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.
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APHA public health struggle: From Haiti to Ukraine, combat imperialism
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- 02 February 2023 667 hits
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.
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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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.
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Führers Biden & Adams: Workers face liberal fascism, need communist revolution
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- 05 January 2023 678 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!
