This article is a republication and originally appeared in CHALLENGE in February 2020. The lessons here are worth reprinting, revisiting, relearning every year.

It was out of my Jim Crow  experiences as a young Negro woman, experiences likewise born of working-class poverty that led me to join the Young Communist League and to choose the philosophy of my life, the science of Marxism-Leninism—that philosophy that not only rejects racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them. - Claudia Jones

One of the biggest lies the capitalists have ever tried to teach generations of working-class people is that Black workers did not play a critical role in communist history. This is because the bosses will ALWAYS try to perpetuate the idea that workers should remain divided by race. However, we in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) know that multiracial unity has ALWAYS been the most effective way for workers to overcome the effects of racial exploitation and oppression. Claudia Jones, a Black female leading member of the Communist Party (CP) for decades, represents the heroic efforts in fighting racism and sexism from the 1930s to 1960s, just as her politics also point toward the weaknesses embedded in the strategy of international communism many years ago. The main weakness in the old communist movement that is evident through looking at Claudia Jones is that they did not understand the need for one international party LED by women and Black and Latin workers to unite and fight directly to overthrow capitalism and establish a communist workers’ state.
Formation as a communist
Like thousands of other workers in the early 1900s, Jones and her family emigrated to New York City from Trinidad in the Caribbean. Jones was an avid student and started writing early on. She had dreams of college, but as a daughter of a garment worker who died too young, she started working herself at a young age. The revolutionary vision and struggle of the communist movement appealed to her, and in 1936 she joined the Young Communist League and became active in the movement to defend the Scottsboro 9, a group of Black teenagers, who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama.
A multiracial, communist-led movement turned the  “Scottsboro Boys” into an international cause for millions of workers all over the world to win their freedom. But just as the communist movement was at its sharpest point of winning workers around the world to workers’ revolution, they began to retreat politically into a “popular front against fascism” and Claudia Jones became part of that larger retreat.
Leadership in the Communist Party USA & fascist McCarthyism
In 1937, Jones joined the editorial staff of the communist Daily Worker, rising by 1938 to become editor of the Weekly Review. After World War II, Jones became executive secretary of the Women’s National Commission, and secretary for the Women’s Commission of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In 1953, she took over the editorship of Negro Affairs, a CPUSA journal. However, if anti-racism and internationalism had been the central premise of the CP’s strategy, they would not have had the need for a separate journal to address “Negro Affairs,” because all affairs of the working-class are touched by racist capitalism and super-exploitation.
Despite the shortcomings of the party’s line, Jones organized women workers and gave leadership within the Communist Party USA on the ways super-exploitation of women could become central to the Party’s theoretical development. She is perhaps best known for her seminal essay appearing in Political Affairs, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”  in which she took to task liberals, progressives and her own Party for not sufficiently recognizing the super-exploitation of Black women under capitalism and their leadership in working-class struggles, writing:

The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced….Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women.

In 1948, Jones, along with several other leaders of the Communist Party USA, was charged for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. Over the next seven years, the federal government  convicted, imprisoned in Ellis Island, and ultimately deported Jones—but not without an international movement launched to free her and thousands of other communist and progressive working-class organizers imprisoned during the fascism of the McCarthy period.
Fighting British racism & imperialism
Following WWII, Caribbean immigration to the United Kingdom increased and Black and Asian immigrant workers faced brutal racism upon arrival. Signs reading “No Irish, No Coloured, No Dogs” littered the streets of London businesses and apartment buildings for rent. Attacks on Black youth by white mobs and police officers were common. Working in London in the 1950’s and 60’s, Jones, a lifelong communist and self-described Marxist-Leninist, tirelessly organized several anti-racist, anti-imperialist campaigns.
Realizing the importance of celebrating working-class culture, Jones founded the West Indian Gazette, a popular newspaper that built a base among Caribbean diaspora workers in Britain and back home, with a circulation of 15,000. In 1958, following the killings of Black youths and riots instigated by racist white mobs in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London, Jones and others organized a carnival in response to the violence as a means of unifying the Black Caribbean community.
Claudia Jones died in December 1964, her health gutted by the years of political persecution and incarceration in the U.S. Her legacy was immediately felt by working-class communities around the world and condolences poured in, from W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Amy Ashwood Garvey to Mao Zedong, whom Jones had met on a delegation to China. Claudia Jones remains an example of how the leadership of Black workers, especially Black women, is key to the future of building a communist society. Paul Robeson expressed his admiration for Jones thusly:

It was a great privilege to have known Claudia Jones. She was a vigorous and courageous leader of the Communist Party of the United States, and was very active in the work for the unity of white and coloured peoples and for dignity and equality, especially for the Negro people and for women.

It is fitting that Jones is buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in London. Following her deportation, Jones wrote:

I was deported from the USA because as a Negro woman communist of West Indian descent, I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow racist discrimination against 16 million Negro Americans in the United States, in my work for redress of these grievances, for unity of Negro and white workers, for women’s rights...

As communists we should all be that thorn in the side of capitalism—so sharp as to make it bleed.

The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) collective in Mexico participated in a forum on dialectical materialism organized by teachers from the National Coordinator of Education Workers, as part of their pedagogical, philosophical, and political training. About 60 secondary school teachers and workers from other areas participated.
At the beginning of the meeting we thanked the attendees for their presence. We introduced ourselves as an international communist party made up of workers from all over the world that has always joined in the resistance of teachers against the bosses' attacks. We reported on the struggles the party has participated in and organized in Mexico, such as the strikes at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), at a car factory, and in neighborhoods in the Valley of Mexico.
Two comrades from the Party presented the laws and categories of dialectical materialism - a philosophy that equips us to make sense of the world and the reality in which we live in order to transform it. We criticized the superficial and pro-capitalist ideology pushed by the media, the universities, and all the think-tanks of the capitalist system. One teacher asked if UNAM was on that list. We responded that many of the leading cadres of the recent governments all trained at UNAM! We also argued that a distinction should be made between the students, professors, and workers who fight against the bureaucracy and the academic elite who control that bureaucracy  and serve the interests of the capitalist class.
To explain the categories of appearance and essence, we explained that the current liberal government of Morena, in appearance, is pro-working class but in essence, like all governments under the capitalist system, serves the interests of the ruling-class. As an example, we explained that social programs have been used to infiltrate communities, weaken their organization, and co-opt leaders to weaken resistance to President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s mega-projects: the Mayan train, the Dos Bocas refinery, and the Interoceanic Corridor that all represent the interests of local capitalists and imperialists, mainly from China and the United States.
A colleague asked how these categories could be applied to the teaching process which sparked a very important discussion. Teachers noticed that in appearance, students are trained so that they can complete a degree and find a "decent" job. But in essence few students “succeed,” making the educational system a failure for the working-class and beholden to the needs of the capitalist system. Teachers also questioned the current situation of the union. They pointed out that in appearance it is very combative and defends the interests of its members, but in essence it is paralyzed and does not fight.
When we talked about similarity and difference, we referenced how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the working-class much more than the capitalist class. Although we are biologically and physiologically similar, our social and life conditions are very different. Our class could not stop working, particularly those of us who work in factories or in service industries. When we got sick, we did not have access to timely and quality medical services.
Then we reviewed the laws of dialectics. We talked about the contradictions present in natural and social processes. Though the main contradiction of capitalism exists between bosses and workers, currently what determines things in the world is the contradiction between the imperialists. We explained that contradictions are only resolved by intensifying them.
When we spoke of the negation of the negation, we described how capitalism had negated the previous social system, feudalism, and that communism would negate capitalism. Each historical change moved us towards a higher stage.
At the end we distributed our newspaper, CHALLENGE and invited teachers to join a PL study circle. Two teachers mentioned that the forum had helped them to understand many of the processes that took place in their communities, such as the appropriation of common land at the hands of private companies or the unhealthy quality of processed food made attractive by marketing. Participation in the forum motivated our collective and that night we made new plans to continue the dialectical process of building a new society – a communist society.

More than 50 years after it was formed in the era of the Vietnam War, the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA) is alive and kicking as new U.S. imperialist wars begin to boil against Russia and China.  Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been a leading force in the RC since the 1980s, our presence showing the importance of a long-term approach to work in a mass organization. At the January 2022 (mostly online) MLA Convention, once again PL brought to the MLA Radical Caucus both the “hard line” of revolutionary communism and the “flexible tactics” of building a communist base among liberal professors.
“Keywords” for communist struggle
PL’ers and friends played important roles in many sessions, analyzing how capitalism shapes the conditions under which teachers of literature think and work. In a session honoring Richard Ohmann, a staunch Marxist who helped found the RC, we emphasized how his work as a scholar and organizer made him part of the “red line of history.” In a session on “Antiracism and the Future of the Profession,” a PLP member urged the teaching of literary texts and contexts that open up “the communist horizon.
The “New Keywords for Our Struggle '' session featured a PL’er who critically and terminally diagnosed the term “white privilege” as capitalist propaganda antithetical to antiracism. Invoking the revolutionary class-conscious poetry of Langston Hughes, the PL’er concluded that only communist revolution can end “systemic racism.” Another panelist analyzed “solidarity” as a continuing goal of multiracial fightback rather than a taken-for-granted liberal value.
Communist politics spreading, tactics evolving
In the session “The Languages of War, Genocide and Climate Collapse” several PLP comrades urged from the panel and the floor that we see these urgent fights as “communism or barbarism.” Our friends who spoke there were also fired up with that urgency, and we are following up with them about joining the Party as the concrete expression of their anticapitalist politics. Two professors we’d never met before asked to know more about PLP’s political line (analysis) and history.
In the past, the RC concentrated mainly on bringing antiracist, antisexist, and pro-working class resolutions before the Delegate Assembly. New developments have changed our tactics. Covid-era restrictions on group gatherings; reactionary changes in the MLA Constitution making it near-impossible to raise and pass political resolutions; the proletarianization of faculty; the resurgence of anti-capitalist activism among young people—these changes have led the RC to broaden its focus.
Younger faculty and adjuncts step forward!
The highly spirited RC meeting at the end of the convention, attended by 33 people, developed this altered approach to organizing all year rather than only at the annual convention. The RC Steering Committee has been expanded to include younger teachers, mostly adjuncts. Inspired by a young elementary school teacher who spoke about the need for the RC to be “really radical,” we discussed an agenda for 2022 to move us from thought into action.  This will involve bringing faculty into students’and workers’ struggles; unionization among academic and nonacademic campusworkers; benefits for adjunct faculty; more study groups interrogating the“keywords” of current social justice movements; involvement in campaigns tomake the bosses pay for Covid-19 safeguards; the urgency of attacking climatecollapse and sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry.  
The challenge facing communists in the RC is to bring to these reform-level struggles over theory and practice an understanding of the need to join a communist party and fight to abolish capitalism. A world without borders; without racist and sexist hierarchies; without toxic individualism and alienation. While some literary works contain glimpses of this better world, it is our writing, teaching and organizing task in the MLA to bring literary people into the Party, PLP, which can make it a reality.

Covid-19 under capitalism will continue to spread. The world is now approaching the mark of two full years  of the Covid-19 pandemic. The thirst for profit and the competition between different capitalist factions and countries has left large segments of the world population susceptible to the coronavirus infection. Many hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people, and now with the Omicron variant millions of vaccinated people, too, are getting Covid-19.
This unchecked spread of the virus is deadly for our class-the working class. As long as it can continue to infect people, variants will arise. We have to look out for our class by keeping each other safe. The bosses of the ruling class are preaching individualism and encouraging us to engage in activities they know will spread the virus and likely lead to more variants. As workers, we can socialize and meet and march in ways that still guard against the spread of the coronavirus and its variants. We can fight for the safest conditions possible where we work or go to school and we can build a movement led by the working-class to fight to get rid of this system once and for all with communist revolution.
Capitalism spreads the virus
These variants are a result of multiplication of billions of viruses with subsequent mutations in RNA as these viruses replicate. Every time the virus infects a new person it makes billions of copies of itself. We should not be surprised to see wave after wave of variants as long as the SARS-CoV-2 virus has room to multiply. This happens because as a virus multiplies, changes in the viral RNA occur spontaneously. If some of these variants become more contagious, they become dominant and may be able to evade the immunity induced by vaccines.
“Mutations occur when viruses are in an immunocompromised host and when they can infect many people. In the first case, the immunocompromised person’s immune system is unable to rid the body of the virus, or to do so quickly. That gives the virus more time to infect more cells and produce more copies of itself, potentially producing more mutations. It is similar when many people in a population are infected. The virus may have less time in a single host before the immune system reacts but has more opportunities to mutate in more bodies….Mutations could also bestow the ability to become more transmissible, making it easier for the virus to infect others, or more severe, meaning it’s more likely those infected will require hospital care or die” (Global News, 4/28/21).
The current situation is a textbook case of a variant generator, “the chance a vaccine-resistant strain will emerge is highest in a scenario that combines three conditions: First, a large portion of a population is vaccinated, but not everyone. Second, there's a lot of virus circulating. And third, no measures are in place to curb potential viral transmission from vaccinated people” (Business Insider, 8/1/21).
The bosses know; they don’t care
The ruling-class knows the dangers of the activities they continue to promote. “The threat of Covid-19 means you should avoid eating and drinking in public if you can. More interactions between potentially infected people will give the virus more pathways to spread and potentially mutate” (WSJ, 1/17).
As long as the ruling-class is in power they will put their needs for profit and desire to keep themselves in power over the needs of the working-class and the suffering will continue. As workers,  we have to look out for each other and fight to make the needs of our class primary.