Friedrich Engels, the comrade in arms of Karl Marx, was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Germany. His father was a textile manufacturer, a reactionary and religious man. He forced young Engels into a commercial apprenticeship, first in his own company, then in another. Despite his reluctance, Engels mastered this profession.
In 1841-2, Engels did voluntary military service in Berlin where he could attend lectures at the university. There he made contact with liberal, anarchist and left-Hegelian circles, and studied military science. In 1842, he began work in his father’s cotton mill in Manchester, England. Engels would go after work into the working-class neighborhoods where he saw the misery of the proletariat. He got to know English labor leaders and married an Irish worker, Mary Burns.
Workers of Manchester made Engels a communist
Engels read everything that had been written about the situation of the English working class and carefully studied available official documents. Engels came to understand that it is their dire economic situation that drives workers to fight for their liberation. However, liberation from capitalism will only happen if the working class consciously sets it as its goal. At the age of 25, Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. As early as 1844, he had published Outline of a Critique of Political Economy in Franco-German Yearbooks where Marx also worked.  Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution (Lenin).
In 1848, Marx and Engels published the world-famous Manifesto of the Communist Party. In that year, as democratic revolutions broke out in Europe, both worked on the revolutionary newspaper,  Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The Prussian state persecuted the paper and its editors, and expelled Marx from Germany.
In May 1849, Engels fought on the barricades in his homeland during an uprising. In June, he fought in another uprising. After Prussian troops crushed it, he fled to Switzerland. In 1850, Engels returned to Manchester, where he worked again in the Ermen & Engels spinning mill. Meanwhile he carried out revolutionary organizing, and supported Marx financially. Both men joined the International Workers Association, the First International, which helped workers' parties, newspapers and organizations worldwide.
During this period Marx began systematic work on the materialist criticism of bourgeois political economy, culminating in the first volume of Capital in 1867. Could Marx have done this without the constant professional and scientific advice and material support from Engels? It is doubtful. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels published two more volumes of Capital and was a leader of the international socialist and communist labor movement.
Engels fought for materialism
Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view  that it is the development of the mind that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the ideas of the mind must be derived from nature, from matter. ...Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels were materialists. Regarding the world and humanity materialistically, they perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by the development of material forces, the productive forces (Lenin, Frederick Engels 1895).
Lenin fought for Engels’ elaboration of this revolutionary-materialistic point of view in his great philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. While Marx at that time worked his way further into the depths of the critique of political economy, Engels … dealt with general scientific problems and with diverse phenomena of the past and present in the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx's economic theory in works such as Anti-Dühring (analyzing highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Peasant War in Germany, and other works
There are many stories about the generous, humorous, witty host, who was a disinterested helper to countless comrades. Engels put all his strength and inheritance at the disposal of the working class. “The European proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always … placed himself after Marx. … His love for the living Marx and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless (Lenin “Fredrick Engels”).

Engels has no grave. “In accordance with Engels’s instructions his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea …” (T. Carver, The Life and Thought of Fredrich Engels)

The struggle continues to force the racist bosses to drop all charges against Black artist/organizer Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson. Mohawk was attacked and arrested in August during an anti-kkkop protest in downtown Chicago with many others, and remains on house arrest connected to “aggravated assault.” Communists from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active in trying to build this battle in the streets, courts, and our workplaces.
The fight to free Mohawk has expanded into a wider mass campaign to challenge capitalist state terror that faces antiracist fighters here in the city. A grassroots citywide defense committee has been created, and over 60 antiracists filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department after being targeted and beaten by the bosses’ attack dogs (See CHALLENGE, 12/16).
So if you’re in the Chicago area on December 29th, come support the fight by joining the rally and picket in front of Leighton Courthouse on 26th Street and California Avenue at 9:30 am CST. The capitalist bosses fear nothing more than a multiracial united working-class armed with communist politics. Let’s keep up the fight to free Mohawk, and tear down this whole racist system!

Learning to fight for students
The pandemic has provided educators with opportunities to build some working-class muscles.
I teach at a high school with a 97 percent Black and Latin immigrant population. While our Black principal prides herself in being pro-student, she leads racist attacks against students with the highest needs.
Just last week, my 14-year-old advisee McKay—a young man with special needs—ran away from home and the principal ordered us to stay out of it. “Do not get involved. That’s not your job,” she said.
This is the same principal that ordered us not to get involved when our student Malcolm, also special needs, was brutalized by the cops during a demonstration against the murder of George Floyd and others in May.
When the school bosses prioritize paperwork and liabilities over the safety of students, they are participating in the systemic pushing out and alienation of Black working-class teens, especially young men. Teachers must push the boundaries of what is “part of our job.” Supporting our students and building student-parent-educator unity is part of our job. Exposing the racist practice of expendability is part of our job.
Many people at work don’t see it that way but little actions add up. So whether it’s fighting to give students more opportunities to meet with teachers for office hours or building a student newspaper or building in antiracism and the fight against police terror into the curriculum, we are slowly but surely learning to stick our necks out for students.
 This work is inherently antiracist and through these tiny actions, we see how the system routinely fails our students and then blames them for failing. That is infuriating. And then, a teen in class yesterday said, “we don’t need cops in our schools because students feel scared and they should listen to us because it’s our experience and our life.” That is cause for optimism.
As for McKay, he is still out there in 31 degree weather. I will keep calling. If he isn’t living proof of why we need to kill capitalism, I don’t know what is.
*****
 Communism is anti-capitalist vaccine
Nine of ten people in poorer countries will not get a Covid-19 vaccine until 2022 and hundreds of millions will never get it and die because vaccine companies have intellectual property rights (IPR). Even though tax payers have mostly paid for their research, IPR allows these companies to produce only enough vaccines that rich countries have contracted to pay for. All current vaccine supply has already been bought up and will be distributed to serve profit and political needs. Six of the wealthiest nations have already refused to suspend their IPR, which would allow the world’s vaccine companies to copy and produce a timely and affordable people’s vaccine that could save the lives of billions worldwide.
It has been said that capitalists would impose IPR on the use of the sun if they could.  is the contradiction between them and communists who fight to use production for people’s needs and an end to profits, inequality and exploitation. Vaccines like all properties need to be owned and shared by all peoples if only because no country is safe until all are safe. And vaccines without masks and distancing won’t stop vaccinated people with capitalist disregard for others from spreading the disease.
Today we need people to spread the need for collective values and a communist world. It has been said that such people do not just happen, they are born in struggle. Now is the time to join Progressive Labor Party to develop the mental communist vaccine that can destroy the world’s greatest pandemic—capitalism.
*****

REDEYE

Afghanistan: How U.S. imperialist wars destroyed farmers
NYT, 12/9 — …80-year-old Jamal Khan’s…plot of land was the source of his family’s livelihood — until the American forces arrived…Armored vehicles drove into fields of knee-high corn stalks, claimed about 30 acres that were owned by about as many families and quickly cordoned off the area with barbed wire. This was how Combat Outpost Honaker-Miracle, one of roughly 1,000 military installations the United States and its coalition partners would prop up across Afghanistan….
Mr. Khan is one of countless Afghans whose land has become a casualty of the U.S.-led war and the sprawling military structure born from it…The Americans have left…but Mr. Khan does not have his land back…Not only are Afghans deprived of justice under the American-backed government, but…the U.S. military presence has added to the injustice….Although the Afghan army now occupies his land, Mr. Khan is still required to pay tax on the plot…In Northern Balkh Province, the U.S.-led coalition forces built a base next to the provincial capital’s airport. Amanullah Balkhi…says the installation occupies about 20 acres of his land….
“I have the deed, and…the courts have attested that this is my land,” he said. But the Americans still have the land and they still deny me....[At] a base in Panjwai….about 10 years ago, dozens of coalition vehicles arrived at the small village….getting to work building a new base. They didn’t carve a road…where we came and went — they carved a road for themselves through people’s lands, people’s gardens,” said Fida Muhammad a tribal elder…
“It ruined the irrigation system too….The land dried,” Mr. Muhammad said…. “Many families…went to the city for daily labor….” When a base was transferred to Afghan control….Afghan commanders…did not care about the local residents’ grievances which they saw as an issue between the farmers and the Americans.
U.S.-British WWII bombings deliberately murdered civilians
NYT Book Review, 11/24—“War” by Margaret MacMillan — The United States and Britain…bombing of Germany and Japan in World War II…deliberately aimed to terrorize civilian populations. In 1945, Americans flying over Tokyo dropped incendiary bombs, a weapon chosen deliberately because so many homes were built of wood; the raid killed as many as 100,000 civilians and left a million homeless….Maj/ Gen. Curtis LeMay…[said] the Japanese were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” MacMillan notes: “It was no oversight that mass bombings were not included in the Allied indictment of Nazi leaders at the Nuremburg trials.”
Pandemic hit Latin, Black, Asian women the hardest
NYT, 11/13 — …A gender gap in retirement security [combined with] women earn[ing] less than men and…[being] more likely to take time off from work to care for children…[means] interruptions diminish wage growth, retirement savings and Social Security benefits….Women…also outlive men [and]…face higher health care expenses in retirement.
…The pandemic recession is disproportionately damaging [to] women…experts call it a “shecession.” Latina, Black and Asian American women have been hit the hardest….Many entered the pandemic earning less, [and] have experienced higher jobless rates….and many may never become fully employed again…Losses beyond the immediate salary…compound over time in…missed wage growth, retirement savings and Social Security benefits….
…Four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force in September alone and barely half that number returned…Women earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men…[and] 49 cents on the dollar in 2015 when measuring earnings of all workers….
The structural problems that women face…translate into problems maintaining their living standards in retirement and raise their risk of falling into poverty…A larger percentage of [women’s]…retirement time is spent needing assistance with their daily living.
Slaveholder Chief InJustices of the Supreme Court
NYT (Book Review), 11/25 — [When] the enslaved Dred Scott brought his first lawsuit for freedom in Missouri, where he was held in bondage,…the Supreme Court hand[ed] down its notorious verdict in 1857. Black people, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
...In 1813, when the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall…in an appeal brought by Mina Queen, an enslaved woman, it was handing a victory to the slaveholding class — of which Marshall was decidedly a member. Marshall personally held more than 150 people in bondage.
Structures of segregation embedded in daily lives
NYT, 12/1 — “CHANGE”…the letters mark…the St. Louis Hotel & Exchange, where…enslaved people…were once sold,….lingering traces that were hidden in plain sight… “Colored” entrances to movie theaters, or walls built inside restaurants to separate non-white customers….Photographs capture the Black institutions that arose in response to racial segregation…[and] depict the sites where Black people were attacked, killed or abducted….The Ghosts of Segregation. …The small side window at Edd’s Drive-In….was actually a segregated window used in the Jim Crow era to serve Black customers
The locked black double doors aside Seattle’s Moore Theater….was once the “Colored” entrance used by non-white moviegoers to…the theater’s second balcony…Slavery is often referred to as America’s “original sin.” Its demons still haunt in the dorm of segregated housing, education, health care [and] employment…The painted sign for Clark’s Café in Huntington, Ore, which trumpeted “All White HELP,” was destroyed….The Houston Negro Hospital School of Nursing has since been demolished…
These photographs are…more about the people who once populated them….[and are] a testament to the endurance of the racial inequalities…The deaths…of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among many other Black Americans, prompted…one of the largest movements in U.S. history. And these pictures prove…the evidence of the structures of segregation — and the ideology of white supremacy — still…[are] embedded in…our day-to-day

On November 15, China signed the world’s largest “free” trade agreement with 14 other Asia-Pacific nations. Beyond reducing tariffs and easing barriers to capitalist investments, the trade deal represents a giant step toward fascism and global war between China and its imperialist arch-rival, the U.S.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) “covers almost one-third of the world’s population and about one-third of its gross domestic product” (South China Morning Post, 12/1). The new alliance includes all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China’s top trading partner. It also draws four traditionally U.S.-leaning countries more deeply into China’s orbit: Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. By strengthening ties with its neighbors, China will be less vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. Along with the Belt and Road Initiative, the gigantic Chinese infrastructure project of trains, roads, and gas and oil pipelines, the RCEP gives China tremendous leverage over poorer debtor capitalist bosses.
According to a commentary published by Renmin University’s school of international studies, the deal is China’s biggest win in economic diplomacy since the formation of the Beijing-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2016:
[It] displays that China’s economic cooperation with Asia-Pacific countries will be substantially strengthened, and significantly counter the numerous pressures from the China-US economic decoupling and changes in supply chains…” (SCMP, 11/20).
China’s rise has been relentless. In 2009, it surpassed Germany as the world’s largest exporting nation. This October, the International Monetary Fund acknowledged that China had overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest economy (EurAsian Times, 10/18). Despite mostly empty threats from President Donald Trump, China’s annual trade surplus with the U.S. still tops $450 billion (focus-economics.com, 10/13). It’s the only major economy that has kept growing through the pandemic.
The RCEP may herald a tipping point, the moment when China supplants the U.S. as the world’s most powerful imperialist. Unlike the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Trump withdrew from in 2017, the RCEP plays to China’s strengths and will go by China’s rules. The pact has minimal labor standards, no environmental regulations, and no constraints on state-subsidized industries—all of which would have favored the U.S. rulers at the Chinese bosses’ expense.
What does this mean for the international working class? First of all, “free” trade is a cynical misnomer. As we saw with NAFTA in North America, it’s designed to give the bosses flexibility to move their companies, technologies, and merchandise freely across borders. Meanwhile, workers are free to be used as cheap labor—or, when the winds of profit blow the wrong way, free to starve.
Second, the looming change in the imperialists’ pecking order will make the world an even more volatile place. As the RCEP sharpens the contradictions between China and the U.S., it brings both countries that much closer to World War III. In the face of this development, workers of the world must reject the bosses’ calls to nationalism. Our task is to build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party and smash capitalism and its enslaving economic system for all time.
U.S. bosses’ split: another win for China
Trump has represented the isolationist bosses who make most of their profits within the U.S. They have more to lose than to gain from multilateral trade deals that bring in added competition to the U.S. market. But for the top-dog finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, which makes much of its money internationally, Trump’s high-tariff, go-it-alone trade policy is a disaster, both for short-term profits and long-term geopolitical control.
The task of future Stooge in Chief Joe Biden is to revive the old order and put the liberal bosses back in charge. He’s probably doomed. For one thing, China’s unified ruling class and full-blown fascism gives them a huge strategic advantage. For another, the domestic U.S. bosses have hijacked the Republican Party and are likely to keep running the U.S. Senate, which must ratify any trade agreements.  
At bottom, the division in the U.S. ruling class is over the best way to handle China and its threat to U.S. profits. Trump’s Fortress America wing would rely on a defensive, scaled-down, predominantly white military that could wage genocide on the cheap. Biden’s interventionist wing is targeting Black and Latin youth to build a massive, multicultural, patriotic fighting force ready to lay down their lives by the millions.
Turn the guns around!
On November 24, a high-ranking Chinese official was published in the Op Ed section of the New York Times, finance capital’s daily mouthpiece. Fu Ying, an ex-vice foreign minister, called for a new era of “co-opetition” between China and the U.S., a “mutually beneficial” mix of cooperation and competition. But when you read the fine print, it didn’t sound so friendly: “On the political front, it is high time that the United States drop its habit of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs….and avoid challenging China on the issue of Taiwan or by meddling in the territorial disputes of the South China Sea.” In other words, China will be happy to work with the U.S.—as long as the U.S. surrenders Asia.
While imperialists may cooperate in narrow and short-lived ways when it serves their interests, competition is always primary. The bosses live by the law of maximum profit.
The U.S. finance capitalists will never voluntarily accept China’s ascent to become the world’s new number-one power—there are too many trillions in multinational profits at stake. They may lose, but they won’t go gently.
For the same reason, the Chinese bosses will stop at nothing to reign supreme. China’s true intentions were revealed in a recent message from President Xi Jinping to the People’s Liberation Army Marine Corps: “Put all your minds and energy on preparing for war” (cnn.com, 10/14).
The instability of this period is a great danger to the working class, but also an opportunity.  Though we cannot say when, where, or how the bosses will take up arms, it is our historic responsibility to transform imperialist war into war for communist revolution. We have no side in this fight between exploiters. Workers of the world, we cannot forget that our class seized state power in Russia during World War I, and did the same in China after World War II. Though these revolutions were a great advance for the working class, they ultimately failed to make a lasting break with capitalism. But history tells us we will have another chance—if we build for it today. Fight for communism! Join PLP!