As of March 30, over 60 countries had not received a single dose of vaccine, and many are not on track to be fully vaccinated before 2024 (New York Times, 3/30). Even as thousands of workers die daily from coronavirus, capitalism sees the vaccine as another vehicle for racist profits and a weapon in inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Chinese imperialists.
In wealthy countries, vaccine apartheid is apparent. The U.S. has vaccinated white people  at 2.5 times the rate for Latin and 2 times that of Black workers (KFF.org, 3/17). Israel has fully vaccinated over 50 percent of the Jewish population and is denying vaccines to the 4.5 million Palestinians under its military occupation. Capitalism will always see the lives of the working class as expendable. We must fight for communist revolution to build a society that serves the needs of the working class.
Vaccines for profit let workers die
UNICEF estimates that the world has the capacity to produce up to 20 billion doses of vaccine, and half of this capacity is in poorer countries. However, new vaccines are protected by patent laws that prevent manufacturing of the available vaccines without the permission of the pharmaceutical companies that own the patents (The Conversation, 2/18). Although there is worldwide pressure to suspend these intellectual property barriers, five wealthy countries, including the U.S. and Britain, have refused to do so. They are determined to guarantee the profits of big pharma, despite the fact that vaccine makers received about $20 billion dollars in public support.
“Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far. Under current projections, many of the rest [of the countries] will have to wait years” (NY Times, 3/21). Pfizer is demanding unprecedented liability protection from foreign countries in order to sell them vaccines, demanding it not be held responsible for rare adverse effects or for its own acts of negligence, fraud or malice. They are requiring that South American bosses put up huge assets, such as federal bank reserves, embassy buildings and military bases, as insurance against the cost of any future legal cases.
Although nine countries have been forced to agree to this sort of deal, five—Uruguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Cuba—have yet to receive a single dose of a foreign vaccine (nakedcapitalism.com, 3/21).
Vaccines become the new blood money
China’s bosses are winning the vaccine war as they have become the main sources of vaccines to Africa, Asia and South America, increasing their ever-growing imperialist influence in these areas. They are forcing the smaller capitalists to do their bidding along the way. The Brazilian ruling class was forced to accept the Chinese bosses Huawei as their 5G developer in order to get vaccines and the working class in Paraguay has been denied the vaccine even as deaths rise because the Paraguayan bosses are in bed with the Taiwanese capitalists.
China is extorting poor countries as workers die, while the U.S. ruling class is battling itself over how to respond. Torn between outright greed and giving up some of their profits to keep up with the Chinese imperialists, the U.S. ruling class has mostly been paralyzed. Though, in a horrifically racist use of the vaccine, Joe Biden offered 1.5 million doses to the Mexican ruling class in exchange for the Mexican bosses sending troops to the border with Guatemala to stop workers from Central America headed to the U.S. (NY Times, 3/18). The perversion of the vaccine being used to pay for troops to attack workers risking their lives to get poverty wage jobs in the U.S. is a damning example of the utter inability of capitalism to serve the needs of our class.
In a communist world, vaccines would be produced, manufactured and distributed collaboratively by the world’s scientists and factories. There would also be far fewer pandemics if production and mining were designed to prevent infection by wild viruses. Workers’ health would be a priority, so that we would also be better able to survive those infectious illnesses that do occur. Only such a revolutionary transition of society with the death of the profit motive can truly protect the working class.

Under capitalism workers’ lives are expendable. Under communism profits will cease to exist and the collective health of workers will be guarenteed.In Bessemer, Alabama 5,800 Amazon warehouse workers are voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). This union drive, among a largely Black workforce, has gotten the attention of the U.S. labor movement and the Democratic Party. The campaign has been publicly endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Stacey Abrams, actor Danny Glover, along with the National Football League and Major League Baseball Players Associations. Even President Joe Biden spoke about the advantage unions provide “for Black and Brown workers.” What is going on?
Amazon hired hundreds of thousands of workers during the pandemic lockdown and grossed a record $386 billion in sales, netting more than $22 billion in profit. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos got much richer during the pandemic while Amazon workers worked in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. Many were infected with Covid-19. Amazon has rewarded them by taking back the $2 wage increase with unlimited unpaid time off that workers received during the height of the pandemic.
Crumbs for workers, preparation for world war
Some billionaires and their politician flunkies want to cover up the obscene exploitation, racism and inequality of capitalism. These finance capital imperialists have ruled much of the world since World War II, but now Chinese and Russian imperialists are challenging their liberal world order. As they prepare for world war these Big Fascists, led by the Democratic Party, need a working class that has some minimum belief in U.S. capitalism. And they need the Big Tech billionaires to fall in line and get ready to pay up. President Joe Biden is already planning on raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires. War against China and Russia won’t be cheap.
So to win some working-class support, some capitalists want to give us $15 an hour, or a union at Amazon, or a stimulus check, or some controls on the racist cops. These are crumbs and they won’t last. Capitalism will never work for the working class. It has to go. As we fight to support the Amazon workers, let’s organize for workers to run the world. That’s the communist future that we need.
Amazon workers take the lead
The Amazon campaign has become a flashpoint in the struggle of low-wage workers, Black and Latin workers in particular, following the fast-food “Fight for $15” campaign. Following the mass antiracist uprising this past summer, the union drive has been linked to the fight against racism in Alabama, with its bloody racist history.
Amazon has defeated previous unionizing efforts and is waging an all-out effort here. It says its starting wage of $15 an hour is more than double the Alabama minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.  Amazon has posted anti-union messages throughout the warehouse, including in bathroom stalls, and uses social media to attack the union. Amazon even asked county officials to change the timing of the traffic light outside the warehouse so that union organizers would have less time to approach workers leaving the plant (NPR, 3/12).
Amazon workers outside of Alabama have also been fighting back, signing petitions for PPE and improved health and safety; striking and taking job actions for more water stations, the rehiring of fired workers and paid time off.  New York City, where Amazon workers deliver 2.5 million packages a day, has seen workers fighting back in the Queens and Staten Island warehouses.
Democratic Party uses unions to control Big Tech
Bezos and his billionaire Big Tech cousins at Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are all heavy contributors to Biden and the Democrats, much more than to the Republicans (Observer.com, 11/2/20). Amazon bought ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications supporting legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. But many in the Democratic Party see the need to reign in and regulate Big Tech more closely. Unionization is one way of regulating them. In addition, fresh from the victories in Georgia that helped elect ‘Jim Crow’ Joe Biden and two Democratic Senators, the Dems are using the unions as a battering ram to win Black workers to take the South away from the violently racist pro-Trump forces.
Communism means workers’ power
The Progressive Labor Party’s strategy for leading the working class to power has always rested on the foundation that Black workers are the key leadership force for revolution. This has led us to focus on organizing in the auto industry, healthcare, and mass transit. Amazon, with more than one million workers in the U.S., is now the single largest concentration of young Black and Latin workers. PLP needs to be there, as much for what our ideas can bring as for what we can learn and the leadership that Amazon workers can give to our movement.
Let us make this a Red Amazon Summer by introducing hundreds of Amazon workers to revolutionary communist ideas of PLP.

ISTANBUL, Turkey – On February 15, 2,300 municipal workers in the city district of Kadıköy boldly went on strike against the poverty wages offered by the local bosses. These essential workers, who have carried on throughout the pandemic, are being “rewarded” with miserable pay, strike-breakers, and a sellout of their fight.
When workers in different parts of the world seek to increase their militancy and sharpen the contradictions of the class struggle, we find ourselves attacked not only by the capitalist bosses and politicians but also by the fake-left trade union misleaders.
Striking workers in Istanbul and everywhere else need and deserve the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) as the only force that can crush the bosses and their profit system and build a worker-run world.
Workers fight back, bosses sabotage the struggle
To mark the beginning of the strike, masses of workers gathered in front of the Kadiköy municipal building in the cold February air to confront the bosses over stalled union contract negotiations. Many workers aired their grievances and put forward reform demands.
A striking worker said that their demands included a wage hike, improved schedules and more of a say in decision-making. He said, "We are garbage collectors for about 360 days in a 365-day year. But when it comes to bargaining, we become ‘cleaner brothers and sisters’" (Spectre, 3/4). He said that some workers were fired for not saying “Hello” when a supervisor greeted them.  
An office worker felt empowered by the strike and said that almost all workers were participating. She said that they want a free nursery for working mothers and a day off for March 8, International Working Women's Day. But she said the main demand was for a wage increase that keeps up with inflation.
Despite growing worker enthusiasm and support, the strike was abruptly called off just two days later by the central leadership of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK*) General Service Union (Genel-Is) after a secret meeting with the bosses. Hundreds demonstrated in front of the municipal building saying, "We don't recognize any agreement that was signed without us” (Evrensel Daily).
The bosses falsely claimed that they offered a 38 percent wage hike, and many people began to question why the workers were rejecting such a “generous offer.” At the same time, the social-democratic Republican People Party (CHP) politicians sent scabs to help defeat the strike.
Still, many students and workers showed solidarity with the workers as they continued to hold rallies. Public workers in Maltepe, Ataşehir, and Kartal also threatened to strike. In Maltepe, workers had called a strike for February 22, but the union’s central leadership called it off when the Istanbul municipality sent scabs to cross the picket lines.
All of these municipalities that have attacked the workers are controlled by the CHP, the main “opposition” party to the Erdogan government (AKP). Like their U.S. labor and Democratic Party counterparts, they share much of AKP’s anti-worker neoliberal policies. They are the “loyal opposition,” loyal to the racist profit system and the bosses’ dictatorship. A boss is a boss is a boss. We need to crush them all!
Battle lines sharpening—fight for communist revolution
The class struggle and ruling class splits within Turkey are connected to the bosses’ disagreements on how to best manage the country’s growing international clout. Under the Erdogan regime, Turkey has been trying to become more of a regional power in the Middle East, sending troops into Syria and buying advanced weapons from Russia despite being a member of NATO and long-time ally of U.S. imperialism.
They were the first to point the finger at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman in the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in 2018, but this was not coming from any place of compassion for human life. Like all capitalist bosses, the Turkish ruling class are opportunistic thieves who make and break alliances as it suits their profit needs. As imperialist battle lines are sharpening, they are trying to play off both sides of conflicts between superpowers like the U.S. and China in order to advance their own interests (see CHALLENGE, 1/21).
We need a future that neither sacrifices workers up to a deadly pandemic or as fodder for imperialist war. We need true workers’ power. From Istanbul to Soweto, from New York to Bogota, we need communist revolution to build a world that meets the needs of the international working class. PLP is fighting to be the Party that will lead us there.

Fighting LA’s racist housing crisis
On March 25, I attended a rally in support of homeless residents who were being “swept” and displaced from Echo Park, located in Los Angeles. The sweeps were conducted by city workers, backed up by a massive Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) presence. Hundreds of people, including neighborhood residents, protested and marched for hours to demand a stop to the sweeps and permanent housing for everyone. The LAPD penned in and arrested 182 people after they sat down in the street. Two news reporters were also charged and National Lawyers’ Guild legal observers were detained, before being released.
There are hundreds of homeless encampments across the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. The 2020 official Point in Time Count for LA County (likely an undercount) was 66,436. Recently, the Los Angeles Times newspaper even compared LA to the encampments described in Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel about the great migration from the “Dust Bowl” to California in the 1930s.
Those who migrated in the 1930s were mainly white tenant farmers and sharecroppers from the South, thrown off their lands when their owners’ profits were hit after a years-long drought that resulted in massive crop failures. In contrast, today’s houseless population in LA County is overwhelmingly Black and Latin. Homelessness here has exploded, in the wake of mass racist unemployment caused by shutdowns of hundreds of factories and other workplaces over the decades, due to an overproduction crisis that sunk the bosses’ profits. This was compounded by skyrocketing rents due to gentrification, and the huge drop in workers’ wages during the pandemic.
LA politicians are doing the bosses’ dirty work, claiming that Echo Park and other encampments are unsafe and unhealthy. But so far, their plan to end homelessness with “Project Room-key” (placing houseless temporarily in hotel rooms) has been a disaster for the working class. Homeless residents are rightly suspicious that the politician’s promises will turn out to be hollow.
The scene at Echo Park was surreal, with five LAPD helicopters circling and diving through the area and hundreds of riot cops at all park entrances blocking any of the protesters from joining with their houseless brothers and sisters. The rally was apparently led by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Streetwatch LA. DSA promoted non-violence, but the young, overwhelmingly white workers responded favorably to a Black homeless speaker who called for multi-racial unity and militant fight-back.
People also responded favorably to CHALLENGE newspaper. I distributed 40 copies of the issue with the frontpage article about our campaign here against racist gentrification. People were open to seeing the connection between evicted homeowners and tenants; those threatened with eviction; and the homeless fighting for permanent housing. Only a system that abolishes the commodification of basic human needs like housing can end this plague on our class. That system is communism.
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Capitalism robs workers of  clean water
Water. Shouldn’t clean water be available to all workers? Under capitalism, it is being stolen, sold, and traded and the working class is suffering. Under communism, ensuring clean water for the international working class would be common sense.
Recently, I was told that the water fountains at the local schools have been shut off because of Covid-19. Health officials rightly don’t want multiple people removing their masks to drink from public water fountains. Students will have to bring their own water. This adds insult to injury in neighborhoods like the one in which I teach where many families can’t afford their rent, never mind extras like clean drinking water. My principal is going to use an already strapped local school budget to buy bottled water for students who don’t have it. A domino inequity effect will ensue: local schools with small budgets like this one will buy drinking water and forgo other extras while schools in well-off neighborhoods with deeper pockets won’t think twice—their students will have clean water available and will purchase the extras my students will have to forgo.
Inequality in educational resources is grotesque. In my school district of 205 schools, five billionaires and 3,200 millionaires (USD) live – these capitalists don’t intend to pay for the water! Racism is plain to see. The families with the lowest incomes are Black, Latin and Asian.
The issue of clean drinking water for the working class should be on the forefront of everyone’s mind - and not just because of Covid-19. One in three people on the planet do not have access to clean drinking water (WHO, 2019).
The capitalists pretend to care. The United Nations passed a meaningless resolution, “declaring water and sanitation to be a basic human right” in 2010.
 In San Cristóbal, Mexico, local workers depend on the Coca-Cola bottling company for jobs. The same company has a permit (2018) to extract 300,000 gallons of water to make their sugary, diabetes-inducing drink yet their workers have no safe sources of drinking water. On average, workers and their families are consuming two liters of sugary drinks a day. That’s just one example.
Wall Street started trading water on the stock market in 2020 like they do for crude oil, soybeans, and corn (Yale Environment 360, 12/2020, https://e360.yale.edu/). The capitalists are betting on the future price of water! Their interest in clean water is only so they can profit. Forget the platitudes of the World Health Organization and the UN. Workers’ needs will not be met without communism.
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Addition to ‘Red Army Defeated Fascists’
"The hopes of civilization rest upon the worthy banners of the courageous Red Army." The CHALLENGE article "Red Army Defeated Fascists''  (2/15) was right on!
With all the lies spread by the world's ruling classes about the U.S. and its allies winning World War II, and about the Bolshevik Revolution, I would add the following: the capitalists were fearful that the Russian working class that seized power in 1917 in the fledgling Soviet Union set an example for the international working class which was why the armies of 17 capitalist countries invaded the workers' state from 1917 to 1925. They were repelled. Some 4.5 million workers died in that bosses' invasion—only 18,000 in the Revolution itself. That defeat of Western armies ended British imperialist Winston Churchil's dream of "strangling the baby in the cradle," referring to the Bolsheviks.
Actually numerous Western historians agreed that the Red Army's smashing of six Nazi armies at the Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of World War II. That fact was endorsed by no less than the U.S. Pacific Commander Douglas MacArthur. His statement to the Associated Press is worth repeating: "The hopes of civilization rest upon the worthy banners of the courageous Red Army." Their heroic "resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy" is "The greatest military achievement of all time."
The solidarity of U.S. workers should also be noted: West Coast longshoremen refused to load ships with military supplies headed for the American Expeditionary Force which had invaded Siberia.
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