that everyone needs to go home and stated “it’s time for an ID check, as CUNY students you automatically are subject to them” even though IDs are already checked at the front gate. The students raised their voices and told them off, and the campus police retreated.

    We are organizing a defense and political counterattack to build on our growing support, campus and CUNY-wide, distributing dozens of CHALLENGES, and we’re developing new young communist leaders along the way.

    As long as we live under the dictatorship of the capitalist class, workers will be subject to racist and sexist attacks. The bosses and especially their liberal lapdogs preach the all-class unity garbage of “we’re all one community” on one hand, while protecting racists on the other and allowing military recruiters on campus to enlist soldiers for widening imperialist wars. But ultimately, it will take building a mass PLP —and a Red Army — to destroy racism and capitalism once and for all, which can happen only if all of us become mass organizers and lead mass antiracist struggles. And this struggle has the potential to become one!

    A single spark can become a fire
    Meanwhile, a four to one majority of delegates in the union representing 29,000 CUNY faculty and staff, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), passed a resolution supporting KCC’s students, declaring “an injury to one is an injury to all.” While the resolution was being debated, some self-proclaimed progressive KCC faculty delegates issued ineffectual pleas for “more time to investigate.” A Black delegate from another campus responded from the floor “we’ve been ‘investigating’ this for 400 years, it’s time for action” and voted “yes”!

    With each study group raising important questions, our new comrades are recruiting even more outstanding antiracist fighters and especially strong Black and immigrant women into the struggle. They are working through sharp political questions and learning to manage sharp disagreements while under increasing state attack. Under communism we will immediately outlaw racism and attack racists with the power of the Party. Despite these challenges, the dark night of imperialism will have its end and these students prove workers can run the world! Their experiences today are planting the seeds of a movement of millions of workers we have not yet met but share their hatred of racism and life under capitalism. As more students fight back and dare to envision a workers’ dictatorship and a bright communist future, the closer the day is when they will lead us there. JOIN US!

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    Big Fascists Discipline Ye

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    01 December 2022 318 hits

    Multi-billion dollar sneaker company, Adidas, ended its nine-year relationship with Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) after the rap mogul made repeated anti-Jewish remarks. Ye praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis while spewing toxic anti-Jewish racism during radio interviews and on his social media accounts. Twitter and Instagram booted him from their platforms, too.

    The statements about breaking ties with Ye is hypocritical at best. It also demonstrates the tactics of the Big liberal Fascists: pretend to care about racism to distract from their systemic racism and exploitation, all while sewing division in the entire working class.

    Black and Latin students and workers are spot on about Ye being reprimanded by a class of wealthy capitalists. However, that class is not limited to Jewish, white, or male; all shades and spectrums of the ruling class must be attacked.

    The main wing of the ruling class prioritizes amassing finance capital internationally while trying to buy workers into the illusion of fairer exploitation. Ye’s racist volatility is too dangerous for this section of the ruling class’s plans for global domination. Instead, Big Fascist bosses prefer to work with artists-turned-billionaires like Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter).

    Adidas, a Nazi-loving company
    Adidas cut ties with Ye not because they are any less racist but because spewing anti-Jewish racism is bad press and bad business. While the company declared “Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other hate speech” (NYT, 10/22), the founding brothers Adi and Rudolph Dassler were members of the Nazi Party. They had joined around the same time as Hitler’s ascension to power.

    In 2020, at the height of George Floyd protests, Adidas workers filed a 32-page report outlining the racist culture at Adidas. "My existence at this brand is praised as diversity and inclusion, but when I look around, I see no one above or around that looks like me," said one employee (Insider, 2020).

    No one makes a billion looking out for others
    The Washington Post, a publication owned by Amazon’s own exploiter-in-chief Jeff Bezos, announced that he was interested in bidding on the NFL Washington Commanders with Jay-Z (Washington Post, 11/3).

    In 2019, Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation struck a deal with the NFL, to launch “Inspire Change '' to allegedly combat social injustice and address the issues that Black and Latin workers faced.

    In reality, it was a disgusting public-relations stunt to derail protests led by Colin Kapernick and other football players protesting the murders of Black workers and children during the national anthem. Jay-Z responded to the backlash: “we’ve moved past kneeling. It’s time to go into actionable items” (Washington Post, 11/3).

    Many Black and young workers took to Twitter to express their defense of Jay-Z’s decision to cross the picket line of Chateau Marmont workers in their struggle against the racist capitalists there, alluding to some super bargaining power Jay-Z has that will surely result in some win for Black workers. Faith in a billionaire or a liberal misleader like Jay-Z is death for our class. Jay-Z is the same billionaire celebrity that sold out workers in Brooklyn to build the Barclays Center, an arena that’s displaced hundreds of workers.

    This is the same billionaire sponsoring classes to teach workers in Marcy housing projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood how to invest in another failing faction of capitalism, cryptocurrency. A local resident said, ``If you want to do something, fix this place up,’” (The Guardian, 6/22).

    Celebrity culture, new opiate
    Karl Marx said, “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the masses.” For many workers today, celebrity culture has become that new drug.

    Celebrities are pawns used by the ruling class to perpetuate capitalist ideology. In the case of Hip Hop, rappers are given deified status because their lyrical content and ‘come-up’ stories appeal to young Black and Latin audiences struggling to survive under capitalism.

    Like the religious opiate, hip-hop celebrities like Ye and Jay-Z promise youth that if we just make the right moves, we too can have all the riches and pleasures. But there is a split between the Small Fascists and the Big Fascists of the ruling class, which is embodied by the difference between figures like Ye and Jay-Z.

    Ye and Jay-Z embody two sides of fascism
    Ye offers young people disillusioned with mainstream liberal politics a way out and into the arms of reactionary ideologies like nazism.

    But the bigger threat lies with yet-to-be-cancelled celebrities like Jay-Z, and their Big Fascist bosses, who gaslight and diffuse the rightful frustrations of the working class by pretending they are fighting racism “the right way.”     

    Ye's reactionary politics expose the insincerity of the Big Fascists and their celebrity stooges. Over the last 50+ years, Ye and other rappers have been a public voice for that disillusionment.

    When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of the southern states in the U.S. in the early 2000s, Ye took advantage of LIVE television to stand in solidarity with workers against the racist neglect of former U.S. President, George W. Bush, saying to the shock of his co-host, comedian Mike Meyers, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” This kind of sharp political analysis and tendency toward going off-script did not endear Ye to the Big Fascists, who require disciplined, liberal celebrities to placate the masses, not incite them.

    Many have dismissed Ye’s behavior as unchecked mental illness. That may be true, but that kind of analysis misses the political conditions that determine the form mental illness can take. Whatever personal issues plaguing the rapper, the course forward from the Katrina moment is clear: alienation drove Ye to the right, when it should have driven him left.

    This is the bribe Small Fascists like Trump in America, Georgia Meloni in Italy, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil continue to offer the masses.

    Those following Ye lack the political guidance of communism, which combats the alienating effects of capitalist terror and neglect with collective action, and proves that a free world is not nationalist, racist, sexist, but an egalitarian one run by and for and by the international working class.

    It’s not just Kanye, Jay-Z, or Jeff Bezos...it’s CAPITALISM!
    Ye’s ideas belong to the ruling class. He is worth close to a billion dollars, and nobody in possession of that much is a friend of the working class.

    Neither the gutter racist, domestically-oriented Small Fascists nor the liberal, imperialism-oriented Big Fascists are acting in the interest of workers. However, PLP fights to win workers to the idea that it is the Jay-Z’s of the world that’s the bigger danger.

    The ruling class has demonstrated that they dispose of celebrities like Ye when it suits them because they are trying to win us to fight for them in their brutal imperialist wars. Once upon a time, Ye was right: most Black workers know Republicans like George Bush don’t care about them; they know enslaved workers escaping to the North were not freed from extreme racism nor super exploitation, and that corporations like Adidas are racist hypocrites.

    But he is also unequivocally wrong: the enemy of Black workers are not Jewish workers or any other historical scapegoat of the ruling class.

    Black workers won’t go to war for a gutter racist like Trump or Bush or work until our feet bleed on a Nazi-run Adidas factory floor. Still, Black and antiracist workers are vulnerable to the rhetoric of the Bidens and Jay-Z’s of this world.

    Progressive Labor Party rejects both ruthless factions of the ruling class. We have confidence that with communist ideas in hand, the working class will see through these lies and build a red army to smash capitalism and its ideological tools once and for all. Join us today!

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    Capitalism fails 48K striking student-workers

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    01 December 2022 325 hits

    Berkeley, CA, November, 14— Four union locals of the University of California striking workers (UAW) representing 48,000 Graduate Student and Postdoctoral workers walked out of the 10 campuses of the University of California (UC).  This is the largest student-worker strike in U.S. history as it enters their third week. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have joined picket lines in Berkeley and Davis - passing out leaflets, distributing copies of CHALLENGE. We joined about 500 workers and students who militantly marched over a mile from 1½ miles from campus to the University President’s $6.5 million mansion in a fancy Berkeley neighborhood.

    In a communist society we won’t need capitalists who perpetually squeeze us for more work and less pay. We don’t need the market competition that forces our living conditions down and down. In a communist society we can work as human beings to provide for one another’s needs – not for a wage.

    Over the last 50 years graduate students have taken on more and more of the undergraduate teaching responsibilities and research while being paid as part-timers. There are fewer future tenure track positions to look forward to - so workers are fighting back. This need to strike reflects the growing crisis of capitalism worldwide as inter-imperialist rivalry intensifies. The capitalists' moves toward war dictate the intensifying economic and political control of key institutions like UC.

    Graduate students now teach a larger percentage of first- and second-year undergraduate classes and low-paid instructors teach many upper-level ones. Full Professors now teach one graduate course, advise doctoral students and do research.  Some beginning Academic Student Employees have a base pay of about $23,000 for what is technically a 20-hour work week but with preparation and grading it ends up being 40 hours/week or more. Then they must find time for their own studies and research. Some departments cover graduate student tuition and fees - for domestic students only - which raises compensation to $37K to $40K. They are demanding to be paid a minimum living wage of $54K with increases tied to the spiraling cost of housing.

    Wages are the same statewide, but housing costs are nearly double in high rent urban areas like Berkeley and Los Angeles than in Merced. Not to mention capitalist development is happening internationally while the profit-driven system and infrastructure of the old world crumbles. This turnout on the picket lines and the support of undergraduate students and professors shows tremendous working class solidarity. This type of unity illustrates the power of the working class which could be used to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a worker-owned, worker-controlled communist society. There are demands for local transportation passes and childcare subsidies. All student workers are demanding more support for international students whose tuition/fees are triple or more than domestic students. There are 10 or more picket lines at the Berkeley campus that are being supported by workers all over the Bay Area. Garbage truck drivers have stopped pick-ups and UPS drivers stopped their deliveries.

    These examples of class solidarity and fightback is a glimpse into the egalitarian world that workers can win if we continue to fight and build for it! Only communist leadership and learning can get us there!

    1. APHA: Communists provide leadership for public health
    2. The New School: Student-workers on strike vs crisis-ridden system
    3. Remembering The October Revolution: Over a century of communist celebrations
    4. October Revolution Celebration: Commit to the Working Class!

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