LOS ANGELES, January 5—On New Year’s Eve, I got news that my patient of more than five years had died of complications from Covid-19 two days ago. He called me just three days before he passed and was exhausted with speaking due to shortness of breath. The best I could do at the moment was encourage him to remain calm and stay on his oxygen. He was hospitalized at Martin Luther King Community Hospital which is currently overrun by Covid-19 cases.
I am heartbroken on getting the news of his passing and have mixed emotions on what more I could have done. I called a physician-friend I know who works there to get her take on his situation but to also get a firsthand account on the conditions for healthcare workers and its impact on the quality of patient care.
She looked into his case and informed me that he developed pneumonia with sepsis that led to organ failure. His family had made him “DNR” (Do Not Resuscitate) and after two days removed his life support. She lauded the doctors and nursing staff of their medical and intensive care teams and said that while they are working in terrible conditions, “I have never worked under [worse conditions] in my entire life,” she assured me the quality of care has not yet been impacted in any major ways. She felt confident that while tragic, there was nothing more the MLK medical team could have done for my patient.
What followed, however, was more disturbing.
Death panel protocols
She mentioned MLK hospital was thinking about implementing plans to ration care and that “Death Panel” protocols have been developed.  She was furious at the hospital bosses for even considering this of their medical teams when there is currently no county-wide coordination between hospitals and said, “I refused to deny care for my patients while resources in hospitals in Santa Monica or in West LA remain available!” She said, “They’ll get my resignation letter first!”
However, many hospitals in LA County are already reporting their ICU’s effectively full and as of last week the county had one percent of their beds available and the current surge is only expected to worsen in January. Hospitals are now discharging severely ill patients home sooner than they normally would. Ambulance services are being told to restrict the transportation of patients whose hearts have stopped and can only transport to the hospital if they’ve successfully resuscitated the patient out in the field. In other words, patients will be left to die in ambulances or at home (LA Times 1/4/2021).  Clearly, the move to fascist “Death Panels” is likely to become a reality.
In addition, the LA Times (1/2) has run a series of articles on MLK Hospital that illustrate how the pre-pandemic day-to-day lives and underlying health conditions of Black and Latin workers are creating “a crisis on top of a crisis….Many residents live in dense, multigenerational housing, work essential jobs and suffer from secondary health conditions due to a lifelong, systemic lack of access to quality primary care.”  
Chief Medical Officer John Fisher said:

I describe our healthcare system as separate and unequal and we have a community here that is a reflection of that. We’re all Black and Brown, low income, almost all publicly insured, and really lack the access to healthcare that other communities have. Because of that, we are being hit hard — harder than every other community — by Covid.  

My patient was a middle-aged Black man living with HIV and hypertension that was otherwise well controlled. Studies currently suggest that living with HIV and having an otherwise stable immune system poses no greater risk for Covid-19 than non-HIV infected individuals. Having said that, he worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant in a hospital also with rampant Covid-19 cases.  His job as an “essential worker” is likely the source of his exposure. In either case, his reality of being a Black worker from Compton in a racist, capitalist system is what killed him.
Sad, angry, but not helpless
While it may be true that it’s the underlying racist conditions that are leading to the high diagnosis and death rates of Covid-19 in Black and Latin communities, MLK Community Hospital is also to blame for being overrun by the virus. When it was rebuilt and opened in 2015, its number of medical beds declined by more than 100 (131 down from 233) and it now lacks the trauma center it once had.
Originally born out of the Watts rebellions of 1965, this current hospital, while staffed by committed healthcare workers putting their lives on the line , is a skeleton of its former self and under-resourced(Politico 11/8/2017).
In the LA Times piece (1/2), one of the ICU doctors said, “For a hospital already struggling under the weight of one healthcare crisis, the patients here are particularly helpless in this battle.”
That’s how my patient and so many other Black, Latin, immigrant and poor working class people are left by a system only concerned with profits. While I am deeply saddened, I am also angry and certainly don’t feel helpless.
Mass work leads the way
I currently work in a mass organization that has been fighting against racist incarceration and organizing healthcare workers, which has been written about in CHALLENGE. We have been building ties with families whose loved ones have been killed by the KKKops, and are getting to know the sister of Nicholas Burgos who was murdered by LA County Sheriffs at Harbor UCLA hospital in October of last year.
I’m talking about my patient and the circumstances surrounding his death with coworkers and friends because only our growth and movement to overthrow capitalism can ever avenge his death and so many others killed by this system.
My patient was deeply loved by family, friends and coworkers. On his social media there are countless messages of shock and sadness. One coworker wrote,

If you work in a hospital you know that your coworkers can quickly turn to family. When you work with people for long 12+ hour shifts dealing with critically ill patients and situations unlike any other work place, a special type of bond is formed. He was just an all-around cool person, one of the most generous, friendly and funny people I've known. He was able to connect with patients, make them feel comfortable, care for them and make them (and me) laugh on a daily basis. He was an amazing caregiver in every sense of the word and risked his life to save others. You're a hero in my book and we'll never forget you.

The bosses took one more of our loved ones and will continue to until we rise up. Healthcare workers need to fight for the lives of our patients, fight for access to vaccinations, refuse their racist “death panels” and join us to build for communist revolution and overthrow this pathological system once and for all!

HAITI, January 1—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Haiti organized its annual solidarity soup in two working-class neighborhoods in a provincial town. Many people had the opportunity to drink the cauldrons of traditional January 1 independence pumpkin soup (soup joumou) with us. The tradition celebrates the victory of the revolutionaries of Haitian independence in 1804 over racism, slavery and colonialism, and therefore against the domination and exploitation of capitalism. To share the soup of independence is therefore to say no to capitalism and yes to communism.
Capitalism: the Haitian working class’worst nightmare
This year, the socio-economic situation marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of the dollar on the foreign exchange market, kidnapping, gang wars, etc., has shocked the working masses. For some families, it would have been impossible to drink the traditional soup, as evidenced by the pleas of many people asking Party comrades if “there will be the solidarity soup for this year.”
There has been a surge in insecurity throughout Haiti: theft, rapes, assassinations and kidnappings all add to the daily burden on the workers. Poverty continues to increase, we are in need of everything, mainly the subsistence minimum. About 60 percent of the population is food insecure—the bosses’ sanitized term that means hungry—with a high percentage severely food insecure—starving. The unemployment rate, for its part, cannot even be quantified. One could ask, “How do they manage to stay alive, these Haitian workers who have no access to health care, electricity or even drinking water?” Despair is written in big letters on the faces of the people you meet in the streets.
With mass misery at its height, and corruption and crime well established, the rulers are implementing a dictatorship worthy of the monarchies and aristocracies of past centuries. Executions, militias, federations of gangs: they have installed terror in all forms. The ruling class, for its part, wages war through groups of armed gangs in working-class neighborhoods. It’s a mess. The race for profit never ceases to craze those in power, or those who long to usurp power.
Life is becoming cheaper for the bosses, who try every which way to topple anything that stands in their way. The working class without  communist  leadership wanders among the tumult of power struggles. Everything is scarce for workers, everything except death!
Working class solidarity illuminates dark night
PLP, our international communist party, understands the suffering and peril of the working classes of the world. Alongside workers in struggle, from near and afar, we participate in and promote the concept of mutual aid and sharing, of putting into practice the communist idea of “from each according to commitment, to each according to need.” It is an awareness of our equality as a class.  As proof, our comrades and friends in the U.S. and in Paris, France, even in their coronavirus isolation, have contributed financially to our solidarity soup.
Long live sharing, long live solidarity, long live the class struggle. Communism is the future of our world. Let's join PLP to build it.

Is the transcontinental country of Turkey an ally or a rival to U.S. imperialists? New President Joe Biden's choice for secretary of state Antony Blinken declares Turkey is acting more like a betrayer: “The idea that a strategic, so-called strategic, partner of ours would actually be in line with one of our biggest strategic competitors in Russia is not acceptable” (Daily Sabah, 1/20).
Turkey—cozying up with Russia and China and destabilizing its solid alliance with the U.S.-aligned world order—is a house of cards. Any of these capitalist players can incite war.
We have no stake in the bosses’ bloody games for profit and power. From Istanbul to Hong Kong to New York, our liberation lies in building a mass, international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and transforming the bosses’ profit wars into class wars for communist revolution.
Inter-imperialist rivalry is the name of the game
The U.S. bosses’-led liberal world order is in utter disarray (see page 2). To understand the driving force of world events, we must grasp the inter-imperialist rivalry which is becoming sharper. This means bosses who cut the world into spheres of influence are preparing for war with each other. Their struggle is intensifying, especially as U.S. imperialist influence around the world is stumbling.
As the biggest imperialists prepare their fight, they maneuver to gain advantage over their rivals. They fight to control as many second-tier countries as possible. But the bosses of these second-tier capitalist states have ambitions of their own. That’s what’s  happening with Turkey.
Regardless of how the bosses’ alliances shift over time, the result is that under capitalism workers will always lose.
Relationship with the West unravels
Turkey has been a member of NATO (the transatlantic alliance led by U.S. bosses) since 1952. Since the Cold War, its NATO base in Incirlik has played a key role in containing the USSR (and now Russia) and helping U.S. forces launch their murderous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the Middle East. Turkey is deeply integrated into NATO’s military structure. It hosts the standing headquarters for NATO’s land forces in the city of Izmir.
When U.S. rulers tried to destabilize the Middle East with the Arab Spring, Turkey lost by backing the losing side, the Muslim Brotherhood. This isolated Turkey from the region, especially from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
The Syrian civil war was a direct result of the Arab Spring. The U.S. was incapable of achieving its objective of toppling Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, who was backed by Iran and Russia. Worse for Turkey, the U.S. allied with its enemy the YPG (Kurdish forces which Turkey categorizes as a terrorist organization). The Turkish and U.S. bosses’ relationship has only continued to unravel.
Erdogan cuts deals with Russia
These developments encouraged an attempted military coup against Turkish President Recep Erdogan in 2016. Erdogan had been in power since 2003 and had been consolidating his control while transforming Turkey into a quasi-religious fascistic state. The coup was an opportunistic attempt by the military to be the ultimate power broker in Turkey, a role that they were accustomed to.
Erdogan survived and blamed the West. It also became fed up with the unfulfilled promises of EU membership. So, Turkey, in crisis and isolated, warmed up relations with Russia.
Erdogan’s first call and foreign visit after the coup was Russia. Since then, Turkey and Russia have brokered the peace talks in Syria (Reuters, 12/16/16). Russia lifted most of the sanctions it had imposed on Turkey. They met seven times that year culminating with the sale of a Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system to Turkey (CNN, 7/13/19).
Liberal Order sanctions Turkey
This dealing with Russia has its contradictions. Russian and Turkish troops still face one another not only in Syria, but on opposite sides of the Libyan civil war, and the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Turkey also has refused to recognize Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula (ABC News, 10/16/20).
Turkey continues to anger the EU by sending a research ship escorted by gunboats to prospect for gas in waters internationally recognized as part of the exclusive economic zones of EU members Greece and Cyprus (BBC, 10/12/20). It has weaponized refugees by busing hundreds to the Greek border and pushing them to cross in a bid to pressure the EU and Greece.
Last month, the U.S. Congress passed a law mandating the President to impose sanctions on Turkey for buying those Russian missiles (WSJ, 12/10/20). The EU is also debating sanctions against Turkey for its incursion into its maritime zone. These imperialists are sending a clear signal to Turkey to play by their rules. Joe Biden, representing the Big Fascists, is “willing to work with "opposition leadership" in [Turkey] to topple Erdoğan in Turkey's 2023 elections” (Daily Sabah, 1/20).
U.S. at risk of losing Turkey to China?
Although China and Turkey have long been at odds over China’s racist state terror against Uighur workers, in recent years the relationship has thawed. Since 2016, they have signed at least ten bilateral agreements, and China is now only second to Russia in trade with Turkey. While the U.S. bosses have railed against Chinese tech giant Huawei as a security threat, market share of the company in Turkey has only grown (Foreign Policy, 9/16/20). Militarily and economically, the U.S. bosses are losing serious ground.
Considering everything, this hornet’s nest “risks bringing Turkey and the United States into a military confrontation, unheard of in their 70-year long alliance” (Brookings, 2/14/18). Biden’s job, as dictated by the Big Fascists, is to prepare for eventual war against the U.S.’s rivals, China and Russia.
No honor among imperialist thieves
Communists know that the world’s ruling capitalist classes are mass-murdering fascists and racists. They are only interested in maintaining their power and control over the world’s resources and workers. They have no principles. They only use religion, patriotism, nationalism, identity politics, and sexism to divide and confuse workers to kill each other for their profits.
As such, their wheeling and dealing is all opportunistic and self-serving. They have no loyalty to each other. When the bosses talk peace, workers should prepare for war. We are the wild card in the rulers’ games. These capitalist rulers are highly dynamic human actors interested in maximum profits. We need to understand their motives to prepare ourselves for battle.
This battle we’re building right now must have no borders. Reject all bosses and their ideologies—turn imperialist war into class war and communist revolution with PLP!

Workers pay the heaviest of prices for buying into capitalist ideas, which in every country capitalism tries convincing us are universal truths— in the U.S., schools and movies alike saturate us with ideas like “individual freedom.” But when evaluating the toll of COVID-19, the cost of these ideas is measured in the hundreds of thousands of workers dead and the millions of workers’ lives uprooted and shattered in the U.S. alone: in the belly of the beast of history’s richest and most powerful imperialist power.
And the very first mechanism by which capitalism guaranteed the lethality of the COVID-19 was the infection of the working class with capitalist ideas, starting with individualism.
To be sure, the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party recommends the COVID-19 vaccine, universal mask wearing, physical distancing, and self-isolation when necessary – to protect ourselves and everyone around us. These are common sense mandates. In many countries workers willingly obey these public health mandates and lockdown orders for that reason.
Yet the U.S. leads in the share of people who defy such public health measures. Many refuse to accept these mandates because they regard them as infringements on “individual freedom,” even though this individualism directly harms others. Misled by politicians like Trump and Christian fascist preachers who promote superstition over science, around more than 25 percent of all U.S. workers —rising to 33 percent of Black and 34 percent of Latin workers— believe the pandemic is “probably or definitely” a hoax (Pew Research, 7/24/20), dismissing the one-third of one million deaths and counting. Far too many of our working class sisters and brothers are incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.
Mimicking Trump’s irresponsibility, many state governors and politicians aligned with the Small Fascist, domestic-oriented “Fortress America” capitalist wing tell people to do what they want. Many small-time capitalists are on the brink of failure, squeezed by monopolies like Amazon on one hand and falling profits on the other.
But it’s not just Trump – it’s capitalism. Such blatant “me-first” disregard for the well-being of others didn’t begin with Trump or any particular faction of the capitalist class. It flows from the entire history and ideology of capitalism, from its early competitive days to today’s monopoly capitalist stage, imperialism.
Politics are primary
Capitalism consists of a relatively tiny class of capitalists at the top: the owners of production and wealth. These capitalists control the lives of the rest of society beneath them—the working class, in countries the world over—control that they exercise through their state power, represented for them by self-serving politicians. And these politicians are (usually!) protected by the bosses’ police and military.
These politicians are a key part of capitalist state power, along with the entire monopoly-owned mass media and educational institutions, who are all represented on think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations. Capitalist state power is supported by and enhances individualism alongside racism, sexism and nationalism to weaken working class-conscious interests like equality, collectivity, internationalism and solidarity.
Communist collectivity vs capitalist individualism
Communist-led workers in China won a revolution and established socialism in 1949. For the period of time that the heroic struggles of workers in China were led by communists, many millions of workers became conditioned with a collective working class consciousness that opposed capitalist individualism.
These movements ultimately failed and came under the leadership of pro-capitalist, fake communists. The old communist movement, for so many achievements and advances, kept many capitalist ideas. They wrongly believed that the international working class could not be won directly to communism, and PLP has analyzed the lessons of these failures elsewhere.
Even so, remnants of that collectivity and solidarity persist. Russia and China have long ago betrayed revolutionary struggle and become fascist states today. And yet China’s success in containing COVID-19 would’ve been impossible were it not for masses of workers selflessly volunteering.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health conducted a study on the “volunteerism” in China (Miao et al, 8/7/20). As the pandemic rose, 85,699 middle-aged worker volunteers interpreted and carried out public health mandates, as public services facing decades of China’s capitalist cutbacks became overwhelmed. Volunteers formed grassroots networks connecting hard-hit cities like Hangzhou, Wenzhou and Taizhou with smaller cities, towns and villages, from running public services to organizing logistics for food and medicine deliveries, to performing invaluable sanitation duties.
Zero praise is due for the fascist “Communist” Party of China or their response to the pandemic; workers in China organized despite their fascist capitalist government, and the bosses found themselves tailing the masses. Tellingly, the survey found that 85.8 percent of these worker volunteers volunteered “on their own initiative,” whereas 10.8 percent stated they were officially mobilized. Tragically, without a mass revolutionary communist party like PLP, these selfless worker volunteers saved lives, but also strengthened the hand of Chinese imperialism.
These volunteers’ parents and grandparents would remember the 1960s when China was led by real communists. Communists organized and channeled working class consciousness to eradicate the disease schistosomiasis, caused by snail-borne parasites that the Centers for Disease Control lists today as both an indication of extreme poverty, and the deadliest of all tropical diseases. Communists mobilized millions collectively, and is documented in Joshua S. Horn’s must-read book, Away With All Pests.
Forward to communism
“Personal choice” and “individual freedom,” are illusions of capitalist ideology, stand in opposition to working class liberation, and under capitalism lead to death-dealing pandemics for which capitalist ideas also have no solutions. Capitalist individualism only tightens our chains. The international working class’ historic task is therefore smashing capitalism and capitalist ideas through communist revolution and communist ideology.
Communism is a new concept of freedom—mass freedom. Where the condition for the free development of each is the free development of all, empowerment of the majority through abolition of the capitalist state, and organization of a working class dictatorship. This collective rule requires mutual responsibility, based on an objective and scientific appraisal of the needs of the global working class. Such an outcome is only possible through a mass organization of millions into PLP and encouraging the full participation of all workers in deliberating, planning, and implementing ideas.
Under communism, the collective power of the working class can be mobilized to solve any problem history and nature presents, from pandemics to crop failures to climate change. Liberating the creative power of each and every worker through communism and dialectical materialism will ensure the survival and progress of all. Join us and join the fight for freedom: to smash the ideological chains of individualism, racism and sexism with communist revolution.