In A life of Labor and Love: A Red Memoir, Wally Linder reminds us of both the power of a united working class to fight the capitalist bosses, and of the special people that make up our class. He interweaves the political and the personal as he chronicles his 89 years of life. He shares the joys and the tragedies, and we get a glimpse of the heart and soul of this ordinary but extraordinary man.
Born in 1930, Wally grew up as a New York working-class kid who loved baseball and was curious about the world. At 19, he participated in a strike at City College against two racist, anti-Semitic professors. At 23, he supported the Rosenbergs, two communists who were falsely accused of giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. He later helped “shut down the waterfront” by organizing teamsters and railroad workers to respect tugboat workers’ very sparse picket lines (600 workers had to cover hundreds of stations). We learn not only about these militant actions, but also about the people in Wally’s life.
Multiracial unity strengthens 1960s transit workers
In the early 1960s, the railroad workers unions were still racially segregated, but Wally had been working to bring the two unions together since he first became a steward in the late 1950s. Wally was a Communist Party (CP) member when he started working on the railroad, but would soon join a dissident group—which later became Progressive Labor Party (PLP)—organized around militancy and open advocacy of communism. PLP’s approach was in contrast to that of the CP, which, in response to the McCarthy witch hunts, hid their politics and blended in with activist liberals.
As a member of the Brotherhood Railway Clerks and Freight Handlers, the first thing Wally did was to develop relationships among stewards from both the two racially divided unions. This laid the basis for suggesting that both Black and white stewards represent any worker brought up on disciplinary charges. Their unity allowed for a stronger defense for every worker and as the union kept winning cases, the bosses stopped disciplining so many workers. These victories built support for the idea of one local with multi-racial leadership. The CP’s position had been that members should tell no one that they were communists. Wally discovered, however, that all the workers knew that he and his 65 other comrades working on the railroad were CP members. The FBI told the union leaders, and the union leaders told the workers.
In 1963, when the railroad laid off all its unionized workers, Wally, now a member of PLP, organized a multiracial Railroad Workers Unemployment Council. He inspired many with his fighting spirit, his antiracism, and his communist politics, which he no longer kept “secret”.
The personal is political
Throughout the book, we meet the people Wally loved. We learn about his first wife, Esther, the mother of his two children Anita and Andrew. Like many women, Esther was Wally’s rock. When he feared getting fired for his railroad organizing and not having a job, Esther said, “So, you’ll get another one”. Esther was friends with Stokely Carmichael, loved to dance and go camping, and was a mother figure to many.  She was also an active member of PLP, and was out with a group of her comrades selling the Party’s newspaper, CHALLENGE, when she was tragically struck by a car and killed in 1983.
Wally’s good friend Gus is someone else we meet in this book. Gus worked at a wholesale shoe market, but was so much more than what some might assume from his occupation. Gus was an accomplished cook, carpenter, gardener, fisherman, creator of ceramics and stained glass, voracious reader, world traveler, and a loving husband and father. Wally’s several stories about Gus are a delight and reminder that people are so much more interesting than the stereotypes we might develop of them.
Wally has led an amazing life, and continues to do so! We learn many details about this fascinating person, the historical periods he’s lived through and helped influence, the people in his life who have loved and been loved by him, and the joys and tragedies of his 89 years of life. This book is highly recommended, especially for those participating in today’s antiracist movements and for those wanting to learn about what it means to be a communist.

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The results are in. The victory for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is a step toward more racism and global war. In the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of the liberal finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, Biden stated, “As president, I will take immediate steps to renew U.S. democracy and alliances, protect the United States’ economic future, and once more have America lead the world” (Foreign Affairs, 1/23). Now that Biden and running mate Kamala Harris have won the election, their first task is to strengthen the U.S. in its life-and-death competition with the Chinese and Russian capitalist bosses.
Historically, the ruling class has used elections to sort out their differences and redefine their strategies for inter-imperialist rivalry and the best way to attack the U.S. working class. But with U.S. capitalism in a state of growing weakness and volatility, this fall’s election resolved very little.  If anything, the gutter-racist Trump has become even more dangerous as he refuses to concede (New York Times, 11/16).
Communists must cut through the noise
A shared hatred of Trump temporarily united the Democratic Party bosses and the workers in their base. But now that the bogeyman is on his way out the door, the differences seem sharper than ever between finance capital’s status quo “moderate” wing and the new wave that wants more aggressive reforms of the bosses’ failing system. Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger chastised “progressive” party mates like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for embracing “defund the police” sloganeering and not pushing back against Republican charges of socialism (NYT, 11/5).
Now led by Biden, the Big Fascist finance capital bosses will need to find a way to close ranks to compete with China’s growing economic power (Reuters, 11/16). To promote patriotism among skeptical workers, the cannon fodder they’ll need for their next war, the rulers may offer student loan forgiveness, climate change deals, or expanded health care coverage. The international working class must cut through the noise of politics and understand that any reforms offered under capitalism will be racist and sexist at their core.
The liberal rulers will also have to deal with 73 million Trump voters (10 million more than in 2016), a raging pandemic [see page 8], and an economy in crisis. As communists, Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) role is to help workers understand that no matter who is president, our class will be exploited and brutalized until we commit to fighting for communist revolution. Only by smashing capitalism can we run society on our own terms, in a new, egalitarian way.
Workers’ identity crisis
Over his disgraceful 40-year-plus career in Washington, Biden proved to the liberal bosses that he was one of the most reliably racist, anti-worker warmongers in town (see CHALLENGE editorial, 11/4). As California’s attorney general, Harris supported the jailing and police abuse of Black, Latin and women workers (NYT, 8/9). A week before the election, Biden announced that workers in Philadelphia, one of the poorest cities in the country, had no excuse for “looting and violence” in response to the racist kkkop murder of Walter Wallace Jr. (The Hill, 10/28). Even so, many Black, Latin, and women workers believed that voting for this ticket from hell would improve their own lives.
From their life experience, workers know the facts of life under capitalist “democracy,” the mask for the bosses’ dictatorship. They know we can’t vote for more jobs or to end poverty or unemployment or racist police terror. We can’t vote to end sexist inequalities or domestic violence. We can’t vote against drone bombings or climate change or capitalist wars that kill or displace millions. We cannot simply vote to create a different world. Even so, a higher proportion of workers voted in this U.S. presidential election than in any other in more than 100 years (Washington Post, 11/5). But if revolution wasn’t on the ballot, why was there a record turnout for the toxic Biden-Harris ticket? In short, most workers don’t yet understand that their essential identity is their membership in the international working class. Many voted for the same reason that so many people pray. They hold to the illusion that the true power to change their lives lies in a force outside the working class itself.
Our long-term fight
The shameful administration of Deporter in Chief Barack Obama confirmed our Party’s understanding that there are no good managers--i.e., politicians--of the bosses’ nightmare system. The failed strategy of the old communist movement to work as the “left opposition” within the Democratic Party led to reformism and irrelevancy. PLP has always been clear that liberal misleaders like Obama, Biden, and Harris are in fact the greatest dangers, even more so than the outright racist Republicans. Why? Because they’re more effective in preventing our class from seeing the catastrophic reality of capitalism.
PLP remains active in teachers’ unions, student movements, immigrants’ rights campaigns, police brutality protests, and strikes from the U.S. to Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. In the early months of the Covid-19 outbreak, we called out pseudo “radical” mayors like Ras Baraka of Newark and Bill de Blasio of New York for their racist curfews and violent policing of demonstrations against murder by cops. At high schools and colleges around the world, we have joined in challenging sellout union bosses who betray education workers’ struggles in the face of relentless cutbacks.
But here is the key: Instead of fighting only for reforms, as ends in themselves, we treat these struggles as schools for communism. While standing shoulder to shoulder with our class sisters and brothers, we take every opportunity to share more advanced political ideas, to teach and to learn from them as well. Our task is to build a mass revolutionary communist organization, and to sweep the Bidens and Harris’s of the world into the dustbin of history. PLP is taking the lead by showing that our class and our class alone can lead the world into a future where the pandemic of capitalism is eradicated for all time.

LOS ANGELES, November 18—The headline almost says it all. He Checked into a UCLA Hospital While Suffering From a Mental Illness, and a Sheriff Shot Him Nine Times While Trying To Use the Restroom  (LA Taco, 11/16).  
On October 6, Nick Burgos, 38, was gunned down by LA County Sheriffs while hospitalized at Harbor UCLA hospital. Not even within a so-called "health" institution are workers safe from these kkkops. A healthcare mass organization, in which Progressive Labor Party is active, responded with protests. One  family, survivors of previous police terror, joined the fight. Their loved one Ruben Herrera was killed in the same hospital by the same racist sheriffs six years prior.
What LA Taco didn’t say was that the only way to live in an unlivable system is to build a new one. Between the choices of a racist system spiraling out in crisis and the aim of an antiracist system built on the foundation of need and collectivity, we must intensify the side we want to win. That’s communism, a system run by and for the working class.
Killing a worker with an IV drip in his arm
Nick was suffering from mental illness and went to the hospital voluntarily. In fact, he was in his third week at the hospital. The medical staff and sheriffs knew him. He had become agitated at being prohibited from going to the restroom. He was still pulling on his IV (intravenous) pole with the line in his arm when the cowardly kkkops claimed “fear” of a “metal object.” Nick was shot nine times. He then underwent nine surgeries, with large open abdominal wounds and a partially amputated leg. After three weeks of suffering, he succumbed. While the coroner ruled his shooting a homicide, these killer cops remain roaming our medical wards.
The healthcare mass organization responded quickly after hearing about the shooting. The first protest we—antiracists and PLP—organized drew over 100 healthcare workers and students. We rallied in front of the hospital and called for the sheriffs to be immediately removed from all healthcare spaces. We held our second march and protest on October 22, at LA County USC Hospital, the largest of the county hospitals and home to a sheriff substation. This drew about 50 healthcare workers and students.
Family left in the dark
At this point, Nick’s name wasn’t released to the press and we had not yet made contact with his family. In fact, Nick’s family was not informed for over a week.
In the weeks prior, Nick had regular visits from his mother.  As his brother Benjamin said, for weeks while Nick struggled to survive, the medical staff did not provide proper Spanish translation to his mother. Moreover, as his body lay riddled with bullets and with open surgical wounds, he remained handcuffed to the bed.
His only crime was being a young Latin man suffering from mental illness and wanting to use the restroom! Nick Burgos joins the thousands of our sisters and brothers stolen by this rotten racist system, and the fact that this happened at a "safety net" hospital is a further indictment of this whole capitalist system. A system that kills and terrorizes workers does not deserve to breathe.
If this nearly nine-month period living within this pandemic has unveiled anything, it is that systemic racism is part and parcel of capitalism and leaves no institution spared. From George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, just as police plague our Black, Latin, indigenous and working-class
communities, so does this virus, disproportionately infecting and killing us.
In fact, every day millions of our class sisters and brothers suffer from preventable health ailments caused by the stress of living under capitalism. Nearly every chronic illness or leading cause of death can be attributed to the inequity and terror generated by capitalism's need to divide our class in order to extract maximum profits. The bosses' public healthcare institutions, like Harbor UCLA, are designed to only maintain the minimum amount of health to keep workers working and profitable and have historically been underfunded and under-resourced.
Workers and families vs. Mahajan
Nick Burgos is the second worker to be shot and killed while being cared for in this hospital in the last six years. Meanwhile, the current Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Anish Mahajan, has made it clear he intends to continue this fascist policing and "healthcare" model as opposed to well established methods of medical personnel intervening with patients in a mental health crisis. He created a task force which is to "really think about — within the bounds of existing law which enables law enforcement to carry weapons in the hospital — how do we best collaborate with our law enforcement partners when situations arise, where patients become violent?" (LAist, 11/16).
Clearly, Mahajan does not intend to meet the demands of workers and families who want these murderers off our streets and out of our health care spaces. We will continue to work within our mass organizations to not only to point out the limits of the reform struggle, but also to expose the whole public health system as part of a larger state apparatus that serves the needs of capitalism.
We have already begun having these conversations and two friends have been meeting regularly in a Party study group for over six months. They have also been joining the protests we've been having with families like Alex Flores who was murdered by LAPD last year. They need to help us fight for communism, a system run by and for the working class.
What connects Nick and Alex?
A couple of days ago, Nick's sister-in-law found the social media page of Alex Flores and sent us a message. (CHALLENGE readers may remember that Alex Flores was murdered by LAPD nearly one year ago on November 19, 2019. The Flores family, antiracists, and PLP have been fighting in the streets since.)  We were then informed that Alex and Nick grew up together and were really good friends!  
This is more than a "small world" story. It is case in point to just how widespread racist police terror is!  In fact there are countless stories we've heard from families who describe other family members being killed or brutalized by the police. It also reflects how racism is capitalism's Achilles heel. As the communist, antifascist saying goes, "They killed us and killed us until there were millions of us!"
Connect the dots, draw in a fighting spirit
We are already in the process of connecting the two families as we commemorate the "Angel-versary" of Alex Flores this week. We will continue this struggle—within our mass organizations, on the job, with the many families we are meeting—and expand this fight against racist killer cops and the whole capitalist system which they serve.
Help us intensify this fight by sharing this struggle with your friends, co-workers, and loved ones. And join the fight for the long haul. Communism, a system run by and for the working class, needs readers like you.

As the Covid-19 pandemic nears a harrowing winter, with deaths surging to record levels around the globe, the profit system is killing masses of people by the day. Worldwide, thanks to capitalist inaction, incompetence, misleadership, and greed, more than 55 million workers have been sickened and over 1.3 million have died—official numbers that are surely huge undercounts. In Belgium, nurses and doctors were ordered to keep working after testing positive, as long as they weren’t coughing in patients’ faces (nbcnews.com, 11/2). In Mexico, where the fake-left president dismisses masks and under two  percent of the population has been tested, intensive care units are overrun (aljazeera.com, 11/15). Latin America, said The Lancet, the top British medical journal, is facing a humanitarian crisis borne out of political instability, corruption, social unrest, fragile health systems, and perhaps most importantly, longstanding and pervasive inequality…. (11/7).
In other words, the working class is suffering from capitalism, the deadliest plague in human history. Exhibit A is the United States, the planet’s wealthiest nation and the runaway leader in Covid carnage. In mid-November, the U.S. logged a million new cases in six days. Hospitals are once again scrounging for medical-grade masks. It can take hours to get tested and precious days to get the results. Rural patients are dying while waiting for space in jammed urban hospitals (USA Today, 11/15). In El Paso, county inmates were enlisted to move an overflow of bodies to mobile morgue units (Texas Tribune, 11/15). By treating us as commodities, capitalism devalues human life as a matter of course, through war and exploitation and the rationing of healthcare. For the bosses, the pandemic is a crisis only insofar as it threatens their revenues. Workers, as per usual, are expendable.
We Are Who We Need!
According to a gold-standard statistical model from the University of Washington, we can expect 80,000 more women, men, and children in the U.S. to die of Covid by January 1, and nearly 200,000 more by March 1. By December, fatalities are projected to reach 3,000 per day (cnn.com, 11/18), more than the 9/11 death toll. And because of racist inequalities in healthcare, housing, and employment, Black workers continue to die at greater than twice the rate of white workers (COVID Tracking Project).
As inter-imperialist competition drives a divided, weakened U.S. ruling class toward fascism and World War III, the pandemic has exposed the bosses as the monsters and frauds they are, utterly unfit to run society. Only the international working class, led by a vanguard mass communist party, can protect our lives and our health. Only a communist revolution can smash the rotten capitalist state and meet our needs. But to get there, workers must reject the rabbit hole of reformism, the illusion of electoral democracy, and the lethal deceit of lesser-evil liberal politicians. Our most dangerous class enemies are the president- and vice president-elect, Jim Crow Joe Biden and Top Cop Kamala Harris.
It’s All About the Money, Honey
In a November 11 interview with Yahoo Finance, Michael Osterholm, the eminent Minnesota epidemiologist on Biden’s blue-ribbon pandemic advisory panel, spoke out of turn. Osterholm posed a simple way to crush Covid case numbers and save tens of thousands of lives: a strict four-to-six-week national lockdown. By borrowing at historically low interest rates, the federal government could cover lost wages for individual workers … losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments…Then we could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year(abc.com, 11/12).
This was only common sense. As daily infections approach the 200,000 mark, contact tracing is impractical. (If a typical person has 50 contacts, that’s 10 million traces per day.) In a degraded capitalist culture, appeals to “individual responsibility” won’t cut it—not when millions of cynical workers follow the bare-faced lead of Sociopath in Chief Donald Trump, and millions more give in to pandemic fatigue. For now, the one way to quell the virus is by keeping most people home.
But the next day, Vivek Murthy, the panel co-chair, made clear that a national lockdown was off the table. With caseloads rising in all 50 states and spiking across most of them, Murthy said: The way we should be thinking about this is more like a series of restrictions that we dial up or down depending on how bad the spread is taking place in a specific region (abc.com, 11/13). The upshot is that Biden will pass the buck to state and local governments and their random crazy quilt of mandates—not so different from Trump’s approach.
Murthy is an internist who served as Barack Obama’s surgeon general. He has no formal training in epidemiology. But he understands that the president-elect can’t afford to offend the Big Fascist liberal bosses who put Biden where he is today. A lockdown would be bad for business, at least in the short run. Giving workers what we need would be a drain on finance capital. It’s why New York City has closed the city’s schools before shuttering bars and restaurants. Under capitalism, money talks—first, last, always.
Vaccine politics
Hours after Pfizer released promising data from a Phase three  trial, CEO Albert Bourla sold $5.6 million in company stock (Wall Street Journal, 11/11). Though the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may indeed be game-changers, capitalist medicines are like sausage; the more you learn about how they’re made, the less appealing they get. After months of cowardly kowtowing to Trump, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) —the vaccine approval agency—has lost credibility. At least seven states plan to add their own expert vetting. The people of this country don’t trust this federal government, said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the hospital closure king who killed thousands by forcing positive cases back into nursing homes.
Even the best medicines won’t work if they don’t get delivered to those who need them. As big pharma is showered with billions of federal dollars, state and local public health departments are starved of needed resources to distribute and track two doses on an enormous scale. Whenever there’s scarcity under capitalism, racism determines who gets left behind. A Maine official acknowledged that “insufficient funding” would slow the rate of vaccination, particularly among disadvantaged populations that are harder to reach” (NYT, 11/14). Internationally, a criminal lag in access to older vaccines—for polio, tuberculosis, and measles—bodes ill for the Covid crisis: The historical norm is that a vaccine of this sort is quickly given to those privileged to live in the world’s richest nations, while the rest of the world’s population often suffers for several decades before deadly diseases are eradicated—if they ever are”(Foreign Policy, 11/12). The poorest countries have next to no public health infrastructure, making it more likely that substandard and falsified vaccines will appear on the market.
Polls suggest that a third or more of the U.S. population may be reluctant to get inoculated, a deadly obstacle to herd immunity. Between the anti-vaxxer disinformation machine and workers’ reasonable doubts about the FDA and Centers for Disease Control, there’s little trust in capitalist medicine these days. It all adds up to a very dark winter, as Biden has warned. But we know that spring will come when Progressive Labor Party leads the international working class to the cure for what ails us: fight for  communism, where decent healthcare will be available to the entire working class. Join us!